I just finished this: It's a new, permissionless, 100%-nostr-based Open Source Software crowdfunding protocol, based on #catallax, #WoT and #dlists . If you've ever been rejected from a grant application, you might enjoy Grantless :) It's kind of like OpenSats, in that money goes from donors to software teams, except it's run by you and the people you trust. Grantless is cypherpunk. There's no middleman, platform or legal entity involved. No KYC nor AML. Anyone can curate, anyone can review work, anyone can handle/escrow funds, anyone can put themselves up for funding (there's no "applying" because you can't be denied a shot at raising money from the plebs). It's crowdfunding done right: where the crowd calls its own shots. We use decentralized lists for basic curation and spam prevention - but we're just scratching the surface of what we can use dlists for... Let me know if you have any questions about how it works or if you'd like to have your project show up on #grantless but you don't feel like going through the **permissionless** legwork of getting yourself on there - I can help out with that. I'll publish a roadmap soon with what I'd like to add to this client in the (near) future. And I'm probably not looking at notifications tonight, so if you reply here I'll talk to you tomorrow. Enjoy!

Replies (64)

It'll be a lot cooler when it's not empty. Proper product marketing people probably would have secured a bunch of users first. ...but this isn't a "product" and I'm not "marketing". Use it if you want - or don't; but I think you should.
i put a project up for completing the smesh forum and marmot DMs. can't see any info on the page about what i put in the form tho. happy to beta test this
i just tagged you - which means when I am selected as a "curator", people will see your project. (also true for anyone else who publishes a 30392 trusted list with you on it - i'm not special) check the page again. so now you need to find someone to act as the escrow and "arbiter" (was the work good, etc) - or you can fill that role yourself if you think people will trust you to act as your own "third party". i'd be happy to do it if you trust me enough. cold start problems :)
super excited about this. nostr has been needing a crowdfunding system for a long time. the output of opensats/hrf projects has not really pushed the envelope so far.
The Opensats/hrf drama this week is what pushed me over the edge. Luckily, the #catallax protocol basically had everything ready to go already, just needed a slightly more focused client and some dlist integration to keep things properly decentralized and open. gonna be offline, I'll catch up with you tomorrow. it's awesome you posted a project! Once you have an arbiter assigned I'll happily help kickstart the crowdfund.
the teams seeking funding themselves could act as their own arbiter if they want. i should have said "middleman optional". this basically would let a thousand OpenSats bloom. (if there is any appetite for such a thing. it may just be the case that enough people feel the way you do that the couple charity bodies continue to reign unchallenged). so i also could have said "a marketplace for all different varieties of middleman - from 'none' to 'demonic' " maybe someone takes it upon themself to curate only performance improvement tasks across all clients that have a budget less than 100,000 sats - something "beneath" a large charity organization... i don't know how people may use this, but i hope we'll see!
yes! good points. a few thoughts there: - "I" don't have any processes - this is just an client instantiation of a draft NIP: (more exposition to read at ) - 100% right! OpenSats could utilize #grantless ; I would love to see this happen. - I'll collect common FAQs across nostr posts over the next days/weeks and add them to the About. I don't want to be too duplicative with similar pages on - after all, this is just a kind of narrower UI over that protocol Thanks for your thoughts!
Figured I'd fund what seemed like a cool project, a lil bit anyway. Allocate it wisely
not necessarily anything _wrong_ with them, just different approaches for different use-cases, risk and compliance profiles, budgets, etc. In my opinion, they're just not extremely decentralized nor permissionless nor appropriate for very small projects. #grantless / #catallax is composed **purely** of nostr events, there's no platform anywhere. Angor is cool, just sort of complex, at least compared to basic zaps and a handful of Kinds -
Angor is decentralised, the founders have explicitly designed the platform with this goal (deplatforming) in mind Granted (!) it's more geared towards a more serious raise, with milestones and on-chain transactions We used it to claim our @SIGit award and the process was smooth. Disclaimer - we've supported Angor in building their product. Catallax looks great, I wonder if it could become a standard for donations
No Stranger's avatar
No Stranger 5 months ago
I submitted this morning... i dont see it as pending or anything, I hope it went through
I've now tagged you so that you show up under my curation view - your project is visible now (and it looks really great!!): You _do_ need to assign an Arbiter, though. Read the About page to see how that works, or read up more on (the protocol that underlies Grantless). I believe I'm the only Arbiter under my curation at the moment, but that absolutely should not stay that way... I'd be happy to do it for you, but if you have someone else in mind let me know and I can tag them in. (or, if you don't want all this reliance on me, you can set yourself up as your own curator ;)
dangershony's avatar
dangershony 5 months ago
You are very right it is pretty complex, took use time to build also and still probably a bit buggy. To avoid spam we push the nostr eventid of a project as an opreturn, that requires spending coins to make a project. Fee is taken from each funding trx paid to the projects identier which is derived from a global Angor key.
dangershony's avatar
dangershony 5 months ago
I wonder if grantless could for certain cases use @Angor under the hood? Ping me if you think that's something you'd like to explore
Does this mean that while any pubkey can author a nostr event that is "Angor-like", the Angor clients only show events that have a corresponding opreturn? What is the Kind for those events and where is the spec or NIP that describes them?
Hey @mleku - don't forget you have to assign an arbiter before you can open your project for funding! (The arbiter holds the raised funds until they're distributed): Let me know who you want to use as an arbiter (me, you, someone else, etc.) and I'll tag them appropriately. Or, of course, if you prefer, you can set up a trust/curation pipeline that doesn't hang on me at all. But for the purpose of early testing I'm happy to do it.
also, the whole point is you don't have to pollute bitcoin and point me at another place on the internet where you can do literally actually trustless anything. yeah, i thought so.
No Stranger's avatar
No Stranger 5 months ago
sorry I left you hanging. the issue is I meant to ask for ~$4000 and i put an extra digit. How embarrassing! i wanted to investigate how the submission is stored to see if I could edit it from my side before publishing.. but tbh I was on a roll working on the game all weekend... i have been rolling the question of an arbiter around in my head. I am kind of a loner on social media, so im still figuring out who to ask.
dangershony's avatar
dangershony 5 months ago
Yes indeed the angor.io website (and the app of course) will check the Blockchain for the presence of the eventid before displaying to the user. We use kind 3030 none-replaceable events to describe the "contract" (I'll have to find the nip definition) @SondreB helped to define that nip
would be rad if cloudfodder got involved. are you saying he’d act as the arbiter for your project? or he wants to post one of his own? i’ll tag him as one or the other under my curation, depending on which he wants to do @cloud fodder
dangershony's avatar
dangershony 5 months ago
I realise we need to add some more data to this nip for Angor V2 projects of type Fund
Just pushed an update - you should be able to edit all of a project's details now, including the fundraising goal. But note: once you initiate the fundraising process, you can no longer change the fundraising goal (though you can change other project details). This is because while the project representation itself is a replaceable event, the _crowdfunding_ event is not replaceable. So the "fundraising goal" change is really creating a new crowdfunding event and pointing the project to it (meaning any previous fundraising goal is orphaned - which is why we don't want to allow in-progress crowdfunds to make this change!).
No Stranger's avatar
No Stranger 5 months ago
Makes perfect sense. I really appreciate your hard work here getting me fixed up so fast.
The money doesn't (necessarily) go to the person running/requesting the project, but to an "arbiter" role who judges the work and refunds the "donators" if the team doesn't deliver properly. The Patron (project author), Arbiter and Worker "should be" different people, but there's nothing at the protocol level stopping the same npub from occupying multiple of those roles. Technically, not only is is not different from zap goals - it actually uses them under the hood. #catallax is a meta-protocol that integrates zap goals into a slightly richer experience - and the clients i'm working on integrate WoT and Dlists to add a curation layer I haven't yet seen with zap goals. is just an opinionated client on top of catallax. You can do #catallax tasks as a single-fund or a crowdfund - the latter of which is better suited for #grantless.
You're one of the sigit guys? I've been trying to get in contact with y'all about running the project cuz the version on the web is broken and I'd like to figure out if there is a demo somewhere that's working so I can figure out it this actually meets our purposes before I spend time fixing whatever is broken
Thanks! Field Partners sound like an interesting approach to the trust problem. ..are they chosen by Geyser, or can users choose their own Field Partners to trust?
We maintain SIGit and have been working on a much improved v3 with state machines Be happy to discuss the approach, and the branch Feel free to reach out on nostrdev@proton.me with your simplex or matrix (or nostr) details
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