I just finished this:
Grantless
Grantless — The Invisible Handout
Crowdfunded grants for open-source work, on Catallax. A permissionless, pleb-funded grant ecosystem on Nostr.
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 (58)
Another awesome project!
Sorry if these are unwelcome tags, but I figured I'd let everyone who reacted or reposted my teaser know that this is live now.
@DagzTagz ,
@npub12a77...rdyd ,
@m0wer ,
@il_lost_ ,
@Ultimate SatoshiInteresting. Is it only for devs and building apps?
It's for anything you think people would want to crowdfund.
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.
:P
nice. 🎯
Nice! I love this.
Did you have the song "small axe" in mind when you picked the logo?
Wo🔥 nice to know ...Keep it up 💪
👀
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 :)
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.
don't see why not! maybe get in touch with some of the people around here involved in music to see if you can put together a community
1. what's the difference?
2. there's nothing stopping one person/institution from supplying 100% of the "crowd"fund
Interesting
an organization receives funds and spends them by awarding grants, an organization requests funds for a project
Well, there goes OpenMatts. Rip
Yeah but that's really only different in crowd size. The main benefit I can see over that is keeping the pool small enough that limited funds actually help some projects. A million projects getting a thousands sats is hardly meaningful. 100 projects hand picked for millions of SATs each might actually make progress. Pros and cons.
But it's centralized to do that
✍️👀
An organization could do the former here.
In the short/medium term would some form of relationship with
@OpenSats be beneficial?
OpenSats could recommend #grantless to all applications they were unable to fund. They could even act as an Arbiter for selected projects they are unable to fund, but still wish to succeed.
If
@OpenSats are truly interested in the Nostr ecosystem and growth this would seem like a no brainer, so long as your processes are clear and robust. (Also probably a good idea to clarify some of the questions asked in the comments before making any approach.)
Oh I know this one... it's from "Dwarf Fortress", still a game I've been meaning to check out...
Dwarf Fortress fucking rules
lol i had not occurred to me that elements of this would be so nicely inter-op'able with other clients - but of course! cc
@YODL
View quoted note →
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 Documentation
Project Creation
A comprehensive guide to creating projects on Angor Platform
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
what stops Angor from taking down projects? where is the project data hosted?
I've now tagged you so that you show up under my curation view - your project is visible now (and it looks really great!!):
Grantless
Grantless — The Invisible Handout
Crowdfunded grants for open-source work, on Catallax. A permissionless, pleb-funded grant ecosystem on Nostr.
You _do_ need to assign an Arbiter, though. Read the About page to see how that works, or read up more on
Catallax - A Protocol for Pseudonymous Contract Work Economies
Catallax is an open protocol that enables pseudonymous contract work economies. It runs over Nostr, Bitcoin and Cashu ecash for censorship-resistan...
(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 ;)
Data is on nostr (and onchain tx), platform can be self hosted
@dangershony could explain more
i stand corrected! reading their docs more fully now...
i do still wonder how they deal with spam. and how they manage to charge a "1% platform fee...?
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.
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):
Grantless
Grantless — The Invisible Handout
Crowdfunded grants for open-source work, on Catallax. A permissionless, pleb-funded grant ecosystem on Nostr.
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.
Bump,
@No Stranger - you've got to assign an arbiter (even if you just want to do it yourself) from the set of tagged arbiters - or create your own curation set - before you can open up to crowdfunding.
Let me know if you have questions
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
I realise we need to add some more data to this nip for Angor V2 projects of type Fund
i do want to try some things. i was reading the docs you wrote and thinking of doing a project there, maybe more..i have to research
I'm actively looking in to editing active projects (especially the crowdfunding goal) - I'll report back here when/if that change is live.
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!).
What makes this different from zap goals?
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 - A Protocol for Pseudonymous Contract Work Economies
Catallax is an open protocol that enables pseudonymous contract work economies. It runs over Nostr, Bitcoin and Cashu ecash for censorship-resistan...
#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.
Grantless
Grantless — The Invisible Handout
Crowdfunded grants for open-source work, on Catallax. A permissionless, pleb-funded grant ecosystem on Nostr.
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.
Hey, very cool project! Love to see innovation and experimentation in this space.
At Geyser we are releasing Field Partners, which are trusted creators like circular economies that can create projects on beneficiaries' behalf - and basically vouch for them. It's a bit different, but still focused on solving one of the key problems: how do we enable trust in a global marketplace.
Thanks for working on it, and if there is anything we can do to help we'd love to chat.
Onwards!
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
I pretty much only use nostr and signal but nostr dms usually don't work lol.
