Aragon Nest: First awarded grants

Aragon

• 6 min read
Aragon Nest: First awarded grants

Five teams already funded and building is underway

We began by first introducing the Aragon Nest grant program back in December of 2017 together with Placeholder. Then near the end of January 2018 the program was launched and opened for submissions.

The program was met with enthusiasm and excitement by the community, many came to discuss their ideas and up to today, almost 20 grant proposals have been created.

For the Nest program, the goal has always been to find great people to work on common goods that will produce quality results that benefit either of these two ecosystems as a whole. We are dependant on the prosperity of Ethereum, and others rely on Aragon to provide them tools for success.

There's a large stack of developers out there who just want to create great things without worrying about where they can get food on their table while working on such a common good. Not every project needs an ICO, not every team needs a business model, and not every piece of software needs a team or an employer.

A project can be funded without having to go through all the time, effort and stress that creating a token sale entails. A team might just want to build a single piece of software that isn't seeking to make a profit, just to get it out there. Someone might want to passionately contribute to the community and #buidl something by themselves and still make a living while creating that piece of software.

The Nest program was created to meet circumstances like these and provide funding to those who wish to step up and construct such relevant software. Therefore, we are not interested in funding startups or monetizable solutions. In order to achieve the best possible results on selecting which projects and ideas to fund, the whole process is made transparent through the Nest Github repository and the only requirement is to be open-source. This also allows all the community members in the ecosystems to take part and comment on what proposals and requests for funding they see as valuable.

Now, it's time to introduce the first five projects that we've granted funding in order for them to flourish, thrive and to pursue their goals of advancing these ecosystems.

Aragon Planning App

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Proposal: Open source incentivization app for Aragon

Team: That Planning Tab

Short description of the project by the team:

In the RFP for Nest #3 it mentions implementing Yondon Fu's OpenCollab solution. While this solution presents a compelling approach to solve the open source software sustainability issue, it places a lot of emphasis on merging and reviewing code. We propose that to begin to tackle alternative models for incentivizing open source, that we should focus on a collaborative planning model that is centered around multiple stakeholders --- designers & application users, in addition to developers.

Additionally, while the original goal of Nest #3 is related to open source software projects, we propose to broaden the scope for what this incentivization system should ultimately be capable of supporting. After all, Aragon's mission is to empower people across the world to easily and securely manage their organizations. But software development is merely one business function. The other major types of work that can be collaboratively produced online in open source manners are hardware, media and documentation. Hence this toolkit should ideally be used as a building block and base layer for a more generic Planning platform.

Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $150,000 in ETH

  • Additionally up to $50,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:

wespr / pando

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Proposal: Open source incentivization app for Aragon

Team: wespr / pando

A decentralized git repo controlled by an Aragon DAO

Short description of the project by the team:

What we do propose for the Aragon Nest #3 grant proposal is thus to develop a.) distributed cooperation and versioning infrastructure; b.) a distributed governance infrastructure based on IPFS and aragonOS and; c.) a dApp relying on these infrastructures and dedicated to Open-Source Software development.

The distributed cooperation and versioning infrastructure and the distributed governance infrastructure developed with this grant aim to be as generic, modular, content-agnostic and token-agnostic as possible. They will basically consist of a distributed git-like versioning system whose governance protocols are enforced through an aragonOS-based DAO.

Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $142,400 in ETH

  • Additionally up to $50,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:

Gnarly Nest Proposal

Proposal: Optimistic UI for Blockchain Interfaces (Gnarly)

Team: XLNT

Short description of the project by the team:

Gnarly is a solid-state interpreter that reduces blockchain information to a developer-friendly format, that supports optimistic state transfers, enabling reactive and user-friendly client-side interfaces. It does this by running a developer-provided state function over every block in the Ethereum blockchain, intelligently handling forks and rollbacks, with no extra effort from the developer. The state function looks a little something like

...

if (tx.to === CRYPTO_KITTIES && events.include('Transfer')) { // this line is pseudo code
because('KITTY_TRANSFER', () => {
kittyState.ownerOf[tokenId] = event.to
})
}

...

Gnarly then handles the logic of keeping kittyState in sync with your chosen persisted store (Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, etc.) so that you can query this state like a normal web developer later on in your application's lifecycle.

Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $42,000 in ETH

  • Additionally up to $50,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:

Frame: OS-level Signing Provider

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Proposal: OS-level signing provider

Team: Frame

Short description of the project by the team:

Frame is a cross-platform Ethereum provider interface built on Electron. Frame interfaces with Ethereum network nodes and signature providers (such as a Ledger or Trezor) to create an OS-level provider that can be used with any dapp. Frame was created to be a user-friendly way to securely and transparently interact with dapps and the Ethereum network. Frame hopes to lower the barrier of entry for users wanting to participate in the Ethereum network while creating a seamless provider interface for dapps to consume.

Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $48,000 in ETH

  • Additionally up to $50,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:

Prysmatic Labs Request for Funding (Sharding)

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https://prysmaticlabs.com/

Proposal: Sharding Client Implementation for Go-Ethereum

Team: Prysmatic Labs

Short description of the project by the team:

We are implementing the first, working version of sharding for the geth client through a strong emphasis on development sprints and results. Our strong suit is being able to create effective, tested code for the community to explore. We are actively developing the project here and are hard at work on our first milestone as detailed in our comprehensive reference docs. We communicate on a day-to-day basis via our Gitter channel here.

Our work is heavily based out of and in collaboration with Py-EVM and the ETHResearch team.

Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $100,000 in ETH

  • Additionally up to $50,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:

We are ecstatic that such astonishing teams have applied for Nest grants and are very much looking forward to seeing them provide their fruits of labour to the world.

If you have an expert level understanding of Ethereum, and have an idea for a proposal or wish to request funding for you or your team to work on one of those proposals, visit the Github repository and have a look at the wiki entries for Nest, including guides!

Browse Nest Proposals at https://github.com/aragon/nest/issues

See Nest Requests for Funding at https://github.com/aragon/nest/pulls