The Event
This year, ETH Argentina introduced something completely novel…
✨ THE BUILDATHON ✨
It was the first competition of its kind. A space to build products from scratch.
The Buildathon consisted of 3 stages:
This was a new approach for teams to focus on product building, the submission included Brainstorming, Business Model Canvas, Data modeling, Design UI/UX, Pitch Deck, and Open-Source repository.
The tracks
The categories were:
- DeFi
- Infrastructure
- NFTs and metaverse
- Public Goods 👀
The stats
- 374 participants
- 32 mentors | 22 juries
- 61 projects submitted
- 38 projects made it into the pitch round
- 15 public goods projects 👀
- 5 track winners
- 13 bounty winners
- 23,500 USD distributed among the winners
The Quadratic Funding
With support from the Ethereum Foundation, we organized a Quadratic Funding round to provide support for curated projects in the public goods track.
- Event Website | QF Website
- ETH Argentina Dates: August 16 - 19, 2023
- Matching pool: 20,000 DAI
- 15 public goods projects that participated in the Buildathon
- Voting period: August 28 — September 4 (1 week)
- Voting platform: https://clr.fund/ (Arbitrum)
The QF setup
In collaboration with Buidlers and NeoPower, the team worked on the setup of the round by forking the CLR Fund repo.
💻 The projects: After deploying the QF site and contracts each project was submitted by the organizing team since all of the info was already available in the Buildathon submission.
👥 The contributors: Each ETH Argentina attendee got an NFT as proof of attendance at the venue. That NFT allowed the team to whitelist contributors' wallets, avoiding a Sybil Attack. Every contributor was a human who accessed the venue (~3000).
💰 The matching pool: The pool was directly funded by the team with the 20,000 USD received from the Ethereum Foundation.
🤓 Technical team:
- At first, we didn’t fully understand the challenge it was to set up CLR from scratch while having to organize the Buildathon. Unfortunately, we underestimated it.
- Two developers worked on setting up the project. One focused on the smart contracts and scripts (Solidity) and the other one on the UI (Vue).
The call to action
Our main communication platforms were Twitter and Discord. This allowed for close interactions with everyone involved in the QF round.
📢 Comms:
- Announcing the QF round: link
- Announcing the whitelisting logic: link
- Sharing a guide to contribute to the QF round: link
- The guide: link
- We hosted many X spaces sharing more insights on the QF round and how to vote.
- Announcing the finalized round: link
The results
- ✨ 15 public goods projects
- 👥 109 contributors voted
- 💰 20,000 DAI matching pool
- 💸 1,041 DAI contributed to the pool
The final allocation
- VeriTrust Protocol: 12,826 DAI
- DeFi Argentina: 5,544 DAI
- Sciencetifical: 648 DAI
- Equilibra: 577 DAI
- Proof of Integrity: 456 DAI
- Ayni.finance: 427 DAI
- Bondly: 147 DAI
- Swaylings: 115 DAI
- OnchaID: 66 DAI
- Compete Learn: 54 DAI
- Impulsando Atletas: 32 DAI
- Empathia: 29 DAI
- Stake4Good: 23 DAI
- TarEagle: 10 DAI
- Giver: 7 DAI
To learn more about the projects (PITCH DAY):
The lessons learned
- 💻 CLR Fund: This platform introduced contracts that fully automated the funds' distribution using MACI technology to make the votes private. This anti-bribery system worked great but centralizes the power in the coordinator's wallet which is a risk.
- ⛽ Gas Estimation: Before deploying the solution is important to estimate how much gas will be needed to cover the main transactions of the process.
- 🎫 Ticketing: We used WeLook as the ticketing tool. This helped us distribute NFT tickets and validate them at the venue to airdrop a second NFT as proof of attendance to be able to vote. Some Buildathon teams didn’t receive the POAP instantly since they accessed the venue prior to the main conference without validating the NFT ticket.
- 📆 Schedule: The dates of each step of the round should be clear to everyone involved and communicated properly. Providing information as soon as possible is key for people to get ready to contribute to the round.
- 🔫 Sybil Attack: Manually whitelisting wallets was pretty straightforward. However, we think is best to use a rule for NFT ownership validation and avoid manually handling lists of wallets. For this, it's important to control the NFT distribution as the organizer team.
- 🦠 DoS attack: When we launched the round we suffered a Denial of Service attack on our Infura instance to query Arbitrum. Since we were using the free plan we passed the limits and the platform stopped working because of Infura not being able to respond. We had to quickly switch the default RPC of CLR to a solution with embedded anti-DoS tech.
- 🗳️ Voting model: The CLR fund model doesn’t use credits but ERC20 tokens like DAI. The token used to vote should match the one used for the matching pool. We lowered the barrier to vote by setting the minimum amount to 0.01 DAI, but this confused people thinking that with that amount they were making a meaningful contribution to the project they were voting for.
- 👥 Participation: There are still no incentives for people to contribute in Quadratic Funding rounds other than being involved in one of the listed projects in some way. Contributors’ wallets can easily be awarded an NFT to be used as token-gating to provide benefits and more incentives to contributors.
- ✍🏻 Buildathon Round: This round was conducted in a closed fashion, limiting participation from both project creators and contributors. While this approach reduced the number of contributors and the size of the matching pool funds, it had the positive effect of guaranteeing that the projects involved were genuine products being developed by real individuals.
- 📢 Comms: Having direct contact with the projects and contributors is important to communicate the stages of the round and encourage people to participate.
- 💪🏻 Team: It’s important to assemble a team of experienced people who can quickly research technical solutions and implement them.
Relevant links
- Website: Event Website | QF Website
- ETH Argentina: https://twitter.com/EtherArgentina
- CLR Fund fork: https://github.com/0xBuidlers/monorepo