In recent news, the Cosmos ecosystem has witnessed a significant event with the proposal of Cosmos Proposal No. 917: Dora Factory and DoraHacks Teams Request $1 Million Funding from the Cosmos Hub Treasury for ten rounds of quadratic funding for the Cosmos Hub ecosystem over a two-year period.
This proposal has sparked extensive discussions within the Cosmos community and has garnered unanimous support. Over $1 billion worth of ATOM tokens have been voted in favor of the proposal, including major validator nodes such as SG-1, Chorus One, P2P, Zero Knowledge Validator, and core contributors to Cosmos like Informal Systems, Keplr, and Cosmostation. With a support rate of 91.6%, Proposal No. 917 has become the most supported motion in the history of Cosmos governance.
Upon the approval of this proposal, the Cosmos Hub has established its first-ever native quadratic funding program. Dora Factory has also become the most heavily supported public goods technology team in the history of the Cosmos community.
Following the approval of this proposal, Dora Factory and DoraHacks have officially announced the launch of the second round of ATOM Economic Zone (AEZ) quadratic funding, marking the beginning of the first long-term funding program. This quadratic funding program will span two years, starting from May 15, 2024, and ending in May 2026. During this period, there will be ten community votes and the distribution of a matching bonus pool. The total matching bonus pool is $200,000 and 80,000 ATOM.
Why did the Cosmos community unanimously agree to allocate a million dollars in funding to Dora Factory, a public goods infrastructure, and DoraHacks, a developer incentive platform? What is public goods funding, and what role do public goods play in the Web3 ecosystem? This article will provide a detailed introduction to Dora Factory, a quietly emerging leader in public goods technology.
What is Public Goods Funding?
Public goods funding is a concept frequently discussed in the Web3 industry. In general, public goods refer to things or services that are available for everyone’s use and are non-profit in nature. These are usually provided and managed by governments or other public institutions, such as parks, libraries, and roads.
Traditional public goods are characterized by non-exclusivity (one person’s use does not prevent others from using them), non-rivalry (one person’s use does not diminish others’ use), and positive externalities (one person’s benefit also benefits others).
In the crypto space, public goods include public chain infrastructure, storage, developer tools, software middleware, and some non-profit applications aimed at users, such as block explorers, data dashboards, and wallets. Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, with their inherent properties of openness, transparency, and verifiability, are ideal tools for public goods funding. Additionally, the use of smart contracts can significantly enhance the efficiency and reduce the cost of funding.
However, public goods in the crypto space also face many problems and challenges. While everyone acknowledges the importance of public goods, whether as regular users, foundations, or project teams, few people consistently focus on supporting public goods. The crypto industry is rapidly evolving, with new narratives emerging constantly, competing for limited attention, time, and funds.
More specifically, this problem can be divided into three points:
1. Lack of coordination among multiple stakeholders (foundations, institutions, DAOs, developers, and communities) involved in public goods funding.
2. Lack of sustainable and effective funding channels.
3. Public goods funding is often perceived as uninteresting.
In the course of Web3’s historical development, Dora Factory has emerged. It is dedicated to building infrastructure to facilitate the widespread adoption of public goods funding.
Dora Factory: Infrastructure Born for Public Goods
From its inception, Dora Factory has been committed to building public goods and addressing the related key issues. Recently, the Dora Factory team initiated an ambitious proposal on the Cosmos Hub, requesting $1 million worth of ATOM tokens from the Cosmos community treasury and planning to launch ten rounds of native quadratic funding for the Cosmos ecosystem over the next two years. This proposal has received significant attention and support from core Cosmos contributors such as Keplr, Cosmostation, Chorus One, and CryptoCito. However, as a team that has been silently building (BUIDLing) for years, Dora Factory seems to be relatively unknown to the public.
Founded in 2021, Dora Factory is incubated and supported by DoraHacks, the largest developer and public goods funding platform in the industry. It is a leading decentralized governance infrastructure and multi-chain public goods funding protocol stack. Its products include the flagship Public Good Staking infrastructure and Dora Vota, a dedicated application chain for voting and governance, aiming to empower global hacker communities, open-source communities, and decentralized organizations.
Multi-Chain Quadratic Funding: Connecting Communities and Ecosystem Builders
Since 2020, the Dora Factory team has been dedicated to promoting the adoption of multi-chain quadratic funding. They are the first and only team in the industry to independently develop and promote the adoption of multi-chain quadratic funding. To date, the Dora Factory team has become a leader in multi-chain quadratic funding and has successfully deployed native quadratic funding in various mainstream crypto ecosystems, including BNB Chain, Solana, Polygon, Aptos, Cosmos Hub, Injective, Filecoin, Avalanche, and more.
Token holders can support early-stage projects and public goods within the ecosystem by donating native tokens, thereby promoting better collaboration between foundations, communities, and developers in pursuit of a shared vision. Through the multi-chain quadratic funding protocol, Dora Factory has provided over $10 million in funding and donations to the multi-chain crypto ecosystem.
With the approval of Proposal No. 917 in the Cosmos Hub, Dora Factory has established the first native and long-term community quadratic funding program. Core development teams of public goods in the Cosmos ecosystem, including developer tools, community tools, data dashboards, and DeFi dashboards, can now receive long-term and stable funding, along with the attention and support of the entire community.
Public Good Staking: Providing Sustainable Funding for Public Goods
At the end of 2022, the Dora Factory team introduced the concept of Public Good Staking. They utilize underlying infrastructure such as operating validator nodes, sorters, and validators to obtain native block rewards and continuously allocate these rewards to fund developers and public goods across multiple chains.
Currently, Dora Factory has promoted public good staking in over 30 mainnets and testnets across various ecosystems. With the support of multiple partners, including foundations, institutions, DAOs, and communities, Dora Factory has achieved over $400 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) in just one year. This number is expected to continue growing, providing sustainable funding of $5-10 million annually. Through steady growth in TVL, continuous product iterations, and collaborations with top developer communities like DoraHacks, Dora Factory has become the only team capable of providing continuous funding for developers and multi-chain public goods ecosystems, while also driving a series of long-term funding projects with different objectives. These projects include the Dora GrantDAO, a Venture Grant project for all crypto and cutting-edge technology fields, the Cosmos AEZ Grant, the Aptos GrantDAO, the BNB GrantDAO, the Injective GrantDAO, and more, receiving over 1,000 project applications in total.
Future collaborations with emerging ecosystems such as Celestia, Babylon, EigenLayer, Movement Labs, Initia, Monad, and exploration of funding methods in frontier technology fields like space technology, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and biomedicine using cryptocurrency will continue to provide support for the next generation of multi-chain crypto applications and areas of innovation that have a significant impact on future human productivity.
Community Incentive Fund: Making Public Goods Funding More Fun
To make the process of public goods funding more enjoyable, Dora Factory has also launched the Community Incentive Fund (CIF) to enhance interaction with the community. High-quality meme and NFT projects such as Celestia Sloth, Injective Ninja, Aptos Gui Inu, and Aptos Monkeys have become partners of the Community Incentive Fund. Through retroactive airdrops and gamified donations, the Community Incentive Fund brings more fun to public goods funding and has received contributions and donations from nearly 100,000 unique addresses in different communities.
Anonymous Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (aMACI): Introducing Privacy Technology into On-Chain Public Goods Governance
aMACI is another flagship product launched by Dora Factory this year. It is currently the most trust-minimized privacy voting infrastructure in the crypto world and has been adopted on a larger scale for the first time in the 2024 ETHVietnam hackathon selection.
MACI is a cryptographic technology designed to detect and eliminate collusion possibilities in voting processes to the maximum extent while protecting the privacy of voters. In 2022 and 2023, the Dora Factory team introduced privacy voting to crypto hackathons through collaborations with the ETHDenver, 0x, and OpenSea communities and projects. MACI has greatly improved privacy and collusion issues in on-chain governance and voting. Building on this, the Dora Factory team launched aMACI in 2024, which adds anonymity to voters, eliminates the possibility of collusion between the initiator and the vote counter, further enhances privacy during the voting process, and significantly reduces the barriers to using MACI voting. This marks a solid step towards a future decentralized voting system on a large scale. In the future, the Dora Factory team will also release research reports to provide a more detailed explanation of aMACI’s technical implementation, potential use cases, and future vision.
Dora Vota: Open Infrastructure for Public Goods Funding
Dora Vota is a multi-chain governance and voting infrastructure that, through Vota and the IBC (also a public good) infrastructure, will provide modular voting and governance infrastructure for ecosystem partners, such as plug-and-play quadratic funding modules, grant distribution infrastructure, and more. Additionally, Dora Vota serves as the first application chain dedicated to decentralized governance and voting without permission, providing developers with a valuable testing ground and unlocking more possibilities for public goods funding, governance, and voting.
At the end of last year, Dora Factory further received strategic financing from institutions such as dao5 and Whompa Digital, as well as support from angel investors like Calvin Liu, the co-founder of EigenLayer. This new round of strategic financing reflects the recognition of professional investors for the influential ecosystem and long-termism built by the Dora Factory team and community over the past 24 months.
With the growing strength of Public Good Staking and the maturation of Dora Vota, we have reason to believe that Dora Factory will continue to explore solutions to address the inefficiencies of traditional funding, accelerating the maturity of governance and public goods funding in multi-chain ecosystems.
References:
– [Dora Factory Research: The Block Incentive Ecosystem Funding](https://research.dorahacks.io/2022/12/02/block-incentive-ecosystem-funding/)
– [Staking Rewards: Dora Factory](https://www.stakingrewards.com/provider/dora-factory)
– [Dora Factory: Public Good Staking](https://dorafactory.org/staking/)
– [DoraHacks Twitter: CIF APTOS Grant DAO R5-QF](https://x.com/DoraHacks/status/1788230551515893897)
– [DoraHacks Blog: Retrospective INJ-QF](https://dorahacks.io/blog/news/retrospective-inj-qf/)
– [Dora Factory Research: AMACI Adoption](https://research.dorahacks.io/2024/04/11/amaci-adoption/)
– [Dora Factory Research: Vota](https://research.dorahacks.io/2023/07/31/vota/)
