Now that the Arweave Community Fund A (ARCA) has stretched it’s legs a bit in the first quarter of 2020, I wanted to take the opportunity to summarize where we are at and where we hope to be.
When I was first invited to this DAO, it was my first experience with this side of the decentralized world. I had heard about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations before, but never really understood their purpose or how they actually work. Voting with ETH? What the hell is that? On the other hand, I was very familiar with being a member and sometimes leader in many first person shooter, MMO and strategy clans, guilds, teams etc. So far, I have seen many similarities… like coordinating a diverse set of internet strangers for the “greater good”… or attracting new talent… handling drama… strategy building… But throw in Decentralized Finance and cutting edge technology to the mix and I guess you have a DAO.
Yes — a DAO can be so much more than a “Blockchain Clan with DAI”. And from what I have seen, the past 3 months have set ARCA in the path to become much more than a coordinated group of internet strangers.
Since our inception in January, ARCA has made the basic, but necessary steps, ranging from just establishing trust with one another’s skill sets and personalities to establishing how we want to operate. Some of these steps include…
* Establishing our mission, based off of community feedback, which is primarily focused on broadening the Arweave reach with decentralized, innovative use cases and building blocks.
* Created basic processes to handle voting, new members, DAO communication channels and social network presences.
* Set up Github repositories to support our own code, community code and grant publications.
* Organized grant templates, submission process, including getting the kinks worked out with the Aragon platform.
One of the major duties of ARCA is to responsibly allocate funds to different things that further our goal. Luckily, the team was seeded with members from different industries and technology backgrounds, and we have already come up with different ideas for dApps, services and operational necessities. As such we have already voted successfully on many different internal and external grants.
I’d like to share some of the most exciting projects have already received initial funds.
Feedweave — The goal of FEEDweave is to serve as a fully functioning social network for early adopters in the Arweave community, the broader crypto community, and eventually mainstream users. It is a community-built application that leverages the open, permissionless nature of Arweave to encourage ecosystem participants to contribute to building it out or reusing its composable components in other Arweave applications.
PermaSnap — Create and publish a simple, easy to use mobile app for seamlessly uploading photos to the Arweave permaweb, optionally leveraging delegated transaction posting to obfuscate Arweave from non-tech savvy users.
ARCA Permaweb Site — A central online location to funnel requests for gtrants and membership while showcasing the mission and results of ARCA efforts to further promote the DAO.
ARCA Arweave Gateway — Host an official ARCA Arweave node and enable Gateway, IPFS Bridge a to provide opportunities for ARCA development and further decentralizes the Arweave network by providing the second public Gateway service. https://perma.online
In the end, we have managed to spend 7500DAI from our initial round of funds. As someone who has an Enterprise IT day job, with no budget of his own to spend — this is awesome! But at the same time, this is barely anything when it comes to paying for skilled resources making great products.
Even with the COVID crisis impacting our daily lives, hopefully in the next month or two we can complete some of these first work efforts. Some concrete processes will be established, like new member onboarding or how we continually engage the community for example. Our website will also make a big impact, as it will solidify our mission and brand, while giving us a cool portal to funnel the community towards.
The next exciting grant could be just around the corner and we are always looking for new members, ideas, code or decentralized patterns. Want to chat with us? Head over to the Arweave Developer Discord… or try to make a post on Feedweave.