ATOM proposal passed: Detailed explanation of Dora Factory, a new leader in public goods technology

The recent major event in the Cosmos ecosystem is Cosmos Governance Proposal No. 917: Dora Factory and DoraHacks teams applied for a grant of one million US dollars from the Cosmos Hub Treasury to run ten rounds of Quadratic Funding community donations for the Cosmos Hub ecosystem within two years.

As the largest treasury grant application in the Cosmos Hub in recent times, this proposal has aroused extensive discussion in the Cosmos community and has received unanimous support from the community. More than 1 billion US dollars of ATOM voted in favor, including major verification nodes SG-1, Chorus One, P2P, Zero Knowledge Validator and Cosmos core contributors Informal System, Keplr, Cosmostation, etc. With a approval rate of 91.6%, Proposal 917 has become the most supported motion in the history of Cosmos governance.

After the passage of this proposal, Cosmos Hub has a native quadratic community funding plan for the first time. Dora Factory has also become the most supported public goods technology team in the history of the Cosmos community.  

After the passage of this proposal, Dora Factory also officially announced the second AEZ (ATOM Economic Zone) quadratic funding with DoraHacks, which is also the official start of the first long-term funding plan. The quadratic funding program will last for two years, starting on May 15, 2024 and ending in May 2026, during which ten community votes and matching bonus pool allocations will be conducted. The total matching bonus pool is $200,000 and $80,000 ATOM.

Why did the Cosmos community unanimously agree to approve a million-dollar grant for the public goods infrastructure Dora Factory and the developer incentive platform DoraHacks?

What is public goods funding, and what role do public goods play in the Web3 ecosystem?

This article will introduce Dora Factory, a low-key new leader in public goods technology.  

What is public goods funding? 

Public goods funding is a concept often mentioned in the Web3 industry. Public goods in general refer to things or services that are for everyone to use and are not-for-profit. These are usually provided and managed by the government or other public institutions, such as parks, libraries, roads, etc.  

Public goods in the traditional sense have the characteristics of non-exclusivity (one person's use does not prevent others from using it), non-competitiveness (one person's use does not reduce others' use) and positive externalities (one person's benefit will also benefit others).  

In the field of encryption, including public chain infrastructure, storage, developer tools, software middleware, and some user-oriented and non-profit applications, including block browsers, data dashboards, wallets, etc., can be regarded as public goods.  

Encryption and blockchain technology are ideal tools for public goods funding due to their inherent openness, transparency, and verifiability. At the same time, the use of smart contracts can also significantly improve the efficiency of funding and reduce costs.  

However, public goods in the field of encryption also face many problems and challenges.  

Although everyone knows that public goods are good and important, few people, whether ordinary users, foundations or project teams, pay continuous attention to public goods. As a rapidly developing industry, crypto has endless new narratives emerging every moment, competing for limited attention, time and funds.  

In more detail, this problem can be divided into the following three points:

1. The multiple parties involved in public goods funding (foundations, institutions, DAOs, developers, communities) are not coordinated;

2. Lack of continuous and effective funding channels;

3. Public goods funding is boring.  

Dora Factory emerged in the historical development of Web3. It is trying to build infrastructure to achieve large-scale adoption of public goods funding.

Dora Factory: Infrastructure for Public Goods 

Dora Factory has been committed to building public goods and solving related key problems since its inception. Just recently, the Dora Factory team launched an ambitious proposal in the Cosmos Hub to apply for $1 million worth of ATOM tokens from the Cosmos Community Treasury and plans to launch 10 Cosmos-native quadratic funding in the next two years. This proposal has caused quite a stir and has received support from Cosmos core contributors such as Keplr, Cosmostation, Chorus One, CryptoCito, etc. However, as a team that has been quietly BUIDLing for many years, Dora Factory does not seem to be well known to the public.  

Dora Factory was founded in 2021 and is incubated and supported by DoraHacks, the industry's largest developer and public goods funding platform. It is the industry's 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 specific application chain dedicated to voting and governance, designed to empower the global geek movement, open source communities and decentralized organizations.

Multi-chain quadratic funding: connecting communities and ecosystem builders 

The Dora Factory team has been committed to promoting the adoption of multi-chain quadratic funding since 2020. It is the first and only team in the industry to independently develop and promote the adoption of multi-chain quadratic funding. So far, the Dora Factory team has become a leader in multi-chain quadratic funding and has successfully deployed native quadratic funding for the first time in multiple mainstream crypto ecosystems, including: BNB Chain, Solana, Polygon, Aptos, Cosmos Hub, Injective, Filecoin, Avalanche, etc. The coin-holding community can support high-quality early projects and public goods in the ecosystem by donating native tokens, thereby promoting better collaboration between the foundation, community and developers to pursue a common vision. Dora Factory has provided more than $10 million in funding and donations to the crypto multi-chain ecosystem through the multi-chain quadratic funding agreement. After the passage of Proposal 917 of Cosmos Hub, relying on Dora Factory, Cosmos Hub has a native, long-term community quadratic funding plan for the first time. Public goods in the Cosmos ecosystem, including developer tools, community tools, data dashboards, Defi dashboards and other products, the core development teams can obtain long-term and stable funding and the attention and support of the entire community.  

Public Goods Staking: Providing Sustainable Funding for Public Goods

The Dora Factory team first proposed the concept of Public Goods Staking at the end of 2022. They obtain block native rewards by operating underlying infrastructure such as verification nodes, sequencers, and validators, and continue to use these rewards to fund multi-chain developers and public goods ecosystems.  

Currently, Dora Factory has promoted the public goods staking movement in the mainnet and testnet of more than 30 ecosystems. With the support of multiple partners such as foundations, institutions, DAOs, and communities, Dora Factory has achieved more than $400 million in TVL in just one year. This number is expected to continue to grow and be able to provide sustainable funding of $5-10 million per year. Through steadily growing TVL, continuous product iteration, and cooperation with the world's top developer communities such as DoraHacks, Dora Factory has become the only team that can ignore market fluctuations and continue to fund developers and multi-chain public goods ecosystems. It also promotes a series of long-term funding projects with different goals, including the Venture Grant project Dora GrantDAO for all crypto and cutting-edge technology fields, and community funding projects for specific ecosystems such as Cosmos AEZ Grant, Aptos GrantDAO, BNB GrantDAO, Injective GrantDAO, etc., and has received more than 1,000 project applications in total. In the future, Dora Factory will cooperate with new ecosystems such as Celestia, Babylon, EigenLayer, Movement Labs, Initia, Monad, and explore ways to use cryptocurrency to fund cutting-edge technology fields such as space technology, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and biomedicine, and continue to provide support for the next generation of multi-chain crypto applications and innovations in fields that have a significant impact on future human productivity.  

Community Incentive Fund: Making Public Goods Funding More Interesting

In order to make the process of public goods funding more interesting, Dora Factory has also launched the Community Incentive Fund to better interact with the community. Some 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, and have brought more fun to public goods funding through retroactive airdrops, gamified donations, etc., and have received contributions and donations from nearly 100,000 independent addresses from different communities.  

aMACI, an anonymous minimal anti-collusion infrastructure: Introducing privacy technology into on-chain public goods governance

aMACI is another flagship product released by Dora Factory this year. It is the privacy voting infrastructure that minimizes trust in the current crypto world and has been adopted on a large scale for the first time in the 2024 ETHVietnam Hackathon selection.

MACI is a cryptographic technology designed to detect and eliminate the possibility of collusion in the voting process to the greatest extent possible and protect voter privacy. In 2022 and 2023, the Dora Factory team will bring privacy voting to the crypto hackathon for the first time by collaborating with crypto communities and projects such as ETHDenver, 0x, and OpenSea. MACI has greatly improved the privacy and collusion issues in on-chain governance and voting. On this basis, the Dora Factory team launched aMACI in 2024. By adding the anonymity of voters, the possibility of collusion between the voting initiator and the vote caller is eliminated, the privacy of the voting process is further increased, and the threshold for using MACI voting is greatly reduced, which is a solid step towards the large-scale decentralized voting system in the future. In the future, the Dora Factory team will also release a research report to explain the technical implementation, potential use cases and future vision of aMACI in more detail. Dora Vota: Open Infrastructure Funded by Public Goods Dora Vota: Multi-chain governance and voting infrastructure, through Vota and IBC (also a public good) infrastructure, will provide modular voting and governance infrastructure for ecological partners in the future, such as plug-and-play quadratic funding modules, Grant distribution infrastructure, etc. At the same time, as the first permissionless application chain focusing on decentralized governance and voting, Dora Vota will provide developers with a rare testing ground to unlock more possibilities for public goods funding, governance and voting.

At the end of last year, Dora Factory further obtained strategic financing from institutions such as dao5 and Whompa Digital, as well as support from angel investors such as Calvin Liu, co-founder of EigenLayer. Dora Factory's new round of strategic financing reflects professional investors' recognition of the strong ecology and long-term influence built by its team and community in the past 24 months.  

As Public Good Staking grows and Dora Vota gradually matures, we have reason to believe that Dora Factory will continue to explore solutions to the inefficiency of traditional funding and accelerate the maturity of multi-chain ecological governance and public goods funding.  

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