DonationDAO

Inspiration

Using crypto to donate to international organizations as seen with Ukraine the past few weeks has become very relevant. However, current problems include making sure the wallet address belongs to an actual foundation, the process is prone to scams, it's difficult to track the crypto dealings of a non-profit, and donors want to ensure that donations are being spent to actually support the cause.

What it does

Our solution is DonationDAO. DonationDAO is a platform that provides a reliable payment system to approved organizations while providing dashboards to view donation spending. All organizations on the platform will be approved by our tokenholders. DD tokens will be awarded to consistent and active donors that use the platform. This will allow for crypto donations to be more safe, reliable, and user friendly.

How we built it

We used a combination of React.js, Next.js, CSS, and HTML to build out the front end of the website. We used ethers.js, Metamask, and openZeppelin in order to create the payment mechanisms and the DAO smart contracts. The backend to store user and organization information implemented AWS EC2 and RDS.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out how to set up our local environments with hardhat and setting up our payment infrastructure required a lot of research and trial and error as this was our first time trying to deploy on Rinkeby and be able to interface with our smart contracts from the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We accomplished so much research on the topic of DAOs. We looked into Aragon, Tally, and open Zeppelin to learn how to create DAOs. What we're most proud of is that we managed to put so many components together with a fairly high level of sophistication for two days of hacking (by our expectations lol). We're really happy with our front end design, smart contracts, databases in AWS, APIs in React, and integrating everything with a blockchain!

What we learned

We learned how to incorporate so many different aspects of the platform. We have never connected a smart contract to react front end until today. We learned how to create governance contracts for the first time. We also learned a lot about KILT and DAOs in order for identity verification. We learned how to use Hardhat and Rinkeby in order to deploy to a blockchain. We also got a chance to learn some new React skills.

What's next for DonationDAO

We want to add a better UI for voting on organizations and make the crypto payments infrastructure more secure. Our DAO contracts and UI aren't fully integrated yet which we would also like to address. In addition, there are so many data visualization opportunities that we can explore in order to make organizations more transparent with their spending.