It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they are awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll look at some projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements from grantees!
GSN
GSN (Gas Station Network) provides decentralized infrastructure for dapp builders to reduce friction in their UX by removing transaction costs. A relay network makes “collect calls” to payer contracts that can implement any logic for gas payment terms. A dapp developer could choose to cover the cost of gas themselves, allow users to pay for gas with a credit card or non-ETH token, or allow ETH-free withdrawals from stealth addresses. GSN v1 is online since 2019but the recent version v2 added a host of new features and improvements, including:
- New modular composable architecture giving developers more choice as to which parts of the system they should understand or trust for their specific use case
- More decentralized and censorship-resistant security model
- Wallet UX improvements to make transaction signing more transparent and secure
- Customizable gas mitigations
Follow GSN on Twitter @opengsn to track future progress, or learn more and contribute to GitHub.
Quadratic Dollar Homepage
The Quadratic Dollar homepage is inspired by Million Dollar Homepagewhich sold display space by the pixel. Rather than just selling space, the Quadratic Dollar Homepage (QDH) allows users to determine the relative scale of images on the page using two experimental blockchain voting mechanisms:
- Quadratic voting allows voters to indicate not only their preferences between a set of options, but also the strength of those preferences. On QDH, holders of MOON, BRICK or POAP tokens can cast as many votes as they have tokens, distributed among the images on the page in any way they choose.
- Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) discourages corruption by making it impossible to verify a user’s vote. QDH achieves this by offering the user the “I’m being bribed” option when signing the voting transaction. This causes the transaction to be sent with an incorrect nonce, invalidating the vote. The user can then change their signing key to submit a second valid vote.
Grantee Raman Shalupau recently completed his funded work on the QDH UI, MACI smart contracts, and documentation. For a more in-depth look at how QDH works, this demo a provides a video walkthrough of the web interface and back-end components. You can find Raman Shalupau on Twitter @ksaitoror contribute to the Quadratic Dollar homepage at GitHub.
Are you working on anything that you think could improve Ethereum? Visit our grants page to learn more about what we look for in the projects we fund.
