Project Description:
Flow State is a streaming funding platform and digital cooperative.
We offer tools for communities to continuously reward and sustain builders/contributors with programmable money streams. This includes streaming funding allocation tools like streaming quadratic funding (SQF), direct voting, and contribution-weighting. In October, we launched a 16+ ETH SQF round with Octant & Superfluid for the first cohort of the Octant Accelerator Program.
We believe that composable money streams are the ultimate form of programmable money. They’re a web3-only primitive that can unlock sustainable business models for independent public goods builders, promote more active cultures for collective allocation decisions, and create compounding efficiencies to outcompete centralized, extractive alternatives.
These digital tools combined with our IRL structure (Colorado-based cooperative) give us a legal playground to experiment with token-based incentive structures that further our mission to “grow the public goods economy.”
Public Repository:
Budget Breakdown
Funding Requested: 15 ETH
Use #1: 12 ETH - Core Contributor Stipends
- Funds will be streamed equally to 3 core contributors over 3 months via our core team Flow Splitter contract
- ~$5k/mo per full-time contributor
- Expected Outcomes:
- Release an SQF case study and implement v2 improvements based on the Octant Accelerator round
- Open permissionless use of the no-code SQF round launcher
- Launch the first Flow Council (direct voting) streaming funding round
- Develop a “Flow Splitter” interface & CSV integration (easy manual management of one-to-many flows for strategy experimentation)
Use #2: 2.5 ETH - Accounting & Legal
- Finalize the tax and legal opinions on our coop patronage system
- Establish accounting and administrative onboarding processes for coop operations
- Expected Outcome: Begin onboarding coop members and utilizing our patronage rewards system.
Use #3: .5 ETH - Operational Expenses
- Pay for monthly software subscriptions, hosting, & traditional operating expenses
- Expected Outcome: We keep the lights on and can use tools/services that accelerate our progress.
Plans should you fall below, reach or exceed funding goals:
We will continue building Flow State regardless of Epoch 6’s funding outcomes:
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Reaching our goal means that our current core team can stay focused on product and market development full-time and deliver the outcomes above.
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Significantly exceeding our funding goals would allow us to bring on another engineer (currently contributing ad-hoc) as a core contributor and accelerate experimentation with onchain patronage rewards systems.
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Falling short means we’ll spend more time hunting for other grant opportunities while reducing the scope of funding strategy development and slowing the rollout of coop patronage experimentation.
Impact Measurement and Reporting
Inputs > Activities > Outputs > Outcomes > Long Term Impact
Short-term Outcomes (0-3 months):
- Complete the Octant Accelerator SQF round, retrospective, & case study
- Launch a Flow Council funding round
- Release a beta Flow Splitter interface
Mid-term Outcomes (3-6+ months):
- $200k in streaming funding allocated on the platform
- Growth of Flow State non-core coop contributions (i.e. the patronage model is working)
- Integration of our funding strategies with complementary protocols (e.g. capital provisioning protocols)
Long-term Impact (5+ years):
- Create an accessible model to be “employed by the commons” (i.e. more independent builders and public goods contributors with sustainable income)
- Establish coops as a go-to structure for DAOs & their principles to bridge the IRL legal gap
- Establish Flow State as a Schelling point for programmable money and incentive experimentation
Outcomes Measurement:
We will measure outcomes with quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback:
- Quantitative (primarily measured with Subgraphs, onchain data, & Github stats)
- Total funding streamed and streaming funding rate growth
- Number of builders receiving streaming funding
- Number of rounds & instances of Flow State primitives
- Number of coop contributors earning patronage
- Qualitative (primarily gathered through direct engagement)
- Funder & recipient surveys
- Partner DAO/protocol engagement & feedback
Interim Reporting
Regular Updates:
We will report interim status updates monthly on KarmaGAP. We’ll regularly share progress across our community social channels.
Milestone Verification:
- Verifiable development progress on GitHub
- Aggregate and share onchain funding stats/results
- Karma GAP milestone submission & attestations
Sustainability Plan
In the short term, we will grow by dogfooding our streaming funding tools/incentive structures, applying for 3rd-party grants, and participating in sponsored streaming grant rounds where appropriate.
Our coop legal structure also provides unique strategic levers to help us achieve sustainability while staying true to an open-source/public-good ethos. We will explore a fee switch on streaming funding rounds where the sponsor wants to reward builder, funder, and/or voter participation under the Flow State Patronage framework. The coop and patronage dividend structure gives us confidence that the fee switch will be seen as an aligned mechanism for fairly rewarding contributors and incentivizing continued platform innovation (with financial upside if the fee-paying sponsors join the coop!).
Case Studies and Testimonials
Gathering Feedback:
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Conduct user surveys and interviews (already in process)
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Community engagement through social channels (X, Warpcast, & Telegram)
Showcasing Success:
We will compile stats, lessons learned, & testimonials for funding rounds to share publicly on social channels and as blog case studies.
Advancing Values of Freedom and Privacy
Streaming funding can unlock sustainable business models for more independent software developers and public goods contributors. While there are select corporate and organizational champions of freedom and privacy, true independence is key for this foundational work.
Supporting Decentralization
Flow State is a coop–the original IRL DAO structure. Governance of the coop is democratic at its core and all profits are distributed to members according to their patronage of the coop. Coop membership and patronage are more inclusive and accessible than traditional company equity.
Team Information
Social Proof
We’ve been actively sharing our knowledge and ideas for streaming funding with the Octant team for nearly half a year. They saw enough value in what we’re doing to sponsor the Octant Builder Accelerator SQF round for 15 ETH launched on October 24. During the round, James, Octant’s Head of Community, shared a tweet calling SQF a “keeper for Octant v2”.
Transparency
Our primary use of funds will be core contributor stipends. They will all be paid on onchain through a public flow splitter. Funds used to pay administrative and operational fiat costs will be swapped onchain to USDC (or a suitable alternative) & off-ramped to a coop bank account for payment.
Other funding
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Grant funding received since the last Epoch (e.g., RetroPGF, Gitcoin, etc.), including funding amounts:
- Gitcoin Grants: ~$2.1k
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Other non-grant funding sources (like user payments, donations, staking or LP contributions to treasury, VC investments, etc.):
- Streaming direct donations: ~$120