LottoPGF - incentivised donations for public goods

Public Good Projects Discussion
1

LottoPGF

Project Description:

LottoPGF allows public goods to incentivise their funding and donations through lotteries.

Historically, there have been very few effective tools to voluntarily raise money for public goods. Lotteries are one of them, but the way they work right now make them easily manipulable, corruptible or inefficient when allocating resources. We are blending lotteries with Ethereum values to make them a great source of fairly and transparently distributed funding for public goods.

To make lotteries fair, we’re researching and implementing onchain randomness technology. For our current version, we’re using new drand scheme that uses BLS on BN254 instead of BLS12-381 to make drand available on any EVM - a contribution done by our contributors. For the picking of winning numbers, we borrow some lesser-known algorithms from the latest in cryptography (e.g., stateless shuffles, grand product check) to achieve gas-efficient lotteries for both users and operators. More specifically, we’re using the Feistel Shuffle for this purpose. You can learn more about it here,

Public Repository:

Budget Breakdown

Milestone 1: Final release of LottoPGF v1
LottoPGF v1 will make it easy for anyone to deploy and configure a public goods funding lottery with a single winner, and the ability to “kill” the lottery by making the last round a 1-or-all winning dynamic.

  • Smartcontract audit/review - $12.5k
  • Opensource frontend & admin dashboard - $4.5k
  • Integration with Zuzalu.city - $3.8k
  • IT infrastructure - $600 per month

Expected Outcome: Making the first version of LottoPGF available for anyone.

Milestone 2: RafflePGF v0
The first iteration of RafflePGF will allow anyone to set up a funding and/or date goal for a raffle. Once this goal is reached a number of winners will receive the prize. The organiser will be able to decide how many winners each raffle has, without affecting the gas-efficiency.

  • Smartcontracts - 28k
  • Frontend - 23k
  • Project Management - 15k
  • Business Development, Social, Marketing (BDSM) - 16k
  • IT infrastructure $600 per month

Expected Outcome: First POC of a raffle factory to raise funds for a public good/charity/cause.

Plans should you fall below, reach or exceed funding goals: Finding other sources of funding, primarily for the audits.

Impact Measurement and Reporting

Inputs > Activities > Outputs > Outcomes > Long Term Impact
Onchain/verifiable randomness, protocol and app development know-how + Network & Community > Protocol & app development + Marketing/BD > Deployments of lotteries to fund public goods/charities/causes > a mechanism that forms large amounts of capital for public goods

Short-term Outcomes (0-3 months):

  • Launch of LottoPGF v1
  • Deployment of 20 lotteries that fund public goods

Mid-term Outcomes (3-6+ months):

  • POC of RafflePGF v0
  • First pilots for RafflePGF
  • Deployment of 100 lotteries that fund public goods
  • 10 ETH of funding for public goods

Long-term Impact (5+ years):
Our goal for the long-term goal is for LottoPGF to become another “money lego” in the public goods funding stack that tackles capital formation (and becaomes an alternative to relying on sponsors), which can be combined with capital allocation mechanisms.

Outcomes Measurement:

  • Number of lottery deployments with our LottoPGF factory
  • Amount of ETH raised for public goods through LottoPGF lotteries

Interim Reporting

Regular Updates:

  • Quarterly

Milestone Verification:

  • LottoPGF factory deployment metrics (Etherscan)
  • Aggregation of amounts of funding raised for public goods via lotteries. First via manual checks (Etherscan), and verification that the funds raised through this lotteries were actually used to fund the public good.
  • Eventually we will create a Dune Analytics board to showcase our impact more visually

*We are consulting LauNaMu, and we will consult or use her Metrics Garden tool to verify our impact.

Sustainability Plan

LottoPGF v2 will include a fee for every ticket deployed with our lottery that will go to OttoDAO (steward of LottoPGF).

Case Studies and Testimonials

  • As I write this application, we’re running a pilot at ZuVillage Georgia to raise funds for the community. At the time of writing more than $300 were raised through this method in 2 weeks and with a ~70 person community.
  • The idea has received validation from Kevin Owocki/Greenpill, CryptoAltruism and others. Check out lottopgf.org for more info.

Gathering Feedback:
At this initial stage we’re in close contact with people using the protocol, so we will be gathering feedback as we go - primarily by scheduleing calls with them after a few weeks of them running the lotteries.

Showcasing Success:
We will primarily post success cases on our Mirror.

Advancing Values of Freedom and Privacy

Lotteries have been monopolised by the state in virtually all countries, giving bureaucrats the power to decide which public goods are funded. We want to give this power back to the people. For privacy, a contributor is working on a privacy preserving deployment of LottoPGF.

Supporting Decentralization

Our members are actively contributing to research around verifiable/onchain randomness to rely less and less on centralised parties for that. These methods can (and will) be used at deeper levels of the tech stack (even the Ethereum Base Layer, read about Verfiable Delay Functions). We also believe that there’s a centralisation risk in relying on sponsors to fund public goods. They can indirectly define what are public goods and decide which ones are being funded. The variety in mechanisms we have to fund public goods, the better.

Team Information

Our well-established team has been working together on different projects ranging from hackathons, to open-source contributions, products and client work for almost 3 years. By now we feel like a well oiled machine ready to chug away while working individually on our fields of expertise. Some important accomplishments include building the Devcon 7 Auction-raffle, contributing to open-source drand, building onchain raffles and troo.ps (discontinued), being a guest at Kevin Owocki’s Greenpill Podcast and being finalists/main prize winners at ETH hackathons (ETHGlobal Paris, ETHOnline, ETHMunich, ETHDam, ETHBerlin, ETHPrague, etc…).

Social Proof

Transparency

We will use the funds mainly to pay for the development of the app, audits and other services. As an onchain native organisation we try to make as many payments onchain as possible, however there might be occassions where we need to transfer the funds to a CEX or similar to offramp and make fiat payments.

Other funding

  • ~$14k from Zuzalu Tech QF Rounds
  • ~$5k Degen Frame Hackathon
  • 3ETH from Gnosis Chain
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