Valaxy

When you’re new to web3, everyone tells you to “go contribute to a DAO” but it can be extremely difficult to navigate the universe of DAOs, let alone locate their on and off-chain information.

We want to help people discover and contribute to DAOs that they will love. Knowing “what you’re getting into” is vital if you want to join or contribute to a DAO.

Valaxy is the first stop for aspiring astronauts in the DAOverse; we’ve crawled, curated and aggregated data from across a number of sources so you can access key insights and decide whether to join, contribute, or partner with a specific DAO.

One of the things that motivated us to build Valaxy, is that although DAO treasuries are (or at least should be) on-chain; they aren’t easily accessible and you may be sent out on a treasury hunt to find what should be transparent and easily available to everyone.

To give users transparency of DAO financials, we scraped DeepDAO for treasury addresses, with limited results, and spent a great deal of effort tracking this down manually.

We then used Covalent to access the token balances for each treasury wallet, and in the cases where a DAO has multiple treasuries, we would combine the balances for a comprehensive overview. This wasn’t as easy as it may sound, we discovered lots of errors and had to manually review and exclude some of the datasets.

Our submission for the hackathon may look simple, but that’s the whole point; we want Valaxy to be the easiest solution for aspiring astronauts in the DAOverse and we are just getting started…

Our very first exercise was to think about the user experience; as someone who is new to the DAO space, what information would you like to have available? After having made a list of desired information we designed a simple user journey and drafted the UI by hand, and later in Figma.

To populate our desired UI we’ve pulled DAOs with treasuries on mainnet from Snapshot, written and curated descriptions and information on their missions, and categorized them thoroughly, allowing our users to filter by type of DAO. The majority of Snapshots social links - Twitter and Discord - were expired or broken, so we had to manually find and connect the correct handles.

As mentioned above, DAO treasuries aren’t as easily accessible; We scraped DeepDAO for treasury addresses, with limited results, and spent a great deal of effort tracking this down manually.

We then used Covalent to access the token balances, token price and market cap for each treasury wallet, and in the cases where a DAO has multiple treasuries, we would combine the balances for a comprehensive overview. This wasn’t as easy as it may sound, we discovered lots of errors and had to manually review and exclude some of the datasets.

After cleaning up our data, we added it to our database. By using Hasura we were able to get an API up and running in a very short time. Hasura automatically creates a GraphQL schema based on the database schema, which allows us to define the schema once and then just populate the database with the data for the backend.

To build out the frontend we used Tailwind CSS for the styling and NextJS (React) as the frontend.