The Problems we are solving

Systemic inequality and limited access hinder equitable public fund distribution, while current 'fair distribution' methods fall short in ensuring true equity in fund matching.

Extent of the problem

Inequitable distribution of charitable funds remains a pervasive issue, even with the implementation of "fair" distribution methods like Quadratic Funding (QF). A 2021 analysis of Gitcoin rounds revealed that 10% of projects captured over 70% of matching funds, exposing a stark flaw in these models. This concentration stems primarily from coordinated campaigns and affluent supporter bases, undermining the intended fairness of such systems. In our digital age, where attention drives influence, the disparity is further amplified. Grassroots initiatives with organic support receive on average 5 times fewer donations than well-marketed campaigns. This systemic bias against smaller, potentially more impactful projects is particularly evident in competitive grant systems. The Global Giving Report (2022) found that 80% of matching funds go to larger, well-established entities, while small projects (under $50,000 in annual funding) often fail to secure any funding at all.

Key Reasons

1. Wealth Dominates: Projects with affluent or influential supporters can dominate funding rounds by leveraging their networks for donor surges. This leads to a disproportionate allocation of matching funds, favouring well-resourced initiatives over potentially more impactful but less-connected projects. For example, a 2021 Gitcoin analysis revealed that the top 10% of projects attracted nearly 70% of funds due to coordinated campaigns and affluent supporter bases.

2. Prone to Sybil Attack Manipulation: Coordinated groups or bots simulate additional donors to artificially inflate matching funds. This tactic diverts resources away from deserving projects with authentic, but fewer, donors. In Gitcoin Grant rounds, projects like "Crypto Babes Club" faced allegations of inflated donor counts, redirecting funds from less-publicised initiatives.

3. Marginalisation of Grassroot Projects: The current system undervalues smaller, underrepresented projects with legitimate community support, particularly those targeting niche or local issues. Grassroots initiatives with organic support averaged 5 times fewer donations than well-marketed campaigns, indicating a systemic bias against potentially impactful smaller-scale projects.

4. Overemphasis of Quantity over Quality Votes: Quadratic Funding prioritises the number of unique donors over the size or intention of contributions. This focus leads to superficial support through small donations from Sybil accounts or coordinated groups, rather than valuing the quality and intention behind each contribution. Studies indicate that this approach can reduce long-term participation by up to 30% due to perceived unfairness in distribution.

These factors combine to create a system that often fails to address systemic biases, amplifying the influence of wealthier donors and coordinated groups while potentially overlooking valuable grassroots initiatives. The result is reduced fairness, misallocated funds, and diminished trust in the funding system.

Our solution - Candor

Candor is a transformative charitable gateway enabling seamless cross-token donations and verifiable social pledge attestations designed for socially fairer fund distributions. It can be easily integrated with any online and physical charitable organization. Candor aims to solve the following issues:

1. Elevating Grassroots via Authenticated Social Pledging

Candor leverages Sign Protocol and WorldID for donation attestations and proof of personhood, ensuring authentic contributions. Users earn anonymous social capital points, effectively guarding against Sybil attacks and multi-account manipulation while preserving privacy.

2. Overcoming Donor Fatigue and Bias

A dual-pool system - beneficiary-specific and generic - addresses donation fatigue and bias. Transparent attestations build trust in fair fund distribution, encouraging sustained donor engagement.

3. Democratising Contributions with Seamless Onboarding

Candor bridges Web2 and Web3, offering a user-friendly platform powered by Biconomy’s account abstraction module (Nexus smart account) with Dynamic’s social login feature that eliminates the need for complex wallet management or gas fee considerations. Candor’s donation platform also accepts multi-assets where tokens are swapped via 1inch Swap Aggregator during the donate transaction to the base currency (USDC). These measures enable easy onboarding to lower the barrier to entry for donating while democratizing charitable giving, making it accessible to a broader audience.

4. Web3 Decentralization with Privacy-Preserving Authentication

Utilizing blockchain technology, Candor enables permissionless social contributions while maintaining the privacy of authenticated human donors via WorldID verification. This guarantees the authenticity of contribution via proof of humanhood, while combining the benefits of decentralisation that enables censorship resistance and permissionless pledging to underserved grassroot initiatives.

5. Innovative Hybrid Distribution Model

Candor's distribution mechanism incorporates both existing quadratic funding mechanism, with its own native social scoring system for fund distribution. This comes in the form of allocating 30% of funds via quadratic funding and 70% through social pledging via on-chain attestation with Sign Protocol. This hybrid approach addresses the flaws in traditional models, introducing a social scoring system that ensures more equitable and impactful fund allocation where the vote weightage of contributors is not tied to the level of affluence, but rather the social history of past contributions on Candor.

Smart Contract

Candor consists of three core contracts: (1) the main Candor contract, (2) CandorSPHook, and (3) Sign Protocol’s SP contract, all integrated within the ERC-4337 Account Abstraction framework provided by Biconomy.

The Candor contract manages two key functions: (1) donation cash flow and (2) social pledges via Sign Protocol attestations. To offer maximum flexibility and convenience for users, the contract integrates multi-token swaps using OneInchSwapHelper, enabling payment settlements in various currencies.

By integrating Sign Protocol, Candor leverages its social pledge schema and custom hook instance (CandorSPHook) to enhance attestation capabilities. This integration ensures pledges are verified and linked to specific users, while preserving privacy using methods like WorldID. Each user’s WorldID is assigned a social score, which increases with each successful pledge, reflecting the weight of their contributions. This score serves as an indicator of proactive social involvement and social capital, which is also factored into quadratic funding distributions.

Off-chain system

The backend acts as a minimally-trusted off-chain solver that uses Vercel serverless functions for automating recurring donations. Instead of a traditional database, Biconomy smart session data is securely encrypted and persistently stored using Nillion’s infrastructure - containing data such as grant permissions, donation amounts and scheduling details. A serverless cron job runs every fixed interval, processing pending donations and triggering donations on behalf of the user via Biconomy’s smart session. The serverless nature is chosen as it improves the reliability by being available to be run anywhere around the world.

Partner technologies

SignProtocol

Sign protocol’s attestation has the perfect synergy with integrating with WorldID’s proof of personhood enabling us to verify a real person made a transaction. Coupled with the immutability, transparency and censorship resistance of public blockchains, Candor chose SignProtocol to be the default attestation platform for social pledge attestation, efficient data indexing and enabling merchants to leverage on these to issue points, cashback, or bonuses to real persons based on real transactions. Sign Protocol’s instance also enables custom hook integration that enables the flexibility for advanced implementation on top of just a simple attestation feature. Here, Candor leverages Sign Protocol for social attestations to guarantee immutability and censorship resistance while gelling with WorldID’s humanhood verification to ensure the authenticity and fairness of its native loyalty program based on genuine proactiveness. And Candor also keeps track of a social score under the WorldID, making a loyalty system to encourage active and recurring participation in pledging.

WorldID

By leveraging WorldID's incognito actions for private proof of personhood, we ensure that all purchases and social pledges are made by real verified users, not bots. WorldID's privacy-preserving proof allows linking multiple ETH addresses to 1 person, enabling accurate collection of loyalty points while preserving privacy. This integration enhances the integrity of our platform and provides greater flexibility for blockchain-based financial services. Additionally, WorldID’s proof of personhood can help combat concert ticket botters by ensuring that 1 worldID user can only make 1 social pledge. World ID mini app kit also allows to create seamless native-like applications that leverage the WorldID ecosystem, enabling users to make donations, verify their identity, and participate in pledges directly within the wallet - all without redirections, creating a frictionless user experience while tapping into World ID's growing network for WLD/USDC monetization.

##Blockscout We verified our Candor and CandorSPHook smart contract on Blockscout for Base Sepolia. Making it much easier to debug and also trustworthy for anyone who wants to build on top of the smart contract.

Dynamicxyz

Dynamic is a core integration which provides a seamless end-to-end experience. Our users first log in with traditional methods like Gmail etc. We integrated Biconomy’s Account Abstraction SDK which allowed us to bundle multiple transactions together like our approve and pay transactions, allowing a one click checkout process. To take things further, we sponsored all our users’ transactions, removing the need for users to understand anything about gas. All of these combined allow for Web3 transactions with Web2 experiences, something that we think is important to onboard the next 1M users.

The Graph

Thanks to The Graph Protocol, Candor has near-instantaneous access to blockchain data through a developer-friendly API. With real-time listening capability, Candor can track firstly all its cash flow activities (from its main contract), secondly the respective on-chain review attestations from Sign Protocol & thirdly its human hood verification tracking & attestation social score system in an efficient manner without the need for complex infrastructure set-up. With the help of abstracting complex data structures, this not only services for simplifying blockchain data analytics but also ensures that scalability requirements can be effectively met as the amount of data generated increases exponentially.

Biconomy

Candor revolutionizes charitable giving by leveraging Biconomy’s latest ERC-7579 compatible Nexus Smart Accounts. Users enjoy smooth one-click donation flows with transaction bundling and gasless transactions, removing complexities like gas management. Smart sessions enables innovative recurring donations without any request of repeated signatures, allowing users to schedule contributions that can only execute under a set of rules and policies. Biconomy's advanced relayer infrastructure also enables efficient session management and secure self-custody, enhancing both convenience and control. By leveraging these features, Candor significantly lowers barriers for new users, creating a Web3 experience that feels as intuitive as Web2 - one-click donations, batch processing, seamless gasless on-ramps and even periodic donations.

NounsDAO

As a public good aligned with its mission to democratize access and uplift grassroots initiatives, Candor's focus on charitable endeavors seamlessly integrates with Nouns' ethos as a community-owned brand. The synergy is reflected in the UI/UX, where Nouns art, avatars, and animations create an engaging, giving-centric theme that perfectly complements Candor’s vision of a world of giving and fairness.

Chainlink

Chainlink CCIP powers Candor by enabling secure, seamless cross-chain donations. With CCIP, users can contribute assets from any blockchain creating a borderless donation platform that expands accessibility and trust, abstracting any unnecessary cross-chain operations required. This integration ensures real-time token transfers and messaging, simplifying fund distribution and breaking down liquidity barriers. By leveraging Chainlink's secure infrastructure, Candor highlights the transformative potential of blockchain to drive scalable, transparent solutions for global philanthropy.

Nillion

Nillion's encrypted storage is used as a persistent and encrypted storage for sensitive Biconomy session data without worrying about database redundancy or maintaining across-globe peer connections. These services need to be reliable while maintaining user privacy as the stored credentials have the potential to execute any permissions granted by the user. By hacking with the schema of the key-value pair, we also managed to create a distributed locking mechanism that theoretically allows services to be executed concurrently.

1Inch

Candor utilises 1Inch Swap Aggregator V6 to enable multi-asset acceptance for donation, as non-base currency assets (not USDC) will be instantly swapped to the base currency within in the donate transaction.

Base

Base's scalable and cost-effective L2 empowers Candor to enable transparent, verifiable cross-token donations and efficient pledge attestations. By leveraging Base’s low fees, Ethereum security, and an inituitive embedded UI, we make charitable giving accessible and trackable for everyday users. This integration enhances our loyalty systems and social scoring, fostering recurring engagement from verified users, while showcasing the real-world potential of decentralized applications.

Polygon

Candor leverages Polygon PoS to redefine social good through transparent, verifiable donations and efficient pledge attestations. By addressing real-world challenges, such as ensuring fair fund distribution and incentivizing recurring engagement, Candor uses Polygon’s scalability and low fees to maximize impact and accessibility. For user onboarding, Candor integrates a seamless experience with features like social logins, gasless transactions, and one-click interactions. These innovations lower entry barriers for new users, making Web3 technology approachable while driving social and environmental impact. With Polygon, Candor combines ease of use with a mission for global good.

Mantle

By leveraging Mantle Network, Candor enhances its social impact through innovative on-chain gamification. Mantle's scalable Layer 2 infrastructure powers Candor's loyalty system, incorporating features like social scoring, leaderboards, and engaging rewards to incentivize recurring participation in social pledges. This integration aligns with Mantle’s vision for gaming and social projects by turning charitable giving into a more interactive and rewarding experience. By combining transparency with gamified mechanics, Candor demonstrates how Mantle’s advanced technology can drive both user engagement and meaningful real-world impact.

Celo

Candor leverages Celo's mobile-first blockchain to provide a low-cost, accessible platform for charitable donations in emerging markets. By integrating Celo’s Ethereum Layer-2 solution, Candor enables seamless mobile donations with low fees and no complex crypto processes. This integration simplifies global giving, allowing non-crypto native users to easily contribute and track pledges and driving social impact in underserved regions.