Pledge

Pledge is an onchain equity crowdfunding protocol where creators raise capital by issuing tokenized shares. Each campaign defines a funding goal, deadline, metadata, and the ownership percentage retained by the creator. During the raise, investors purchase shares at a fixed ICO price through a non-custodial escrow contract. If the goal is not met or the creator cancels, contributors withdraw refunds automatically. Once successful, the treasury is deployed into Aave to generate yield while shares become freely tradable in an AMM environment. Investors can hold, trade, or accumulate more ownership, and claim dividends and lending yield proportional to their stake. Creators participate under the same rules, with no privileged withdrawals or backdoors. The protocol combines primary issuance, yield generation, and secondary market liquidity into a single transparent system. Every balance, rule, and payout is enforced by smart contracts, removing platform custody and manual administration while enabling internet-native capital formation.

The project is built with Scaffold-ETH 2 using the Foundry flavor inside a Yarn workspace monorepo. Smart contracts are written in Solidity and rely on OpenZeppelin primitives such as ReentrancyGuard and SafeERC20. A factory deploys isolated campaign instances, each minting its own ERC20 equity token and routing capital into a treasury vault. After a raise succeeds, vault liquidity is supplied to Aave v3 on Base Sepolia, allowing idle capital to earn lending yield while remaining attributable to shareholders through cumulative per-share accounting. Dividend and yield claims follow a pull-payment model to stay gas bounded and avoid holder iteration. For market activity, the system is designed around Uniswap v4 concepts. Hooks can support behaviors such as fee routing, buybacks, or dividend sourcing, while the swap widget enables immediate trading once the ICO phase ends. The frontend uses Next.js App Router, Wagmi, and Viem for contract interaction, with Scaffold hooks providing typed reads and writes from deployed ABIs. Zustand manages UI state without duplicating onchain truth, and Zod validates every user input before transactions are sent. For identity, each campaign can map to an ENS-style Base name, giving projects human-readable discovery like project.pledge.eth. Local development runs with a Base Sepolia fork to access real protocol contracts, producing realistic integrations without mocks. The result is a minimal but credible piece of financial infrastructure: issuance, yield, and liquidity, unified.