RaysToken

Everything starts with someone creating a listing for a project or a cause (can be anything they want to raise money for really). For the sake of argument let's just say the cause is wanting to grow a YouTube channel (keep in mind that the goal is to move away from YT, but...we'll get there, baby steps). You would go to our site which is connected to a smart contract that allows you to deploy your own smart contract based on the info you input. We will then help you to set up a way for followers to interact with your contract through a widget that you can add to your own website. Through this widget followers will have a few options:

1. They can donate a set amount of crypto directly to your cause. Based on how you set up the contract and based on how much the follower donated, they may become eligible for some sort of kickback (Just like Kickstarter). This part is quite simple.

2. They can lock-up a set amount of crypto (with no min or max time requirement) in your cause’s honour using Defi protocols like Compound. I won’t go in-depth on how Compound works, but you can check it out here: https://compound.finance . In short it creates a money market for lenders and borrowers and the lenders earn interest paid by the borrowers. So essentially your followers would be lending out money to other people on your behalf, and giving you the interest, and in exchange you might give them a tiered set of kickbacks that you can define and change as time goes on. In this option the follower can decide when they want to take back the amount they have locked up at anytime, and this would exclude them from receiving any further kickbacks they may have had access to. This part is a bit more complicated.

3. They can lock-up a set amount of crypto, but this time with at least a minimum duration (maybe even maximum too). This is where some magic starts to happen. You can of course incentivize your followers with higher tier kickbacks the longer the lock-up period and so forth. But because the funds are locked up for a determinate amount of time, we can make some fairly reasonable estimates on your future interest revenue, and issue that as an upfront amount. Essentially using the funds that your followers have locked up for you as collateral. This is getting a bit closer to Patreon and is also getting quite complex.

(Ultimate Goal that we probably won’t get to during the hackathon) 4. They can lock-up a set amount of crypto for a set amount of time, but they can also set parameters on how often they would like to add funds, and how much each time. This is practically the crypto version of Patreon. This would likely require us to create our own wallet, but before going that direction I want to validate the idea first.

So there is the brain dump of where I see this project in the short term. Ultimately the idea for this came out of seeing Cryptotubers being booted from YT. I believe that it is only going to get worse as they tighten their algorithm to suit their agenda. The best way to ensure that you can’t be censored is to host your own content. This obviously gets rid of a major issue, but it also makes it harder to monetize, and maybe more importantly, it makes it harder to be discovered.

So this project aims to help build a bridge for content creators (as an example) to use to get onto their own platforms while bringing the fanbase they have built on other platforms with them.

Once we get some traction and, more importantly, some data I want to try tackling the discovery part of the problem, but I think this is a step in the right direction.

we used Compound and Ethers.Js to make this. I wanted to use Uniswap so that we can accept multiple coins as donations. I also want to implement a way of utilizing on-chain data to work on a discovery algorithm