universe

Helena from our team has been doing the OSINT investigations about corruption in Ukrainian universities. 3.7 million USD was stolen in ONE corruption scheme run by my university management and it took us 5 years to investigate this flow and make it public.

Even though in Ukraine there's a "transparent" system for the public institutions purchases, it is centralized and only the university TOPs have access to it.

Blockchain should solve it.

That’s how she onboarded the whole team into the decision to built a PoC of the transparent public institutions purchasing system for EthIstanbul.

Our vision:

1. Students must be able to participate in the governance, vote for the university management and budget spends in a verifiable way where nobody can fake the votes.
2. Universities must spend funds in a transparent way so you can track each purchase and have an easy way to follow through the spends and see the reports and identities of those who receive the funds.
3. Students should have non-monetary incentives to participate in the governance in the way of redeemable credits for the politics/public science/sociology classes.

This is how we not only onboard the masses to the blockchain but also nourish civil society and individual responsibility in the decision taking process.

The major idea behind the DAO is to really have it decentralized and on chain so we have a Mina Protocol smart contract that ensures that students can vote in a zk manner and have the redeemable contributions into academic credits.

For the basics we used React and Next.js.

Each of the following steps also incorporates the web3 technologies:

1. Student card NFC student card NFCs are done with Arx (yeah my ukrainian student card does not have an NFC by default) which instantly gives the students their voting rights once they are enrolled into the university
2. Identity proof By creating the identities students confirm their WorldID uniqueness and corporate emails ownership. These attestations are revokable so that students can attach new identity pieces if the previous ones were lost.
3. Identity attestations Each identity piece (aka NFC card, corporate email, Mina wallet, WorldID) is attested
4. Nounish public goooods! We used nouns prop house to emulate the DAO platform where anyone from the university can create the proposals and then academic community votes. Voting is gated with an NFT that is minted after the identity initialisation. The ideal implementation would involve the account abstraction gating where user owns an NFT-wallet with the identity credentials registered on the corporate email and can access the voting with it.
5. Scroll NFTs The NFTs that allow for access on the prop house.