DashRoots, just announced via their blog post that their platform has officially launched to help individuals and teams have greater access to funding by the Dash community.

Dash Force News caught up with Martin, one of the founders of Dash Roots about the project and other things they have planned.

“DashRoots helps people at the grassroots level bring their skills and talents to Dash by helping them crowd fund their ideas directly from the Dash community.”

Martin then added that “the Dash treasury is a key part of the network, enabling continued evolution, but is often too expensive to fund smaller ideas”. He differentiated that “DashRoots helps people raise smaller amounts to bring their ideas and skills to Dash at the grassroots level, where small things can turn into big things”.

Individuals will be able to “create a proposal at no cost directly from their account in DashRoots”, where it is live for the specified time period and anyone can donate to the proposal. Then as long as the proposal “received the required funding amount (or more) by its end time, the project receives the funds and work begins”. DashRoots requires that “proposals must include objective goals, and an estimate for delivery” and that “once the delivery estimate is reached, the proposal owner is asked to supply evidence of the successful delivery of their stated goals, and backers are then invited to vote on whether they agree that the project was delivered”. The DashRoots team hopes to parlay this into a reputation system to make “even more interesting ways the community can leverage trust among people building and those supporting them”.

Details of developing the projects

The Dash Roots team started over 14 months ago with a regular DAO Treasury proposal to the Dash network. They started off strong with “around 100 yes votes with just one or two no votes”, but they eventually did not get funded due to concerns around “releasing 6 months of funds to a developer who had no previous work history”. The team understood this so rather than submit a smaller proposal, they just started to work, which allowed them to better refine their idea and work on cool Dash side projects.

Martin highlighted that DashBoost got funded a few months after the original DashRoots proposal and that they were initially worried that the ideas would overlap. They soon realized that “DashBoost follows a model in which everyone votes on how to spend a pool of money and requires the consensus of the voting group”, whereas “DashRoots is a crowdfunding system, allowing people to raise money from even just one other person. Martin pointed out that for a “hyper-local idea, or just a small idea” it is hard to get a wide consensus, but much easier to get just a couple local or world-wide people to back the the project.

Then the team has been working on “DAPR (DAsh PRotocol), which is the humble beginnings of a full node implementation of Dash, written in Go”. They said they wanted to “develop something that could start an important conversation” and eventually thought “an alternate implementation of [a] full Dash node would be hugely beneficial, as is the case in other networks”.

“Having more than one team responsible for innovation on the network, and another team to find bugs, think about future issues, and also just to break the knowledge over two separate entities all sounded like big benefits for the long term future of Dash.”

They admit that it is a huge undertaking and the DAPR they have constructed so far can only do a little, but “hope what they have built shows the potential of what could be” if there were enough dedicated resources. They have chosen to write their version of a Dash Node in Go, much like GETH, which is the Ethereum node written in Go. Martin also emphasized that “Dash Core are doing amazing work (hat-tip folks at DCG), but having more teams doing such work would mean more collaboration, more ideas, and hopefully a stronger network as a result”. Martin added that the coding languages does not matter as much for integration of the two node versions as “that the two versions have complete agreement on network rules and consensus”.

Moving forward, the team is focused on DashRoots and is currently crowdfunding the DAO Treasury proposal fee in an attempt to get fully funded to build out DashRoots further. Martin said that they want to move away from the escrow model since they “had positive conversations with Dash Core members about mechanisms for decentralised escrow (where DashRoots simply wouldn’t ever handle funds itself)”. They are also exploring the possibility of “leveraging mechanisms in Evolution to enable this, and that will be a major focus moving forward”.

Dash community continues to innovate

DashRoots is the latest example of the Dash community innovating to benefit the network. Not only did DashRoots innovate despite lack of funding, but their project is aimed at helping other groups that are unable to get DAO Treasury funding or don’t have enough money for the 5 Dash spam-prevention fee to submit a DAO Treasury proposal. Over the past few months, the demand for crowdfunding has increased within the Dash network since the treasury has come under exchange rate pressure. DashDonates and Mega Dash Raffle are two other early solutions. All of these initiatives have demonstrated the ingenuity that is created within the incentivized structure of the Dash network and community.