EcoDAO

Empowering change for a brighter, greener future.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this sustainability DAO project stems from a growing sense of urgency and responsibility to address the pressing environmental challenges. As we witness the devastating impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation, action is imperative. The decentralized governance model of a DAO provides an innovative and community-driven approach to tackling these complex issues. Through collaboration, funding, research and development, lobbying efforts, and community engagement, we can work towards a more sustainable world that preserves our planet for generations to come.

What it does

EcoDAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) committed to combatting climate change through ESG-focused R&D, grants, investing, lobbying, and community events.

Furthermore, a donation-based treasury is utilized to champion industry adoption, innovation, and regulation through grants/investments. The portfolio may also include environmental commodities (i.e. carbon credits, Renewable Energy Certificates, biodiversity credits) to further offset emissions.

Unlike traditional entities, DAOs entail a decentralized governance model (majority consensus decision-making). Participation eligibility is often contingent on owning specific digital assets; to inhibit governance attacks, our model enforces equal weightage in voting (via one token per wallet).

How we built it

We designed the smart contracts in Solidity, utilizing the Hardhat development environment. The back-end was fairly straightforward, however, front-end was laborious. We utilized Tailwind (a CSS framework) and React (a JavaScript framework) for customizability and streamlining. Snapshot, an off-chain governance platform, was leveraged for proposals/voting (on-chain governance was cumbersome and expensive). Our website depicts "Web3 UI" aesthetic, entailing round edges, dark tones, and soft palettes (VSCode was utilized for all development).

Challenges we ran into

Connecting the front-end with smart contracts was grueling, especially as novices to the thirdweb SDK. This entailed countless hours of debugging (excluding the back-end woes and writing JS scripts/tests for the Hardhat development environment).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Connecting front- and back-end. This facet of development was particularly arduous for us at HackTX - absolutely satisfying and exciting to see improvement since then!

  2. Hack the Future's only blockchain project. As Web3 connoisseurs, we're thrilled to be championing this technology and presenting its benefits (even in sustainability).

  3. Front-end. Our website looks INCREDIBLE!

  4. Carbon-negative blockchain (deployed on Polygon Mumbai Testnet)

  5. Random motivational quote generator - a strong mind is a strong environment.

What we learned

Our team took a comprehensive approach to learn front-end and back-end connection for Web3, thirdweb SDK, DAO tooling, off-chain decentralized governance, and Tailwind integration with React. We immersed ourselves in online tutorials, documentation, and community resources, and worked closely with one another to gain a deeper understanding of these tools/technologies.

What's next for EcoDAO

  1. Obtaining Wyoming DAO LLC and 501(c)(3) status for tax-deductible donations
  2. Mainnet deployment
  3. Non-fungible token (NFT)-gated access or tiered membership

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