Lasso

Lasso is a tool that allows both individuals and organisations to round up their crypto ‘change’ and fund public goods

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Lasso is a decentralised multi token sweep and swap protocol that allows both individuals and organisations to round up their crypto ‘change’ and fund public goods through it’s native crowdfunding marketplace.

This open-source project is to be submitted under the Future of Finance track.

Inspiration

In 2020 more than $471.44 billion was donated to charitable organisations through traditional means. As crypto adoption inevitably increases users will look for crypto native solutions to donate their ‘spare change’.

After conducting some research interviews we identified that crypto users were often left with small balances of various cryptocurrencies in their wallets, they cited that they would often just leave the small balances in their wallets until the time came when they would have to add more. Cleaning out their wallets was described as a painstaking task and there are currently limited tools available to ease this pain.

Unlike the Binance dustsweeper, Lasso provides a smooth, passive and frictionless experience that allows individuals to remain anonymous while funding public goods.

What it does

Lasso is a DeFi protocol and crowdfunding marketplace for socially conscious organisations and small businesses. With Lasso you can sweep your wallet for any unwanted tokens and convert them to Wrapped NEAR and eventually any supported ERC-20 token. Currently it’s possible to set up to 4 tokens in a single transaction. This separates our protocol from centralised competitors that only allow for dust sweeping into their own native token.

Lasso was built with core web3 principles in mind hence, it has it’s own marketplace where the user is able to choose to donate to a variety of onboarded charitable organisations. Donations can be made anonymously with no KYC required.

How we built it

Web3 technologies used

Exchange protocol: 1 inch

Wallet connection: Rainbow Kit and NEAR

Wallet Networks: Aurora and NEAR

Frontend technologies used

Deployment: Vercel

Wallet Connection frontend: Wagmi.sh

Component Library: Create-React-App

Framework: Tailwind CSS

Bounties

Pagoda - We have identified a significant flaw in NEAR’s protocol design, after trying to troubleshoot with 5 members of the JS tactical support team we found that the NEAR fungible token NFP-141 standard is missing 2 important functions:

  • transferfrom
  • approve

Without these functions we were not able to use Lasso’s functionality on NEAR the way we wanted to and had to pivot to Aurora. We also created technical content and documented our build journey on our TikTok, we chose TikTok as our main marketing outlet as the short form media platform has replaced YouTube as a source of information for younger demographics.

Covalent - Being able to effortlessly query wallet balances is key to scaling Lasso, this would not have been possible without Covalent’s Unified API.

Mintbase - We are committed to radical social change and in order to give out users access to a wide range of organisations we have used Mintbase as the infrastructural backend behind our marketplace. This has allowed us to bring commerce to crowdfunding.

Challenges we ran into

One of the big challenges that we encountered was figuring out how to swap multiple tokens to one token in a single transaction. As we are committed to building a seamless user experience it was important for us to identify areas of friction when scoping this project. It’s common in web3 to have one swap and one approval per transaction however for the Lasso use case this would provide a less than desirable user experience. The team researched ways to make this possible and were able to find a solution that would allow us to batch approve each token swap in a single transaction.

We were forced to pivot our project halfway through as we originally planned to deploy on NEAR and use Ref.finance to carry out our token swapping. Lasso is currently only available on Aurora as there’s no way to transfer a token on behalf on another user on NEAR, this functionality is available in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Over the course of the hackathon we were blocked many times due to us pushing the bounds of what is currently possible in the NEAR ecosystem. Not only were we able to reach out to technical staff onsite but we also successfully solutionized within our team and overcame those obstacles.

  • We are committed to decentralisation and have been able to build a decentralised alternative to an existing web3 product but have taken it one step further by giving the recuperated value utility.

  • After meeting at NEARCON, the Lasso team is proud of the way that we have collaborated to bring this project to life. We are a multidisciplinary team of 3 developers, a data scientist and a product manager who have been able to ideate and build a viable solution to a real web3 problem.

What we learned

Each member of the team has been able to develop their technical skills from typescript to design and branding, we have been able to hone our individual crafts.

We have learnt soft skills such as resilience, communication, teamwork and time-management.

NEARCON really highlighted the importance of ReFi and this is an area of web3 that we would like to continue learning about.

What's next for Lasso

Now

  • Raise grant funding to continue building
  • Conduct research into automated dust sweeping and multi-chain support
  • Work with NEAR to enable [problem Kareem had]

Next

  • Launch Lasso Protocol
  • Onboard eligible organisations in the NEAR ecosystem
  • Launch multi-chain support
  • Investigate DeFi options e.g. staking

Later

  • Monetise Lasso through identified revenue streams
  • Launch $LASSO token economy
  • Scale!

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