Inspiration
Inspiration
Over the last year, I've gotten passionate about cryptocurrency and AI. I wanted to work on a project that merged by twenty years of campaign experience with those two passions, and create something that will help both the campaign and cryptocurrency community.
What it does
NextRaise helps campaigns accept cryptocurrency contributions. It uses a smart contract to ensure that donations are compliant, meeting campaign limits. Contributions are received in crypto, transferred to USDC and sent to the campaign's financial institution.
NextRaise will start working with US Federal candidates and nonprofits. My goal is to expand to state and local races, and campaigns abroad.
NextRaise is the Act Blue for cryptocurrency and Venmo, with two big differences: 1-We engage both donors and campaigns, building a cryptocurrency ecosystem. 2-Our goal is to charge 2%, a significant difference than the standard 3.5-4.9% that other payments processors charge. A study by CNBC estimated that over $208M was spent on credit card transcation fees since 2008 - for US federal campaigns. As a former campaign staffer, I know how tight budgets are and reducing those fees could impact the outcome of many elections.
How we built it
I built NextRaise as a solo developer, using generative coding tools. My tech stack was: -Claude Code (with Puppeteer, Figma, Tailwand MCP servers, Supabase CLI, and Claude-Swarm. I've built a detailed set of guardrails and markdown file that helps speed up approvals and standardize Claude agent's work. -Lovable (design of landing page and scaffolding). -Replit (smart contract development). -Netlify and Soliena (deployment)
Challenges we ran into
Claude Code issued a new release that made noticeable changes to agents. Agents stopped responding to regular commands and we unable to do tasks. They began deleting work and "auto-reverting all changes," causing hours of redoing important work. These agents even began deleting files outside of the directory that they were working in. When I ran this through Claude (through the web interface), I got this reply: "The Real Fix Needed: This is a Claude Code regression. The agents should:
Detect existing project structure Find running development servers Maintain project context between sessions
This needs to be reported as a bug - it's breaking basic development workflows"
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is my first tech conference and first submission in a hackathon. I'm proud of myself for taking on a big challenge, making significant progress, and having a clear plan to move forward.
What we learned
Agentic coding is a fantastic tool, but it can go wrong quickly. I'm now starting to set up Claude, Replit and Cursor on future projects, working from the same github, so I can switch between tools if one of them glitches.
Deployment was far more difficult than I expected, and I'm going to deploy earlier and work from a live app.
What's next for NextRaise
I don't want to look at my computer for a day or two after this conference! But I have a few to-do's on the calendar next week: -Starting conversation with a campaign finance attorney to solidify regulatory questions.. -Beginning to expand the team.
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