Project Story

Landing Page

The StrawPoll Dapp

Inspiration

Currently a minimum bond of 400 GLMR to make a proposal which is eventually refunded. Still, not all users will have easy access to 400 GLMR or feel comfortable with locking it for an indeterminate amount of time.

This financial barrier stagnates the overall improvement of the blockchain as many good ideas would be left un-proposed.
Many community members don't put their vote in the proposal because of high fees, which is reflected in governance process as lack of representation of members who don't have enough coins. This in turn centralizes power to stakeholders with more coins.
A good proposal that only caters only those members having less coins, might get unnoticed.

What it does

A strawpoll is an unofficial poll that usually takes place before a official governance poll.
Our "Straw Poll" Dapp is a intuitive and a community-based web solution that lets users submit, read, discuss and interact with proposals published by other users.
The app collects proposal information (i.e. likes, dislikes, proposer etc) on-chain. Users can read, vote and discuss the proposals. Further, the top voted proposal is submitted for official governance periodically.
We have launched our app on the Moonbase Alpha testnet.

Home page

Website Homepage

How we built it

Architecture

Dapp Architecture

Smart Contract

We started with deploying the smart-contract on the monnbase alpha test net. The smart contract records the details of the proposals and encloses a wide variety of usable functions that provide decentralization to our project.

Fronted

Then, we build the front-end. We designed the website on figma keeping in mind user accesibility. The frontend is written in react. We used moralis hooks to connect our smart contract to metamask wallet and to call methods on the smart contract. We have also added packages that provide personalised profile pictures.

IPFS for Data Storage

We store the proposal metadata on-chain using ipfs leveraging pinata apis.

Flask Backend and Database

Each proposal has a discussion page, where users can post comments on the proposal, and vote on other users' comments. These discussions are stored in a SQL database connected through REST API built on Flask.

Challenges we ran into

As beginners in web3.0 development attempting to build a solution from scratch, we faced a lot of challenges. We learn a lot in the way and overcame most of the challenges!

What data to upload on chain?

Storing data on chain comes with an extra cost in the form of fees that has to be paid by the user. Data such as the discussion under a proposal can be stored in centralized database with no issues. The proposal hash is already on the chain which can be used to verify that the proposal is unaltered.

No support for chainlink keepers

We wanted to use a chainlink keeper to periodically call the pushToGovernance() function, but the support is not yet availabe.
We found a workaround by using Open Zeppelin Defender.

Who sends the proposal for governance?

At the end of the week we want to push the top proposal on chain. We had to decide whether to push it for governance automatically or allow users to do it at the end of the week themselves.

Options:

The user pushes the proposal to for the official governance poll. They are allowed to do so only once the 7-day expiration period is over.
When solidity receives a request to push a proposal, it verifies the request using the time-stamp of that proposal stored on chain.

It verifies the following:
a. Is the proposal at least 7 days old?
b. Is it the most voted proposal?
c. Has a proposal already been sent this week?

Only after the three checks are verified, the smart contract will send the proposal to chain.
Open Zeppelin defender is integrated with our smart contract, which periodically calls the pushToGovernance() function to push the proposal for official governance poll.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

On running into all the challenges mentioned above, we read relavant articles, documentations and other literature for days, and finally built a working solution!

Putting proposal metadata on IPFS

Proposal metadata is put on IPFS. Discussion is built on flask and stored in SQL database. We decided not to put user comments on chain to save gas fees.