Træsury

Created by Néstor Nicolás Campos Rojas

Inspiration

For years I have wanted to participate in fund initiatives to invest in projects (startups and others), but the bureaucracy, the high requirements, and many other problems make it very difficult. And it is something that not only I experience, but also many other people who have a little money and want to support projects in the medium/long term.

The exact size of the private investment fund market is difficult to determine, as there is no single, comprehensive source of data. However, it is estimated that this market has experienced significant growth in recent decades. According to Bain & Company's Global Private Equity Report 2021, assets under management in the private equity industry reached a record of approximately US$4.6 trillion in 2020.

The United States has traditionally been the leader in the private investment fund market, with many of the largest private equity firms based in the United States. However, in recent years there has been a significant increase in private equity activity in other regions, such as Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

In addition to traditional private equity, there are also other types of private investment funds, such as hedge funds, venture capital funds, and private debt funds. Each of these segments has distinct characteristics and investment approaches.

Therefore, through DAO (decentralized organizations) we can create structures so that anyone can invest, through investment clubs (by affinity of ideas, professional relationship, etc.) through Blockchain from anywhere in the world and with fewer requirements. That is why Træsury was born

What it does

Træsury allows you to manage investment clubs, and to spread access to participate in investment funds to anyone, decentralized, agile, and without bureaucracy. To this end, Træsury, through these investment clubs, people can:

Create investment clubs: Just define a name and the club will be associated with the account of the user who creates it (owner).
Join or leave clubs: Anyone with an aeternity blockchain account can join the available investment clubs, as well as leave one, with just a couple of clicks.
Contribute to the club: Any member of a club can contribute to the common fund (pool), depositing AE coins that can be used in proposals.
Create and Vote on Proposals: Any member who has contributed funds to the club pool can create proposals, giving a description, amount (not to exceed the pool amount), and recipient, with a view to investing in any business/person in a project. Also, all members can approve or reject the proposal (only one vote per member is allowed on each proposal).
Run Proposals: A proposal owner can execute a proposal (if approval is greater than rejection), which will cause the proposal amount to be sent to the specified recipient. The owner can also close a proposal, in case of not continuing with it, either as a cancellation, publication error or to avoid sending funds.

Restrictions

The Træsury smart contract has some restrictions, similar to real hedge funds:

Up to 99 members per club (in many jurisdictions, such as the USA and Chile, this is the maximum limit of club members for certain purposes and types of clubs).
Only members can participate in club instances.
Only members who contribute funds to a club have the right to create proposals.
Only proposal creators can execute them.

For now, everything works only on testnet.

How we built it

Everything was built only with Javascript (native, no framework), HTML, and CSS, supported by Aeternity Blockchain SDK

For the backend, a Smart Contract developed with Sophia is used. The Smart Contract code is available on GitHub and is published on the testnet, with the ID: ct_yDEFosoW9EsrXDTGs2rq7WwaxvR2XXB8hw1tZgkEaDZyUGaNY

Due to its design, it is possible to run it completely in a local environment or web server. For a demo, it's available via GitHub Pages

Due to technical problems, an internal wallet is managed in the system (by local storage in the browser with encrypted data) and it cannot yet be connected to Superhero Wallet.

Challenges we ran into

Given my little experience with NodeJS or any other Javascript framework (my strength is .NET and Python), to get around that problem I decided to use the Browser Javascript SDK for all development, so to achieve something concrete and functional, I preferred that all It was 100% web without a backend other than the smart contract, so any other developer or person can test it in any environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What I am most proud of is the learning process, as I have many ideas and project initiatives for Web 3.0, and now that I know aeternity and Sophia, they became a relevant opportunity to carry out such projects.

What we learned

I had the opportunity to learn much more about Aeternity Blockchain, its Javascript SDK (to connect to the network and published contracts), and how to create smart contracts with the Sophia language, which in my opinion is simpler than Solidity. To work with the smart contract, I used AE Studio.

What's next for Træsury

At the project level, with Træsury we want to apply for Grants from the aeternity Foundation, and funds to transform Træsury into a complete venture capital fund management system to continue evolving.

While at a technical level, we will work on:

Publish in aeternity mainnet.
Create the project in Javascript framework (not just HTML as now) and publish in a server.
Fix validations and methods.
Allow more types of tokens to be managed, not just AE coins.
Allow whitelist so that only selected members can join the funds.
Manage private funds (not visible to everyone).
Add more parameters, such as the minimum amount to be a member of a club, and the number of approvals before executing a proposal, among others.

Additionally, we hope to be able to participate with aeternity to learn more and create different products and services.