Skip to main content

Polkastarter

  • Team Name: Polkastarter
  • Payment Address: 0x69367459A962FDF55a6aF0f9D5aB969548bc2b30

Project Overview 📄​

Overview​

The Polkastarter protocol enables projects to raise capital in a decentralized environment by facilitating cross-chain token pools and auctions. Polkastarter has already launched its MVP on Ethereum, allowing teams to raise ETH at a fixed swap rate for their native token.

The Polkastarter team has already started working on bringing this protocol to Moonbeam to bring these features to Polkadot and Kusama. The next phase that we want to pursue is a dashboard for Parachain Lease Offerings. This dashboard will offer several benefits to teams and users:

  • Teams will be able to instantiate their crowdloan.
  • Users will be able to trust that they are not being scammed, i.e. that the proper functions are called.
  • Users will always be able to reclaim their DOT/KSM after a parachain lease. As Polkastarter is non-custodial, users don't need to trust us to be live two years later to reclaim their DOT/KSM.

Polkastarter was created with the vision of generating a fair and safe environment for cryptocurrency investors to participate in token swaps and other decentralised fundraising models. Because Parachain Lease Offerings are going to move millions of funds in $DOT, it's of most importance to guarantee a simple and safe platform for both teams and investors to participate in this process.

Project Details​

As we already have our MVP live on Ethereum, you can see the UI theme by looking at the pools there. Our backend is built using Polkastarter JS, and we would expand this to implement the backend needed for Polkadot/Kusama interaction.

Core Functionality​

  • Launch or Register PLO
    • Teams can create their crowdloan campaign by calling crowdloan.create with its parameters.
    • Teams who have already created their crowdloan can register it with Polkastarter with additional project information such as description, team bio and other notable sources of information that will help showcase the credibility of the project to the Polkastarter community.
  • Contribute
    • Users can connect their wallet and contribute to any of the listed campaigns with the crowdloan.contribute function.
    • The crowdloan will have a page on Polkastarter that resembles the current pool UI with adapted parameters to the crowdloan architecture.
  • Bid
    • Teams can use the raised funds to participate in auctions during the campaign's duration.
  • Reclaim
    • If the campaign fails, or when the slot lease ends, users can reclaim their DOT/KSM with the crowdloan.withdraw function.
  • Low Fidelity Mockups

Ecosystem Fit​

There are several teams working on custodial PLOs (Binance, Huobi, OKEx, etc.), but we don't know of any other projects created a non-custodial dashboard. Having a custodian or dashboard aids in preventing scams where projects ask users to transfer DOT/KSM to their crowdloan, when in fact users should interact with the Crowdloan logic. Using a custodian means that they handle the contribution logic. However, because parachain slot leases can last up to two years, they also introduce risk: namely, that the custodian will not exist and be able to reclaim the DOT/KSM principal. Polkastarter is different because we provide the trust that users gain from interacting with a known, consistent UI, but users use their own wallet and will be able to reclaim their DOT/KSM in the future without trusting that Polkastarter will exist.

Team 👥​

Team members​

  • Daniel Stockhaus
  • Tiago Martins
  • Rui Teixeira
  • Miguel Almeida
  • Henrique Caiano

Contact​

  • Registered Address: Craigmuir Chambers, Road Town, Tortola, VG 1110, British Virgin Islands
  • Registered Legal Entity: Dotstart Technologies Ltd

Team's experience​

  • Daniel Stockhaus: A strategic digital leader with 20 years of innovative and dynamic eCommerce, B2C / B2B and blockchain expertise. Remarkable in leveraging resources, capabilities and relationships to transform enterprises and design scalable digital roadmaps. CEO of Polkastarter.
  • Tiago Martins: Tiago was co-founder and CEO of one of the first project based online programming schools (Codeplace) reaching 100k students. Now CTO of Polkastarter. Main exp on Ruby and Javascript.
  • Rui Teixeira: Rui is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bepro Network, a Code-as-a-Service protocol providing technology and support for blockchain-based gaming applications. Maintainer of Polkastarter JS. Main exp on Solidity and Javascript.
  • Miguel Almeida: Miguel was the CTO and Co-Founder of Liquid Data Intelligence, an automated growth marketing SaaS for mobile apps with clients like Intercom. Now Head of Engineering at Polkastarter. Main exp on Ruby and Devops.

Team Code Repos​

Team LinkedIn Profiles​

Development Roadmap 🔩​

Overview​

  • Total Estimated Duration: 2 months
  • Full-time equivalent (FTE): 2 FTE
  • Total Costs: 15,000 DAI

Milestone 1 — Implement Substrate Modules​

  • Estimated Duration: 1 month
  • FTE: 1
  • Costs: 7,500 DAI
NumberDeliverableSpecification
0a.LicenseApache 2.0 / MIT / Unlicense
0b.DocumentationWe will provide both inline documentation of the code and basic tutorials that explain how teams can create a campaign and how users can contribute.
0c.Testing GuideThe code will have unit-test coverage (min. 70%) to ensure functionality and robustness. In the guide we will describe how to run these tests.
1.BackendWe will have the backend calls integrated to call the appropriate functions on Polkadot/Kusama.
2.Wallet ConnectionWe will be able to connect to the Polkadot JS Extension wallet.
3.UIWe will have a primitive UI for teams and users to interact with.

Milestone 2 — Additional features​

  • Estimated Duration: 1 month
  • FTE: 1
  • Costs: 7,500 DAI
NumberDeliverableSpecification
0a.Article/TutorialWe will write an article or tutorial that explains the work done as part of the grant.
0b.Testing GuideWe are gonna add a battery of quality assurance scenarios to define on what constitutes as a successful user flow. An example would be a user attempting to participate in a crowd loan.
1.UIThe UI will connect to Polkadot/Kusama/Westend mainnets for live functionality.
2.UIWe will perform user testing to add final touches to the UI and launch to production.

Future Plans​

Polkastarter plans to support a wide range of fundraising efforts in the Polkadot ecosystem. For our PLO functionality, we plan to support the full parachain lifecycle, like bidding to extend slots and users reclaiming their DOT/KSM at the end of a parachain slot lease. We will also expand the wallet functionality so that users can connect other wallets, like Parity Signer and Ledger to the interface.

Additional Information ➕​

  • Work done so far: Production fundraising platform on Ethereum and started work with integration to Moonbeam.
  • Polkastarter has not applied to other grants.