Smart Invoice flips traditional invoices on their heads with a combination of escrow, milestone payments, and arbitration. We enable clients and service providers to transact with less trust and fewer intermediaries.

Origins

Smart Invoice originally was custom built by RaidGuild for improving how clients paid for work. RaidGuild Raid Parties (project teams) needed better assurances that clients could pay for contracted services. At the same time, we set out to give clients more confidence in the ability of the Raid Party to deliver. We realized that this problem - which we call the invoice dilemma - was a very common one, so we set out to generalize our internal tool into a more polished product for DAOs, Web3 companies, independent contractors, and freelancers to use.

Today, Smart Invoice is live and running on Gnosis Chain, Polygon, and Ethereum Mainnet. Check out our documentation, blog, and twitter to learn more; and drop by our Discord server for any questions or support.

The Next Iteration

Through our experience working with freelancers and grant-giving organizations, next to the importance of generic invoicing many stakeholders acknowledged, a tailored offering for grant disposal is needed to fund the next iteration of public goods built in Web3. For this reason, we are introducing a new way of using smart invoices - Smart Grants.

It uses the same underlying on-chain and milestone-based escrow invoicing system, but optimizes explicitly for the grant-funding and delivery process. Smart Grants ensure secure, efficient, and fraud-resistant grant project management. By introducing Smart Grants at GitCoin Round 18, we want to make the public grant allocation process more accountable and reliable.

Although Web3 benefits already from a wide range of available grant funds, financial support for builders, and fellowships, Web3 has yet to tap into the full potential of such funds. Smart Grants is part of that solution, because it offers efficient grant management of organizations and safeguards to builders.

Features that are build

Grant-awarding organizations often lack cohesive and reliable systems for tracking deliverables associated with grant funds. Smart Grants provides an integrated approach for these organizations to efficiently fund and incentivize deliverables for public good grants and manage those milestone releases all from within one platform.

Contributing to this grant will help to fund:

• Expansion to other networks like Arbitrum and Optimism
• Private metadata sharing between clients and service providers (and arbitrators as necessary)
• Support for more arbitration providers
• Ongoing maintenance of the current version
• Improvements to the user experience of our platform to become more inclusive than ever

We also dedicate to launch:

• A re-designed user interface for Smart Grants
• Project dashboard so grant-givers can manage several projects simultaneously
• A branded portal available to grant-givers
• Proof of deliverables process to request release of the milestones

We want to be Part of the Web3’s Best Version

As a Solarpunk application Smart Invoice dedicates its vision to building the most sustainable version of Web3 that subscribes to principles of accountability, equity, and transparency. We believe that it is important to give freelancers the certainty that they deserve when entering fair competitions and hackathons around the globe. From our experience working with large grant-giving organizations, however, we also know that grant distribution can be messy and opaque. Our mission is to bring both parties closer together, for less time to be spent on the negotiating table and more space for organizations and individuals to grow beyond their reach. One of our early adopters summarized the essence of Smart Grants as follows:

At a hackathon in Bogota I thought it would be right to indicate that we have the funds like in escrow or something while we do the KYC. I feel like every hackathon I’ve been in, there’re always people constantly asking like when do we get paid?

We want to ensure that this was the last one to complain. Support us in our mission of building a dedicated platform with Smart Invoices’ security for grant giving organizations. By donating to Smart Grants you will support us in building our vision of transparent and equitable grant giving in Web3 and beyond.