The problem

Last year, my loved ones in Ecuador lost their jobs due to the pandemic. They attempted to crowdfund the purchase of a farm to feed the whole neighborhood but then one person stole all their savings and ran away, resulting in them eating one meal a day before I dropped out of university to support them. I saw what happens when a community wants to take care of one another but doesn't have the right tools. This is a global issue. $30B is wasted annually on crowdfunding projects that never deliver what was promised. This is because traditional crowdfunding platforms provide no guarantees.

The solution

With crowdfunded prizes, anyone in a community can propose a variety of projects, anyone can add funds to the reward for completing a project, and anyone can complete the project and win the reward. This creates a mechanism wherein ideas recognized as valuable may gather momentum. This is beneficial for prize proposers, funders, and winners, as they can easily outsource great ideas, donate to projects they like in a de-risked way, and earn rewards for pursuing projects that help their community and/or the world.

viaPrize solves this by sending funds to escrow. This platform encourages contributors to fund a prize, which is awarded for successful project execution or refunded, minimizing waste and boosting willingness to contribute. To our knowledge, we are the only crowdfunded prize (also known as a bounty) platform in the world. Prizes include three types of contributors: With viaPrize, ideas are crowdsourced, rewards are crowdfunded, and project execution is an open invitation.

The Middle Road for Public Goods Funding

Prizes open up a complementary alternative in the public goods funding ecosystem that balances funder confidence and builder security. Gitcoin optimizes for builder security because it gives upfront funds, but lacks funder confidence because there is no guarantee of success. Optimism Retro PGF optimizes for funder confidence because funders review the impact of existing projects and add rewards, but it is bad for builder security because there is no guarantee of any particular amount of funding. There's the additional issue that current options only exist because funds are being funneled from profitable projects to these more "charitable" programs, but the programs are not sustainable in and of themselves. How could a community launch its own public goods funding program without a pre-existing pool of funds? With viaPrize, your community does not need a pre-existing pool of funds to launch their own public goods funding program. Imagine if you didn't need a corporate sponsor to launch a hackathon and instead could simply ask your community members to toss in $20. To coordinate the ideation, funding, and creation of public goods simply post a prize and let the community decide. More details on this here: https://www.noahchonlee.com/post/prizes-as-the-missing-middle-road-in-public-goods-funding

Our origins

The concept of crowdfunded prizes sounded revolutionary as I discussed it with residents of the entrepreneurs' pop-up city Zuzalu, so we tested it. As residents discussed the idea of making an AI voice for a river, I launched a prize and residents tossed in $20. After an impromptu five day hackathon attracting twelve builders, we presented the first AI voice for a nature entity in history to the Prime Minister of Montenegro. If we had used Kickstarter, then only the team who posted an idea would receive funds. By using prizes, any builder was welcome. However, I wanted to be certain this can make a real impact. Thus, I found myself watching anti-missile defense shoot down a kamikaze drone as it dove towards me while on my way to deliver medical supplies in Ukraine, funded by a prize from viaPrize.org The medics ended up using the supplies saving the lives of 45 injured, and I decided to pursue this initiative full time.

Budget

We expect to need a budget of $100,000 for the next six months in order to pay for wages of the team of five including myself and four core devs. We also add funds to “meta-prizes” inviting anyone to build desired features to our open source code which is how we have recruited our core devs. As of Oct 12 we have distributed $18,721 in successful prizes for building open source public goods projects ranging from free productivity apps to orphanage donations.

This has all been accomplished since June 2023 with our only funding totaling $8000 coming from over 500 donors on Gitcoin plus matching.

Next steps

We are applying to accelerators and fellowships, consolidating our code to typescript to make it easier for more people to contribute to our open source code, are soon releasing a more web3 native version of our platform, and reaching out to communities to offer our infrastructure. We would be happy to offer this to Gitcoin, Optimism, Giveth etc. to support public goods funding.

Connect!

Join our tg community: https://t.me/+QsphrF50bv43ZTg5 See opportunities to win prizes on twitter: https://twitter.com/viaprize We are a fully open source project. Please check out our github and help us build! :) https://github.com/viaprize/viaprize