PanDAO Focus on Treasury Management

A set of open-source tools and utilities, which can be worked upon and improved, for projects that need treasury management functionalities.

Bioinformatics, Python, JS, Big Data, ML, AI, Blockchain.

Team = 5 + 3 Advisors -> https://intellart.ca/#/team

PhD-level, Post-doc-level.

[IMPACT]

We've all witnessed how powerful treasuries in crypto projects can be. Project Catalyst is a prime example of it. However, due to their nature, treasuries hold a tremendous amount of value. They are prone to both internal and external attacks.

We define external attacks those which come from the outside, from a third-party that is able to exploit a vulnerability and steal money. But these are not the only threats. Bad governance practices and non-optimal decision-making outcomes can become internal dangers.

To counter these threats as best we can, standard practices for treasury management within DAOs are our best bet. This proposal is focusing on building an open-source toolset to help with just that.

In addition to the aforementioned potential complexities of decentralized treasuries, some projects are inherently cross-chain, and suffer from even more vulnerabilities due to their nature. One such project is our company's upcoming decentralized peer-review academic ecosystem, PubWeave, whose proposal is in the dApps and Integrations category in this Fund 8 (more on that in the final section). We wish to decentralize every aspect of it we can, including the data and UI of PubWeave, and will inevitably need a minimal amount of cross-chain communication with a decentralized data storage blockchain (see our other PanDAO proposal in Cross-Chain Collaboration).

Open-sourcing the code for treasury management, especially when cross-chain communication is involved will ensure code auditability, trust and constant improvements to our protocols.

Toolsets form the foundation of open-source collaboration because they not only help bootstrap future projects but also bring developers together. Treasury management for DAOs is a cornerstone of decentralized collaboration, and having a well-established framework for any new project to use will make it much easier for said new project to form a community around it.

Creating a well-founded DAO governance structure will inevitably bring people to Cardano and make it the blockchain of choice for new and existing projects to build on.

The biggest risk to an open-source project is not attracting enough people for it to gain traction. Our company has a rapidly growing ecosystem of projects and tools and we are collaborating with more and more development teams. For some examples, see our OpenScience Marketplace, PubWeave and PanDAO dDataStorage projects that each have attracted a different collaborator. We are hopeful that if we continue on this same track, will be able to expand and connect with more projects in the future, and hopefully their teams will be receptive to collaborations on our codebase, as we would be on theirs.

[FEASIBILITY]

1 month

• Build a testable set of minimal tools for basic treasury management operations.
• We get to > 50 commits

3 months

• Our toolset has started integration with other projects, including ours and other teams'.
• More than 3 projects use our treasury management strategies.
• We get to > 200 commits

6 months

• PanDAO tools are being used and many projects are also helping maintain them.
• More than 10 projects use our cross-chain treasury management strategies.
• We get to > 500 commits

We have been fairly conservative in previous funds regarding our hourly wages. However, now that we have started collaborating with at least two software development companies we were made a bit more aware of the higher nature of the costs associated with this kind of development. We have thus increased the hourly rate by 10-15 % and reduced the number of weeks of work to keep the funds we ask for reasonable with regard to the challenge's available funds.

• Senior blockchain developer

80$/hour x 40h/week x 10 weeks (2.5 months) = 32,000 $

• Junior smart contracts engineer

50$/hour x 40h/week x 12 weeks (3 months) = 24,000 $

Total = 56,000 $

Core team:

• Albert Feghaly: Project leader and blockchain developer (Plutus smart contracts).
• Louis Gendron: Web and blockchain developer (Arweave NFT data storage and permaweb hosting).
• Jordan Quenneville: Backend developer.
• Jack Bauer: Science and art communicator, osNFT and logo design.
• Yahya Benslimane: Networking coordinator within the academic world.

Advisors:

• Roger Palou: Academic advisor.
• Tariq Daouda: Infrastructure and AI expert.
• Maude Dumont-Lagacé: Scientific advisor and art/design expert.

More information about the team can be found at https://intellart.ca/#/team

[AUDITABILITY]

Development of PanDAO is just starting following the success of our Fund 7 proposal. Being an open-source modular project, it can be audited by the number of:

1. Commits made to the GitHub repo.
2. Number of developers actively working on the projects.
3. Forks.
4. Number of projects integrating components of PanDAO.

You can find/reach us at:

• https://intellart.ca
• https://github.com/PanDAOxIntellart

Weekly updates are and will continue to be pushed to https://intellart.ca/#/weeklyUpdate in a very succinct manner to allow for fast progress tracking and auditability. Moreover, we have started writing short blog articles on https://intellart.medium.com to let the community in on our successes, struggles and evolution.

Being modular and open-source is at the core of PanDAO, meaning that a major milestone for us is that other developers decide to embark on our journey to provide the much needed set of tools and protocols described above. Obviously, the end-goal would be a vast majority of projects using and developing PanDAO. As we've probably all witnessed with the evolution of Cardano, good open-source projects are ones that foster collaboration, excite and become time-tested the more they're used.

Our aim is to become the go-to infrastructure for sustainable NFT minting, secure treasury management, and DAO governance practices.

PanDAO is a modular suite of components for sustainable creation and minting of NFTs, governance and management of treasuries as well as minimal cross-chain interactions.

It aims at building the necessary infrastructure needed for the development of our decentralized academic platform: PubWeave, a Fund 8 proposal in dApps and Integrations: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401104.

This PanDAO proposal is a continuation of our successful Fund7 proposal: PanDAO: Focus on interoperability: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384816. Our previous proposal did not touch enough on treasury management, which is an essential building block of our ecosystem. This proposal will help ensure that we can get to a usable version of this aspect of PanDAO.