Gradient

Modern societies can amass a large amount of knowledge and resources because they distribute bits and pieces of it among its many members

But to put this knowledge & resources into productive use, societies need efficient means to reassemble these distributed bits through organisations and markets

For the purpose of technology innovation, this is achieved via a symbiotic ecosystem of startups and VCs, where the former compete for resources to achieve maximum value creation, the latter compete to infer, assemble & provide the right resources to add maximum value during the former’s growth and development

But for the purpose of personal development, no such market/ecosystem exists to efficiently infer, assemble & provide the otherwise distributed resources to help individual reach their full value creation potential

Gradient is an ecosystem that facilitates the flow of resources to people who need them to achieve their potential. In return, resource providers ("investors") can profit from the future worth and revenue of their beneficiaries.

For the hackathon, we focused on crypto-startup founders who need resources (money/networking/education). Using Gradient, a founder will be able to get the resources from other people from the community. In exchange, we'll set up a DAO which owns the founder's share in the company they are building. If the company is successful, the profits from a small pool (e.g. 5%) of the founder's shares are distributed among the investors, and the rest is automatically transferred to the founder. In addition to this, we will enable investors to trade their investment tokens (via an external protocol, e.g. Uniswap) so they do not need to wait many years for the exit event.

We think this ecosystem can boost technology innovation in our society by discovering optimal ways for people from different walks of life to reach their potential.

Since a couple of us are complete beginners, we decided to give Austin Griffith's "scaffold-eth" a try. The vanilla version was easy to set up, kudos to Austin! We played with ERC20 and ERC1155 (imported from Open Zeppelin) to implement the basic functionality of our contract. All code is written in Solidity.

We also tried to run Optimism on scaffold-eth, which was considerably more hacky, but one of us (Cole) managed to do this!