👨🍳Pot Owners & Chef Training (Pot)
How to deploy, run, and manage quadratic funding rounds. As a Pot Owner and a Chef
Background
First, what is a Pot, how are donors involved?
Pots are quadratic funding round contracts that sponsors can directly fund via a matching pool. They have a series of phases in which projects apply & get accepted, donors (who usually met a human criterion) that donate through the pot directly to the approved projects, and projects that are paid out from the pot’s matching pool when the round is over based on the donation (the formula for calculating this is called quadratic funding).
A Pot Owner, Admins (optional) and the Chef, see the success by bringing in sponsors, donors, and facilitating projects and initiating payouts.
Difference Between Direct Donation at Matched Donations via Pot
Pots are quadratic funding rounds. Quadratic funding rounds for the user are different from direct donations. While donations during a quadratic funding round to the project goes directly to the project. Those donations are logged in the pot contract and used to calculate how much of the matching pool a project will get when the round is over. Unlike direct donations where anyone can donate to a project at anytime, a matching round has a requirement to donate and only live when the matching round is live. This requirement is usually being a human via nada.bot, a bot protection tool. This is to prevent people from scamming more donations to get more of the matching round out.
Who Is Everyone that involved
Alot of people in this kitchen
🔑 Pot Owner: person who deploys pots and can change settings and do everything a Chef can do. Usually coordinates round and selects chefs and closes off chain sponsors. Can remove chef and other admins.
💪🏿 Pot Admin(s) - Optional: specified by owner. Can do everything an owner can do except add or remove admins.
👩🏿🍳 Chef: appointed account responsible for approving applications, supporting donors, and can collect automated fees for donations and sponsorships
🙏 Verified Donors: people who verify as a human through nada.bot (or other verification requirement in species, and that can donate to a project through round to get matched
🥯 Sponsors: anyone can donate to the entire round and their logo (aka near.social profile picture) shows up on sponsor board. Usually most money comes from a committed sponsor before the round. Alternative to people who don’t want to verify and support the whole round instead of individual projects. 🏥 Projects: projects that are applying. If they are approved they are often onboarding their network of donors in order to get a bigger matching round. They will be expecting to be notified when they get accepted, how to support their donors, and where there money was at.
😩 Biggest Challenges of A Round
Let’s be honest, it's a lot to manage your own quadratic funding round. You are dealing with advertising your round, onboarding sponsors, project, donor w/ verification via nada.bot, payouts and post pot engagement. You are dealing with the on-chain process but also communicating directly with teams in support channel. Luckily we are here to help and facilitate!
Here is a list of the most difficult parts of managing a quadratic funding round/pot:
Getting your committed sponsors to do an onchain donation directly to the round
to create a profile and directly donate in NEAR to sponsor.
You may need to onramp, or even create an account to bridge and create a wallet with near social profile to donate with their accounts
Its ideal they make their own account
Marketing the Round: Social media and coordinating with Potlock brand. Getting people to apply and getting donors outside of the existing network. .
Keeping Applicants Up to Date: Letting applicants know if they got rejected or accepted. We currently do not have an email service as approval and rejections for applications are on chain. One way to get relatively helpful notification is through LEARN NEAR WATCH bot or a mobile HERE wallet to get notifications about any on chain changes. So this will require direct communication with applicants for updates in their status. Get people to be on registry.
It wont show to donate until the matching round is live, and they will only show on registry
Getting People to verify humanity through nada.bot: Nada.bot can be tricky as it requires users to go on nada.bot, go to third party app and verify a credential, come back to add and reverify on the nadabot contract to get enough “points” to be a human. Then after they are human only then are they eligible to donate. This process is difficult currently in terms of UX, requires NEAR transaction fees, requires connecting to different apps, and isn’t permissionless. (This is to prevent people from matching rounds). If all else fails they can just donate to the overall matching amount (but they are donations don't get amplified, they would be displayed as sponsor who amplifies other donation)
They might donate directly to project and not in round, if they go to page and click donate
If nada.bot gets botted or clear signs of collusion: The nada.bot team may change what it means to be human and different requirements, and this may be seen as unfair. It also may hinder people that were previously considered human to no longer be before donations. It may also lead to. This is a new uncharted territory but be in the nada.bot/support team and set up communications with them so they can keep you informed of any changes. This will also make it more difficult for people to verify. The other way may be true, as being a human is too high a barrier of entry and weights may be changed and requirements may be lowered.
For Pot Owners & Admin
Choosing A Chef
Selecting a Chef is important. This person should not only have domain expertise on the Pot's vertical or focus area to approve applications, but they should have knowledge of the Potlock platform (see us for training), a network to raise funds, custom support experience, and be a trustworthy person)
Managing Chefs & Sometimes Doing Chef Roles
As a pot owner or admin you are responsible for keeping the chef in line and making sure their isn't any wrong doing. You always have the ability to select a new chef. Also since their can only be one chef and you have all the permissions of the chef, you may also be promoting the round, helping donors get verified, helping projects with application, approve projects with application and so forth.
Advertised Funds for Matching Are Put on Contract from Sponsors Account Ahead of Time
Make sure if you are deploying a round that if you are marketing a round for certain amount, that sponsor put the matching amount directly in the contract after deployment. All payments and fees occur directly on chain.
Making Sure No Wrong Doing for Chef Payouts & Check Down During Cooldown Period
The actual calculations taking donation information from the pot against matching amount to calculate what the quadratic
For Owners
This is only relevant for Pot owners (but also admins who can change settings of a Pot0.
When you deploying a pot, you are creating your own contract. For this it will cost 4.4 NEAR. There are essential things to you can customize about your rounds
✏️ Information: only thing you cannot change. The title of pot an description
📆 Dates: Applications start and end date and matching round start and end date. Your matching round cannot start before applications start. You can have applications open during matching round. You can also push back dates later. Applications denote when projects can apply and matching round denotes when people can start donating in round.
﹪ Fees: protocol, referrers and chef fees. The factory contract, or the contract responsible for deploying this contract, has max protocol, referrers and chef fees, as a chef. These fees can be zero. A protocol fee takes a percentage of every matched donation and sponsor coming in. As well as Chef fee. The chef from this fees to incentivize more donations and more sponsorships to grow the Pot. The referrer fees is a link generated on sharing when a donation or sponsorship is made that gives a kick back. This is to incentivize the public to grow the pot. The public can see this by seeing in the settings.
✅ Eligibility: Project & Donor Requirements. Pick the registry (list) that projects must be on to be eligible. This is usual the Potlock public goods registry (projects on bos.potlock.org). Additionally donor requirements require, the check that donors must have in order to give a matched donation. This by default nada.bot is human which is a contract that allows users through app.nda.bot to verify different services to build up a human score. Also allows for aminum donation (optional)
🧑🍳 Admins and Chef: Admins are people who can change settings as well as reallocated chefs.Admins are optional. Chefs are responsible for accepting applications. Admins and you as owner can do anything that a chef can do. Chef would be allocated fees for growing pot
Want to look at the code? Check out the pot_factory contract and the pot contract here
Settings Page
The settings page lets you know what the current configurations of a Pot is, and it also let’s you know any changes in settings to see if the owner has changed the matching round, application dates, fees, even whether you are a chef, pot name, max number of applicants, etc.
What If The Chef "Spits in The Food"
Round managers are a huge vector of attack
Based on the current design of Potlock their is room for round manager corruption. This includes
Rejecting application / approving applications (get off-chain kickbacks)
Not approving in timely fashion
Maliciously calculate payouts
What is a Chef
A Chef is someone who manages a pot (a quadratic funding round). But like any chef, you don’t own the kitchen, you just make sure the meals are prepared. Similarly, you are not the one who who deployed the account, and if you are caught spitting in the food, plenty of people know how to cook
YOU SHOULD HAVE A TELEGRAM GROUP CHAT “ROUNDNAME / POTLOCK” (contact potlock community telegram group to set this up if you haven’t already
Responsibilities of a Chef
On-chain
As a Chef this means
you approve and reject applications
You can reject someone even if they have been approved. Please put a reason why as it posts it on-chain and allows for transparency. This may be the case of finding additional information or evidence of wrong doing.
Initiate Payouts - after round is over click payout buttons and then let cooldown period transpire for payout period to happen. It is up to own and admin to actually finalize pyouts
Resolve Challenges: resolve on chain challenges regarding payout calculations before the payouts can happen.
Communicate with projects and donors
Get Funding into Pot
It is your responsibility to get additional funding into Pot. More money = more projects applying = more donors wanting to help them get money = makes your job easier.
Why would there be bad actors exploiting the system?
We have a pot of money and the way to get more of it is by getting more donations. So naturally people will try to qualify through different wallets as human, donate a little to get more matched. There maybe clear money trail between projects and direct exploits / sybil attacks to system to get this fund. This may justify rejecting a project.. While the nada.bot team will be working to adjust human thresholds and stamp thresholds accordingly, we may covertly see that certain projects are gaming the system. Join the nada.bot/support channel to setup comms with the team.
Advantages of Being A Chef
A Chef gets fees of donations and from sponsors; incentives are directly aligned. This means the chef will get an amount from all donations and all sponsorships coming to the round if this is available. The amount of fees is ultimately set by the owner of Pot (or who deploys the contract), additional there is a max cap on these fees. At the same time, fees might be zero for a round deployed by the owner, and also users and sponsors can opt out of fees.
Understanding Fees
Fees are ways to align incentives with every stakeholder. In our pot factory (a contract that deploys pots aka quadratic funding rounds) enforces a max fee on every pot that prevents owners and admins from going past a certain percentage. Additionally there is an option for sponsors and donors to not give any fees if they don’t want to. There can be a chef fee or protocol fee that takes a percentage from matched donations and sponsorships to the appointed chef at the time and to impact.sputnik-dao.near, the Potlock treasury. On the pot page there is a share button that copies in the logged in account as a referredId, when someone donates to a project (public round fee) or sponsors a pot, through this link, that referrer account is automatically paid out. This is to incentivize the Chefs to do a good job growing the pot, and for the public to also have incentives for growing the pot.
Compensation for Chefs
Differences Between Chef & Pot Owner
This is different from an owner. An owner deploys a pot as its own contract, sets fees you as a chef earns, number of applications. It is also important the owners can also update fees and settings.
Some crucial step is the calculation happens off chain and has a cooldown period so others can audit that this calculation is done correctly. Then YOU (or owner / admin) needs to initiate payout after challenges are addressed.
Although anyone can deploy their own POT in our factory contract, only certain people will be whitelisted to display from our UI. If you want to deploy your own round, you can deploy your own gateway.
Stages of A Pot
How Projects Apply
Project must apply. One of the things for projects that will be confusing is that
1. Get A Project NEAR Account: First they need a project account on NEAR, preferably a named account representing their organization (example potlock.near). We recommend at least having 1 NEAR around $2-$4 depending on the market, to save their on chain profile and do other things. This will be the case for most projects if they are not already in NEAR ecosystem, To do this a keypom.xyz link with 1 NEAR in it should be given or they should make an account on https://wallet.meteorwallet.app/wallet and you should then transfer funds to them. If projects need support for this then join the https://potlock.org/community where we will provide with associated fees for project onboarding.
2. Apply to Project Registry: Next step is to create a project on Potlock, which asks them to fill out their profile information, past funding, team information etc. For how to create a project https://docs.potlock.io/user-guides/create-your-project.
3. Get Accepted to Project Registry: As of right now projects will be pending on registry and must be approved by Potlock admin. Please go to Potlock telegram and under “new-project-registration” channel let Potlock core team now you have applied so you get accepted or rejected with the link to your project. It will say what status your project is in with no banner if it is approved.
4. Go To Round During Application Period And Apply: Then a project will need to go to the pot when the application period is open and apply.
DIRECT DONATIONS are not DONATIONS through Pots. Make sure that matched donations are by people who meet nada.bot requirements and its done through the pot and not through the project page.
Confusing parts: they may think that direct donations via project page are matched donations.
Project get donations immediately, this is not kept on contract, just tracked in order to calculate how much is matched from pools at end
Approving Projects
Projects can be accepted or rejected with a reason on chain by Chef owners, admins or chefs. However this should be done by the Chef unless there is a backlog.
Reasons for rejections may be
Not a public good in the round
Not a project that fits the scope of that Pot’s vertical
Had a history of not delivering or malicious activity
Some projects may have difficulty applying as
They need to be approved on the registry first
Go back to pot
May not have enough NEAR for transaction fees
May be waiting ot long to apply
Supporting Donors
Biggest challenges with donors. To get matched donations there are currently hurdles for donors.
Donors need to create a wallet (preferably a named account) and have NEAR to pay for transactions, and also to pay for stamps to be a human. Allocate at least .5 N $2 for donors. Users will need to save their private keys
This means they will need to use an onramp (click here for available on-ramp options)
Another alternative is to create a keypom linkdrop where you preload NEAR for someone to use
Nada.bot verifications: In order to get a matched donation they need to verify to be a human with a nada.bot stamp/This involves signing into the app, going to a 3rd party provider, verifying with another contract (requires NEAR for transaction), and then going back to stamp and verify with our contract until they meet the threshold.
Understanding the difference between direct donations: users can directly donate to a project. Make sure they are donating through a matched round.
Users won't know how much will get matched until payouts are done.
Sponsors
They need to onboard Fiat to NEAR, and then create account and donate from NEAR.social account for logo to show on sponsor
If they cannot then take payment for it, onramp to near and make an account that represent organization, but this is not preferred
Have sponsors edit their profile
Sponsor can edit their NEAR social profile. Have them login and go ot my profile
Save profile, and the board will dynamically pull this logo
Paying People
After a matching round is over, the chef or pot owner needs to initiate a transaction to payout. Which calculates how much each project gets paid off chain and put results on contract. Then to initiate payouts.
Cooldown Period
The only thing that happens off-chain, is the quadratic funding payout. This is why there is a cooldown period seen here after a payout has been initiated with a timer. This is x amount of time (usually 1 week), until payouts are initiated. This allow anyone to challenge any wrong doing or miscalculations of offchain calculation.
Payouts have a cooldown period for any challenges. Anyone can challenge a pot, reasons for challenging a pot include
a miscalculation in matched amounts
someone clearly paying people to donate and using unfair incentives to favor them in a round,
the chef/owner/admin doing some wrong doing.
In order for payouts to happen, all challenges must be addressed on chain. Then the payout can be initiated by Chef, Owner, or Admin(s).
Post Pot -> Retro + Keep Projects Engaged
Our Quadratic Funding Rounds vs Gitcoin
At any point of a round the matching amount can get bigger as anyone can donate, while the sponsor board dynamically changes. So as traction increases anyone can increase pot
For bringing in new sponsors, there is referrer id, which has associated fees
A chef can have fees and a protocol can have fees for all donations and sponsorships to matching rounds to aligned incentives (check settings for this)
There is an owner and a chef. Anything an owner can do a chef can do. An owner sets all associated fees and deploys the contract (takes 5 NEAR -> this is entirely NEAR protocol contract deployment cost).
We do not have keys to pot-factory contract which deploys round (check changelog), and owners deploy the pot, which no one has the keys to.
When a pot is deployed on the front end we default to nada.bot isHuman function for donation requirements, and potlock public goods registry for requirements, however different sybil providers can be chosen that fit the is_blank(account_id): bool format, which is what all providers use for nada.bot. Nada.bot abstract different sybil providers by aggregating stamps, setting scores and managing human threshold dynamically on threshold level.
Our gitcoin passport = nada.bot which is all based on onchain stamps. Need to be a human according to nada.bot or whatever sybil check is provided
You can earn referral fees (fee is set by pot deployer)
Project profiles are global and linked to your social profile. Use this to apply and connect to social feed
Project can be donated directly from their project page. However, this is not counted as a matched donation for pot.
Direct donations go directly to user before fees, but that donation struct or data type is stored on the the pot contract, letting
Matching Payouts are first calculated when round is over via off chain, then payouts are initiated in which a cooldown period is activated for auditors to verify results.
Are fees calculated with the matched amount?
For those who are familiar with quadratic funding rounds we will outline the differences between Gitcoin and Potlock quadratic funding rounds.
📚 Your Most Helpful Resources
Potlock Community Telegram: support channel to answer any questions https://potock.org/community
Your direct telegram with Potlock team
Documents Docs.potlock.io
Your chef training doc (this) potlock.org/chef-training
Potlock BOS App https://bos.potlock.org
Potlock Tutorials https://potlock.org/tutorials
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