Bankless Loans Season 4 Budget Proposal

[Katarina]

Authors: Katarina & Birdman

SUMMARY

In Season 1, we started building the Bankless Loans App, our BanklessDAO frontend for Liquity, an interest-free loan protocol. We continued the coding work during Season 2 with already some testing on Rinkeby Testnet, but there was still some bug fixing and styling work to be done. During Season 2 we also decided to improve the UI/UX and add some extra features. We submitted a new proposal for Season 3 and last season we did exactly that. We onboarded IsraelRex, a new designer in BDAO, who assisted us with creating a whole new design. Birdman, our main dev, worked almost full-time to finish off the coding work and got help from CompositeFellow and Activate-glacier-instinct.

We are now almost finished with the MVP and Season 4 will be the launch of Bankless Loans, after some more fine-tuning, bug fixing, and testing.

BDAO will earn LQTY rewards generated by the ‘Bankless Loans’ App.

SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES IN SEASON 3

• In Season 3 we especially worked on updating the design for Bankless Loans. IsrealRex worked on new Figma files and a more modern and BDAO look. He created a logo and added a homepage with footer for some links and instructions.
• Birdman continued the coding work on the Stability Pool functionality, LQTY Staking functionality and coding of the WalletConnect, Coinbase, and Metamask connectors. Security updates were done and the implementation of the new design in code. He got help from Activate-Glacier and CompositeFellow for finetuning and bug-fixing.
• Abstrucked did further research on adding notifications for the users when they become at risk with epns to give our users a better level of protection. This won’t be active for the MVP yet.
• The MVP is now almost ready, with still some testing and bug fixing to be done. The domain was transferred to Birdman by Pradhuma and Birdman started a new Vercel account to host the Dapp until it can be taken over by the DAO.

SEASON 4 PLANS AND GOALS

• The MVP functionalities are coded but there is still styling finetuning work needed.
• More testing and bug fixing needs to be done.
• We are still looking into the option to allow users to earn BANK along with LQTY when staking LUSD in the Bankless Loans App. The Liquity team has said that a new smart contract would be required on top of the Liquity protocol to get this done. We want to launch the MVP in Season 4 first and then maybe move further with this on a later stage.
• Work on the education of the users and marketing.
• For support, we decided to work together with the Liquity Discord Server.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

For Season 3 :

Refund Birdman for domain name: 45$/year
Refund Birdman for Vercel and Namecheap DNS: 20$/month
Hours left to pay for ( coding, design and admin): 23 hours

For Season 4 :

Finetune Styling Theme Work: 35 hours
Figma Files Light Theme: 40 hours
Code Bug Fixing: 50 hours
Wallet Connector Updating: 45 hours
MVP Testing on Operating Systems and Browers: 35 hours
GoLive Deployment: 20 hours
Legal Disclaimer by Legal Guild: 9 hours
Ongoing Maintenance and Support in Season 4:
( about 7 hours/week ): 90 hours
Education of users: 20 hours
Marketing plan: **20 hours

TOTAL: 387 hours ⇒ 387000 BANK still needed
0 BANK left in multisig
⇒ EXTRA GRANT NEEDED S4: 387000 BANK

Foreseeable revenue streams https://docs.liquity.org/faq/frontend-operators
Bankless Loans will earn LQTY rewards distributed by the protocol: The poll in the discord came out on 2% fee for BanklessDAO.

Rewards are calculated based on the total deposits tagged by the frontend. In a LQTY reward event generating LQTY_d for a deposit d made through a frontend with kickback rate k, the frontend receives(1-k)*LQTY_d and the user receives k * LQTY_d.

SUCCESS METRICS OR KPIS

Amount of deposits and loans
Revenue amount for BDAO

Approve S4 Funding:

• For
• Needs Revision

[links]

Ive been looking forward to this product

Can we see what you’ve finished thus far?

How long will it take to get « shippable »?

[TheMarvel]

Fantastic initiative and talent teamwork as well as collaboration to push this effort to get it this far. I know several contributors on this team and am thrilled at this level of commitment and success. This is DAO work and web3 style. Permission less risk up front trusting the goodness of the community to make it right when they can. This would not happen in old trade Fi. LFG make it happen for them and us! TY

[Katarina]

We are still finishing off in testnet mode, but you can see what we have now on https://www.banklessloans.finance/
We didn’t set a launch date yet, but it should be in the next few weeks.

[tomtranmer]

Looking great. Love the super-simple UI!
Working well with Rinkby ETH testing.
Trove Created > Borrowed > Deposit to stability pool. All good!
Keep up the good work!

[links]

More questions:

• Do you have an estimate of potential demand for this product?
• Who is doing your marketing work? Can you share the marketing plan you mentioned?

In general it feels like your budget is heavy on the technical execution and light on sales/marketing.

[Katarina]

Thanks for your questions:

• The Liquity Dune Dashboard gives an indication of the use: Dune
• Indeed, we are still light on marketing as we have been focusing on the coding. As long as there is no finished product, we can’t do marketing anyway. We didn’t hire anyone yet for the marketing work and hope to keep that within BDAO of course. First step will be to organise a workshop in the DAO and feature the Dapp on the website, in the newsletters, on twitter, …I’m sure Ryan and David will promote it in their Youtube video’s, as it was David that was one of the first that got excited when LiveTheLifeTV did the proposal within BDAO… We want to let the Bankless members and fans start using it first. We will of course also be featured on the Liquity website as one of the frontends.

[links]

Thanks!

As an alternate point of view: it’s never too early to start marketing. And by that I mean gathering an audience that will eventually use your product.

I understand Liquity the protocol is well-used, but what makes our frontend more desirable than someone else’s? What’s going to make people choose Bankless Loans for their borrowing needs? If you understand the answers to those questions, then all the work you’re putting into the tech is more likely to succeed.

Personally, I would love to see a bump on your project budget for more marketing/strategy work.

Also - is Birdman the only dev on this project?

[0xBirdman]

Other devs that have helped implement our design are activate-glacier-instinct with some very important refactoring and also compositefellow.

As far as other Liquity frontends, if you look at the majority they are clones. There are only a few Liquity frontends that have their own unique design. One could argue that Bankless DAO frontend is one of the simplest and easiest to use. Our frontend is mobile responsive and provides support on multiple wallet types unlike the majority of Liquity frontends.

Bankless Dao’s unique selling point is: “be part of a DeFi app that is helping our mission to empower the masses to go bankless”.

Depending on what BDao wants to do next with Bankless Loans, we could continue to build on this to make Bankless Loans’ user interface a Defi hub connected to additional protocols.

[Katarina]

About the bump on the project budget for more marketing/strategy work. I believe we should start slowly, make sure all works perfectly, and do more guerilla marketing in the beginning. There is lots of marketing that can be done without big budgets.

[sianjon]

I’ve been a hardcore bankless subscriber since January 2021. I’ve been wanting to contribute to the BanklessDAO. For this season, happy to help out in Code Bug Fixing, education of users, marketing plan, and any ongoing maintenance and support required. In addition, I run a public goods DeFi project called LonesomeShark. We were born out of a EthGlobal hackathon last year. Our mission is to increase user adoption onto DeFi and help to onboard the next 100 million users via flashloans and automation. I don’t have any BANK tokens yet. Love to find out how to get them.