Big Win

Big Win My team just release a decentralized blockchain app that facilitates on-chain charter proposals and voting. To take a step back. Last June I shutdown my development agency of 15 years and went to work for a blockchain/ai startup based out of Lehi Utah called Nerd.

I got hired as the VP of Engineering for the Node Governance team. Nerd is best described as a blockchain incubator. They have 10+ blockchains project. This isn’t financial advice and I am not advising you buy anything. I am a node owner in one of the chains for full disclosure. Making money in “crypto” isn’t what interests me. I appreciate the need for projects to fund themselves so I am all for it. But what I am most interested in is building blockchain and ai platforms/apps and the tech behind all of it.

The role of my team is to build a platform that provides node owners a way to govern these 10+ blockchains. The end goal is a suite of decentralized apps that allows the community to run and own the chain. The community is made up of node owners. The blockchains are all governed by charters. So my team first worked on an informational website for the 10+ blockchains that provides all the details for each chain. We published that site in the fall.

Phase 2 has been the fun part. Over the last several months we have built a decentralized app that supports on-chain charter proposals and voting.

Last week we launched the platform live for the first chain. Then earlier this week the first proposal was submitted and has gone live. Currently the proposal is in the 10 day review period outlined in the chain’s charter. The vote will go live next Friday and will close on the following Sunday.

So what’s the big deal you might ask. For me this is the first professional blockchain project I have been a part of. I am deeply grateful to Nerd for taking a chance on an old app developer who wanted to break into blockchain. Prior to Nerd I was at best a blockchain hobbyist, down the rabbit hole in 2020.

I plan to put together some content showing the dApp being used. Watch for that later this week.

Thanks for letting me share this huge personal win with you. Keep reading if you’re interested in the tech.

There is a Global Voting smart contract that manages all the proposal and voting related logic and data.

There is another smart contract for Node Ownership. Both contracts are written in solidity. The Node Ownership smart contract stores all the node ownership data on-chain.

The source of the node ownership data is snowflake. We built something we are calling the “Node Ownership Oracle” that runs in a docker image in the cloud and reads data from snowflake and stores it on-chain. It does a full verification of the license data each time the logic runs.

The frontend is built with React/Next. For v1 we have just integrated MetaMask. The site works well on desktop and mobile (in the MetaMask embed browser)

We have a form that gathers all the required data for a charter proposal. We take that form and generate a PDF and store the PDF on IPFS. Node owners can submit proposals by staking or making a payment of a certain amount of the native chain token. The app runs all on-chain and has no traditional backend. Everything is stored and retrieved from the blockchain smart contracts or IPFS.

After a proposal has been submitted an “approver” makes sure the proposal complies with the charter and doesn’t include anything illegal. The approver signs an on-chain transaction approving the proposal and having it go live in a review period.

After the review period the proposal goes to a vote. Voting all happens on-chain. The outcome of the vote is done automatically through logic in the smart contracts. To pass a certain threshold of nodes needs to vote and 75% have to approve it.

We also built a cool onboarding tool that helps node owner get setup with MetaMask and configure the network automatically for them.

This project has been so much fun to be a part of. I have learned and grown so much over the last 10 months.

We have some super exciting upgrades in the pipeline for the node governance platform.

I love my team and love the projects I am getting to work on. So grateful.