This is really cool! I think a lot of people might be willing to donate to a cause, but only if they believe the cause will meet a certain viability threshold of donations.
Anyone can create an All-or-Nothing campaign where funds are only released if the campaign reaches its stated goal. If the goal is not reached, contributors can claim their refunds.
The problemThe problem
Some projects raised partial funding, but not enough to fully deliver. This created a difficult situation for everyone involved. Creators faced pressure to deliver without sufficient resources, while contributors took on risk without clear guarantees.
As a result, creators became hesitant to propose more ambitious ideas, and contributors became more cautious about supporting early-stage or complex projects.
For many use cases, partial funding is simply not enough. In those cases, direct donation models begin to break down.
How Geyser solved the problemHow Geyser solved the problem
Contributors fund campaigns using Lightning or on-chain Bitcoin. Funds are locked for the duration of the campaign and cannot be accessed by the creator while the funding goal is still being reached.
Meanwhile, contributors can get refunded at any time of the campaign up until the point in which the project reaches the goal.
If the campaign reaches its goal before the deadline, the creator explicitly claims the funds.
If the goal is not reached, contributors can claim their refunds.
What are they actually doing?What are they actually doing?
This behavior is enforced by @rootstock_io smart contracts, which define the rules of each campaign and ensure they are followed.
@Boltzhq bridging enables seamless interaction between Bitcoin payments and the smart contract layer, allowing contributors to participate using familiar Bitcoin tools without needing to interact directly with Rootstock.
This is definitely a hard problem to solve in a noncustodial way. I'm curious to see how it ends up working out for Geyser.
What is RootstockWhat is Rootstock
I don't know much about Rootstock. They seem to operate a number of bridges as well as a "Bitcoin sidechain"
Rootstock is a Bitcoin sidechain, powering Bitcoin DeFi through EVM-compatible smart contracts. Secured by over 80 percent of Bitcoin’s hash power through merge-mining, Rootstock extends Bitcoin’s utility while maintaining its security and decentralization.
I'll admit that I have a somewhat negative association with merge mining. Probably something that bears a little more research. (There are quite a few posts on SN about Rootstock, but they mostly seem to be from a few years ago).
I'm a bit cautious regarding Rootstock as well.
Wonder if it would have been possible with something slightly less shitcoiny, like RGB.. development seems to have stalled there though (4 years since last update to their contract language: https://github.com/RGB-WG/contractum-lang). Would it be possible to implement all-or-nothing contracts with multiple donors in RGB @dr_orlovsky?
Hi there!
It's Stelios, co-founder and CTO of Geyser. We will share a write-up soon on the motivations behind choosing Rootstock. But in a nutshell, we considered a number of approaches before settling for this. It came down to a mix of tech maturity and tooling that made the implementation both viable and with the UX we wanted.
Curious what makes you say Rootstock is "shitcoiny" though! To be clear, there are 0 tokens involved in this implementation, and we wouldn't have done it if anything other than Bitcoin was required to make it work.
Thanks for adding some info! I can't speak for @Lumor, but I think that my own vaguely negative feelings about Rootstock come from their marketing language being so similar to what one often hears from the shitcoin landscape (DeFi, rBTC, so on). It's not like any of those words mean things that are inherently bad, but they've been associated with shiTcoining for so long, it's hard not to see people who use them as being aligned.
I'd be very interested to read something about merge-mining and Rootstock and why you all chose to go with that rather than Spark (Flashnet looks like pretty similar tooling to me).
https://twiiit.com/geyserfund/status/2011827027137962033