How Smart Raise works

Campaign Manager Auditor Supporters

Setup

  1. The Campaign Manager creates a campaing, with phases, description. He also nominates an Auditor. (The nomination is actually for an ethereum address, the verification of the owner happens off-project)

  2. The Campaign Manager starts the project.

  3. Supporters finance it.

Successfull funding and payout

  1. Everything goes according to plan. The Campaign Manager provides his documentation to the auditor off-chain and requests as payout. This can contain confidential information which does not get published.

  2. The Auditor writes an audit report, uploads it, and adds the URI/Hash into the project contract.

  3. The Auditor sets a new payout limit.

  4. The Campaign Manager pulls the payout from the contract

Cancellation, Refunds

Cancellations can be triggered by the Campaign Manager, Auditor, or a timeout. (missed funding goal, missed phase timeline)

  1. Payins and payout are blocked

  2. Supporters can retrieve payment from the remaining funds proportionally to their payin.

Q & A

Who are the auditors?

We leave maximum flexibility here, to accommodate various situations. Fundamentally the campaign can nominate anybody they want. For transparency, the auditor has to be picked before the project accepts payments.

  • If it's a bigger organization already working with independent auditors, they can nominate one of them.
  • Smaller organizations might just pick a lawyer, notary, or similar
  • On some projects a trustworthy person from the community might be enough.

If you need help to find an auditor, write me a message, we might have suitable contacts to professional auditors who do pro-bono work.

Why is the payout not decided by the supporter community?

It's too easy to game: Some of the projects on the platform have only a few dozen supporters, so any type of "random selection" or voting could be gamed.

It's a lot more complicated: Any system to try to mitigate for fraud risk and possible edge cases, would introduce a lot of complexity with little upside. Also, we'd have to deal with inactivity, disputes, malicious intent and so on. Creating a sophisticated voting system is not the goal of SmartRaise, but to create a simple system that's easy to use for a lot of projects and supporters.

Average people from the supporter community lack expertise: Do you know how to verify an invoice from a foreign countrty? Do you know how to look for fraudelant patterns?

Having said that, campaigns can nominate anybody they like. In some cases a trustworthy person from the community might just be the right auditor for the project.

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