TL;DR We’re OttoDAO, building permissionless, cryptographic primitives to foster public goods. The first protocol we’re building is LottoPGF, which allows people to deploy a fully onchain lottery to fund a cause, public good or community in a fun way.

We’re currently looking for early contributors to the DAO (see Token and DAO) and will be opening a crowdfunding campaign on Juicebox to fund the DAO very soon.

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OttoDAO

Mission

Make the internet self-sustainable and keep it cypherpunk.

Vision

Permissionless, cryptographic primitives that unlock capital formation mechanisms for public goods funding.

Strategy

Build an out-of-the-box protocol that allows any community to incentivise the funding of its cause, with a focus on public goods and charities.

Product – LottoPGF

Problem:
- In 2021, European lotteries earned more than €100 Billion, out of which €20 Billion went to Public Goods. Almost 80% of that allocation had an unknown destination. Similarly, US Lotteries made more than $31 Billion in revenue, out of which only 35% goes to fund Public Good or causes, because operational costs and commissions grow to 15%.
- The Ethereum ecosystem has been trying to solve the public goods funding problem. However it’s been focused more on the resource allocation side of things (through Quadratic Funding, RetroPGF, Conviction Voting, etc…). Lotteries have historically been a great capital formation mechanism to fund public goods, and can fill the gap in the PGF equation.
Solution: A permissionless protocol to deploy transparent and unmanipulable lotteries for public goods funding on Ethereum.

Learn more in this embedded PDF 👇

LottoPGF-deck(June-'24).pdf

Tech

Black Magic Algorithms: Onchain lotteries that model real-life lotteries, such as Powerball, are extremely difficult to implement efficiently in the EVM. We borrow some lesser-known algorithms from the latest in cryptography (e.g., stateless shuffles, grand product check) to achieve gas-efficient lotteries for both users and operators. @kevincharm previously developed a novel, unbiased, and gas-efficient method for raffling. More info here.
State-of-the-art VRFs: public verifiable randomness sources are required and OttoDAO is committed to funding VRF research, including making VDF usable for practical use-cases beyond our lotteries.
- EVM-compatible drand (Phase 1): A new drand scheme that uses BLS on BN254 instead of BLS12-381 by one of our early contributors @kevincharm. More info here. This is used to generate a fair and onchain verifiable random number. This is the first incarnation of VRF that the protocol will use.
- Threshold VRF (Phase 2): A permissionless threshold VRF network that improves liveness guarantees compared to incumbent VRF solutions.
- VDF (Phase 3): Verifiable Delay Functions are the endgame for generating verifiable randomness. These are very close to being available for practical use through the VDF ASIC project and recent advances in SNARKs. We are actively collaborating with Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation) and working on making these viable for use on the EVM and will implement this as a method for verifiable randomness as soon as it’s available.

Learn more in this embedded PDF 👇

LottoPGF-technical.pdf

Roadmap

	LottoPGF v1	LottoPGF v2
Lottery features	- Deployer picks parameters: ticket price, split between prize pool and contribution pool, prize draw time interval, and chances of winning (range of numbers to be picked).

2 game-modes:

After number is drawn there can either be 1 or 0 winners
If “Apocalypse Mode” is activated, the lottery ends with either 1 winner or splitting the prize pool amongst everyone | - Deployer picks parameters: ticket price, split between prize pool and contribution pool, prize draw time interval, and chances of winning (range of numbers to be picked).

Feature parity with traditional lotteries
Tiered ticket prizes e.g. for predicting 3 or 4 out of 5 numbers
Modularity, e.g. interfaces for ticket issuing (beyond sale and owner free claim)
Roll fees to external contracts e.g. recipient address (vs organisers) | | Extras | - Open source frontend (available)
Farcaster frame template (available) | - Open source frontend
Farcaster frame template | | Fee | Fee Switch (X% from all deployed lotteries’ ticket revenue go to OttoDAO) | Fee integrated in the protocol (X% of all deployed lotteries’ ticket revenue go to OttoDAO) | | Status | 3 iterations tested via PowerBALD and other deployments, feature set defined, final deployment soon | Initial POC in development | | Audits | Code review by independent auditors, official review pending | n/a |