The problem Distributed Funds solves

Raises awareness for the open-source framework Holochain that allows people to build custom self-hosted distributed P2P applications with modular and extensible features, removing 3rd party intermediaries for cryptographic data integrity, cloud hosting and web server protocols. Connects interested funders to relevant project applicants, where they can choose from and modify a set of templates to designate amounts, time periods, weighted criteria, etc. Then select approved evaluators, review applications, and fund projects via Rainlang smart contracts connected to eligble Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible wallets. This application allows for completely transparent decentralized grants campaigns where data integrity is guaranteed by cryptographically signed hash chains without the need for global consensus. Agents can participate autonomously, held accountable with actions that are automatically peer validated within a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) according to pre-defined tamper proof validation rules.

Challenges we ran into

Rainlang documentation and examples limited. Holochain is still under active develop, not all business and validation logic is clear to know what are best practices. Testing in a P2P environment has its challanges with spinning up mock agents and creating an overall adversarial construct. Integrating Holochain (which is not Blockchain - does not requre global consensus) with Blockchains is a novel concept and architecture.