The problem PinnerDAO solves

How do you build uncensorable dapps?

Backend: Smart contract on Ethereum
Front end: dWeb hosted on IPFS or distributed storage network or locally
- If we build our own front-end, we control it - we can remove aave’s check for the OFAC - cool but not accessible to everyone.
- If we distribute it on IPFS - nobody should use it because there’s no way to check it’s not malicious! It could be any code in there, and will probably steal all your money.

Solution

Complete end-to-end tooling integrated to:

1. Build uncensorable front-ends and post the repo and build to IPFS (Proposer)
2. Check that the build comes from a specific repository and commit - to be able to audit the code (Checker)
3. Submit the right content to a DAO that will:
   1. Pin the content in an IPFS cluster
   2. Accept donations for privacy-related public goods funding (like Free Alex campaigns)
   3. Create an ens subdomain so the hash is easily accessible by everyone using any
4. Access the frontends via a variety of self-hosted / IPFS gateways + ENS domains to be able to update them and be human-readable.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges:

Goerli didn't have the DAO tooling
Using ENS in rinkeby does not allow us to resolve as if it were in mainnet
We couldn't use The Graph for getting all ens subdomains quickly without any Smart Contract (we had to create an intermediary Smart Contract to record the pinned content)

Future

In order to move forward the project and simplify it, the builder-ui, ipfs-pinner and monitoring-ui will be unified into a single user interface that:

Will monitor the SC of the DAO, letting users know which ENS are getting pinned.
Will allow to run a pinner in the background to contribute the DAO pinning system
Will allow to propose a hash to a given ENS, by running the builder-ui toolkit in the background. Furthermore it will be allowed to validate a proposal of the DAO for a given hash with the builder-ui toolkit, so it gets compared with the hash output and DAO users can ensure if is valid or not.