The problem fren2fren - solving Bolivia's banking crisis solves

There's a restriction on USD withdrawals in Bolivia. Additionally, crypto is forbidden (tho not criminalized) there. So, the way people are protecting their wealth is through Binance P2P, which is a centralised, non-anonymous onramp to crypto and traders there ask for huge premiums.

Solution

Deploy your own invite-only P2P exchange (which is also a treasuryless DAO!)

• Community based
• No KYC
• Permissionless
• Social scoring
• First step towards fully fledged DAO

How it works

🏦 Deploy an invite-only P2P exchange with 5 frens
💸 Onramp frens to crypto (and a treasuryless DAO)
👯‍♀️ The more frens you invite, the more points you get
👿 One fren tries to scam, community votes him out
🫥 Your fren gets kicked out = you lose all your points

Functionality

• We deployed a smart contract that allows to create trade offers with crypto/BOB pairs.
• The crypto assets are locked in escrow and only released when the offer is either finalized or cancelled.
• With every finished trade (when both parties sign the offer and finalise it), their social credit (PP) score grows.
• Once the user reaches 10 PP (10 finished trades) they gain the power to invite new users into the circle.
• We integrated light MLM features that earn the inviter 0.5 PP every time a user they invited completes a trade to encourage growing the community.
• On the contrary, if a user gets terminated from the circle the inviter will have all their PP slashed. This encourages users to only invite fully trusted participants.
• A dispute can be called at any time and go through a traditional DAO style vote. Every participants PP can be used as voting power. We deployed a Governor contract to make it compatible with standard DAO tooling.

Links to all deployments

https://github.com/maggo/fren2frentend#fren2fren

Challenges we ran into

• We wanted to create an anonymous P2P circle using UniRep but had to resort to a traditional pseudonymous system with wallet addresses as understanding and deploying the UniRep stack would cost is too much time.
• We had many discussions around the social economics and how to verify trust. In the end we landed on a social score + DAO style dispute voting
• Had to pull an allnighter to make the frontend work nicely 😬
• Deploying on some chains was complicated due to block explorers being down or RPCs causing issues
• Naming things 😛