The problem Veles - Staking-powered fundraising on Flow solves

Emerging crypto projects are looking for new ways to raise capital. ISPO (Initial Stake Pool Offering) is a fundraising model popular on Cardano blockchain. It enables stake delegators to invest their staking rewards into the fundraising project in return for project tokens. ISPO projects use the funds for the initial funding of development and operations.

Veles is a decentralized application that brings staking-powered fundraising to Flow blockchain. The process of raising funds is following:

1. A project creates an ISPO event in Veles smart contract.
2. Users lock $FLOW into the smart contract.
3. The smart contract delegates the $FLOW to a validator node.
4. $FLOW staking rewards are collected by the smart contract.
5. The fundraising project collects the $FLOW staking rewards from smart contract.
6. Users can unlock their staked $FLOW anytime and collect project tokens as reward when the ISPO ends.

Most new crypto projects have to sell a token to raise funds. An ISPO is fairer, easier, and more accessible.

• Broader token distribution and early user engagement.
• No approval process or upfront costs.
• No middleman risk and easy execution

Challenges we ran into

Designing the overall tokenomics/smart contract architecture.

• Coming up with a sound and fair model for reward token distribution considering the peculiarities of Flow staking.
  Solution: Rewards come with a delay, unstaking isn't instant either.
• Figuring out how to withdraw Flow staked in the smart contract back to the user's account.
  Solution: migrating the whole delegation vs de-staking and then withdrawing flow directly

Emulating staking on the emulator for the sake of testing.