The problem VennDAO solves

VennDAO solves two problems:

First, it gives web3 apps a straightforward way of placing orders with vendors directly on-chain, eliminating the need for traditional servers and APIs.

Second, it brings vendors into the web3 economy by making it easy to list products on-chain without having to understand smart contracts. VennDAO clearly differentiates itself from traditional web2 products by offering vendors the ability to control the platform.

Challenges we ran into

Storing Sensitive Data On-Chain — To deliver orders of physical goods, vendors need access to sensitive user data, like mailing addresses. It would be unacceptable to store this raw data on-chain. We discussed several approaches to this problem, including setting up an off-chain database and API layer. Because the spirit of our project was to see if we could keep everything on-chain, we decided against this solution. Instead, we used asymmetric encryption to protect this sensitive data so that only vendors are able to decrypt it.

This solution works, but is pretty tied to specific technologies and there are likely better solutions. If we launch this project, we'd go with a different approach or offer multiple options so apps can select whichever option makes the most sense for their use case.

DAO UI — We're using Tally to allow members to propose and vote in the DAO. After deploying our DAO contracts, however, we couldn't get Tally to index our contracts. We spent several hours trying to debug this issue, before giving up and posting in Tally's discord. The issue did end up being on Tally's end, but a member of their team was able to help us out.