Perpetual Motion Protocol

Have you ever started a project and sought funding to make it sustainable?

Our original vision was to create a DAO and form a community of contributors that could help founders realize their funding goals via small and frequent microdonations. As we developed the idea, we realized that we lacked the tooling for our concept, so we reduced the scope of our project and set out to implement the protocol first.

We wanted a protocol that could allow contributors to donate the spare change, rounded up from their on-chain stablecoin transactions and send them to another address.

We soon realized that what we had on our hands was a powerful, generic layer for payments that can be used for a multitude of purposes. Simply include it in your daily on-chain life to meet your financial goals - whatever they look like for you. Donate. Save. Fund. Invest. As a permissionless protocol, anyone is free to utilize it to compose in different payment flows and monetization strategies.

We are so excited to share Perpetual Motion with the Ethereum community, and launch the first tool on top of it with the specific intent of funding public goods, ReFi projects, and charities with an initial community focus in Latin America. Contributors can, for example, donate to a sustainable cacao farm or an ambitious land-regeneration project, both colombian based.

The user experience is so simple - even a banker could do it:

• Connect your wallet,
• Select your favorite project,
• Choose your perpetual strategy for microdonations,
• Approve you transaction,
• …and watch your donations create impact in real-time.

The Future:

Perpetual Motion Protocol will always be a public good. Enabling network effects to develop and hope to see it become a valuable funding lego for individuals, traditional organizations and DAOs alike.

Our monetization path relies on our hope of a collaborative future for web3: An ecosystem of protocols and DAOs building together for a brighter future. Web3 companies will support public goods because they advance the whole space together. We will implement the option for users of the protocol to donate a small fee that we hope can support our organization. The fee will always be optional, but allow users of the protocol to support it.

Our wider vision for the future of Perpetual Motion is to build the DAO that we originally set out to create. Our DAO will be just one user of this generic protocol. PerpetualDAO will encourage contributors to perpetually donate to its treasury by rewarding them with soulbound tokens based on their activity within the DAO and their contributions made to the treasury. The DAO will curate projects looking to achieve certain funding goals and then allow holders of the soulbound tokens to vote on whether, or how much, a project should be funded. These snapshot votes will be gated by soulbound tokens previously issued to contributors. We’re excited to define the tokenomics of the DAO and look forward to supporting many projects along our journey!

Perpetual Motion Protocol consists of smart contracts implemented in Solidity and a React Frontend - The smart contracts define Perpetual Motion as a very generic protocol and the frontend implements a particular use case of it.

Web3 Backend:

The smart contracts have been deployed on three platforms offering cheap transaction fees:

• Polygon (and Polygon Mumbai) - Polygon has the highest transaction volume of all Ethereum scaling solutions.
• Optimism (Goerli) - An L2 scaling solution chosen for its vibrant and rapidly expanding ecosystem.
• Scroll (Pre-Alpha Testnet) - A ZK L2 chosen for it's near EVM-equivelance and simple developer onboarding process.

Perpetual Motion Protocol's smart contracts utilize:

• Hardhat as the development suite.
• OpenZeppelin's libraries (IERC20, SafeERC20) for a dependably secure implementation and to enable swift time to market.
• SuperFluid to enable effortless streaming payments.

For communication with the blockchain during testing and deployment we used:

• Pocket Network for Polygon, Polygon Mumbai (later: Optimism Mainnet),
• Alchemy for Optimism Goerli, and,
• Scroll's own RPC nodes for communicate with the Scroll Testnet.

Design:

The wireframes and layouts were created in Figma.

Web3 Frontend:

The user interface is a React Dapp which uses Tailwind CSS for styling.

Hosting:

• The Dapp is hosted on IPFS using the web3.storage. Their IPNS API enables continuous deployment of fully decentralized frontend.
• ENS is used as a decentralized domain name; find the site at: https://perpetualmotion.eth.limo.

The following integrations have been made to enhance the web3 user experience:

• ENS name and avatar resolution (ready for mainnet deployment :saluting_face:)
• Wallet Connect for secure connection to your mobile wallet.

Planned integrations:

• Uma to enable optimistic donations.
• Autonomy to trigger scheduled executions of the smart contracts execute() method that pulls payments from contributors.