Grant Proposal: Alphaday

Community Grant Applications
#1

Grant ID: 37wxg5b

Summary:

Alphaday builds crypto experience dashboards for enthusiasts, developers, and projects. Users can drag and drop from hundreds of services, news and social feeds, charts, and dapp functionality to create their daily workflows inside a single dashboard. This eliminates the need to have multiple browser tabs open to get different bits of information. i.e. imagine having token prices, gas prices, twitter feed, latest news headlines, TVL, borrowing rates and any other information any user could possibly want all within one single dashboard.

I have read and agree to the privacy policy:
true

If available, please enter a link to your project below:
http://Alphaday.com, app.alphaday.com

Are you applying as a team or individual?:
Team

What type of grant are you pursuing?:
Long-term (continuous)

Please select the category your project best fits into:
Other

Please select who you think will benefit from your project?:
Other

How much funding are you looking for? (USD):
5500

Provide a breakdown of your requested funding:
2,500 USDC upfront costs for development including integrating the discussion forums, blog post, social feed, jobs listing, TVL and other on-chain metrics.

250 USDC per month for 12 months for maintenance including having an Alphaday content analyst quality-checking the dashboard every day and ensuring the Calendar widget is up-to-date with latest The Graph events, all news mentions across the internet are captured by the dashboard, any updates not automatically captured by the Alphaday aggregator engine is manually added to the board, and other maintenance tasks.

Have you applied for (or already received) funding from somewhere else?:
Yes

If yes, please describe where you’ve received funding from and how much you have, or will, receive:
We have received pre-seed money from Anthony Sassano, Mariano Conti, Signum, IOSG and a few other Ethereum-focused angel investors.

What’s your vision for how your project will impact The Graph and/or web3?:
We’d like to build a Graph community dashboard on Alphaday that aggregates Graph news, on-chain data, social media, dev resources and much more into one customizable UI. The desired outcome is to enhance community engagement, awareness, as well as experience that revolves around The Graph.

What can you share about any past work that is relevant to this grant?:
Please see our Beta version product live:
Alphaday.com, app.alphaday.com
For The Graph, we can offer the following:

  • The latest The Graph official announcements and blog post content
  • A feed of all news mentions of The Graph from coindesk, cointelegraph and 20+ other news sources aggregated from across the internet
  • A calendar containing all The Graph events including Governance and DAO votes, meetups, hackathons with bounties, AMAs. Includes past events (Graph Day 22, Graph Hack 22).
  • Podcast feed containing the latest appearances and interviews given by The Graph team members. Includes GRTiQ podcast feed.
  • Youtube stream containing educational The Graph content. Includes ‘Indexer Office Hours’ and ‘Core Dev call’ videos.
  • A widget dedicated to Educational tools for users looking to participate in activities offered by The Graph. This includes descriptions for each link that makes it easier for users to find what they are looking for.
  • The Graph Docs directory.
  • Integration with The Graph Governance and DAO Forums to show the latest and trending discussion topics.
  • Discord, Reddit, Telegram, & Twitter Integration to show a feed of latest discussions.
  • FAQ, Technical Paper, GRT token information.
  • The Graph careers integration to show the latest open jobs listed on The Graph.
  • Dev Resources widget that includes The Graph Academy (Subgraph developer course), LearnWeb3, freeCodeCamp, Bug Bounties, as well as other useful links.
  • The Graph metrics including Overview, Indexing and other metrics pulled in from Dune Analytics.

Can you share any information about current/past web3 experience?:
I’ve been involved in the Ethereum space since early 2016 and joined Kyber Network in 2017 as Head of Ecosystem Growth. [insert section about how I used the project we are applying for, ie for Aave see this example:] I was an early user of ETHLend and worked on the ETHLend x Kyber liquidity partnership. I’ve also known Stani and Jordan for many years through our co-hosting of meetups and parties during Ethereum hackathons and conferences (ie. during ETHCC ‘19) and have attended many rAaves :slight_smile:

My co-founder Felipe has also been involved in Ethereum since 2016 and was a Developer Advocate at Pegasys and Consensys before quitting to work full time on Alphaday.

Alphaday’s third co-founder is DeFiDude who used to be a community manager at both Aave and Kyber Network before co-founding Alphaday.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/denizomer/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/faraggi/
https://twitter.com/defidude

Why are you interested in contributing to The Graph and/or web3?:
Having all this information in one place allows The Graph’s stakeholders (ie. users, developers, investors) to easily stay up to date on The Graph’s ecosystem updates, see the latest news and developments, do research and stay engaged. In general users who can track their favourite projects more easily stay more engaged with the project which in turn supports user retention.

Basically our The Graph Alphaday dashboard will provide a single end-point from which users can consume all the information on The Graph. Specifically, The Graph Community Dashboard will aggregate all the discussions, talking points, narratives, events, metrics, official announcements and much much more into one single dashboard. With one glance at this dashboard community members would have a top-down view of what is happening across the entire The Graph ecosystem. From this view they could then jump deeper into their areas of interest (ie. devs to dev documentation, The Graph holders to twitter and reddit discussions, investors to on-chain metrics across both The Graph’s own pages and to third-party data providers)




Primary Community Poll

Do you fundamentally support this grant application, knowing that the final scope and grant amount may differ from the requested proposal?
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters




Grant Committee Vote (Closes on Jan 4th)

Do you recommend this grant to the DAO?
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

1 Like
#2

Thanks for your application.
It might be a good portal for DeFi people for their daily checks!
I have some questions about this proposal:

  1. Do you mean it will be a GRT dashboard like the NFT and Arbitrum in default?
  2. Do you have any wireframe or prototype for the widget for educational tools?
  3. Are there grants you apply to other projects now? For the offer of the dashboard.
  4. After the 12 months of maintenance, what is the next step for the Graph dashboard? Does it will remove from the tabs on the top or remain on it?

Looking forward to your reply!

3 Likes
#3

Greetings!

Thank you very much for taking the time to apply for the grant. I also wanted to note that you have very detailed your application, that most of the questions find an answer in it. But I still had a few, ahha.

  1. Have you done a comparison with other analytics platforms. I won’t go far, with the big and at the same time simple giants of the analytics field there is Messari. What advantages do you see over it? Perhaps you have done some research in this area?

  2. Do you plan to monetize your product somehow? Or do you plan to work through grants with other projects and make the product eventually free for all types of users?

  3. How do you plan to identify the user. The user will create his personal account with email or login will be realized with a wallet, for example Metamask?

Thank you for your answers!

2 Likes
#4

Hello,

Thanks so much for applying for a Graph AdovcatesDAO Community Grant. I must say after reading your application and tooling around with the application I think this product would be of considerable value to the community. In addition to the questions from the @doxe01.eth and @jiimxjim.eth I just had one clarifying question for you:

  • Near the bottom of your website’s homepage you ask the question “How secure is Alphaday?” and answer it with the following: “While we do plan to support on-chain activity and other DApp usage in the future, Alphaday has no wallet interactions that could compromise your security, or funds, in any way.”
    However, when I launched the application it does look like there’s a wallet connection which is, I assume, how a user would be able to track their portfolio. Can you provide a bit of clarity here and details on the security measures in place for users that opt to connect their wallet?

Thanks a ton! Very much looking forward to reading your responses to the community’s questions and learning more about the application.

#5

Thanks for the questions!

  1. Do you mean it will be a GRT dashboard like the NFT and Arbitrum in default?

We will have The Graph dashboard displayed alongside the NFT and Arbitrum dashboards at the top bar but it will also be available in the Board Manager which we are launching in a week.

Very small note that we’d like the Graph board to cover the entire Graph ecosystem as opposed to focus only on the GRT token.

  1. Do you have any wireframe or prototype for the widget for educational tools?

For this widget we were thinking of deploying a new table widget we are working on that will have both outbound links to the Graph’s documentation, ie. direct links to Benefits, Developing/Deploying/Publishing Graphs, Billing, Cookbook but also expandable sections so users can get quick information on these topics before jumping to Get Started - The Graph Docs if they require further information

  1. Are there grants you apply to other projects now? For the offer of the dashboard.

Yep, we only started reaching out to projects last week but have already been accepted to build dashboards for Aave, Dfinity, Verasity, and have been invited for a call with Aztec Protocol in a few days. We’re also waiting to hear back from Uniswap, dYdX and a few other DeFi projects

  1. After the 12 months of maintenance, what is the next step for the Graph dashboard? Does it will remove from the tabs on the top or remain on it?

The Graph dashboard will remain on the tab bar after 12 months but we’re also hoping that in the meantime this board becomes popular enough for us to build a new widget where users can run The Graph queries directly from Alphaday

1 Like
#6
  1. Have you done a comparison with other analytics platforms. I won’t go far, with the big and at the same time simple giants of the analytics field there is Messari. What advantages do you see over it? Perhaps you have done some research in this area?

The main difference between analytics platform and Alphaday is that our scope is to aggregate crypto enthusiasts’ everyday workflows into one dashboard. Ie. you wake up and check your portfolio, you look at what’s being discussed on twitter, you read the latest discussions from your favourite DAOs, you listen to a podcast, you read the latest headlines. You can do all of this on Alphaday whereas Messari, Nansen etc are all focused on research.

Another difference is that due to their research focus, products like Messari are not going to integrate DApp functionality into their products (ie. it’s unlikely Messari will let you run The Graph queries within the Messari dashboard) while in the mid to long term we envision Alphaday integrating all sorts of on-chain DApp functionality into its dashboards. Imagine a DeFi dashboard that let’s you run The Graph queries and analyze the results in Teh Graph widget, swap a token in the Uniswap widget, and then lend that token in an Aave widget, all without having to leave Alphaday.

  1. Do you plan to monetize your product somehow? Or do you plan to work through grants with other projects and make the product eventually free for all types of users?

We won’t monetize our product until we’ve validated our assumptions around Alphaday’s product-market fit and shown strong user growth but in the mid-term we plan on monetizing Alphaday by charging projects a monthly fee to maintain their dashboards (ie.up to a few hundred dollars per month). Another option we will explore once we’ve passed 100k MAU is charging power-users a small fee (less than the price of a Netflix subscription) to access premium features such as unlocking an alerts system, adding more than 10 widgets, API access, creating their own widgets, etc etc.

  1. How do you plan to identify the user. The user will create his personal account with email or login will be realized with a wallet, for example Metamask?

For now personal accounts are created by connecting to Metamask. In Q1 we will add a feature where once you’ve connected your Metamask, you’ll have the option to update your dashboard to show you news/blogs/price-charts/events/podcasts/videos and other contextual information based on the tokens you are holding in your wallet.

1 Like
#7
  • Near the bottom of your website’s homepage you ask the question “How secure is Alphaday?” and answer it with the following: “While we do plan to support on-chain activity and other DApp usage in the future, Alphaday has no wallet interactions that could compromise your security, or funds, in any way.”
    However, when I launched the application it does look like there’s a wallet connection which is, I assume, how a user would be able to track their portfolio. Can you provide a bit of clarity here and details on the security measures in place for users that opt to connect their wallet?

I’ve pinged my CTO/Co-founder to give you a comprehensive answer on the above but in general a user connects their Metamask to Alphaday if they want to see their portfolio information (similiar to Zapper) but they only need to sign a message with their Metamask wallet to prove they own their wallet only if they want to be able to customize and save their own Alphaday boards (ie. if they want to create an Alphaday account). Regarding the security measures, I’ll let my co-founder take this question.

1 Like
#8

Hi everyone/@Mr.1776 , Felipe here, Alphaday’s Co-Founder and CTO. :wave:

Adding to Deniz’ answer on security:

Alphaday has two wallet interactions:

  1. Connect Wallet, which consults read-only data from the blockchain to obtain portfolio information &
  2. Verify Wallet, a personal (account) signed message that’s used to prove the user owns an account. This verification is used to create an account at Alphaday and maintain custom boards, widgets and settings for the user, across devices. This latter signature is prefixed with the personal_sign message so it can not be used to impersonate transactions in any way according to its specification (internal/ethapi: add personal_sign method by bas-vk · Pull Request #2940 · ethereum/go-ethereum · GitHub & Signing Data | MetaMask Docs). Neither of these are transactions- and they don’t require an approve/transfer of tokens nor gas fees.

That said, we aren’t immune to all types of attacks and in order to improve security and combat DNS level attacks, we secure our traffic using the DNSSEC protocol (Domain Name System Security Extensions) as well as all other types of good security practices, which we take very seriously.

Happy to help. Let me know if you you have further questions.

2 Likes
#9

Really appreciate all of your thoughtful and detailed responses @Deniz-Alphaday and @faraggi . You’ve answered all my questions.

Sounds like a very compelling platform and one I’m excited to try out!

#10

Thanks for saying that! We’ve been huge fans of the Graph since 2018 (and have met so many awesome team members at Ethereum conferences across the world!) that we’d love the opportunity to build a dashboard for the Graph community and to eventually integrate subgraph functionality directly into Alphaday.

#11

Greetings!

The presentation of the project will be in the public-voice-chat channel on the Graph AdvocatesDAO Discord server on December 27 at 18:00 UTC. Entrance is open and everyone is welcome to come in and ask their questions during the presentation!

Thank everyone for your attention!

2 Likes
#12

Hey @Deniz-Alphaday,

I really like the idea of this dashboard, and I think it would help myself, and many others, keep up with all the amazing stuff happening in the ecosystem!

After the public presentation, I think the amount of funding your team is looking for is a fair amount.

The information the dashboard would show looks to be very helpful, I think you have covered most information resources.

I fundamentally support this grant application, but I have a couple questions:

  1. How would Graph AdvocatesDAO be able to measure the enhanced community engagement, awereness, and experience around The Graph, as a result of approving this grant proposal?

  2. Would Graph Advocates be able to help your team with quality-checking the dashboard?

Thank you for your answers!

1 Like
#13

Yes, a very interesting proposal, even after watching the grant presentation, I still have the similar opinion, but also a couple of questions arose:

  1. Do you plan to localize your news in the future?
  2. What platforms for gathering information do you plan to use? Because I kind of haven’t heard about it, in terms of whether it will be some sources or whether you’ll be writing news by yourself.

Appreciate it!!!

#14

Regarding measuring community engagement, awareness, and experience, there are a few things we can do to track these metrics:

  • At a very basic level we can see the number of visitors to individual dashboards so we’d be able to see over time how many people are using this board, ie. if we have 100 MAU to the Graph dashboard in February, 500 MAU in March, 2,000 MAU in April it gives us an indication of interest over time.
  • We will be deploying a Poll Widget in January where we’d be able to ask users of the Graph board questions like ‘How valuable do you find this board?’, ‘How many times a day do you visit this board?’, ‘On a scale of 1 to 10 how likely are you to recommend this board to others?’ etc etc
  • As a team we’re huge proponents of the lean startup framework so we’re constantly in build-measure-learn cycles so we will be interviewing users of the board and making improvements and adjustments based on the feedback.

Regarding Graph Advocates helping with quality-checking the dashboard, we’d definitely welcome this! We are trying to reduce the burden on projects as much as possible but if teams want to be involved with quality-checking this would greatly help us.

2 Likes
#15
  1. Do you plan to localize your news in the future?

This is on our roadmap for Q1. We’ve have local language versions of the boards planned out including Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean versions. Is there a particular language or location that interests the Graph more than others?

  1. What platforms for gathering information do you plan to use? Because I kind of haven’t heard about it, in terms of whether it will be some sources or whether you’ll be writing news by yourself.

Different widgets have different sources of information.

-For the news widget we pull in data from Cointelegraph, Coindesk, Decrypto, The Defiant and a dozen other sources plus our content analyst will google ‘the Graph’ on a daily basis and manually add news articles that aren’t from our pre-existing coverage list.
-For token information we pull in data from Coingecko and Zapper.
-For DAO discussions we’ll pull in data directly from forum.graphadvocates.com/

Every widget will have different sources. Let me know if you’d like the full list of widgets and data sources we have in mind for the Graph.

1 Like
#16

This is great! Could the https://forum.thegraph.com/ also be integrated? This is the main Graph Forum page and where all of the GIPs, monthly core dev 1-pagers, and a lot of Graph related content is posted.

#17

Greetings!

Yes, about languages, this question can be discussed in more detail. At this stage, we are working on support for 4 languages. Specifically Español (Spanish), Russian, Ukrainian and Nederlands (Dutch). Since January, we also plan to add support for Urdu. We have several advocates as well as members of DAO who I think we can get in touch with.

About widgets, I think it would be a plus, if there is such a possibility. So that anyone who wants to can view them.

Thank you!

UPD. If necessary, we can talk about language support in more detail.

1 Like
#18

Yep we could have two seperate widgets, one that pulls in the latest discussions from the main Graph Forum, and a seperate widget that pulls in discussions from this forum.

1 Like
#19

This is a pretty cool idea! We could deploy separate Spanish/Russian/Ukranian/Dutch/Urdu boards but just so that we have a better idea of the scope for this, what content would have its local language versions? Would it be the developer documentation only or would there also be local language discussion forums?

1 Like
#20

I think we need both options. After all, in the process of working with documentation, questions can arise which you can ask right away and get an answer in the end, without looking for answers in other social networks.

1 Like