1. Applicant Information
- Team Name: Lighthouse Labs
- Website/Company Blog: https://lighthouse.cx/ / Lighthouse Labs
- Entity ENS:
lighthousegov.eth
- Primary Contact(s): Arnold Almeida, 1a35e1.eth. James MacWhyte, jkm.eth.
- Company Overview: We are an applied research lab with a mandate to improve the accessibility of on-chain governance in decentralised environments. We offer three services:
- Lighthouse Governance, public good, native client free for end users.
- Dispatch, an enterprise multi-faceted messaging tool for on-chain orgs.
- Signals, an open-source emerging-ideation protocol to supplement governance.
- Requested Amount: Requesting $400k for a one year stream
- Team / Commitment: Currently 2.5 FT resources, ready to expand to 4 if this proposal is successful. We commit to making the work outlined in this proposal our top priority for the duration of the agreement.
2. Eligibility Confirmation
-
Company Age & Reputation: We have been operating for ~29 months as a bootstrapped company.
-
Team Experience
- We are the first to market with a native mobile app that supports multiple governance systems with attention to complex features, such as voting with Safe and native notifications.
- Our work and experience indexing all the major DAOs across the EVM landscape has given us deep insight into operational inefficiencies we plan to address through our work.
- In addition to native app development, we also are competent blockchain developers as evidenced by our Signals protocol (which won the Arbitrum x RnDAO hackathon), and our Snapshot x Safe integration which included a complicated mix of on- and off-chain voting.
Arnold, Founder/CTO
- 15 years industry experience
- Led teams up to 10 heads
- Scaled orgs with headcount up to 150 at C level
- Taken 10+ products to market from ideation
- One exit, two public listings
James, CPO
- 12 years crypto startup experience
- Early-stage Coinbase and Kraken
- C-level at BRD, involved in 4 rounds of funding leading to one exit
Xaun, Head of Engineering
- 10 years digital experience
- Led cross functional teams up to 8 heads
- Digital Agency, Founder Experience
- ENS Token Endorsement Requirement
No public endorsement as of yet. Please consider voting for us in the upcoming vote!
- OFAC Sanctions Compliance
- We, Lighthouse Labs, confirm that neither our organization nor any of our employees, contractors, or executive leadership is located in, or a resident of, an OFAC-sanctioned country. We further confirm that none of our business resources are derived from or routed through any country or entity that is subject to sanctions imposed by the United States (OFAC) or equivalent regulatory bodies. We pledge to remain compliant with all applicable sanctions laws and will promptly notify the ENS DAO if our status changes.
- For avoidance of doubt, all employees currently reside in:
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- Multi Year Stream Eligibility
Not Applicable.
3. Open Source Commitment
- Our governance client mobile app and Lighthouse Dispatch is currently closed-source. We simply do not have the resources to maintain an OS variant and want to be in a better capital position before taking on the work of preparing an open source release.
- Our business model does require modules to be developed in conjunction with other protocols, and in those instances, we are more than happy to issue MIT licensed code for our work.
- For Lighthouse Signals, an on-chain protocol, we adopted an AGPL to ensure forkers are unable to re-license works as proprietary.
- Work we do for ENS will be open sourced where appropriate.
Generally, we prefer AGPL primarily as it forces work to remain in the public domain. MIT code, for example, can be forked and made private.
4. Scope of Work & Budget
- Requested amount: $400,000
- Description:
We propose to support ENS by adding ENS-specific features into the Lighthouse app, as well as leveraging our other products to improve the ENS governance ecosystem. For a detailed scope, please see the below spreadsheet which covers the projects we will commit to delivering over the course of the 1-year program.
- KPIs / Success Metrics
- In addition to delivering the above, we will also maintain the below SLA:
- 99% uptime for using the Lighthouse app to connect to the Lighthouse service
- 99% success rate of in-app message delivery
- Parity with on-chain data sources with a maximum latency of 5 minutes
- Maintain feature parity between iPhone and Android (100% support for the 5 most recent iOS and Android major releases)
- In addition to delivering the above, we will also maintain the below SLA:
- Budget:
$400K per year to cover development and infrastructure costs
5. Past Achievements & Additional Information
At Lighthouse Labs, we create more than voting software. We think deeply about the promise of tokenised systems and their potential impact as a technology.
Our team’s background is rooted in mainstream technology (high-traffic e-commerce and AI), being early adopters to Web3 technology (Bitcoin ATMs, Bitcoin Wallet Software) and experience in companies like Coinbase and Kraken.
We are on a mission to make governance and associated systems so easy to use that even non-crypto users can get involved. We strongly believe that ENS has the potential to serve as a critical component of this infrastructure, both through the ENS Protocol and how the ENS DAO conducts its operations.
Company History
- Nov 2022, Idea born.
- May 2023, ETH Global - Lisbon hacker
- July 2024, Deployed iOS and Android apps for voting on Snapshot and Governor systems.
- Aug 2024, Awarded SAFE DAO grant to research and implement native voting.
- Late 2024, Gitcoin and Optimism Retrofunding participant, Governance client recognized as a public good by both organizations.
- Dec 2024, Signals won Arbitrum x RNDao collab tech hackathon.
- Jan 2025, Currently participating in Uniswap Hooks Incubator for nuanced protocol development for Signals.
Thought Leadership
- On Network Economies, https://paragraph.xyz/@1a35e1/on-network-economies
- The Governance Stack, https://paragraph.xyz/@1a35e1/the-governance-stack
Appendix
- Lighthouse Client DEMO
- Signals Protocol,
https://github.com/0xLighthouse/signals
- 1st Place - Arbitrium x RnDAO Collabtech hackathon
Ecosystem affinity
- Safe
- Alchemix,
- Exploring solution for renewing ENS with ALCX in-app
- Optimism
- Retrofunding recipient, View project
- Grants Analysis, View project
- Gitcoin, GG22
6. Video Introduction (≤ 5 minutes)
7. Conflict Of Interest Statement
N/A