Breadchain grant interview: automated fund management for the Bread Crowdstaking Application

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PowerPool

4 min readFeb 19, 2024

Expanding the post-capitalist POV with PowerPool automation

In partnership with Gitcoin, PowerPool is growing its ecosystem by offering Builder Grants of up to $20,000 to developers seeking to incorporate decentralized and reliable automation into their projects.

Now, we are thrilled to share the details of PowerPool’s third approved Builder Grant recipient — Breadchain Cooperative. By leveraging PowerAgent’s automation capabilities, the cooperative will streamline their operations by automating the distribution of yield funds, efficiently managing their treasury, and seamlessly converting EigenLayer rewards into BREAD tokens.

In this interview article, we will share the highlights of our discussions with the Breadchain team, give insights into their grant application and automation use cases, and provide some advice to future Builder Grant applicants on making their proposals better.

Let’s explore the interview in detail:

1. Please introduce yourself and the DAO you are a part of

We are Breadchain Cooperative, a collective of organizations looking to advance a progressive vision for blockchain and its potential to transform society. We aim to do this by building and utilizing what we call “solidarity primitives,” development tools which can help forge solidarity between individuals and collectives. We believe Web3 presents a unique opportunity to significantly expand collective governance over our digital systems and embed them with solidarity.

We were founded by Joshua Davila, aka The Blockchain Socialist and others in the Crypto Leftists online communities. The project was created as a vehicle to promote projects working in crypto building applications from a post-capitalist economic POV.

2. What are you building?

The first solidarity primitive we’ve built is the Bread Crowdstaking Application. The smart contract accepts a user’s DAI and converts it to the DAI savings rate (sDAI). In exchange, the user receives BREAD tokens, minted at a 1-to-1 ratio with the collateralized DAI. All of the interest earned on the sDAI is sent to Breadchain to help fund the collective and its various member projects. As a result, the Crowdstaking Application functions as a fundraising engine for the Breadchain Cooperative, and a collectively owned credit union, while the BREAD token acts as a local currency within the ecosystem, promoting financial sustainability.

Additionally, we have plans to build many more applications for things like governance of the yield generated from BREAD and collectivizing rewards earned from EigenLayer. All of these have been written about in detail in our PowerPool grant application.

3. Why is automation important for your product?

Automation is important in the context of post-capitalist economics because in order to compete with the existing system, we need to be able to provide similar levels of efficiency. Automation is an essential tool to building a new economic system that can usurp with the existing one. Since our applications are meant to be much more democratic than what exists, it requires more computation based on more input from more people. Automation helps make this computation more possible.

4. Could you provide details of your automation strategy — its goals, requirements, how it should work, what are possible issues and attack vectors

In our grant we have 3 different Jobs laid out we want to pursue and so each of them has different things to consider. In general, the goal is to create an actually existing crypto system that expresses solidarity among many people and a post-capitalist economics. The automation strategy therefore involves ensuring we are taking into consideration the right inputs that will lead to our desired democratic output. One of the attack vectors we have foreseen is the ability for someone to use their capital to take advantage of the governance however we have designed it such that even if someone were to attempt to do such a thing, they would only help benefit the collective.

5. Why did you choose PowerAgent v2 as an automation solution?

We chose PowerAgent v2 because we are decentralization maxis! We want automation and we don’t want to compromise on our principles of decentralization. It also helps that it can do everything we need and PowerPool has a long-term vision that aligns with ours.

6. Provide your roadmap

We are at the moment very close to finishing our first milestone to outline the architecture of each Job while at the same time very far along on the second milestone since we have been working on the Resolver Jobs to ensure that our architecture makes sense in the first milestone. We are planning to have the majority if not all of the back end components ready in the next six months with one of the Jobs having a high priority to have a front end finished in time for ETH Berlin.

7. How did you structure your proposal and what advice could you provide for future grant applications?

We structured our proposal with subsections for each Job we have planned to make that go into detail of each. However, we still included sections that explained the larger vision we have for using PowerAgent. We’d recommend taking a similar approach in order to make clear what each separate Job will do and how they come together to make a larger whole.

8. Do you have any ideas of possible products that could be built on top of PowerAgent v2 and benefit Defi and its users?

The top 3 products we can envision the PowerAgent easily creating would be an automated treasury management tool for DAOs and other kinds of organizations, an automated governance facilitation tool like we are planning to build, and a collectivized yield aggregator for groups of DeFi users.