Say hello to V2!

Today, we launched V2 of the Endaoment protocol and application, a major step forward for the organization, and our first complete rewrites since launching—almost two years ago to the day—Happy birthday, Endaoment!

We’re thrilled with the new features, and with the upcoming roadmap set up by these improvements. Below you’ll find details about what’s changed, what’s new, and what’s to come. This new protocol, and the programs it enables are the culmination of more than a year’s worth of planning and engineering. We hope you’ll see the love and care that went into this endeavor.

Before we go any further, Endaoment.org would not have made it this far without the tireless work of our full-time team members across Endaoment.org and Endaoment.tech, as well as the incredible minds at ScopeLift, Least Authority, Paul Hastings, NEO Law Group and all of our incredible supporting vendors.

But most importantly, we could do any of this without you, our donors. Thank you!

Note: for current fund advisors

Good news, if you had a fund on Endaoment V1, you’ve already been migrated to V2 by the Endaoment.org team. You’ll see your old funds in the new application, with their complete balance & grant recommendation history.

If you have questions, or have trouble accessing any existing fund, please email us ASAP @ admin@endaoment.org.

Composable, investable philanthropic capital

Last year, as the Endaoment team met in NYC to celebrate our one-year anniversary of launch, we began to set the bar for the next version of our application and contract architecture.

Endaoment V1 demonstrated the power of smart contracts to bring newfound speed and transparency to philanthropic giving, but our contract suite was falling behind industry standards.

While individual donors were using our wallet-connected app to donate thousands of different assets, we were seeing a marked interest from the web3 community in a more programmatic, integrated approach—one that enabled donations to be programmatically collected and invested.

A growing number of DAOs, NFT projects, and crowdsourced community treasuries were also routing their pooled capital directly to Endaoment-controlled ETH addresses, supporting nonprofits through our infrastructure. This clarified some key goals for protocol V2:

Goal 1: Actively steward Assets Under Management

• In Endaoment V1, all donations were held as USDC

• While we’re proud to have distributed over half of our donated assets to nonprofits, over $20m in value is currently held in Endaoment-managed DAFs, not able to earn yield or grow with the market

• In Endaoment V2, we enable idle assets to be productively managed

Goal 2: Introduce contract-level composability

• In Endaoment V1, a hot wallet accepted donations centrally, and routed donations to smart contracts after liquidating into USDC

• Developers and donors alike were prevented from sending funds/tokens directly to the contract address for an organization or fund

• Donation logic and fee processing was opaque and managed off-chain

• Endaoment.org overhead was gas-intensive; admin wallets had to constantly be monitored and managed

• In Endaoment V2, fund and org contracts are completely composable and can be interacted with just like private wallets.

Goal 3: Improve usability & product consistency

• In Endaoment V1, our infrastructure was built for a small number of users

• Search performance fell as more orgs were onboarded, making it hard to find orgs

• Wallet connectivity was spotty and didn’t support popular wallet providers

• Information was hard to find, and sparse on context

• In Endaoment V2, search is greatly improved, blockchain connections are up to industry standards and information is now easier to find and organized clearly.

Portfolios: charitable donations, meet DeFi

Our most requested feature since launch has been enabling fund advisors to allocate donated capital to crypto-native investments. With Endaoment V2, we’ve introduced Portfolios, a new way for Endaoment Funds to get access to crypto-native yield bearing and investment strategies.

We’re launching with three portfolios this week: WETH, Aave V2 and Compound V2. This short list will expand over the coming months. The contract architecture is completely modular and expandable, and as we battle test the system and complete more contract development work, we’ll open up more portfolio options.

C_urious to dive into the details? Check out our Portfolios Mirror Post_

Protocol V2: contract composability & developer tools

V2 of the Endaoment protocol also moves significant amounts of previously off-chain logic into atomic, gas-efficient transactions on-chain. Donation logic (including liquidation), fee processing, and grant logic is processed on-chain through atomic transactions at the individual contract level, making every Endaoment organization and fund contract address a viable endpoint for any Ethereum-based asset.

This has several impacts on user experience. First, donations are now processed in a single transaction on-chain, with clear outcomes for donation outputs in the same moment the donation is made. This improves donor confidence in the charitable value of the donation, and allows for donations to come from any provider that correctly formats the donation transaction.

Second, this makes all contract addresses in the protocol accessible as if they were end-Ethereum addresses for the causes and nonprofits the contracts represent. We often hear people ask, “Who’s got a list of all the wallet addresses for nonprofits that accept crypto.” Now, with Endaoment V2, every organization contract address—over 900 at launch—can serve as a de-facto wallet for fundraising on-chain.

Later this fall, we’ll roll out an Alpha of the Endaoment SDK & Subgraph, which will enable developers across the Ethereum ecosystem to compose impact directly into protocols, projects and platforms. There’s a new “money lego” in town, and it enables crypto developers to incorporate impact into any transaction.

If you’re interested in learning more about the protocol & composability, check out our Documentation, or reach out to partnerships@endaoment.org to enquire about launch plans & partnership opportunities.

Interface V2: improved usability

A fully redesigned Endaoment app accompanies the launch of V2 of the Endaoment protocol and represents the full execution of our rebrand we launched earlier this year.

We’ve rewritten our front and back end code repositories to take advantage of the latest coding standards and development practices, delivering a smoother and more usable application than ever before. Search is faster and effective, additional context is surfaced, and information is organized into easy to consume layouts.

Organization and fund profile pages have both been completely redesigned, and entering and exiting portfolios is intuitive and straight-forward for everyday users. Contract addresses are also now surfaced throughout the interface, enabling easy auditing of contract activity.

We think you’ll love these changes, and look forward to continuing to improve the donor experience with this new, more stable infrastructure.

What’s next: new portfolios, decentralizing oversight & dev relations

At Endaoment, we feel like the holidays came early. This incredible new platform allows us to expand our product offering, and engage in exciting new partnerships.

Going forward, we’ll be adding new portfolios into the mix of available allocations, partnering with protocols and projects throughout the DeFi community to to continue expanding the ways donors can grow their impact through investments.

Later this month, we will also be announcing details of our progressive decentralization of our oversight and accountability. Moving the election of the Endaoment.org Board of Directors to a token base offers exciting new opportunities to incentivize our most active participants with token rewards, and encourage philanthropic behavior in novel ways.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, we’ll be rolling out an alpha version of the Endaoment SDK & Subgraph later this fall. If you’re interested in integrating impact into your project this Giving Season, please reach out to partnerships@endoament.org to find out more.