Last week In ETHPrague, during a fireside chat with Amir Taaki, Vitalik said something that struck a chord with me: "Don't build empires, build tools." This statement resonated with some recent conversations I've had regarding protocols, tools, and how to launch them. One of the biggest challenges in launching protocols is the security audit, which costs anywhere between $50k to $250k, depending on the complexity. Also very often this need to pay for an audit becomes the primary reason for raising funds.

So, here's an idea I'd like to share: What if we created a way for projects to directly raise funds for audits in a permissionless, trust minimized manner? An "Initial Audit Offering" where Ethereum addresses can contribute to funding an audit, audit challenge, and even a live bug bounty if there are remaining funds. 

All the necessary tools are already available; just need to bring them together.

This approach makes sense for a few reasons:

1. As a VC, my focus is on investing in billion-dollar protocols, projects, and products. However, as Vitalik mentioned, not every "tool" needs to aim for such high value accrual. There are protocols that create significant value worth $50 million, and that's perfectly fine.

2. Many projects prefer to remain anonymous, and preserving this right within our community is crucial (while maintaining self-regulation and accountability practices). This significantly reduces the overhead of anonymous teams to launch audited projects and contribute to the ecosystem.

3. The current practice of launching unaudited contracts has led to significant losses which harm the community and reduces the perceived trust the ecosystem as whole.

I'm sharing this idea to gather interest and feedback with the goal of hacking this in ETHBarcelona or ETHcc.

Open questions:

1. Does this general idea make sense? Do you see this being used?

2. How do you see this going wrong? How are people abusing this to launch memecoins and ponzis? how can we mitigate?

3. Currently the spec I was thinking of using is something like Juicebox which sends funds directly to a Hats.Finance deployed vault.

   • Any other available tools we should use?

4. Do you know of any anon projects who might be interested in building/contributing to v1?

5. Are tokens given in exchange for funding the audit? Should this be standardized?

   • How much, what %, what vesting scheduled, etc

Last week In ETHPrague, during a fireside chat with Amir Taaki, Vitalik said something that struck a chord with me: "Don't build empires, build tools." This statement resonated with some recent conversations I've had regarding protocols, tools, and how to launch them. One of the biggest challenges in launching protocols is the security audit, which costs anywhere between $50k to $250k, depending on the complexity. Also very often this need to pay for an audit becomes the primary reason for raising funds.

So, here's an idea I'd like to share: What if we created a way for projects to directly raise funds for audits in a permissionless, trust minimized manner? An "Initial Audit Offering" where Ethereum addresses can contribute to funding an audit, audit challenge, and even a live bug bounty if there are remaining funds. 

All the necessary tools are already available; just need to bring them together.

This approach makes sense for a few reasons:

1. As a VC, my focus is on investing in billion-dollar protocols, projects, and products. However, as Vitalik mentioned, not every "tool" needs to aim for such high value accrual. There are protocols that create significant value worth $50 million, and that's perfectly fine.

2. Many projects prefer to remain anonymous, and preserving this right within our community is crucial (while maintaining self-regulation and accountability practices). This significantly reduces the overhead of anonymous teams to launch audited projects and contribute to the ecosystem.

3. The current practice of launching unaudited contracts has led to significant losses which harm the community and reduces the perceived trust the ecosystem as whole.

I'm sharing this idea to gather interest and feedback with the goal of hacking this in ETHBarcelona or ETHcc.

Open questions:

1. Does this general idea make sense? Do you see this being used?

2. How do you see this going wrong? How are people abusing this to launch memecoins and ponzis? how can we mitigate?

3. Currently the spec I was thinking of using is something like Juicebox which sends funds directly to a Hats.Finance deployed vault.

   • Any other available tools we should use?

4. Do you know of any anon projects who might be interested in building/contributing to v1?

5. Are tokens given in exchange for funding the audit? Should this be standardized?

   • How much, what %, what vesting scheduled, etc