Ungravel helps loose individuals to become a self-governed group, potentially attracting investor funding.
Ungravel is a distributed application for a bunch of people. It does not make sense to use it alone. Ungravel is not a platform and it does not belong to a company. It is entirely based on blockchain. Ungravel groups may found a start-up or any other initiative together. Ungravel saves each members' belongings and share. It creates a fair and safe space for informal team building.
Ungravel morphs a wild bunch of people into a self-funded, self-governed disciplined group of co-workers.
The term „ungravel“ resembles to gravel and sand that have no stability at all. If dust, sand and stones un-gravel, stable sculptures emerge. Ungravel encourages social meshes of cooperation and participation that enhance group stability.
More than ever, it is easy to start a company today. But this is not true for all countries and cultures around. It is more complicated if founders come from different continents and legal backgrounds. Distributed groups of co-workers or co-founders cannot easily formalize their foundation. National business law is not quite suitable.
If you are part of any informal group you may ask yourself: Do I really belong to the group? Do I own a stake if the group becomes a company? What happens if I get kicked out?
Ungravel helps to organize distributed, informal groups that might develop into companies or organizations. Ungravel guarantees membership, member stakes, participation and voting rights. That's vital in case the group finally gets funded and suddenly group shares become valuable. Ungravel also guards leaving a successfully formed group while ensuring fair parachute compensation. It even supports a democratic, guided group split within fair rules in case two parties emerge and vote for seperate ways.
Ungravel takes away some of the stress and co-founder headaches.
Ungravel is well suited for founding companies and start-ups, in particular in early phases before external investors appear. But ungravel is particularly valuable for any informal group, wether it may become a company or not. International cooperation may benefit from stable and fair group management. NGOs may organize fund raising for their projects overcoming barriers. Ungravel has quite a low entry level. Once an adventure turns into something usefull, group members don’t have to care about their stake or voting rights. Ungravel has fund-raising built-in from day one. Even if you do not intend to raise funds in the near future, it's good to have it when needed. If funding succeeds, ungravel groups do not suffer any disruption while group shares turn into valuable assets.
Ungravel requires the native currency of the chain preferred. On Ethereum, for instance, you need ETH to pay for transaction fees. Ungravel smart contracts charge a small transaction fee while deploying a group first time. It charges 0.5% in case the group gets funded, later on. Ungravel mainly gets paid if the group has become successfull enough to attract investors and run a funding auction to offer group shares.
On test chains, such as Goerli or Sepolia, it is entirely for free. On Polygon or Moonbeam it is virtually free due to low gas prices and moderate transaction fees.
Ungravel started on Ethereum, later on it was deployed on Moonbeam and Polygon. It is available on Ethereum testnets, such as Goerli or Sepolia. Since Ethereum mainnet suffers from high gas and transaction costs, it is not yet clear if Ethereum mainnet will be fully supported short term. It is also extremely expensive to deploy ungravel smart contracts on mainnet. Sometimes, they need to be updated. Mainnet funding required.
It is easy to use. It is free until a group gets funded and turns successfull. Then, ungravel gets paid a transaction fee. It runs on different blockchains and cannot be stopped by a webhoster, a payment provider, gatekeeper or chain control. It is platform-independent. It is end-user friendly. It is based on open standards. (EVM|ENS|ERC20|IPFS|JSON) It is a truly distributed app. It is cross chain. (goerli|sepolia|moonbeam|polygon|gnosis|bscmain) It can migrate entire ungravel groups to another blockchain with only two transactions. It avoids most library or framework dependencies, it is mainly written in plain JavaScript and Solidity. It does not require a particular wallet to use nor does it require browser plug-ins to be installed. It does not need installation at all. Ungravel scripts load automatically while starting-up first time. It loves to run on Chrome, FireFox or Opera browsers and is browser-independent. It also runs on Safari, a bit slower. Ask Apple why the Safari JavaScript VM performs relatively slow. It is not yet fully mobile, although it should work on a decent tablet. It was built user-centric from day one. It is democratic from day one. Each decision requires majority, even for an update. It offers group government not only for heydays and sunny sundays. It has a split-group command built-in. It has a simple transactions based business model, no vaporware required. It does not rely on investor or VC money, it is entirely self-funded and independent. It may simply be a good idea for many people around.
Ungravel stores all application data encrypted. If you have a strong project password, your project and all keys are safe. If you have a short, unsecure project password, you and your group are in danger. It is up to the user to use strong passwords.
Ungravel encrypts project passwords, user passwords and private keys internally. Sensitive data is stored inside the browser application storage. In case you do not write down your project password and have not put it into a safe place offline, your account still remains protected but inaccessible if you ever forget your password. Nobody can help or decrypt your key file. It depends on you to use a strong project password and to put it to a safe place offline. OK?
Yes. Ungravel imports keyfiles that come from web3.js - driven apps or from compatible products, such as MEW, MyCrypto.com or MetaMask. In general, a web3-compatible keyfile can be imported into ungravel like charm.
Yes. Any user can export one account at a time in web3-keyfile format, readable by tools, such as MyCrypto, web3.js-based dAPPs and MetaMask. Reminder: The keyfile stores your private key in cryptographically encrypted form. Its safety depends on the quality of your password. You better put the keyfile password elsewhere, write it down and put it somewhere safe, say offline. Anyway, do not upload keyfiles into the cloud, on a server or elsewhere to the internet. You may store the keyfile to an USB-stick and put your offline password elsewhere.
Yes. Ungravel was created by a single JavaScript developer over the course of the past six years. From the beginning, it was designed to be built and maintained by a single developer or a very small team. It was not built to start a company and is not looking for VC funding.
Therefore, compromises belong to ungravel: It is only available in simple, plain English, no translation or localization scheduled. It is not yet fully mobile, although it should run on a tablet. It is not a fully-fledged groupware on blockchain. It has a simple and easy-to-use interface for end-users but it is not quite visually appealing. For example, it did not spent time and effort for background images with astronauts. Sorry. Ungravel may not look fancy, it works.
Oh, yes. Ungravel is about to be launched during 2023 on testnets and some of the more affordable networks, such as Polygon and Goerli. Lately, Goerli morphed from a network with test ether into a chain with GETH, that have become tradable overnight. Perhaps, Goerli is a very good candidate for a friendly-user test and a limited product launch to enhance product quality under load. Not much of a roadmap, I guess.
Ungravel requires an EVM / Ethereum-compatible blockchain with an ENS - Ethereum Name Service installation present. Since ENS is not present on many blockchains other than Ethereum and ungravel wanted to stay independent, it ported ENS to other chains. Ungravel is entirely based on ENS, all ungravel smart contracts rely on ENS, the name Registry, the ENS Resolver, ReverseResolver, BaseRegistrar, RegistrarController and more. Today, ungravel uses ENSV3 on Goerli and (theoretically) on Ethereum mainnet. There is a complete ENS deployment on Moonbeam (.glmr), on Polygon (.matic), Sepolia (.sepeth), Gnosis (.gnosis) and BSCMain (.bsc) enabling ungravel.
Ungravel is not another ICO tool and it is not suitable to raise funding from crowds or to organize crowd sales. Ungravel may become your tool for fund raising or investing rounds, but you have to address each investor individually and it is not really suitable for classic VCs. In fact, you may not need a VC at all if you find other investors instead. We are not for or against VC funding, we only think that this part of the journey belongs more into the hands of the founders.
Perhaps, ungravel may serve cooperatives more than high-tech start-ups because it is cheap and accessible. Some may benefit even under difficult circumstances for groups that we did not think of yet, surprise us!
Since I am a start-up founder myself, I went through many stages of a typical start-up company. Honeymoon in the beginning, high pressure during due-diligence, expectable conflicts with co-founders, endless negotiations around shareholder structure, celebrating being finally funded by a VC and 18 months later selling my stock under pressure to board members while leaving the company that I had built myself. Definitely, I've made a lot of mistakes myself.
Years later, I thought, that we did hire too many people at the same time under too much time pressure. And above all, we made almost all of them stakeholder of the company, a major mistake. It would have been so much better to grow the team more organically, but milestones and deadlines didn’t help that much. I thought that a tool for co-founding teams would have helped back then. But there was nothing around.
Since 2016 I experimented with Ethereum and smart contracts and I thought that it offered truely programmable digital money, for the first time. ICOs proved that one could also make a lot of money out of thin air and turned fluffy whitepapers into millions. Then I thought that blockchain could also be used to create new digital institutions, not only banks, fonds and derivatives. A group of founders needs institutions to lay down a foundational contract, sort of constitution, to seal shareholder structure and to sign funding investors. I think that this institution can be made on blockchain and ungravel is a prototype to prove the idea right.
Ungravel creates stability and trust, leading to fair and cooperative teams that are built upon participation, transparency and democratic votes. Ungravel is not about hierarchy during the founding process but on the contrary it brings more fairness to start-ups and to founding teams.
Smart contracts dealing with highly programmable digital money and convertible assets can be considered a building block for digital institutions. In particular for groups. The key question is: Can it be done without blockchain? Say, using a professional database on a grid of powerfull servers? But this would still be a centralized installation, it belongs to a company, a hoster, a database company, a team of administrators. All of a sudden there are dozens of gatekeepers involved that may decide that your project is not eligible or legitimate at all.
Blockchain is decentralized, to a certain degree, certainly not all chains the same, but generally speaking, blockchains are more decentralized as they do not belong to a single party. Smart contracts may act similar to an attesting notary, with the important difference that they execute a decision immediately. For instance, they transfer shares for funding immediately, right after you have won an auction. If done right, smart contracts fullfill their task without any interference possible. And that makes them capable of doing interesting new things that legacy technology can not do at all:
Toolboxing new institutions to encourage social meshes of relationship, belonging, membership and stake holding. Since digital assets management is built-in, each of these things may become valuable assets by themselves:
Groups that offer valuable memberships, groups that provide valuable relationships and partnering, like an exclusive club. Groups that guarantee that members belong to them and are legitimate team players, s.a. a remote chess team. Groups that organize common wealth and asset management, comparable to wealth management. Or partners that formalize complicated payments for complicated transportation of goods, s.a. an export/import trust.
If one imagines those types of groups a step further, it is absolutely clear that many of them will turn their group shares into convertible, tradable assets with a price tag. Successfully operating teams will heat-up symbolic group shares and turn them into tradable, valuable goods. That’s what blockchain is good for, to have the whole process been served by smart contracts and to give back a lot of power and freedom of choice to the acting people.
Therefore, Ungravel unifies different stages of "ungravelling" into a single, easy-to-use and user-centric tool.
No. Ungravel helps to organize groups on blockchain without requiring a wallet. Ungravel is a distributed app supporting founding teams and informal groups looking for funding. Yet, ungravel covers basic wallet functionality. You can send Ether, for instance, and receive native chain currency. You can easily send and receive group shares or trade them within your group. Sometimes, we use the term „GroupWallet“. But a typical wallet does have way more functionality. Ungravel cannot hold or administer collectibles, such as NFTs. It does not support foreign ERC20 tokens except group shares. It covers only a minimal feature set of a wallet, not more. In this sense it is a minimal self-custody wallet offering smart accounts.
Nobody knows. Since there are not many applications for end-users, mass adoption of blockchain is far away, yet. Today, blockchain companies and cooperatives are mainly focussed on infrastructure and that’s indispensable. Countless chains are competing for user adoption and for attention. Blockchains more and more become a commodity, there are many of them, but end-users do not care about them very much, they care about applications that are affordable and useful to them. Today, applications are multi-chain, therefore chains that support EVM for instance have an advantage: Applications can run transparently across all EVM-compatible chains.
But mass adoption requires even more: We think that end-users need easy-to-use applications, applications that do not force them to install components. Mass adoption demands an extremely low entry level.
Since blockchain is relatively new to most of them, countless acronyms and complicated concepts do not really help. End-users are not developers, therefore future applications will have to abstract from the underlying tech stack and simplify things so that non-crypto savvy users can follow. In this respect, mass-adoption may need more time, perhaps a couple of years. In the meantime, a few thousand of coins, token and chains will consolidate dramatically. Blockchain companies with a viable business model based on revenues will survive. And, of course, it needs a lot more good ideas for applications.
Blockchain is relatively new to many users. It comes with a lot of weird concepts and undoubtedly is a disruptive technology. But that’s also a huge problem: Disruption is challeging to understand and to follow. Disruption forces users to give-up familiar concepts, for example that web application are responsive and execute fast. With blockchain we all learned how to wait patiently for minutes on transaction receipts. That’s new. Disruption introduces new ways of thinking: Value does not only derive and legalize from authorities or central banks that issue national currencies but value can also be minted with cryptographically signed blocks of transaction data. Value may emerge out of nothing but distributed number crunching. And value can collapse or even vanish very quickly!
Since there is an enormous gap of understanding between crypto-literates and crypto-newbies, room for misunderstanding between them is quite large as well. That’s why so many crypto-companies are targeting mainly crypto developers. It’s comfortable since developers are considered insiders.
Some personal advice (without a guaranty) New crypto users should take some time to play around with DApps and services on testnets. Get accustomed to crypto before you invest. Check out faucets to get your first test ether, for free. Find a wallet that you like and experiment with it on a testnet. Do experiments, be open to new apps and services.
Use this DApp on free testnets to gain confidence and experience crypto while avoiding risk. Do not invest into any service, product, DApp or company that you do not have at least a basic understanding of. If you cannot explain it in simple words, e.g. to parents or grandparents, it is quite possible that you didn't get it yourself. Do not believe that you are an early-adopter if you enter the crypto space now, you’re definitely not, sorry. Focus on DApps that you understand and that you consider valuable or useful. Consider to contribute that way to a very creative community. Trust yourself and trust your team to create true value.
This DApp coined the term "Prepaid Account". Ungravel always starts with a working sample group. In case you want to create your own group, you need a working account with a bit of native currency, say 0.1 Goerli Ether. Ungravel offers different ways to import your own wallet file.
In case, you don't want to import a wallet file, you can create a Prepaid Account. You get asked to transfer a bit of native currency to a smart contract using any wallet you prefer. The Prepaid smart contract forwards your initial funding to a brand new working account. Ungravel reloads once and your funding can be used to submit transactions or to register your own group. The Prepaid account holds a bit less than your deposit, since transaction fees have been paid. Ungravel downloads a safe, encrypted wallet file of the Prepaid Account into your Downloads folder. Most important, you did not disclose any sensitive account information.
Prepaid Accounts allow easy and safe on-boarding and are considered a low-level entry point to Ungravel.