Frequently asked questions

A public good is generally understood as work that creates more value for others than it extracts. On PotLock, projects apply to the registry and are reviewed against community guidelines before approval.

An uncensored view of pots and unapproved registry entries is planned so broader participation remains possible outside the curated directory.

Referrals help grow a decentralized network of people who surface great projects. Donors can remove the referrer from the URL if they prefer that no referral fee is paid. On funding rounds (“pots”), fees can also be set to zero while still attributing who drove traffic.

Pot-level fees are set by the pot owner within limits enforced by the factory contract to protect donors and referrers. Pot deployers can set protocol, chef, and referrer fees to zero (or below the configured maximum). Direct donation fees are optional as well—though some front ends may not expose every option yet.

PotLock runs on NEAR. Quadratic funding rounds use NEAR as the native asset for matching pools and contributions, while the direct donation flow can support multiple fungible tokens. The product surface may vary as the app evolves—follow the core repos for contract updates.

Quadratic funding (QF) is a matching mechanism that rewards breadth of support: many smaller, independent donations unlock more matching than the same total from a few large wallets. It is a common tool for public goods and open-source funding.

There is no PotLock token today. The community is interested in incentives for sustained impact contributors; if you work on tokenomics or want to discuss models, join the ecosystem chat.

The team is designing composable “public goods legos,” including campaign-style launches anyone can run. See the roadmap and design files for what is shipping next.

Nada.bot is a sybil-resistance aggregator spun out to meet ecosystem needs. PotLock can aggregate multiple human-verification providers. Integrators should read the Nada.bot docs; end users can use the support link for questions.

PotLock is a protocol, a set of platforms, and an ecosystem for public goods funding and impact tracking. Anyone can fork or adapt the contracts and front ends for their own accounts and eligibility rules.

Approved listings are curated. Projects typically need admin approval before they appear in the primary explore experience.

Amounts vary by round and traction. Registry and donation statistics are published on community dashboards; total matching in early rounds was modest by design and grows with participation and impact.

Strong profiles, attestations, and plural funding strategies improve outcomes. If you need help beyond matching rounds—ecosystem grants, multichain programs, or acceleration—ask in the PotLock community chat.

Featured placement is manual today. Reach out via the community channel; longer term, curation may be democratized or automated from donation trends.

Much of the product is exercised on staging and live gateways rather than a dedicated public testnet demo. Contract addresses and networks are documented in the contracts overview as tooling evolves.

Many individuals and teams contribute across contracts, front ends, data, and ops. Active contributors are listed on the ecosystem site.

PotLock uses the MIT License. Forking and building new funding mechanisms on top is encouraged.

Pick up issues tagged for newcomers on the backlog and introduce yourself in the community chat.

Approach includes operational security, audited and locked contracts without backdoors, redundant and forkable front ends, and open development so the community can run alternatives if needed.

Yes—there is an indexer repository for on-chain events and analytics pipelines.

Front ends include BOS (Alem-style components) and Next.js apps; smart contracts are Rust on NEAR. The indexer uses Python; analysts often use SQL. There is room for contributors across these stacks.

Core contracts have been reviewed by OtterSec and Guvenkaya, with reports in the repository. As new contracts ship, more audits are planned. There is no public bug bounty yet; use the community channel for responsible disclosure.