The challenge faced by the project was to create a decentralized and transparent funding process that would be secure, efficient, and would help to onboard new projects and contributors.

Important aspects that had to be kept in mind when designing and implementing the product were:

• Security: The team had to develop a secure way to store and manage funds. This was done by leveraging smart contracts to form a DAO. All actions made by the DAO are controlled through a set of members that can only move forward if they find consensus via on-chain voting. The DAO's treasury resides under that control on the chain too.

• Transparency: The team wanted to create a transparent funding process that would be open to everyone. This was done by making all proposals, the discussions, and decisions on them public. The blockchain obviously adds to that transparency. The off-chain interactions are handled via GitHub issues that allow everyone to read and take part in the discussions.

• Scalability: The team had to design a platform that could scale to meet the needs of the growing Neo community. This was done by using a modern tech stack hosted on DigitalOcean as the infrastructure provider.

• Numerous stakeholders: Because of GrantShares' decentralized nature, it was important to liaise with many key players in the Neo community when creating the product definition and the technical design. Thus, our team was functioning as a facilitator and coordinator in the inception process.