xGov-86: Bonfire šŸ”„

Governance xGov Proposals
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This is the official discussion thread for xGov-86: Bonfire

Author Brian Whippo (@SilentRhetoric)

Category Tools

Focus DeFi

Open-Source Yes

ALGO Requested 10000

Abstract

Burn ASAs by throwing them into the Bonfireā€“a standard, permissionless, and verifiable way to take ASAs out of circulation forever by implementing an interface for ARC-54: ASA Burning App.

Team

Brian Whippo is a self-taught, full-stack software developer passionate about bringing the promises of blockchain to the people. When he is not trying to build a better world with the Algofam, he is leading strategic technology transformation at a top financial institution, where he has been designing better ways to manage derivatives and commodities for over 14 years.

LinkedIn - Brian Whippo
GitHub - SilentRhetoric

Experience with Algorand

Brian has been an active developer and contributor in the Algorand community since 2021 in various capacities:

  • Built the open source Solid Algo Wallets Javascript library for integrating several wallets into a web site, a project funded by xGov #49
  • Created the open source xGov Viewer app for reviewing xGov proposals and analyzing proposal voting data
  • Completed the Encode x Algorand Bootcamp and won a 3rd place prize in the 2022 Encode x Algorand Hackathon
  • Collaborated with Joe Polny (@joe-polny) from Algorand Foundation to draft the ARC-12 standard for ā€œclaimableā€ assets. Notably, this xGov proposal seeks to address one use case which we had intended to be solved by ARC-12.
  • Runs two participation nodes in Algorand consensus

Present Proposal

I will build Bonfire, a web app that implements a user interface for ARC-54: ASA Burning App, a community standard for burning ASAs. I will deliver:

  • A web app with multi-wallet connectivity
  • A simple interface for burning ASAs by sending them to the ARC-54 smart contract
  • Open source code for everything with documentation
  • Free-tier site hosting for a website for the foreseeable future. (Eventually, it would probably make sense to integrate this with ChainUI so that the interface would always be available.)

The project will be completed in Q1 2024.

Benefits for the community

ARC-54 and a user interface to burn ASAs will help the community by enabling tokens to be easily, permissionlessly, permanently, and verifiably burned. By standardizing how ASAs are burned in the ecosystem, the burning address can be known to defi sites like DefiLlama that track circulating supply metrics and exclude tokens burned there. Projects which want to burn tokens to reduce their supply can use the ARC-54 burning approach to avoid any doubts about how or where the tokens were burned.

Additional information

For fun, I will aim to light the Bonfire on February 7th as a poetic nod to the ā€œBonfire of the Vanitiesā€ on 7 February 1497, when supporters of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola collected and burned thousands of objects such as cosmetics, art, and books in the public square of Florence, Italy, on the occasion of Shrove Tuesday, martedĆ­ grasso.

Link to proposal on GitHub:

3 Likes
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Can you give an example of why one would burn an ASA or what they might burn?

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Two use cases stand out:

  1. Fungible token issuers may want to burn a sum of their treasury to decrease circulating supply and increase the value of tokens already purchased or airdropped. This is fairly standard practice in the industryā€”even major blockchains have done token burns. Having ARC-54 as a standard will make it easy for analytics sites and people alike to easily ascertain that tokens have been properly burned.

  2. As a general-purpose tool, Bonfire lets token holders get rid of any ASA they donā€™t want, from fungible coins to non-fungible tokens (NFTs). You can always send tokens back to the creator account, but if the tokens have some value, you may not want to hand that back to the creator. Doing this today would be quite manual if, say, you have dozens of NFTs with different creator accounts. Tossing them indiscriminately into the bonfire will be easier.

Throughout Algorandā€™s history there have been some half-baked tools to help people burn tokens, but as of this writing they are either no longer being hosted online or never had a web interface at all. Some solutions required trust in a third party, while others sent burned tokens to different addresses, which is a mess if you want block explorers to label a known, trustless burn account. There simply has never been a proper standard for this utility, let alone with an intuitive and free UI.

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Thank you for this! Helpful.

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How do you plan to make revenue out of this for long term sustainability. Just curious

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This is proposed as a community utility. I have no plans to commercialize this.

It will be built in such a way that it could eventually be uploaded to ChainUI so that the tool is always available to anyone even if the web hosting becomes a cost issue.

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That is a good idea.

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@SilentRhetoric, I voted for this and Iā€™m glad to see it get funded.

Free-tier site hosting for a website for the foreseeable future. (Eventually, it would probably make sense to integrate this with ChainUI so that the interface would always be available.)

If it is just going to be a single page web app this would be a better fit for Arweave, because then it wonā€™t rely on people repinning on IPFS or continuous payment of someone to do so.

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Thank you for your support and the technical suggestion.

The tool will be built as a single-page application to make it easy to host/pin/store anywhere.

The community will be free to use the open source code to create integrations with other apps, stripped-down functionality for lightweight decentralized hosting, or even reskins of my ā€œwhite labelā€ site for custom-branded experiences.

1 Like