From Build Club to Mainnet: My Journey as a Midnight Developer
I'd like to introduce a project I've been working on throughout the summer: Shadow Labz.
It started as a project during Midnight Build Club, an eight-week program where I joined a group of developers building products using Midnight technology.
Over those eight weeks, an idea slowly turned into an actual platform.
But before I show you what we built, we have to go back to where everything started.
Surveys!
Have you ever completed a poll or survey?
You know the type: a few multiple-choice questions, maybe some ratings, and a little feedback box at the bottom.
They may seem simple, but surveys can be incredibly useful.
You can gather data, identify patterns, discover problems you may have overlooked, and learn more about the people you're trying to build for.
Usually, you create a group of questions, send them to a particular audience, collect the responses, and then use that information to form a hypothesis.
That's exactly what we did.
We created a survey focused on DAOs and Web3 communities and shared it with DAO members, community managers, and people interested in starting their own DAOs.
One thing stood out:
Communities were spending a lot of money and effort piecing together their infrastructure.
Voting might happen on one platform.
Treasury information might live somewhere else.
Community discussions happen on Discord.
Token or NFT verification requires another tool.
Calendars, proposals, analytics, and other community tools are often scattered across completely different services.
That gave us an idea:
What if we could build something similar to platforms like Snapshot or Tally, but focused on private governance, community tooling, and cross-chain functionality?
And that is how Shadow Labz was born.
Wait... What Is a DAO?
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization.
That sounds complicated, but the idea is much simpler than the name.
At its core, a DAO is a way for a community to govern itself.
One of the most common features of a DAO is a proposal.
A proposal could be:
- A budget request
- A new feature
- A community decision
- A change in direction
- A funding request
- A new rule
Community members then vote on that proposal.
Ideally, the result represents what the community wants.
But there is one major problem with traditional Web3 governance:
Everything is often public.
Your wallet is public.
Your vote can be public.
Your voting history can be public.
Your delegation can be public.
Depending on the community, that can create pressure around how someone votes.
That is where Midnight became especially interesting to us.
With Midnight, we can explore governance where certain information can remain private while still allowing the system to verify that the rules were followed.
For Shadow Labz, that means building toward things like private voting and private governance, where users do not necessarily need to publicly expose how they voted.
No public vote history.
No pressure to explain why you voted a certain way.
The community gets the result without requiring every participant to reveal everything about themselves.
Building the Tools Communities Actually Need
Voting was only the beginning.
Once we started thinking about community governance, another question came up:
What else does a community need?
Quite a lot, actually.
Treasury Tracking
A proper treasury is one of the most important parts of many communities.
Who controls it?
How much money is coming in?
How much is going out?
Where are funds being sent?
Is the community able to see what is happening?
Blockchain already gives us something incredibly useful here: transparency.
For example, imagine your community treasury is on the XRP Ledger.
The wallet already exists on-chain.
So instead of forcing the community to manually search through transactions, why not give them a dashboard?
That's essentially what we built.
A DAO can add a wallet address that it wants the community to monitor.
Shadow Labz can then display information such as:
- Treasury activity
- Incoming transactions
- Outgoing transactions
- Balance information
- Visual charts and statistics
It gives the community a much easier way to understand what is happening with its treasury.
Keeping Everyone in Sync
Another feature I built was a calendar.
It sounds simple, but community coordination becomes difficult very quickly when you're part of several groups.
Our calendar syncs events across the DAOs you've joined.
For example, it can show upcoming proposal deadlines so you don't forget to vote before a proposal closes.
Communities can also create custom events and attach links.
Maybe it's:
- A community call
- A governance meeting
- An AMA
- A livestream
- A funding deadline
- A product launch
Even creators could use it.
If you run a YouTube channel, for example, your community could see when you're planning to go live.
Governance isn't only about voting.
It's also about helping communities stay organized.
Gating Your Community
Another feature we're excited about is community gating.
There are thousands of NFT communities that want more ways to give their NFTs utility.
Governance is one possible use case.
Imagine owning an NFT that doesn't simply sit inside your wallet.
Instead, that NFT could grant access to a community, unlock governance features, or determine a member's role inside that community.
It also provides another layer of verification.
We are exploring things like different permissions for different NFT tiers.
For example, a particular NFT collection or NFT trait could eventually unlock a special community role.
We're also exploring weighted voting.
Maybe a community wants members holding a particular asset to have additional voting weight.
Or perhaps users need to hold a minimum amount of a token before they can join a DAO.
These systems have to be designed carefully, so we're actively gathering feedback and figuring out what makes the most sense for different types of communities.
And gating isn't limited to NFTs.
Tokens can be used as well.
That opens up a lot of possibilities for how communities determine membership and participation.
A Full-Circle Moment
One of my favorite parts of this project is that we eventually came right back to where everything started.
Polls and surveys.
My partner actually brought this idea up very early in the project.
At the time, we were focused heavily on DAO governance.
But eventually we realized:
Why stop at governance proposals?
Private polling could be useful almost anywhere.
So we built Shadow Polls.
You could use a poll during a livestream to ask your audience:
Who should the next guest be?
Or:
What song should we play next?
You could use polls at events, inside online communities, for feedback, or simply to gather opinions.
Then we took it another step further.
Instead of only creating a single poll, you can create an entire survey.
Multiple questions.
Different answer types.
Feedback boxes.
Essentially the same kind of tool we originally used to gather the information that helped us design Shadow Labz in the first place.
That's probably my favorite full-circle moment of the entire project.
We used surveys to help us understand the problem.
And now surveys are part of the product.
Even better, people using the polling experience don't necessarily need to already understand Midnight or manage a crypto wallet themselves.
We can handle much of that complexity behind the scenes.
For me, that's important.
Blockchain applications shouldn't require every user to become a blockchain expert before they can use them.
From Build Club to Mainnet
And then came one of our biggest milestones.
Mainnet.
What started as an idea during Midnight Build Club became something we could actually build, test, iterate on, and bring forward as a real product.
Shadow Labz is now our attempt at building a privacy-focused governance and community platform that communities can actually use.
The goal is bigger than simply creating another voting website.
We want to give communities the tools they need to govern themselves while taking advantage of what blockchain and privacy technology can offer.
With our base experience, communities can start with features such as:
- Private voting
- Proposal management
- Discord integration
- Community tools
And if you just want to experiment with private voting without creating an entire DAO, you can check out the polling tools as well.
No deep blockchain knowledge required.
What I Learned
Build Club taught me something that I think a lot of developers eventually learn:
The first version of your idea probably isn't the product you end up building.
We started by asking questions.
Those questions led us to DAOs.
DAOs led us to private governance.
Governance led us to treasuries, calendars, token gating, Discord integrations, polls, and surveys.
And somehow, after building all of that, we ended up right back at the surveys that started the journey.
That's what made this experience so interesting.
Shadow Labz wasn't something I completely designed on day one.
It evolved through feedback, conversations, experiments, mistakes, and actually building things.
And we're still figuring out where it goes next.
A huge thank you to Midnight Build Club and everyone who gave us feedback throughout the process.
From Build Club to mainnet has been a crazy journey.
And I think we're only getting started.
Until Next Time
Love you all.
MrParanormal39
Shadow Labz: https://www.shadowlabz.io
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