Ember
Milestone-based on-chain crowdfunding — contributions sit in escrow and release only when backers approve each milestone by vote. Trust-minimized, never custodial.
Crowdfunding’s biggest failure mode is simple: creators collect money up front and then disappear, leaving backers with no enforceable recourse. Ember is a milestone-based, on-chain crowdfunding dApp — “a better Kickstarter” — that fixes the incentive.
The solution
Instead of releasing funds immediately, Ember holds every contribution in a per-project escrow smart contract and releases money to the organization only when backers approve each milestone through an on-chain vote weighted by contribution size. Each contribution mints a portable position NFT as inspectable proof of stake; funds move only through on-chain actions, so the platform is never custodial. Organizations are manually verified, milestone 0 auto-releases on contribution, and a permissionless keeper resolves votes once the voting window closes.
Built on Stellar
Cheap, fast stablecoin payments make micro-contributions and per-milestone claims economical, and Soroban expresses the escrow-and-vote logic directly — adding an accountable-crowdfunding consumer dApp to a category the ecosystem largely lacks. Mainstream backers onboard with Google login plus a connected wallet and contribute in stablecoins.