Boson Protocol’s Governance Strategy and our upcoming Signalling DAO

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BosonProtocol

7 min readDec 15, 2021

Boson Protocol is building the decentralized network upon which future commerce will run — and decentralization is key to our vision. We believe a properly distributed protocol and ecosystem are fundamental for creating solutions that everyone can use and anyone can trust.

In other words, we are not building merely a technology solution, but a system for enabling decentralized commerce exchange of on-chain value for off-chain goods or services, from physical products to digital wearables.

This means that governance plays a very important role, as it enables, supports and encourages the community to actively participate in the protocol. The governance design goes hand in hand with the technical solution, and is a vital part of the whole.

If the system really wants to welcome co-creation and co-building, it has to enable those features by default, at a technical level as well as an organizational level. This blog post and its sequel are a manifesto for our community and a plan for progressive decentralization and openness by design.

Why does decentralization matter?

We believe that now, more than ever, it is important for innovation to be used in building open and inclusive digital spaces. Our core protocol is aimed at decentralizing commerce, starting with the metaverse.

There are many negative consequences created in our society by the existing value-extracting tech platforms. Now, a new Web3 paradigm is here and Boson is leading the e-commerce revolution within it. With a stellar team and a unique vision, we are bringing to you an open, interoperable commerce infrastructure, that is more fair and equitable. We call this dCommerce (decentralized commerce), and it starts with the metaverse. We are thus also committed to the principles and practice of an open metaverse, which is why we are founding members of the Open Metaverse DAO.

Most of the tools that will allow us to create, communicate, transact and live our lives in a world where no single entity extracts all the value and captures all the data still need to be built. We are providing in this blog post the answer to the question: how are the tools of the future being built and who is building them and who is profiting from it?

Values can be embedded in the design of a system. Boson has been created as a response to the centralized, extractive entities that monopolize current commerce. Using public blockchain technology and the best practices in the Web3 ecosystem, Boson Protocol is building a system of capture-resistance, fair and equitable distribution of ownership, value and control. Here, governance plays a crucial role.

Writing about our values does not help if we don’t transform them into actual designs, features and guarantees that will allow community ownership and operation.

What will the Boson Protocol look like in the future?

We are publishing a detailed plan for how the Boson Protocol will look in the future and how the community is going to be progressively included in its governance and design and ultimately in its ownership. We will be gathering feedback from the community to advance our plans.

Our vision is that Boson will become the decentralized network on which future commerce will run, and it starts with the metaverse.The first version of Boson Protocol has been deployed on Ethereum Mainnet. Boson Protocol’s v1.0 enables the sale of physical products in the metaverse as NFTs — initially within Boson Portal, our Decentraland brand experience space.

The protocol has been brought to life by the Boson team following the vision of its founders, and we are actively working on v2 of the protocol, scheduled to be released in 2022, which extends its breadth and depth of scope. A core part of the founders’ vision is to progressively decentralize and allow individuals not only to be a part of this peer-to-peer system as a user, but ultimately as a co-creator and co-owner.

Different governance approaches

There are different approaches to protocol governance*. For the future development of Boson it’s important that there will be an efficient execution of the vision, at the same time ensuring openness for new solutions and perspectives. A DAO will ultimately lead the creation and the operation of the protocol, where the token holders will participate in the DAO governance through voting and writing proposals.

Simultaneously, an open ecosystem or a combination of entities and individuals that operate without a central community, will lead some of the initiatives that are complementary, but not core to the protocol.

A combination of those two approaches brings enough certainty in the vision, while still being as open as possible for different iterations and variations.

The first version of Boson Protocol creates a commerce bridge between the virtual and real worlds. It is a decentralized, interoperable system which replicates the benefits of a market intermediary, without the disbenefits of centralized systems. Going forward, while developing new versions of the protocol, maintaining this vision is crucial.

The protocol and the governance around Boson are built in such a way that the value of decentralization will grow over time. We will design a set of minimum technical and governance guarantees we will provide. These will assure the community that the application will stay a part of the protocol and will not be deleted or otherwise negatively interfered with or will guarantee that the community’s voice will come into effect.

This is why our main principle is to build a system that follows a modular approach and allows open competition over the features of the protocol but maintains the design of the base architecture within the Boson DAO.

Specifically, this allows for:

Competition for features: Allowing competition over the features means creating room for experimentation and innovation. Anyone can add new features and in this way enrich the ecosystem with new opportunities.

Control over the core protocol: The core protocol will be maintained by the DAO to ensure its development and maintenance. The protocol is a fundamental infrastructure upon which other applications will be built. We are confident that a DAO is the best structure for assuring its continuous evolution and sound operation.

Taking the first steps

Our end goal of this progressive decentralization is thus to take this hybrid approach, where the core protocol is governed by a DAO while an ecosystem of experimentation and innovation is simultaneously created.

In other words, Boson will become a DAO progressively over time, giving more power to the community. This combination of technology development and community governance requires an approach based on milestones. This means that the development team needs to develop new systemic features that support community inclusion (for example, an on-chain voting system) before these can be used by DAO members.

As specific milestones are reached, the community incrementally acquires governance functions. The speed and timeline for this will be determined by:

The state of development of the protocol
The distribution of the tokens
Overall community engagement

The Hybrid approach will be applied to Boson Protocol. The Boson DAO will govern the core protocol and core components. The rest will be developed within the ecosystem framework.

In practical terms, this milestone-based approach means that the community first acquires more power over voting on certain features and proposals that are not core to the protocol. It is only later, when the community has matured enough, that it progressively gains power over core decisions.

This cautious approach is crucial for Boson and prevents the risks that would come with decentralizing too quickly. We can see many examples of DAOs that went into full decentralization fairly quickly and struggled with community engagement, infrastructure maintenance and operational efficiency.

Involving the community over time while facilitating and supporting the coordination of different activities by an expert team is crucial.

The Signalling DAO

The first function to be decentralized is the Boson grants decision-making process. We are introducing the Signalling DAO, which will be the community tool for Boson grants allocation.

Boson token holders will be able to vote to make their favourite project eligible for a grant from Boson using a tool called Snapshot. Snapshot is a voting tool used by many DAOs and similar projects to govern some of the decisions in a coordinated manner, but still off-chain. Snapshot allows configurations to be made for the community to suggest and vote for different proposals.

We value your input and would like you to take part in the decision-making process for the projects that will be supported by Boson. Boson grants are periodically distributed to projects that build applications and infrastructure for decentralised commerce. Allowing the community to participate in the grants distribution will bring additional legitimacy to the process, while taking into account potential negative outcomes, like a malicious takeover due to low participation and preventing them from happening. You will be the one deciding what project is best fit for being a part of our ecosystem and to get our support.

We’re looking to launch the snapshot module in January and will release a detailed article about the launch and how to participate.

*Coalition of Automated Legal Applications (COALA): Financing Open Blockchain Ecosystems https://coala.global/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/BRI-COALA-ICO-Financing-Open-Blockchain-Ecosystems.pdf.

About Boson

Boson Protocol is the decentralized network on which future commerce will run.

And it starts with metaverse commerce. Boson Protocol enables anyone to sell physical products in the metaverse as NFTs within our Decentraland space — Boson Portal.

With Boson Protocol you can build commerce applications that anyone can trust and everyone can use.

Keen to learn more?

Enjoy the dCommerce Stack outlining the services we’ll need to build a dCommerce ecosystem.

Want to get involved?

See our live job openings
See our Boson Portal website

Got more questions?

Our FAQs ought to have you covered.