The first ever DAO in Curaçao, CuraDAO

Published in

Caribbean Blockchain Network

4 min readJul 8, 2019

Introducing, CuraDAO, the first ever DAO in the Caribbean. Cura referring to the beautiful island of Curaçao and DAO stands for, Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

The CuraDAO is an organization (organism), initiated by the Caribbean Blockchain Network and realized through Alchemy, a decentralized application (Dapp) on the Ethereum blockchain network, created by DAOstack, that enables the use governance capabilities (e.g. reputation and voting) in DAO’s. The project will be run as a pilot for the duration of 6 months, mainly to test out what this new form of organization could mean for Curaçao.Introducing, CuraDAO, the first ever DAO in the Caribbean. Cura referring to the beautiful island of Curaçao and DAO stands for, Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

The DAO is:

Community-governed and owned — members of the community partake in decision making related to the DAO.
Open — the organization is open to anyone, however after approval (through voting) from the community new members will receive reputation so that they can partake in the creation and voting of project proposals. Also, while not everyone is allowed to vote in the DAO, anyone in the world will be able to create proposals, stake their GEN tokens and partake in the process of curating proposals
Scalable — Powered by holographic consensus, an emergent behavior created by DAOstack, the DAO will be able to scale while maintaining decentralized governance and conserving equal access to the governing process
Innovative — Never before in the economic history of Curaçao, has there been a DAO. DAO’s bring innovative changes to the fundamental building blocks of economic organizing, transforming organizations into decentralized networks with open community governance systems, ushering in a new form of collaboration and inclusivity.

What is DAO ?

A DAO is defined as a non-hierarchical organization in which decisions and tasks are performed on a peer to peer cryptographically secure distributed network (blockchain). A DAO can be fully automated in the sense that there is no human involved in the decision-making process, instead rules and operations are encoded in so-called smart contracts — computer programs that execute once a specific condition has been met. On the other hand, a DAO can also be human-oriented, which means that decisions and tasks are still performed by humans themselves. Compared to centralized organizing, in a DAO there are no shareholders, board of directors, CEO’s, etc. Also, the DAO does not have a physical building, it could have if that is the wish of members, but generally the organization is just represented by an application that rests on a blockchain. Furthermore, DAOs tend to have certain organizational tools that allow for improved cooperation between members. These include voting mechanisms, reputation systems and/or a social currency that facilitates democracy, cooperation, and social inclusion. And because the DAO itself rests on a blockchain, values of transparency and thus accountability are incorporated by design, without the need of any third party. Thus by design, potentially reducing organizational costs and also reducing the risks of corruptive and coercive behavior, since every actor within the DAO can be held accountable for their actions.

Why a DAO?

Recent research, into the shortcomings of centralized decision making, conducted by the Caribbean Blockchain Network, conveyed that there are many social shortcomings associated with centralized decision making in the political, economic and environmental sectors of Curaçao. Shortcomings relating to accountability, corruption, transparency and cooperation, all structural by nature. A DAO promises to solve these shortcomings because they are mitigated by systems design.

About the pilot

During the pilot, we will re-evaluate how we organize, fund and manage with the aim to create sustainable development in Curaçao through collaborative innovation that benefits the commons, our goals are to:

Create Value — Improve the collaboration environment in Curaçao by empowering individuals and organizations to co-create projects with a positive socio-economic impact.
Healthy Organization — Create positive shared values, methods and rituals that promote collaboration, honesty, and responsibility.
Research DAOs and Curaçao — Research the effectiveness of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Evaluate the pros and cons of decentralized organizations and better understand the ecosystem in Curaçao.

Technology

This pilot will use Alchemy, a decentralized resource allocation tool created by DAOstack. Alchemy is an easy solution for launching and running a Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

Alchemy is built on top of Ethereum, a Turing-complete blockchain that is often used to build Decentralized Applications (DAPPS). Participants will learn how to use Metamask, a web 3.0 extension to access these DAPPS.

CuraDAO will use Alchemy for two main functions:

Allocation of resources: Resource allocation will happen on the blockchain so we have a transparent and honest overview of all resources coming in and leaving the organization.
Governance: Everybody involved will have a vote when it comes to picking the projects that actually get funded. This voting will happen on the blockchain, again to ensure transparency and honesty. Each participant gets a different amount of votes based on their reputation, which is earned by contributing to the

Get Involved

Keep an eye on our twitter and facebook pages to stay up to date on the developments of the CuraDAO. In the near future, we will be releasing content on how to become part of the CuraDAO.