Why We Gave Up On Old-School Software Development and Invested in Dora Factory Instead
We all know the tools needed to get work done in a traditional “Web2” context: tools for communication, document sharing and collaboration, to-do lists, road-mapping, bug-tracking, sales pipeline, accountancy, payroll and a million other humdrum processes. And they all function pretty well, until…
…You start working within a Web3-type organization, which is decentralized and autonomous (a “DAO”), such as Free TON, The LAO, Flamingo DAO and so on. These DAOs have very specific needs in areas like governance and voting (including new system like quadratic voting), incentivization and treasury management, and most fundamentally the requirement for all key decisions and transactions to be recorded immutably and transparently on a blockchain.
Suddenly and completely, the old tools fail to deliver. They’re so out of touch with the needs of a DAO that they cannot be tweaked or optimized. You’re forced to start looking around for something totally new, like the purpose-built DAO tools that come out of the DoraHacks community and its associated hackathons, which take place regularly in key locations from San Francisco to Beijing.
We need a factory
Now the problem changes. The software from the hackathons is a great starting point, but there’s not enough of it to cater for all the diverse and often very niche requirements of different DAOs. Even if certain basic components can be universal, a DAO that facilitates investment in NFTs will require very different software features and modules to one that focuses on lending money, for example.
No matter how frequent the hackathons are, nor how well they’re incentivized thanks to sponsorship from major blockchain platforms and funds, they alone cannot keep up with demand.
That’s why we’ve invested in Dora Factory, which takes the energy and talent of the Dora Hacks community and the spirit of open source, and channels it in a way that is more scalable, global and continuous.
How Dora Factory works
Dora Factory will be a welcoming starting point for any organization that wants to operate as a DAO. This organization — effectively, the customer — can get off the ground using a generic toolset offered in the form of a “DAO-as-a-service” (Daas). They’ll have three blockchains to choose from to best suit their requirements: Polkadot, Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain. (Over time, Dora Factory also hopes to enable various activities to be bridged across these and other chains).
In parallel, Dora Factory will welcome any developer who thinks they can build software modules (called “pallets”) that DAOs are likely to find useful as add-ons to the basic DaaS.
Eric Zhang, the founder of Dora Hacks and architect of Dora Factory, believes that only this kind of open platform will be able to grow quickly enough to meet demand for DAO tools:
“Imagine in the future, there will be hundreds of thousands of DAOs. An open infrastructure for DAOs is important, and we should build it now.”
A DAO to build tools to build DAOs
Dora Factory is starting out as a relatively centralized effort, with the basic service and initial pallets created through individually-incentivized hackathons. However, over time the factory will implement its own utility token, DORA, which the user of a pallet will need to spend and the creator of the pallet will then receive.
As a complete system, Dora Factory will be able to evolve into something very much like a DAO itself. In addition to ensuring that a pallet cannot be used without paying its maker, various “taxes” built in to the flow of tokens will help the factory to be profitable and self-sustaining, so that it can grow even faster.
We at BR Capital are confident that this type of model represents the future of software development for decentralized organisations, and we’re proud to be a part of it. More selfishly, since we’re active members of plenty of DAOs ourselves, we also cannot wait to use the new DAO-centric tools that the factory is already starting to deliver.
