DAOs Marching Forward
Seeding an Ecosystem
“The first principle of designing the DAO stack was not to build a specific protocol or a specific application, but rather to build the soil, the ground from which a whole ecosystem can grow and thrive.” — Matan Field, Founder
From the start, the DAO stack has been designed to facilitate the emergence of a scalable DAO ecosystem. Our efforts began nine months ago with the Genesis Alpha experiment, the first DAO powered by DAOstack. Genesis Alpha has been hugely successful, producing hundreds of proposals, uncovering a critical vulnerability within the Arc Platform, and growing a community of Genesis Pollinators who have provided key feedback guiding the development of the next version of Alchemy, aka Alchemy Earth.
With Earth’s launch, it’s now time to move forward with planting the first seeds of the DAO ecosystem. We hope that many seeds will mature into successful prototypes, establishing governance design patterns new DAOs can leverage for their own bootstrapping. We’re expecting that certain DAOs, such as the dxDAO, will govern “DAO primitives” — that is, products and tools such as the DutchX exchange protocol that can be used by the whole DAO ecosystem. Finally, just as startups do, we assume a high percentage of DAOs will fail. They will provide important lessons for the ecosystem, and improve the antifragility of future DAO generations.
Upcoming Launches
All of the following pilot launch dates are subject to change.
Genesis Beta / TBD
Launched June 2018, the Genesis Alpha was the first DAO powered by DAOstack. Genesis Beta is the second step of a three step plan to eventually transition Genesis to being the “Coordinator DAO” of the DAOstack ecosystem. According to the DAOstack team’s recent statement, Genesis would have additional responsibilities as coordinator, such as management of 40m unminted GEN. In this sense, it could be a decentralized institution that distributes ecosystemic grants loosely analogous to the Ethereum Foundation.
PolkaDAO / April
Web3 Foundation is endowing a community-led DAO with $10,000 in DAI to fund proposals related to Polkadot. The goal of the PolkaDAO is to fund community projects with microgrants that may not have otherwise been funded. According to the announcement:
“The PolkaDAO is a fun way for [DOT holders] to engage with the Polkadot ecosystem and get involved with the community… 80% of the Reputation for voting on proposals will be designated to DOT holders, proportionate to their contribution in the crowdsale.”
Some initial ideas proposed for the PolkaDAO to fund include:
- An aggregation website (a list of projects building on Polkadot, such as Polkaprojects.com, or an Infrastructure Directory of projects in the ecosystem)
- A user interface to show what Polkadot is capable of (a UI that lets you visually architect multi-chain DApps)
- A tool for prototyping and architecting multi-chain DApps via a UI and scripting interface
- Cool visualizations of the different actors in Polkadot and how they interact to run the network (explaining the relay chain vs. parachain, a nominator vs. a validator)
dxDAO / May
The dxDAO is designed to facilitate global, open trade. It will develop, deploy, and govern decentralized trading protocols and platforms, starting with the DutchX, an open trading protocol for ERC20 tokens using the Dutch auction mechanism. It is the first example of a DAO controlling a smart contract protocol. The dxDAO, as steward of the DutchX, has the potential to provide some initial DAO primitives for ecosystem, such as decentralized price feed oracles. It is expected to launch mid-May, after being delayed due to an effective bug bounty program.
Social Evolution / TBD
Social Evolution is forming a DAO-based mutual benefit society, a “Quest Society,” by and for decentralist changemakers — innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs. The Quest Society will offer financial resources (in the form of project grants and aid), knowledge, and assistance to its members. According to their litepaper, Social Evolution aims to:
“Elevate innovators and entrepreneurs on a quest to liberate humanity from coercive power and create a world of mutual benefit.”
Will be at: Future Frontiers, June 7–9, Austin, TX
Why all the interest now?
2019 truly is the Year of the DAO.
We can identify three main reasons why projects are beginning to get excited about DAOstack and are seeking to join the DAOstack ecosystem:
(1) The development team writ large. Our ten man tech team has continued to keep their heads down, regardless of market conditions, to rapidly iterate and make ready a production ready version of the DAO stack. Additionally, a number of open-source developers — such as the (currently) five person dOrg collective — are also throwing their weight behind building the DAO stack.
(2) The DAOstack Pollinators and Genesis Alpha community. The Alpha as a proof-of-concept and case study provides valuable context and data that projects can directly observe. Overall, the discussions provoked, lessons learned, and proposals executed have helped formulate an ideal prototype for a Community DAO pilot. In our previous blog post, we noted that Genesis:
(3) DAOs are the next logical step in the decentralization movement. Projects all over the space are progressing to the point where decentralized governance is becoming necessary. To capitalize on this energy, the team has presented our upcoming 2019 developments at many recent industry events, speaking directly to the individuals and project leaders who can benefit from using DAOstack. In response, we’ve experienced a flurry of interest from industry insiders who see the immediate value in scalable, decentralized governance, and we have every reason to believe more large-scale DAO experiments will be launched throughout the year.
Some recent highlights:
- GEN was one of four tokens featured for launch on slow.trade, the new decentralized exchange built on top of the DutchX protocol featuring fair price mechanics.
- Our Founder Matan Field and Martin Köppelmann were featured on Epicenter together.
- We attended the DGOV Council and Aracon.
- We joined Gnosis for a one week joint team workshop at Full Node, Berlin. While at Full Node our advisor Martin Köppelmann introduced us to many interesting individuals within Berlin’s fast growing blockchain ecosystem.
- Our BizDev Lead Nave Rachman presented Alchemy at Nature 2.0.
- Ecosystem Lead Natalia Scherer was featured on the KGNU podcast.
- Matan Field presented Holographic Consensus and the Living DAO Ecosystem at EthCC, during which the team ran a booth.
… and more.
Learn More and Get Involved
- Interested in creating a DAO? Want to join the DAO ecosystem? Fill out this form.
- Join our community on Discord and follow DAOstack on Medium or any of the other channels you’ll find on our website.
- Join the DAOtalk forum to discuss all things decentralized governance.
- Interested in joining the Pollinators, our official early-adopter community, and participating in the Genesis DAO? Read our onboarding guide.
- Developer? Check out the DAOstack Github, or jump into the stack with our friendly Hacker’s Kit.
