Lately on DAOstack
For the past 8 months we were relatively quiet in DAOstack and I feel it’s about time to reconnect. ‘Quiet’ doesn’t mean less active, vice versa, we were quietly very active on developing some exciting new stuff, and it’s a good opportunity to update everyone about them. We were also quietly refining our long-term vision, and elaboration on it would be the topic for another post.
For the first two-three years of the project, we’ve focused much of our effort on developing the infrastructures and tooling for DAOs and DAO interfaces. From the contracts to the indexing and javascript layers. We collectively called these layers the DAO stack, or simply DAOstack (duh!).
We also faced some design tensions. On the one hand, the basic design principle of the DAO stack, and particularly its contract base layer, Arc, was to enable any governance set of rules in a modular way. With Arc, in principle, you can easily add to a DAO or change any possible rule. In that sense, one could say that Arc is a “governance complete” framework.
On the other hand, when we’ve built and connected the next floors of the stack — the subgraph and javascript library, and finally the UI itself, Alchemy — we’ve realized that we’ve lost much of the power of modularity. While it’s pretty easy to write a new “scheme” or “constraint” into Arc, it’s not as easy to add its stack software-tower and particularly UI component into Alchemy. In particular, it requires interfering with Alchemy’s main code base, which isn’t a friendly experience for an outside developer.
We have ran into the basic tension between the approach of building a modular and adaptive operating system for DAO governance (similar to the one taken by Aragon), and the approach of building beautiful and useful end-to-end products (similar to the one taken by Moloch, Colony, Maker, Compound, Balancer and others). But we want both! And we’ll get back to that in a later post :)
However, we realized that in order to bring DAOs into wider adoption we must put more emphasis on upgraded interfaces, on end-to-end DAO usable products. And that was much of the reason for focusing this year on building Common.
Common is an app for social group collaboration, where members can pool funds and collaboratively manage them to pursue their shared causes. The inspiration to build Common came from the realization that DAOs are useful beyond the realm of companies and open-source development projects. DAOs can be used as the fundable and actionable version of Facebook groups, billions of which are organized in discussions around shared goals. But in contrast to Facebook groups, these DAOs would also have the ability to raise funds, transform discussion into action and pursue those goals in reality, moving from social to collaborative networks. Rather than DAOs, we simply called them, commons.
In order to achieve that, we wanted Common to be very user-friendly, mobile native and with web2.0 user experience, while being integrated with web3.0 technology. It needs to be integrated with credit cards and wire transactions. And it may be desirable to be fully compliant when a jurisdiction is evident.
After 8 months in the making I’m excited to say we’re almost there. But, we’re also still facing the tension between insisting on mainstream-level production readiness and the web3.0 technology we’re relying on. Some of these technologies are still introducing new bugs once every week or so, and in order to go live with Common in the coming weeks we’ll either need to compromise (for a short while) on the blockchain, or on the audience who’d be wanting to use the product. What do we do? I’lll write about that in another post :) .
This or that, Common is ready to launch in the coming weeks with a few interesting and real use-cases. It’s still an MVP and there’s a long way to go from here, but we were waiting for a long time for DAOs to meet the real world, and it’ll be a very exciting moment. More details on the launch and an invitation to play with Common will come soon.
Throughout the year, we’ve also kept advancing Alchemy with many small but important improvements, including an improved DAO creation process, lower gas DAO deployment framework and higher security standards. We’ve deployed an Alchemy version on xDai, and will soon release an intuitive interface to propose a DAO to call any function on the blockchain, the so-called “generic call” proposal interface (similar to what Gnosis Safe is doing).
One of the most exciting use-cases growing a lot this year was the DXdao that we’ve helped Gnosis launching last year on Alchemy. The DXdao has been working diligently on its several DeFi products, including its prediction market interface Omen (with US election market crossing $600k in volume) and token exchange interface Mesa (that has been running several IDOs such as mStable’s). It opened its DXD token sale and raised over 10 million US dollars, grew its distributed team a lot and got some exciting new partners, such as Delphi, DMM and recently Aluna Social. And it’s about launching its next product, the DXswap, which worth keeping a close eye on.
If you haven’t paid attention to the DXdao you’ve probably missed the most exciting DAO experiment on the planet right now, and it’s still not too late to get on board :)
Finally, we’ve been product researching and collecting insights from the DeFi DAO craze the past few months and have designed the next, up-to-date-biggest iteration of Alchemy to unfold over the next 6 months or so. I’ll keep the details of this roadmap to another post, but I can promise it’s going to be game changing. We’ll break these developments into several releases, and I hope to see the first one coming around the beginning of the next year.
A lot of good things have been in the making in DAOstack this year, thanks to a fantastic team and extraordinary partners. A lot more is coming Soon.
