Celebrating 2 Years of the EffectDAO: Reflections on Our Journey and What’s Next

Looking back at the milestones, challenges, and achievements of the past two years

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been two years since the launch of EffectDAO! In the time since its inception, EffectDAO has finally been poised to be a key player in the Effect Network.

For those unfamiliar with EffectDAO, it is a community-driven organization that focuses on governing the Effect Network and supporting the development of projects building on TEN. Through the use of decentralized governance, the community is able to collectively decide which projects to support and how to allocate resources.

In case you missed it or just want to get caught up on the journey, you can read about its first anniversary in our blog post here.

2022 started with cycle 26, and since then we’ve had 32 proposals accepted by the DAO. Some were proposals to gauge sentiment; others were as small as a simple UI update. Others were quite significant, and we’ll highlight those more in-depth later in this article. Consistently over the past year, without fail, we met on a biweekly basis to discuss proposals and initiatives, and these were timed midway through the biweekly DAO cycles. Without further ado, let’s delve into the achievements and progress we have made over the past year:

DAO-Sponsored Hackathon
In January, we supported the team at Effect Network with the sponsorship of a hackathon. The platform was in it’s testnet phase at the time, and the hackathon was a great event to identify bugs, fix them, and also identify areas of improvement. We awarded over $16K worth of EFX to seven winners. DAO Guardians voted for a first- and second-place winner, and then five promising projects were chosen to share a third-place prize pool. You can read about all the participants and more about the winners of the event here.

Launch-a-Thon

Once the Effect Network launched on mainnet, a consensus was reached that, while the sponsorship of the hackathon was a success, it wasn’t enough. A funding proposal was passed to sponsor a launch-a-thon, which you can surmise is an extension of the first hackathon. A pool of EFX was granted from the cycle budget and matched by the Foundation, along with a number of our governance tokens, NFX, to award to winners of the event. The event was designed to incentivize developers to launch their finished dApps on the network. Unlike the sponsorship of the hackathon, this time only the DAO guardians were judging the participants and awarding prizes.

LP Farm

With the previous success of the LP reward farm, we passed a proposal to extend the farm for 12 months. This farm is an incentivized program for liquidity providers on PancakeSwap (PCS). This program is designed to reward EFX to liquidity providers on PCS.

DAO Development Fund

At the beginning of April, we created a proposal to create a developer fund. A pool of EFX was allocated to developers that would like to pick up tickets that were created on Effect Network’s GitHub. With this accepted proposal, we grew it to become a job board for the DAO. Currently, it focuses primarily on the Effect Force microtasking platform and the EffectDAO dashboard.

Community Guides

Guardians have banded together their knowledge and expertise and have created an ever-expanding stack of how-to guides and tutorials to help people join the DAO and the network and learn about best practices for safety and security. You can view (and even contribute to!) the EffectDAO Community Centre on GitBook here.

Improved Communication and News Sharing

Another area where DAO guardians have stepped up to benefit the larger community is the establishment of a DAO-managed Telegram chat. Many guardians felt this was needed, especially since the Effect Network’s Telegram channel was closed and moved exclusively to Discord. The DAO-run Telegram chat was set up in part to serve DAO members who prefer Telegram to Discord but also to help prospective DAO guardians and other newcomers to the Effect Network get started. This is the DAO’s first completely independent social space!

Task Notifications

One of our talented DAO Guardians, DJSTRIKANOVA, created a task notification service that alerts us when there are new tasks posted on Effect Force. Not only does it post these alerts lightning quick, but it also automatically updates the notification to show if the batch of tasks is still ongoing or if workers on Effect Force have already completed them all. Join the Telegram channel here to find out when new tasks are posted to the platform.

Committees
DAO Committees define long-term work areas and cover a broad set of responsibilities.

Each committee is composed of one or more High Guard members and any number of DAO Guardians. These committees self-organize and are a new way of having working groups within our DAO to accomplish the goals of the DAO.

Since its launch, the EffectDAO has been limited to the extent to which it was currently programmed:

• Distribute a bi-weekly budget for proposals
• Own the treasury funds
• Own the collected network fees
• Decide on network parameters like proposal costs and recycle strategy

This meant that the EffectDAO had no influence beyond the smart contracts that defined it. Even as early as the first six months of operation of the EffectDAO, there were plans forming for the DAO to have more responsibilities.

As the Effect Network grew to be decentralized over the past year, it became urgent for the DAO to gain powerful and impactful abilities. These essential actions include things like approving network smart contract updates, approving which dApps get whitelisted on the platform, being able to change the network fee model for dApps, and a lot more. And that, I’m incredibly honored to announce, is what brings us to this point today!

DAO 2.0

With a year under our belt, we were able to reflect and see where the DAO had success and where improvements could be made. One thing that became very clear was that the High Guard was ready to be updated and hold its first democratic election. In addition to that, and because the DAO is becoming as decentralized as the network it controls, we realized that we could better organize ourselves into working group committees to help both the DAO and the network grow.

High Guard Election

The first part of DAO 2.0 was setting up and holding a democratic election. DAO guardians submitted their intent for consideration via a sentiment proposal during cycle 52. Seven guardians were endorsed by the members of the DAO to receive the High Guard designation. A High Guard member will keep the designation unless there is a proposed and accepted recall or they resign.

First and foremost, a High Guard member’s role is to ensure that no harm is done to the EffectDAO and the Effect Network. They are a safety measure to protect against things like a malicious takeover of the DAO or to veto proposals that could harm the network. With the implementation of ATPs (Arbitrary Transaction Proposals), a High Guard member is even more essential than ever before. High Guard members will also serve as community leaders within various DAO committees.

Arbitrary Transaction Proposals

Arbitrary Transaction Proposals (ATPs) allow EffectDAO proposals to execute arbitrary EOS transactions with the DAO’s permission. EffectDAO proposals can currently send funds from daopropsals to the proposal author. This is known as the proposal reward, and it is limited by the cycle budget. It has long been planned to allow proposals to execute any type of transaction with the DAO’s permission.

When the proposal is executed, an embedded EOS transaction will receive a signature from the DAO. This needs a majority vote from the DAO and a cooling-off period so that the High Guard can review it and ultimately approve or reject it. To prevent malicious transactions from passing through, users must be able to inspect the content of an embedded transaction and verify that it matches the proposal’s written intent.

For an ATP to succeed, the contract being called must explicitly allow daopropsals to carry out the provided action. This permission will be pre-assigned to the vast majority of Effect Network smart contract actions, allowing the DAO to modify them.

What is Possible with ATPs

An ATP can embed any type of transaction. Crafting these can vary in complexity, and there will be DAO dashboard updates to allow users to select the most needed ones when they’re crafting their proposals. Some examples of ATPs that we will be using are:

• Assign a new High Guard member in the theeffectdao contract
• Change the network fee on tasks
• Set the price for creating a new proposal
• Transfer funds from the daoproposals account
• Publish campaigns and tasks on the Effect Network platform
• Designate a participant in a multisig transaction
• Update the EffectDAO Constitution
• Use liquidity pools like Defibox

ATPs are a leap forward in our capabilities as a DAO, and we are extremely excited that they have finally arrived!

In only two years, EffectDAO has made significant progress toward its mission of governing the Effect Network and supporting projects that build on top of TEN. We are a diverse and global community of members who have worked together to develop our DAO and, ultimately, the Effect Network into a thriving community that will bring innovation to the way work is done in Web 3.

First Cycle of 2023

Our first cycle this year kicks off with the ATP proposal of assigning the newly elected High Guard members the High Guard role and responsibility on the blockchain.

Once this proposal passes, the following transaction will be authorized by Effect DAO: hazdkmbxgene/highguard. This ATP’s transaction was generated using the following script: set_highguard.cljs. The highguard permission requires 4/7 members to sign a transaction. In the next few cycles, the High Guard will have to explicitly execute approved proposals (this happens in 1 transaction every cycle). Once security concerns around the proposal price and quorum have been settled, the High Guard can be upgraded to a reject-only role, also through an ATP. You can review this proposal here.

The second proposal of this inaugural cycle is a technical update to make the voting system of the DAO more secure. With the release of ATPs, there is more at stake, so it is important that the DAO updates the quorum value that was put in place two years ago. As of this writing, the current quorum is 420,000. This is a pretty low value, as some members carry this vote weight by themselves. More on the calculation and the specifics can be seen by visiting the proposal here.

We can’t wait to see what the future holds for EffectDAO and the entire Web3 community as it enters its third year. Furthermore, we have no doubt that, with our continued commitment to growth, EffectDAO will broaden its role in shaping the future of the Effect Network. Looking ahead, we are excited to see all the incredible projects and initiatives that EffectDAO will support in the coming years.

Here’s to EffectDAO’s hard work and dedication over the past two years, and to many more years of making a positive difference in the world.