Source-Level Decentralized Autonomous Organization (SDAO)

What is a Source-Level DAO?

A Source-Level DAO (SDAO) is a democratic enterprise where a decentralized source code repository is the epicentre of all collaboration and governance activities.

Source-Level DAOs go beyond holding tokens for investing and voting on rules set in a smart contract. They are a living, constantly evolving repositories that allow anyone in the world to contribute their skills (coding, design, testing etc) to a shared goal.

Source-Level DAOs are execution environment agnostic, meaning, they can be executed as smart contracts or deployed anonymously to AWS, Heroku etc. Source-Level DAOs deployed on centralized systems run autonomously without interference from the DAO contributors. Centrally deployed SDAO are extremely scalable and are deployed from the blockchain. Collaborators can build any kind of software projects such as websites, APIs, libraries, smart contracts etc. It’s just a version control system with governance tools.

We are currently building the first git-powered Source-Level DAO blockchain — Ellcrys.

Decentralized Version Control System

A DVCS is the foundation of a Source-Level DAO. It is responsible for coordinating, collecting and organizing source codes (and other assets) contributed by users with the ability to allow collaborators democratically decide on actions surrounding commits, branch management, merging, issue tracking, task delegation, accessibility, revenue management, deployment and membership.

Repository objects are distributed across a decentralized network and stored efficiently. Ellcrys’ implementation will be based on the popular git version control system and leverages IPFS for object storage.

Ephemeral Ownership

Source-Level DAO can be owned by any number of people and ownership is determined by the continuous contribution to the organization. Members create and publish tasks which are completed and certain ownership points (or stakes) are awarded. Members vote to determine the acceptability of a solution to a task.

A key thing to note is that ownership is ephemeral. It is like a fire where the burning intensity reduces overtime as oxygen levels decreases. To maintain ownership, contributors must continue to contribute to the organization to avoid gradual dilution of their stake. Contributors could sell back their stake to other active contributors on an exchange if they wish to exit.

In the future, developers, designers, testers, QA etc will work for Source-Level DAO organizations and own stakes doing interesting things they love and no longer be tied to working for just one firm all their life.

To accommodate complex ownership and governance arrangements, SDAO platforms must allow ownership parameters to be configured at creation time only. Properties like max. number of contributors, voting powers and dilution level should be configurable.

Democratic Governance

Source-Level DAO are organizations with no hierarchy or central office. There are no bosses or managers and so on. Everyone can have a say in the direction and actions of the organization. Collaborators engage in decision making processes through a proposal creation and voting scheme.

Proposals can be created and published by any contributor with a stake and voted for or against. The majority vote will prevail and be enforced by the SDAO platform. Contributors can create New Tasks Proposals to delegate work to any or specific contributors. Task Review Proposal allows contributors to review and vote on a completed tasks. Merge Proposal proposes a request to merge a branch to another branch. Deployment Proposal configures a branch for executed centrally or decentrally and so on

Source-Level DAO should also allow voting outcomes to be optionally determined by a contributors reputation or stake. This will be suitable for organizations where total democracy is not desirable. Must be configured at creation time only.

Reputation

Reputation is important within an SDAO platform. In an SDAO, it gives contributors higher influence over certain proposals in organizations where voting powers are configured to not be equal. They are earned through consistent quality contributions and can never be transferred like ownership/stake.

On an SDAO platform like Ellcrys, reputation plays an important role in determining how much new coins are distributed to collaborators as native compensation for work done. SDAO organizations themselves start with a fixed, quantifiable reputation and slowly distributes the them to contributors over time. The organization will earn more reputations from the network for future distribution.

Third-party platforms and individuals may also use reputation to determine whether to transact or trade with a person on the network. For instance, a person with a high reputation is more likely to get a website development task than someone who has lower reputation.

Reputation signifies trust, experience and power.

Revenue Generation & Management

Source-Level DAOs can be revenue generating organizations. Organizations providing services to end-users and charging for it. On Ellcrys, SDAOs will be able to accept the native coin as payment for services offered. This payment will be moved to the SDAO account and visible to anyone. Access to an SDAO account will be authorized through the regular Proposal/Approval scheme.

For instance, if wages need to be disbursed, one participant must create a Proposal, detailing how much is to be deducted, the purpose and the beneficiaries. On acceptance of the Proposal, the SDAO network enforces the deduction and transfer of wages to the approved beneficiaries.

Incentives

SDAO contributors need to be incentivized to promote continuous contribution and improvement of shared organizations. We discussed some models above but I will go ahead to further outline them here:

• Native Coin Reward: SDAO platforms like Ellcrys will reward DAO contributors for every accepted pull request proposal they created. The exact amount of coin reward will be determined by factors such as size, time, SDAO and the contributor’s reputation.
• Stake: Contributors to SDAO are reward with stakes (a.k.a DAO equity) when they complete tasks. A stake is an ephemeral asset that is diluted over time when the owner does not contribute to the organization. Stake can also play a part in influencing decisions within an organizations.
• Revenue: Contributors can receive a share of revenue by completing tasks or by being beneficiaries to wage proposals. An SDAO that pays salaries can list thousands of contributors as beneficiaries to a monthly salary payments.
• Tokens: SDAO tokens are like ERC20 tokens on Ethereum. They serve as the primary medium of exchange to accessing the service offered by the organization. SDAOs may include tokens as reward for tasks completed.
• Reputation: Probably the most important asset on an SDAO platform. It can determine the level of influence a contributor controls. How they are viewed and interacted with by other contributor or third-party entities around the ecosystem. On Ellcrys, reputation also determines how much reward a contributor will receive for their contribution.

Execution

So, we already know SDAO are formed around softwares. They can be mobile apps, web applications or services, smart contracts, libraries etc. However, Web applications and smart contracts need suitable environments that can support their execution.

SDAOs that require execution in a trust-less, censorship resistant environment will be executed as smart contracts. User-facing, interactive applications like websites and API with no real/justifiable need for trust-less, censorship resistant environment can be executed autonomously on centralized hosting platforms like Heroku, AWS etc.

Centrally executed applications are autonomous because they are deployed to hosting platforms based on the instruction of SDAO contributors. A deployed and executed applications cannot be modified, paused or stopped by any contributor as they will have no access to the environment.

Typically, the hosting platform will pull the repository and configure the environment based on a Deployment Proposal. Configuration parameters may include but not limited to memory, disk, bandwidth, domain, IP, database etc.

Deployed SDAO can only be destroyed in two ways:

• Termination by the hosting platform due to non-payment of hosting fees.
• Termination by SDAO participants voting to destroy deployment.

Funding SDAO

Unlike the DAO which was an investment fund driven organization. An SDAO is effort driven. This mean, participants contribute work in the organization and only contributors are deserving of any direct benefits. If we are to hope for a future where decentralized organizations become common in every industry of the world, there needs to be a way for external players to fund them.

Developers, designers cannot fund large scale acquiring, marketing and distribution efforts like centralized organizations such as Uber, Airbnb etc. For instance, they alone cannot purchase 1,000 vehicles to build a fleet of self-driving cars to compete with Uber. External financial contributors must be considered.

The most suitable funding model for an SDAO is the ICO. Initial Coin Offerings allow organizations offer fractions of pre-generated digital tokens to the public for a price. These tokens act as tickets that is required to access services offered by the organization. Tokens offered for the purpose of buying access to a service are often known as utility tokens, whereas, tokens promising dividends in a shared enterprise are considered securities and are illegal to offer without proper registration in some jurisdictions.

Although the DAO failed, it was recently ruled as a security by SEC. This means DAOs must either register or ensure tokens exists purely for utility purpose. SDAOs must avoid security tokens.

External investors can participate by buying up tokens offered in a token sale event. They can also become contributors themselves by purchasing stakes from contributors who are looking to exit the organization. Purchasing stakes gives the investor access to a share in any future revenue sharing events on the SDAO and governance activities for SDAO where stakes are factored in decision making.

Stakes can be arguably considered as security but they are affected by the holders level of contribution to the organization. To maintain a stake, the holder must contribute or lose it in time. This is not a normal behaviour of most securities.

Ecosystem & Marketplace

For any community-driven project to work, there is need for an ecosystem composed of people and entities contributing in different way towards a shared goal of success. A Source-Level DAO is just an entity in possession of source codes. Without a thriving ecosystem, it is no different from repositories on Github or Bitbucket. For example:

• Cloud infrastructure providers can help SDAOs deploy and make web applications accessible from the browser. They can also provide access to other services like database, DNS, logging etc.
• Payment gateway providers can help SDAOs accept credit/debit cards, automatically buy the native coin and pay them to SDAO accounts.
• Marketing firms can offer marketing products to SDAOs to help them gain more exposure and customers.
• Human resource firms can provide temporal staffs to perform duties that require physical human intervention.
• ….and many more!

A whole lot of new businesses types will be created for the purpose of providing specific functions tailored to SDAOs for free or for a fee. With an ecosystem, an SDAO will be more than just a version control system.

Implementation

The first Source-Level DAO platform is currently being built by us at Ellcrys. We are a small team based in Africa and highly excited about the possibilities of building a platform to foster leaderless and democratic organizations. When you consider the state of political and corporate governance in the continent you’ll understand the need for SDAO to level organization hierarchy and make them intrinsically democratic.

We have been working on variations of this project for the last 3 years and now it has come to a point were we must raise funds to push ahead. To that end, we have decided to raise via a token sale. We are having a pre-sale of our token on February 1st, 2018. If you like the idea of Source-Level DAO and you want to contribute, the next section of this post provides information about our token sale rounds.

For those who are not interested in getting some Ellcrys tokens, this is where the post actually ends 🙂. Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed this post, please don’t forget to share your comments and tap the 👏 button (that’s another way to contribute).

Brief Introduction

A token sale allows an organization to fund the development and marketing of a project by selling cryptocurrency tokens to the general public. For more information, please read this.

How To Contribute

Please go to the token sale page and click the Register button. Go to the Transactions page to see the unique Ethereum and Bitcoin addresses generated to receive your contributions. You will only be able to see the unique addresses after the Pre-Sale starts or if you are enabled to participate in the private sale (send mail to contribution@ellcrys.co before January 24th, 2018 if you wish to participate).

Token Details

Name: Ell (plural: “Ellies”)

Symbol: ELL

Decimal: 8

Tokens Available for Sale: 2 000 000 000 (2 Billion)

Token Type: ERC20 (to be swapped for main net. equivalent)

Website: https://ellcrys.co

Token Sale Rounds

Private Sale (Round 1)

The first round is the private sale. Only early supporters are allowed. Admission is on a case-by-case basis. Tokens purchased during this round will vest for a period of 12 months starting immediate after the first exchange listing of the ELL tokens.

• Available Tokens: 300,000,000
• Price: $0.05
• Starting Bonus: 10%
• Start Date: December 24th, 2017
• End Date: January 24th, 2018

Tokens not sold in this round will be added to the ICO supply. Minimum contribution is 0.2 ETH or 0.007 BTC.

Pre-Sale (Round 2)

We consider the Pre-Sale to be equivalent to a seed round. The purpose for this round is to provide us with the resources to better structure the Ellcrys organization as a Public Benefit Corporation, hire additional talent, continue development, cultivating relationship with the top exchanges in preparation for distribution of tokens after the ICO and to enter into partnership with relevant partiers around the world.

• Available Tokens: 800,000,000
• Price: $0.01
• Starting Bonus: 30%
• Start Date: February 1st, 2018
• End Date: March 1st, 2018

ICO (Round 3)

At this point, we expect to be close to releasing a beta version of the Ellcrys client. We will expand the team to help build a cloud based hosting service for Source-Level DAOs. Massive marketing and sponsorship campaigns will commence with other measures to kick start and incentivise the Ellcrys ecosystem.

• Available Tokens: 900,000,000 [+ any tokens not sold in previous round]
• Price: $0.35
• Starting Bonus: 30%
• Start Date: March 30th, 2018
• End Date: April 30th, 2018
• Distribution Date: 2 weeks after ICO

There is a Sign Up Bonus! Go Register Now!

Remember you get 5% bonus on your contributions when you register today. It only takes just a few seconds. Register!

And Referral Bonus too!

If you are interested in receiving more tokens, join the referral campaign. Share your referral link and get 5% additional tokens when the person you referred contributes. Additionally, the referred person gets an additional 1% bonus on their contributions. Visit the Social page after you log in to see your referral link and code.

if you enjoyed this post, please don’t forget to share your comments and tap the 👏 button.