Together with all of you we recently woke up in a brave new world, where we more than ever witness that a systemic and mindset change is needed to tackle complex issues. We have been tremendously inspired by our community that did not stop building for even a heartbeat. More than ever we believe in the importance of regenerative systems that empower communities and the open source toolkits to design them properly.

In Iteration 0 of the Commons Stack, our focus is on staging the cultural and technical initialization tools required to make complex systems succeed. After a quick summary of our overall vision, you will find a detailed run-through of the many projects we have launched or supported, and what is still in the pipeline.

We have been refining our strategy, growing our community, supporting community initiatives, contributing to research, … and a lot more is coming. The Commons Stack is nothing without its community, so first and foremost we would like to thank you, and invite you to continue to support our mission in any way you can.

The Commons Stack, Realigning Incentives to Support Public Goods

Before we dive into everything we have been up to, you might be wondering, what is the Commons Stack? And why does it matter?

Our current economic paradigm incentivizes the exploitation of the environment and systemically undervalues open-source software, open research, and other altruistic efforts to address our collective needs. We want to help build a world where public goods are valued and protected by the communities that use them. To achieve our vision of creating an entirely new way to sustain public goods, we aim to evolve how we design and build cryptoeconomic systems.

The Commons Stack isn’t a platform, but rather a modular library of well-engineered components that can be used to align incentives around contributing to public goods. Our planned components, which all have a cultural and technical roadmap, will facilitate governance, incentivize work towards shared goals, provide accountability, and monitor the health of the Commons.

Our long term mission is to support communities in using holistic Token Engineering design to create circular, purpose-driven economies powered by continuous funding streams and transparent decision making.

Refining the Strategy

The world looks different today: so much has happened since Giveth and BlockScience first teamed up and outlined a strategy, built a team of trusted advisors and core contributors, with POCs being hacked on at ETHDenver, ETHParis, and the Odyssey hackathon through the spring of 2019. More than ever, in the light of recent worldwide events, we see how important it is to collectively incentivize and govern public goods.

Our goal is to start very ‘small’ with communities within our ecosystem that are willing to experiment with our technical and cultural components, but our long-term vision is to be able to support any future Commons: we hope to support regenerative economies around any cause, whether it is open-source software development, creating and managing self-sovereign identities or COVID response and research.

To make this a reality, we’ve been hard at work on refining our overall vision, mission, strategy, and constantly integrating feedback from the communities for whom we are building this. The fruit of this labor is turning into a whitepaper that we hope to publish later this year. This content will also transpire into articles, AMA sessions and website content. If you are interested in any particular aspects of our strategy, we invite you to join the discussion!

“The Commons Stack plans to create a Cyber-Physical Commons toolkit, that is capable of providing continuous funding to open source projects. We’ll deliver it over 5+ codebase iterations, focusing on one layer at a time, starting with the sustainable funding layer where we will design and construct a general purpose Augmented Bonding Curve. Anyone can fork, customize, and implement the modular components produced by the Commons Stack as we release them.

This toolkit addresses the primary scalability issues for DAO ecosystems, namely continuous funding, accountable escrow, real-time decision making, and impact measurement. After we have completed the fifth iteration, we will have a Commons codebase that will be easy for any community to customize, deploy and use.”

‘Medium-term Mission’ — excerpt from the Commons Stack whitepaper (work in progress)

Growing the Community

We have been working hard over the past year to grow the community that will help steward this new kind of collaboration. First and foremost our focus is on building the Trusted Seed, a curated list of reputable & experienced community members who are aligned with our mission of creating sustainable funding for public goods. If you haven’t applied just yet, no better time than right now.

Next to this we have been presenting all over the world (live presentations in Berlin, Osaka, Denver, Paris, Barcelona, an AMA with the full team, interviews and podcasts, technical deep dives, and recently of course virtual conferences), constantly refining our strategy and messaging, based on our audience’s feedback.

We also published a number of articles, ranging from the importance of open engineering standards over an exploration of Cyber-Physical Commons ecosystems to component explainers and deep dives. You can find all of them under our Medium publication. Meanwhile we’ve been participating in the cultural build of what will one day be the Token Engineering Commons, we hope you will join them. Next to sustainable funding, introducing and integrating novel governance mechanisms are a key part of our mission, so we’ve been contributing heavily to the DGOV gatherings and calls, as well as collaborating with the Metagovernance project to expand the DAO dialogue.

A thriving Ecosystem

We are supporting, uniting and funding an ecosystem, not just a project: there is no Commons Stack without the Commons. It’s been inspiring to see such a vibrant community spring to life, experimenting and coalescing around the goals we set out to accomplish together.

We supported the open sourcing of BlockScience’s cadCAD, our token engineering foundation, which helps you design, test and validate complex systems through simulation. Their community has grown exponentially and many teams have been collaborating and integrating their research:

• Molecule recently built a novel crowdfunding route for researchers and put their Module Catalyst to the test with cadCAD
• Barnabé Monnot worked on Ethereum 2.0’s Beacon Chain, with an improvement on their first Beacon Runner, an economics-focused simulation environment for eth2, wrapping up the current eth2 specs in a cadCAD environment.
• Barnabé also simulated EIP 1559 which changes the gas fees from a first price auction (you pay what you bid) to making a mandatory base fee that fluctuates with how full blocks are with an option to tip miners.
• Grassroots Economics is using bonding curves to enable communities in Kenya to create their own currencies (aka Community Inclusion Currencies). They are now building a cadCAD Simulation of their system.
• The Graph has been working with the BlockScience team to validate their cryptoeconomic design.
• Le Grand Jeu is a hands-on tool to co-design sustainable micro-economies empowered by cryptocurrency, which you could see as a gamified cadCAD ‘front-end’ for interaction designers.

The Commons Simulator is a hands-on community project incorporating solarpunk art and storytelling to create a game where the player is a time traveler from the future tasked with inspiring the RadicalxChange community to create a Commons and prevent a dystopian future. The topic of this leap was chosen by the largest donor to the Commons Simulator Gitcoin Grant during CLR round 4, RadicalxChange community member Danibelle. The next leap (each level of the game is called a leap) has been chosen by Sebnem (the largest donor in CLR round 5) and will be the Token Engineering Commons.

The game simultaneously illustrates the power of cadCAD and how a Cyber-Physical Commons will work, allowing players to simulate building a range of successful Commons. To win the game, the players need to design a Commons that will create sustainable funding and social impact for the community. Once they’ve set their design parameters, the cadCAD backend simulates how this would play out. The highest scores win and they will be enshrined on our leaderboards. Contributors are actively rewarded, and you can join in on the project here.

Although we are still in the staging phase of the Commons Stack, this has not stopped people from diving into the designs of our four components and experimenting through various initiatives:

Augmented Bonding Curve ‘ABC’ (Iteration 1):

• The Grassroots Economics team has been designing a bonding curve for the Red Cross Community Inclusion Currency project and initializing a Hatch of a Community Inclusion Currency.
• Freeelio is researching ‘Fractal Ownership’ through the use of Augmented Bonding Curves with a concrete application within the ElectraSeed Fund Ecosystem.
• @randomshinichi, one of our contributors to the Commons Simulator, rewrote our ABC simulation.
• Sem, working with 1Hive, has started building a Commons template using the Aragon Fundraising App (connected to his CV app) and is looking to add alternate funding streams to it that are akin to entry and exit tributes.

Giveth Proposal Engine ‘GPE’ (Iteration 2)

• Our contributing developers Andre and Amin have continued to work on stabilizing our running version of the Giveth DApp (Donation Application)
• Meanwhile Max Semenchuk has been working on the design specs for the Giveth Proposal Engine, showing what Giveth will look like integrated with the Commons Stack’s ABC and CV components.
• The Coz team started working on what we call ‘Giveth 2.0’, the next evolution of the Giveth DApp, producing an MVP to collect funds for Covid research and a successful Gitcoin Grant that guarantees further development work.

Conviction Voting ‘CV’ (Iteration 3)

• David Lopp (Sem) implemented the first CV designs into a working Aragon Dapp, and continues to work on this under the 1Hive umbrella.
• 1Hive is creating the Gardens Project, a social network where individuals can easily create or join a decentralized autonomous community, leveraging a standard template combining Aragon Fundraising, Conviction Voting, and Aragon Court.
• KarmaDAO, another project out of the 1Hive community, is experimenting with new token issuance through Conviction Voting, where new recipients of $KARMA are voted on via CV of existing members, in recognition for the hard work & good deeds they’re carrying out.

Commons Dashboard ‘CD’ (Iteration 4)

• Multiply Charity is using funds received through a successful Gitcoin Grant to create a dashboard for donors to donate directly to Kenyans in need and see the impact of their donation. This impact data will eventually be able to be fed into cadCAD models of the system for optimization, effectively creating a first prototype of our Commons Dashboard.

Next to this we’ve also been consulting on and contributing to a whole lot of related research within the space that directly or indirectly contributes to our mission, such as:

• Foundations of Cryptoeconomic Systems, by Michael Zargham and Shermin Voshmgir
• Economic Games as Estimators, by Michael Zargham, Krzysztof Paruch and Jamsheed Shorish
• From Curved Bonding to Configuration Spaces by Michael Zargham, Jamsheed Shorish and Krzysztof Paruch
• Exploring DAOs as a New Kind of Institution, a paper by the Metagovernance Project and the Commons Stack
• Towards Open and Collaborative, Socially Pre-Distributive and Ecologically Sustainable Infrastructures of Value Generation and Distribution by Michel Bauwens and Sarah Manski (soon to be published)
• Upcoming academic paper in collaboration with the P2P Foundation, Economic Space Agency and Commons Engine
• Collaboration and consultancy on multiple aspects of technical and sociological research for Grassroot Economics and BlockScience.

Supporting the Commons Stack

There is still so much planned for Iteration 0. We will further refine our strategic approach and overall plan, continuously consulting our community and adapting our strategy wherever and whenever needed. We will continue to grow our community and support this fantastic, budding ecosystem with a special focus on the Token Engineering Community. We have been deeply impressed by how many people have been helping to build out the foundations of the Commons Stack.

Our next, very tangible endeavor is to work with a community to help them launch an ‘MVP’ Commons, as a part of our Iteration 0. If you are a leader of a technically savvy and culturally aware community providing a public good, we would love to help you bootstrap your work with our tools. Reach out to us!

For us to continue pushing the development of economies around causes we need your support. We invite you to contribute to our mission in any way you can. You can contribute with time to any of the above projects by joining the community.

You can also contribute financially to Iteration 0, and this would be highly appreciated — with extra funds you are not only supporting us as a core team, but a wide network of contributors. And every DAI contributed is spent transparently on the Giveth DApp.

No matter how you want to contribute, the first step is to apply to become a member of our Trusted Seed, where you can indicate in which way(s) you can support.

Join us

If you would like to support the Commons Stack initiative and help us create a new way to fund public goods and open source projects, you can do this by applying here.

• Join the Commons Stack community on Telegram or Riot
• Read more on what the Commons Stack is building
• Follow the Commons Stack on Twitter
• Find more resources on our website

Warm regards,

The Commons Stack

Celebrating Progress: One Year into the Commons Stack Journey was originally published in Commons Stack on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why the Commons?

Thank you for joining us. Today we will be talking about the tools that we’re building to scale the commons, to re-prioritize people and the planet.

It’s first good to establish: why are the commons important? We have some really big issues on the horizon that we can only solve together: climate change, resource depletion, open source incentivization — these are all public goods that are prone to the free-rider problem. This problem applies just as much to the extraction of environmental resources as well as the funding of writing open code. It’s a coordination problem that underlies some of the biggest problems we face. Ostrom and others have suggested that we need larger-scale coordination mechanisms for making rules to determine how we use and allocate existing resources. We have some of these coordination tools already, but our current approaches are flawed. Our current global coordination mechanisms — both markets and states — are dealing with quite some challenges. We have one-dimensional economies that optimize for profit and exclude people and the environment from their calculations. We have outdated governance structures that are reactive to the problems we seem to be creating for ourselves, rather than being proactive in solving them. They don’t seem up to the task of responding to new problems fast enough to keep up with the speed at which they’re emerging. We have a lack of global cooperation around the resolution of these problems, which leads to a breakdown of coordination on a global scale. We have nations coming together to resolve climate change, but country A won’t commit to carbon reduction measures because country B won’t do it first, and vice versa, until we wind up in this stalemate where very little gets done and climate change only gets worse — the tragedy of the commons writ large.

But there are solutions out there in cooperative structures: communities come together around shared goals (the commons) and value their local communities and environments. They have their own non-hierarchical governance structures and decision-making processes. These are great solutions, but they have a problem. They rely on trust, which today is person to person — this doesn’t scale. So how can we scale this trust and these coordination mechanisms to apply commons-type solutions on a global scale?

Scaling Trust With Blockchain

Luckily there’s this new technology you may have heard of called the blockchain. So we have this opportunity to create what are essentially global trust networks, in which we align economic incentives with these communities’ values. We can give communities economies and allow them to encode their community values within these economies. In this way, we can scale these community commons into global networks that are protecting our most valuable resources.

This is essentially what the Commons Stack is trying to do. We’re trying to scale trust using the blockchain, and we’re trying to scale the commons with these tools that we’re building. We’re creating an open-source library of components that enable purpose-driven communities that are united around any cause, whether it be cleaning up trash or planting trees or producing open source components for the betterment of humanity, and we’re giving them the ability to raise money, make decisions about how to spend it, and to measure impact.

This tech stack for the commons will include tools for varying methods of governance, funding, proposals, simulation and initialization. These are modular, interoperable components, so any project can take the pieces that are relevant to their community, customise them to their specific needs, and combine them into a token network . This could be considered an SDK for DAOs, so you can take any of these components, interoperably combine them and launch your token network around your community goals. This is a future vision of the Commons Stack, so let’s look at where we’re going to start today.

A Minimum Viable Commons

We’ve identified four key components for a ‘Minimum Viable Commons’: the Augmented Bonding Curve would provide sustainable funding for communities, the Giveth Dapp provides a proposal and escrow service, we have Conviction Voting which is a continuous decision making governance process, and we will have the Commons Analytics Dashboard (powered by cadCAD) which will allow us to measure the value produced in these communities. We’ll be building with an iterative engineering approach, so we’ll be developing each component one by one and inviting communities to launch them in beta test environments. As they we test out how these components work in live environments, we can improve them in our next codebase iteration. Once each of these components is built we will synthesize them into an ‘Minimum Viable Commons’ and we believe it will be a new standard in token network design.

So the important thing to note about the Commons Stack is that it has a rigorous token engineering foundation. This is not based off an idea in a whitepaper, it’s based on solid token engineering research and built with tools and processes like cadCAD. Each of these components will be modeled based on mathematical-first principles, then we test them and only then do we start implementing them. We’re producing a library of robustly designed components that can then be forked and used in any commons initiative or open source project, and anything we learn from those live deployments are an opportunity to collect data and improve our model. We’re turning this into an engineering design process which will revolutionize the entire crypto industry.

Complex system design is complex. To build these components, we start by defining mathematical conversation laws, then we model these systems in token circuit diagrams and simulate them to understand where their systemic failure modes may lie before we even write our first line of code. The great thing is that you don’t have to do this modeling, you can just use Commons Stack components, knowing that this robust design is already baked in.

Sustainable Funding: the Augmented Bonding Curve

To zoom in on the first component: the Augmented Bonding Curve is a sustainable funding mechanism for your community, one that we think will help solve the problem of community incentivization. The Augmented Bonding Curve is a token bonding curve, with some added mechanisms to address attack vectors. It has two phases: the Hatch phase is the initialization phase, and then there’s the Open phase when the public can buy from and sell to the bonding curve. The Hatch phase is a community crowdfund to initialize the funding pool and collateral pool. Most token bonding curves only have a collateral pool, but by separating these into two pools we can create two different uses for the token which brings some stability that we’ll discuss in a moment.

First, the Hatch phase: the community comes together and funds an initiative they believe in. That money is split according to some agreed-upon percentage into the funding and collateral pools, and then you are issued a dual-purpose token, which is both a claim to one part of the collateral pool (you can burn it for some collateral) and it provides you with governance rights over the funding pool (you will be able to vote on how the funds are used). Note that this is not a time graph, it’s the amount of money people put into the bonding curve, so it can go up or down depending on people’s behavior. It’s not a magic money-making machine.

Next, the Open phase: as the price goes up people may want to sell their tokens to reclaim the collateral backing them. As more and more people exit the economy, though, the people who are left have all the governance over the funding pool. Then others who want to share this decision making power will buy-in, exerting an opposing buy pressure against those selling. The interplay of these forces creates market volatility within an acceptable range, which generates funds for the funding pool via an ‘exit tribute’. Every time someone sells their tokens, some percentage of the value that it represents is taken from the collateral they get, and deposited into the funding pool to pay for more work in your community.

To recap the Augmented Bonding Curve: we’re creating circular, regenerative economies that can be used by anyone, any community, any cause or open source project that wants to coordinate around a goal. We have incoming capital that gets split between the funding and collateral pool, we have funds flowing from the funding pool to complete proposals and provide value to the community and perhaps the world at large, and you have exiting capital which creates this circular flow from the collateral pool into the funding pool, so that you get sustainable funding into your community.

Augmented Bonding Curve Simulation

What can we do with cadCAD? Here’s a simulation: You can set all these initial conditions, for example what percent of community funds goes into the funding pool, the pre-and post-Hatch token prices, the exit tribute amount, the vesting half-life (which protects the initialization period before the community establishes value for itself). And you can approximate how much you might raise from your community. Important to note: when you run this info, it’s of course just a simulation and not an actual prediction. The green line represents your community token and the blue line is the accumulation of funds continuously flowing into the funding pool. So you can see this community in this example has raised 2,000,000 DAI in a year. This is what we can do with cadCAD, you can see how this system might fail and how to adapt it, before a single line of Augmented Bonding Curve code has been written. Play around with this demo and see how it could be useful to your community.

Ecosystem-Funding DAOs

How might the Augmented Bonding Curve be applied in the crypto space? We have ‘ecosystem-funding DAOs’ popping up all over the place, and they’re targeted towards specific purposes. Moloch DAO is focused on ETH2.0, MetaCartel on UX, we have art DAOs, open-source DAOs … many different communities are coming together around causes, and they could all use the Augmented Bonding Curve as a sustainable funding mechanism, rather than just relying on member donations.

There are other challenges we can tackle with ecosystem-funding DAOs too. There’s no accountability right now over allocated funds, there are on-chain voting issues all throughout the space, and a lack of impact measurement, it is difficult to trace whether our money spent has the intended impact. Solving these problems is the roadmap of the Commons Stack, each of these challenges, one by one, and synthesizing them into an easily forkable ‘Minimum Viable Commons’ to move forward with and bring us into an age of decentralization.

Token Engineering Commons

We have an invitation to the community today. We’ve realized that blockchain research and development is a public good as well, it’s also a commons. It’s providing public goods for the entire community to use: it’s non-rivalrous, it’s inclusive, and therefore it falls prey to the free-rider problem as well. We need an ecosystem-funding DAO to push forward token engineering R&D in the blockchain space. Our invitation to the token engineering community is to come together as a DAO once the tech is ready and launch the Token Engineering Commons (TEC). This will be the first commons that we hope will be launched, using the Augmented Bonding Curve. Many of the token engineers today are working separately, getting by on client work, doing token engineering research in their spare time. This work is crucial, and we believe it needs to be done, it will push the ecosystem into the next level of maturity. The Token Engineering Commons will provide a sustainable funding mechanism to unite these researchers around the common cause of maturing this industry.

We’re going with an old school, tranche-style raise to fund the development of each component in this system. We are excited to think that once we build this system, such old-school style raises will never again be necessary, because we will be able to use the Commons Stack as a sustainable funding mechanism to raise money for similar OS software and community endeavors.

We’ve broken it down component by component to be synthesized in the last step into a ‘Minimum Viable Commons’. We’ve gotten here through contributions of labor and finances and we’re more than open to contributions from the token engineering and blockchain communities, because we’re excited to start building these components as soon as possible. We have ideas, we have tested our assumptions, run simulations, and now we’re going to get down to building these OS tools for the community at large. We have a dedicated team with decades of experience in this and relevant fields, we have some of the top token engineering advisors giving us their wisdom and expertise, and ensuring that we’re moving forward in the most circumspect way as we build these components. We have a strong legal team that’s looking at the future legal framework of DAO ecosystems because this is also an important entanglement that we need to keep our eye on.

We are here today to ask you to join the Commons Stack community: help us help you to realign our economies and re-prioritize people and the planet.

Open Sourcing cadCAD

One final announcement: a year ago at the first unofficial TEGG, a tool was announced that had the potential to revolutionize the crypto industry by introducing an engineer’s loop of simulating, modeling, and testing these systems before we get down to coding them: that tool is cadCAD. Our team and advisors think this is such an industry-critical bedrock for pushing forward the token engineering industry that we’re happy to announce that after completing an internal raise, we’re open-sourcing cadCAD… today.

So jump into the repo, have fun, and join the Commons Stack community. We want to coalesce a community of people who want to use token engineering and practices to push this discipline to a greater level of maturity so that we can all tackle the biggest issues of our times, together.

Help Us Help You

👉 By applying to become a Member of the Commons Stack you will help us help you realign our economies to re-prioritize people and the planet. You can do this here: commonsstack.org/apply.

• Read more about what the Commons Stack is building
• Join the Commons Stack community on Telegram or Riot
• Follow the Commons Stack on Twitter

This article was originally published on Giveth on August 29 ’19, you can find it here.

The Commons Stack: Scaling the Commons to Re-Prioritize People and the Planet was originally published in Commons Stack on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Trade leaves things as they were, with no external Surplus. A Gift creates a Surplus as it spreads. ~ Seth Godin

Giveth is exploring new territories and expanding its horizons: we are embarking on an exciting mission to enrich the Giveth Donation Application by making the core part of it, the donations, more sustainable. From enabling Givers to donate to the causes they believe in and providing a layer of transparency and accountability through our DApp, we will now be tackling the sustainability of the donation process itself. We want to create continuous streams of funding through the creation of economies around causes, by building a system of token bonding curves feeding cause-focused DAOs (with a unique governance model) on top of the Giveth DApp, in a collaboration with BlockScience.

Edit May 2019: for a technical deepdive by Abbey Titcomb go here, for more on the Commons Stack initiative, read this most recent update by Jeff Emmett.

From centralized Donations to sustainable Collaborations

If you have been following Giveth closely, you will know by now that we are not your regular organization and are constantly changing our own collaboration models through many experiments, and that we are involved in many, many initiatives, seemingly not moving in just one specific direction, but actually, we are! We are a Decentralized Altruistic Community (DAC) focused on making the World a Better Place through the use of blockchain technology, and yes, this is a wide and ambitious mission. But we have a path we are on, well, actually we have several, and we are doing this on purpose, to make us more resilient, even antifragile. The Ethereum community and the blockchain space as a whole is in constant flux, so we are working on and supporting a wide array of different initiatives (we call it the Giveth Galaxy) that we believe are bringing lasting value to the wider community.

During this cryptowinter, we ourselves, as a non-profit blockchain-based entity, have been struggling quite a bit to keep financially afloat and have only been able to do this through a generous donation by an anonymous donor, but mostly through a constant stream of personal donations by our co-founder Griff Green, for which we are eternally grateful. This scarcity however got us to discuss our own sustainability quite a bit, and the importance of good, objective governance that will benefit our individual and collective interests, our ‘Commons’. Depending on pure goodwill, even if it happens in a transparent and accountable way, is not sustainable, not for us nor for any other altruistic community: it puts you in a scarcity mindset and is a heavy distraction from the cause(s) that unite you. This concern made us see more clearly than ever that we have to invest time in bringing Giving to the next level, and change the way humans collaborate.

1–2–3 — Infinity.

First things first, we are very happy and proud to say that our flagship project, the Giveth DApp, currently in beta, is now feature-complete, bringing us very close to what we could call ‘Giveth 1.0’. This of course does not mean that we will stop working on the DApp, on the contrary, much more is coming, such as deploying our DApp on the xDAI chain, introducing governance solutions through Aragon, a complete UX overhaul and so much more. This is all in the making but in order to continue with this, we are currently focusing very hard on the funding part of the puzzle. We want to help forward the ecosystem itself through an ambitious token-engineering experiment, in collaboration with BlockScience. The target of this experiment is to transform communities around altruistic causes into entire economies and to build this on top of the Giveth DApp. In the coming months, we will be working hard on this initiative that will bring us at some point to what we like to call ‘Giveth 2.0’.

Now that we have traceable donations working in the DApp, we can start to experiment with new models to support both the organization as well as the funding of communities. Your support stays very, very welcome (all tokens accepted 🙏) but in the long run, we want to incentivize you so that you are no longer just a Giver, but have a real stake in the success of the community you will be supporting: we want to align the very human behavior of profit-seeking with socially beneficial behavior: to us this is the real Future of Giving.

We built the foundational layer of our Giveth DApp on the Ethereum blockchain and not on a centralized server to bring true accountability and transparency to decentralized governance experiments: there is an immutable piece of evidence of what happened with your funds. The true magic however, that will allow us to create sustainable streams of funding, lies hidden within the existing dynamics of blockchain technology. Every blockchain network in existence has aligned incentives around supporting the network itself: every ‘actor’ in the system, when acting in their own best interest, actually benefits the system. Miners earn inflation for supporting the network, developers hold the token hoping their efforts will raise its value, and users buy the token creating demand and pay transaction fees: it is a very simple and well-balanced ecosystem: helping yourself, helps the system to thrive, and very often it doesn’t even matter whether that system is useful or not.

We are building the Future Of Giving and are fascinated by these mechanisms, we want to use these self-sustaining models for actual good. The ‘Commons’ can be defined as “[…] resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit.” We, and many communities like ours, that are organized around social impact causes, are suffering from scarcity, because we think about the collective benefit and ignore the individual, who needs to survive as well; this is unsustainable. By default, people will actually do the opposite and take their individual interest over that of the common good, which is often called the tragedy of the commons. In both cases, there is a major incentive alignment issue: either the individual gains but the collective suffers or the other way around. Witnessing for a while now these emerging, more sustainable systems, we believe it is time for the next step. By modeling the success of existing blockchain ecosystems (through the implementation of new cryptoeconomic primitives) we want to create abundance to support the Commons, thinking about both the collective as well as the individual interests.

Now, our goal at Giveth is to use token engineering, more specifically, Curation Markets, to bring this from a purely digital realm, into the real world. We will build it on top of our Dapp, and build it in such a way that it supports projects that benefit our common interest, or in other words, that will enable us to sustainably crowdfund the Commons. The initial work was to enable transparent and accountable donations on the blockchain, the next step is to move away from ‘donating’ altogether and to create a sustainable system: gifted funds become backed by a token of value in a circular economy. As Abbey Titcomb says:

“We believe the answer to the underfunding of social goods and underserved community contribution is to reframe social goods as self-governing and continuously funded commons.”

Wait but How?

Through building the augmented bonding curve model created by BlockScience on top of our DApp we want to create continuously funded organizations. How does this work? We first learned about them through a post by Jeff Emmett, a Giveth collaborator, who explains the basic building blocks — a highly recommended read to learn more on how token bonding curves could enable a project to bootstrap funding and token value along with project success and popularity. You can find more references in Abbey Titcomb’s report on what we built at ETHDenver, and for all technical definitions and more theory, we refer you to Michael Zargham.

However, we would like to illustrate the theory now through a real life example of how this could work, imagining a future in which Giveth has already built this model into its DApp (also available in video format, narrated by Griff Green):

So imagine you live by the beach, and you have the habit of picking up trash regularly, but you see this is just not having the impact you desire: it doesn’t scale. For more impact you are also regularly donating to a nonprofit promising exactly this, large-scale impact but … all you see is a lot of marketing and a continuous request for more funds. This is all very frustrating.

At this point in time, you run into Jonathan, an activist who you often saw on the beach doing exactly what you do: cleaning up. He tells you about a new kid on the block: the ‘TrashHeroes’ and they are offering you something else. They invite you to not just give money but to actually help them steer the organization. In return for an amount you choose you will receive tokens, tokens that allow you to make decisions for the common good of the organization. On top of this, if you do a good job and the organization runs smoothly one day those tokens could be worth more than what you donated. This sounds too good to be true, but hey, you were donating funds anyways and with this one you get a say in the decisions!

So you give 10 xDAI (a representation of DAI token) and receive TrashHero Tokens, which you hear actually have value, in the real world. The value however, is not determined by an open market, but by a smart contract, which is actually the token bonding curve. So how does this work you ask? The price, the value of the TrashHero Token, is determined by the total supply of the token in general: if more people mint the token in return for xDAI, the price of the TrashHero Token goes up. If the supply goes down — when people burn their tokens and take money out of the contract the price of the token goes down. The big difference however with existing curve models, and which makes this one sustainable is two-fold. First, there is the curve itself which disincentivizes people who get in late to burn their tokens quickly, they need to keep these for a while if they want to make a profit. The second element is that people who get in early should be the people who are in it for the long haul, because they are the believers in the cause, they will most often be the experts. This is stimulated by preventing our pioneers from burning their tokens immediately: their tokens are locked until specific goals (which we call Milestones in our DApp) have been reached. In this way the collective interests you are fighting for are protected by default, the Commons needs those funds and outweigh your short-term self-interest, and you are incentivized to reach the set goals, the Milestones. This innovative system where everyone acts in their own self-interest, propels the Commons forward and pushes it to reach its set goals.

Back to our TrashHeroes that have invited you to be part of this initial group of experts who together have raised quite some xDAI to initialize the curve and the TrashHero Commons. One half, 50% of this xDAI, is locked in the smart contract, 50% of this xDAI is given to a DAO controlled by the TrashHero token holders to execute on their common interest, now baptized the TrashHero Commons. This Commons that supports the cause of cleaning up the beaches will now need to come up with good proposals to actually support this cause. As the Commons spends money, the tokens that were given to the group that initialized the curve will become unlocked periodically. This spending goes through Milestones you help create in the Giveth DApp: xDAI will be released once the initiative takers (the ‘Milestone Managers’) prove they have actually reached the goals they set that support the Commons’ cause (i.e. cleaning up beaches) — this is where the power of Giveth kicks in: you only get rewarded when you are being accountable.

The effective working of the TrashHero Commons is steered through a novel type of curation market governance system that allows you to use your TrashHero Tokens to signal priorities of tasks (Milestones) to be executed for the Commons to reach its goals. When a target that supports the goals of the Commons is proposed — for example, you get 15 friends together and make a Milestone for doing a side-by-side, step-by-step cleaning of 5 km of coast — and if it is supported by the TrashHero Token holders, it will receive funding from the Commons: xDAI will be sent to the Giveth Milestone. Then once the task has been completed, by documenting in pictures and videos the gathering of 3 tons of plastic and waste, the xDAI will be sent to the token bonding curve and you will be minted TrashHero Tokens, which you can then decide to burn immediately (without a need to speculate if you don’t want to) to receive your xDAI. When you or anyone else decides to burn your tokens, there is a fee that goes back into the Commons, which is the lever that will support more social good. To us, this is the Future of Giving: your socially beneficial behavior creates a surplus!

Generosity generates Income

Doing good feels good, and we hope our alternative economic system will attract more people who want to do good by not just giving but by staying involved. Instead of just simply donating, they get the opportunity to participate in a circular economy that supports the underlying cause. As more people will be encouraged to join the Commons, it incentivizes the people who initialized the curve to do even better, as the initial token holder’s funds will only be unlocked as the community actually does good, and spends the money. By being generous and by participating in good governance they can generate an actual financial return, an income — they create abundance.

Next to this, speculators will get involved, because that is what happens with tokens, and actually, its great! Secondary markets and the trading volume will hopefully create an extra flow of funds that isn’t normally part of a charitable community. After the initialization of the curve, the new donations create tokens that have no locking period, and 100% of those funds go straight into the bonding curve. When later participants burn their tokens they however always pay a fee, and this fee goes back into the Commons, which further support its goals. Every participant — whether it is an initial crowdfunder, a regular Giver or a speculator — should and will act in their own self-interest, which is steering the Commons to become a success, with everyone’s incentives aligned.

One more important note: this is a giant experiment and it may not work. However because of the use of the Giveth DApp the projects that are looking to clean up beaches, help the homeless or do research to cure Alzheimer are insulated from the governance experiment’s failure. The benefit is that these initiatives will exist on our Giveth DApp, so there are multiple ways to fund them. If a token holder really wants a specific Giveth Milestone to be supported but the governance of the Commons breaks down for one reason or another, they can burn their token (again helping the economy through a small fee), receive xDAI, and send it directly to the specific Milestone on the DApp they wanted to support. The Commons is one actor in an open system. What we will have done is create an extra way to fund projects on our DApp and most probably generate quite some buzz around that specific economy, a buzz supported both by the community as well as by speculators. Whatever happens, more people will know that this cause needs to be supported.

We started Building this Future of Giving Yesterday

With every statement we make, new questions come up (for example this dialogue in our chat), and we do not have all the answers just yet. The models we use are however based on years of research by BlockScience, and are being refined and further documented by the team led by Michael Zargham with whom we are in a constant dialogue. To put this theory to the test, we wanted to build this yesterday, so that’s what we are doing. With the very limited funds we have available, we have decided to kickstart this project by addressing the wisdom and skills of the very core for whom we are building this: the Crowd, the Commons, You. We will build and hack this together with you, and we have already started doing this successfully. At ETHDenver we supported the Pactful Team, where we won the Impact Track by building a proof-of-concept user interface for our idea. We continued at EthParis and are now ramping up to build various components that will all tie into a working whole during Odyssey in the Netherlands, the biggest AI & Blockchain Hackathon in the world. We are the largest group participating and have been accepted with five teams, working on four of the hackathon’s tracks gathering a multi-talented team of 30+ people. We are uniting developers from many different projects in the Ethereum space to form a Commons and help us build this Future of Giving, together.

More is coming very soon but in the meantime you can catch up by watching Griff Green’s EthCC talk, read Abbey Titcomb’s ETHDenver update, scrutinize the models at BlockScience, and keep yourself up-to-date by following us on Twitter. Next to this we are actively looking for more developers to help us build at future hackathons (such as ETHCapeTown) and beyond, so please come join our community and signal your interest.

We hope you will join us on an adventure that has already started and is expanding our Giveth Galaxy, and invite you to be an active participant in this primordial Ethereum and Giveth-powered Commons that is Building The Future Of Giving. Join us Today.

Warm regards,

Giveth & the Commons Stack

Help Us Help You

👉 By applying to become a Member of the Commons Stack you will help us help you realign our economies to re-prioritize people and the planet. You can do this here: commonsstack.org/apply.

• Read more about what the Commons Stack is building
• Join the Commons Stack community on Telegram
• Follow the Commons Stack on Twitter
• More resources on our website

The Future of Giving is Realigning Incentives was originally published in Commons Stack on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a transcript of @jeffemmett’s presentation on the Commons Stack, the closing session at the Token Engineering Global Gathering (TEGG) in Berlin on August 23. Article transcribed by Don Adams, edited by @krrisis, with added links for reference.

Why the Commons?

Thank you for joining us. Today we will be talking about the tools that we’re building to scale the commons, to re-prioritize people and the planet.

It’s first good to establish: why are the commons important? We have some really big issues on the horizon that we can only solve together: climate change, resource depletion, open source incentivization — these are all public goods that are prone to the free-rider problem. This problem applies just as much to the extraction of environmental resources as well as the funding of writing open code. It’s a coordination problem that underlies some of the biggest problems we face. Ostrom and others have suggested that we need larger-scale coordination mechanisms for making rules to determine how we use and allocate existing resources. We have some of these coordination tools already, but our current approaches are flawed. Our current global coordination mechanisms — both markets and states — are dealing with quite some challenges. We have one-dimensional economies that optimize for profit and exclude people and the environment from their calculations. We have outdated governance structures that are reactive to the problems we seem to be creating for ourselves, rather than being proactive in solving them. They don’t seem up to the task of responding to new problems fast enough to keep up with the speed at which they’re emerging. We have a lack of global cooperation around the resolution of these problems, which leads to a breakdown of coordination on a global scale. We have nations coming together to resolve climate change, but country A won’t commit to carbon reduction measures because country B won’t do it first, and vice versa, until we wind up in this stalemate where very little gets done and climate change only gets worse — the tragedy of the commons writ large.

But there are solutions out there in cooperative structures: communities come together around shared goals (the commons) and value their local communities and environments. They have their own non-hierarchical governance structures and decision-making processes. These are great solutions, but they have a problem. They rely on trust, which today is person to person — this doesn’t scale. So how can we scale this trust and these coordination mechanisms to apply commons-type solutions on a global scale?

Scaling Trust With Blockchain

Luckily there’s this new technology you may have heard of called the blockchain. So we have this opportunity to create what are essentially global trust networks, in which we align economic incentives with these communities’ values. We can give communities economies and allow them to encode their community values within these economies. In this way, we can scale these community commons into global networks that are protecting our most valuable resources.

This is essentially what the Commons Stack is trying to do. We’re trying to scale trust using the blockchain, and we’re trying to scale the commons with these tools that we’re building. We’re creating an open-source library of components that enable purpose-driven communities that are united around any cause, whether it be cleaning up trash or planting trees or producing open source components for the betterment of humanity, and we’re giving them the ability to raise money, make decisions about how to spend it, and to measure impact.

This tech stack for the commons will include tools for varying methods of governance, funding, proposals, simulation and initialization. These are modular, interoperable components, so any project can take the pieces that are relevant to their community, customise them to their specific needs, and combine them into a token network . This could be considered an SDK for DAOs, so you can take any of these components, interoperably combine them and launch your token network around your community goals. This is a future vision of the Commons Stack, so let’s look at where we’re going to start today.

A Minimum Viable Commons

We’ve identified four key components for a ‘Minimum Viable Commons’: the Augmented Bonding Curve would provide sustainable funding for communities, the Giveth Dapp provides a proposal and escrow service, we have Conviction Voting which is a continuous decision making governance process, and we will have the Commons Analytics Dashboard (powered by cadCAD) which will allow us to measure the value produced in these communities. We’ll be building with an iterative engineering approach, so we’ll be developing each component one by one and inviting communities to launch them in beta test environments. As they we test out how these components work in live environments, we can improve them in our next codebase iteration. Once each of these components is built we will synthesize them into an ‘Minimum Viable Commons’ and we believe it will be a new standard in token network design.

So the important thing to note about the Commons Stack is that it has a rigorous token engineering foundation. This is not based off an idea in a whitepaper, it’s based on solid token engineering research and built with tools and processes like cadCAD. Each of these components will be modeled based on mathematical-first principles, then we test them and only then do we start implementing them. We’re producing a library of robustly designed components that can then be forked and used in any commons initiative or open source project, and anything we learn from those live deployments are an opportunity to collect data and improve our model. We’re turning this into an engineering design process which will revolutionize the entire crypto industry.

Complex system design is complex. To build these components, we start by defining mathematical conversation laws, then we model these systems in token circuit diagrams and simulate them to understand where their systemic failure modes may lie before we even write our first line of code. The great thing is that you don’t have to do this modeling, you can just use Commons Stack components, knowing that this robust design is already baked in.

Sustainable Funding: the Augmented Bonding Curve

To zoom in on the first component: the Augmented Bonding Curve is a sustainable funding mechanism for your community, one that we think will help solve the problem of community incentivization. The Augmented Bonding Curve is a token bonding curve, with some added mechanisms to address attack vectors. It has two phases: the Hatch phase is the initialization phase, and then there’s the Open phase when the public can buy from and sell to the bonding curve. The Hatch phase is a community crowdfund to initialize the funding pool and collateral pool. Most token bonding curves only have a collateral pool, but by separating these into two pools we can create two different uses for the token which brings some stability that we’ll discuss in a moment.

First, the Hatch phase: the community comes together and funds an initiative they believe in. That money is split according to some agreed-upon percentage into the funding and collateral pools, and then you are issued a dual-purpose token, which is both a claim to one part of the collateral pool (you can burn it for some collateral) and it provides you with governance rights over the funding pool (you will be able to vote on how the funds are used). Note that this is not a time graph, it’s the amount of money people put into the bonding curve, so it can go up or down depending on people’s behavior. It’s not a magic money-making machine.

Next, the Open phase: as the price goes up people may want to sell their tokens to reclaim the collateral backing them. As more and more people exit the economy, though, the people who are left have all the governance over the funding pool. Then others who want to share this decision making power will buy-in, exerting an opposing buy pressure against those selling. The interplay of these forces creates market volatility within an acceptable range, which generates funds for the funding pool via an ‘exit tribute’. Every time someone sells their tokens, some percentage of the value that it represents is taken from the collateral they get, and deposited into the funding pool to pay for more work in your community.

To recap the Augmented Bonding Curve: we’re creating circular, regenerative economies that can be used by anyone, any community, any cause or open source project that wants to coordinate around a goal. We have incoming capital that gets split between the funding and collateral pool, we have funds flowing from the funding pool to complete proposals and provide value to the community and perhaps the world at large, and you have exiting capital which creates this circular flow from the collateral pool into the funding pool, so that you get sustainable funding into your community.

Augmented Bonding Curve Simulation

What can we do with cadCAD? Here’s a simulation: You can set all these initial conditions, for example what percent of community funds goes into the funding pool, the pre-and post-Hatch token prices, the exit tribute amount, the vesting half-life (which protects the initialization period before the community establishes value for itself). And you can approximate how much you might raise from your community. Important to note: when you run this info, it’s of course just a simulation and not an actual prediction. The green line represents your community token and the blue line is the accumulation of funds continuously flowing into the funding pool. So you can see this community in this example has raised 2,000,000 DAI in a year. This is what we can do with cadCAD, you can see how this system might fail and how to adapt it, before a single line of Augmented Bonding Curve code has been written. Play around with this demo and see how it could be useful to your community.

Ecosystem-Funding DAOs

How might the Augmented Bonding Curve be applied in the crypto space? We have ‘ecosystem-funding DAOs’ popping up all over the place, and they’re targeted towards specific purposes. Moloch DAO is focused on ETH2.0, MetaCartel on UX, we have art DAOs, open-source DAOs … many different communities are coming together around causes, and they could all use the Augmented Bonding Curve as a sustainable funding mechanism, rather than just relying on member donations.

There are other challenges we can tackle with ecosystem-funding DAOs too. There’s no accountability right now over allocated funds, there are on-chain voting issues all throughout the space, and a lack of impact measurement, it is difficult to trace whether our money spent has the intended impact. Solving these problems is the roadmap of the Commons Stack, each of these challenges, one by one, and synthesizing them into an easily forkable ‘Minimum Viable Commons’ to move forward with and bring us into an age of decentralization.

Token Engineering Commons

We have an invitation to the community today. We’ve realized that blockchain research and development is a public good as well, it’s also a commons. It’s providing public goods for the entire community to use: it’s non-rivalrous, it’s inclusive, and therefore it falls prey to the free-rider problem as well. We need an ecosystem-funding DAO to push forward token engineering R&D in the blockchain space. Our invitation to the token engineering community is to come together as a DAO once the tech is ready and launch the Token Engineering Commons (TEC). This will be the first commons that we hope will be launched, using the Augmented Bonding Curve. Many of the token engineers today are working separately, getting by on client work, doing token engineering research in their spare time. This work is crucial, and we believe it needs to be done, it will push the ecosystem into the next level of maturity. The Token Engineering Commons will provide a sustainable funding mechanism to unite these researchers around the common cause of maturing this industry.

We’re going with an old school, tranche-style raise to fund the development of each component in this system. We are excited to think that once we build this system, such old-school style raises will never again be necessary, because we will be able to use the Commons Stack as a sustainable funding mechanism to raise money for similar OS software and community endeavors.

We’ve broken it down component by component to be synthesized in the last step into a ‘Minimum Viable Commons’. We’ve gotten here through contributions of labor and finances and we’re more than open to contributions from the token engineering and blockchain communities, because we’re excited to start building these components as soon as possible. We have ideas, we have tested our assumptions, run simulations, and now we’re going to get down to building these OS tools for the community at large. We have a dedicated team with decades of experience in this and relevant fields, we have some of the top token engineering advisors giving us their wisdom and expertise, and ensuring that we’re moving forward in the most circumspect way as we build these components. We have a strong legal team that’s looking at the future legal framework of DAO ecosystems because this is also an important entanglement that we need to keep our eye on.

We are here today to ask you to join the Commons Stack community: help us help you to realign our economies and re-prioritize people and the planet.

Open-Sourcing cadCAD

One final announcement: a year ago at the first unofficial TEGG, a tool was announced that had the potential to revolutionize the crypto industry by introducing an engineer’s loop of simulating, modeling, and testing these systems before we get down to coding them: that tool is cadCAD. Our team and advisors think this is such an industry-critical bedrock for pushing forward the token engineering industry that we’re happy to announce that after completing an internal raise, we’re open-sourcing cadCAD… today.

So jump into the repo, have fun, and join the Commons Stack community. We want to coalesce a community of people who want to use token engineering and practices to push this discipline to a greater level of maturity so that we can all tackle the biggest issues of our times, together.

Help Us Help You

👉 By applying to become a Member of the Commons Stack you will help us help you realign our economies to re-prioritize people and the planet. You can do this here: commonsstack.org/apply.

• Read more about what the Commons Stack is building
• Join the Commons Stack community on Riot or Telegram
• Follow the Commons Stack on Twitter
• More resources on our website

The Commons Stack: Scaling the Commons to Re-Prioritize People and the Planet was originally published in Giveth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Trade leaves things as they were, with no external Surplus. A Gift creates a Surplus as it spreads. ~ Seth Godin

Giveth is exploring new territories and expanding its horizons: we are embarking on an exciting mission to enrich the Giveth Donation Application by making the core part of it, the donations, more sustainable. From enabling Givers to donate to the causes they believe in and providing a layer of transparency and accountability through our DApp, we will now be tackling the sustainability of the donation process itself. We want to create continuous streams of funding through the creation of economies around causes, by building a system of token bonding curves feeding cause-focused DAOs (with a unique governance model) on top of the Giveth DApp, in a collaboration with BlockScience.

Edit May 2019: for more on the Commons Stack initiative, read this most recent update by Jeff Emmett, for a technical deepdive by Abbey Titcomb go here.

From centralized Donations to sustainable Collaborations

If you have been following Giveth closely, you will know by now that we are not your regular organization and are constantly changing our own collaboration models through many experiments, and that we are involved in many, many initiatives, seemingly not moving in just one specific direction, but actually, we are! We are a Decentralized Altruistic Community (DAC) focused on making the World a Better Place through the use of blockchain technology, and yes, this is a wide and ambitious mission. But we have a path we are on, well, actually we have several, and we are doing this on purpose, to make us more resilient, even antifragile. The Ethereum community and the blockchain space as a whole is in constant flux, so we are working on and supporting a wide array of different initiatives (we call it the Giveth Galaxy) that we believe are bringing lasting value to the wider community.

During this cryptowinter, we ourselves, as a non-profit blockchain-based entity, have been struggling quite a bit to keep financially afloat and have only been able to do this through a generous donation by an anonymous donor, but mostly through a constant stream of personal donations by our co-founder Griff Green, for which we are eternally grateful. This scarcity however got us to discuss our own sustainability quite a bit, and the importance of good, objective governance that will benefit our individual and collective interests, our ‘Commons’. Depending on pure goodwill, even if it happens in a transparent and accountable way, is not sustainable, not for us nor for any other altruistic community: it puts you in a scarcity mindset and is a heavy distraction from the cause(s) that unite you. This concern made us see more clearly than ever that we have to invest time in bringing Giving to the next level, and change the way humans collaborate.

1–2–3 — Infinity.

First things first, we are very happy and proud to say that our flagship project, the Giveth DApp, currently in beta, is now feature-complete, bringing us very close to what we could call ‘Giveth 1.0’. This of course does not mean that we will stop working on the DApp, on the contrary, much more is coming, such as deploying our DApp on the xDAI chain, introducing governance solutions through Aragon, a complete UX overhaul and so much more. This is all in the making but in order to continue with this, we are currently focusing very hard on the funding part of the puzzle. We want to help forward the ecosystem itself through an ambitious token-engineering experiment, in collaboration with BlockScience. The target of this experiment is to transform communities around altruistic causes into entire economies and to build this on top of the Giveth DApp. In the coming months, we will be working hard on this initiative that will bring us at some point to what we like to call ‘Giveth 2.0’.

Now that we have traceable donations working in the DApp, we can start to experiment with new models to support both the organization as well as the funding of communities. Your support stays very, very welcome (all tokens accepted 🙏) but in the long run, we want to incentivize you so that you are no longer just a Giver, but have a real stake in the success of the community you will be supporting: we want to align the very human behavior of profit-seeking with socially beneficial behavior: to us this is the real Future of Giving.

We built the foundational layer of our Giveth DApp on the Ethereum blockchain and not on a centralized server to bring true accountability and transparency to decentralized governance experiments: there is an immutable piece of evidence of what happened with your funds. The true magic however, that will allow us to create sustainable streams of funding, lies hidden within the existing dynamics of blockchain technology. Every blockchain network in existence has aligned incentives around supporting the network itself: every ‘actor’ in the system, when acting in their own best interest, actually benefits the system. Miners earn inflation for supporting the network, developers hold the token hoping their efforts will raise its value, and users buy the token creating demand and pay transaction fees: it is a very simple and well-balanced ecosystem: helping yourself, helps the system to thrive, and very often it doesn’t even matter whether that system is useful or not.

We are building the Future Of Giving and are fascinated by these mechanisms, we want to use these self-sustaining models for actual good. The ‘Commons’ can be defined as “[…] resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit.” We, and many communities like ours, that are organized around social impact causes, are suffering from scarcity, because we think about the collective benefit and ignore the individual, who needs to survive as well; this is unsustainable. By default, people will actually do the opposite and take their individual interest over that of the common good, which is often called the tragedy of the commons. In both cases, there is a major incentive alignment issue: either the individual gains but the collective suffers or the other way around. Witnessing for a while now these emerging, more sustainable systems, we believe it is time for the next step. By modeling the success of existing blockchain ecosystems (through the implementation of new cryptoeconomic primitives) we want to create abundance to support the Commons, thinking about both the collective as well as the individual interests.

Now, our goal at Giveth is to use token engineering, more specifically, Curation Markets, to bring this from a purely digital realm, into the real world. We will build it on top of our Dapp, and build it in such a way that it supports projects that benefit our common interest, or in other words, that will enable us to sustainably crowdfund the Commons. The initial work was to enable transparent and accountable donations on the blockchain, the next step is to move away from ‘donating’ altogether and to create a sustainable system: gifted funds become backed by a token of value in a circular economy. As Abbey Titcomb says:

“We believe the answer to the underfunding of social goods and underserved community contribution is to reframe social goods as self-governing and continuously funded commons.”

Wait but How?

Through building the augmented bonding curve model created by BlockScience on top of our DApp we want to create continuously funded organizations. How does this work? We first learned about them through a post by Jeff Emmett, a Giveth collaborator, who explains the basic building blocks — a highly recommended read to learn more on how token bonding curves could enable a project to bootstrap funding and token value along with project success and popularity. You can find more references in Abbey Titcomb’s report on what we built at ETHDenver, and for all technical definitions and more theory, we refer you to Michael Zargham.

However, we would like to illustrate the theory now through a real life example of how this could work, imagining a future in which Giveth has already built this model into its DApp (also available in video format, narrated by Griff Green):

So imagine you live by the beach, and you have the habit of picking up trash regularly, but you see this is just not having the impact you desire: it doesn’t scale. For more impact you are also regularly donating to a nonprofit promising exactly this, large-scale impact but … all you see is a lot of marketing and a continuous request for more funds. This is all very frustrating.

At this point in time, you run into Jonathan, an activist who you often saw on the beach doing exactly what you do: cleaning up. He tells you about a new kid on the block: the ‘TrashHeroes’ and they are offering you something else. They invite you to not just give money but to actually help them steer the organization. In return for an amount you choose you will receive tokens, tokens that allow you to make decisions for the common good of the organization. On top of this, if you do a good job and the organization runs smoothly one day those tokens could be worth more than what you donated. This sounds too good to be true, but hey, you were donating funds anyways and with this one you get a say in the decisions!

So you give 10 xDAI (a representation of DAI token) and receive TrashHero Tokens, which you hear actually have value, in the real world. The value however, is not determined by an open market, but by a smart contract, which is actually the token bonding curve. So how does this work you ask? The price, the value of the TrashHero Token, is determined by the total supply of the token in general: if more people mint the token in return for xDAI, the price of the TrashHero Token goes up. If the supply goes down — when people burn their tokens and take money out of the contract the price of the token goes down. The big difference however with existing curve models, and which makes this one sustainable is two-fold. First, there is the curve itself which disincentivizes people who get in late to burn their tokens quickly, they need to keep these for a while if they want to make a profit. The second element is that people who get in early should be the people who are in it for the long haul, because they are the believers in the cause, they will most often be the experts. This is stimulated by preventing our pioneers from burning their tokens immediately: their tokens are locked until specific goals (which we call Milestones in our DApp) have been reached. In this way the collective interests you are fighting for are protected by default, the Commons needs those funds and outweigh your short-term self-interest, and you are incentivized to reach the set goals, the Milestones. This innovative system where everyone acts in their own self-interest, propels the Commons forward and pushes it to reach its set goals.

Back to our TrashHeroes that have invited you to be part of this initial group of experts who together have raised quite some xDAI to initialize the curve and the TrashHero Commons. One half, 50% of this xDAI, is locked in the smart contract, 50% of this xDAI is given to a DAO controlled by the TrashHero token holders to execute on their common interest, now baptized the TrashHero Commons. This Commons that supports the cause of cleaning up the beaches will now need to come up with good proposals to actually support this cause. As the Commons spends money, the tokens that were given to the group that initialized the curve will become unlocked periodically. This spending goes through Milestones you help create in the Giveth DApp: xDAI will be released once the initiative takers (the ‘Milestone Managers’) prove they have actually reached the goals they set that support the Commons’ cause (i.e. cleaning up beaches) — this is where the power of Giveth kicks in: you only get rewarded when you are being accountable.

The effective working of the TrashHero Commons is steered through a novel type of curation market governance system that allows you to use your TrashHero Tokens to signal priorities of tasks (Milestones) to be executed for the Commons to reach its goals. When a target that supports the goals of the Commons is proposed — for example, you get 15 friends together and make a Milestone for doing a side-by-side, step-by-step cleaning of 5 km of coast — and if it is supported by the TrashHero Token holders, it will receive funding from the Commons: xDAI will be sent to the Giveth Milestone. Then once the task has been completed, by documenting in pictures and videos the gathering of 3 tons of plastic and waste, the xDAI will be sent to the token bonding curve and you will be minted TrashHero Tokens, which you can then decide to burn immediately (without a need to speculate if you don’t want to) to receive your xDAI. When you or anyone else decides to burn your tokens, there is a fee that goes back into the Commons, which is the lever that will support more social good. To us, this is the Future of Giving: your socially beneficial behavior creates a surplus!

Generosity generates Income

Doing good feels good, and we hope our alternative economic system will attract more people who want to do good by not just giving but by staying involved. Instead of just simply donating, they get the opportunity to participate in a circular economy that supports the underlying cause. As more people will be encouraged to join the Commons, it incentivizes the people who initialized the curve to do even better, as the initial token holder’s funds will only be unlocked as the community actually does good, and spends the money. By being generous and by participating in good governance they can generate an actual financial return, an income — they create abundance.

Next to this, speculators will get involved, because that is what happens with tokens, and actually, its great! Secondary markets and the trading volume will hopefully create an extra flow of funds that isn’t normally part of a charitable community. After the initialization of the curve, the new donations create tokens that have no locking period, and 100% of those funds go straight into the bonding curve. When later participants burn their tokens they however always pay a fee, and this fee goes back into the Commons, which further support its goals. Every participant — whether it is an initial crowdfunder, a regular Giver or a speculator — should and will act in their own self-interest, which is steering the Commons to become a success, with everyone’s incentives aligned.

One more important note: this is a giant experiment and it may not work. However because of the use of the Giveth DApp the projects that are looking to clean up beaches, help the homeless or do research to cure Alzheimer are insulated from the governance experiment’s failure. The benefit is that these initiatives will exist on our Giveth DApp, so there are multiple ways to fund them. If a token holder really wants a specific Giveth Milestone to be supported but the governance of the Commons breaks down for one reason or another, they can burn their token (again helping the economy through a small fee), receive xDAI, and send it directly to the specific Milestone on the DApp they wanted to support. The Commons is one actor in an open system. What we will have done is create an extra way to fund projects on our DApp and most probably generate quite some buzz around that specific economy, a buzz supported both by the community as well as by speculators. Whatever happens, more people will know that this cause needs to be supported.

We started Building this Future of Giving Yesterday

With every statement we make, new questions come up (for example this dialogue in our chat), and we do not have all the answers just yet. The models we use are however based on years of research by BlockScience, and are being refined and further documented by the team led by Michael Zargham with whom we are in a constant dialogue. To put this theory to the test, we wanted to build this yesterday, so that’s what we are doing. With the very limited funds we have available, we have decided to kickstart this project by addressing the wisdom and skills of the very core for whom we are building this: the Crowd, the Commons, You. We will build and hack this together with you, and we have already started doing this successfully. At ETHDenver we supported the Pactful Team, where we won the Impact Track by building a proof-of-concept user interface for our idea. We continued at EthParis and are now ramping up to build various components that will all tie into a working whole during Odyssey in the Netherlands, the biggest AI & Blockchain Hackathon in the world. We are the largest group participating and have been accepted with five teams, working on four of the hackathon’s tracks gathering a multi-talented team of 30+ people. We are uniting developers from many different projects in the Ethereum space to form a Commons and help us build this Future of Giving, together.

More is coming very soon but in the meantime you can catch up by watching Griff Green’s EthCC talk, read Abbey Titcomb’s ETHDenver update, scrutinize the models at BlockScience, and keep yourself up-to-date by following us on Twitter. Next to this we are actively looking for more developers to help us build at future hackathons (such as ETHCapeTown) and beyond, so please come join our community via the Social Coding chat and signal your interest.

We hope you will join us on an adventure that has already started and is expanding our Giveth Galaxy, and invite you to be an active participant in this primordial Ethereum and Giveth-powered Commons that is Building The Future Of Giving. Join us Today.

Warm regards,

Giveth

• Join us on Riot or Slack
• Discover our Site and Wiki
• Fork our code on GitHub
• Follow us on Medium, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

The Future of Giving is Realigning Incentives was originally published in Giveth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Giveth has just released a new version of the DApp (in closed beta) that significantly increases our Donation Application’s Milestone functionality. Other new features and improved UX updates make it even easier to transparently manage donations, and bring us now very close to what we would call version 1.0! In the What’s DAppening series we want to keep you informed about our progress on building the Future Of Giving: what the new features are, why they matter and what to look forward to.

The DApp is on a roll! Since the recent integration of DAI on our platform, we started onboarding a number of fantastic and very active projects on our DApp, such as DataFund, GraceAid, and Castro Limon. For the latter we are collaborating with Alibre to beta test a ‘last mile’ solution, allowing easy crypto-to-fiat conversion. And to top it all off: we have a major new release of the DApp!

With this release we have focused mainly on optimizing the creation of Milestones, the smallest and most used building block of our DApp, making them way more configurable, based on user feedback. We made it possible to disable Milestone reviewing, to send the reward to the Campaign itself or set a recipient after Milestone creation, added an optional funding cap, enabled multi-token Milestones, and allowed funding after Milestone completion. Let’s break it down!

Optional Milestone Reviewer

Next to transparency the accountability of its users is and remains a key aspect of the Giveth Donation Application. This means that in most cases you want funded and completed Milestones to be reviewed by an independent and objective Milestone Reviewer, to ensure that the Milestone Manager (the person who proposed the Milestone) has actually fulfilled the described tasks and delivered sufficient proof before they can withdraw funds from the system. Milestones can however also be used for regular and fixed payments, such as the regular reward of a long-term contributor, in which case proof might be less relevant and timely payments (with fewer barriers) are more important. In the case of the Giveth DAC, the accountability stayed just as important but shifted mostly to the weekly Community meetings (where we account for time spent on tasks) and the monthly Roles meetings (where we evaluate delivered work of our peers). Accountability stays key, so we only recommend disabling this option if other processes to guarantee this are in place. An example of such a Milestone can be found here.

Send the reward to the Campaign or set your Recipient later

In some cases, community members may want to create a Milestone for the Campaign that acts more like a bonus if a metric is reached. Before you could do this, but you needed to send funds to a person and have them re-donate the funds to the Campaign. Now we can cut out the middleman, the wasted coordination, and the gas fees. If you flip the switch pictured above, you can raise funds directly for your Campaign!

In other cases, you may have a task for which you want to describe the execution steps but you have not found the right person to fulfill this just yet. By enabling the creation of Milestones without a set address to send the funds to once the Milestone is completed we allow you to use the Milestones themselves to promote the actual task itself, very much like a bounty. An example of such a Milestone without a Recipient (at time of publishing) can be found here.

Optional funding cap

Want to create a Milestone but don’t know exactly just yet how much funds will be required? Or maybe you don’t care how much you receive as a donation! As of now, it’s possible to create a Milestone without defining what the final amount needed will be. Imagine that you want to already start collecting funds for the purchase of solar panels, but you have not received a final invoice just yet, or you are going to do a good deed whether you get donations or not and just want to allow the community to contribute whatever they want. Now they can! For this we cap-less Milestone we can give the same example as above, as it has no Recipient and no funding cap!

Multi-token Milestones

As we’ve mentioned before the DApp now supports DAI as well, and more will be coming! In some cases the Campaign or Community, or for that matter any Giver, who wants to donate to your Milestone should have the freedom to donate in the currencies they prefer at that moment. To support this you can decide to set your Milestone to accept donations in both DAI and ETH. In this case, the field to indicate a specific amount disappears and the fundraising cap is automatically disabled. If you want to see an example of such a cap-less, multi-token Milestone, check out this great real-life Milestone by our contributor Dani.

And so much more!

As with all of our releases a lot of other tweaking happened under the hood, for more details you can dive into the code here, and of course, you can also just discover the new features via beta.giveth.io. With this release, we made some huge steps and crossed some of the final things off of our list to make our Donation Application feature-complete. Next steps are now amongst others a complete user-experience review and subsequent overhaul, and a migration to the xDAI sidechain. Next to this, we are also hacking away on what we’d like to call Giveth 2.0, which brings the focus to the sustainability of Giving itself.

You can get a sneak peek via this report and video on our work at ETHDenver where we won the Impact Track with the Pactful Team! You can also watch Griff explain it at EthCC. Now we are ramping up to build various components that will all tie into a working whole during Odyssey in the Netherlands, the biggest AI & Blockchain Hackathon in the world, where we have been accepted with 5 (!) teams. More on that coming soon!

Does all of this get you excited? Do you want to contribute to building the Future of Giving? If you’re a developer and you want to dive right in there are a number of ways you can get involved:

1. Pull some issues while they’re hot on GitHub
2. Drop into the DApp Dev room on Riot
3. Attend the next Dev meeting

Join our Community: by tackling interesting issues you can help us positively impact charitable giving forever!

• Join us on Riot or Slack
• Discover our Site and Wiki
• Fork our code on Github
• Follow us on Medium, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit
• Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🚀Donate directly 🚀or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link.

What’s DAppening 0x5: Ultra-configurable Milestones! was originally published in Giveth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Below you can find an article I wrote in January ’19 to promote the Aragon DAC proposal that unfortunately did not go through for a vote. Publishing this for reference and inspiration only: this is work that still needs to be done by some team in the future! #sharingiscaring

The Aragon DAC, the second development team building out core Aragon infrastructure, is very proud to announce that it has submitted its Flock proposal to the Aragon Association for review and, if passed, very soon to the entire Aragon Community to vote on during the upcoming AGP Vote #1. Aragon is implementing a set of tools and components to empower freedom by making decentralized governance happen. Aragon’s sole purpose for existence is to give you, the individual, the freedom and the power to decide. To be able to do this, we need to practice what we preach: we need you to decide on our future.

Right now two teams are working on the development of the Aragon core infrastructure: Aragon One, the foundational team, and the Aragon DAC, a community effort announced in August, 2018. Allowing the Aragon DAC to work alongside Aragon One was the first step the Aragon Association has taken to decentralize the development of the project, but this is only the beginning. Aragon intends to onboard even more teams in the near future because our ambitious mission cannot be accomplished by just one or even two teams. The Aragon DAC exists because the Aragon Association wanted to kick off this process and is very much value and culturally-aligned with the people of Giveth (who form part of the core team of the DAC), saw an opportunity to join forces here and decentralize now. However, as Luis states correctly: hand-picking your teams is not very decentralized. So, after having established the Aragon Governance Proposal process, it is time for the next step: we invite you, the ANT Holder, to decide if we should continue our work on the core Aragon infrastructure through the review of our Flock proposal which we submitted together with our AGP.

To allow you to make a truly informed decision on our proposal, we are providing a number of ways to make it easy to understand what we are working on and why. The first way is, of course, through the Flock proposal on GitHub itself (to which we will keep on linking back, and back, and back until you click!). The second is an even more detailed proposal right here to which we hope you will add comments so we can learn from and improve through you, the community. Last but not least, we invite you to follow us and/or join our community and ask us any question (really, any!).

Our Flock proposal outlines the development projects the Aragon DAC plans to tackle in the next 6 months. Below you can directly click through to the various parts of our Proposal and you are invited to comment at will. Please do also look into who we are, our legal and financial structure and why we are doing this! We also made a sprint report of our most recent accomplishments and right here you can find a detailed overview of all we did since our launch.

We will spend 75% of our time continuing the development of:

• aragonCLI (GitHub here, documented on hack.aragon)
• aragonAPI (GitHub here, documented on hack.aragon)
• hack.aragon.org (GitHub here, live on hack.aragon.org)
• Dapp-DAO Interactions (GitHub here)

15% of our time on new development projects:

• Function Registry DAO
• LiquidFunding & Liquid Democracy

And 10% of our time on developing a strong Aragon Ecosystem with these outreach projects:

• Online Office Hour Appointments
• In-Person Events (such as our recent meetup in Chiang Mai, Thailand)

One of our long term goals is to build a sustainable consulting service into our community to bring outside funding into the improvement of the Aragon ecosystem and we will make important steps in that direction during these next 6 months.

To accomplish these objectives, we are requesting a 333,000 DAI one-time payment, plus 80,000 ANT with 1-year cliff and 4-year vesting period.

This is the first of many Flock proposals by the Aragon DAC. We hope to expand this team and spin out a user-focused Community R&D group in future Flock proposals to continue our mission to Build the Future of Human Collaboration with Aragon.

Warm and decentralized regards,

Aragon DAC

To keep us with the progress of the Aragon DAC:

• Discover our site
• Join us on Riot or Rocket Chat
• Follow Aragon DAC on Twitter
• Find our meetups and streamed meetings on Youtube
• Contribute to Aragon on GitHub
• Find our Campaign on the Giveth DApp
• Subscribe to the Aragon Monthly Newsletter

Aragon DAC’s Flock Funding Proposal was originally published in Aragon DAC on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story originally appeared on Aragon and Giveth’s blog on August 9, 2018

The Aragon Association and Giveth are proud to announce the launch of Aragon DAC, a Decentralized Altruistic Community on the Giveth platform that will work on building out core Aragon infrastructure from the end user’s perspective.

Decentralizing Aragon the Giveth Way

You might know by now that Aragon is decentralizing its development: the first step was the introduction of Aragon One, the next step was announcing the onboarding of more teams to work on core infrastructure, in the near future. Well, the future is today!

The second team that will be working on the Aragon stack is a community focused effort led by the Giveth community: the Aragon DAC will kick off with two specific projects or ‘Campaigns’: one focusing purely on development, the other on experimentation with the Aragon stack. Experienced members of Giveth and Aragon One will help kickstart the Aragon DAC initiatives on a voluntary and part-time basis, with the clear goal of steering the DAC towards full independence.

The Development Campaign is staffed with full-time and part-time people that create and tackle issues in the full Aragon Stack and is managed in a semi-decentralized way, while collaborating heavily with the Aragon One team and the R&D Campaign. This Campaign is spearheaded by Quazia, Social Coding Circle Lead at Giveth, who’s already very familiar with Aragon through his work on an open-source planning app (which was awarded a Nest Grant) and by Chris Remus, who is (and remains) Product Manager at Aragon One, and brings inspiring product and project management skills to the team (check out some of his posts on this topic!)

The Community R&D Campaign will focus on helping end users (=non-developers) experiment with using the Aragon Stack. #Dogfooding is the name of the game! This team is stewarded by Griff Green, Giveth’s Governance Circle Lead, who brings loads of community management experience to the table (see initiatives such as an open block explorer, scaling and governance of the Ethereum ecosystem) and Luke Duncan, Research Lead at Aragon One who adds some serious R&D to the mix, through his current role and overall passion for and experience with decentralized organizations. The Community R&D team will also keep you, the community, up-to-date on all progress of the Aragon DAC with the help of communication leads Tatu Kärki (Aragon One) and Kris Decoodt (Giveth).

Both of these Campaigns will be very transparent, collaborative, and community-focused. They will implement a non-hierarchical and teal-based structure and will use Aragon, Giveth, and other blockchain-based tools to build their organization.

Our hiring process will be adaptive, focusing on a fluid labor sourcing via incentivization mechanisms. We hope to target gaps in the Aragon One and Giveth teams skill set and available resources. Once these gaps have been identified, we can onboard more committed team members in a way that cultivates synergies with the Aragon One team. This should allow both teams to focus on their strengths in a complementary way.

More Campaigns will likely be created once these initial ones are up and running, and we have built a team of 8 to 10 people dedicated to working on this DAC as their primary focus. More details on these two initial Campaigns in the notes from our kickoff meeting in July.

Aragon onboards Giveth onboards Aragon

The collaboration between the Aragon Foundation (which leads the onboarding of new teams) and the Giveth DAC (the primordial user of the Giveth DApp) makes a lot of sense to all individuals involved, as it is a logical next step in the evolution and scaling of both projects, and is reinforced by a strongly connected mission and deeply shared values.

Aragon was born to bring transparency and independent governance to the forefront of managing an organization. Giveth focuses on using blockchain technology for good and is building a completely free, open-source platform for DACs, to drastically increase transparency and accountability.

The Giveth DApp, Giveth’s flagship project is currently in closed beta and is ready to onboard its first Communities (DACs) who live and breathe Ethereum (the ‘early adopters’) to further guide the development of the platform, before opening up to a larger audience.

The Aragon Foundation from its side wants DAOs to conquer the world as soon as possible and is ready to increase its bandwidth.

Aragon is making this a reality by kicking off a close collaboration with Giveth through the funding of a DAC/Community on the Giveth platform, that will work on the Aragon Project, making this a solid win for both parties.

Eagles and Unicorns Unite!

The initial priorities of the Aragon DAC are first off to bridge the communication channels, bridging Aragon’s Rocket Chat rooms with Giveth’s Riot Chat rooms — join us here or here — and to set up common tools and regular meetings. For the Development Campaign there is the Aragon All Core Devs call (every other week) plus daily stand-up meetings, while the Community R&D Campaign has a bi-weekly call and mainly communicates through a github repo with zenhub boards.

Next to the legal and financial set-up we also started to actually build this Community by initiating the recruitment process, and for this we need you!

Come talk to us on Riot or Rocket Chat, and tell us how you can help us build Unstoppable Organizations.

Warm regards,

The Aragon DAC, Aragon & Giveth

To keep us with the progress of the Aragon DAC:

• Join us on Riot or Rocket Chat
• Follow Aragon DAC on Twitter
• Contribute to Aragon at GitHub
• Find all our streamed meetings on Youtube
• Find our Campaign on the Giveth DApp
• Subscribe to the Aragon Monthly Newsletter

To keep up with the progress of Aragon:

• Come chat with us at the Aragon Chat
• Follow Aragon on Twitter
• Subscribe to the Aragon subreddit
• Follow Aragon at LinkedIn
• Contribute to Aragon at GitHub
• Find us on YouTube
• Subscribe to Aragon Monthly Newsletter
• Explore the Aragon Wiki
• Browse job openings at Aragon

To keep up with the progress of Giveth:

• Join us on Riot or Slack
• Discover our site and wiki
• Fork our code on GitHub
• Follow us on Medium, Twitter and Reddit

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🚀 Donate directly 🚀 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

Aragon DAC, a new community effort to foster Aragon’s development led by Giveth was originally published in Aragon DAC on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Giveth team was very honored to get a hacker node in Studio 2.0 at the Web3 Summit to bring people together to decentralize NOW!

As expected this summit was overflowing with teams of superstars decentralizing all the things and we wondered … why? And how? What will this decentralized future look like when we get there? With this node, we tried to cover the current state of progress in this movement, discuss its importance, what we need to focus on to get there, and dream about the end game.

We hosted loads of interactive demos, our now infamous ‘fishbowl’ discussions and held 2 late-night hackathons with bounties and beer, proudly supported and sponsored by Gitcoin and bounties.network! Whatever you could decentralize was talked about: hardware, governance, development, data, ICOs, identity, oracles, internet access, commerce, justice, … All The Things!

We were just blown away by the quality of the discussions, and the positive reactions to our constantly overflowing little corner of the conference. The high level of interaction of all these extraordinary bright and inspiring souls was really encouraging.

We streamed most of the content live and now time stamped all of the talks, which you can find right here.

Below the direct links to the various talks, apologies for the unsteady sound quality of some:

Day 1

• Blockchain4Good Demos by Giveth and Seedom (Kyle Graden & Griff Green) - Giveth and Seedom are live working products that are decentralizing charity.
• Blockchain4Good (Griff Green): Does blockchain make the world a better place? I thought it was just a get rich quick scheme? Well hey, maybe it’s both!
• Signalling for Consensus (James Hancock): Blockchain Governance strongly relies on a bunch of people all over the world reaching consensus… but how does the important relevant information get to people?
• DAICOs Let’s do it! (King Flurkel): ICO’s suck. We can do better! An open discussion on how to DAO-ify ICOs
• DAppNode Workshop (Part I* & Part II*) (Eduardo Antuna): We’ll show you how to install a DAppNode on the proper hardware, and how to access version of your favorite DApps in a decentralized way!

Day 2

• Oracles: Bridging to Meatspace (James Ryan Moreau): Open discussion on how smart contracts reflect the real world in smart contracts and vice versa. How can we bridge this gap better through technology and incentive design?
• Build your own Zero-Knowledge Proof* (Jordi Baylina): Learn to build a simple circuit (a small program that can be used to generate zero-knowledge proofs). You will be surprised at how accessible this is, maybe. Bring a Laptop with NodeJS installed and you will learn how to create your first of many circuits with Circom, a new programming language that makes working with zk-snarks easy!
• Decentralize All The Data! Deployment of BlockScout* (Igor) — unfortunately other demos were not streamed
• Etherscan: Ethereum’s Secret Centralization (Griff Green): Open discussion on the importance of being able to have open source blockchain explorers
• Decentralized? What are we doing wrong? (Luis Cuende): We will go over multiple mistakes we are making as a community, and how to solve them to make sure we don’t end up just building the next establishment
• Deploy your own DAO (Luis Cuende) — With Aragon, decentralized governance is available today! Bring a Laptop with Metamask installed and try it out!
• IPFS (Sponnet): Inter-Planetary File Storage is the best way for decentralized websites to store pictures, text and needed assets that are usually hosted by a server. We will discuss innovative ways to use it!

Day 3

• Self Sovereign Identity (Griff Green): Do you own your identity? Open discussion on the state of self sovereign identity with a panel led by Griff and Jordi Baylina
• Open Source Culture and Funding (Scott Moore): What are the values of open source culture? What does it mean for open source software to be sustainable? How can we work towards this vision? Resources mentioned here
• Why Decentralized Data Is Important (Jay Rush): Does the on-chain data, need to stay decentralized? Why and how do we accomplish that? Will there be a data marketplace? Publishing to content-addressable file stores? Mantras mentioned here
• Decentralized Discussion (open): Mainly on the Giveth Chat Bot and Inclusion and Diversity in the Blockchain Space. Bot background and repo here
• Decentralize Justice (Loie): Punitive justice systems are failing at healing conflicts, and succeeding at making money for massive central powers like prison corporations and governments. Come here to chat about the alternatives and practice!
• Anonymous Voting (Pau & Xavi): An open discussion on the current state of blockchain tech in relation to voting and digital governance.

* Unfortunately part of these workshops were not fully streamed, due to technical difficulties.

A warm thank you from all of us at Giveth to the Web3 Foundation Team for hosting us, to all of our talented node hosts and the entire Web3 community for sharing their knowledge and thoughts.

If you’d like to discover more about Giveth, please join the discussion on Riot or Slack, check our site or give us a follow. If you would like us to run more events like this and want to support #Blockchain4Good, support us, by donating to Giveth. ❤

• Join us on Riot or Slack
• Discover our Site and Wiki
• Fork our code on GitHub
• Follow us on Medium, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

Web3's DecentralizeNOW! Hacker Node was originally published in Giveth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the past months, we’ve shared some more technical updates on how the DApp has been evolving, but it’s been almost a year (!) since we wrote an overview of what the platform would be capable of when we’d open it up to a larger audience. We bring good news: we are now getting ready to onboard some of the initial Campaigns and DACs that will hopefully Build the Future of Giving with us!

First and foremost, if you are new to Giveth and you don’t know anything about our Donation Application, this is a TL;DR: Giveth is re-engineering charitable giving, by creating an entirely free, open-source platform, built on the Ethereum Blockchain. Our system cuts out bureaucracy and enables nonprofits to create a high level of transparency and accountability towards Givers. At any point until the moment funds are locked for a specific purpose, a Giver can decide to withdraw them, more on this here.

Bridging, testing, and growing our community

What have we been up to? Well, we’ve been busy! We’re very happy to let you know that we recently moved from alpha state into closed beta testing.

During the past year, we’ve been working in constant iterations to improve the platform based on the feedback of the primordial users of the Dapp, our hardcore alpha testers: the Giveth DAC, the people building and using the platform since the very start of this adventure.

The Giveth DAC is comprised of four Circles, four dedicated teams working respectively on social coding, governance and communication initiatives, and of course the development of the DApp itself! This power team consists of Vojtech, Perissology, and Satya. In every team, we have regular contributors and part-time collaborators, who’ve been building and testing alongside us. We’ve been using the system literally every day by creating weekly Milestones for ourselves and others to reward people for their work, as transparency and accountability are key values to us. If you want to have a very concrete look on what this looks like, check out our Campaigns with their respective Milestones live in the DApp!

Before we get to the other good news, a little update on what else we’ve been working on since we last spoke.

• In January 2018 we were actually ready for our mainnet launch, but scaling issues with the Ethereum network (a reality many projects have had to deal with) forced us to go back to the drawing table.
• We came up with an efficient 3-phase solution that allowed us to pay our contributors without compromising on transparency or accountability.
• Meanwhile, the Governance circle went to work with the wider community to collaborate on scaling solutions, governance and an open source blockchain explorer — three elements we believe are essential to the success of the wider ecosystem.

This extra time also provided us with another crucial benefit: more time to test and optimize the DApp functionalities with the support of our ‘inner circle’, people from the Ethereum community who helped us refine some of the basic and essential features of the DApp itself. This eclectic mix of people from the Ethereum and nonprofit worlds is dedicated to building the tools that will make it easy for anyone to build a global community around a cause.

This resulted in us feeling confident enough to participate in Edcon’s Super Demo in Toronto and win first place! If you’d like to see our beta in full action, no better way than watching the super demo by Vojtech right here.

Our ‘Giveth Galaxy’ has kept on growing during this period and we cannot thank all of you enough for your feedback and participation. Oh, by the way, if you are an avid and skilled DApp tester, you should join us, every month we dish out DApp points (=ether) to our contributors to show our appreciation for the community.

The move to beta

In May 2018 the Giveth core team had thoroughly tested and deployed the bridge solution we described earlier, and in June, after a transition period we officially (but quite silently) moved our entire platform to the beta environment. In this beta, the entire flow from the creation of a Milestone to the funds’ disbursements to Recipients happens via our ‘ghetto bridge’ solution, as we love to call it. The bridge has 3 parts: A contract on the Ethereum Mainnet, a contract on the Rinkeby Testnet, and an off-chain service that connects these two contracts. The off-chain service listens for events from these contracts and relays commands from one contract to the other.

The bridge, written by Perissology, solves multiple issues: it helps us scale the platform, reduces fees substantially for both Givers and Makers and acts as a security layer in case of abuse of funds. It bridges two EVM networks and supports native tokens as well as ERC20, ERC223, and ERC777. A new, decentralized bridge is being developed by POA Network (an evolution of their current bridge, specs here) and we will switch to it as soon as possible. Depending on how Ethereum Scales, we may remove the bridge entirely. That’s why the bridge is as much as possible decoupled from the codebase. Below you can find an easy explanation by Vojtech at the Paralelní Polis Unconference.

For the end user, this more technical explanation might be less relevant, as the main flow stays exactly the same: Givers donate funds to a Community (DAC) or a Campaign and funds are further delegated until — after the necessary reviews — they reach the final Recipient. The fact that part of this happens on a side-chain has no impact on the users of the platform, it only adds benefits such as greater scalability, higher levels of security and lower transaction fees.

We are getting ready for you

The main building blocks are still the same as initially described: we have our DACs, Campaigns, Milestones. Next to a more stable, future-ready solution we’ve been working on extra features such as Milestone reporting for built-in accountability and will keep on optimizing the user experience during the next iterations later this year.

So now that we’re in closed beta, the time has arrived to open it up. Our initial step in this process has been to start on-boarding some of the projects that are very close to our heart. Some have been developed by Giveth collaborators, others sprung forth from Governance and Social Coding circle initiatives. These ‘inner circle’ users understand both the technical restrictions and power of what we are building and continuously provide us with valuable feedback. A big shout out to our two ‘biggest’ projects: DappNode and the Aragon DAC, but just as much love goes out to other budding initiatives such as Tennagraph, BrightID and Ethkan who are currently live on the DApp as well as the best burning man camp on the playa DECENTRAL which has been transparently run two years running using the Giveth DApp.

The next step is now to gradually onboard other projects that are not directly linked to the ‘Giveth Galaxy’ (= our ever growing network of projects) yet are still familiar with — and if possible active in — the Ethereum ecosystem. Ideally, these projects have already reached a certain level of ‘maturity’ and come to us with their own predefined, specific goals, angle and project needs. Onboarding this second community layer will help us to further build our platform and tweak functionalities based on their feedback.

This onboarding will be a steady process with various steps and feedback rounds and will be the main focus of Danielle Bellavita, our newest Unicorn. A former corporate project manager of information technology systems, Dani is a published author, educator, and facilitator at The Mobile Office Mystic. She has worked at the intersection of permaculture and festival production organizing art and music, social justice activism and grassroots community building ecosystems from Standing Rock to Costa Rica. We cannot imagine a better match to bring Givers and Makers together on our platform and to facilitate the onboarding process.

The onboarding we envision is multi-phased. We are currently talking to some potential Givers, as we want to be sure that when we onboard more projects, we will also be able to help with funding. Some projects will come with funding, but if not, it’s crucial for us to help out so that the initial projects are immediately viable and become actual use cases from Day One! For this reason, the selection of initial projects will happen in close collaboration with these Givers. If you are interested to become one of our initial Givers please contact us here and we will reach out to you ASAP!

The Giveth DAC, the team of people working on the DApp and many other projects, is funded through the DApp. We ourselves depend on you, on Givers: the people out there who believe a tool like this should be a reality, individuals who want to help us to make the World a Better Place. If you want to be one of our favorite Unicorns, go to donate.giveth.io and claim your space on our leaderboard, or come talk to Griff, Vojtech, Bowen or Kris on Riot, and tell us how you’d like to contribute. ❤

If you are a nonprofit or aspire to become one in the near future, if you are familiar with the Ethereum ecosystem and have time and interest to become one of the initial Makers, to live and work with us on the DApp, please leave your info here, we will be reaching out to you in the coming months.

And if you’d like to talk to us right now make sure to join the #communities room on Riot Chat and ask us anything.

Today marks the start of an exciting new chapter for Giveth, and we hope you will help us Build the Future of Giving. Join us today.

Warm regards,

Giveth

• Join us on Riot or Slack
• Discover our Site and Wiki
• Fork our code on GitHub
• Follow us on Medium, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

Where are we NOW? Status of the Giveth DApp was originally published in Giveth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.