Prime Deals: Trustless DAO2DAO, the cryptonative way
Enforceable, accountable, and transparent on-chain agreements between DAOs
We summarized our vision for the future of DAO-2-DAO (D2D) negotiations back in May, and now it’s evolving into a reality. Prime Deals is a framework for DAOs to collaborate and negotiate in a neutral environment, creating verifiable and enforceable social contracts.
This ground-breaking architecture excels in creating meaningful and transparent agreements, which we hope to offer better trust and collaboration throughout the entire Ethereum ecosystem. Trust and collaboration are crucial foundations for flourishing an interconnected web of communities. Let’s break down what Prime Deals is all about and look at the advantages it offers over the status quo of D2D negotiation methods.
What is Prime Deals?
At its core, Prime Deals is a framework of DApps for negotiating and executing enforceable, on-chain agreements between DAOs. It combines Ethereum smart contracts with a smooth UX that allows DAOs to collaborate confidently. Prime Deals satisfies three core principles:
- Agnostic: Any DAO that can issue external transaction calls can use Prime’s D2D mechanism. Moloch DAOs, Aragon DAOs, Gnosis Safes; all are compatible with Prime Deals.
- Trustless: All parties can recover any funding issued for a D2D collaboration when all conditions are not satisfied.
- Flexible: The D2D prototype goes beyond traditional escrow mechanisms to allow for flexible negotiations that operate closer to existing, real-world negotiations.
The Prime Deals interface will provide diverse deals cases, starting with Token Swaps, followed by Joint Ventures, Co-liquidity Pools, and Co-liquidity Farms.
Token Swap
Drafting a Token Swap agreement is used when DAO tokens or the DAO’s assets are swapped or utilized to establish an alignment between multiple DAOs or another common purpose. It will be the first tool to come online within the Prime Deals framework. It can manifest as simply exchanging governance tokens for mutual skin-in-the-game/ alignment or movement of DAO funds between parties to fulfill specific Deal clauses. The Token Swap interface has several customizable parameters, including:
- Vesting options for different DAOs
- An unlimited amount of DAOs can participate in a Swap
- Multiple tokens from a DAO’s treasury can be swapped simultaneously
- Assign representatives for each participating DAO
- Correlate on-chain addresses with off-chain digital identities
Our UX also offers a transparent system for drafting clauses of an agreement, and providing relevant discussion channels will make DAO Token Swaps via Prime Deals transparent, consensual and effective.
At the technical level, Prime Deals employs a base smart contract that facilitates the interactions on the UI and coordinates the currently deployed and used modules. When the DAOs have agreed on all terms on the Prime Deals UI, the deal admin submits the information, and the on-chain phase of the deal is created. A Deposit Smart Contract is spun up for each of the DAOs submitting tokens as per the Deal identifier. If all the conditions of the Token Swap are met, the deal admin can finalize and execute the deal on-chain, sending the tokens that are part of the deal to the specified recipients (or to a vesting contract if vesting is being used.). If an agreement goes sour and the Deal’s clauses are broken or are not met before the on-chain execution period, each DAO can claim their funds back from their corresponding deposit contract on the Prime Deals UI.
How does the Token Swap work?
To begin drafting a Deal, a DAOplomat will have to outline the basics of the proposal: A title, a summary, then a description with the finer points of the agreement. Following that, both parties need to provide the technical details: an Ethereum Address of the proposal lead as well as addresses for the representatives of each DAO at the negotiating table. The proponent will also specify which tokens they’re proposing to swap and in what amounts, there’s an option as well to add social media handles for off-chain coordination and communication.
DAOs will be able to define clear clauses of the deal that become the single source of truth for agreement. Furthermore, a Deal can be specified as private, meaning the Deal details will not be published publicly until negotiations reach a level where all participants are ready to reveal them
Proponents can also integrate links to previous discussions and define an “expiry date” or on-chain execution period to stipulate when the agreement must be executed.
Why is this framework necessary?
The critical architecture built by Prime Deals will revolutionize DeFi, DeGov, and how DAOs collaborate. No more chat room dealings with uncertain terms and unreliable outcomes. Having a common ground and trusted platform where DAOs can meet and hash out agreements with clear, on-chain implications will make D2D negotiations easier and more accessible than ever before.
The ability to designate DAO representatives will clarify agency roles within a negotiation process. Having community input is valuable, however, at an inter-organizational level can create confusion and befuddle communications.
By the implementation of clauses, we have verifiable terms of a deal that are transparent and uncensorable. Prime Deals creates a single source of truth on which multiple parties can rely. To nurture the DAOverse to its full potential we need better tools for DAOs to negotiate and build relationships. Prime Deals, notably Token Swaps, are the first foray into this essential tooling. Stay tuned for more updates to Prime Deals, including the release of Joint Ventures, Co-liquidity Pools, and Co-liquidity Farms to the DApp framework. Watch this space.
Hungry for more?
PrimeDAO has a wealth of D2D services, notably Prime Launch. It is a cutting-edge decentralized and curated token offering platform powered by Balancer V 2.0, enabling fair and user-friendly token launches. Projects can use Prime Launch to create different types of token launches that coincide with the values of an organization. No coding required.
Prime Rating allows anyone to create and review technical and fundamental analyses of DAOs and DeFi projects and see their overall rating among the ecosystem. This system provides a neutral and all-encompassing opinion on open finance protocols. Raters are rewarded in reputation tokens and $D2D.
Building off of Prime Rating and Prime Deals will be the release of Prime Pools, which will frictionlessly manage protocol-owned liquidity and create index pools of value-aligned DAOs and DeFi protocols via Balancer.
Lastly, we will be co-developing Proposal Inverter with a couple of partner DAOs, a new funding receiver primitive that will allow DAOs to pool resources and co-fund open research/crowdfunded initiatives through semi-automated payment flows. PrimeDAO is poised to overhaul DAOs and D2D collaboration tools as we know them, no better time to get primed.
