A Simplified Overview of rLoop
What is rLoop?
rLoop is a decentralized and crowdsourced engineering organization. We are re-defining how people organize and collaborate to engineer solutions to the world’s greatest challenges. Our mission is to develop and launch innovative technology fueled by a genuine desire to improve the world and humanity.
rLoop mitigates the risk of early-stage R&D by leveraging an untapped global pool of talent and resources, harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, and facilitating group coordination. Over the past three years of operation, rLoop has developed and tested processes for collaboration on complex and interdependent work with a view to advance from conceptualization to prototype to launch in the shortest possible time frame (think weeks to months, instead of years).
What is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization?
A decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, is a centerless network of peers governing democratically or meritocratically with company functions and rules enforced digitally. Blockchain technology has permitted this new type of structure to exist without a formal hierarchy, thanks to smart contracts with verifiable rules that cannot be broken and which can only be altered in accordance with the rules themselves. Instead of centralized management, a DAO facilitates coordination among an amorphous group through incentive and code. In the rLoop model, there is a native token (RLP) tied to the projects and resources of the network, a reputation system which determines credibility and influence within projects, and a governance system encoded in smart contracts.
Why Decentralize?
Some of the major benefits of decentralization include:
- No single point of failure. Decentralized systems rely on many separate components and, as such, have much higher fault tolerance.
- No single point of control. As decentralized systems do not have sensitive central points of failure, they are incredibly difficult to manipulate.
- Collusion resistance. It would be very difficult for participants in a decentralized organization to act in a manner that would benefit themselves at the expense of other members.
- Scalability. Unlike legacy corporations, which become less efficient as they grow in number, a decentralized organization operates with the efficiency and agility of free markets, while maintaining the ability to pursue scalable projects with a startup mentality.
rLoop Governance
As the governance system for rLoop requires resilience to manipulation, a token itself is not sufficient to represent voting rights. If tokens represent influence, and tokens can be traded, then the risk is the potential for the wealthy few to dictate control over the network. This would be a pseudo-plutocracy, which seems to be becoming more common in decentralized projects.
The rLoop solution is a non-transferable reputation system. This dynamic rating system, measured across a variety of metrics, encourages and rewards productive activity and contributions while discouraging counterproductive and malicious activity. The reputation of contributors to the network will affect their rights and responsibilities, thereby ensuring contributors of value to the network have meaningful involvement in the governance of the organization.
