We Elected 9 Multisig Owners!
After two weeks of open elections, 23 candidates and a lot of excitement, we finally have our custodians for the Trips tokens!
Here’s how it works:
- We will create a 6-out-of-9 wallet in Gnosis Safe.
- We will move the Trips tokens to the wallet.
- Every time we need some Trips tokens we will initiate a transaction and instruct the Multisig Owners to sign it. We’ll need at least 6 signatures to make it go through.
When this process is completed, control of the Trips tokens will be effectively delegated out of my hands.
- “So, who will control them?”
Let’s make one thing clear, because I know this tends to be hard to understand:
The Multisig Owners do not take decisions.
They only execute transactions when instructed to do so by Trips Community.
They are not the board but act, in fact, as notaries.
We could call them “custodians of the tokens” and make sure not a single person can run away with them or lose the private keys.
Ok, I did all I can to avoid the term “bankers”, but that’s probably the closest thing.
Except that they don’t profit from it or lend the money.
It just sits in a vault, and they have the keys, while the tokens belong to the Community.
So, how did it go?
I must say, I am pretty satisfied with the results because some important conditions have been met:
1) High Technical knowledge
To be a Multisig Owner you need to know how to store safely the private keys. You can’t lose them or let someone steal them.
It’s not super hard stuff but you must understand that those 12 or 24 magic words are powerful, not just a password you can lose and replace.
So, having a daily exposure to crypto is really important.
8 out of 9 of these people are advanced crypto users, one is probably not, so we will take extra care in training him.
2) Low Collusion Probability
If six of them meet in a shady bar or online chat room, they could effectively drain the funds.
This is in theory possible but still less probable than me running away with the money, lose the keys or get robbed with a 5 U$ wrench.
So, it’s a very important improvement.
These people don’t know each other.
There are 5 Trips Community members and most of them have never met each other.
I know almost all of them personally, except Carla78.
The only way for the five Trips Community members to collude would be to convince one of the other four to join.
The other four owners are highly respected and well known individuals who won’t burn their reputation.
Now, as the value of the token grows, as we of course hope, all kind of risks increase.
We’ll adapt when the time comes, split the treasury into several wallets, add time locks and whatever this ever evolving industry will throw at us.
For the very low value and liquidity the Trips tokens have today, this setting is more than enough.
Compare this to the 27 U$ millions in dev funds $Sushi had drained or the 1 B U$ sitting on a wallet held by an anonymous user in Harvest Finance.
(Note, I don’t have a position on this specific matter, I’m just using as an example). *
In fact, Trips now has a world-class army protecting a small grocery shop.
There is virtually no chance collusion happens at this stage.
3) Wide Industry representation
Trips has a foot in the ailing rentals space (I don’t call it “vacation rentals anymore, this was the pre-covid world) and one in the thriving blockchain space.
We act, in fact, as a bridge between these two distant universes.
The composition of the group is perfect:
- 8 have deep knowledge of crypto.
- 2 are protocol level crypto experts.
- 6 are vacation rentals experts, two of them at the highest levels.
Five of them are from Italy, but this was expected: Trips is foremost an Italian project.
They don’t all know each other.
4) Huge Credibility
We’ve got some big names, and we couldn’t be more thankful.
Richard Vaughton is one of the most respected figures in the whole space.
You can’t go to a conference without seeing in on the stage in several panels.
He’s also the founder of Yes Consulting, a new consulting firm with many experts in it.
Chris Maughan runs a Trust-As-A-Service company, I-Prac which is growing rapidly confirming the fact that trust is what we need today in this space.
As Web3 is also called the Internet of Trust it’s understandable why he wants to be close to the action.
Josh Fraser and Matthew Liu are giants in the startup and blockchain space.
Just to give you an idea, Matt was the 3rd project manager at, well, Youtube.
Together with Josh they launched Origin Protocol in 2017 and innovated ever since.
Recently they launched OUSD, a stable coin meant to facilitate transactions in marketplaces and at the same time pay a nice interest (about 7% per year at the moment), by leveraging the assets on yield farms.
Hosts will be able to be paid in a coin always worth 1 USD and earn interests while they stay in their wallets.
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Blockchain Protocols + Stable Coins (Origin Protocol | OUSD)
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Blockchain
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Internet
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Real World
The Other Candidates
I want to express my gratitude to all the candidates.
Some of you may have gotten more people voting than the elected ones, but this is how this round worked: the more Trips tokens one had, the more weight it brought.
Having said that, decentralized governance is far from mature.
Many had Trips in the liquidity pool, and they didn’t count, as they should.
Others didn’t know you could move the tokens to a wallet and vote, or vote with several wallets.
Some left their Trezor hardware wallet home while travelling around a COVID-19 ravaged Europe.
Some voted “No” by mistake and so on.
As a result I can openly say these were not perfectly executed elections, the technology and education are not there yet.
But they were effective: we got what we needed.
Here’s another weird crypto thing: you can have unfair elections and it’s still OK.
That’s because there were 100% transparent.
(By the way, you can see the election results here).
Testing Our Way into the Treasury
We’ll take the slow and safe route.
First we’ll all test on Rinkeby, to make sure everyone knows what they are doing with zero risks.
Then we will create the real wallet on Mainnet, move some small funds and try a transaction for everyone to sign.
After that we’ll define some rules:
- How often move to funds: we need to find a balance which makes us sure everyone still has the keys and the same time don’t bother the owners with too much work. Something like every 3 months at the beginning and then once per year may be fine, but we’ll discuss it and research what the industry standards are.
- How many signatures one can skip before is considered a not active owner.
And some more for sure.
About a month from the first implementation we will replace Francesco with Valerio who classified in 10th position.
We’ll do that as a live test for replacements.
After all we can’t expect everyone to be a Multisig Owner for the next five decades
Conclusion
Thanks to anyone who has helped and will help.
It’s amazing to see how this space allows more and more decentralized cooperation to happen.
Being part of it is extremely exciting, challenging and, I must admit entertaining.
(*) I wrote this on the 23rd of October and three days later about 30 M U$ were stolen. Would you believe it?
