OrgTech Review #14
dOrg Limited Liability DAO, StandardBounties 2.0, Ethfinex DAO, and more!
The latest issues of OrgTech Weekly haven't been strictly "weekly", due to time spent on developments behind the scenes. The hope is that these will allow me to scale OrgTech Review and bring more original insights on top of the news roundups. The first development is the introduction of Theodor Beutel to the team, who helped me co-write this issue! Theo is a long-time community member of the DAO space, who is working on governance innovation across fields, from international development at GIZ Blockchain Lab to organisational technology at DAOincubator, and was the first ever guest on DAOstack's podcast. As for the rest, watch this space!
Previously on OrgTech Review
Most clicked: DAOstack - The Future of Smart Companies, Colony - Introducing Glider, MetaCartel DAO - Accelerator Applications Now Open.
Project News
Aragon
Proposal Agreements and the Aragon Court. Luke Duncan explains in more detail the upcoming functionality. Organisations will be able to define subjective rules that determine valid proposals, stored in a document on IPFS, and use the Aragon Court to enforce those rules.
Aragon Black Monthly #2: A History of Decentralization. In this essay, Aragon Black touches on the history of the nation state and decentralist revolutions, the origin of Aragon's name, the meaning of decentralisation, and specific modern case studies.
Minor Aragon 0.7.4 update, with enhancements to the labeling system. Also, email notifications coming soon.
Bounties Network
Ushering In a New Era of Bounties: Going Live with StandardBounties 2.0. Bounties Network have released a significant upgrade to their generalized bounties smart contracts. Bounties can now include non-fungible tokens, multiple payout recipients, and dynamic payouts (e.g. milestone-based piecemeal payments). Also, with their new Meta Transaction Relayer, the gas for transactions can now be paid by third party sponsors. Note that these contracts underpin Gitcoin and Aragon Projects, so you can expect this functionality to find its way into those apps too.
Commons Stack
Michael Zargham | BlockScience | Commons Stack - DAOcast podcast. BlockScience founder and long-time computational social science researcher Michael Zargham shares his perspective, his work on the Commons Stack, and cadCAD - the complex systems simulation software.
DAOstack
Holographic Consensus - Part 2. After discussing the model conceptually in Part 1, Part 2 defines an MVP specification that is embodied in v0.2 of DAOstack's Genesis protocol. DAO members can attempt to highlight (upstake) or minimise (downstake) a proposal by staking DAOstack's GEN tokens based on their prediction that it will pass. The proposal will be "boosted" if the confidence score (upstakes/downstakes) is persistently greater than the boosting threshold, which grows exponentially with the number of currently boosted proposals. More details on the GEN Predictors Network here.
Ethfinex Launches Funding DAO. The 21 founding members consists of three equally sized groups - the largest token holders, active community volunteers, and existing Ethfinex team members - who will govern a trial budget of $5,000. Others can join the DAO by successfully submitting proposals.
KyberDAO Experiment #2 on DAOstack. After their first experiment with Aragon, Kyber Network are now running a test DAO on DAOstack, with a trial budget of $4,500.
dOrg
dOrg Launches Limited Liability DAO. The blockchain development cooperative, who has been working closely with DAOstack, formed a blockchain-based limited liability company (BBLLC) in Vermont and linked it to their DAO. This enables the DAO to enter contractual agreements and offer participants liability protections. Contractors of the DAO are issued with the appropriate jurisdictional tax forms and “the Operating Agreement establishes that the Company will only accept requests to perform services for Clients, allocate work and renumeration to Participants, add new Participants, and distribute voting rights through the DAO’s decision-making engine.” More details here.
Memorandum of Understanding. A few days later, dOrg LLC and Open, Esq LLC, an Aragon LLC-DAO, formed the first memorandum of understanding between two limited liability DAOs, to collaborate on LLC-DAO pilots and develop a tool that will enable other DAOs to establish their legal identity.
Edgeware
Edgeware's Unusual Lockdrop: Get Tokens Even With Frozen Funds - Unconfirmed Podcast. Dillon Chen appeared on Laura Shin's podcast, explaining lockdrops as a novel mechanism to distribute tokens and looking ahead at Edgeware's role in the Polkadot ecosystem. Edgeware's lockdrop is ongoing (stats here).
Edgeware introduces OurNode. This DAO for Web3 server infrastructure operates like Moloch DAO, in that you can't withdraw money but you can "rage quit" after losing a vote. You can earn OurNode DAO tokens by donating server resources or donating EDG/DOT tokens. To access the server resources, you will need to burn OurNode DAO tokens.
Moloch
Moloch receives support from DAOstack. With its membership proposal passed, DAOstack committed 100 ETH and offers Moloch expertise, tools and lessons learned from Genesis DAO, it's own community DAO.
Wetonomy
Wetonomy embraces the DAT paradigm, implementing the Decentralised Autonomous Trust (DAT) smart contract design from Thibaud Favre's continuous organisations into their DAO framework.
Brain Food
At the first talk of YC's Summer 2019 batch, Airbnb advocated for startups focusing more on community stakeholders, echoing the principals of the crypto movement. a16z Crypto partner Jesse Walden highlighted the link to OrgTech and DAOs, concluding that "the next frontier [of crypto] is providing online communities with new tools to harness their collaborative energy."
Can DAOs compete with platforms?. Digital platforms fail due to pricing decisions, lack of trust, amongst others, according to this study. Through transparent and self-enforcing smart contracts, DAOs may increase a platform's chance of survival by creating trust among stakeholders, even when they are anonymous. However, decentralisation may be a hindrance to agreeing on politically controversial yet critical pricing decisions when subsidies are beneficial to network effects and long-term user growth.
Aragon, DAOstack, Colony, Moloch. A comparison. Aragon provides a modular backbone that supports any decision-making mechanism, which may make it easier for them to build out a developer ecosystem. DAOstack explicitly prioritises decentralised decision-making at scale, targeting the problem of attention with their "holographic consensus" model (linked above). Colony's focus is designing mechanisms that don't rely on voting, overcoming inertia with time-driven reputation mechanics that help workers "get shit done". Moloch is a "minimum viable process" for resource allocation, which prioritises minority protection with a novel "rage quit" mechanism.
Beyond OrgTech
Libra Association, the entity behind Facebook's newly revealed digital currency, may be governed in a more "open and collaborative" way than some anticipated. The white paper states that the Libra Association "will develop a path toward permissionless governance" and aims to "start this transition within five years". It remains to be seen whether such intentions materialise, given that key decisions require a two-thirds supermajority among validator nodes, which are initially provided by the founding members, including VISA, PayPal, eBay, and Uber, and carry a $10M membership fee.
Events
19 June - The Year of the DAO (Ljubljana)
27-28 June - OPEN 2019: Decentralised Collaboration (London)
28 June - DAO Crash Test #3, Aragon Edition (Online)
19-21 August - Web3 Summit (Berlin)