OrgTech Review #6
Pando live on Rinkeby, dxDAO whitepaper draft published, Coinbase adding governance services, and more!
Previously on OrgTech Review
Most clicked: Discovering the Dark Side of Self-Organisation, The Year of the DAO Comeback, MeshHub sneak peek (at 1:01:00).
Project News
DAOstack
dxDAO Whitepaper draft. Outlines more details of how to participate, the DutchX trading protocol, and Gnosis' use of DAOstack for governance.
Reputation vs Tokens. DAOstack's CTO argues that reputation-voting is more defensible than token-voting because reputation is burnable (you don't own it) and non-transferable, which limits vote buying, bribery, and means a bad actor's voting rights can be slashed at any time. These benefits make reputation-voting more suitable for frequent and non-objective decisions.
DAOcast is Back. This episode shares what to expect from Season 2.
Edgeware (by Commonwealth Labs)
Edgeware Ambassador Program. Join a "volunteer think-tank for decentralized governance".
Gitcoin
A Gitcoin Bounty Platform Fee. Gitcoin are introducing a 10% fee for all bounties posted on their marketplace.
Giveth
The Future of Giving is Crowdfunding the Commons. "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".
Kleros
Decentralizing Exchange Listings: What Have We Learned So Far?. How Kleros is helping the Ethfinex community govern token listings.
MakerDAO
Coinbase Custody to launch in-app Maker and Tezos voting in Q2 2019, as part of a broader move towards providing governance services to clients.
MolochDAO
Moloch is now open for the community to join. Read the "summoning guide" here.
Pando
Pando live on Rinkeby. The decentralised GitHub will enable repositories to be controlled by DAOs. Coming to mainnet later this year.
Sobol
The mysterious ConsenSys project’s website was quietly updated with more information. Sobol is an interface for self-organising firms to map out organisation charts and employee responsibilities, helping to maintain accountability at scale.
Brain Food
There was a lot of thoughtful content this week, which I decided to give some extra attention. We'll return to looking Beyond OrgTech next week.
Fostering Worker Cooperatives with Blockchain Technology: Lessons from the Colony Project: The scarcity of worker cooperatives can be attributed to non-conducive legal environments, scarce financing options, and coordination problems that only grow worse with scale. OrgTech (and Colony specifically) promises to revitalise cooperatives by providing intuitive platforms that solve these problems.
A Relative Value Model for Governance Tokens: Coinfund's founder outlines how governance tokens can be valued based on their "decisiveness", i.e. how often a stake can overturn the outcome of a vote. Tweetstorm summary here.
Ethereum is game-changing technology, literally: Serving as an incorruptible enforcement layer, Ethereum can turn any non-cooperative game into a cooperative game, by enabling players to set up credible triggerable punishments that "warp" the game's payoffs.
Coinvoting ≠ Plutocracy: Luke Duncan (Aragon) argues that since, unlike states, you can be a member of multiple blockchains simultaneously, how much of the blockchain's assets you own is a representation of your interest in that chain, rather than your total wealth. In this case, democratic governance wouldn't fairly represent interests, but would actually make the chain more vulnerable to attacks.
Coinvoting = Plutocracy: Elsewhere, Santiago Siri (Democracy Earth) argues that coinvoting is unsuitable when blockchains are public goods. In this case, unlocking one-person-one-vote functionality is the most important goal for governance projects.
Ethereum governance has failed: Lane Rettig (Ethereum core dev) laments that Ethereum is a technocracy that, faced with non-technical decisions, won't make decisions. Vlad Zamfir (Ethereum researcher) argues that this doesn't represent failure, just the misuse of a governance institution that was designed for technical decisions. Also check out Boris Mann's in-depth overview of Ethereum governance.
Blockchain Voter Apathy: Low voter turnouts can be attributed to lack of subject matter expertise, friction in voting infrastructure, opportunity costs (in the case of designs which require token locking), and lack of direct financial incentives (which is why Proof-of-Stake chains like Tezos, Cosmos, and Decred, tend to have higher turnouts). Polkadot and DFINITY are given as interesting examples of novel governance designs.
Events
15-30 April - Ethereal Hackathon by Gitcoin and Microsoft (Global)
16 April - Decentralized Governance and DAOs (Amsterdam)
27 April - DAOcon (Croatia)
30 April - Governance and new organizational challenges (Brussels)
8 May - How to organize your community-driven initiative using a DAO (Netherlands)
10-11 May - Blockchain for Science steps 2019 (Barcelona)