Eight characteristics to test the "purity" of various DAOs on the market

Jan 21, 2022

In the world of blockchain, there are many terms consisting of three English letters. From ICO to STO, there are IEO, ITO, IDO, and of course the hot NFT. It's an interesting phenomenon that the whole society is using technical terms, but a lot of times, although everyone says ABC, everyone doesn't say the same ABC. For example, it is becoming popular to say DAO again, but it is difficult to adjust. Organizations that call themselves DAOs include almost any type of collaboration. It seems that soon a few friends will pool money to eat, and they will soon be called Dinner DAOs.

I do not intend to deny other organizational types, but I will take LikeCoin as an example to explain the characteristics of a rigorous DAO and how it works by dismantling an actual implementation proposal in depth.

LikeCoin DAO was established independently from Ethereum on 2019.11.15, also known as the Republic of Liker Land. Over the past two years, LikeCoin DAO has voted on 30 proposals, and is processing proposals 31 and 32, which involve policy, economy, technology and other aspects.

For example, last month's Motion 28 was about hiring promotion company Irtysh Digital to manage the LikeCoin Twitter account, and allocated 164,616 LIKEs from the Community Pool to its wallet as compensation.

Although the proposal is simple and the amount involved is not high, in-depth analysis shows that the Citizen Republic is appreciated as a DAO in the true sense, surpassing the eight characteristics of traditional governance.

1. Code is law: Code is the law

100% of LikeCoin DAO's public funds are stored in the Community Pool, which is a community pool specially designed for code. There is no corresponding private key or even a wallet address. The only way to use the assets inside is to put forward a proposal, let the community vote and judge the voting result by the code. If the proposal is passed, the assets will be automatically transferred by the Community Pool immediately, and the whole process will not be done manually. Motion 28 was voted to pass at 2020.12.30 15:10:41, and the program code instantly transfers funds to the amount and address specified in the motion in the same block.

2. Trustlessness: No need for a foundation of trust

All public funds are managed by the program code, which is the highest standard in the decentralized spectrum. For most of the public chains in the industry, a certain amount of public funds are still managed by the project party, which is flexibly used for various ecological promotion activities such as publicity and development; LikeCoin also adopted this method in the early stage, but the public funds have been withdrawn with the cancellation of the foundation. Full transfer to Community Pool. Entrusting public funds in the foundation is through the traditional governance mechanism, and trusting the parties will not enrich their personal pockets; if they are stored in the Community Pool, which is guarded by code, there is no need to trust anyone, because technically no one can enrich their private pockets.

3. Decentralized: no platform

The full name of DAO is decentralized autonomous organization, and the absence of a single power center is naturally one of the necessary characteristics. There is no great platform that can be manifested in various levels, and there are also degrees of a whole spectrum. For example, Proposal 28 reflects decentralized procurement, so that procurement is authorized by the referendum, and service providers are responsible to all stakeholders; collusion between officials and businesses is avoided, and private grants and acceptances are avoided.

4. Autonomous: Community autonomy

LikeCoin DAO allows the community to decide public policies by itself through the collaborative mechanism of liquid democracy, and stakeholders control their own destiny. Each individual is a stakeholder with space to think independently, and no one can govern it from the top down. All stakeholders can drive policy and need to be discussed openly in a civilized manner, explaining the pros and cons and convincing the community to support it. Before the passage of Motion 28, Irtysh Digital had publicly explained the company's publicity experience and future work plans, and accepted questions.

5. Permissionless: Free Participation

The proposer of Proposal 28 is not a validator, and only mortgaged 1 LIKE as a deposit when proposing. There are no prerequisites for participating in any DAO work, whether it is proposing a proposal, staking support, voting, or becoming a validator. Regardless of race, gender, nationality, color, religion, anyone who wants to participate can participate; there is no approval committee within the DAO, which can shut out indifferent stakeholders.

6. Privacy by default: Default privacy

The default identity of the stakeholder is a wallet address, there is no KYC (three-letter term again), and it is not mandatory to associate with the physical world identity. For example, the proposer of the proposal 28 is cosmos1ecpa7m0nfr8d69p7tq0kz3hr0kp6zwx3ca47uf, and there is no need to disclose the identity. The focus of the proposal is on the content. Although it is not mandatory, individuals can disclose their identities and even related titles according to their own circumstances. The receiving address of Motion 28, cosmos143r2naeehd4kx0h32xpu55zzkvnh4l9pzp3xx3, is the wallet disclosed by Irtysh Digital. Another example is my wallet, which is directly associated with the @ckxpress account name, and the on-chain behavior is completely transparent.

7. Open data: Open data

The governance of LikeCoin DAO is all on-chain data, which can be freely consulted by those who understand technology. In addition, various "blockchain browsers" such as Big Dipper, the "Etherscan" of the Cosmos ecosystem, allow non-technical stakeholders to easily view all historical on-chain data through a web interface.

Eight, Immutable: can not be tampered with

Just like assets on the Bitcoin chain, every action of LikeCoin on-chain governance is data that cannot be tampered with. Every proposed proposal and every voting decision is clearly written on the chain, and neither votes can be changed to cheat, nor history can be erased. The attachment of Motion 28 is written in IPFS without a large hard disk instead of a traditional online document, in order to further achieve the effect of non-tampering and co-preservation.

Since 2019, the LikeCoin community has been evolving towards a pure DAO with extremely rigorous standards, step by step. Today, more than two years later, a seemingly unremarkable proposal reflects the characteristics of the above eight items that are absent from most “DAOs” in the world today.

Next, LikeCoin DAO will continue to take the most serious attitude to push the latest collaboration method of human society to the extreme and create democracy.

I am the author of "Blockchain Sociology: Reimagining Money, Media and Democracy " Gao Reconstruction , slash writing/teaching/entrepreneurship, exploring freedom of the press , financial freedom and democratic freedom , published every Friday in #decentralizehk weekly .

These articles are fully open and aimed at popularizing knowledge; if you believe in value, don't punish openness and encourage closure, please pay for a subscription and support me to keep doing it.

[ Course funding support ]