#0 [đź’” declined] DAO proposal: invest on the DAO code

As you’re all probably very aware, @pet3rpan has forked Moloch and convinced a bunch of us to create a Metacartel DAO. It now has about less than 20 members and about $200-250k on it. Peter can give the exact amounts. While it’s a great achievement it’s by no means a fortune and we have a limited window of attention to turn it into something great.

Compared to other projects, it starts short on cash and short on time, but it is still abundant in it’s ability to cause impact. That is why I propose that the first round of funding should go on the DAO itself, to increase it, build on the basic Moloch game theory and conquer it’s own personality. Here are the main changes I believe should be worked on:

1. Grant tokens in small continuous amounts

Every proposal would have 3 main asks: a (smaller) amount of upfront tokens, a rate in which new tokens are paid over time and a deadline at which that rate ends. The amount of tokens anyone has at any given point, for all practical purposes (ragequit, voting, etc) are always set at (amount of tokens in balance) + (rate of new tokens) * ( ( current time or the end of contract, whichever is smaller) - (last date in which the rate was changed)). While tokens that were given cannot be taken away, the rate of new tokens can be changed at any time, via the normal proposal mechanism. It creates the following incentives:

  • Grantees are “contracted” and paid continuously over time, but they can be “fired” at any moment (with the proper notice being the usual time delays required for voting a proposal), creating a better incentive for responsible, long term and mutually benefitial relationships between grantees and the DAO.

  • All relationships have a deadline so the default action if noone is taken is to end any relationship (grantee or member) that doesn’t bother to justify it’s own value

  • Inactive Members are diluted away. In the beginning, all members getting 100 shares or 1 share per day is identical for all voting matters. But over time, as new shares are continuously given and some members are dropped off, then the old shares of inactive members are dilluted in their power, therefore guaranteeing that the most active voting power remains to current members, not only founders who have long gone

  • It’s more in line with current experiments that are gathering attention, like Vitalik’s DAICO, or Andrew Yang’s push for Basic Income and therefore is more likely to capture the public’s mind and be more aligned with future use cases

  • It’s very easy to implement. Really, it’s a few extra lines of code, I can do the basic changes myself (but it’s better to add more automated tests)

Other possible improvements are…

2) Allow multiple tokens to be used

This is specially relevant with the previous point. If the DAO can use the power of a continuously interest paying token like cDAI, then it would make even more sense for it to pay in a continuous aspec. We can even imagine a scenario in the future that the DAO has enough cash to be able to fund projects forever with just the interest

3) Experiment with more voting schemas

Traditionally in schemes like these, only a small amount of the total members are active, but with a few governance experiments we can make sure that votes are still aligned with the overall will of all members. For instance, what if when a proposal is rejected, all the members who voted against it have their shares slashed by 1-5%, while those who successfully predicted the result by voting with it have their shares increased? What if we experiment with liquid delegate voting or other continuous models? Or also go with the continuous voting system and try “conviction voting”. This is an area in which I don’t claim to know the answers but I would love to see more participation

Who would the money actually go to?

The one and only Austin Griffith, of course! This is where we can kill two stones with a single bird (or something like that): Austin has experience building continuous payments schemes, and has a great track record at making acessible experiments, and he just happens to be available and looking to work in open source community funded experiments. So we pay Austin for a few months of work to build this our current Vanilla Moloch DAO into something unique.

6 Likes

Yes! Great suggestions to be implemented into the DAO. However I question how much should we budgeting for improvements on the DAO vs. funding for application projects that advance UX, Usability or new usecases? Maybe for every 3 grants, we have 1 meta improvement grant.

Improvement proposals:

  1. Streamed continuous payments for workers of the DAO
  2. Integration of CDAI, exciting point of paying folks just using interest
  3. Experiment with voting schemas

I am quite more excited about options 1 & 2, as they can perhaps add more immediate value to the DAO workers and members. Whereas with option 3, I expect us to still rely a bit more on soft signaling and voting for a while, I think that a simple voting scheme works for the short term, until we introduce more members and perhaps want to improve our ability to form better consensus.

2 Likes

Agree with Peter here.

Proposals 1 and 2 seem easy enough to implement and huge marginal improvements.

As we are trying to get some initial grants out the door for the first wave, I believe it would be beneficial to focus on those.

Voting schema experimentation and share dilution would take a significant amount of thought to do correctly. Perhaps something we can revisit later (if / when we experience members being less active than desired)

A mistake here, option 2 CDAI would also involve a DAO contract migration - an effort that I would not advise for us at the moment. But definitely a migration we move if when we have a significant amount of ETH.

For now, I think an immediate value-add would be to figure out to enable streamed token contracts.

Proposed draft requirements

1 Like

Hey everyone!

I’m dumbfounded to stumble upon this thread and see how much overlap there is between MetaCartel and Sablier. We’re working on strikingly similar things and I’m looking forward to seeing if and how we could collaborate.

I describe Sablier as a decentralised app for continuous salaries, but the smart contracts that power the UI could be used as an “SDK” for money streaming - in fact, this is one of my major goals for the rest of the year, to separate the protocol from the payroll dapp (which is in beta now).


And also ERC-1620, which is implemented in this monorepo.


That’s exactly how Sablier streams work. @pet3rpan’s sketch explains it very well too.


Here’s a screenshot for how the redeem functionality (“firing” grantees) works in the beta dapp.

I also recorded myself demo-ing how to cancel a continuous salary, a video which is part of the How to Use Sablier playlist.


Sablier works with any ERC-20. For token bundles, we could use SetProtocol.

I discussed how businesses and organisations could leverage cTokens in this Twitter thread.


I’ve been working alone on this for quite a while, but I recently started looking for a grant/ small investment to fund myself and one or two additional engineers.

There are many things we have to do to make the protocol and the dapp really usable.

  1. Conduct a security audit. Talking with companies interested in money streaming, I quickly realised they are all reluctant to deposit 6-digit salaries in a dapp that some guy announced on Twitter.
  2. Ship a secure javascript/solidity SDK so that projects like MetaCartel DAO can use our software for continuous payments.
  3. Implement ERC-1337 so that we can extend a salary from the current month to the next one.
  4. Integrate Compound, a few web3 providers other than MetaMask etc.
  5. Surprisingly, many employees working for crypto startups never used an Ethereum wallet. Implementing meta transactions would make the UX so much better.

Great points, Paul! I’ve been hearing people point out Sablier quite often. Maybe you should apply for a grant in metacartel too, to build this?

1 Like

I’ll probably do it soon - I read the criteria for evaluating funding proposals and Sablier pretty much checks all the requirements.

Hey @PaulRBerg! Excited for the work you’re doing with Sablier. Just wanted to clarify that the criteria thread was just an initial proposal and hasn’t been agreed upon by the group. I just edited the title of the thread to make that more clear.

Feel free to apply and hopefully we can find a way to help or be useful :slight_smile:

Howdy @yaniv :wave:

That’s awesome, thanks for the update!