Description
Sporos is building a platform that enables DAOs to launch in a legally compliant way, and to distribute equity in the form of tokens on-chain using our sweat equity system.
Vision
Our belief is that Ethereum offers a technical foundation for a new economic system, and we envision a future where more and more economic activity is moved onto the blockchain. There have already been great strides made in DeFi, and the core infrastructure and tooling of Ethereum is improving at pace. But there is a fundamental gap in the ecosystem’s development efforts: legal engineering. To realise the full benefits of the migration of economic activity to Ethereum, there must be a fusion between the traditional methods of organising economic activity, and the new technological solutions to coordination which Ethereum provides us.
Traditionally, economic activity is secured through legal contracts backed by a sovereign state. In the new world built on Ethereum, economic activity is secured through smart contracts and tokens. If Ethereum is to rival the size and scale of traditional economies, we need to incorporate the laws of the land into our products and services and we need to do it on-chain. This is what motivates Sporos.
Problem
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It is currently difficult and expensive to launch businesses on-chain that are legally compliant and limit the liability of members.
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Attracting, compensating and fairly rewarding contributors during the bootstrapping phase of start-ups is v.hard, especially in the decentralized world of web3.
Solution
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A simple and compliant DAO setup process
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An on-chain sweat equity management product
Our solution allows founders to tokenize the work that goes into their projects, and reward contributors with sweat equity that is represented on-chain and represents legal ownership over the enterprise. We bridge the gap between the legal contracts of web2 businesses and the tokenized world of web3.
Product Features
- DAO formation on Arbitrum
- Limited Liability Company (LLC) formation on Arbitrum under the Kali DAO Master LLC
- Necessary agreements for teams to function safely (contributor agreements, IP, operating agreements)
- On-chain governance
- Token issuance (tokens represent units of interest in LLC + carry on-chain governance rights)
- Delegated token issuance
Validation
- We are on track to launch our MVP by the end of year. We have not spent a single dollar on development. All work has been compensated for using our own sweat equity system. This validates our thesis that legal clarity coupled with web3 tech is a powerful coordination mechanism.
- We have 14 projects on our waitlist ready to use our product when it launches
- Our discord server has grown from zero to 143 members in 6 months. We are offering no token, no whitelist, no obvious financial upside. People have come because our vision resonates.
- Our twitter follower count has grown from zero to 263 in six months.
- We have validated our idea with relevant communities, namely lexDAO and kaliDAO
- Dozens of conversations with attorneys and web3 legal professionals
Progress
- MVP UX designs (complete)
- Smart contracts (complete)
- Front end (ongoing)
- Suite of legal documentation (ongoing)
- Website v2 (ongoing)
We intend to have our product launched by the end of the year.
Differentiation
There are several DAO formation platforms on the market today which we consider to be competitors to our business. However, they do not seriously attempt to address the legal dimension to DAO/business formation which we feel must be solved to make meaningful and long term progress.
Kali DAO is the notable exception. A team of engineers who are also lawyers, Kali DAO pioneered the concept of representing legal entities as NFTs on-chain. Sporos has used the Kali DAO product to form its own Limited Liability Company (LLC) as a series LLC. Kali DAO is not a competitor to Sporos, we are collaborators. We operate closely together; attending weekly meetings in each other’s communities, contributing code to each other’s projects, and offering regular feedback on our respective projects.
Kali DAO has extensive expertise in the law and Sporos brings UX, developer and business development skills to the table.
Team
All of the founders contributed to Olympus DAO during 2021. We experienced first hand the speculative mania that so often grips DeFi protocols and we also experienced the dramatic downside to that speculation as market conditions worsened. As contributors in one of the largest DAOs in DeFi, we learnt how difficult it is to coordinate in a decentralised organisation. We grappled with challenges around personal liability, how to partner with other protocols safely and how to compensate work fairly and transparently. All of this experience has fed into our work on Sporos as awarding equitable ownership rights with legal significance is central to the Sporos vision.
Ivelin is an experienced open source software contributor and technology entrepreneur. At Sporos, Ivelin leads development efforts.
Lipman is a seasoned business developer and entrepreneur. At Sporos, Lipman leads partnership and business development efforts and also spends time writing for Sporos:
https://medium.com/@lipmanohm
https://twitter.com/lipmaneth
Kleb is a mature student studying economics. He is trained as a data analyst and has previously worked at an early stage startup in a data/product role. At Sporos, kleb works on product development and spends time writing about the concepts which underpin Sporos:
Grant Request $
$10,000
Funds
We have received no investor funding. Our approach is to build an MVP and launch as quickly as possible to test our ideas in the market. Everything we have built to date has been compensated for with sweat equity tokens in Sporos DAO.
Help
Outside of funding our main asks of the MetaCartel community are:
- Feedback and discussion on the concepts behind Sporos: legal formation for DAOs + tokenized sweat equity
- User testing of our product
- Ideas for how our product can/should be developed
- Helping us to reach web3 entrepreneurs who may be interested in using our product
Additional Resources
Website: https://sporosdao.xyz/
Github: GitHub - SporosDAO/sweat-token: Sweat Token code and resources - Sweat Equity Vault for DAOs
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SporosDAO
Medium: Sporos DAO – Medium