DAO Incomplete Recent Report: Failed Experiments and Revival of Technology

This is an "incomplete status report" on DAO written by DGOV's Rebecca Rachmany. Some events that happened in 2019 and the beginning of 2020 made her quite frustrated, as she said, "fading", but fading In the end, it will only belong to those blind and unjustifiable DAOs.On the other hand, we have also seen many DAOs have achieved significant positive results so far in 2019. This is what she calls "revival". Rebecca has a small number of analysis cases, so it cannot completely summarize the true picture of the entire DAO world, but the cautionary cases are typical, which can be described as a lesson learned and can be shared. —— Typto

In the past few weeks, there have been some major failures in the field of DAO and distributed governance, but at the same time they have also marked a renaissance of DAO technology, and some new positive factors seem to be resurrecting from the gap between failures.

 

• Inventory | Blockchain is not absent: 20 blockchain epidemic prevention applications are launched online in 14 days
• Observation ｜ There are no investors in the blockchain project, only sponsors
• Charlie Munger: Negative interest rates make me very nervous, I hate things like Bitcoin

Reborn from the ashes …

As I mentioned in my July and October DAO case studies, most DAO experiments were unsuccessful, so the following list only lists the 3 most recent failure cases.

Recent failures:

• The end of DigixDAO
• End of funding for Genesis Alpha DAO and withdrawal of its community organizer
• The dGov committee's participation rate has fallen by 50%, and there has been a noticeable tension within it

Revival signal:

• HyphaDAO appeared on Telos (fork of EOSIO)
• Members of Genesis DAO are still sticking to their DAO experiments
• Nectar DAO launch
• dGov committee members are reviving their organizations

2020 starts with depression

Genesis DAO: Vision Misplaced

Genesis DAO has been collapsing for a long time, but in reality it cannot be called failure. DAOstack created Genesis DAO on his Alchemy platform, and used it as a sandbox for DAO functional tests. The Genesis community was once very active and attracted experts and teams from all over the world. The result of the Genesis project is that more than twenty new DAOs were born on the Alchemy platform, hundreds of people tried the technology in many "dHacks", and dozens of "DAOfest" held worldwide activity. Today, with the efforts of Genesis DAO and dGov participants, www.daolandscape.today has built a huge knowledge base.

However, the decline of the DAO was inevitable from the beginning, because the Genesis community and the DAOstack community had major differences in their views and goals. The community never seemed to really accept the sandbox status of Genesis Alpha, and their willingness to self-fund was simply not in line with DAO's business goals.

The mission of Genesis DAO includes supporting and promoting DAOstack, but not all participants agree that the direction of DAOstack is consistent with the DAO philosophy they uphold. Although a few people (including myself) talk publicly about this misalignment, most people have chosen to remain silent in order to increase their reputation (REP) and get ongoing funding from DAOstack. In other words, economic incentives have led people to choose to retain their true views and take advantage of this system.

For DAOstack, it invested resources in the Genesis Alchemy project, but it didn't seem to have good feedback. Although I don't have any inside information, to be honest, what is the reason why DAOstack adopted these people's opinions? Only one self-sufficient DAO (dOrg) stood out from the year, with a reserve of $ 150,000.

 

Other performances

DAOfest is one of the most successful and unsuccessful cases of Genesis Alpha, and it is exactly the same as the criticism that DASH has encountered in the DAO fund allocation incident. The problem is basically that people like to organize events and parties, and they are happy to hold events in the local community to get financial returns. They are so passionate that so much money is invested in activities that have no real effect, even if they have a little The results, and usually no one is responsible for maintaining the community built by the event organizers.

The benefit of community activities is that they bring more DAO participants, and the problem with community activities is precisely that they bring more DAO participants. These new participants want to fund …… more activities! In other words, "initiating an event" has a snowball effect in DAO. DAO voters continue to use more and more funds for more and more activities. In the case of Genesis Alpha, these activities quickly consumed Exhausted their budget. This is an important caveat for anyone who wants to create a DAO. Most current DAO features do not include buckets for budgeting, so it is important to be aware of this potential pitfall.

Functional defect

The main reason for the current failure of DAO is due to functional defects. The DAO technology on Etherum allows complex multi-sig schemes (the majority vote to decide whether to release funds) and / or automatically implement on-chain code upgrades (a consensus reached by voting) Rather than forking code), both of which are great features, but DAO technology still has flaws in the creation of social structures, and even the common mission of DAO is not yet available. This flaw was pointed out in a post by DigixDAO and in a Google doc published by the outgoing Genesis DAO community manager.

Achievement and revival!

Despite so many disappointing incidents, the community still showed resilience. The initial failure gave birth to DAO technology updates and more suitable application scenarios. Nectar DAO is using the best aspect of this technology: fund allocation. NectarDAO is fulfilling its promise to let the community use DAOstack to manage their own funds.

Again, I have no inside information, but for DAOstack, this is better than continuing to support Genesis DAO. Although the end of the Genesis DAO community has made me sad, this is a big step forward for DAOstack: from sandboxes to beta users.

Community Resilience: Genesis DAO and dGov

Participating in this year's dGov Council was a disappointment for me. Last year, 60 parliamentary participants were sold out, and this year we only had 30 participants. Compared with the results of last year's parliament, this year's parliament was a major failure. It is a shame that dGov's parliamentary activities are deeper than any other media in the industry, but have not attracted more people to participate.

However, the community itself has accepted the challenge, and we have a weekly meeting (if you are interested, 2 pm CET on Wednesday, you are welcome to join) to ensure continuous dialogue and increase its motivation, one of the participants He said he would launch the dGov Parliament in Barcelona in the coming months.

Similarly, the Genesis DAO community is considering self-funding and sticking to weekly meetings without paying promoters.

The resilience of the community is encouraging, and despite the first set of setbacks, the prospects for distributed governance are clear.

Nectar DAO: Large DAO on DAOstack

As mentioned above, NectarDAO was launched on DAOstack in early 2020. NectarDAO has more active members and a larger budget than any previous DAO on DAOstack, and members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DAP) have demonstrated their commitment to participating in NectarDAO. Excitement and willingness. Last year, NectarDAO participants have successfully used Kleros technology to list their tokens on the Diversifi exchange, and now they will use DAOstack to manage their budget expenditures.

The core team of NectarDAO did in-depth research on DAO and DAOstack, and applied the best development practices to this launch. Their website and blog also provided very good guidance for the community. At present, NectarDAO's initial work quality is much higher than the previous DAO, the proposal is more accurate , the task is more clear, and the participants have also been reviewed. For the existing DAO technology, this launch is a step forward for DAO. A big step.

Hypha: The first DAO outside Ethereum

The JoinSeed and Telos communities are developing HyphaDAO, which is the first general DAO technology developed outside of Ethereum (as far as I know, if I am wrong, please correct me).

Hypha takes a radically different approach from other DAO technologies. It is specifically designed to support people in the SEEDS community, and to some extent, their platform is more like a freelance trading platform than a governance platform. The focus of the platform is to define the job requirements that need to be completed in the community, and then publish these job (role) requirements, and accept the applicant to implement the job. After the applicant completes the job, the applicant will be paid by the platform.

HyphaDAO is still in its infancy. Most of the current platform's work is done by volunteers, but the quality of the team is very good, the main members of the team are from Digital Life Collective (Digital Life Cooperative?). They have a big bias, which is to provide rewards for everyone's contribution time. I recently provided the team with a few hours of advice and received SEEDS token rewards (a similar bias exists in the Commons Stack community. Suddenly, you will find yourself being "praised" just for being a decent person ).

In any case, it is definitely exciting to see DAO technology cross Ethereum and develop onto other smart contract-based blockchains.

 

to sum up

Although we have seen some major setbacks in DAO technology in 2019 and early 2020, the community is still full of vigor. These failures not only did not discourage people, but seemed to stimulate the investment and breadth of DAO's revival. People with attitudes have also felt this call and actively invested in it, and the emergence of some new DAO architecture designs makes the coordination better than the previous generation technology.

 

Original address: https://medium.com/@rebeccarachmany/dao-falloff-and-revival-2cf74f3c18c1

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!