Observation ｜ There are no investors in the blockchain project, only sponsors

Author: Frank Yao; Amber Yang

Source: Darwin Think Tank, with cuts

Editor: Tony Feng

1. Don't forget to open source and cultivate the community

I recently spoke with an early investor in Anonymous Coin, who denied that he was an investor and insisted that he was a sponsor of this project. On careful consideration, the term "sponsor" is used very precisely. Because most blockchain projects are in the early stages, consensus may break at any time, community crashes, project abortion, and great risks. Is n’t that just sponsors?

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Before starting the text, let's clarify the concept. Community and community are two different concepts, but because the semantics are similar, they are scattered, and many people often confuse the two. In this article, the community mainly refers to aggregates with common values ​​and common values, such as the Bitcoin community and the Ethereum community; the community, mainly social tribal groups with a specific short-term behavior, such as WeChat community, Telegram community and many more.

The community mainly creates or enjoys value products and services through large-scale collaboration. Since the influence of the Bitcoin community, many blockchain projects have called it the community or DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization, decentralized autonomous organization).

DAO, source: blockchainhub

Because early blockchain projects were mainly initiated by the community in a voluntary and crowdfunding manner, participants were willing to donate a certain amount or pay some time to participate in the project even when they realized the huge risks, and Work together to promote project development. After the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin community established a solid foundation in this way, and its influence is growing.

With the increasing number of blockchain projects, the myths of riches such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have attracted more scammers and speculators. In addition, the early loose organization of blockchain projects, the characteristics of community autonomy, and start-up projects The probability of failure is too high, resulting in lower crime costs and higher fault tolerance rates. As a result, early investors in many projects have lost their blood and become "sponsors" who donate time, money, and energy.

2. What kind of blockchain project is easy to "sponsor" success?

The long-term top 100 crypto assets in the world have their commonality, or basically have reached a certain global consensus for a long time, and this consensus is honestly reflected by the global market value ranking. At present, CMC has collected more than 2400 kinds of encrypted tokens. I do n’t know how many have not been included and bred.

In these rankings or trading platforms, the top-ranked blockchain projects are more likely to succeed. In general, crypto assets with a religious value vision, tokens that combine the most widely agreed consensus, strong profit models, and token projects with strong leading teams often lead to better development.

We have summarized three rules of judgment.

2.1 Near-Religious Vision

Represented by the Bitcoin community. God V mentioned: "The Bitcoin community now has a big advantage: they have a rich ideology, and many people are thinking about what role Bitcoin has in the world and what they do. For example, Tuur Demeester and Daniel Krawisz are at Writing about Austrian economics, and Paul Sztorc. "

The Bitcoin community basically believes that Bitcoin is the most decentralized, the most robust network, the most secure system, and the most concise function. Bitcoin's development is determined by the users who own it. Only when all users reach a consensus can all people benefit. Therefore, Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community can be regarded as the first well-functioning self-organization, also known as DAO.

The Bitcoin community includes: forums, social networks, parties, IRC chat rooms, non-profit organizations. These groups constitute a thriving Bitcoin community. In recent years, with the occurrence of industry influential events such as the Bitcoin hard fork, the New York consensus, the Hong Kong consensus, and the Bitcoin breaking million, more and more people have been affected by this openly governed community. Start researching and learning more about Bitcoin.

2.2. The most extensive and complex Mission

Represented by the Ethereum community. The Ethereum Foundation is a foundation consisting of more than a dozen people centered on Vitalik. The headquarters is set up in Singapore. The foundation's technical staff is dedicated to the development of the underlying core architecture of Ethereum. People from all over the world can join this open source. Community development.

As of now, Ethereum is also the number one open source development platform for developers worldwide. There are many developers of Dapp and ecological business, which can be regarded as the practitioners of the Ethereum community ecology.

With the rise of IC0 and its influence through platform performance, Ethereum's Defi Finance, which was established on Ethereum in 2018 and 2019, will bring the value of Ethereum to the fullest. Although Defi only had a volume of 100 million US dollars in 2018, because Defi is an innovation initiated by the ancient form of traditional financial industry borrowing, it has quickly and silently eroded and affected the global financial lending market.

Recently, in the beginning of 2020, a major event on Ethereum, that is, the top 5 technical funding of Quadratic Funding, the first funding of 4 projects came from DAO.

This proves DAO's success in identifying and delivering promising projects to the community. From this we can see that DAO is playing an increasingly important role in the governance of the entire community and the financing of good projects.

2.3 Strong profit model and leading team with strong community governance follow

DAO generally uses a certain project as the core and token as a beneficiary voucher and incentive tool. “Sponsors”, developers, and users naturally become members of the DAO, offer gifts and suggestions, and participate in the governance of the DAO together.

Due to the open source nature of the blockchain, having the ability to evolve and upgrade in continuous development will become a key factor in whether the blockchain project can survive the competition in market interests. All these need to be promoted with resources and money to safeguard the interests of the relevant communities in order to form a virtuous development cycle.

In the middle of this ecology, the community must safeguard its own interests. In order to eliminate the "common land dilemma" and to achieve the purpose of a real decentralized project operation, in the early days, there must be a centralized or semi-centralized subject to gather Consensus to promote community autonomy.

If the subject of centralization is not strong or strong, not a strong resource, a consensus strong, an operational strong, or an open source technology strong, the probability of failure of this project can be said to be 80% probability .

2.3.1, EOS is a successful case representative of a strong profit model

EOS uses Dpos to select super nodes for bookkeeping, performance improvement and governance, and integrates off-chain governance into the entire operating mechanism through the EOS constitution, upgrade agreements, and frozen accounts. The DPOS mechanism is to build ecological construction governance on the basis of "people governance". Compared to consensus mechanisms such as POW based on cryptoeconomics, "rule of man" is often abducted by interests or other strong tendencies in many crisis times. For example, there is a phenomenon of "bribery election" in the super nodes of EOS. Why is bribery election? Because as a super node of EOS, there will be many benefits. Since its birth, Tron has been accompanied by controversy and luck, and its founder Sun Yuchen has been called a marketing expert.

2.3.2 Governance of the Ethereum Community

The development of Ethereum has such a global status so far, and it has survived the storm. One of the important reasons is the core person, founder, and Vitalik who is known as the V god.

Has been committed to the development and exploration of Ethereum, which has affected many people due to the effective governance. But even in the Ethereum community, all the proposed solutions require the community's unanimous approval to pass, even the proposal proposed by the founder Vitalik. In 2018, Vitalik Buterin tweeted, "Ethereum network will definitely survive without me."

The Ethereum community has played a lot of roles in the development history of the project, such as the introduction of cooperation with Zcash on anonymity and regulatory technology, the decision-making in The Dao incident, the vigorous development of the Defi ecosystem, and so on. Every major Ethereum key event, The impact of the community is crucial.

Recently, the Ethereum community and Vitalik are doing another important thing, which may be relevant to everyone in the future: quadratic freelancers.

However, Ethereum's pow governance also faces difficulties: the POW mechanism based on cryptography makes the coordination cost greatly simplified, but the two mining pools control 51% of the hash power of Ethereum. Therefore, Ethereum is also transitioning to the consensus governance model of pos.

2.3.3 The Zcash community can be used as a case representative for strong community governance.

The Zcash community has followers with a strong belief in anonymity. But despite being born with a golden key, Zcash community governance has not been smooth. Fortunately, the founder Zooko Wilcox has great community influence. After two forks, the Zcash team still has a good community foundation. Especially in the latest issue, the Zcash community has agreed on a new mining reward distribution method and will continue to fund the development of its privacy crypto asset ZEC.

Source: coinpost.jp

The Zcash community has been discussing for months about whether to continue funding ZEC's development. Continue to develop and provide development funding for Zcash can help Zcash find more top talent, especially when anonymous coins are facing increasing scrutiny by international regulators. This time, the Zcash community has supported Zooko Wilcox again.

3. How to compose a broader majority consensus?

One is open source. Blockchain originated from a group of geeks with an open source spirit. It has nurtured and grown up in an atmosphere that emphasizes innovation and intellectual property in the West. Everyone's contributions leave marks in the community and gain prestige. In this atmosphere of brainstorming, more open source projects become more and more secure.

Animals that grew up in a crisis-ridden environment are always strong in natural evolution. The earlier the open source, the faster the iteration, the more complete the code, and the fewer vulnerabilities, such open source projects can stand the test of the market. Because Bitcoin is open source, assets running on the open network have not received more attacks because of transparency; Ethereum's open source has nurtured numerous public chains and altcoins, and has not shaken its position as the world's first public chain. Because open source, so powerful.

Therefore, in the top 100 projects with a long-term stable market value, the better the performance of open source features, the more consensus and trust they get, and the greater the probability of success.

The second is governance. Governance of a company has never been as collectable, large or small as the governance of a blockchain project. With the iterative development of technology and the rise of a knowledge-based society, everyone has become a "freelancer" and a node, and blockchain community governance has become a key event in project development.

How to distribute and plan the benefits of loose nodes, individuals, small teams, and large communities requires the relevant processes, systems, and consensus for implementation and implementation. This is community governance.

Community governance is a process of democratization and openness, as well as a process of collective decision-making. The community governance of the blockchain is actually the practice of the consensus mechanism. Currently, there are relatively successful governance methods such as mining, pos, and dpos. Community governance mainly uses consensus to reach consensus on issues, make up for and resolve practical problems such as consensus algorithms, incentive distribution, and so on, to exercise governance power.

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