Everyday Superpowers with AstroDAO - Jordan Gray

get to deep dive into dao's um i'm not going to explain what that was are i assume we're all on the same page with that but i want to introduce what's up with dao's on the near protocol and what we've been up to the past uh two years basically if you want to follow along on twitter hit up star pause and hit up astro dial so before we go too deep i want to just give an overview of the entire ecosystem of dao's on here and how it's structured um it's kind of an inverse pyramid where at the very bottom um of this iceberg we've got the sputnik smart contracts and these are intentionally the smallest part um the audited code like the the good stuff that actually runs everything so those are tight and true and that's like what everything is built on top of what i'm most directly involved in is astro which is the ui that builds on top of that that makes it friendly and easy to use so it's not only like a responsive phone tablet desktop usable website for that but it's also some middleware tooling that allows a bunch of other tools to easily query the chain and do indexing and things like that and then around that there's a lot more being built like command line tooling other interfaces like commonwealth im there's a lot of tools for automating what your dows want to do so for example cron cat allows you to schedule tasks to happen on a regular basis just like cron does except it's on chain rope.2 allows you to do streaming payments there's a multi-call tool that allows you to set up a series of a series or parallel um set of calls that you want to make with the single proposal on your dow um and then there's a bunch of bots that allow you to plug into your dow do voting on it um you can keep updated that way get notifications and so on so there's all that all that going on in the in the near ecosystem around dao's and every friday we have a demo day where we show up like different projects that are being built there's kyc coming together which gets some people excited and other people dread it depends on how much payroll logistics you have to deal with and then on top of all of that is the biggest layer of all and that's the dow cubader which is a program that we started for incubating dials on near it really started uh maybe like a couple months ago is really towards the the middle of last year that we started the dow cubator program and in those few months we uh brought brought in like a ton of dows funded them with over 100 thousand dollars and then we're doing the same thing this quarter so what literally can you do with spitnik towel what are these contracts good for um it's got flexible voting so you can do seat based voting token weighted voting voting based on nft ownership you can do funding so things like grants which are paid in advance or bounties which are paid afterwards and i do encourage people to think about like their payment models when they're forming their dials so that there's less confusion about how you get paid because that is like a big discussion that happens in the dow space is like okay so i want to work for an hour do some work like there's bounties out there but what if i've got a new idea that's not a bounty those things wind up as grants where you put your put your idea forward say what you're going to measure what's going to happen and then it goes well it doesn't go well you've got your grant already um and then there's bounties which are just like more like gig work gig economy type stuff that's what those are good for and then another super powerful part of sputnik is the fact that it can call any function on any smart contract the way that the account model works on nir is every account is named you get a named account off the bat whatever your name is dot near and it has sub sub accounts too so for your dao it's going to live at your doubt.sputnikdow.near everybody gets a name um what lives at that name can be just your wallet or it could be a whole dao but that dial can act on the chain just like any other wallet could so literally anything that a single user can do a dao can do collectively as a group and common things we see people doing with that is collecting nfts creating nfts launching their social tokens and and the list goes on and on uh to the point where we're now supporting that in in such a capacity that we're starting to build a dapp store of things that come people commonly want to do with their dows and then one last bit that's that's really cool about sputnik in in addition to all the rest is that it's upgradable so in addition to being able to call any function uh on on any other contract it can call a function on itself to upgrade the factory or to upgrade dials that are like um spun out from the factory if people in those dials want to adopt code that's been pushed out to the factory um that's an important uh thing to note as well is that sputnik contracts are under a factory model where there's a factory and when you create a dao you own it entirely it's yours and that costs about like five near to set up so it's a pretty cheap cost right now that's around like 50 60 us dollars to set up a dow and if you go through dow cubater then you can have that reimbursed quite easily so how did we get here um the sputnik contracts have been around for a while like i was mentioning it's been around for about two years and last year with the v1 contracts we saw over 12 million dollars in flow so that was people getting paid out for doing bounties doing grants all kinds of work happening through the through the dials in 2021 and then we thought that was great like yeah things were going well and then uh this year hit and suddenly we launched v2 of the of the dow contracts and have over 2 billion locked now in all the different taos a large chunk of that is actually aurora which is the evm that runs on top of near and that is compatible down to like the base token so if you're not familiar with aurora definitely check it out redeploying solidity contracts on aurora is as simple as reconfigure and deploy there's not even changing out the base token or anything like that so aurora runs their dow on astro and a bunch of other folks too there's over 277 monthly active dials that are engaged in all kinds of activities and we'll get to case studies and then there's also hellborn auditing to make sure that those contracts are actually like buttoned up and if you want to dig deeper into all the statistics around it go to dowstats.io and you can see who the most active dials are who's got the most users who's got the most flow in out et cetera and then v3 well we'll see where it goes all right so that's the contracts what about this ui how can anybody use these contracts well you could use the cli tool if you if you're a developer in the house but for most people and honestly a large amount of the near audience um they like you guys uh they're coming from a space of like having a collective in real life and maybe not even being technology people and for the first time doing blockchain after getting their near wallet so for a lot of people having a web to like easy application that's good for everyday people is where it's at and that's what astro provides it was designed uh in collaboration with we three which is a bunch of ex-ideo folks and then it's been developed and we've continued to iterate on it in an open source manner with magic power and it's live now you can check it out at astrodow.

com and there's also a test net version if you really just want to clunk around you can go to testnet.app.astro.com and as as we were working on this with ideo we did a bunch of focus groups and we're really talking to people about like what are dials good for in the world like what are the real world use cases and we boiled it down to kind of three pillars of what the value add of astrodow was and that's to meet people that share the same values as you um to vote and take collaborative action and then to fund your collective goals so these are kind of our litmus tests as we're doing all of our design work is does it make these things easier is it focused on enabling these things for everyday people if yes it's in if not maybe we'll put it later so gonna run through what meet vote and fun look like and while it's just static screenshots um i do encourage everybody to still look at them or at least glance up and pay attention because it'll get your visual memory going and then when you're going in there and interacting with like the new dial you created or checking out other people's dials you already have the visual memory of how to do all these things so um the when you're going in for the first time to discover what dials are going on you can sort by newest the oldest maybe you like want to see what's fresh and going to be active that's upcoming and just like really looking for new contributors maybe you want to be part of something old and established and has has a track record so you can sort however you want maybe you want to go for really big funds maybe you want to go for who's got the most members maybe you want to go for less members so that your different your contributions make a bigger difference all up to you and then if you want to get like really deep into the stats and um really compare like okay which one of these dials of their activity is income versus outcome who's actually paying the most people out who's really active in governance and like who's doing like actual polling and passing proposals versus just funding you can kind of see the shape of how people are using their dials if you go to dowstats.io and if you look at these charts you'll see groups like hack they they just once in a while we'll have something that passes whereas something like news is kind of always on um there's a lot of activity and same with like marma j you'll see here so people use dials different ways generally at least once a month people are using their dials because they're just in the habit of like weekly pay or monthly payouts and that mindset but some of them are like a little bit more active and then once you find a dial that you like you can follow it and what that actually enables is the notification so there's a notification system built in and what this does is it it bridges the the biggest gap we see in dao participation which is forgetting to vote forgetting that you've got something to do um that's that's the number one falling off point for people so getting notifications in was key if you're interested in a dao thinking about maybe joining it you can hop on the follow list for it see what's actually happening with it um and then it gives you a better idea of like oh i want to be putting my energy here these people are like really active and there's cool stuff happening and then any dials that you create or are on the console of you automatically get the notifications as well and then when it comes to voting uh the interface is pretty straightforward it allows for conversations right on each one of the proposals so you can go back and forth and have conflict resolution whatever you want right on the proposal before making your vote and then you'll either hit the big green button or the big orange button went with orange instead of red it's less angry and then um when it comes to the funding if you take a look at the treasuries of any of the dows it displays all fungible tokens all near and also all the nfts that are owned by a dao and you get your history and you can check things out like you see the little dip there that's like if a doubt gives out a loan for some funds or something and then they come back after the loan is done um or when funds come in things like that and then there's an nft view so all the dows that are collecting nfts have a way of showing off their collections mama j is very active on the nfts and then let's do case studies so that was all kind of abstract like here's some tooling here's some cool stuff that's being built what is this actually being used for so off the bat one of the most interesting things happening is the humanitarian causes that are being funded through astrodow last year we had over half a million dollars donated to relief for flooding in china and also for relief for kovid in both india and vietnam so humanitarian causes do really well there's folks that are building games and dapps of all kinds and they're using the dials for like governance of their their projects what features go in and out things like that and also for like managing airdrops if they're going to be rewarding their users and figuring out what metrics to use to reward their users shrimp kingdom has done that through their dow nearweek we saw earlier is one of the like always-on dials nearweek is doing a really interesting thing they're doing news curation with their dial where every piece of news that gets submitted to them is a proposal and then if it's new news then it gets voted up and if it's old news then it gets voted down and um that way like all of the news curation on near is curated through a dow and like near week is awesome if you're new to near and you haven't checked it out before your week is the way to go for like getting acclimated really fast because there's a ton going on and nearweek does an excellent job of every week getting you those executive bullets like there's three bullets of the most important things that happened then they've got the long scroll scroll of all the other things that you can get into as well but definitely check out near week to stay up to date on what's going on in here and then creative dials are a big one probably over half the dials on astro are creative ones um there's hype dial which does like weekly uh nft battles which is kind of like a photo shot battle but anything goes as far as how you make it just the end in the end it has to be an nft um there's the near nft club which is like helping artists promote themselves and helping projects promote themselves so they do like uh featured artists spotlights and project spotlights do marketing help for people and also teach people how to do marketing around nfts because that's not something that's necessarily easy to figure out there's fam jam which is a really welcoming awesome community for queer artists and non-binary artists and they do a ton of onboarding as well and then there's kin dao which is really focused on in real life activation so they're working with a lot of like people who are like running their garden and they're they're not technology people but they want a way to manage funds for their garden um and and different cooperatives like that like grocery crop cooperatives all that kind of stuff and one of the coolest things coming out of kindow is a project where they're helping um the unhomed so underserved people unhomed um learn how to do nfts and have that as an additional source of income and that can sound kind of goofy and like why would that happen but honestly like in san francisco in la a lot of the unhomed are artists and they're people who have been around the area forever and things just haven't worked out so when they go and do outreach and frankly a lot of these people do have cell phones they're given a new means of income for themselves and a new way to sustain themselves so it's really cool work and they've actually been really successful with the program and it'll be at art basel miami i think later this year and then kendall is also so big that it's like spinning out several other things among his projects and then we have kodame which is an art and tech non-profit that i've been running for the past seven 11 years as a collective and the way it works is every year we look at the programming that we've done it's usually like nightlife stuff workshops etc and then we as a group decide like well what's interesting what should we do next year how can we better serve artists so now all of that is on chain which is great because we have a guiding light everybody's agreed to it it's sitting on chain everybody knows where we're going this year and again we get a litmus test for is it part of our mission for the year or is this a project that's not or an opportunity that's not aligned with what we're up to and then we can also put all that to votes with the community um and it's it's been a great process of like taking something that's been established and a well-running machine has been running in the black for um for 11 years like i said and now like allowing us to do all our payroll easier all of our like after we run a festival it is usually months of paying out artists to get everything right and doing international and all that um now with our art shows especially the ones that we're doing online because of covid we're able to just put all of the splits into the contracts so that when the art sells everybody gets paid and that includes the people who did the curation work um the people who are actually helping like build out the online galleries and things like that so um the the flexible splits in the way that splits for nfts are actually part of the standard on here at the protocol level uh was a big reason that i got engineer in the first place and why it was so attractive to the nonprofit was to like ease that logistic pain that administrative overhead of just being able to pay artists out and not have to worry about okay is this is this uh standard for payouts something that was developed by like this marketplace or a different marketplace and it's not compatible across them it's just like across the board it works on all the shops on near um and then also artists when we were getting into this about two years ago they were complaining about ecological impact and whether or not that's a real thing had to listen to our artists and our constituents and be like well let's find something that's green nier's got the carbon neutral thing going on um so that was another big big part of like why we wound up on near music dials um i absolutely love all the music that was on here i'm electronic music producer myself so if you check out star paws you'll get the beats i do weekly beats and it's all out under creative commons so it's free for remix for use and nfts commercial whatever just by attribution attribution is paramount i always give attribution but there's like there's multiple dowels that are doing things around music on ear so nyric's music is kind of the the largest holding pen and bao is really focused on compilations and beat tapes chapter one foundation is focused on onboarding musicians and um is primarily working with uh ones based out of africa and then we've got the environmental dial so saying earlier near's carbon neutral so it attracts a lot of projects there's the clean nft guild which is something that i was paying attention to is it was forming um about two years ago when i was getting into nfts too and the work that they do is is so great they've cataloged every single marketplace across all the chains and they have people's input on them it's really an exhaustive effort that has gone in there and it's such an honor to have them running their dao on near and then there's sisu which is also another like multi-chain dao and friendly sea creatures which in addition to doing environmental work they have like um calm calm space in their discord and they're really focused on mental health and it's something that i think is actually quite needed um there's a lot of ups and downs that people go through so to have a dao specifically focused on being friendly and and letting people like find their calm spot when things can get crazy and hectic is pretty cool and then we've got tank dao tank is uh basically a generative nft incubator um it launches projects so profile picture projects any kind of generative art project we put together the smart contracts on a minting site for this and it's all open source so this is the technology that like all the open all the generative profile picture projects on here are using and we do our payouts so because we help out projects we take a percentage of their projects as like an incubator model and then we're able to pay out like further smart contract development we're able to pay out project managers um we're able to pay for like artwork and metadata generation and for doing the regional marketing and all those things so it's another organization that's running really smoothly as a dow on near and tank actually as far as like income goes has the most incoming transactions out of any other dow on near and um let's see what else do we got oh yeah another awesome thing is like all of the generative art projects that come through tank we help them with their road maps and like figuring out what the meaning of their project is things like that and usually making a dao is the first thing near is a space that hasn't seen like that many rugs there hasn't been a lot of that kind of activity things aren't too scammy and we want to keep it that way so all of the generative art projects that we're working with we encourage them the dow is not a point on the road map like after your mint it's before the mint so that some portion of your funds go into the dow and everybody who's part of the dao can govern how those funds are used and we also encourage them as the creators to like take their own cut as well but for some portions of funds we we always encourage folks to really do the dao there's no reason not to it takes five minutes to set up on astro dial so go for it um and then we've got like i was talking about the numbers of like okay we've got two billion locked but how are we doing on incoming and outgoing transactions um tank is again the leader and news has a lot of activity as well hack well it's a social coin so people are social around it and there's a lot of other cool things to check out too uh as we were talking about like meeting people and getting acclimated to the space open web sandbox is a big one and they've got a discord where you can go and just like uh as an individual contributor learn where your place is and kind of find your way into the ecosystem and there's a lot to do in the ecosystem so we covered off on just like okay creative projects and um like people building their daps and game things like that but there's also just like skill-based skills and all of these people are offering services and they take payment in near or other social coins whatever you want and it's a really nice way to be able to get help and stay inside the ecosystem when you've got like dao box around that can help you set up your swissvaran if you need like a legal wrapper for your dao there's there's guilds offering ux like um like avb over here and there's guilds doing marketing and growth development consulting really whatever you need help with you can find it in one of the skills guilds and if it's not there maybe you should start it or find somebody to start it um if you go to near guilds you'll see all the different things that people are offering as services it's an it's a it's quite a list and i use the word skills and dials interchangeably like before the before every guild and uh group working on near had daos they were calling themselves guilds and then now as dials have kind of like matured and they've all rolled into it they're usually called taos but sometimes they still call themselves guilds so really same thing in my mind if you really want to make a distinction daos are just tooling and whatever else you wrap around it whether it's a llc or a guild or anything else is the business part mentioned open web sandbox as being like a great way finding spot if you've got skills and you want to contribute to the ecosystem as an individual contributor or to find your people hope we have sandbox is a great place to land definitely check it out and then my favorite guild slash dao is the near chan one um this was me and a couple friends we we were anime critiques so we're critics we we wanted to do it right we made a chan for near so now there's near chan and it's an original character design she is the unofficial mascot of the chain definitely not official and she's under the creative commons but she's still intellectual property and if you want to grab a free nft that's the qr code to hit um if you go to near chan github you can you can also find it there but yeah qr codes scan it free nfts she might be dancing um and and this is like one of the examples of how forward-thinking the taos on here are like near chan happened months before a16z wrote their article about how intellectual property was going to be something managed by daos for characters like in the future and i was like really the future i think it's now so we've gone over some of the cool use cases maybe you're inspired maybe you've got an idea maybe you want to bring your down to near uh welcome to docubator docubator was set up specifically for easing the process of onboarding for everybody who's interested in building their project finding success on near and this can be anything it can be a social cause it can be a pet project like near chan it can be anything dials are very flexible and because it's so easy to get onboarded on near with like the the easy-to-read wallet name and the fact that you can like do it on your phone um we do see a lot of everyday people picking up dows and so we do see a lot of dials that are like okay just a group of friends that want to do something together it's their group chat and they decide to make a dial together and they're aligned in values but they don't know quite what they're doing yet and that's okay because they're just figuring it out and then eventually they'll come up with something to do with the funds that they've accumulated but dows of all sizes are welcome it doesn't have to be some like huge vision to to be a dow um and we've got funding tiers so like for people that are just starting out uh maybe it is the group of friends we can do like a one thousand dollar grant just so that people are rewarded for their time of like figuring out how dolls work because it is work to like figure all this stuff out um and get set up and have a little bit of a kitty and then we do grants up to like five thousand and then ten thousand uh based on like the the road map and the metrics that somebody's showing us with what they see for their growth and engagement into the future and then how do we get all those people through the doubt cubator with dow structures so here's a little workshop that happened in san francisco we were out on a cabana during code when we couldn't meet inside and everybody's setting up dials on their phones on their tablets it was it was a great time we did like ten dollars that day and a lot of them went on to do great things like this is where kindness grocery co-op and fam jam started so this program we found to be really successful and as i was saying like in the last quarter of last year we were able to distribute about 100 000 of funding to these different dows but the demand that we have for this is through the roof so what we're doing next is enabling a whole new model where there will be dow cubators of dowcubators and these dow structures will be enabled to go and run their own programs find people and provide them with funding so we've already got like our first set of dial structures we've got ankit ua aaron chloe it's it's saya um and all of these people oh i got aaron's picture wrong aaron i'm so sorry maybe cute um but yeah all these people are are great instructors they've already been they've all shown potential as leaders in the dow space and what we're looking for or what those people can do what what it means to be a doubt structure what it enables what the reward is for having this like esteemed position is i mean it's it's small stuff like just governing the dow cubator like what are we gonna do with this hundred thousand dollars of funding um that we have at the moment uh it allows us to curate the dow kit which is uh it's a docket of things that you do to become a dial structure so there's like a checklist of different things that you can do to be successful and that's a curated list so it's really a peer designed program and then kind of like heavier responsibilities are organizing events hosting office hours onboarding new dials going through the logistics with them and then when it gets on the larger scale like people can run their own projects start their own dap start their own company lead their own initiatives or sit as the chair of the working group that drives all this forward all this collaboration forward and i mentioned the docket the dow kit there's different size work so this is i'm a pm and i like encouraging people to think about the size of work and the dell kit has that built into it with small medium and large tasks which are rewarded differently so you you do your tasks and you add up how much like points you've earned and that's when you can put a proposal to the council and say hey i'm ready to be a doubt structure so it can be really small things you can get started just turning on notifications for astrodown on twitter and showing that in a proposal and getting the check off on it or you can do something really big like um actually like file an issue with astro dial which is real work like it takes time after you've encountered a bug or some rough edge to go through and document it and write it down so we want to reward people for that um presenting dials all over the place um and creating a dial like test styles and playing around with configurations of dials are all things that we reward the instructors for the dow structures so that when they are in a position of being able to help other people they have the the full nine yards of like everything that they can do um one of the medium ones that i'm a big fan of is near drop i o near drop is a really easy way of onboarding people to near if you want in your wallet or anything just let me know and i'll hook you up near drop allows you to make drops of near with a qr code that lets somebody claim it and if they already have a wallet they just get the near that's inside of it if they don't have it yet then it lets them sign up with their name and has some near in there so they can get started and go buy one of the less expensive entities on peras or mess around with the dial whatever and then the big alpha one more announcement one more thing uh to roll out the dow cubator program astro is partnering with asac which is the number one nft project on here right now with over 1.

5 million in volume um and just a great community and we're going to be working together to roll this out and bring on as many dow structures as we can so if you want to have a lot of fun come check out our rollout of the dowcubator with asac and astrodow thank you for listening and also near eddie's denver [Applause] thank you