Governance is Messy James Duncan

i'm just kidding uh i'm gonna ask you to be a little nice to me because uh my product lead who is this very handsome guy over here got kovit a few days ago so i had to fill in last minute so i may be all over the place but you know please be nice so today i'm going to talk about kind of governance being messy uh so it's a review of i guess some observations about how dows are developing today and what seasons is doing to solve those problems and i'll try to make it not as chilly as possible and just observations for overall how we think that dial space should go in the future uh you can follow duncan right here and me and our platform those are twitter handles and i'm not going to walk around because i need notes okay so just to get a gauge of the audience here um i guess how many people would say they're familiar with dallas okay so i'm not talking to like noobs right so hopefully i'm not like boring people so we'll start with some governance uh how many people here agree with this guy ross is a baller by the way i'm a fan if he's here um who would say they agree raise your hands if you do okay anyone who wears a size large if you want to speak up into why you think you agree you get a free t-shirt anyone oh no okay well how about who disagrees raise your hands anyone want to speak up would you like to share why you disagree personally i've found dao's can differ in basically every conceivable way so they might have a multi-sig they might not have a multi-sig um ultimately they're up to the community members within the dao to craft it great opinion uh would you like a large or small large launch all right maybe i'll give this at a later part but yeah so dials are pretty confusing i think you know there's a lot of definition different definitions about those are and i think most of uh i guess what at the crux of what those are is this concept of like governance decentralized governance how do we go about defining governance and i would say it seems to me that governance and dowse in general is just not very novel it's how people are determining what is the best means of coordinating and acting properly as an organization but what's unique is that with crypto you have tokens and incentive structures that you can codify so you can have consensus on how do you define what a meaningful participation look like and this is what we as a dao believe to be a proper process for how external people can come in participate and impact organizational change as a dao um and we are seeing that thousand are quite messy so i'm sure many of you here know what happened with um wonderland uh but basically this you know danny over here no judgment you know saying hey i'm gonna take charge of this now and it begs the question is this really decentralized right that's we we have decentralized autonomous organizations also but we also see kind of the uh the corollary where compound does have a governance structure where it's not a simple multi-sig but when they were hacked they weren't able to uh i guess uh recover or fix the contracts quick uh quickly because the uh con the governance system in place required a proposal to be passed and a seven-day voting period right so we're seeing that right now as things uh as things are there is a trade-off between how quickly you want to act as a dao and how secure you can make it and i think ultimately we as a community want to make our systems better by finding that optimal trade-off of being able to uh operate quickly but effectively and we see that even though those are messy they're real and i would say they're going to be meaningful for some time to come numbers for dow involvement and engagement continue to rise we have more funds being held as dials and there's different types of dials that are coming out as well there's nft dials there's investment valves there's dials for practically anything where people are figuring out okay how do we take this new paradigm of trustless organization and create different organizations out of that and there are a lot of challenges can i move this so i can i feel like i'm leaning like an idiot okay um so there's various challenges there's coordination challenges where people are like okay well i'm part of the style what do i use a lot of people use discord there are some other really cool tools out there like commonwealth that want to be kind of the home for all of these styles but still there presents kind of a coordination challenge of where do you communicate uh where do you have all of the members congregate right there's participation challenges people are getting really tired of participating in dallas some people are in like ten dollars and they're like all right i can't do my job because i'm in discord all the time there's also the challenge of like determining what proper governance mechanism to have as uh overall so right now a lot of dows have basically voting done off chain on snapshot but then the execution of what the people have proposed gets done through by a small multi-sig of actual leaders of a protocol but i think there is perhaps room for improvement there where maybe a a true thou is where a member can have a proposal where it gets executed on chain once it's voted on but there's um i think going back to kind of the topic of uh dao and decentralized governance being a problem of like political philosophy as a whole is kind of the like when we're determining as a society or as a community on what a proper governance mechanism is it kind of begs questions of like even okay like this gentleman over here thous can have spectrums of decentralization and trustlessness so isn't it okay to give some people power and delegate authority for them to be able to uh act with authority so that its actions get executed faster i think that's uh quite reasonable and it's a job for us to determine or maybe for those to determine what governance models that they believe makes sense for their own communities and then finally decentralization challenges i think though like even if we agree that some dows can operate in a trust-based manner the whole i would say reason why we have web 3 or crypto is that we do have now the ability to create trustless systems and people can work together without trusting a particular intermediary and with consensus they define what rules to participate in so i'm going to focus on the fourth one i have 10 minutes left okay so how do we increase decentralization first we want to lean toward trustless systems and then reduce what we believe is reduced reducing technical overhead will be helpful for other people um and i'll explain and with very little shilling uh so what we do at seasons is we allow people to create what we call albums uh which are baskets baskets of nfts that are fractionalized or uh collectively governed through erc20 tokens and i'm sure you guys have heard like you know fractional uniquely those are other fractionalization platforms out there in the market the way that we differentiate is we have a governance mechanism built in where the erc20 token holders of these albums are able to have proposals crafted that are voted on snapshot but it actually if you craft a a transaction for that proposal it can get executed on chain through the reality.ef module where people vote off chain on snapshot it gets the contents of that transaction gets sent off to the reality eat module it gets arbitrated and then it will get executed on chain we think it is one governance mechanism that might prove useful to other nft dials and we're keen on exploring kind of the further adoption of that okay so we mentioned how do you increase decentralization one is leaning toward trustless systems so it's kind of tying back to what we have uh i guess built in terms of the off chain voting and on chain execution so we built a single flow for kind of how these token holders of an album can participate and actually have meaningful participation a lot of nft dials today actually tie back to the uh the screenshot that ross shared where it's just multi-sigs there's actually gen z people who like no no no offense to gen z but you know they're like collecting nfcs together and they share private keys like whoa that's that's no good i know uh so i think uh uh hopefully like what we are able to create is a platform where people don't even if they're friends don't have to trust each other and can use our platform by verifying the contracts and knowing that it does what it's supposed to do and be able to manage these nfts collectively together and then reducing technical overhead so one aspect of what we what i mentioned was now executing that transaction on chain um it does create a barrier of entry where not everyone knows how to craft an ethereum transaction so let's say you uh to give an example let's say you as an album participant want to buy a nft off of open c and if you want to do that in a decentralized way and it's a proposal it would be um or or at least in seasons what we're going to support is the ability for somebody to make a proposal and in that proposal is a series of uh contract calls and api calls to openc where you can say i would like to buy this piece for 5e using the album treasury and once that's executed the album is able to buy the nft collectively but the part of the technical overhead is that not everyone is able to craft those transactions and what we're doing is we have this concept of a standardized proposal where we want to package uh contract calls or transactions that are most popular of nft dials and package it into kind of like a user-friendly manner so when you as a album uh token holder or a regular user have an idea or proposal that you think the album should partake in you're able to use these standard proposals that gets voted on and it gets executed again i think you know there's actually a lot of room for improvement here but the idea is that we are trying to lower the barrier of entry and participation of dows okay so finally uh trash uh you guys are like wtf okay so we're launching a hopefully what's an interesting initiative called the trash dial where people we're going to create what's called a trash album on seasons and you can deposit your shitty nfts and you get 69 trash tokens and what i think is very interesting about this is that unlike any crypto projects like this is going to be a true experiment in collective governance where there's no team allocation we don't get any trash tokens predefined by being contributors it's actually what we like what we'd like to see is random people depositing nfts getting trash tokens and saying actually can we think about maybe setting up a fund or allocation for contributors who are going to be i guess helpful to this project and making that uh i guess form completely organically and i don't want the seasons team to be part of that actually i i would say the only means by which we participate should be just uh making sure that our governance mechanism is something that fulfills the needs of trash dell and if it doesn't it's kind of an experiment for us as well to improve our platform because we're taking a very like opinionated approach on governance and we recognize that it might not be you know ideal in certain cases or maybe even most cases and we'll fix it so a pretty good team much better than me they're back there say hi um okay so takeaways uh governance is messy and technically challenging there's a lot of ways to achieve governance and how to run a dao and the way that we are approaching our seasons is trying to make meaningful trying to give meaningful decision-making power to anybody that could be you know for better or worse because i'm not sure if you saw the ftx commercial uh for the super bowl like you know like one part of it was like i made like you know this is the declaration of a constitution or whatever and then he's like everyone can vote and then the guy's like even the stupid ones and he tries to rip off the constitution right um but i mean and i think you know those considerations are legitimate but uh i think uh what we have the the opportunity i guess for the builders here is creating a system that uh we believe is more fair and at least what we're trying to do at seasons is broaden that participation by everyone um thank you and i'll take questions for here yeah