New Standards for DAOs

next up we have a panel the first panel of the day new standards for dows with a group of awesome people from around the ecosystems um yeah let's just get it started uh let's get nema in here and say hello to everybody hello hello awesome all right i'll take it away yeah thanks hudson um interesting that jay was talking about dao's from the perspective of communities so you could say you can have like social collab collaboration between dao's you could even look at dao's as formalization of communities but in this panel with our lovely dowie guest we're going to talk about the technical side so thanks to jay and now hello everyone do you want to introduce yourself a little bit but also tell us why you care about dow standards sure i'll go jump in real quick uh my name is james young ceo of abridged and we have a consumer product called collab land and i was fascinated with dows since the 2016 the dow hack that really is what compelled and still going down that rabbit hole of reducing coordination costs and this is what the internet endows can provide just online and the the more i learn the more i find out how little i know so it just keeps the cycle going but that's me thanks james um as always great hair so ilia do you want to go next yeah hi everyone uh ilya co-founder at nir and for me kind of there's like few levels of doubt i think like the highest level you know the kind of original discussion about how people can self-organize in new ways and like share resources and build something and be aligned like that's you know definitely an amazing work an amazing idea that like i think we're still all striving for to build uh i think like the kind of more practical like technical side of this i think is unlocks a lot of kind of on-chain [Music] like resources and stuff we do like governance and like management of like you know investment and stuff like this like practical things that you know we all have problems with for various reasons and so it kind of solves this problem right now while we're still figuring out this kind of future you know path of like how do we build companies in the new world right so that's kind of combination for me thank you it's you david yeah hi everyone so david ruins your co-founder of open law and i also been always into the like tower in 2016 i think that even before already in 2015 like vitalik was writing the article about it and i found it fascinating and um so i don't know we we were working like mainly on the on the legal layer of things and how like basically organization or set of agreements uh between uh between members of this uh organization that that's what led us to the work that we've been doing the law where we basically set dows to to uh for like a specific use case and in terms of funding and and even other services around that and i think that by going really deep into these use cases and trying to understand what is what do we have in common between all of them and how we can generalize and standardize them and what how can we be flexible and and dynamic and and involve as a any organization evolve like it can be something a sort of point in time then becomes something else i mean in the story of uh of companies we've seen that like nintendo was just doing some little games nokia was doing uh tires and other stuff like companies and organization evolves and we need to have also foundation so that it can uh evolve with it and um i i find it fascinating to be able to play between the formalism of creating smart contracts and doing things on chain and the fuzziness of managing an organization and community and how to marry these two and make them work together yeah and i think for the lao and people who are dealing with legal doubts you have like these constraints from two sides you have to formalize with respect to law but also code and then you also have humans and communities uh by the way myself i'm also with nir on twitter at insidenima that's that's that's me and uh i'm focused on growing our ecosystem of communities so um to kind of start to formally start the conversation um i think we should talk about why now is the right time to talk about tao standardization and dao standards and formalizing them and i think one of the reasons is we're kind of growing to this direction of multi-chain multi-dial multi-community universe and now i think is a good time for dao's to formalize how they're going to collaborate together talk together and you know even go as far as you know endow on even a centralized platform god forbid talking to a dow unchained and then talking to a slightly less centralized chain and then a real central decentralized chain so it's like you i think now is the right time to talk about this and start you know the conversation around it and um and i think uh one of the coolest thing that happened at east denver was we were having a conversation about how to formalize guilds and communities and then i turned on like ethember stream and the vitalik was talking about like this is how to come up with formalisms for uh memberships on chains so maybe we could pick up where vitalik left it and talk about like how is that relevant for daos in the context of dao's if the concept of membership is formalized uh does it change anything for dao's or not james seems to have do you want to go first sure yeah you know with collab land uh we have this token permission chat and you know at the root of it is you need to hold a token in order to be in this chat uh and that is the kind of like this beginning of a membership or you know i hesitate to say identity because that's a huge rabbit hole and then you go to you know mixing um via like your platform username because you know we allow uh token holders to assemble and coordinate through telegram and discord and the bot just controls if you were to move those tokens out the bot would just kick you out it's very very simple um it's not quite a dow but we're seeing use cases of people uh using like snapshot which is an off chain voting tool and collab land to like formalize and i think this notion of membership and this kind of standardization i think will emerge regardless um uh so it's it's uh either going to be ad hoc you know kind of like you know if you are an ethereum developer erc20 token standard just kind of emerged and people just started using it now it's like a standard it may not is arguably not the best you know and who knew it was going to be widely popular we're seeing the same type of pattern happening now so i think it's great to have this kind of conversation to get ahead of it rather than like the market kind of dictating um the just what's available and everyone latching on um and so uh it it's going to be this really interesting topic because you'll have people that are kind of rooted in i think like the kind of core notions of cypherpunk bitcoin pseudo anonymity versus those that you know don't really care have those values in those so you know as we evolve the ecosystem in general i think you'll see some contention there and that's kind of the value system of the ecosystem that we we have to address from a human culture value perspective uh and and i think that's going to drive a lot of conversation so it's great that vitalik is leading the charge there and you know it's gonna be messaging top down or like from you know the thought leaders of the ecosystem and then bottom up by the communities growing and so trying to find that middle ground and where that is going to be i don't know exactly but i think it's going to have to do with some type of token address uh and you know this is why being an ethereum developer i'm interested in near just to give a quick plug if you don't mind um there's this like implicit account and a kind of an account based system uh that is not um like a first-class citizen let's say in like other blockchains so this is this is fascinating uh and uh you know i i think this is something to explore um uh yeah when you when you talk about um account extraction um and and membership and things like that from a technical perspective yeah got it any direct responses to that i i would say it's also always a question of like how do you define memberships like you could you could imagine in certain organizations especially as they grow that you have certain levels like uh when you think about shares in company you have about voting chairs non-voting shares i mean even even already in the model v2 you have this idea of shares and loots where we have like non-volunteering members that have um they have a say like if they want to reach me they can get some of the of the asset in the dao but they don't they're not able to vote so i think it will be it would be also part of that like we have to define what do we mean when we see membership what kind of machine are we interested in and and things like that yeah i think for me kind of like when we're thinking about governance more kind of high level like we we kind of end up in this understanding that there's like way too many stakeholders in the ecosystem and as you know as like with like working like guilds as there's more like projects launching and then like this d5 explosion right where kind of everybody wanted to have their own governance uh kind of for their platform it's actually like i think this is like just just like showcases the need where you know the complexity of interaction between all of those parties will just keep growing and if there is no like clear quote unquote api for them to interact between each other right like we're kind of going from individuals interacting on internet right to projects like you know balancer and whatever and one inch for example now interacting with each other they are interacting through smart contracts but same time both of them now have a governance layer that can change like you know a bunch of stuff about how these things work and so like this governance like this people kind of who are trying to make decisions they need to find a way to interact with each other but it is you know pseudonymous and like put like have a very different spectrum and like same same problem kind of in a governance like in a higher level where you have like you know developers and validators and you know token holders and all those different parties and like you know nft creators and dao builders right all of them have a somewhat different position on what what should happen and like how do you coordinate them while they like like not you know not putting them into one you know voting thing which you know we know fails like if you just put everyone and say like here's one vote everybody vote it's like that doesn't work so like how do you actually coordinate like the smaller groups together and i mean this is literally what like governance has been like you know in political science but like we are you know in this new world where code is lost so like how do we actually do that uh so that that's why i think it's like it's time to do to start defining this uh as we just have this kind of explosion of of like this governance tools and and people starting to use governance to actually like control smart contract platforms and like they need to communicate with each other on the governance layer and uh i think it would be good to talk about like dao's a little bit like chains the same way that when two chains have a bridge and they interoperate you want to know like what are the security guarantees like how often does this chain get forked and all those things you kind of need to know like what's the minimum viable like the time that you need on the other side to react to forks and like governance events on the other chain you should probably should come up with standards for dowse too that for example uh i remember with uh metacartel uh there was no way initially to upgrade the dial so like everyone had to rage quit and then join the new dow so something like this should be formally defined so if two dials have i don't know some kind of bond or collaboration reliance they know that oh like we will have like a seven days notice period for this other dow to get dissolved and then like we have to return the assets and stuff so so i think that that's probably one of the reasons why we we do really need to formalize dow standards um if no comments i wanted to kind of move to some uh examples because i feel this is this still kind of abstract have have you guys seen any actual examples of social collaboration between daos or alliances that you think could be formalized to kind of paint a more clear picture for everyone uh yeah i can jump in real quick we're seeing this in the social token space where actual collabs are happening and really what that means is uh there is just uh this like informal or formal uh swapping of tokens uh and having you know in from a collab land perspective in like in a discord you'll have one token community allowing another token to be used to get access to a channel so this is kind of the first kind of merging of kind of groups of holders and so um that that is becoming a thing uh and could we say that's a little bit like the star alliance or something with like airlines that if you have like a card from one of these like members of the alliance you can enter all the other like uh what do they call a premium lounge that's right no yeah that's that's uh basically uh what it is in terms of like you know what do you do when you have a token you have protocol tokens that you know define some type of work to be done some yield or whatever let's for example indeed but in social tokens it's like access to a community and a group and whatever the values of that group are so yeah it's very very similar to that and we're seeing that happening more and more i mean um in the web 2 space you're actually seeing i think it's a stir they you know raised 4 million in october to help people influencers collab on youtube and i think it was just yesterday they announced a 100 million dollar raise so within four and a half five months they went from like seed to series a because there's demand there like on the web 2 space so it's really like this collision between web 2 creator economy influencers that need to start collabing because they're getting demonetized from these different platforms and then now you see them looking into crypto with the explosion interest mainstream adoption and they're just looking for another revenue stream so i think we're just kind of at the tip of the iceberg and i think this is you know why we we need to get ahead of this in terms of you know standards uh for dows because you know once you have these tokenized communities they're going to want to start voting and moving around funds and so you need to be able to do that layer 1 layer 2 multi-chain all of that because people aren't voting right now because gas costs on ether are too high so you know it costs 30 bucks to vote um so if the aggregate cost of whatever funds you're moving for the vote um you know is not as much as the aggregate you know if the gas cost of everyone voting it's just like it it kind of doesn't really make sense to do this and so this is why again we need to look for alternate solutions and uh like i think i tweeted about this maybe we should do like hot takes at some point here but uh i feel like going from ethereum maintenance which is obviously the most secure chain at the moment where and to these like other chains and layer twos is is not just like going from like a slow chain to a faster chain it is i feel more like when everyone got access to broadband it's just a complete game changer that's really what i meant with game changer people are gonna do things that we cannot even imagine now because when you have like one gigabit internet that's more like solana near is more like 100 megabits but we have sharding so when you have when you have like one gigabit or 100 megabit internet you can do really insane stuff that were not even possible with like dial-up internet um and then another uh point that you made i just want to make it more clear about interoperability and open standards is that uh it's kind of insane that like when i joined crypto more formally a couple of years ago it was all about like kind of my red pill was the fact that data identity all these things were open and data portability is kind of like a jargon and this is actually not possible you even have like nfd platforms issuing nfts with features that are not supported on other nfc platforms which is kind of crazy and and then with like daos like owls need to collab like they're all about cooperation makes no sense so i think that's why we're having this conversation now yeah yeah um i i agree and uh you know it's an interesting thesis to see you know is there like a deposit chain or root chain that you can secure funds and read from uh in an atomic way where you can actually do votes potentially like faster transactions from a dow perspective is just voting and then having that go back into uh like the main chain or root chain in sync depending on time day or whatever um so yeah i think that you know to your point emergent design people will like use it and we will have no idea and it would be hard to anticipate it's impossible to look forward and go okay this is the use case but it's going to make so much sense looking back you're like of course and so we just need more of these experiments to happen so that we can see what works and what doesn't work we need more times at bat um for for the success to emerge yeah yeah uh i don't know if elia and david you have any comments or we move to the next topic i mean i think one of the examples that uh is emerging for sure is definitely like different like this application dows right kind of starting to be leveraged more for kind of business development and like where either like individuals or or other dows i mean or like other organizations can pretty much apply to like for this data to work with some other party right and i actually think this is really interesting because like if we imagine that each organization is you know operating as a doubt then well it's like almost they are you know requesting work or requesting some kind of collaboration from each other and so that's kind of already happening through like some types of proposals and things like that and like it's it's in like you know there's like funds allocated for the work to be integrated off you know this application is that application or if it was that chain or whatever and so i think like going forward kind of that type of thing where actually one dow will be like requesting for some work to be done by another dial or like pretty much putting a bound to it and that some other doubt some other doubt can come in like great for example yeah yeah like great guild can come in and you know do the work and get paid into their down and then distribute it to their like whatever token holders or something i think like that kind of thing is like it's almost happening like yeah i mean the tooling is very formalized janky yeah yeah it's very not formalized tooling is very janky i think i mean one of the things is like formalization here it becomes more and more complex because this is where like the social part comes in right like actually you need to have a conversation about many of these things like it's really hard so like we have this uh for for splitting now we have this like policy and there's like 100 ideas how to extend like the policy of how people vote on things depending on some conditions and like reality is it's kind of hard to to formalize that in some piece of code because well everybody has like a different way of like what information they want to see or what they want to discuss and stuff like this so i think like you still need a social layer there like as part of this formalization but yeah i mean i think like just few simple kind of apis between how to establish connection how to uh like send information like where is kind of almost like a mailbox for each dow for mozart house and like how it's going to be processed and prioritized like few of those things i think will go a long way and then everything else can go in the social layer and i think us being crypto and open web these things should not become like one size fits all but but dao's and these communities they should at least be able to subscribe to a set of standards and then broadcast that to other dows that we're working within this like i don't know is blah blah blah blah standard for dao collaboration and then they know how to communicate and send signals um so we have like seven minutes left i wanted to kind of get into this more like um hot takes or like let me start it with this like are you more guys more a fan of like big dowels like the lao kind of is a medium-sized kind of dao or flamingo dao for nfc but like are you a fan of large-scale dows or lots of small dowels or kind of they would fit within this framework of dao mesh from zefram uh i think that uh you know it depends on where you're coming from if you're looking at you know just putting your organization online then the structure of top down you know trying to mimic a corporation can definitely be doable and i think the first ideas of daos were rooted in that but uh and that calls for like organizations to become like larger i think that uh this network of dows where you can npm install dao and they're more composable and you just it's just dowels all the way down and so you know you may be a networked with a bunch of different dows so it's not like this top-down hierarchy of dials maybe that's some of it but some of it may be flat and you just mix and match kind of how you want and i think because of the speed of being online and it being driven by smart contracts i think he'd be a lot more fluid and dynamic and so what we know of like organizations and you need to kind of have to reset your mental model and so this is what we're learning about so i think the technology is there and as elia said it's just about the social coordination how we're going to all like work together but i i i see it from like a technical perspective if we can all agree and that's always the hard part you know i don't think that we're going to solve governance because it hasn't really been solved since the beginning of human history so just thinking like you know crypto is going to help and like magically solve it i i think is uh yeah not realistic but it'll be a lot more fluid and there'll be different things that will emerge ephemeral organizations if you will that are not so structured and tied so you might have a dow that it lives for two weeks combined with another dow that is more anchored you know there's a bunch of different combinations and i think that the standards will help uh push forward this idea of organizational composability love that davish another buzzword was like ephemeral daos hope we see more of those on these like gen 2 chains uh david and ilya any hot takes on this so i think that's like coming from the legal side and i'm not a lawyer but uh working with lawyers for for a few years now i think that when you think that an organization is really just a set of agreements in that governance is here not only to make it legal but also to like evolve um avoid conflicts to make to streamline decision making and things like that i think that um dao is a concept to do that but the tools are like what we're building the standardization and also the smart contracts and having kind of automated way to take decision and make this in certain in a certain way that basically the fact that we we have our emotions and stuff that get in the way of taking a good decision suddenly can be removed and having almost the organization working on a protocol level as opposed to on the human level i think can can make things much more fluid like james was saying and i think that another thing that is for me very interesting in in standardizing that that our end as james was saying uh having this composibility is that suddenly he can scale good governance in a way that he's not possible today like today if you you even if you someone had the golden um recipe for perfect governance you would have to go to school for three years or five years or whatever try to learn that and then you have to go come down to all your team so they understand this this government so that it works and here you have a way of formalizing it so that people kind of go along with it as opposed to the need to actually understanding it and you cannot have human bugs in the sense that they misunderstanding of what the the agreements in the organization is and i mean i didn't what was talking about if like um ephemeral um dowels it's true that you can start a project saying we just need a project here the few people they have access to these funds and they have access to these things to to do abc and then once the project is done the dao just like dissolved and there is nothing less to be done or as elia was saying and imagining agreements between those and between protocols to have also special deals you can imagine that you have a different protocol to say like okay let's do a win-win situation where we lowered the the fees for each other and create a new product together and do it on a protocol level so you don't need to trust the other team you just deploy it and then it works and that's actually something that is that will bring a lot of innovation and because you don't need to trust you can just move forward and and make it happen by the way we have one minute left talking about many dows and damage uh i would like to make an announcement we have more than 100 million near tokens which is 300 million dollars in our community fund and if you want to build a thousand dollars apply to community plus dao at near.org we'll drop the email just tell us what crazy dao stuff you want to build and then we'll be happy to support you ilya any 20 second efficient last words check out sputnik sputnik though as well and launch your doubt today yes yes sputnik that font yolo so that was uh that was our panel we finished the in time and you you guys see these like links on this side or this side uh you you can claim them and get some nfts of sputnik dao's logo that's a special thing for everyone here awesome and ft's are great thank you everybody for uh joining us today great panel