Building a Sustainable Web3 Ecosystem with Two Treasury Solutions Panel led by Francesca Te

good um hi everyone my name is Francesca and I head up the marketing team at mantle Network which is essentially a ethereum layer 2 the first ever initiated by a Dao so speaking of dows you know the debate on doubt is a big one and it continues throughout several years and depending really on who you speak to Dows can either be a revolutionary concept set to define the Utopia of what could be a virtual leaderless organization of the future or on the polarizing end a dystopian dysfunctional construct not my words some people say that fraught with existential and perhaps even a self-existential challenge but lucky for me I'm really not the one put in the hot seat today having to answer some of these uh greatest debates surrounding the the wonderful world of towers introducing my paddle speakers right here representing game seven and Edge we have John and Spock Dao co-found himself Josh very nice to have you here um founder of hyper play as well as the author of the mantle the first version of the mantle proposal Jacob as well as the head of ecosystem for mantle Arjun um very good to have you all here so I'd like to first start off with uh you know good old round of introduction as well as kind of linking to you know your perspective from the organizations that you represent what do you see are the biggest challenges facing the growth and sustainability of web 3 ecosystems today starting with you John yeah happy to kick things off um yeah appreciate any kind introduction for him I think uh some of the biggest issues in my you know kind of thinking from our first principles perspective is really how do you get engaged positive contribution to these web3 communities I think a lot of people have tried various token models and you know if you launch a token then hopefully you have this decentralized community that spontaneously comes together and things just happen um I think we've realized that a lot of times oftentimes that doesn't just happen so you really have to be thoughtful and so coming up with these novel Frameworks or different ways of coordinating or tools or variety of tools pieced together is something that both game seven and najida have been thinking about very deeply um and so I think that's been really kind of the fun part where it's like how do you create a framework that's loose enough to evolve and flex with the community that's participating to really fully utilize what Dow should be which is you know optimizing for Community contribution um so I think I think that's really the biggest struggle is like how do you have that framework that is also you know allows people to participate in that but also as shape to the community and it's not too like structured and rigid so that people can not make changes and evolve with the skill sets and and kind of like uh people who are participating sounds good over to you Josh thank you um I I think uh I think the there's a finite amount of attention that can be captured among everyone right and uh with sporked out what we've done is we've designed a very long tail we've designed the our tokenomics to expire uh the Genesis to expire in 2032 and when you're playing these long-term games it's harder to compete for attention with people who are just giving out tokens it's like hey look at my airdrop come come claim these come mint this free nft and so in this vacuum I think that would be one of the bigger challenges um and I think the second side of that is making the decision in design choices a lot has to be designed around compliance and you make this decision should we do things incredibly compliant what is the structure we should set up uh with sport out we chose a Colorado Cooperative which is like deep in the U.S infrastructure of like yes we're going to comply to the letter of the law which then disables us from being able to do some of the ponzienomic things that a lot of other projects in the ecosystem are accustomed to like liquidity mining and trying to to rent Community um I think on the longer tail it'll benefit us but in the short term we have things like eat Denver to keep people excited Jacob yeah so I think the the traditional uh corporate model is not fit for um you know not not fit for unleashing the innovation of of everything that's possible today and we've seen you know generally like crises of ownership crises of alignment of the incentives between the the communities that use products versus the communities that build products um and you know part of what I was really excited about uh when I joined the bittau ecosystem is this was a Dao that uh that had this vision of fractal growth where there could be a Dao that would join together with other external projects create other Dows or autonomous entities or new companies and use tokens to to create incentive alignment so we you know the the bit Dow has its own token uh bit and and that um and that in our treasury has been used to to join with other Dows or other projects in the ecosystem so to to illustrate this in a really concrete way um bit Dao and Forte one of them most uh the the most uh respected and major web 3 game development projects joined together to create game seven which is a Dao that is focused on accelerating sustainable uh web 3 gaming infrastructure and uh that that Dao went on to form another project which I'm the founder of called hyper play which is a web 3 native game launcher that allows players to carry their metamask or Walla connect wallet into native or browser games sort of like a steam for web3 and then uh even uh you know hyper play was actually a collaboration of game seven and metamask and then now in hyper play we're working with some other external protocols I'm not ready to announce yet but you can see these waves of fractal growth and and incentive alignment between the different layers of the dowels all the way down so um you know we we are launching features that are related to hyperplay on the mantle L2 uh who who Fran leads uh Community for um you know and we're we're seeing this this this ecosystem of fractal growth and many many different organizations which have autonomy of action so that they can build products I mean we uh we built hyper play in like six months if you try to do that in a traditional Corporation the bureaucracy of it wouldn't have been capable of doing that but the autonomy of action of the Dow structure allows people to take initiative in a way that you couldn't during it in in regular structures and yeah bet that was an organization with with a multi-billion dollar treasury that's able to to deploy this in a much more effective way than than traditional Capital allocation and and traditional um inefficient forms of capital so I'm I'm really I'm really excited about creating new forms of structure and governance that benefit community that regenerate society that our ethical business models that that are both sustainable and that empower the communities and redistribute ownership so uh those are the reasons I'm here gotta know that that was the the like those are some pretty interesting uh so yeah so those are some pretty interesting points uh that Jacob and and this is interesting for me because at mantle we run a chain which is run by a Dao right so the the Dow gets to make decisions in the you know in in the in the way we want to shape the blockchain now the problem is that you've got some super technical discussions which very few people could maybe understand or fathom or be able to take a decision on and then you've got business decisions in which you may not be able to let's say talk about all the different details involved right so we want the community to be involved in decision making for the blockchain but how do we involve the community in which kind of decision and when we do this is is kind of a bit of a challenge right and and this is not unique to what we've seen at mantle right so we've actually seen this before and if you see like the governance models of protocols like synthetics you will see that you know synthetics has got a Dao but then they have the subcommittee right where you can like go and take certain decisions if you look at let's say um apecoin a coin has this voting system where you sort of vote people to the ape Council look and then take certain decisions so you know I'm seeing different kinds of governance models evolve in different types of dows um and and and this is kind of what I'm trying to learn from from the ecosystem because these entities are very operational in nature like you know they need to get stuff done like synthetics needs to build products um you know if if the ape Community or yoga Labs needs to ship games right and and we need to build an ecosystem and deploy a chain so the problems are operational in Asia and what kind of um you know and how you maintain your information symmetry in in this kind of a construct where the community feels involved that there is collective ownership and Collective responsibility but at the same time you know we're able to operationally achieve all the results right and deliver on time like for me this is like a tough challenge um you know because like like even basic stuff right like you have proposals people won't vote on proposals right and then you need to like follow up you know and vote Etc and and this is super important for me because if the proposal doesn't doesn't get vote then we can't take a decision so so I think like nimbler governance structures which help you solve operational problems or something which have to evolve right and and like I said not everybody should take every decision maybe people should take certain types of decisions whether technical or business whatever have you and then and then you know you evolve like a governance model like that uh so that's kind of like so so this is these are the things I'm learning from the ecosystem from different governance models it has pretty exciting time and hopefully you know we'll figure out something which works really well for us as well so yeah Arjun I I I'd love to dive a little bit deeper to what you talked about because you provide a perfect segue into the topic for today which is building a sustainable web3 ecosystem with two treasury Solutions so when you talk about kind of like having that technical uh layer of decisions as well as you know the business side of things how do you think the web3 ecosystem can be optimized by separating these responsibilities first on an infrastructure building as well as the ecosystem development side of things and origin as soon as you're done I'd love to hear your perspective as well Josh not sure definitely so so this is interesting right so we've been talking about this model for almost four or five months now right so if you go on YouTube you can see the discussion around separation of technology and ecosystem interestingly this is exactly what even coinbase is doing right so coinbase is now working with OP Collective where coinbase will do ecosystem stuff and the OB collector will do the technology stuff right and interestingly op Collective have their own Dao which is powered by the op token right so those guys can take technical decisions while maybe coinbase can take business decisions right so in some sense it validates the model which we you know we've been like proponent we've been proponents off for a while uh even at a blockchain level at mantle uh we want to have the same system because we understand not everybody can take deep technical decisions on like let's say roll up technology or data availability and similarly not everybody could take best ecosystem decisions right so you need to have um parties who understand these different things take those decisions right very similar to how governments operate where where the um you know where let's say the department which is responsible for let's say building infrastructure will not take decisions related to Homeland Security right that's somebody else's purview so just like in governments you have specific let's say think tax or departments which take certain decisions you need to have the same thing in blockchain where technical decisions maybe certain financial decisions maybe ecosystem decisions have to be taken by different parties all collaborating with each other for Mutual value creation so so this is kind of what I feel is a sign of things to come and yeah I'd love to like see you know how you guys are doing doing that at Spock the the only thing I'd want to add to that is putting a label on it and that's what we've created a system of like separation of powers which I think is is just good governance that's good so let's a little bit about resource allocation and kind of like the goal of achieving Mass adoption for web 3 technology and I'd love to hear about this from the gaming point of view so first of all to Jacob um with the current kind of like number of on-chain web 3 participants uh still kind of like in the single digit Millions uh what new approaches do you think are needed to optimize those two goals for resource allocation as well as achieving Mass adoption so I think there's some pretty um you know the the typical corporate business model for example or in an allocation model often pits the shareholders of a corporation who often have short-term interests um and who who don't have incentives that are aligned with the the long-term growth and sustainability of the companies that they invest in um and and they often pressure those companies to do things for for short-term capital returns uh that are not uh long-term sustainable and one of the things that a lot of projects for example and I think that John should probably speak about this a little bit more um you know we're we're looking at building things like reputation protocols where those who contribute the most they have a greater say in the governance of a thing those who are closest to building a problem they have a greater insight into how to create value around and solve and solve different problems and so in in the bitter ecosystem you know we've had inside of one of the the autonomous entities of bit Dao there's game seven which is building a protocol called summon it's a a protocol that's that's launching features on our mantle layer 2 and and that is a reputation protocol that incentivizes uh Community engagement Community idea and ideation and contributions uh developer contributions uh all the way to gameplay and activity and games and fun and and bringing all of those things and taking the people who really are using our products taking the people who are really building our products and giving them a greater voice in the development uh and roadmap and navigation of the product rather than than short-term speculation this creates a greater in of alignment between Builders and our communities and and and also you know uh in in the larger bit Community around that token John I'd love to hear your view tell us a little bit more about summon as well yeah yeah so happy to unpack I mean like Jacob mentioned summon I mean this is something that I've been spending a lot of time on and thinking about and I think it's kind of this amalgamation of a lot of the the kind of issues that I've had in a lot of the exist the the past and past and current kind of uh you know Dow communities that I've been a part of um you know like Jacob mentioned I think really when you like think about what the core thing that you need for a successful doubt Community is you need positive contribution and so a lot of these other things that you're stacking on top and people are doing in Dow tools are really kind of missing that core point where you need people who are actually positively contributing and a lot of doubts start they'll launch a token like and you're kind of hoping that those initial people who get that token oftentimes cheap or maybe free from an airdrop or something will continue to work and be aligned with the doubt to ensure success for two three four five years but if you have a very Complex Community people like you know sometimes are no longer interested and so what we've done is we started developing this platform that Jacob mentioned it's called Uh summon and what it allows is you to have a soul-bound nft they can basically meet your community where you are you can easily make these tasks and quests and you can earn XP and you can level up based on the different engagement that you do on different platforms it's extremely platform agnostic but it makes this really nice unified experience for organizing your Dow so game seven is really trialing this kind of experiment which I think just to tack on I'm a huge fan of how bitdao has so much breadth and it's able to have all of these experiments experiments to really expedite the Dow community at large that's one of the reasons why I was so excited to be an active member in that Community um but so you know you have game seven who's trying the meritocratic angle and they're saying you know based on your engagement you should have more or less say you should have more or less access and influence and stature in the community but what's kind of cool is once you have this core primitive for a meritocratic governance model you can start to hybridize that with a liquid token and I kind of like to think about it like a spectrum you have some Dows who are like I only care about your economic contribution I don't really care about your engagement on the other hand you say I don't care anything about your economic contribution I only care what you're actually doing for the Dao but when you combine those two you start to realize that I would say oh being a spectrum I would say that all communities fit somewhere on that Spectrum where it's like maybe I care 70 30 right or 50 50. and you can have to have this really interesting balance and what's kind of cool is maybe You released a token and you realize that it's really lopsided to begin with if you start to introduce something like summon and you start to add vote waves as a multiplier to this base liquid economic token you can start to shift the balance to people who are actually more active contributors in your Dow and I think it fixed a lot it fixes a lot of these kind of like early problems or midterm problems that people run into because of the one dollar one token one vote model that most Dows are currently using so I'm hearing a lot of kind of Engagement participation and Community being Central to to many of these Dow systems Josh from your perspective how do you drive this kind of community engagement and how can people get involved in a dow ecosystem that's a good question um I think empowerment and designing tokonomics to incentivize people to be empowered and then to exercise the power that you've given them so for example in sportdow um uh it controls owns whatever word you want to use uh eat Denver right it's the the Dao that runs eat Denver and if there's something that you don't like about eat Denver or there's something that you'd like to see improve next year you're empowered via this doubt to exercise that um for attending you've got 52.8 uh sponsors get a bunch of sport buying merch there's a lot of different things that you could do throughout the ecosystem to try to uh increase your voting power right and we encourage people to provide that feedback to help improve the event sounds good and and I do appreciate that there are different levels different tiers of participation so from a bit down perspective and this is an open question to any one of you how do we encourage participation within the bitter ecosystem soon so I think so it's interesting right so so when you for example take a Dao right and you throw let's say a token into the mix like you know what what happens with spoke and with some of the other doubts you can then create like some level of incentive alignment right now them the problem with incentive alignment also is that at some point it can become purely about incentives right versus really wanting to solve a problem or possible real kind of like you know Mission based engagement so it's a very fine balance there for for example like if I were to take bitos example right now beta has a bunch of Investments this mantle which is an infrastructure piece which has got a different problem to solve um there is game seven which is focused on game tooling there is ejidao which is focused on education ZK Dao is focused on ZK um these Dows can also spawn more Dows like we've seen with hyperplay um so at every level there are a different set of incentives and different objectives and different kinds of people who might be involved in in these kind of structures right so so what is pretty clear is that you cannot have one single incentive scheme which sort of encompasses all of this so if this is not a smart contract problem right this is more of a execution and and goal problem and goals could also change for example game sevens goals could change depending on how the gaming industry changes um so so the way I see it is that if you want real participation I think first thing you got to solve real problems right you got to solve problems which the community is passionate about not what you want to solve but what the world needs to solved right and that's when you get Mission orientation like you got people who are involved in the mission right and then whatever incentive scheme you come up with has to be aligned to that mission right so this is not about like for example like you know we as human beings right we have some goal in life something we want to do right to achieve that goal we do certain things like you know some of us take up jobs maybe some sort of business like others do other things but essentially it's a means for us to achieve or do what we want to do right there's a mission somewhere and and I think if you can Define that mission for the Dao and that get align incentives in such a way that's I feel when things become like successful um so so this is I how like like at bit Dao for example we want to think where each body has their own mission and find people who are passionate about solving or being a part of that mission and then align incentives accordingly right where Mission takes priority right and incentives enable that mission so I think that's like a more organic or maybe a better way of getting people involved in like you know whatever you might want to build right whether it's a company well it's a chain whether it's a Dao or whatever have you so yeah right um so unfortunately we're almost out of time so as a final question and this is addressed to each and every one of you uh Dows right now are clearly having a moment uh in In This Very thriving kind of uh ego system and the territory that we operate in but is it ready to go mainstream um and this is a question I guess we'll start with you John for your perspective yes I mean I think I won't go too much into you know I think it is very easy to kind of segue into something like summon right or a lot of these different products or engagement tools or things that we're traveling and testing I think we're still very early days um you know I I think to kind of like back up a little bit a lot of people like to compare this to you know this model is going to take on you know corporations right or these traditional centralized models um it's kind of interesting to me because it's very reminiscent reminiscent of back when I was you know talking to these like large corporations back in 2016-17 and building building products and kind of Consulting for them that a lot of them didn't fundamentally understand and we're getting really bad information about the trade-offs between a centralized database and a blockchain there are things that a blockchain is very good at and it's when you want to optimize for that primitive trust or when you lock lack trust and you have an adversarial environment most centralized companies don't have that and a centralized database would be much more efficient I think I think the same exact conversations right now are happening with Dows almost everyone's like let's just cut you know this x style y dial right we could just doubtify everything but then a lot of people don't actually want to run a dow they want to have a committee they want to make decisions and they don't want to actually like put in the work and effort to open it up to the public to actually build the tools and build the governance systems to let it be a Grassroots ground up movement where people actually have say and influence it can actually shape the direction of the Dow and so I think that's my biggest point is just when people are thinking about building a dow it's like do you actually want to just build a web three focused company and keep it centralized or do you really want to put in the work and effort to do a Dao I think we still have a decent way there but it's just fantastic seeing all the people at the Denver and all the phenomenal people in the bitdot community who are putting in the work and effort I think to do some interesting experiments to further this so I think we're getting there but you know is it like hey TurnKey everyone should join one everyone can do one like no but I think the people who are sitting here today putting the effort communities in Dallas building tools trying to engage a community um you know we're well on our way which is great to see that was a pretty good answer the only thing I'd want to add to that is yes no and it depends I I so I think Dows are ready for certain things and I don't think they're ready for other things so we're talking about replacing entire governments probably not replacing smaller parts of what smaller departments do probably uh managing smaller products managing a massive event like this yeah Dows are definitely ready so it depends yeah so I think that as a as a general whole the Dow ecosystem is still pretty immature the the earliest hours like if we go back to the Dao I mean you know it didn't it ended pretty spectacularly uh in a hack that that lost a lot of funds and then we can go forward to smaller Dow experiments like like like you know the the moloch Dao's and the other Dows that came out of that and those were really like um you know built around the rage quit mechanism they're meant for a small group of friends to invest in things they're high trust environments they typically don't have a particularly large treasuries uh but they were really important to validating the Dow model and in doing so in a way that was really experimental for small groups now if we fast forward to you know the current period we have now we have protocol daos that are governing things like uniswap we have uh you know we have various different protocol dials and then part of what's so important about bit Dao is that this is the first Dao of its of its size and treasury that's actually deploying things in in building multiple products I I don't think that there's any Dao of this type um that that has that has existed on this scale and also it's revealed to us you know through through our work that there's a lot of things that are still like really hard to do and super difficult I mean even just things like our Dow participating in the governance of third-party protocols and and managing our treasury these are like super hard problems uh that you know a private company could just just like make their CFO do or something um so uh we're we're by building in the way that we are we're forcing ourselves to make the Dow ecosystem more mature and and hopefully progressively decentralizing and we're you know there there's certainly things that we want to increasingly decentralize over time I think that you know bit down maybe uh doesn't meet the levels of decentralization of some other Dows but as we have a serious commitment to Progressive decentralization and Community empowerment and we're we're constantly moving things in a direction that makes the Dow ecosystem more mature makes the Dow ecosystem more decentralized and that empowers things around the other autonomous entities and Dows that we've created no definitely makes sense um like ultimately uh like you know like I think mentioning what Josh was also saying that not not everything needs to be a Dao right so Dows are good at solving certain types of problems right just like how blockchain technology is good at solving a certain class of problems um so I do feel that there are structures out there or other problems which are better solved with a maybe a centralized setup while there are certain problems which are very elegantly solved by a decentralized setup or possibly operating like a Dao I think identifying where a Dow's strengths sort of come out makes like the most sense so like what Jacob was saying um you know there are many doubts which have done successful Investments right simply because you were able to sort of uh you know sort of operate with with the intelligence of multiple perspectives right which even many big funds are not able to do right and and they were able to make successful Investments so so I think it depends on use case now could we expand the kind of problems you could solve with the Dao yes but those are again subjective developments in governance right so so so this actually is exactly how governments operate where governments are good at solving certain problems and the Private Industry is good at solving certain problems in in situations where the government solves all problems like we've seen in possibly let's say a more communist socialist style of thinking versus a type of governance where just the private sector solves all the problems like we see in completely capitalist societies we kind of see that that's not what what really works right so governance can solve certain problems governance cannot solve certain problems our ability to identify and evolve governance will then allow us to solve more problems so that's kind of how it is so I think identifying where this where the strengths of decentralized governance Collective ownership and most importantly Collective responsibility come that's kind of where you would want to like set up a dollar and I think that's kind of where does also succeed so not not everything should be a doubt but a lot of things can be as long as you get the governance right very practical advice there and and with that I'm afraid that's all the time we have for today uh a big thank you to our panel and just and you know you guys have been great thank you so much for tuning in my name is Francesca it's been a pleasure being with you today till next time thank you [Music]