Bringing Community Voting and Decentralization to DAOVERSE

DAO Labs COO, Shuyong Yang

August 30, 2023

News

Bringing Community Voting and Decentralization to DAOVERSE

Introduction

Since its founding, the final cause of DAO Labs’ Social Mining Hub, DAOVERSE, has always been to become a Decentralized Autonomous Organization of the community, by the community, and for the community.

To achieve such an end, it is necessary to implement a high-level framework that guides the entire decentralization process in an organized manner. Such a high-level framework, called Progressive Decentralization, suggests developing a DAO by gradually transforming an organization from centralized to decentralized with multiple stages.

"It is essential to understand the detailed steps DAOVERSE will take to become a DAO with on-chain governance"

We strongly believe that rethinking the concept of work, as its fair compensation, and self-produced data value are possible to achieve through Social Mining under decentralized terms. Before diving deep into DAOVERSE's Progressive Decentralization and Off-chain Community Voting as a significant step, exploring some common issues from existing DAOs is helpful for you to understand the reason for our choice.

Why Voting matters in the decentralized concept of a DAO like DAOVERSE — Credit: SocMin Visuals

It is essential to understand the detailed steps DAOVERSE will take to become a DAO with on-chain governance. Incentivizing communities before collective actions, laying out clear guidelines to avoid that profit would be above the governance of a project and making individual merits the key for vote and participate in the big decisions are challenging principles that we are willing to face with the help of the Daoversian Community, as you will read below.

We will also examine the current progress of DAOVERSE's milestones in its decentralization journey and foresight future steps.

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Why must we improve the current DAO concept?

The concept of decentralization isn’t new. On the contrary, decentralization has a strong historical ties to liberal thought since the Enlightenment period in Europe that spanned from the late 17th to the 18th century. Although DAO is a newly emerged governance concept from blockchain innovation, it still focuses on the core idea of decentralization, preventing the concentration of power in the hands of a single authority.

Blockchain enables digital scarcity with immutable record keeping and cryptographic-proved ownership. In essence, digital scarcity in the form of tokens plays a central role in DAOs, influencing governance, decision-making, and participation. As a result, in most decentralization models, issuing governance tokens is often the first step. Voting is usually enabled after token distribution to stakeholders who often are investors and airdrop participants.

"Projects must create more robust and lasting connections between financial benefits and governance participation to make DAOs generate meaningful values for all stakeholders that last".

Such a model has a fundamental flaw as investors and airdrop participants are driven by profits, and governance is more like a byproduct with a wake connection to profits, resulting in low participation rates in most DAOs. It also allows for polishing or straight up faking participation since vote influx can be manipulated through the timing of incentives. A DAO built on readily available monetary benefit, liquid or not, alone, can't be enduring and ultimately successful.

DAO Investors only care about reaching an ATH ROI (All-Time High Return on Investment) before dumping. Early investors who bought large sums of tokens at a discounted rate can even come together and short on retail investors and buyers from the secondary market. Airdrop participants can sell tokens at any time as they get them cheaply, often at the cost of some on-chain interactions, not to mention many organized groups that cheat airdrop programs by using multiple identities, such as creating hundred or even thousands of wallets to earn airdrop tokens in multiple times from a single project.

To combat dumps after their TGE (Token Generation Event), projects often introduce lucrative staking and compounding programs at the beginning to prevent dumping. However, these measures are often shortsighted, which just prolong the inevitable - dumping, not fixing the root cause to sustain the token ecosystem for the long run.

"Since DAOVERSE launched on March 24th, 2022, the DAO Labs core team has assigned a total of 71.288 Reputation to 172 validated users through various Social Mining jobs".

Projects must create more robust and lasting connections between financial benefits and governance participation to make DAOs generate meaningful values for all stakeholders that last.

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Progressive Decentralization with Social Mining

At DAO Labs, DAO isn't built in a day. Instead of starting with token sales, token airdrops and token distributions, DAO Labs utilizes Social Mining to recruit interested individuals that aim to build the Social Mining ecosystem and validate them on multiple levels with Social Mining tasks in a centralized manner, understanding these individuals’ skill sets, quality, and commitments before enforcing token-based on-chain governance. The development of a DAO should be an organized process with progressive steps, not rush to achieve decentralization without a proper structure because a great DAO isn’t built in a day.

"Community Board Voters will function as Task Validators that validate Task submissions by distributing their Upvotes to each accepted submission published on the Community Board".

The development of a DAO should be an organized process with progressive steps, not rush to achieve decentralization without a proper structure because a great DAO isn’t built in a day. The blockchain world has suffered -and still does- of failed projects that used the trust of their communities and greed of so-called investors and gamblers to enrich themselves and, sadly, it has been made under the DAO name. It is time we change that for good.

‍DAOVERSE’s Progressive Decentralization Steps

Phase 1

Initial Stakeholders Validation (Assigning Reputation to Users)
Off-chain Governance (Reputation-based Community Board Voting)
LABOR Allocation Registration

‍Phase 2

Token Contract Deployment (Single EOA Deployment)
Multisig and Time-lock Implementation
Governance Token Distribution
On-chain Governance

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**1) Initial Stakeholders Validation (Assigning Reputation to Users)**

Since DAOVERSE launched on March 24th, 2022, the DAO Labs core team has assigned a total of 71.288 Reputation to 172 validated users through various Social Mining jobs, including tasks in graphic design, article creation, web development, content translation, and social media marketing.

These validated users who demonstrated their skills and commitment will be the first group of people who can register LABOR allocation through the whitelist. In addition, some of these users will be able to participate in the off-chain governance to test various voting models for assisting the later on-chain governance implementations and improvements.

Currently, the Initial Stakeholders Validation is completed. We will soon be giving more details on this important news to our community.

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**2) Off-chain Governance (REP-based Community Board Voting)**

DAOVERSE’s Community Board Voting is an off-chain governance model, which allocates voting powers to eligible users based on their Reputation. This governance practice will be used for allocating community funds that aim to reward community contributors.

All users with a minimum of 0.5 Reputation can participate in Community Board Voting. At the moment to write this note, there are 33 users that meet this requirement.

Every week, Task submissions with “Accepted” status will be subject to voting. Users can only use Upvote at the beginning of the off-chain governance. Downvoting will be enabled later. Other Task submissions from the past that were considered as unfairly validated will be published to the Community Board for voters to judge.

In essence, Community Board Voters will function as Task Validators that validate Task submissions by distributing their Upvotes to each accepted submission published on the Community Board.

Each Upvote equals 1 Point and authors of submissions received Upvotes will receive Points. Early voters will also receive a Validator Reward that is equivalent to 30% of what the authors receive.

The DAOVERSE Off-chain Governance started on August 28th, 2023.

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