Hi folks,
Time for another update. There’s a LOT going on in the HoS ecosystem, and things are definitely accelerating, so I’m not entirely sure where to start. I’ll break things down by workstream:
- Delegates: The four working groups are all making good progress in their respective areas and have begun to produce insights and actionable results. See the below slides for concrete examples of progress. I’ll encourage the working groups to also post updates, including some of these deliverables, here and/or in the public Telegram group. The delegates have begun to discuss topics including proposal process flow, constitution, and what the initial set of proposals should be.
- Hiring: I’ve onboarded two contractors to fill in the gaps while we continue to work on growing the team. @haenko has also generously offered to help out as a volunteer. All of these individuals are already adding value and helping me focus on the areas where I have the most to contribute; that said, they’re still onboarding and we haven’t fully decided what their respective areas of responsibility will be going forward. I’ll encourage them to also introduce themselves here. I apologize for the delay in getting those job postings up. It remains a top priority, but I’ve continually been pulled into more time-sensitive tasks over the past few days and haven’t had the chance to finish them yet. I intend to do so ASAP. In the interest of transparency, here is a draft of the Head of Governance job posting.
- AI work: I began personally reviewing the source code for the Cami assistant from NEAR AI, to assess whether we might be able to repurpose it for our HoS governance assistant. Unfortunately, this code isn’t open source yet so I cannot share it - that’s up to NEAR AI. @haenko also identified several other open source repositories that we may be able to rely on. We shared that we’re planning two initial, concrete initiatives here: a global call for data to create a governance-related data set (that we can use to build an assistant, an AI delegate, etc.), and one or more AI agents/delegates that can help with public goods funding. Progress here will continue to be slow until we have full-time technical staff working on this; reach out if you’re interested.
- Community: There were a couple of open AMAs on X spaces, including one with me that was recorded. Summary and takeaways here. There are more Spaces and AMAs planned by the community in the coming days. NF is working with an experienced social media consultant, whom I’ve personally really enjoyed working with and have learned a lot from. I asked him to run a workshop with the endorsed delegates on social media strategy, something that’s in the process of being organized. Delegates having a bigger social media profile will help raise the profile of House of Stake and of NEAR more generally; it will help the world understand what we’re doing and why, and why they should pay attention.
- Events: We have a final agenda, and some preliminary swag designs, for the in-person HoS activation that’s happening in Cannes on July 1. As a reminder, we’re going to have a one day workshop for the endorsed delegates and a few partners, followed by a happy hour (co-hosted with NF) that’s open to the public. I’ll also be giving a talk on HoS and AI at EthCC.
- Partners: Gauntlet continues to make great progress on the HoS 2.0 design: i.e., on the impact that HoS will have on overall protocol economics. Most recently, they delivered sensitivity analysis and scenario analysis on the impact on network security of things like changes in the NEAR price, changes in total validator rewards, changes in the amount of NEAR staked, etc. This work is ongoing.
- Agora continues to make great progress on the HoS frontend. @mmazco shared updates here previously, and I’ll let her do so again rather than speaking on Agora’s behalf.
- I’m very excited to announce that we’ve signed a contract with Hack Humanity, an experienced team of systems thinkers led by @KlausBrave that brings a wealth of expertise in governance and group dynamics from both Web2 and Web3. We expect that they’ll work with the delegates on things including building trust, ecosystem mapping, and proposal identification & acceleration. They’ll be participating in the Cannes event as well, and we plan to run an open GovHack event with them later in the year
- Research partnership work (mentioned previously here) is a bit stalled. We’re still working out what sort of partnership would make the most sense, and what the initial set of research tasks will be.
- Entity setup: Finalizing the setup of the new HoS legal entity is blocking on setting up a multisig to receive and custody the inbound NDC funds from the old NDC Trust. We finalized the composition of the multisig, and one of the signers asked that we use the Fireblocks MPC solution for signing. I have a call with Fireblocks tomorrow to better understand their product as a next step. In parallel, I also worked with the HoS delegates to come up with a list of questions for the NF legal team to better understand the entity setup, governance, and processes around executing proposals and disbursing funds. We’re still waiting for answers.
That’s all I can think of for now. As always, feel free to post questions or comments here!
Lane
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Updated roadmap. This does NOT include all initiatives or everything that’s going on but it gives you a rough idea:
Working groups:
One concrete example of progress from each group. There’s a longer status report from @haenko coming soon.
