I agree with limiting the number of initial members. I like the idea of 7 or 10 those are both numbers of completion and give more weight to voting initially. We can also easily find from the community or sub-DAO’s enough folks to fill these seats.
I’m glad to hear that these members will vote in the Chair as I wondered what the selection process would entail.
I also agree that there should be a representative or proxy from each of the sub-DAO’s to ensure their needs are being met.
The cap of 200M initially seems as though it could be distributed very quickly with sub-DAO’s in mind. I would recommend raising this to 500M. How will additional funding be added from the Foundation or is there a thought that there will be other contributors?
In terms of voting, I agree that it should be done by delegation of stake this is the voting mechanism at the core of NEAR and should be utilized. However, it would be nice to be able to delegate voting rights without unstaking. I know we are looking at things like this with MetaPool (stNEAR). Additionally, a voting system should be built similar to SnapShot on ETH to facilitate voting throughout the ecosystem.
Considering 200M NEAR is quite a large amount, perhaps we should experiment with a variety of Ecosystem Treasury DAOs, in order to understand the different models and collectively decide what works best. I’d say that is already happening on the Sputnik DAO platform ~ so far, about 131K NEAR has been distributed as a result of 891 successful proposals going through 58 DAOs (23 councils have approved more than 5 payouts). Details: https://stats.sputnik.fund
Also, we have multiple DAO frameworks in our ecosystem, including Sputnik, Catalyst (akin to Moloch on Ethereum), and potentially others. How might we choose an optimal design for this Ecosystem Treasury DAO? Ultimately, who will decide what our validators must decide?
Of course, I understand the need to keep it simple and focus on this root DAO of DAOs. Establishing a legitimate process for transparent decision making at the highest level would facilitate progress toward responsibly decentralizing the NEAR Community Fund.
Eventually, might be worth pluralizing each categorical “sub DAO” that receives allocations. For example, we could have many interconnected Marketing DAOs with unique names, goals, members, configurations, and projects. These would probably emerge from the official Marketing DAO, similar to how Creative DAOs like NxM operate as beneficiaries of the Creatives DAO. Smaller amounts requested by these particular DAOs would mean less risk and more granular accountability for the overall Ecosystem Treasury DAO(s).
As we move forward in exploring the possibilities, I’m hoping to use a v1 Sputnik DAO for gauging opinions / feelings about off-chain proposal discussions and technical implementations. For that purpose, there is a new DAO here:
Everyone is welcome to submit a “New Member” proposal to join the council and vote in polls. Anyone may submit a reasonable “Payout” proposal in order to see what people think. Below is a guide for participation ~ help us experiment with governance of DAOs, by DAOs, for DAOs!
Feel free to request a bit of NEAR for your time and effort. However, keep in mind, council members are less likely to vote if you ask for more than 1 NEAR.
The proposal description should be a YES / NO question for the council. Please try to phrase it carefully, so there is minimal confusion.
v2 Sputnik DAOs have a better polling feature, and this might be a very temporary experiment. However, I hope it can be a fun way to learn about contributing to NEAR governance.
Thanks for your attention! I’d appreciate any feedback
Will express my support for this as well - think it’s an excellent initiative that I am certain will accelerate growth across the ecosystem - unlocking existing talent and passion while also attracting more. I like visualization, so offer this up as my understanding of what is being described:
On my first read through, it struck me as being a very hierarchical structure with a centralized decision making body, but I think it’s absolutely necessary to have that central council setting/directing strategic priorities - the importance of which would be represented through size of funding provided to the sub-DAOs (represented in the pic above: liquidity, grants, marketing, guilds).
Very much in agreement that setting up the ecosystem funding along functional lines makes sense. Give the sub-DAOs adequate resources and let them go off and do great things - each of them basically nurturing and growing communities within their functional domain.
Evolution
After visualizing what it might look like, was comforted by the fact that although it seems very centralized in terms of funding flow at the start (ecosystem treasury to sub-DAO to individuals/projects), there is nothing stopping the structure from evolving into a more decentralized entity creating links outside of the initial functional lines, interconnecting with DAOs and indivs/projects that may be operating in other functional areas as long as DAO interoperability is a foundational component.
For example, a project DAO funded by a grants DAO can submit proposals to a graphics design DAO funded by the marketing DAO. Get pretty excited thinking about all the different ways these various individuals/communities could start interacting.
To that end, I like what James mentions here (maybe because he mentions Catalyst ) - but I think it’s a valid point that should be embraced:
DAO Platforms and Interoperability
By virtue of NEAR’s account model, pretty sure DAO platforms built on NEAR will at least have a basic level of interoperability in that DAO members on any platform should be able to submit proposals and receive payouts to a DAO account on a platform of their choosing. I think, from an accountability and transparency standpoint, it’s important that happens vice sending funding direct to a non-DAO (personal) account.
Accountability and Transparency
Would also recommend/emphasize that one really think through the accountability piece. Obviously transferring a lot of control/trust over to the sub-DAOs to achieve the strategic objectives in their functional domains. Ensuring that formalized/regular reporting on progress towards those strategic targets should be emphasized to keep things moving along with some thought on what happens when things don’t go as planned (unintentional negligence or worse).
That said, how sub-DAOs implement their own accountability systems should be up to them, but I’d suggest some kind of basic framework would be useful to get things started and facilitate mutual understanding.
Questions
Couple questions:
Curious about the delegation piece. In Catalyst we’re building in ability to delegate or take back delegated shares (voting power) at any time. I guess I’m not clear on what the issue is with continuous delegation. The way we envision it - members of the DAO have submitted their contributions to the community fund - and once we figure out who to do it/build it, we want to put the fund into a staking position until it is needed - at which point funds will be unstaked and distributed. In doing so, we track how many shares each person has separate from that, thus the voting power can move around.
Do you see the sub-DAOs essentially submitting business plans that provide a breakdown/justification of funding being asked for to conduct planned activities in their domain? Or is an initial allocation just sent to each sub-DAO to manage and they decide what to do based on what they are given?
In my opinion, quorums are annoying It is frustrating when a proposal goes through the entire voting period (which could be a substantial length of time) and doesn’t achieve quorum. Then the whole process needs to start over/delay everything simply because someone decided not to show up and vote. Maybe consider not baking a quorum requirement into the contract and take the view that those who are motivated/care about it are going to show up and vote. i.e., let it pass or fail based on who decides to participate and let the delegation take care of whether uninterested people remain part of the community (could also be something more formal like a member removal proposal).
Summary
Again, love the direction this is going. I think it will definitely bring some more apparent/transparent structure to better enable achievement towards operational/strategic priorities while improving understanding of how to seek/get support to build/contribute/participate in the ecosystem. And the best part, in my mind, is that we are looking at relying on and pushing the development of DAOs and open web tools to fully realize that.
Thanks for the opportunity to express my opinions/ask questions based on my meager understanding (hopefully they are somewhat useful). Keep up the great work all - I feel super fortunate/excited to see these types of initiatives take off.
200M are all the funds that were allocated for community funds at initial distribution. 500M were the total that Foundation received and there are allocations to other places from those funds (see below picture posted by @jack).
As explained in the proposal, it’s only delegation of staked tokens.
It’s pretty much “Community grants, Programs…” + 30M of the Early Ecosystem that was mentioned as: One of these unannounced programs contains 30M tokens on a 6-month linear lockup. in the article. That program didn’t actually happened, and in result these funds got reallocated in to “Community” bucket.
Obviously part of this whole proposal is to increase transparency of the funds vs the current status quo.
As suggested, initially funding will be only fraction of this amount in the spirit of the running an experiment.
Correct, and these funds have came from Foundation and me. Foundation doesn’t have a clear framework to fund DAOs and have been very conservative with funding them. The goal of this proposal is to have a large enough DAO fund that can fund other DAOs for them to subsequently fund various activities in the ecosystem.
Exactly. The proposed sub-DAOs in the list are literally “suggestions” that I see clearly needed now. I expect a large number of applications to Treasury DAO with different positioning around the same topic. E.g. Grant DAOs to fund projects in India or students in universities – there can be 10s of grant DAOs like this.
I think one question that only starts to exist is cross-DAO accounting and accountability. E.g. if project / team have received funding from one of the DAOs but have applied at the same time in a few places. And then later when they are successful or not, how accountability is considered. This is part of the rules that must be established for this framework to work. One of the tools we need is a registry of the projects / teams funded that others can refer to.
Given there is no optimal design, the idea was to use rough consensus around this proposal. If by end of month there are no clear reason to not go with the proposed design - that design will be go live. Over time it can that morph as we will have elected members who can listen to their delegates and propose changes to the design.
If I was selected to be the member of this DAO, I want to make sure there is some permanence to this job. Not that it will disappear in tomorrow because someone undelegated. I’m going to be putting work in figuring out part of strategy, thinking through various DAOs and keeping them accountable. All this is non 0 time that is required from members. This is different from what you are describing, because members are not committing their own funds, they are elected to manage common funds.
I wouldn’t expect it to be super detailed initially, funding it’s a people business. I would expect that subDAOs should present what they want to achieve (goals) and methods of achieving this to the Treasury members. The presentation, background of subDAO members/founder and their governance approach all should be then considered for initial funding.
In subsequent funding, the performance and history of subDAO should be considered. How did fund allocation go, how did governance work, did members make decisions together, where there a lot of churn in the members, etc.
Subsequent funding is pretty much one of the main ways to manage accountability and do retrospective on the initial funding decision.
This allows us to not only have accountability for funds, but also transparency wrt what the funds were used for (after the fact). We allow each report to be in whatever method the group chooses (forum post required, but info can be in written, video, or even NFT format).
for people working closely on ecosystem DAO setup, might be worth compiling research from existing projects in blockchain space and their attempts to do something like this prior. E.g. worthwhile listening to this recording for learnings: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1yoKMAADBNwKQ
Thank you for this timely proposal. I agree with many others in this thread that for greater efficiency and transparency in funding community initatives, something like a Treasury DAO to allocate funds to sub-DAOs would be necessary.
Most of my initial questions have been discussed previously, but I’m still confused on how delegation of staked tokens work. If there are some resources or literature I could use to read up on this, please let me know.
Am I correcting in understanding that
delegated tokens will not be removed from their staking pool (if staked)
and they only function to determine the “weight” of each candidate, and do not carry economic value in this context?
Are the tokens un-delegated after the election or locked up for the duration of the period in which the elected DAO member serves?
Can I still use my delegated tokens to make transactions?
I owe here a finalization post and next steps earlier. Sorry for delay.
One of the main questions in the discussion was how to have functioning membership of the DAO, while having representation.
Generally, talking with other operational DAOs and other organizations, the number 7 have came up as a number where people are actively participate. Above this number of people in the DAO, it will require to have enforcement function for people to actually participate, as there will be always some people who are not active. It still important to have some rules around members relieving their seats due to inactivity (there are various reasons why this can happen).
Members who are representing some type of stakeholder have been suggested. I think it’s important part going forward, but will not be useful at the current moment. I would like to capture the need to revisit the structure in the Constitution of the Treasury DAO / NEAR’s governance in general. This revisit should include collecting opinion from various stakeholder to understand if the v1 structure represents them well or changes are rquired.
In short next steps will be:
Setting up the the voting structure. Next implementation is required:
Snapshot of the delegations from July 1st.
Smart contract that has a merkle root of this snapshot
Frontend that will look up given user’s account in the snapshot and send the merkle path.
CLI tool that generates commands for near CLI for users who are using custom key management or offline signing.
Constitution of the DAO: constitution will define the rules of the engagement of the DAO, what are roles and how long can single person be in the member/chair seat and how the changes to the constitution (and through it in governance) will be accepted. Pretty much this will cover things that will be hard or impossible to cover in the smart contract.
Code of conduct: it’s important that members and chair of Treasury DAO (and through this DAO - of other DAOs) follow Code of Conduct of NEAR ecosystem. Defining it will define the culture and maintain high level of the conversation. Again, this is something that hard to define in the code but is critically important for functioning ecosystem.
Use the election process to solicit ideas for developing next quarter strategy direction for the Treasury DAO. I’ll create a separate topic for people to self nominate/nominate others to as candidates.
I’ll follow up with github repos for these items in coming days.
I believe that this kind of money should not just be handed out to everyone.
Projects that work with near and for near and do not have permanent funding must have their own network validators. And this money should be distributed as stakes to these validators.
It is protected from scam
Projects will be confident on a monthly basis that they have a budget to live and develop
I will add this from a project that does not have permanent funding and is not yet developed enough to support itself on its own. Specifically for us, it would be a kind of salvation and good help in development.
Please keep the community posted on how to apply to become members of the Treasury DAO. We will be referring back to this post and Github repo links as they become available. Thanks!
Could you clarify what you mean by this? Why would a project need to run its own validator to build on the network? There is no mechanism that requires bidding in or running validators just to deploy a dapp so I’m trying to understand the use case you’re highlighting.
Semi-related, there will be a network upgrade in the next few months which greatly increases the number of validator seats.
In my country there about 500 council representatives and thousands of different civil servants. It is one of the most corrupt and inefficient country in the world. Bigger council does not mean less corruption. To be honest, the whole idea seems disgusting to me. You are trying to play politics when we all know how disgusting it works around us.
in this case, GalaxyOnline needs to be able to attract users for its game, and wants to be able to use staking rewards from running validator as marketing budget
I would also assume that the idea is to have the funds being disseminated from the treasury DAO towards projects that are supporting the network long term by running their own validator?
This would ensure that treasury DAO funds are going towards projects that are vetted in the sense that the projects are supporting the security of the network before getting a payout. Also, this would support the projects receiving the funds by ensuring that they have a long-term outlook on earnings as well (at least from staking rewards).
Personally, I think that this (using the treasury DAO to support more ecosystem projects running their own validators) could be a reasonable outlook to have, at least for some of the treasury DAO funds. As seat price comes down for running a validator at NEAR, it may be more reasonable for an ecosystem project to consider running a validator as a reasonable medium/long-term plan to ensure there is revenue coming in as they build on NEAR.
This is personally my plan when thinking about building within the NEAR ecosystem. May be interesting as well if the treasury DAO managed the contracts to support these validators getting started. For example, instead of just handing the funds directly to another (potentially untrusted / new to the ecosystem address), the treasury DAO could delegate to a new project as a validator to get them above the minimum seat price (for a certain amount of time). This type of bounty would require capital allocation, but over the time period of the bounty (min seat price support) the project could acquire enough delegation from their own community to no longer need that capital allocated to them and the funds could then be allocated to another project looking to get started.
Interesting perspective. Thinking out loud here. For quick reference, the NF does run a validator support program to help bootstrap new validators but the intent is meaningfully different because the goal there is to help validator a who are expected to attract their own capital get into the active set to help with overall decentralization before scaling down NF delegations to them. See Stake Wars is Over, but We're Just Getting Started - NEAR Protocol
What you’re describing is more like an ongoing grant created with staking rewards. If those rewards are due to delegation which is provided non custodially (so the project doesn’t have title to the original tokens, just the rewards from them being delegated to the project’s validator), it’s effectively the same as if the eco treasury just stakes its own tokens and promises a certain grant Ofer time (but better because the ecosystem treasury should really never be staking its own tokens or it will have too much market power).
If it’s custodial (a full grant to the project) then it’s more similar to startup investment where they invest their treasury to generate yield to support their operations.
Either way, the key consideration is of course how many tokens to provide to the project. The validator route has higher technical overhead for the project but does allow them to attract additional stake by being meaningfully present in the staking ecosystem and winning hearts and minds, which is a nice alignment of incentive.
And this is the beauty, I think, of having the treasury DAO managing some aspects of a program that hopefully has already shown some promise. It wouldn’t be starting something completely new, but hopefully making the process more transparent (maybe even more efficient).
I would hope/assume that as the capital requirements lower, so too will the technical requirements to run a validator. Having a number of grant recipients also running validator nodes allows for a larger set of participants who are incentivized to go through the learning curve of settings up and securing a node well.
To make this program more like a grant, it could probably be reasonable to reward projects that continued running their validator well by allowing them to keep a portion of their grant amount (missing epochs could lower their final reward amount)?
Im mostly thinking about how to have some sort of reputation tied to the total payout amount and how to also have that NEAR be as efficient as possible. For example, If the project/grant period lasted 3 months, the 3 month period could include validator workshops, general NEAR education, and be organized like a cohort to make the experience more community oriented. If that isn’t desired the grant recipient could choose to use a 3rd party service for the 3 months as their try and gain delegates (chorus one or bison trails etc).
At the end of the 3 months (end of the project period), if being a validator isn’t the right choice for the grant recipient, they could choose to go below the min seat price (let’s assume they didn’t gain enough delegates from the community), and still have supported the NEAR ecosystem in a number of ways. If they have gained enough delegate support, they could withdraw their NEAR reward from the grant program and still keep running a validator.
It would be cool to see an eventual implementation of a system like this from the treasury DAO (or similar vertical with the NEAR ecosystem) as seat price gets to a manageable level .
) - but I think it’s a valid point that should be embraced:
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