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!
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How will the snapshot work with multiple lockups contracts? Maybe a mechanism to report lockup contracts to form a single identity?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 
.
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I mean, for projects like ours, that would be very good support. Especially at the stages when the project is still developing and third-party funds are needed while there is no self-sufficiency. I’m just saying that the network needs validators and without them anywhere. And why not rewards from the stakes that the fund gives to develop projects, and not feed the validators who, apart from the fact that they are validators, do nothing for the network.
There are pluses for everyone here:
For projects:
They strive to develop well and take a responsible approach to their work (since a stake from the validator can be taken at any time)
They can plan their development as there is an understanding of how much funds will be available every month (you can plan the amount of funds for development, marketing, to stimulate users)
For the fund:
Protected from projects that do not fulfill obligations or promises (a kind of fight against a scam, because the project only receives rewards and does not get access to the main account)
With greater confidence, you can manage money and simplify the receipt of grants, since the principal amount will not be distributed, but saved for the further development of the network and the amount will grow due to the fact that it lies in staking
When the project has reached self-sufficiency, then you can take the stake and invest in another project, or finance projects directly with the same funds.
In general, my opinion is that this would greatly help in the development of many projects not tied to finance. This would contribute to the development of many art projects that do not need huge amounts at once, but which cannot survive on their own at the initial stages, since they either did not collect enough users, or did not fully build their business model to make a profit. It would also contribute to the development of many charitable projects and volunteer organizations that need funds constantly, and not once.
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Currently it’s not practical because of technical reasons (the way seats are allocated to validators leads to very high entry barrier for new validators). You can keep track of progress of extending number of validators: Increase the number of block producers and subsequent NEP.
At the current moment, Grants program and various DAOs is the best way to kick start the project development and marketing. You can receive a reasonable grant in NEAR which will be comparable to rewards from the validator. Ecosystem Treasury will be allocating funds into the DAOs then will be distributing funds to projects.
For example, it make sense to have a Game Dev DAO that supports game developers both in terms of initial funding, marketing programs, initial users onboarding and more.
I also suggest having streaming payments framework attached to a DAO, which would economically have the same effect as having a validators and receiving reward from inflation.
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I believe we must determine common goals, not just financial guidelines, but clear and solid goals in common for all sub-DAO and for the ecosystem.
These common goals cannot be as easily changeable as future guidelines, similar to what happens in a Constitution.
One problem I see about minimum capital allocations to perform tasks for the Treasury, which is also a problem of current DAOs in all blockchains is Plutocracy, it would be interesting to develop and study Proof of Humanity, which allows us not only to see balances, but individuals and institutions with their own id.
About the number of members, I believe that we can define a quorum according to the participants so that there is not little representation or centralization. Initially we could do a study on the number of initial participants and project an ideal number.
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Hey everyone,
Wanted to mention that because progress of this effort has been slow on project management (due to me doing a bunch of other activities as well), I’m looking for help with coordinating this project.
More info is available here: [Hiring] Looking for help with Governance
I’ll update as we start making progress again.
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Here are some ideas to combine prediction market with a Dao to make the delegation (aka “expert” selection) more meaningful.
Following @jlwaugh : “Anyone may submit a reasonable “Payout” proposal in order to see what people think.” I came up with the following thoughts:
Prediction Markets
Prediction markets (also called: information markets) are vehicles for aggregating financially backed sentiment about the expected outcome of a future event [1]. Similar to polls there are two types: categorical (e.g. red, green, blue, yellow) and binary (yes, no) [2].
The voting function of any DAO is typically used to make an informed and well-balanced decision by a group of people. This decicion making usually includes a deliberation step through discussion on proposals [3].
How exactly users would have to describe their proposals so they can be resolved by a market is still an open task. Some examples for valid (“don’t resolve as invalid.”) proposals can possibly be adapted from [2].
Deliberation
The term “experts” is sometimes used for a group of people who are most powerful or just the loudest.
pol.is [4] is used for used agenda construction (what to vote on) and (quoted from [5]): “RxC Voice aims to incorporate other components as well: delegation of responsibility, deliberation, and ballot construction.” and in the “Delegation Stage will … distribute voice credits”.
RxC solves the delegation by equally (or by any fair metric) distributing voice credits by humans. What I am proposing here is a Staking step before Deliberation and Voting to select the “experts” for a given task:
Prediction markets could be potentially a way to put “voice credits” (knowledge / information / gut feeling) at stake to benefit the community in the expert selection step.
Links
[1] https://xdai.omen.eth.link/faq.pdf
[2] https://xdai.omen.eth.link/rules.pdf
[3] [Proposal] GR10 Matching Pool: Use Gitcoin to build GitcoinDAO - 📜 Proposal Discussion - Gitcoin Governance
[4] https://pol.is/
[5] Introducing RxC Voice - RadicalxChange
To hopefully support this thoughts more please let me quote Jero from the RxC community:
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pretty cool approach, reminds me of this conversation with Ralph Merkle here: EB141 – Ralph Merkle: Revolutionizing Democracy Using DAOs - YouTube
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Is it possible to configure quadratic voting without a DID so that “fake voters” do not appear?
I joined NEAR recently and still confused about DAO operation and governance. With all my respect, I think these are a lot confusing about concept of DAO. the simple way to define DAO governance is DAO = Dis-agreement offer. This will make the concept of DAO governance is more simple to be understood and explained. We can input to using DAO by a proposal/offer and the output is a dis-agreement.
Example: We create 2 chairs for each DAO (each chair need a mount of $NEAR exp. 100M $NEAR, anyone can seat on the chair if they collected consensus of 100M $NEAR). The input need 1 chair, and output also need only one chair. if output chair is no one seated, it means proposal/offer is approved. By this way, all members can participate in input/output chair and stop the DAO anytime if they feel the project is not good enough. if the project is successful, the input chair can get some reward from project bet.
This suggestion is only initial ideal about how to governance on DAO and NEAR foundation, it is very hard to explain clearly by wording for me. if you think it is useful, we can discuss further.
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I want to propose to use our DAO tool to deploy the Ecosystem Treasury DAO.
We recently got a NEAR grant to build Better, which is live on testnet (https://near-testnet.betterhq.org/) using Sputnik v2 contracts to coordinate voters, users, funders and builders around improving NEAR DApps. We also propose to extend our tool to integrate into Github, for a more transparent and scalable grants program: [Discussion] Moving Grants to Github - #10 by CChris
Our tool is Open Source and easily forkable, benefiting communities of any size and suiting the DAO of DAOs approach.
Here is how Better can implement the Ecosystem Treasury DAO:
- Run applications for DAO Members and Chair
Better allows
- Anyone to apply as DAO member or chair on a dedicated Better landing page
- Applicants to add any helpful information
- Anyone to vote on applications using their NEAR wallet
- Anyone to stake NEAR on applicants
- Break down structure into subDAOs
Once the Treasury DAO is set up, Better allows anyone to open a subDAO. The UI is easily customizable, which allows for different use cases like content marketing bounties, product roadmap prioritization, or transparent grants programs.
Integration between subDAOs and the main DAO gives small, agile groups the freedom to implement their ideas, while keeping decisions transparent and accountable.
- Provide community funding as strong signal
Better allows funding per individual idea / proposal. Which allows for skin-in-the-game signals for further funding.
We could allow anyone to fund a proposal. And similar to Gitcoin grants, match the funding amount from the community treasury, eg. via quadratic funding.
Additionally, we could use onchain reputation to whitelist accounts for funding.
- Match ideas with builders
Better allows anyone to submit ideas, and matches them with other community members who can implement it, like builders or content creators.
Imagine the NEAR jobs platform, plus a landing page with a list of proposals that can be worked on.
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Sounds great, but I don’t think (not a legal professional, can’t say for sure) that all of this is feasible at this point.
The reason is that the funding process for individuals, projects, and guilds is changing to become more legally compliant.
Consequently, we (the NF) won’t be distributing funds directly through DAOs.
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I think that is a great idea. Decentralizing the grant process will allow for efficiency gains. We @ Cofund are creating and launching soon tool for these grant diving DAOs to make their life easier.
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Hi @Phil decentralizing and automating payouts is the way forward. I see that Cofund is being built on Superfluid which I believe is based on the Ethereum blockchain.
Do you have plans to integrate Cofund with the NEAR blockchain?