TLDR: Proposal to establish an Ecosystem Treasury DAO. Proposal includes member selection, funding this treasury with up to 200M $NEAR from NEAR Foundation and potential types of allocations. The next step is for the NEAR community to give feedback on this proposal and, if no major concerns are surfaced within the next 2 weeks, to launch the vote for initial members of this DAO.

Preface

The NEAR Ecosystem is growing at an exponential rate and there is not single organization that can efficiently manage this. This is why decentralization is important not only on the technology and community side but on the strategy and funding side as well. To achieve this, a DAO of DAOs approach is taken: lots of small DAOs each with specific purpose around supporting a Guild, a project or a type of fund allocation.

At the root of DAO of DAOs is Treasury DAO - the one that allocates to the first level of sub DAOs and decides on the high level which directions to invest in the ecosystem. Transitioning this role from solely NEAR Foundation to a decentralized organization is Foundation’s long term goal and has the benefit of increasing transparency, involving more people in the process and being more flexible around some decisions.

Proposal

Establish a DAO as the NEAR Ecosystem Treasury to grow the Ecosystem. DAO members will be identified via delegation of staked $NEAR to pseudonymous and known actors (see Tech Details).

To scale the fund allocation, the Treasury DAO is not expected to allocate funds directly into projects / initiatives. Instead, the Treasury DAO will allocate funds into other DAOs. Members of the Treasury DAO will focus on defining the strategy for allocating the funds and due diligence/reviewing of DAOs to fund into.

Members will need to select the “Chair” who will be responsible for driving members to come up with the high level strategy, collecting information about proposals, and enforcing the timeliness of the DAO’s decisions.

The work of the Chair will be compensated from Treasury DAO, as this is expected to become a full time job and may require a team and funding other DAOs / projects to do research. The rest of the members initially are not expected to be compensated, as they are already holders of $NEAR, but Treasury DAO could potentially establish a compensation plan as well. The Chair is also responsible for providing transparency into allocations back to the community by participating in Town Halls and presenting progress of allocation and subsequent results.

Funding Allocation

NEAR Foundation will allocate funds via public grant to the initial members of the Treasury, who have known identities in the ecosystem. The initial size of the grant is proposed as 30M $NEAR.

The Treasury DAO grant can be renewed to cover the rest of the Ecosystem’s funding from token distribution (up to 200M $NEAR total) if the Treasury DAO has not had any issues and has earned the support of the community.

Tech Details

Due to technical limitations of staking and lockup contracts, there is a problem with enabling continuous delegation. The process also is more predictable if there is a specific voting period requirement rather than rolling or continuous voting.

There will be a delegation smart contract DELEGATION. On every first day of the quarter, the checkpoint of current delegations will be taken and committed to the DELEGATION contract. Anyone can register as a candidate for delegation, provided they have 10k $NEAR staked and include some information about their role in the ecosystem and identity: role in the ecosystem (validator, developer, investor, etc), twitter handle, description of how they see their position in Treasury DAO and anything else they want to share.

Each account that has staked or delegation then can call delegate(account_id, amount_pct) function on DELEGATION contract to allocate a percentage of their stake to one of the candidates. Every quarter when the stake is updated, the votes for a given account get rescaled to the amount they have staked in the snapshot (e.g. if a user had staked 100k $NEAR on June 1 but only has 50k $NEAR on July 1, their delegation weight will reduce by half).

At the end of the quarter, the votes go into effect, reweighting and potentially changing current DAO members. To facilitate communication and information sharing, members should use the NEAR ecosystem forum at http://gov.near.org (though we expect that there will also be a dedicated Telegram or other messaging group and bi-weekly meetings to be managed by the Chair).

To prevent the “tragedy of the commons” pitfall of too large a group where participants become inactive, the DAO membership is limited to the top 21 delegates.

The DAO will make decisions via voting of the members with a quorum achieved by 11 of delegates.

The Chair is appointed by the DAO members via vote and will be active until explicitly changed by the current members. The Chair does not need to be a standing member of the Treasury DAO.

Potential allocations

The community has already proposed several DAOs which could potentially get funding from Treasury DAO in its first voting period. These include:

• Liquidity DAO: a DAO focused on funding liquidity incentives and other DeFi needs in the ecosystem.
• Marketing DAO: a DAO to fund operations of Guilds focused on awareness and marketing for ecosystem projects. NEAR already has a number of guilds like this and they are important to grow awareness and spread information across the ecosystem in a more emergent, decentralized way. It’s already clear that the NEAR Foundation is not an efficient way to do this for the whole ecosystem.
• Grants DAO: DAO that allocates grants to builders in the ecosystem. This is to augment the existing NEAR Foundation Grants Program and provide a more scalable and transparent approach going forward.
• Guilds DAO: a DAO that would allocate funds to all the Guilds in the ecosystem.

Collecting the list of potential funding recipients and ensuring timely decisions by the delegates will be the job of the Chair initially. The Chair will be facilitating KPI collection from the funded DAOs and report back to the ecosystem on the result at the end of each quarter.

A comparable example is a VC that invests into independent companies and collects information about their investment for their LPs, which in this case are all NEAR holders. Using this information to learn and improve how to best do these decisions will also be big factor.

Next Steps

This Treasury DAO proposal is active for discussion until June 30, 2021. Incorporating feedback from the community will be a major part of this process. After that is done, and if the proposed plan is mostly intact after the discussion, the technical implementation will kick in.

NEAR Foundation will allocate the grant if the amount of voted tokens is above 66% from the total staked (excluding Foundation’s delegations) indicating that a critical part of the network is participating in the selection process. If 66% are not achieved within 30 days from the start, NEAR Foundation will be responsible to collect information about why a large percentage of stake didn’t participate, provide a report with community feedback, and suggest another iteration of this process.

The goal for the selection process would be to guarantee a set of initial members who represent different stakeholders in the ecosystem: validators, projects, DAO operators, strategic investors and thinkers. NEAR Foundation should help to promote candidates from various stakeholder types, balancing out the initial membership in the DAO.

PS. For more on how I believe DAOs are changing the way people are working together read and how Sputnik can provide tooling for that: https://medium.com/sputnikdao/sputnik-dao-empowering-communities-e55ac65f4433

in the first 2 years, A temporary committee composed of NF, core team, and community representatives will be OK.

illia:

The Chair is expected to facilitate KPI collection from the funded DAOs and report back to the ecosystem on the result at the end of each quarter.

I see this as a requirement. “Expected to” leaves wiggle room for the chair to not track KPI. Maybe just a semantic detail. More robust documentation of Chair role & responsibilities will be good to establish as part of this process.

Super exciting direction/initiative!

From first sight 21 voting members seems to be a bit high from practical point of view. It would also makes sense to have it prime number - 13 or 17 are a perfect candidates.

I think the set of top level DAO members should be strictly removed from decision making at the sub-DAO capital allocation level.

The analogy would be CIA providing funds to Afghan proxies to fight Soviets, where biases in perception of political alignment deviated funding from equal weighting. Proxies which were worse funded could compensate by using better tactics and being more resourceful.

A similar approach makes sense here to enable better capital allocation decisions at the sub-DAO level to compensate for any correlated biases in capital allocation at treasury DAO level i.e. prevent micro-management and meddling.

sasha:

From first sight 21 voting members seems to be a bit high from practical point of view. It would also makes sense to have it prime number - 13 or 17 are a perfect candidates.

I tend to agree that 21 is too much. I got some feedback that it would make sense to start small and extend over time vs starting with a big group that doesn’t know each other.

I think optimal start point is 5 members, as it’s small enough for people to get familiar with each other quickly, vote in the Chair and start initial process. And then for next quarter can extend it to 7 and further based on vote distribution.

maxlev:

I think the set of top level DAO members should be strictly removed from decision making at the sub-DAO capital allocation level.

That is exact idea of DAO of DAOs approach: sub-DAOs decision making is not affected by the Treasury. Think of them as separate companies. Otherwise it’s also a big conflict of interest.

The goal for Treasury DAO is to define strategy of investment, make sure the DAOs it is funding are legit and also request reporting from these DAOs on quarterly basis to report back to the community on how Treasury DAO doing. This is similar how VC would report to LPs on their investments - collecting stats of the companies that they have invested in but not taking executive control in any way, just some advisory help if asked.

I would also expect that Treasury DAO will be investing into mulitple sub-DAOs of the same sort. For example in 10 different Grants DAOs with different focus: infra grants, grants in India, grants in Latam, grants for students, grants for startups and etc. Each of these Grants DAOs can be run by a small group of people as well, making them efficient at sourcing projects and quickly getting them to funding decision.

I agree that it will be more effective to start with a smaller number of members, and it is also easier to gauge participation and responsiveness in a smaller group. Starting with 5 or 7 seems to be a nice fit.

To prevent the “tragedy of the commons” pitfall of too large a group where participants become inactive, the DAO membership is limited to the top 21 delegates.

While I see how a smaller group would prevent “the tragedy of the commons” (I believe the expression is being misused here but I will go with it), I don’t see the reasoning on why it is wise to restrict membership to the top 21/17/13/7/5. This only helps the big getting bigger…

There should also set constraints minimum capital allocation per sub-DAO segment. Top level DAO committee may have view on temporal sequencing of sub-DAO segments in terms of product market fit, but these can be hard to time and can be wrong.

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[PROPOSAL] Create Mineria-Virtual GUILD / NEARer Wallet PROJECT - focused in crypto adoption Guilds

Hello everyone! Now that I understand the goals of the NEAR Community, made my own contributions and participate, I can propose the creation of the End-user Guild / NEARer Wallet Project / Mineria Virtual Guild with the support and help of my team @Jloc @Mineriavirtual @Luismayar @Nicolasp2 and others. TLDR proposal Drive the existing community we manage (Mineria.Virtual) into NEAR with the aim of receiving new collaborators, developers, ideas and constructive criticisms with which the financ…

Great idea overall - DAO model is the only way forward to ensure the further development of the NEAR Ecosystem.
Unlike other comments - I don’t think 21 representatives are too high of a number.
The idea behind the DAO is distribution of power and control versus centralization in a few hands. We want to avoid centralization and possible corruption at all costs.
Another important consideration for selection of DAO delegates is making sure you have a balanced selection of not just technical operators but also stakeholders and community members working in other areas: marketing, education, etc.
It’s easier said than done actually.

FreshNEARs:

This only helps the big getting bigger

These are top by delegation, not by stake. Most of the big stakeholders will be delegating to designated individuals that would represent their position. Though if you have suggestion of selection criteria to use instead, I’m all ears (see below couple alternative suggestion that I have).

eluzgin:

technical operators but also stakeholders and community members working in other areas: marketing, education, etc.

I agree, but I don’t think it’s practically possible in the selection process. To represent their needs and positions delegates are needed.

One of the options that we have discussed before, addressing both of these questions, is having a X seats that each will be filled in by a sub-DAO. E.g. if there are 5 sub-DAOs like “Stake DAO”, “Guild DAO”, “Validator DAO”, “Developer DAO”, “User DAO”. Each of these DAO would need to select one delegate that then will be active participant of the Ecosystem DAO. This model would allow to actually have equal representation by various types of stakeholders.

I think over time this might become a good way to select members, but currently I don’t see that much participation from many of the types of stakeholders. Hence it’s unclear that at this moment they will self organize enough to select a reasonable candidate for participation.

Another alternative is to use quadratic voting in delegation. This way the broader community will have more relative weight than large holders. This is especially true given most of the large holders are still in lockups and are not even able to split their funds into multiple accounts.

eluzgin:

I don’t think 21 representatives are too high of a number.

The problem is really in that when there are too many people - each individual has way less responsibility and motivation to speak up / protest or promote their idea. At the end DAO is still a group of people that are working together.

In practice, even a meeting with 10+ people already end up not very efficient due to this.

The various stake holders and community members can and should come in as parts of sub-DAOs, taking on specific challenges, getting funded, doing the work and reporting back to community on the work done.

The job of Treasury Council at the end will be to make funding decisions. So in really it will end up being a mix of an investment and politics: represent the delegates, negotiate with sub-DAOs, allocate funding and keep sub-DAOs accountable.

illia:

e.g. if a user had staked 100k $NEAR on June 1 but only has 50k $NEAR on July 1, their delegation weight will reduce by half

so the snapshot updates by month? should by quarter, right?

I still don’t understand about, what is the source of those maximum 200M $NEAR? Thanks a lot!

We currently have the CommunitySquadDAO and CreativesDAO funding initiatives and projects from the Community. How to best reconcile with the Ecosystem TreasuryDAO, more specifically Marketing and Guild DAOs?

One way of increasing value for our community is establishing a threshold amount where there is a min/max value for proposals reviewed by the Ecosystem Treasury. This way, below the threshold proposals can continue to be submitted and reviewed by the Community Fund DAOs. I will post more details on this on the forum.

buster:

so the snapshot updates by month? should by quarter, right?

Correct, the snapshot time should match the re-election time.

MinhHieu:

I still don’t understand about, what is the source of those maximum 200M $NEAR? Thanks a lot!

The funds are coming from the “Community” and “Early Ecosystem” buckets in the initial token allocation. See details of these buckets here.

Grace:

How to best reconcile with the Ecosystem TreasuryDAO, more specifically Marketing and Guild DAOs?

Ecosystem Treasury DAO should indeed only focus on funding things like Marketing DAO, Guild DAO and CommunitySquadDAO itself. We can define the size / timeline of funding (e.g. it will be larger check for longer period of time).

This is a great initiative - NEAR will ultimately need a Treasury to oversee the allocation and use of funds.

Making such a Treasury representative of the entire community mainly via delegation seems sensible.

Although I can understand the concern voiced by eluzgin about a Treasury DAO being too small a group of people ultimately we need a group of people which is elected by the stakeholders and which can work well and decisively together. Large numbers militate against this .

Finally…the BIG question. Why focus on establishing the Treasury without due consideration of the strategic direction? Surely this is the most fundamental thing to get right first - a Treasury is just part of the enablement process.

Can I refer you to NEAR Governance - moving toward more community involvement - answering the questions posed here should help get strategy and direction right.

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.

illia:

The funds are coming from the “Community” and “Early Ecosystem” buckets in the initial token allocation. See details of these buckets here .

According the initial token allocation , there are 503,000,000 NEAR under the control of NF:

• operations grants,11.4%=114,000,000
• foundation endowment 10.0%=100,000,000
• early ecosystem 11.7%=117,000,000
• community grants,program… 17.2%=172,000,000

image1514×858 91.9 KB

how many near left of “Community” and “Early Ecosystem” buckets by now?

Love this!

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:

Sputnikfund

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!

Click To View Guide

Join Sputnik DAO

Step 1: Navigate to Join.SputnikDAO.near

Screen Shot 2021-06-25 at 3.53.36 PM1439×358 38 KB

Step 2: Click “Create New Proposal”

Step 3: Select “NewCouncil” Proposal Type

Screen Shot 2021-06-25 at 3.56.37 PM1439×724 45.9 KB

Step 4: Input Account ID and Proposal Description

Screen Shot 2021-06-25 at 3.57.41 PM680×455 15.8 KB

Step 5: Link To Your Forum Post

Screen Shot 2021-06-25 at 3.59.54 PM562×337 15.3 KB

Step 6: Allow Transfer of 0.1 NEAR

Screen Shot 2021-06-25 at 4.00.38 PM600×573 18.1 KB

This bond (deposit) will be returned if your proposal is approved.

Step 7: Notify Council Members

Telegram: Contact @sputnik_DAO

Submit a Proposal

Follow the steps above to create a poll. However, instead of a “NewCouncil” proposal type, choose “Payout” in step 3, like this:

Screen Shot 2021-06-25 at 4.27.22 PM1440×681 46 KB

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:

ecosystem-dao2229×1904 585 KB

Initial Thoughts

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:

jlwaugh:

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?

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:

1. 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.

2. 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?

3. 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.

blaze:

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.

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).

blaze:

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.

As explained in the proposal, it’s only delegation of staked tokens.

jack:

• operations grants,11.4%=114,000,000
• foundation endowment 10.0%=100,000,000
• early ecosystem 11.7%=117,000,000
• community grants,program… 17.2%=172,000,000

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.

jlwaugh:

Considering 200M NEAR is quite a large amount, perhaps we should experiment

As suggested, initially funding will be only fraction of this amount in the spirit of the running an experiment.

jlwaugh:

so far, about 131K NEAR has been distributed

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.

jlwaugh:

Eventually, might be worth pluralizing each categorical “sub DAO” that receives allocations.

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.

jlwaugh:

How might we choose an optimal design for this Ecosystem Treasury DAO

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.

ALuhning:

I guess I’m not clear on what the issue is with continuous delegation.

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.

ALuhning:

Do you see the sub-DAOs essentially submitting business plans

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.

ALuhning:

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.

Great point, we have been using a monthly reporting system for the guilds/daos that have received funding: [Guide] How to submit monthly reports to the Creatives DAO.

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?

It’s July 7th now. how is the NEAR EcoTreasury DAO now?

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.

rimberjack:

delegated tokens will not be removed from their staking pool (if staked)

Correct. A snapshot will be used.

rimberjack:

and they only function to determine the “weight” of each candidate, and do not carry economic value in this context?

Correct, the “weight” will not be transferrable. Though one can assign value to the governance vote and potentially auction their vote off.

rimberjack:

Are the tokens un-delegated after the election or locked up for the duration of the period in which the elected DAO member serves?

The real tokens are not touched at all in the current specification.

rimberjack:

Can I still use my delegated tokens to make transactions?

Delegated tokens for staking can not be used unless you are unstake them. The snapshotted “weight” for voting can only be used for voting.

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.

1. It is protected from scam
2. 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!

How will the snapshot work with multiple lockups contracts? Maybe a mechanism to report lockup contracts to form a single identity?

galaxyonline:

Projects that work with near and for near and do not have permanent funding must have their own network validators.

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.

eluzgin:

We want to avoid centralization and possible corruption at all costs.

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

galaxyonline:

Projects that work with near and for near and do not have permanent funding must have their own network validators.

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).

erik.near:

Semi-related, there will be a network upgrade in the next few months which greatly increases the number of validator seats.

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.

erik.near:

Either way, the key consideration is of course how many tokens to provide to the project.

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 .

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.

galaxyonline:

Projects that work with near and for near and do not have permanent funding must have their own network validators.

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.

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.

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.

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 - 📜 Proposals - 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:

image545×450 64.9 KB

tgoerke:

Here are some ideas to combine prediction market with a Dao to make the delegation (aka “expert” selection) more meaningful.

pretty cool approach, reminds me of this conversation with Ralph Merkle here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvzpvXLbpv4

illia:

Another alternative is to use quadratic voting in delegation. This way the broader community will have more relative weight than large holders. This is especially true given most of the large holders are still in lockups and are not even able to split their funds into multiple accounts.

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.

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:

1. 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

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

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.

[Update] New Community Payout Process - still in progress Community Fund

Happy NEAR-Year! January 2022 and its new beginning has us looking to a new legally compliant and more proactive approach to regulation in the ecosystem, as evidenced in our payout process (as referenced in @Grace’s November and December update posts). Simply put, we will be installing a new payout process which involves identity verification(s), ideally by the end of January. And until this new process is in effect, all payouts to Guilds, projects, contributors via NF Community Team establish…

Consequently, we (the NF) won’t be distributing funds directly through DAOs.

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.

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?