NEAR: Vital Point AI Redefines a DAO

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

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   hey everyone dorian crutcher here from the bloghead series i'm happy to be hosting this series of interviews with some of the top contestants from the near hack the rainbow hackathon in this episode i've had the distinct pleasure of interviewing aaron dunning from battle point ai where he showcased his vp dao application which facilitates a coordination and resource allocation

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   using decentralized autonomous organization technologies i'm really sure you guys are really excited to find out more about what that means and what that looks like so with that as we jump right into the interview so summarize what erin created using the molok v2 dial from ethereum as a foundation inspiration he built an application that helps communities autonomously manage community funds

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   approved members get voting rights and abilities made proposals as to how these committee funds should be used so instead of having a board of directors organize a meeting in person or resume to decide amongst themselves which projects to fund or even who should be member of that board all that is automated in the dow like the one aaron built the blockchain contract defines the rules for how the organization works manages how proposals are submitted by whom monitors voting and ultimately funds management and

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   distribution this means the organization is controlled by its community no central authority decisions are transparent and the automation eliminates the need for managerial involvement once decisions are made it's a new blockchain way of running a community and allocating its resources on what that community feels is important oh it's so cool how did you get that how did you get started well blockchain in general it was uh you know i think around 2018 end of 2017 i think using your platform

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   to build like a parachute like what like logging or tracking you know right now in the parachuting world basically everybody writes down their their jumps that they do and it's all hard copy um and they have to get an instructor to sign off on the fact that they did that jump so people have these books that are you know 300 up to thousands of jumps long if that book ever disappears it's

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   impossible to replicate that data because you'd have to go back and find every instructor that you jumped with they'd have to remember that they jumped with you and then sign off on on your jump again just to prove it was done and those are important for getting certain qualifications and things in the parachuting world so um you know if it's gone it's gone so that was kind of the impetus to build this parachuting

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   application at that time so oh wow and that's kind of the direction of going with um like vital point ai and the guild you know focusing on real world applications and problems that exist and they're typically things that affect me right now but i'm sure they have application in other realms as well so actually i think it's a cool transition to like uh like your project so like if you want to give us like

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   the name of your project and then um like what the problem that your project aims to solve i think it'd be really cool the project's name is vital point dao so dao is decentralized autonomous organization and actually you know i knew nothing about daos before before the hackathon i think it was nima or someone in here i aimed me at uh the molok dao on ethereum and i went and took a a read of it and uh as soon as i did i noticed some similarities between what it was trying

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   to do and what the near guilds program was trying to do in terms of having people propose projects and then find a way to collectively kind of vote on them and decide which ones were good for funding and that sort of thing i decided to try and solve that problem basically give people way to manage community resources in a in an efficient manner and a dow seemed like a good way to do it so

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    i ended up trying to port the oh i did port the molok dao from ethereum so it's running on near in assembly script right now oh wow it's amazing would you like to show us like a demo of your project yeah i could definitely uh take you through that and figure it out here okay so this is uh the dow that uh i put up on uh or reported from molok uh so this is what you'd see when you

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    show up at the the front page here and it goes through the the old near uh authorization piece so i'm signing in is vital.ai that doesn't it okay this is the initial set up for uh for the dao so it can take any kind of tokens but uh for this i i built um a fungible token on here called vpc it could also work with near as well but and then you'd set some uh things like voting period lengths and grace periods and et cetera i'll go through each of these in any detail but they'll make sense in

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    in a minute okay all right so that sets things up uh behind in uh in the background uh so this this is the dao so the interface here you've got your account up here um a bit of information about it telling you whether you're a member of the dao or not yet i am because i was signed in i was the first person that summoned the dao um which gives me one voting chair within the dao and there'll be two kind of banks that are associated with it so there's the bank that is the the guild bank and

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    you can see the the balance of it right now is zero and then the escrow bank uh where funds are kind of held before things finalized and and then they move over to the guild bank so what we'll do um we'll sign out from that and we'll sign back in as uh somebody else as you can see here so this person is not a member yet has no voting rights or any any funds associated with them so basically the only thing you can do at this point is propose that you become a member so

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    um you can ask for as many voting rights as you want and if you want you can also donate to the guild bank uh which becomes part of the community funds that can then be uh held out as well so we'll submit that proposal and as you see it's there so once it's in the member would then open it up put in a reason why they should be considered as a member so they'd uh put all their details in here upload a picture or whatnot and then it can either be

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    draft or published so you can come back to it and uh and turn it off or on depending on whether you want to add more details or not submit the details this number here this is basically keeping track of uh minutes um so if you remember it back at the initialization screen you set the voting period for for 60 seconds uh so as time ticks by it's uh it'll it needs to keep track of how much time has passed in order for

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    things like voting and that to happen uh so now the the proposal is in there uh we'll sign back out it's basically waiting for somebody now to to look at it and people will discuss it so i come back in so this is uh by the point the the member so they're gonna look at the proposal check it out you know see whether it's good maybe they want to ask some questions about it um hold this guy etc so is that discussion can go on as long

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    as it as people want until they've decided okay this is uh something to consider at which point okay i've said yeah he's good to go so i'll sponsor this so when the initial proposal was submitted it had a proposal deposit with it so that's been put into escrow as well as the um when i sponsored it that's also gone into escrow so the funds are now with the contract and if things go well and they get approved then they'll get moved

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    over into the the bank or get distributed to the to the member so it's now in the it's voting period and if remember at the beginning we set this for 60 seconds gonna be take two minutes basically uh so for this we'll both yeah and then we wait it'll take a couple minutes until it's uh until it's processed so no worries that's the so if there's any questions up to this point i can probably answer them but like what's a real world example of like one of these guilds

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    so if you're in a company you typically have a bunch of decisions make you'll ask people to make proposals uh those will come in you'll sit around a table as a board of people and decide who's how we're going to disburse funds to each of these projects or whatnot so you could use something like this instead of having people come into the room and do that each one of those people has one or

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    or more voting shares and you can use a system like this to do it automatically so the proposal and everything goes online they can vote on whether they support it or not and then at the end everything's distributed automatically advice having to do it manually you can also do it restlessly because you know your funds go to the contract and the contract handles the distribution nobody's reneging on things at the

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    at the end of it and as i'll show here in a bit there's also a way to pull your stuff pull your funds out of it in case you don't agree with the proposal so okay i see and just so make sure like i understand like so could you define could you define guild in this uh in this instance just make sure i understand like yeah guilt here is just it's my organization so vital point guild it's just my group my community i guess so okay got it yeah anybody it doesn't

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    have to be a guild it could be uh it could be anything but this is just branded for for vital point guild which is the community that i'm gonna be using it for at some point got it okay instead of like having to manually accept a meeting put a proposal like on the table talk about it and like go through a whole like long process they can just post this on this application everybody can see it you can see what the idea is and you can discuss it

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    remotely and this will handle the voting and like whether like how the funds get distributed do i have the idea yep that's pretty much it wow okay cool so this was gone through now so it went through the voting period uh once that was done there was a finalization period which is called a brace period uh for another minute and it ends up in the queue here so basically it says it uh you know what it is and at this point somebody has to come along and process it part of the proposal deposit at the

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    beginning goes to the person that processes it so it's kind of an incentive for for people to to do that they get they get paid for doing so and it doesn't cost it's no effort on their part other than pushing the button so we'll just uh we'll do that so it's processed and so it's in the list here and we can see it passed uh it was for one share you can see the escrow assets are now gone and that one went into the bank and then one was distributed to the

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    uh might be the member i'll check intercept so we'll log back in as the the member now yeah so now they are a member they have one voting share so now they can start to do more interesting things like request some funding so and i said it is multi-token so you can uh if there's another snap 21 token on there running you could just type it in they could send that and submit voila so they've submitted a funding proposal they're asking for five um vpc and

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    it'll get processed in the same way so we'll go back into the other way and voila person would have filled out the details of the proposal again and then you could discuss it again same sort of thing uh we'll sponsor it which means there's now more money in escrow or show up for voting all right so this time we'll say we don't support it we'll say no then we'll wait again it's a quick question so if they do

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    support it uh does the funds come from the uh guild assets or is there another like parent account can like fund like this proposal it comes from from the guild bank so if there's not enough funds in there it won't uh it won't work um so typically what will happen it's like the ethereum dow you'll get uh people who want us to more support some kind of objective in a community they'll all pump a bunch of money into or a bunch of tokens into the the dow to start with and then that becomes the

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    the pool of money that gets distributed and then like another question um the number of like shares that's interesting so like uh i assume like the more shares like a member has like does it mean like how does that affect like uh say their their voting power does that does that play a part in that or yeah it's one for one right now so yeah people could buy boats basically with this mechanism

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    we are looking there's a group on here right now looking at amalek version 3 which is modular and potentially has the ability to you know you could take out this voting mechanism and insert a different kind like a a contribution voting or a quadratic funding kind of uh mechanism um to suit that community so yeah this uh this this voting one is just one for one so obviously it has some some issues if people have a whole lot of money and want to

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    take control of things or if a bunch of them collude but in that instance where a bunch people do collude and you've said no to the proposal and now you're worried that your funds are going to be used to support this proposal this is where you get a in this grace period you have this chance to it's called rage quit and you can basically burn your shares and take your stuff and and leave at that point so that that means your money isn't supporting that thing and then you can

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    come back in later if you want it so i'll just let that you're currently in the account of the member or if like the primary like shareholder the sponsor and voted on on the other proposal got it got it voila and then it's cued we'll process it and you can see that the second one didn't pass you know there's no more money left in escrow everything went back to everybody who started the one in the bank in addition to that there's a couple other things here so

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    you can white list other tokens so like i said it was it's multi-token so bpc is in there now but you can submit a proposal to to bring other ones on you can also remove people called guild kick you know in this case if guild leader here it gets on everybody's bad side somebody can submit a proposal saying we don't want this guy in in the dow anymore and everybody can vote on the proposal

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    and he'll get kicked out so right now like shares equals votes uh someone could like direct like have live shares right now as it stands to um buy a bunch of shares and like get control like the way things move and the way the funding actually goes for like this particular guild um and are you saying like you're looking at options to improve that with like you said quadratic quadratic funding

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    and uh uh the other one that uh i think nema put me on on track it was called contribution funding or contribution voting and uh which is interesting basically everybody starts with the same amount of voting power and then they can basically allocate a portion of that to as many projects as they want and the longer um it's allocated to that project the more voting power it has over time so

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    you know if somebody's really committed to to something um you know it'll it'll eventually rise to the top uh vice things that kind of show up and you know they're just kind of flashing the band type stuff that might not be appropriate for for every kind of community so the idea is that you know there'll be a setting in the initialization piece where you can use what what voting mechanism you want for what

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    proposal and uh and go from there what was the driving like idea behind making this the inspiration is really uh just a suggestion that somebody that nema at near.org made in a telegram chat you say people were talking about dowels and i just looked at it and you know i saw the the benefit of using it for a guild type setting where i have to deal with proposals anyway so um but i mean overall like i say honestly that's a really cool application

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    so i'm well done i appreciate it what were like some like the major like challenges you found like while building this project like i said it's not my primary uh job so just trying to get uh up to speed on all the intricacies involved with blockchain and you know i've found that since i've started in in the space everything is you know typically pretty disjointed and trying to put it all together and figure out how it works is uh is difficult at times but

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    uh i guess with a lot enough persistence and determination you can get through it and you know like i mentioned that the community at near has been super helpful at uh you know taking those obstacles away when they when they get get in the way you know time is would be i guess be the other biggest challenge for me like everybody else million things to do and sometimes the family wants to see me

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    but either working or working on this so it's that that's about it but other than that you know i said it's kind of a hobby for me and fashion and i like doing it so it's not uh not an overly ownership or or uh you know a waste of my time so what were some things that were weird to get up to speed on before coming to this like all the front end stuff for sure like react uh i've been muddling my way through that and it's uh it's working you know i can i

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    can hack something together but it's definitely not comfortable there yet so that's been a long long learning curve had a little bit of typescript knowledge before so that was one of the big benefits of near uh with the ability to to code an assembly script they're very similar so at least that uh that sped things up a little bit um and actually the the whole deployment sequence and how the nearer accounts work that's actually easier to do than than working on ethereum i found so

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    i guess that that's been good um i guess on the near side the thing that has been a little bit difficult is figuring out how the the keys work on in their system so they have like full access and then function call access keys which has a whole lot of good application but it's still not 100 clear in my head how to to make them do what i want them to do so figure out the function keys was like that feel like a challenge for me like to think about just like understand wrap my head around like um what they were like actually i've used

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    them and you said like just like integrating like ipfs into the application was like another like like kind of like challenge area too for you yeah yeah it was new so you know and like everything everything's new right there's a whole bunch of new technology or companies coming out with new stuff all the time so as soon as you see another fancy widget you need to figure out how to go and integrate that widget right so yeah this id

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    takes me down a whole nother rabbit hole into into something else it's like the fun curse of like programming it's like pretty much i finally heard somebody start a new project and i like look up some new tool like i realized oh this is like three passages here that i've never even heard about before and i have to like spend time researching it's like both fun because it's always different and changing but it's like oh my god yeah exactly and you see it and it's

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    like oh i could do this this and this with that if i like and then suddenly you're off and on a whole different direction youtube university is like definitely a real thing for me do you plan on um like continuing this project uh keeping it growing uh yeah so i mentioned previously the the group working on molok three uh so at some points be looking to integrate those features in or basically upgrading this so it's it's

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    more modular and you can have more more control over the voting mechanisms and other proportions to it it might be able to take this and turn it into like a standalone uh kind of product i guess is there a way you would like the community to get involved with like your projects or like is there um any way that people can find about what you're doing definitely uh so vital point guild exists uh it's a near guild program and

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    uh i'm running the guild basically to take people like me who don't really necessarily have a tech or a programming background introduce them to blockchain near some data science some some other stuff as well and then basically create an army of developers within the guild that we can then work on bring them up to speed as fast as i can so that we can work on on projects together like the dao or

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    other stuff so uh the headquarters for that's at vitalpoint.ai if people are interested they can uh definitely come there and and read read about it some more or you can uh reach out to me on twitter at the aaronmooning if anybody's interested check out the description for the in the video too there you go down below i mean this is a really cool application i think there's a lot of potential

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    in seeing this actually work and like seeing this game involved with like you know larger companies too i think it's really exciting are you comfortable with like um you're get like having a github link to your project to or is it like something more within the company still i know i it's uh i published it as part of the hackathon but yeah i can't i'll send you the github link to the the repository if anybody wants to play around with it or take it and modify it and do whatever they want with it if you

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    want the github link for ep dial check the description um and if also again if you want to get in contact with that point ai we'll also point at put their contact info in the description as well it's all down below and thank you again for uh taking your you know giving your time and like you know creating this interview with me yeah no problem i appreciate you reaching out uh a couple times and second time i actually answered so appreciate it

50. 23:49

    and uh basically forcing me to do this so it's been good my defaults usually is to say no to these things so uh you'll you'll determine whether i ever do another one again i appreciate it and uh basically forcing me to do this so it's been good if you were okay with it i would love to like see how this like application develops and like it would look do like a follow-up interview at some point um when you feel like you're in a good spot you can always like let me know

51. 24:14

    for sure once a once i have something else to show i'll definitely let you know thank you aaron for your time i really appreciate it hey guys thank you so much for watching this video i hope you enjoyed it i had a lot of fun interviewing aaron from battle point ai if you guys would like to learn more about what aaron does and what his efforts in building a decentralized community by using your pro call's

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    platform to solve real world problems looks like head over to vitalpoint.ai and learn what it means to join the five point guild i visit a few times even i've used some of the resources to help myself make these really cool music scenes for you like i made i use their awesome summary on new year's access keys to learn more about how to get better control of near's access keys so i had a lot of fun learning about it i'm sure you guys will too um with that guys thank you so much for watching keep an eye out for more blockades videos to

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    come and i'll catch you guys later my defaults usually is to say no to these things so uh you'll determine whether i ever do another one again