Happy New Year! For us, 2023 will forever be remembered as the year that poidh went from an idea to a fully formed dapp with users, fans, and real economic value:
With 2024 ahead, we wanted to write a post about what you can expect to see from poidh in the new year, why these changes expand what's possible to accomplish with crypto, and when we're planning to roll them out.
what is poidh v2?
The plan for poidh v2 is to upgrade the existing poidh bounty product by including the option for bounties to be collaborative. What does this mean? This is how I've previously described it:
While this post is a bit old, the main outline remains true. When poidh v2 is rolled out bounties will have the potential to have a limitless amount of contributors, each with a stake in confirming the completion of real-world tasks.
Why are we expanding poidh to include this functionality? Two reasons:
It seems really fun.
We believe collaborative task funding is a unique opportunity where applying crypto truly improves on the existing fiat money tooling that is available.
This blog is meant to focus on the second point and why it could represent a breakthrough in onchain collaboration.
why fully onchain collaborative decision-making matters
Crypto makes new value coordination mechanisms possible. But instead of being creative with new tech, we’ve fallen into using the same old coordination mechanisms with crypto tacked on as an extra feature.
The way that humans have coordinated value to get things done for thousands of years boils down to a few tried-and-true steps:
A group of people decides that there is a common cause they want to work towards. They all agree to contribute funds toward that thing.
Funds are pooled, and a smaller group of people within that larger group are assigned the responsibility of managing the funds.
That smaller group of people does the hard work of managing what actions the group will undertake, finding people to complete those actions, and using the group’s funds to pay for services.
The other members of the group have varying degrees of oversight over the small group managing funds and can replace them when they do not perform their duties adequately.
The steps above are very generic but generally describe human organizations from those as small as a neighborhood HOA to those as big as national governments. It is the natural method of coordination humans adopt whenever a group has shared tasks to complete.
Most DAO governance falls under the description above. A group of people pools their cryptocurrency and a smaller group amongst that larger group manages the funds with some sort of multisig wallet. Anyone who is a member of the DAO can propose that funds be used for something, but the actual payment and management of funds is completed by the inner circle.
In and of itself, this structure is not bad. Many DAOs have accomplished great things. But is this really innovation? At the end of the day, we are using the same method of organization as we have for thousands of years, but using cryptocurrency instead of some other currency for the underlying value transfer. Some things are made slightly easier thanks to the transparency of onchain voting and internet-native structure, but the coordination method remains the same.
there's a better way
Let’s go over the model above once again. There are three types of actors:
People who want to get something done and contribute funds toward it
“Elites” amongst that group that manage the funds
People who actually complete whatever tasks the group wants to be done and get paid to do so
Good model, but the “elites” in the middle feel a bit unnecessary. What if you could simplify things to:
People who want to get something done and contribute funds toward it
People who actually complete whatever tasks the group wants to be done and get paid to do so
Before cryptocurrency, this wasn’t possible. Normal money isn’t programmable. Once someone contributes money to a fund, they lose all control over it. Someone else needs to manage it and keep track of the specific donations amongst all other contributions. It’s the nature of the beast. Elites are necessary.
Crypto is different. It’s seamless to track who has contributed what to any given address on a blockchain. This means we should be able to have organizations where communal funds are controlled directly by the people who contributed.
But there are other problems. How does a decentralized group of people know the task they wanted to get done got done? Who gathers the evidence? Who triggers the voting period to release funds? What platform is voting done on? Who figures out what address those funds need to be sent to? Who’s responsible for figuring out how much to send? And on and on.
Things get messy at the phase of DAOs where taking action is needed. So we lean back on centralized mechanisms to abstract that messiness away. A few people manage a multisig, we put a lot of trust in those people, and we call it good.
But this strategy completely fails at decentralizing the most important thing DAOs should be doing: taking action to get things done.
DAO expert Spencer Graham has a fantastic blog post on this topic where he makes these crucial points:
“The common misconception that governance is primarily about decision-making is wrong, outdated, and dangerous. The goal of governance is to DO things. Governance is about taking ACTION. Decision-making is important, but it is just one aspect of taking action.”
“If you ignore the actual goal of governance – taking action – you're liable to create a system that is exposed to capture, just like our broken governance systems in place throughout society today.”
“Until very recently, it was literally impossible for agents in a network to collectively execute an action using the network’s shared resources. Instead, many legacy governance systems rely on trusting individual people to execute actions on behalf of the many. ‘Governance’ came to refer to the process for deciding which action to trust a single agent to execute. But we no longer live in that world. Thanks to blockchains and smart contracts, for the first time in human history we have the ability to distribute executive power across multiple agents.”
“Our new ability to design governance systems that actually cover the full breadth of governance is a profoundly important shift. We may look back on it as one of the most important advances in human history. Let's use these new tools to their full potential. Let's build real DAOs.”
With all this in mind, we are left with a single core question: How do we make it easy for a decentralized group of people to incentivize the completion of an action without a centralized middleman confirming/executing the action?
We believe that finding solutions to this question is one of the most important research spaces in crypto today. And poidh v2 will offer users one such solution.
how it will work
someone has a task they want completed
A simple example would be that I want to see someone take a bite out of a kiwi (skin-on) while wearing a Farcaster branded t-shirt. I spin up a poidh project with a description outlining the task. I seed the task with $50 of ETH.
people vibe with the task
I promote the task and other people think that this is a task they would like to see done in real life. 5 other contributors chip in $20 each. They each receive voting rights for the bounty equivalent to their overall contribution (13.33%).
someone wants to do the task
Someone decides they want a shot at $150 and they jump through the hoops to complete the task. They get a t-shirt printed with a Farcaster logo on it and buy a kiwi. They take a bite of it, then take a selfie holding the kiwi while wearing the shirt. They upload the selfie as the “claim” NFT to the poidh bounty page.
the task creator is notified
Because a claim was made with NFT photographic evidence, I (the task creator) am notified. I believe the photographic evidence submitted is a legitimate claim, so I now trigger a voting period for all contributors.
the public voting starts
I vote with my 33% share that the task was legitimately completed. At this point, two more votes are needed from other contributors to reach a >50% threshold for the release of funds. Two other contributors vote that the claim was legitimate.
funds are released
Because a successful >50% vote was reached, the person who submitted NFT photographic proof of task completion will automatically be sent the funds that were locked in the bounty. As bounty creator, the successful claiming NFT will be sent to my original bounty funding address.
the aftermath
All project contributors will receive credit within their poidh account for their contribution to the project represented by a "poidh score" visible on their profile page. This is part of the app’s social mechanism to ensure that it is easy to see at a glance what users are trustworthy based on their past contributions and actions within the ecosystem. These points are purely a social signal and hold no direct monetary value (think: Reddit Karma).
what if it fails?
In the event a claim fails to reach a >50% vote, the bounty simply resets to its original state. A new claim can be selected to be voted on, or the bounty creator can cancel the fund entirely in which case the poidh contract would automatically return all funds to bounty contributors.
Importantly, bounty contributors will also have the ability to withdraw funds at any time (as long as a vote is not currently ongoing). If they lose faith in the project or the bounty creator to properly select a sufficient claim, they don't need to worry about their money going to waste. Their wallet (and only their wallet) controls their deposit.
potential use cases
Collaborative poidh projects could be used for anything that someone desires to see done in the world. Where we think they'll be exceptionally useful is allowing communities to make subjective decisions regarding task completion in a fair, 100% transparent manner.
Incentivize media appearances
Say that the ETH community wanted to incentivize Vitalik to appear on the Joe Rogan podcast. A project could be created, funding could be collected, and it could reach a dollar amount where Vitalik is swayed to appear. Vitalik/Joe would then claim the funds following the completion of the podcast by submitting a picture of them at the interview table as an NFT.
Improvements to protocols
A large group of the Warpcast community is passionate about enabling video on Warpcast. They create a fund that will be claimable once embedded video for casts is enabled. DWR posts a screenshot of the first video being uploaded to claim the funds.
Political causes
Some Americans are passionate about seeing marijuana declared legal at the federal level. A poidh project could be created that is claimable once this legislation is passed. In theory, a large project like this, if it caught on, could reach millions of dollars of funding. Then, once the legislation was passed, there would likely be multiple politicians, organizations, and PACs claiming that they were the ones that made this happen (and, therefore, putting in competing claims for the bounty).
It would then be an interesting experiment to see which claim proved to be most popular with voters. This would become a way of settling complex debates on who should get credit for specific actions in the real world. If people who put money on the line for a task to be completed vote in your favor vs someone else, that’s a powerful signal that will live forever onchain that you were the most important factor in completing a specific action.
what's next?
The most obvious question coming out of all this is "wen v2". Our current plan is for the new contract allowing for collaborative bounties to be launched by the end of Q1 2024. This timeline should become clearer as we make progress. If you want to stay as up-to-date as possible, we recommend joining our Discord channel.
Users of the current poidh app should expect no interruptions in service while v2 is being worked on. We encourage you to continue making bounties, submitting claims, and collecting NFTs like before. And who knows, users of v1 may be grandfathered into specific benefits on v2.
Some other bonus points to look forward to with v2 beyond the option for collaborative bounties include:
Rollout of the new app UX based on the winner of our design contest
Upgraded profile pages allowing users to seamlessly explore the history of the app and its users
A new chain for creating and completing bounties (in addition to Arbitrum): Solana!
We hope you're as excited for poidh v2 as we are. As we mentioned before, to stay up to date on the latest poidh news we highly recommend joining us in the official Discord. We're looking forward to collaborating on bounties with you throughout 2024 🍻.
