Andrey Didovskiy

💎 Digital Asset Investor 🧙‍♂️ Crypto Content Wizard Laser focused on bringing incredible applications to Life 🌟

DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations have become one of the most powerful and widespread applications of distributed ledger technologies. 

Being an innovation based on blockchain technology, DAOs are transparent, auditable smart contracts intended for the purpose of coordinating groups of individuals, with a vested interest, in making governance decisions on a unified subject matter.

Typically consisting of parameters relating to proposing, voting, and implementing structural changes to an application’s codebase or operational system, DAOs can be built around any arbitrary purpose. 

DAOs redefine the model of arriving at social consensus. Traditionally group structures existed in a hierarchical “master-slave” model where a central organizer(s) was tasked with execution and demanded to be trusted.

DAOs supersede the traditional model by providing three key functional benefits:

1) Displace hierarchical structures with horizontal ones.

This is where the D in DAO comes in. Power over organizations is no longer centralized, rather, it is proportionately distributed amongst all participating members. This minimization of reliance on a single entity results in a more efficient flow of processes and strengthens the relationship between involved parties.

 *It’s crucial to note that there is still some element of centralization risk present in DAOs, namely in the form of developer/deployer key controls.

By removing arbitrary hurdles of involvement present in legacy organizations (

no government approval or degree required

), DAOs create a more inclusive, equitable playing field for talent to be attracted to. While capital does play a role in power accrual, some models of governance reward activity over assets, allowing for less financially equipped people to earn their stake in an organization. 

As an organization, a DAO must have something of value over which to govern. That is why, nearly every DAO will have a treasury (multisig wallet) that belongs to its community. With a hard-coded set of rules revolving around its utilization/management, individuals can influence how/what those funds are used for. This is evolutionary in terms of the depth of stakeholder involvement. Think about this from the standpoint of something like Apple. Shareholders may be entitled to owning a portion of the company and some of its earnings, but they have no say in how Apple uses its war chest of money. 

*There can be arguments made from both sides whether it is good or bad, but the point here is that with a DAO it is at least possible.

DAOs can be seen as modern-day business structures in cyberspace (the internet). Whereas in the real world, a business can be set up as an LLC or INC; in cyberspace, businesses are set up as DAOs.

But the need for coordinating people spans far beyond just business.

Whenever a DAO is set up there must be some way to specify membership and inclusion; this is generally done through one of two ways: tokenization and/or contribution.

At the heart of a DAO exists its token. Commonly associated as being units of account and instruments of value/influence; in the case of DAOs, tokens represent proportional shares of the right to participate in voting.

However, organizations are well aware of the possible capital constraints that can exclude promising members from joining on the merits of being able to acquire tokens alone. Therefore, incentive system rewards for active participation have become a popular tool for token emission, allowing people without money a chance to earn their way into a DAO through their efforts.

Once tokens are acquired and users can participate in a DAO, there are three general models for their involvement: 

This is the most desirable form of governance as it involves all users independently, directly participating in all activities. Once a consensus threshold level is reached, the smart contract will automatically execute the specifications without the need for a single authority to intervene.

A model that has long been utilized for consensus mechanisms in distributed systems, delegation is something vaguely similar to a representative democracy. Here, community members offload their responsibilities to other community members and trust them to make decisions on their behalf. Important note, tokens are not given to other members, only their weight equivalent in influence.

A model that slightly goes outside of the natural executional automata of smart contracts, multisig governance refers to the allocation of funds into the hands of the most financially apt and trusted participants of the community that reveal their identities publicly. So even if there are 10,000 voters passing a vote, they will not be able to influence the treasury without the involvement of the multisig entities. The main reasoning behind this formulation is to deter malicious anonymous entities from subverting the system for financial gains and the minimization of inadequate voting on behalf of the community. 

(If a DAO control $100 million USD and some proposal garners 6,000 of 10,000 votes to spend $90 million USD on minting random NFTs, it would be best if a smaller patch of clear-minded participants never execute on that.)

Being products of geo-neutral software systems, many assume that DAOs are not subject to the same regulatory frameworks as traditional businesses. That has not been completely the case.

Government organizations, namely the CFTC, have actually transferred the burden of legal implications onto the shoulders of the token holders and the developers possessing the private keys for conducting upgrades 

). It is still unclear as to how things will pan out, but as it stands, decentralized autonomous organizations are slowly materializing into hybrid traditional organizations. Some authorities around the world have begun to acknowledge DAOs as real-world entities by providing legal frameworks to recognize DAOs

In any case, the future will be digitized, we can sit in uncertainty trying to figure out how the legal system may integrate with DAOs, or we can understand these systems better and do something awesome with them and then have governments catch up to us retroactively.

From the very first iteration of the “The DAO” which raised >$150 million USD and caused the infamous hard fork split of Ethereum in 2016, to today's recognition by nation-states as legitimate entities, the landscape of DAO is quickly evolving.

AI technologies have captured to fantasies of mankind, and their applications have found direct, meaningful ways to integrate with blockchain. Delphi Labs has put out a whitepaper in which it sees the synthesis of 

) to advance upon the shortcoming in the 

 portion of existing DAOs by introducing artificial agents.

There is no doubt in my mind that DAOs as a sector/metric for the representation of growth in the digital economy will continue to flourish and empower people around the world with the freedom to pursue radical new ideas.

Stay interested. Stay involved. There is a renaissance taking place, and everybody who can rise above the noise of negativity is invited to participate.

We are no longer at the beginning, but damn, we are still so early.

DAOs: The Modern Future of Social Coordination 

wutwut DAO thoughts

 refers to the minimum amount of time that a proposal must remain unchanged before it can advance to a formal submission. The mechanism, which is part of MakerDAO’s new governance setup, helps to avoid putting contentious proposals up for a vote before all major points of feedback are resolved.

 allows token holders to delegate to a voting pool, which is then distributed to active DAO members based on a predefined reputation rank. By tying reputation to activity levels, this mechanism could solve the problem of ghost delegates. At the same time, blind delegation reduces the need for voters to conduct research into delegates, which reduces the barriers to delegation.

 is a proposal type to remove members from the DAO. If a GuildKick proposal is successful, the kicked member’s voting shares are automatically converted into treasury assets proportional to the value of their voting shares. Once a member is guildkicked, they cannot be added as a member again.

3 things I learned about DAOs this week

DAO Thoughts & Learnings 23/17

The Tinkering Society

Insights from builders and thinkers on a mission to further develop the crypto ecosystem through protocol research and incubation.

This is our second ChatGPT tinker. Make sure to check out 

, an NFT collection developed (almost entirely) by AI.

Lots of DAOs bloomed out of DeFi summer, most wilted, but a few remain perennial. Those thriving today are a hotbed of collective opinions, decision-making, and execution.

We decided to use ChatGPT to cut away the thicket of governance and offer a glimpse into those DAOs where votes have the biggest, opinion-splitting impact.

 is our aggregator for active and contentious DAO votes. For the casual degen, perhaps with an interest in the sociological aspect of governance, the breadth of DAOs was too wide to pick out where interesting and difficult decisions were being made. For the casual community member, it likely wasn’t worth the time to track proposals that they would be able to influence.

The task was relatively straightforward: populate a list of ongoing DAO votes and sort through them based on how closely-contested the current polls are.

Unlike our previous approach, we decided to take a more active role and use ChatGPT as a teacher. The two members of the collective with more novice coding skills would strengthen their knowledge base while the actual Tinkering devs were busy building.

As before, whatever code ChatGPT helps us churn out will be the final version. There will be no place for misshapen images and awkward formatting to hide, and it’s on us to drill down into the fixes.

We had most of the Python packages installed from our previous project. We set about getting ChatGPT to create database models. We knew roughly that we wanted [proposal titles], [DAO names], [vote options], [vote percentages], and [time remaining].

The Snapshot API felt like a good place to start and a simpler integration than Tally. We fed ChatGPT all of the relevant queries based on our intended database schema.

Snapshot proposal data needed to be fetched at regular intervals. ChatGPT pulled together a manual [feed_updater] file for us that we could run locally.

It was time to start designing the app layout. We figured that it made sense to keep it simple and implement one column of proposals.

ChatGPT doesn’t work with visuals, so we had more influence here. We opted for a 

 theme to keep in-line with our first AI hackathon project, PixelWhimsy. We later asked ChatGPT to add unique styling to the most fiery ongoing votes.

We needed to add filters to make sorting simpler. We gave ChatGPT the parameters and gave it feedback to fine-tune them.

Most of this process was run locally. We made the switch to Heroku and AWS using ChatGPT’s guidance on deployment and database management.

Our process here was very different from 

. We weren’t dealing with anything on-chain but we were still aiming to organize a potentially sizable pool of data.

Taking the time to implement our idea to track contentious DAO governance votes achieved its goal in cutting through the noise (or lack of it). Being able to easily pick out which DAOs are making important decisions gets right to the underbelly of the votes which could impact Web3 in the next 1-2 years.

At a community level, it is also interesting to see that DAO governance isn’t as gamed as we thought. Early token allocations do not always equal the ability to puppeteer the direction of a project. This is refreshing when you 

 of some of the previous Core DAOs in our list.

One of the most exciting outcomes was that both Tinkering members felt ChatGPT greatly steepened the coding learning curve. The benefit of having a knowledgeable code brain analyze and write code in front of you makes it far easier to grasp the underlying processes. The practice has a kind of paint-by-numbers effect, being actively guided through it means you have greater capacity to understand the intricacies.

There are still clear limitations too. Coding alongside ChatGPT can be as frustrating as it can be enlightening, it regularly misconstrues simple feedback which can leave you developing in circles with it.

Got a ChatGPT idea to share? We’re always excited to hear about potential new tinkers and always feel free 

We tasked ChatGPT to school two code n00bs on a dash app build. The result was spicy.vote...

Tracking Feisty Governance - A ChatGPT Hot Take

Kokonut Network

Building the Infrastructure to Connect Web3 with Agriculture 🌴 🥥

We are thrilled to announce a comprehensive partnership with the Department of Agriculture. This collaboration will provide technical, logistics, and agricultural support to our coconut plantations and other community development projects. Full detailed post Soon. 📸 Dec 14, 2022 https://t.co/UPM4JUADjw

Let's dive into what the partnership is bringing to the table

Benefits for Kokonut Network & Local Community

Access to Financing for Agricultural Production

During our discussions with the Department of Agriculture, one of the key topics that emerged was the importance of access to financing for our agriculture projects. We were pleased to learn that the Department of Agriculture has a bank called “

,” which is dedicated to advancing the development of agricultural infrastructure and ensuring a stable food security system.

As a DAO, the core of our philosophy is to prioritize shipping 10x more than the funding we spend. However, we see this as an additional 

stability, resilience, and liquidity in case of emergencies

Our vision is to remain community-led, and we believe that the initial distribution of Governance shares to fund the V1 Plantation is the way to achieve this. This approach allows us to obtain funding, governance, and “wisdom of the crowd” in one take. Our main goal is to build a community-owned asset that serves as a proof of concept as a decentralized group of people, who can control and develop real-world assets independently of its founders or core team. By reducing the 

 of the founders & core team, we can create an organization that evolves based on collective beliefs, rather than being controlled by a centralized group.

Empowering Farmers with Worldwide Trading Opportunities

, our goal at Kokonut Network is to eliminate risks and barriers to investment in the agriculture industry. However, this goal cannot be achieved 

, where agricultural products can command higher value, creating more wealth for the entire community.

As a community-led DAO, it's an incredible achievement to be 

 in the game. Our network of coconut farms will now have the opportunity to trade and make deals directly with end buyers, 

 on middlemen. We aim to maximize value for the community by 

Steady Supply of High-Quality Planting Material

The Department of Agriculture and Kokonut Network share a common commitment to 

efficient agricultural resource management

. As part of our partnership, the Department of Agriculture will be providing 

 to support the care of seedlings before planting, ensuring that they are acclimated to the 

local humidity and temperature conditions

. This approach is aimed at maximizing the success of planting and improving crop yields.

In addition, the Department of Agriculture will provide access to the 

 and planting material available in the country. This includes high-genetic-quality planting material that is known to contribute to increased product quality. By leveraging these superior planting materials, we aim to improve crop yields and enhance the overall quality of our agricultural products.

Training in New Techniques and Technologies

The Department of Agriculture will provide us with 

access to training programs and resources

 that focus on cutting-edge technologies and best practices. This includes training in areas such as crop management, soil improvement, and other innovative techniques aimed at improving the quality and profitability of our agricultural operations. By leveraging these resources, we aim to stay at the forefront of agricultural innovation and maximize our 

Technical Advice from the Department of Agriculture

As part of this collaboration, assigned personnel from the Department of Agriculture will make 

supervision, measurements, and verification

 to ensure that we are following their guidelines. These guidelines are essential for us to earn the 

 our coconuts to global markets by producing a product that is 

This collaboration contributes to our goal of producing a globally compliant and high-quality product while minimizing the costs associated with 

Conservation and Environmental Protection Practices

deforestation, bad land stewardship, and harmful practices

 in the agriculture sector. These issues have detrimental impacts on humans, wildlife, and plants, and we recognize the urgent need to address them.

In collaboration with the Department of Agriculture, we are developing 

 for our plantations, as well as local farmers, land stewards, and community members. These guidelines aim to collectively 

reduce emissions, and promote conservation and environmental protection practices

Our goal is to go beyond mere compliance and actively contribute to the conservation and improvement of the environment. We believe that by implementing responsible practices on our farms, we can make a positive impact on the local ecosystem and contribute to the protection of our precious natural resources.

Kokonut Network has gained access to public policies that promote innovation and technological development in the agricultural sector. This partnership has provided us with an opportunity to 

As a result, we now have access to the latest advancements in equipment, tools, measurement, reporting, and verification 

We are committed to utilizing these opportunities to drive positive change and promote sustainable agriculture practices in our network of farms.

Streamlining Export Procedures for our Agricultural Products

As a community-led DAO in the agriculture sector, we are aware of the challenges posed by regulations and permits for exporting our products.

Unlike some DAOs and Web3 organizations that face 

excessive regulations and difficulties with banking

, we are fortunate to have the support of the Department of Agriculture in obtaining the necessary permits for 

exporting our coconuts and coconut by-products

Subscribe to stay in the loop! Our next post will cover the DAOHaus V3 upgrade, followed by a Deep Dive into the last 12 months in Kokonut Network, including a 

 detailing the funds raised, spent, and milestones achieved with this budget.

Do you want to learn more about Kokonut Network? 

Discover how our partnership with the Department of Agriculture is accelerating the development of Kokonut V1

Kokonut Network Partners with the Department of Agriculture

DAO Thoughts & Learnings 23/15

Platformless

A weekly newsletter educating creators and brands on how to succeed in web3.

A warm welcome to everyone who joined us last week.

I completely agree with the statement above.

And so, I’d love to involve every one of you as much as possible.

Have you been enjoying this newsletter so far? Is there anything else you’d like me to cover?

 is a FREE weekly newsletter sharing web3 insights and guides for future-proof creators and brands.

Here’s what happened last week in the web3 creator economy.

The launch of OpenSea Pro was one of the biggest stories last week.

Opensea had been facing increased competition from other NFT marketplaces (mainly 

) and needed something to reverse the trend.

 — the NFT aggregator they acquired last year.

So far, the market has reacted positively with several trading and user metrics swinging back in their favor.

🧵 OUR ETH PLATFORM IS NOW LIVE!

Today is day 1 of many.

We're proud of
- Partnering w/ 17 ETH Launchpad creators
- Respecting royalties on native listings for ALL collections
- Providing ALL ETH Launchpad partners royalties AND our 2% fee for 6 months

Follow @MEonEthereum! https://t.co/OcGdz4kr9Z

Today we are incredibly excited to present Bonfire Pro, our premium subscription designed to supercharge your creator journey on Bonfire. With Pro, you will unlock advanced customization, powerful analytics, and everything else you need to engage and grow your web3 community. https://t.co/xEoimZpltP

$5 million paid to artists.

Thank you to every single artist and collector that made this happen.

Together we are tipping the balance in a music industry that doesn’t always put artists first.

A thread on how we got here and how we’ll get to $10m 👇 https://t.co/CI8pI75jNV

Is hyper-financialization a good or bad thing for NFTs?

The Blur marketplace and the hyper-financialization of the NFT market:

Where our space is heading 🧵👇

(1/19) https://t.co/TTvjrSWpul

And cheers to the next 10, 100, and more!

Did you enjoy this post? If yes, kindly forward it to a friend or fellow creative. It only takes 10 seconds. 🙏

Also, if you’re new to Platformless, please subscribe to receive new posts. I’m so happy to have you!

 — A weekly newsletter sharing insights and guides for web3 creators and brands. He also consults with projects building web3 products and experiences. Book a free call 

Platformless is strictly educational and informational. Nothing I share will ever be financial or investment advice. No content will be sponsored unless otherwise stated.

OpenSea Pro, Magic Eden on Ethereum, Reddit Gen 3 Avatars, Bugatti NFT, and more

P-010: The Week In Web3 (April 03-09, 2023)

 A quorum represents the minimum number of votes needed for a proposal vote to be valid. Usually a quorum is a fixed threshold, e.g. 5% of all voters need to vote. In contrast, a dynamic quorum is a variable threshold that increases with every new vote. The more people vote the higher the quorum, until a predefined max quorum is reached. This mechanism makes it harder to pass contentious proposals that receive a lot of negative votes. 

 of voting bots that could vote on behalf of users. The bot would crawl the user’s posting/voting history to create a set of beliefs that represent the user. If a vote comes up, the bot would automatically vote on behalf of the user according to the user’s “belief system”. This “Optimistic Voting” approach would boost voter participation by creating a default vote that can be edited if needed.

 Some DAOs have established security councils that can bypass the normal governance process to enact emergency updates in case the protocol is attacked. Critics of this approach argue that this would give security councils too much power and suggested an alternative model: Security councils could merely have the power to freeze a protocol, and hand over the details of the update to the normal governance process. 

DAO Thoughts & Learnings 23/14

Rich Uncle Pennybags (aka, Mr. Monopoly) would love crypto. It blends casual gambling, canines, and even jail time.

It is interesting to think about how the magnate would view 

 as a business proposition. Whether he would scoff at the altruistic vision or see an opportunity.

In this article we take a puff-free look at Canto, and what it 

 do, and share some predictions on its state when the bull market rolls in again.

Free Public Infrastructure is a powerful proposition in an industry where chasing gains can often dominate. It pitches it as a wholesome good against a wave of money-grabs. It is juicy PR, on par with tokenizing carbon credits.

The ecosystem itself is built on a triforce of public-good amenities: a DEX, a lending market, and unit of account ($NOTE). The Canto DEX is free to use and will never be subject to governance or fees. The lending market, which is free for LPs, is directed by network stakers. $NOTE is its overcollateralized stablecoin, with a self-adjusting interest rate to buffer volatility.

A second token - $CANTO - acts as the network and governance token. The max supply of $CANTO is designed to increase over time, but at a decaying rate of distribution.

Theoretically, inspiring builders to build and apes to ape in an ecosystem built on free use should be a difficult task. 

Where does the participation value come from?

Well, $CANTO is used liberally across the network to provide the following rewards:

In addition, the ecosystem’s Contract Secured Revenue (CSR) mechanism provides an add-on to smart contracts that developers can use to generate a fixed 20% revenue from fees that the network would usually burn. To do this, developers create a CSR NFT that accrues value and acts as a treasury for each dApp.

A core angle in the Canto vision is that it is 

 decentralized and free from dominating, singular influences, such as VCs.

There is no core team. Instead, the early contributors that developed the ecosystem have stepped back from any majority claim of ownership. The two most prominent names from that stable of early contributors are 

One quirk of this genesis structure is that these builders’ $CANTO allocations 

An effect of having no core team is that there is also no pre-set roadmap. The decision-making process has relied on governance to craft the early vision and development path. This 

 includes making changes to protocol fees, adjusting emissions, and registering new tokens in the Canto EVM.

The core vision of Canto, and as outlined 

, is certainly a worthy mission. Crypto can be far too concerned with TVL (ironically, as Scott Lewis claims to have invented it), when instead the betterment of communities should dictate our thinking.

 at length in various articles, Canto has put itself at the foot of a giant mountain. Coordination with an outlined vision can be tasking enough, but it is uniquely challenging when one is lacking.

Excluding any black swan events (like COVID and mass money printing), the future looks blurred here, and these are likely some of the trials that Canto will face.

Constructing CSR as an optional add-on to a deployment has the potential to shift the network monopoly from validators to dApp deployers.

It is a two-fold issue. Firstly, wash network activity or stealth marketing could be used to manipulate and boost specific developer revenues. Secondly, by making the revenue fee variable, it is likely only a matter of time before developers on the network will look to vote and increase that figure.

Both of these outcomes could ultimately undercut the public-good premise of Canto by introducing politics and vote gaming, which would kick-start a trend of 

 that the network has been created to protect against.

The ecosystem’s current economic structure could stifle growth where it matters most: cross-chain. We are at a precipice in blockchain development where composability, and working together to leverage strengths, will be a key driver in scalable progress. There won’t be one winner of the Chain Wars after all.

While building on the Cosmos SDK certainly facilitates this kind of development, there currently isn’t any indication within the vision to pursue cross-chain ambitions that can keep pace with the rest of the market.

Developers will want to build where it will create the greatest impact; and in its current, shuffling state, Canto is at risk of fencing itself off into irrelevancy.

As covered above, governance can be a juggle between coordination and incentivization. In its current state, Canto does not provide enough reward for users who are interested in anything other than flipping the $CANTO token as short-term play.

With no vesting for early contributors, and large funds 

, it is difficult to distinguish how the Canto ecosystem setup is any different from the protocols that are often touted as being manipulated by big players, such as Uniswap.

The outcome is likely that those early contributors, with influence from other majority stakeholders, will govern and direct the vision of Canto in a way that doesn’t reflect a unified ecosystem voice.

The Canto launch garnered hype across the board. Has it made $NOTE-worthy progress on its mission? Let's assess its current state, risks, and potential outcomes.

Canto: A Dice Roll at Free Public Infra

Metaverse Fashion Week, Doodles Genesis Box, DeGods & y00ts migration, Sound Swap, and more

P-009: The Week In Web3 (March 27-April 02, 2023)

This week I went a bit deeper into voting theory to understand how we can improve voting in DAOs.