Tezos Ecosystem DAO - Round 1 Results

The first round of the Tezos Ecosystem DAO has concluded, with two proposals approved:

Open sourcing and decentralizing TezID Profiles

Tezos Tip-Bot on Telegram

We’d like to thank the proposers and the community for participating!

We will now be injecting the on-chain proposal to confirm the transfer from the treasury to approved proposals. The voting cycle for DAO members to confirm the transfer will begin next week, and lasts one week. After that, the transfer will be executed in approximately 12 days from now. This process can be monitored here:

Note: Unfortunately, the DAO cannot currently consider proposals involving citizens or residents of countries under global sanctions, which applied to multiple good proposals in this round. We hope you continue building!

Stay tuned for announcements on Round 2, but feel free to begin discussing new proposals anytime!

7 Likes

Thanks a bunch for the vote of confidence :blush: :pray: I’ll work hard to create a great solution for the community :raised_hands:

8 Likes

Great to see some projects getting funding out of this, huge step in the right direction. Congrats to the teams that secured funding.

For the next round, can we aim to improve the process a bit? I’d love to see the keyholders identify themselves properly, and most importantly publicly discuss their decisions. At least 1 keyholder never voted … why? did they forget? was there technical issues? did they not find any of the projects appealing? More than one person asked for this info via Twitter and got no response

I think 2 holders only voted for 1 project each. Where the holders fully aware they could vote for many? Lots of the other projects had very positive feedback on their Agora threads … where these not taken into account?

We also need to see some improvements to the homebase tool as well (not sure who owns that). The display of the votes was quite odd. I didn’t know what 1.583333333333333 TED towards 1 project means. I ran into bugs where certain links were not working. The overall UI of the site is very technical focused and limited. The tool itself should be able to show who voted for what

6 Likes

My gratitude to Tezos Ecosystem DAO :pray:

More updates will come to Gonut in Oct, 23.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know what you guys are looking for on Tezos,
we can make it happen to everyone :smiley:

4 Likes

At least 1 keyholder never voted … why? did they forget? was there technical issues? did they not find any of the projects appealing?

The structure of the people managing keys for said entity changed at the last minute, and the process was re-reviewed by their legal team to ensure they could participate as expected. They were cleared to do so and should be voting to confirm the transfer on-chain, but unfortunately missed the first poll.

Also keep in mind this is voluntary extra work for everyone involved. We will however continue improving the process until ideally handing it off to the community properly, and do our best to communicate as much as possible where it makes sense.

I think 2 holders only voted for 1 project each. Where the holders fully aware they could vote for many? Lots of the other projects had very positive feedback on their Agora threads … where these not taken into account?

Yes, all signers were aware they can vote for multiple projects. Three signers voted for 2 projects each, one signer voted for 1. Everything was taken into account, but unfortunately as mentioned above, multiple entities involved cannot currently approve transfers involving possible sanctions. Two other proposals may possibly have passed if not for this issue. While not ideal, we suspect that the community would dislike an extensive KYC/AML/Sanction Screening process for every proposal even more.

Every round and issue will be taken into account to hopefully improve the process in further iterations.

The display of the votes was quite odd. I didn’t know what 1.583333333333333 TED towards 1 project means.

This is unique to the way that we’re using off-chain polls for this DAO. In most cases for other DAOs, the goal would be for only one option to ‘win’ the poll, and voters are able to split their voting power among multiple options if they support more than one. For the Ecosystem DAO, we’re using this in a different way, and the token split is irrelevant. Any project that receives 3 or more -voters- is approved, so the amount of tokens for each proposal can be ignored. This was mentioned in previous communications.

The tool itself should be able to show who voted for what

It does show this, if you click the number of votes at the bottom. We already have a feature request in to make it more obvious how to view this data. Although most of the addresses involved are not yet public, regarding which entity they belong to.

We also need to see some improvements to the homebase tool as well (not sure who owns that).

The Homebase team welcomes feedback in their Discord: Homebase

2 Likes

The lack of feedback of the voting parties to the proposals / voting is frustrating. We still don’t know why each project did or did not get a funding and no answers to what to improve on.

It’s the opposite of decentralized and everything Tezos stands for. Closed parties without communication to the community. All direct or indirect funded by the Tezos foundation.

Also parties having political agendas has nothing to do with a ecosystem DAO. The vote needs to be given to the community as soon as possible to avoid that.

One more thing: What wallet is what party and who is in charge of the voting for each wallet? Is there any open communication possible to them on Discord/Twitter or whatever they prefer.

2 Likes

I believe that is the goal, to ultimately give the power to the community. But we must take steps to get there, and this is the first step.

I do strongly feel that we should know which wallet belongs to which entity, and possibly even which person(s) have access to use that wallet. This is the absolute bare minimum level of transparency that we should have.

6 Likes

For TC, half of the team reviewed and discussed proposals together and what to vote for on our side, both before and after community input. Not voting for something doesn’t mean we dislike it, just need to weigh community needs vs. available limited treasury for the time being. We voted for 4 projects in round 1.

TC address (same as CRP address):

tz1So7udy2xhCWpsxa8GLbgjKAV5LERo7q4H

Whether the other entities want to publicize theirs or not is up to them, won’t doxx them. Have brought it up with them to discuss with their teams.

But yes, we would love to hand it off to the community asap, just needs to be done properly.
We were recommending for anyone in the community to start something similar using Homebase for a long time every time the topic came up, but nobody did, so regulated entities were forced to kick it off :slight_smile: . Will try to improve it step by step until it can be handed it off completely.

As for who gets a vote in a 100% community controlled DAO, would be happy to hear input on best ways to do that. Things we have considered and mentioned previously:

  • Giving bakers either voting power or the ability for X% of baker stake to override/add/remove/replace signers if the DAO does not align with community desire (using some calculations with the TOTAL_VOTING_POWER and VOTING_POWER values available within smart contract calls). If they get votes, should be in a way where a whale couldn’t control every proposal.

  • Adding more signers/entities from the community (easiest to do in short-term). While we understand the criticism of members being funded in some way by TF, difficult to avoid this when most reputable teams in the ecosystem have been funded by TF in one way or another. Would like to note that TF does not tell us how to vote, participating teams aren’t funded extra for this, and we wouldn’t have wanted to be involved if they influenced our votes (nor would they).

  • Working with the community to have neutral community parties launch a new DAO that is structured in a fair and decentralized way, and transfer the treasury to that. This would avoid the potential issue of current entities being attached to any token which would be attributed a monetary value because of the attached treasury, and therefore become a security token when distributed more widely. This is the method that would have been initially preferred from the beginning.

  • Assigning voting power based on Tez balances. This however also runs the risk of potentially being controlled by either a whale if it goes by balance, or by scripters if each funded account gets one vote, etc.

All ears!

4 Likes

I like the idea of adding more signers/entities form the community over time. New members should be added by current members based on reputation and activity within the DAO, proposals etc.

I don’t like giving bakers a special position or stake since they might not align with broader community. It’s much harder to create aligned incentives when you have multiple roles to deal with.

I don’t like giving voting power to XTZ holding or any other tradable token for that matter. People or teams that are given voting rights in the DAO should not be able to sell those rights to others.

Reputation and activity should be the determining factors to include / exclude new voters.

I think :blush:

2 Likes

This resumes why I have different voting templates on TzVote. The only designs that works are :

  • plutocracy : baker voting power
  • permisioned : either do KYC or not, an administrator will have to allow a group of voter

Other Tzvote templates will come but if you try to build a broken vote design, it will be untrustable

1 Like

Giving bakers either voting power or the ability for X% of baker stake to override/add/remove/replace signers if the DAO does not align with community desire

I don’t think giving bakers voting power will be very successful, it is hard enough to rally bakers to vote on core protocol proposals. Most aren’t going to vote on or care about a community DAO imho. I think bakers being the mechanism that can add/remove/replace DAO signers could work, but the question again is, will they participate.

Adding more signers/entities from the community

I like this idea a lot, and as mentioned it is easiest to do in the short term. I think it could work just fine in the mid to long term even. They key is that the community DAO must have willing and active participants. If a signer falls out of being active or no longer wants to be a signer, the remaining signers can replace them. Existing signers can add new signers. This makes sense to me. I would even say right now there are 1 or 2 signers that the existing quorum should replace post-haste as they do not participate. If it is a burden for someone to cast a vote, then they should be replaced.

Working with the community to have neutral community parties launch a new DAO that is structured in a fair and decentralized way, and transfer the treasury to that.

This is hardest to do, and I don’t think is realistic in any short term timeline (or probably even any medium term). It is also very pie in the sky and there are a lot of unanswered questions and unknowns, which is part of what makes it the most difficult and time consuming to pull off.

Assigning voting power based on Tez balances.

I don’t personally like this option at all. I think it will be far too easy to manipulate without some checks and balances. However, I think something like the community can vote on the proposal polls with their tez balances, but then the top X of those must go through the DAO signers could work. Essentially what exists now, except the first off chain poll is done by the community based on tez balances. The on chain proposal and execution remains with the DAO signers. This still requires figuring out who are the right entities to be DAO signers and how they can be added/removed/replaced.

1 Like

Your last point is what is currently being developed and will be released this quarter. For the first step towards decentralization, we will allow the community to vote on proposals using their Tez balances. However, the DAO signers will initially decide which proposals make it into the polls to be voted on, so we can filter out scams/etc beforehand. And DAO signers will also confirm the final on-chain transfers, but will do their best to honor the community vote. This will allow verified hodlers to more directly participate in the voting process, instead of only the discussion process.

This feature will also be made available to all DAOs on Homebase.

2 Likes

Very cool. Keep it up guys. Happy to be seeing DAO activity on Homebase.

1 Like