Not sure how close SourceCred is to creating a token and DAO, but it’s certainly an exciting possibility. Have spent a couple hours here tinkering and wanted to share some initial impressions and think out loud. Plan on diving deeper next week. Take with large grains of salt, as I’m just getting into the guts of this stuff.
Aragon smart contracts and tooling seem to be maturing… Played around with a couple DAOs, and the UI was surprisingly painless (at least compared to other blockchain UI). Smart contracts have passed extensive security auditing iirc, and MetaMask is better since the last time I used it. Project did just do a bunch of major launches last month (@burrrata must have been busy!). There could still be some kinks to work out, but feels like it’s finally becoming stable enough to start building on…I still have some reservations about putting too much money on a pure PoS chain, but that’s another bikeshed to paint:)
So the r/EthTrader subreddit’s Aragon DAO is quite interesting. It basically has all the basic features we’re talking about here for a SC DAO.
- Has a non-transferrable reputation token (CONTRIB) based on contributions to the r/EthTrader subreddit.
- Mints a transferrable ERC-20 token (DONUTS) based on reputation.
- Just did an airdrop based on past contributions, where people were given a window of time to claim their DONUTS.
- Has polls/voting
- Owners of DONUTS can affect change in an off-chain, centralized system (Reddit, which offered some engineering support to the project), namely buying the banner ad space on the subreddit. Users can also tip each other, and will be able to purchase ‘special membership’ soon, presumably giving them more features or permissions.
- Token is trading on Uniswap DEX, which trivially easy to set up for ERC-20. The token just needs liquidity providers (of which there appear to be none yet for DONUTS?).
Have gone through the flow of claiming my DONUTS (all 95 of them (out of 46M), presumably from a comment I made two years ago and forgot about ¯_(ツ)_/¯)–took less than a minute, and onboarding was surprisingly easy. Poked around the DAO and tipped 1 DONUT to its creator, which was also easy and seamless, cost me $0.03 in gas to do the transaction on the Ethereum mainnet.
This will be a good project to watch, as it is tackling some of the same challenges SourceCred will face if it does something similar.
I am wondering how they integrate CONTRIB/DONUTS with Reddit, as we’ll presumably need to do something similar with boosting.
In general, I think that running the SourceCred algorithm off-chain, and distributing tokens manually in the UI is not a major issue. While a fully autonomous smart contract would be very powerful (and inevitable on a longer timespan), at this stage, I think it’s fine to trust our TBD (Temporary Benevolent Dictator) @decentralion, as we are already with the prototype. There exist several paths to further decentralization from here. The most obvious and easy to implement IMO would be the community voting on any distributions proposed by Dandelion. That way if Dandelion isn’t calculating Cred or minting Grain they way they said they would, or the community wants to re-negotiate, it can veto the transaction. I believe the standard Aragon DAO voting and finance apps already have this capability. Another, perhaps longer-term path would be using oracles. E.g. the smart contract calls a Chainlink (or other) oracle service run by an independent third party that updates the scores.
Risk here could also be mitigated by forking. As SourceCred is still currently centralized in its dev resources and funding (@protocol is the only buyer of Grain currently afaik), if we wanted to we could just blow away the DAO and re-mint the Cred/Grain off-chain, start over. Though if the token is out in the wild and trading, there’s a possibility it continues as a zombie coin, or gets picked up by another party. Seems like a remote possibility for now, but SourceCred does have some buzz right now. We don’t want to attract scammers that try to co-opt that into some pump and dump scheme or something. If there was another legitimate party that wanted to run with it (it is an open source project), then I think you’d just want to be sure “SourceCred Cash” (SCC) is clearly dileniated in the market. Getting a bit ahead of myself now, but if Grain becomes widespread, issues around network effects, exchange support, IP (e.g. ticker), will arise. And I do believe we should design SourceCred to be forkable without undue technical barriers. This ability to exit will hopefully give the community a voice should the token be captured by interests not aligned with the community’s values.
OK, stepping back slowly from the rabbit hole…