For context, Patron member is at €120K+ per year, and this puts them as the 7th one. Other patron members are GPU manufacturers (Nvidia/AMD), game engines (Epic/Unity), Facebook (pre-Meta, but presumably for VR reasons), and AWS (no idea, publicity move to promote AWS use by game studios?). Decentraland fits in there alongside Meta.
Right, that makes sense. It's now evolved into O3DE, but last year when they joined the BDF Lumberyard's license required games to use AWS for servers.
I take regular tours around it to see what's going on. And the general answer is not a lot.
Largest percentage of developed plots are NFT showrooms, some for sale, some just showing off (which is totally valid in my mind). Some trying to sell wearables for your in-world avatar.
There's some casino operations, the largest being a poker room which seems to where the most people congregate.
There's a crafting game where you have to collect materials that are doled out slowly enough that it takes days to make anything.
A couple of very mildly interactive "rides" for lack of a better term.
A number of largely abandoned...I don't know...architectural phantasies? Places where someone built weird/interesting things because they could.
There's a lot of hype around trading the virtual land, but the prices are all out of whack with the utility. Far, far too little land at far, far too high prices. People are dreaming of being virtual landlords, but it's hard for me to see that playing out well for them.
The software development is glacial compared to the rest of the crypto world.
My opinion is that the project as a whole on a dead end path, but I check in once or twice a week to see if anyone is doing anything interesting with their little piece of it.
Always glad to see funds go to a great and well managed Open source project like Blender!
That said, looking up what the hell is 'Decentraland' and how it works is to dive into a dystopian nightmare. Cutesy illustrations tell you: 'Decentraland: it's like a second rate RPG, except instead of in game currency you have to use your actual cash to participate in a tech-bro pyramid scheme where each coin has the climate impact equivalent to burning down a substantial area of rainforest'.
Blender foundation should insist on getting cash up front ;)
I just find it funny that people are using this to escape all the problems of the real world by implementing all the problems the real world has in a virtual world.
I do have to give people credit for coming up with one of the most elaborate pump and dump schemes of all time.
I looked into Decentraland about a month ago (because someone I know was going on about it) and to me it looked like what I remember Cybertown [1] was circa 2000, except with NFT's. I wasn't very impressed, even visually, it looked quite dated.
You will only see a dystopian nightmare when that's what you are looking to see.
* A DAO is a lot of people who are looking to create common good via small donations and common participation. This was the goal and ideology of Ethereum from the moment it was conceived. And here the DAO is helping out a beautiful open source project that has benefited many people, so Ethereum is delivering on its ideological promise quiet literally and objectively. Very dystopian, right.
* What Decentraland is is beyond the point. If you don't like Second Life and all that (I have zero interest personally) it has nothing to do with your argument. People enjoy it and here they are supporting to keep it free (as in freedom).
* I do not see how "use your actual cash" is a negative argument here. Having all platforms be absolutely free made the user the product and lead to an actual dystopian nightmare which is the current control of all user data by like two corporations. New methods of governance, monetization and user-owned data are what's needed to prevent a dystopian nightmare. Decentraland is making progress on all of those. All of those, btw, are part of the ideological vision of Ethereum that I mentioned above, so once again - it is doing the intended job.
* Climate impact is an old argument, we can argue about it for hours and not get anywhere. But Ethereum is switching off PoW within the next few months and many projects have already moved to L2 which does not rely on PoW consensus for every transactions.
Again, you see only the things you are looking for. People coordinating major funding for a large open source project while having democratic say over the platform they are using to you seems like an accidental byproduct but it was the primary goal all these years.
Picture a corporation, but instead of a board and CEO the shareholders vote on what to do directly. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I could come up with a better analogy.
They seem to be functionally identical to a Board of Directors or how a co-operative might run.
Though as I understand, with potentially a very large number voters in ever-changing cloaked identities (as voting right tokens could be continuously bought & sold).
Today, in the real world - DAO’s are an LLC coordinating on Discord, or Zoom, or other common communication tools.
That DAO coordination happens fully in cyberspace is promoted as a unique differentiator to how businesses run today.
In my experience, the key unique characteristic of DAOs are that you may not know who you’re doing business with.
Also instead of a legal entity with the ability to petition the government for redress of grievances, it's just a bunch of data emitted by some smart contract code.
This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf.
I mean, just to take this particular mostly-harmless situation as an example: that membership in the Blender Development Fund presumably includes some amount of official input into how the money gets spent. What if the DAO has specific desires or expectations, and Blender simply chooses to ignore them?
What you can expect as a corporate (or any) sponsor, or corporate membership, as it's called, is defined here: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/
The two (short) PDF's go a bit into detail, but in a nutshell they can fund core projects, access meetings, and "more closely monitor" progress they are interested in.
> This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf.
This already happened, and they hard forked the Ethereum blockchain to revert the hack.
To be clear, that attack (also the The DAO event that caused the ethereum fork) was a hack. It was a bug in the contract that got exploited. And that's a risk too.
But even if a DAO does everything right, technically, they're still subject to the problem of having to trust entities in the real world (e.g. "whoever on the Blender foundation gave them the address to pay") to behave the way they promise (e.g. "actually hand them an address under the control of the Blender Foundation"). It's trivially easy in this world to just cheat.
And in the real world, with real people on both sides of the transaction, that's addressed in the courts. And it works, and fraud as a proportion of our economy is quite small. But that protection doesn't extend to anonymous smart contracts.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you completely. There's nothing to be done in this case since the hackers are anonymous, but alas, noone seems to care.
This is a misunderstanding. Many DAOs have off-chain legal entities attached.
In American law, corporations are people. American Courts will give a very high leeway to respecting whatever corporate bylaws dictate. Including being governed by code.
It’s very easy to register a Delaware LLC which states that it’s board decisions are whatever output a smart contract spits out.
> It’s very easy to register a Delaware LLC which states that it’s board decisions are whatever output a smart contract spits out
Yes, but you still need people. The point was more than anonymous funders have no standing to sue. You're right you could have a conventional corporation fund itself with a DAO, but you're still trusting that corporation with your anonymous cash and if they take it and run you're SOL.
At the end of the day unless you're willing to put a signature containing your legal name as a human being down on a contract written on paper[1] the law isn't going to protect you. And if you are willing to do that, a "DAO" doesn't bring much to the table that, say, a plain old trust or LLC doesn't.
[1] Not actual signatures, not actual paper, but a real human being.
I have spent some time learning about DAOs and this is what I understood. Please correct me if there is a mistake.
Coined as Decentralized autonomous organization, they are decentralized applications whose main function is to handle fund disbursement. They work more or less as any other treasury but in a more transparent and automated way.
What further separates them from the traditional treasury is that they are essentially a piece of code that runs on blockchain networks, like Ethereum, Cardano, Solana etc. It makes DAOs a lot different from traditional organisations and businesses from an economic and regulation sense.
This can be called a decentralized application or a smart contract. It defines an Interface which can be used to instantiate a DAO contract. The first few constants define the regulatory parameters. The most interesting part is the proposal array. It holds all the proposals submitted by the proposal creator that specifies an amount which is to be paid to the proposal recipient if it gets approved. Approval is done by DAO stakeholder by casting votes.
From a freelancer’s perspective this can be a bidding platform where gig workers can place their proposals and get paid once the work is done. A very transparent and seamless experience as compared to existing freelance marketplaces.
In the case of the JuiceboxDAO, I contributed funds (ETH) to the DAO treasury (bank account), and in return I got $JBX (a token that lives on Ethereum). I have about 40,000 JBX tokens. With these token, I can:
- use it to vote on proposals.
- "burn it" in exchange for some ETH back (but probably not get my original investment
- sell it somewhere else (an automated market maker like Uniswap)
I think I'm very close to beginning to understand this whole thing haha thanks for the post
Oddly enough I've already been wanting to set something like this up -- my equivalent is running a regular business but with a pretty intense profit share scheme
Honestly it sounds perfect except these gas fees. Can someone clarify am I right in thinking it's prohibitively expensive to create any of these tokens/shares/votes/whatever because of fees? Assuming you're broke as hell and missed the original crypto train
If you set it up on Ethereum, then yes, it probably will be too expensive in your case. However, there are several other chains where you could set up a DAO with close to zero gas fees. For example Polygon or Fantom, among others. The major hurdle atm is "bridging" assets onto these newer chains. Most exchanges currently only support the big players, but as these grow and mature, adoption and UX/DX should improve as well.
Can someone w/ more crypto experience explain how a DAO actualizes its decisions?
For example: Here, there was a vote. Now what?
Will Blender setup a wallet that can accept ETH?
Will the DAO then vote on a transaction that sends money from the DAO to Blender's ETH wallet??
I'm not sure about Decentraland specifically, but typically there will be a subset of the DAO members who actually control the DAO treasury in a "multisig wallet". Say they have 10 signatories, they might have a requirement that 8 of the 10 signatories approve a transaction to either send ETH to Blender, or do the necessary swaps to give Blender USD. The signatories have committed to execute the will of the DAO.
That's pretty funny, that's basically identical to how standard corporations work, except instead of "signatories" you have "corporate officers" and instead of "off chain voting" you have (very thoroughly-regulated!) "shareholder proxy statements".
Well that's the point actually. It is a lot like shareholder/board of directors voting. Except that the DAO requires virtually no bureaucracy to get up and running. So if, say, you and your local community wanted to start an organization to fund some common-goods project you can do it in a few minutes, provided you have people who are onboard with the vision and have a little money to put in. After that all voting and movement of funds is transparent. The code replaces corporate structure. There are unsolved problems like vote-buying and all that, but then other mechanisms would kick like "rage-quitting" (a term used officially by some DAO systems) by which DAOs can dissolve and funds be withdrawn by contributors. Plenty of research projects on the table, but benefits are already being reaped, as in this Blender case.
The most common way it works is that a snapshot of all holders of the governance token is taken at a certain point in time and a proposal is made, which all holders in the snapshot are able to vote on by signing their response.
Blender already accepts donations on Ethereum mainnet at 0x9De8991C56F622175274fb358f981AF6F903a799. The proposal which passed was to send a "one-time" donation to Blender, but it's not clear if they're going to be sending MANA (which is the currency in use on Decentraland) or if they're going to send a USD equivalent stablecoin. Unless the Blender devs are willing to be paid in MANA, it will need to be converted to fiat at some point.
I assume this is Decentraland looking to attach itself to popular open source projects for publicity. It's actually good if it works for them, but i dont get their product. Very few people use it, their worlds look childish and nobody is in them. Yet somehow they sell their parcels for millions.
In contrast, opensimulator.org is open source, self-hosted, decentralized, much more beautiful, has an active and happy user base of thousands, and it gets $0 in funding from anyone. The main developer doesnt even get any donations. how does that make sense
Lots of people asking about DAOs. So here are a couple of resources you can look up.
To look at a large list of different DAOs with info about what tech stack they run, how big the treasuries are, etc., look here: https://deepdao.io/#/deepdao/dashboard
My understanding is that most jurisdictions seem to equate the ICO / tokens as securities and as such should be regulated in a similar manner to an IPO.
Do you have any good links on that or what is your experience?
I have not yet seen a governance token, such as ones issued by DAOs, get under fire. From what I inferred over the past few years only very specific tokens are considered unregistered securities so I stopped worrying.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadhttps://o3de.org/
Thinkbox/deadline is pretty mature and as I understand it is actually already being used by a handful of big shops.
Good video overview here
https://youtu.be/z5-QaCq9mh8
Largest percentage of developed plots are NFT showrooms, some for sale, some just showing off (which is totally valid in my mind). Some trying to sell wearables for your in-world avatar.
There's some casino operations, the largest being a poker room which seems to where the most people congregate.
There's a crafting game where you have to collect materials that are doled out slowly enough that it takes days to make anything.
A couple of very mildly interactive "rides" for lack of a better term.
A number of largely abandoned...I don't know...architectural phantasies? Places where someone built weird/interesting things because they could.
There's a lot of hype around trading the virtual land, but the prices are all out of whack with the utility. Far, far too little land at far, far too high prices. People are dreaming of being virtual landlords, but it's hard for me to see that playing out well for them.
The software development is glacial compared to the rest of the crypto world.
My opinion is that the project as a whole on a dead end path, but I check in once or twice a week to see if anyone is doing anything interesting with their little piece of it.
That said, looking up what the hell is 'Decentraland' and how it works is to dive into a dystopian nightmare. Cutesy illustrations tell you: 'Decentraland: it's like a second rate RPG, except instead of in game currency you have to use your actual cash to participate in a tech-bro pyramid scheme where each coin has the climate impact equivalent to burning down a substantial area of rainforest'.
Blender foundation should insist on getting cash up front ;)
I do have to give people credit for coming up with one of the most elaborate pump and dump schemes of all time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown
* A DAO is a lot of people who are looking to create common good via small donations and common participation. This was the goal and ideology of Ethereum from the moment it was conceived. And here the DAO is helping out a beautiful open source project that has benefited many people, so Ethereum is delivering on its ideological promise quiet literally and objectively. Very dystopian, right.
* What Decentraland is is beyond the point. If you don't like Second Life and all that (I have zero interest personally) it has nothing to do with your argument. People enjoy it and here they are supporting to keep it free (as in freedom).
* I do not see how "use your actual cash" is a negative argument here. Having all platforms be absolutely free made the user the product and lead to an actual dystopian nightmare which is the current control of all user data by like two corporations. New methods of governance, monetization and user-owned data are what's needed to prevent a dystopian nightmare. Decentraland is making progress on all of those. All of those, btw, are part of the ideological vision of Ethereum that I mentioned above, so once again - it is doing the intended job.
* Climate impact is an old argument, we can argue about it for hours and not get anywhere. But Ethereum is switching off PoW within the next few months and many projects have already moved to L2 which does not rely on PoW consensus for every transactions.
Again, you see only the things you are looking for. People coordinating major funding for a large open source project while having democratic say over the platform they are using to you seems like an accidental byproduct but it was the primary goal all these years.
Picture a corporation, but instead of a board and CEO the shareholders vote on what to do directly. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I could come up with a better analogy.
They seem to be functionally identical to a Board of Directors or how a co-operative might run.
Though as I understand, with potentially a very large number voters in ever-changing cloaked identities (as voting right tokens could be continuously bought & sold).
Today, in the real world - DAO’s are an LLC coordinating on Discord, or Zoom, or other common communication tools.
That DAO coordination happens fully in cyberspace is promoted as a unique differentiator to how businesses run today.
In my experience, the key unique characteristic of DAOs are that you may not know who you’re doing business with.
This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf.
I mean, just to take this particular mostly-harmless situation as an example: that membership in the Blender Development Fund presumably includes some amount of official input into how the money gets spent. What if the DAO has specific desires or expectations, and Blender simply chooses to ignore them?
This already happened, and they hard forked the Ethereum blockchain to revert the hack.
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2016/07/20/ethereum-executes-b...
Badger DAO got scammed for 120 million USD last week and I doubt they were the first.
But even if a DAO does everything right, technically, they're still subject to the problem of having to trust entities in the real world (e.g. "whoever on the Blender foundation gave them the address to pay") to behave the way they promise (e.g. "actually hand them an address under the control of the Blender Foundation"). It's trivially easy in this world to just cheat.
And in the real world, with real people on both sides of the transaction, that's addressed in the courts. And it works, and fraud as a proportion of our economy is quite small. But that protection doesn't extend to anonymous smart contracts.
In American law, corporations are people. American Courts will give a very high leeway to respecting whatever corporate bylaws dictate. Including being governed by code.
It’s very easy to register a Delaware LLC which states that it’s board decisions are whatever output a smart contract spits out.
Yes, but you still need people. The point was more than anonymous funders have no standing to sue. You're right you could have a conventional corporation fund itself with a DAO, but you're still trusting that corporation with your anonymous cash and if they take it and run you're SOL.
At the end of the day unless you're willing to put a signature containing your legal name as a human being down on a contract written on paper[1] the law isn't going to protect you. And if you are willing to do that, a "DAO" doesn't bring much to the table that, say, a plain old trust or LLC doesn't.
[1] Not actual signatures, not actual paper, but a real human being.
DAOs can also be built to support fund disbursal through a m-of-n multisig - ie, a certain number of members have to vote on a transaction.
It's also possible to do things like create NFTs and setup recurring revenue from them to go back to the DAO which distributes them to their members.
Side note - in WY, DAOs have some degree of legal standing now (IANAL): https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/SF0038
Coined as Decentralized autonomous organization, they are decentralized applications whose main function is to handle fund disbursement. They work more or less as any other treasury but in a more transparent and automated way.
What further separates them from the traditional treasury is that they are essentially a piece of code that runs on blockchain networks, like Ethereum, Cardano, Solana etc. It makes DAOs a lot different from traditional organisations and businesses from an economic and regulation sense.
Let’s take an example DAO and how it operates. There is no defined template of a DAO yet so I’ll use this open source code written in solidity as an example https://github.com/blockchainsllc/DAO/blob/develop/DAO.sol
This can be called a decentralized application or a smart contract. It defines an Interface which can be used to instantiate a DAO contract. The first few constants define the regulatory parameters. The most interesting part is the proposal array. It holds all the proposals submitted by the proposal creator that specifies an amount which is to be paid to the proposal recipient if it gets approved. Approval is done by DAO stakeholder by casting votes.
From a freelancer’s perspective this can be a bidding platform where gig workers can place their proposals and get paid once the work is done. A very transparent and seamless experience as compared to existing freelance marketplaces.
A DAO isn't necessarily an "application"; it's more of a concept, an idea.
There are a bunch of tools/applications that facilitate the operation of a DAO. I wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.juicebox.money/dao-tooling-101/
In the case of the JuiceboxDAO, I contributed funds (ETH) to the DAO treasury (bank account), and in return I got $JBX (a token that lives on Ethereum). I have about 40,000 JBX tokens. With these token, I can: - use it to vote on proposals. - "burn it" in exchange for some ETH back (but probably not get my original investment - sell it somewhere else (an automated market maker like Uniswap)
Oddly enough I've already been wanting to set something like this up -- my equivalent is running a regular business but with a pretty intense profit share scheme
Honestly it sounds perfect except these gas fees. Can someone clarify am I right in thinking it's prohibitively expensive to create any of these tokens/shares/votes/whatever because of fees? Assuming you're broke as hell and missed the original crypto train
Maybe I'll pop back when it's web3.1
Thanks for stating it this way, makes a lot more sense now. Your example and blog post cleared a lot of doubts !
For example: Here, there was a vote. Now what? Will Blender setup a wallet that can accept ETH? Will the DAO then vote on a transaction that sends money from the DAO to Blender's ETH wallet??
Voting happens "off chain" using a tool called Snapshot (https://snapshot.org/#/snapshot.dcl.eth). If people hold some Decentraland tokens/assets, they can vote, and their vote is weighted in proportion to their holdings. This isn't without its problems: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html
If you want to learn more, I wrote a blog post on DAO tooling 101: https://blog.juicebox.money/dao-tooling-101/
Blender already accepts donations on Ethereum mainnet at 0x9De8991C56F622175274fb358f981AF6F903a799. The proposal which passed was to send a "one-time" donation to Blender, but it's not clear if they're going to be sending MANA (which is the currency in use on Decentraland) or if they're going to send a USD equivalent stablecoin. Unless the Blender devs are willing to be paid in MANA, it will need to be converted to fiat at some point.
> "Join our Discord"
In all seriousness, congrats to Blender for getting some more money.
In contrast, opensimulator.org is open source, self-hosted, decentralized, much more beautiful, has an active and happy user base of thousands, and it gets $0 in funding from anyone. The main developer doesnt even get any donations. how does that make sense
To look at a large list of different DAOs with info about what tech stack they run, how big the treasuries are, etc., look here: https://deepdao.io/#/deepdao/dashboard
Here is a good article written in layman's terms (it's CNBC after all) about the concept and current landscape of DAOs: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/what-are-daos-what-to-know-a...
If you want to get a peek into organizational minutiae that DAOs deal with the CabinDAO does a great of documenting it. For example: https://creators.mirror.xyz/Le68ptgaqsBh1g6w8UqqVL2kIrA_Lqn3...
And here is a mega-collection of resources on the ever-evolving landscape by a16z: https://future.a16z.com/dao-canon/
I am a happy member of two DAOs in case some people think it is a conflict of interest.
My understanding is that most jurisdictions seem to equate the ICO / tokens as securities and as such should be regulated in a similar manner to an IPO.
Do you have any good links on that or what is your experience?