Reflecting on the DAO’s Direction | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
Despite the challenges of the bear market, our collective efforts to buidl and contribute to the decentralized web have remained steadfast. We have shown an unwavering desire to keep pushing forward, working tirelessly to create innovative offerings in this ever-evolving ecosystem.
This week's editorial reviews a Forum post by cryptodad, which discusses the pursuit of growth and sustainability within the DAO. The post highlights the need for a clear focus, with the community suggesting the development of a business model or the adoption of a public goods approach.
The highly anticipated BanklessDAO Writers Cohort #5 has arrived! Starting on July 19, this immersive program offers you the opportunity to unleash your writing skills. The idea is to publish a 1,000-word post every week for three weeks, plus you can benefit from four live workshops, and access 30 pages of valuable resources.
In this week’s Community Call roundtable, discussions were centered on the partnerships that could potentially generate tokens for the BanklessDAO multisig, particularly Gitcoin and Panvala. Members gave insights on implementation and perceived benefits. Participation in the roundtable discussion is highly encouraged for all.
Enjoy the weekly wrap up that is the Rollup, and have some fun this weekend!
Contributors: WinVerse, AB_colours, theconfusedcoin, anointingthompson1.eth, Paulito, jackalpha, d0wnlore, KingIBK, MiuMan, Warrior, trewkat, HiroKennelly
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✅ Action Items
🗳️ Vote on the Dynamic Forum Quorum for bDIPs on Snapshot.
🏫 Share the Web3 Wayfinder with friends and family.
✍️ Sign-up for bDAO’s Writers Cohort and elevate your writing skills.
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.
🏛 Governance
Snapshot Votes
Dynamic Forum Quorum for bDIPs
In order to better accommodate the DAO's changing membership and lessen the effects of voter apathy, this proposal considers implementing a formula-based dynamic quorum for bDIPs. If approved, the Governance Department will revise the quorum requirement each month using the formula outlined in this proposal. If you haven't already, visit Snapshot and cast your vote.
Reflecting on the DAO’s Direction
Author: WinVerse
Where do we go next? This is a question that has been brewing for BanklessDAO for quite a while. We have heard people talk about these things, give their opinions, bring forward suggestions, and raise calls to action. In many cases, these ideas get buried in channels and DMs without being applied.
However, we are faced with a significant challenge. To gain clarity on how we could move forward as an organization, it is imperative to understand where we are and cryptodad’s Forum post does justice to this. In this post, he walks us through our current financial situation, showing us how BANK has been disbursed thus far to organizational units, using figures from the bDAO Treasury Report 2022.
We can understand our current DAO strategy this way; BANK is distributed to groups, and these groups work towards their stated goals, hoping to achieve self-sustaining revenue when it comes to projects. The only requirement for projects to receive further funding is to report back to the Grants Committee on predefined KPIs once per month. Ideally, there’s a commitment that 10% of revenue generated is sent back to the DAO, but this is not always the case.
Reimagining our DAO to foster sustainability necessitates looking at a range of different initiatives. Comments made during the last Community Call and those on the Forum post point to one thing: the lack of real focus. Different groups are building amazing stuff — and although tied to the DAO’s mission, these groups drive their own initiatives. People come into the DAO, see the projects being developed, fall in love with one or two of them, and start contributing to their success. This is great but the question arises, ‘How can bDAO effectively capture the value our community generates?’
What exactly are we? A media DAO? What exactly is that?
This gives birth to a host of approaches that have been suggested by the community, which are centered around two main topics: developing a business model or taking the public goods approach.
Business Model
The image below shows Ocean Protocol’s web3 sustainability loop. In such a system:
“1. Projects are proposed, and curated, by the community.
2. Projects are funded by Network revenue, and Network reward.
3. As projects do work and add value, network revenue goes up and $TOKEN goes up, and ever-more funding goes to the community.
The last step causes a positive feedback loop (snowball effect) such that over time, more and more projects get funded. It implies more constraints:
Each project must add sufficient value to the ecosystem (on average).
Value added to the ecosystem needs to get reflected in the token price.”
The full article by Trent McConaghy of Ocean Protocol is worth a read for a deeper explanation of the thinking behind the model.
It has been proposed that the DAO is in need of a business model with a clear focus. That way, we can streamline all efforts toward meeting said goal. There have been a few suggestions as regards the pivot we could take: the merch approach, monetizing our data, and more in the Forum post. However, the question still remains as to whether taking any of these pivots as our business model will provide financial sustainability.
Public Goods
At the moment, we have various groups within the DAO applying for external grants as they provide useful content to the ecosystem and thus the public good. Concerning this approach, the suggestion has been made to represent the DAO itself as a public good. This way, we capture every facet of the DAO, giving us a more cohesive look when we apply for grants. There has also been the BanklessDAO University conversation where we reach out to universities, provide value, and then seek out public goods funding. However, the major concern raised with regard to this approach is the problem of depending on grants as the source of revenue.
There have been other suggestions and problems raised: resurrecting projects that align with the DAO’s mission rather than focusing all efforts on revenue, running an ETH node, leveraging the audience of our media nodes, our market being generally internal, and more at the discussion in last week’s Community Call. All these are really strong ideas but the question still remains about whether these are sustainable.
The truth is, we will never know until we give it a shot. There are a number of ways this won’t work, but there is a way it will. So please, let’s participate in the Forum and turn these ideas into solutions.
👀 In Case You Missed It
🌐 BanklessDAO x ETHGlobal Waterloo
The June 23-25 weekend saw the return of ETHGlobal Waterloo, the third ETHGlobal event in Waterloo and a return to where it all started in 2017.
The event attracted over 650 attendees, 47% of whom were newcomers to web3! Both the new and veteran builders received ample support throughout the three days, with 19 workshops and five talks at their disposal for inspiration and problem-solving. The hackathon had numerous partners providing bounty prizes for teams that utilised their technologies — prizes ranged from $1,000 to $25,000, with the total prize pool amounting to $250,000 USD.
Vitalik Buterin (pictured above right) officially kicked off the hackathon with a discussion on ‘Ideas Worth Building’. Vitalik underscored that many of the deep technological problems were either resolved or being sufficiently addressed. Thus, he urged hackers to focus on developing practical applications for users by leveraging existing platforms and technologies. He emphasised the importance of this current phase's focus on adoption to encourage more widespread use of web3 technologies in our daily lives.
With a number of ERC-6551 authors present and offering a partner prize, ETHGlobal Waterloo witnessed numerous applications of ERC-6551, also known as Non-fungible Token Bound Accounts. Finalists employed ERC-6551 to create NFTs as piggy banks to encourage savings, to create games where users can engage in asynchronous battles with collateral-backed NFTs, and more.
BanklessDAO also had a member, d0wnlore from the InfoSec Team, participating with a team working on a web3 alternative to Splitwise. This project enabled cross-chain payments for reimbursing group expenses, also addressing one of the ideas Vitalik spoke about on the opening night.
Newcomers to Canada were also treated to a uniquely Canadian hackathon experience, from midnight poutine and BeaverTails snacks, to the event taking place in the picturesque Lazaridis School of Business at Wilfred Laurier University. Overall, this was another successful ETHGlobal event that brought together new and existing builders to collaborate on improving the Ethereum ecosystem, with the help of the event’s partners.
👥 Gitcoin Citizens Round
The Gitcoin Citizens Round has come to an end and a big thank you to everyone who donated to BanklessDAO. During this round, we were able to raise a total of $5,900 in ETH and $2,600 in DAI, which gives a total of more than $8,500! Your contributions will help us foster our mission of helping people go bankless.
🍔 Grab It While It’s Hot
💮 Coordinape CoSoul
CoSoul is a free-to-mint NFT that brings GIVE on chain for Coordinape’s 15,000+ contributors. According to this Twitter thread, CoSoul is an NFT on OP Mainnet which is designed to become part of your digital CV. Each month, CoSouls will autosynch with Coordinape data to update your Public GIVE (in beta), so as you gather GIVE and notes, your on chain stats will grow. Get yours via http://app.coordinape.com/cosoul.
⛴️ BanklessDAO Content
🧠 Crypto Sapiens
🏹 Quorum
✍️ Bankless Publishing
🗞 The Rug Newsletter
👩🏼💼 Bankless Consulting Newsletter
🗓 Set A Reminder
✍🏻 BanklessDAO Writers Cohort 5
The fifth BanklessDAO Writers Cohort will kickstart on July 19. Every week, for three weeks, participants will publish a 1000-word essay. The purpose of this cohort is to help members hone their skills and develop the confidence to publish online. Click here to sign up!
📣 Campaign to Spread the Optimistic Vision
BanklessDAO has submitted a proposal on the Optimism Foundation forum on our Global Campaign to spread the Optimistic Vision. If you hold OP tokens, check out the proposals and vote (and please support the one for BanklessDAO!).
🤩 New Joiner Session S8 x 03
Join the New Joiners Session to learn more about BanklessDAO and how to get involved. You will meet mentors who could guide you on your journey into DAO life as well as other new joiners who may become fellow travelers on your journey. This session will be held on Zoom. Please be prepared to share a little about yourself.
RSVP to have Zoom meeting details emailed to you nearer to the event, which will be held on Monday, July 3 at 13:45 UTC.
🤖 How To Collab.Land
Collab.Land is a user-friendly, tokenized, community-management system designed for anyone to build tools to manage their community. Join the Education Department on Tuesday, July 4 at 14:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel to learn how tipping and gating work in Discord.
🛄 How To Bounty Board: Dry Run
Are you interested in learning how to create and claim bounties on the bounty board? Or have you been having a hard time figuring out how it works? Join Oluwasijibomi on Wednesday, July 5 at 14:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel as he takes you through the workings of the Bounty Board.
📔 MetaCRM Demo
MetaCRM provides a one-stop CRM solution for web3 projects that supports all stages of the customer journey and is trusted by 40+ projects, including Curve Finance and Radiant Capital. To learn more about this product, join this demo in the Amphitheater on Wednesday, July 5 at 19:15 UTC.
🛡️ Wallet/Security Knowledge Session
Understanding wallet mechanics and safety are fundamental in the web3 ecosystem to ensure the safety of your funds. If you want to learn more about web3 wallets, join the Education Department on Thursday, July 6 at 14:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel.
🤣 Meme of the Week
