Meta #42 - MetaSys; Kicking off the Year of DAOs
Why is 2021 finally the year of DAOs & how to build one yourself.
For me, this whole blockchain movement can be looked at & split into 3 major eras. “The Decentralized Currency”, followed by “Decentralized Finance”, finally leading into the “Age of Decentralized Societies”.
Ending the governmental monopoly over creation of money & enforcement of rules, we could say blockchain forms the bedrock of a post-nation-state world; it’s not hard to see some of these decentralized societies flippening nation state economies over the coming decade.
With all these DeFi primitives & basic DAO frameworks in place, we’re about to enter the third era.
😬 Not quite there yet
We weren’t really happy with how DAOs currently work.
They are pretty much command & control based, with commands simply being given by token holders rather than CEOs.
They are decentralized, but decentralized in what way exactly? If the weight of your vote is based only on how much money you have, then what the fuck are we doing?
Now, I’m not saying there should be no politically centralized & strictly voting-based DAOs. That might make perfect sense for grant giving or investing DAO, but it's just not optimal for actually building things.
Having to vote on everything is cumbersome & having a mass dictating what to do kills all the front-line morale - where’s the autonomy in that? Not to mention design by committee - you don’t want that.
So we flipped it:
Give anyone able & willing the autonomy to create value however they see fit.
Let them claim rewards based on time contributed & impact of work.
Yeah, no voting. Its all “yes” by default.
If disputes arise, they are solved through discussion.
If unresolved, vote as last resort - 1 person 1 vote.
After a while, we found a system to make the process smoother; create value & automatically get rewarded, no claiming needed.
😱 Enter Sourcecred
For those who still haven’t heard of it, Sourcecred is this magical tool for tracking value creation inside open source projects. It hooks onto github, discord & discourse, then spits out scores based on interactions.
Alright alright, it's not magical! The results weren’t always perfect, and, as a matter of fact, still aren’t; there’s always some human judgement & fine tuning needed - but the thing is a gamechanger, let me tell you.
We were the first to fully utilize it besides the Sourcecred team itself.
We were the first to implement the Discord plugin.
The first to mint tokens based on scores earned.
& the first to add these tokens inside an AMM pool, making them liquid
There is little if any governance; the system is about getting out of people’s way and making the value-creation2value-capture as seamless as possible.
We do still vote from time to time, but mainly when it's a matter of taste: like deciding on which version of the logo we’ll adopt - and of course, its still democratic.
🐙 MetaSys Core
Combining these building blocks you get a minimum viable stack for building decentralized organizations. Also, the most capital efficient way of building crypto projects so far.
Sourcecred - for tracking value creation.
Aragon - for minting reward tokens.
Balancer - for mediating between active & passive supporters.
Do note that Sourcecred is the only critical piece, the token minting & distribution system can be swapped out for other DAO frameworks & the market making mechanism for other AMMs.
We predict an exponentially growing number of dApp & DAO builders to be using a variation of this system in 2021, partially because we'll be promoting the fuck out of it and helping people get it up & running 🙃
Anyhow!
🧩 How it all fits together:
You have people converging around an idea, exchanging thoughts & creating value through platforms such as Discord, Discourse & Github.
You have Sourcecred, tracking value creation through these three platforms & rewarding value creators with XP.
Once every X, you mint a fixed number of tokens & allocate it to the people earning XP, based on their share of XP earned.
You add these tokens inside a liquidity pool along with ETH or DAI, allowing people to buy or sell the token without affecting the price so much.
Build more awesome shit & repeat the cycle.
It sounds so simple now, but it took time to pioneer this way. We’ve spent most of the first year putting it all together, making sure that it works and that the people are happy. Then we spent a few months getting the system validated by investors by reaching the $1m marketcap in record speed after adding enough liquidity & validated by players, by them not dumping it.
Hovering around $50 for almost 2 months after a 10x pump - not bad at all.
What I think investors like: Tokens made through this system are rewards for completed work, not a promise of future work.
We’ve blazed the trail and others will follow.
Click here if you want me to write a “X reasons Sourcecred is awesome” article 🙃
⚖️ Costs & Benefits
Costs: It takes real time & effort to get the whole system up & running. Not something you’ll want to do for your hackathon project - at least not until after you decide to turn your hackathon project into a DAO.
Benefits: You don’t need co-founders from day1. Once you find them, you don’t need to trust them & you barely need to know them. Also no need to worry about the equity split up-front as it gets dynamically allocated based on effort. No need think up & evaluate all the tasks, no need to negotiate salaries or even go through the hiring processes.
🤔 What are we doing with it?
Running the system successfully for months now, what for?
Well, you know the overarching idea is to build a decentralized society, an anarcho syndicalist network of people & projects. 14 Reasons People Are Playing MetaGame.
But pretty much everything we’ve done as a community so far has been accounted for & incentivized by this system.
To begin with:
We put together the rest of MetaSys & built up an awesome community.
We organized a conference, a hackathon & a shitton of other smaller events.
We started this wiki - meant to be all about building decentralized organizations.
We built MyMeta - profiles to be used by anyone who wants a members directory for their DAO or simply just a decentralized profile page.
We started building the MetaOS - more soon.
⛓️ S1W2 Chainlog 📜
2 weeks down, 10 to go!
Kind of a quiet week with all the builders rushing to close up their years 🤷♂️
Trolleo finally swoops in to claim his long time earned rewards for making the Player, Guild & Patron illustrations as well as the logos & a bunch of other things.
Hammad creates the MetaDrive - MetaGame’s dropbox - and migrates our sourcecred leaderboard to its own domain - xp.metagame.wtf.
A few more people Octo the fuck up (add 🐙 to their nicknames on social)
defileZebra scribes for the Monday’ Champions Ring as well as for the Friday’ Community Gathering.
JackG, defileZebra, mprime, s_ben & a few others add more liquidity to the pool by planting their Seeds - officially over $300k now.
AtHeartEngineer makes a simple request & gets the MetaMedia Youtube channel to reach 100 subscribers & qualify for a custom URL - yay!
Shep & AtHeartEngineer made WIPs of competing MetaGame trailers - now we need to figure out whether to combine them into one or pick one & finish it.
WonFiddy takes the podcast intro track he made last week & starts recording the MetaGame rap song, unfortunately can’t share it with you just yet 🙃
Heterotic wins the Swarm grant & starts figuring out how to integrate her BZZ tokens with Seeds so that MetaGame may use them as free file storage.
Peth rids us of the 1000 block limit in Notion then proceeds to get crazy with moving everything from Roam over to Notion. Not everything is there yet but expect all about the ongoing raids, the open roles & quests to be on there soon.
Also writes up the issues for the AppDrawer & LoneRonin gets busy refactoring the code & closing up the issues.
Luxumbra does an epic job of getting players reactivated or transition to patrons.
After removing a total of ~20 Players last week, we are now back to 150/150 Player limit. Got a few new Patrons as well but a lot of empty slots still linger. 😉
Biggest number of people so far get their roles switched out from Player to the Fallen Ones after being unresponsive to warnings. 😬
✨ Make it real!
Seriously though.
If you’ve been around for a while and you still haven’t quite gotten active or bought some Seeds - what are you even doing?
You got 3 options:
If you’re somewhere on this map, expect to be prompted soon.
❓ Quests:
🧠 Learn or Teach - We need more knowledge to spread! Go to the #🧠-brain-exchange channel and post “I want to learn X” or “I can teach someone Y”.
🌱 Plant Yo Seedz - If you’ve been holding your Seeds for a while, its about time you plant some - you’re going to need to do that sooner or later 🙃.
📚 Elder - We need more of the people who already found their way in Ethereum, to write their playbooks for people of similar angles & backgrounds. Check what Cooper did then do something similar.
🏗️ FreeMasonin’ - We got the House of Ethereum, we got the House of DAOs, Vanilla is writing the House of DeFiance & Uranus is writing the House of Permaculture… What about the House of Tokens? House of dApps? House of Philosophy? House of Worldviews? House of… Anything? Just go ahead and write something.
⚔️ HackETH - Get over to github & start closing issues.
😍 MyMeta Dashboard - Design the basic dashboard with the info shown on the wireframe: Seed amount, Seed price & total value, XP & XP gained this week. We’ll get the morale & co2 next once we have more backend for it.
🏥 Help Others - Go help someone! May be a fellow metagamer or it maybe a a fellow stranger - any philantropic or ecological cause out there.
🤔 Open Roles
🛠️ Builder - Can never have enough builders, mainly looking for those familiar with working with React & Hasura, writing TypeScript & GraphQL.
🤗 Friendly Face - Keep an eye out on the #🍻-tavern & welcome new members.
🎊 Meetup Master - Make sure there’s something going on for each Community Gathering. Could be an AMA with someone, a topic of discussion, a game or whatever sort of activity.
☸️ Navigator - Help newcomers find things to learn & ways to contribute based on their background & interests.
🎨 Designah - Need more UX/UI designers to help design anything from the archetype selection screen, to the dashboard, the market & questing system.
✨ Fairy - Fairies make sure the XP system is being fair. They keep an eye out for emoji accrual on discord & XP scores in the ledger & alarm when it seems unfair.
Interested in one of the roles? Please do reach out to me @petheth 🙃
Onwards! 🐙
There’s no denying MetaGame has seriously been accelerating. Seeds have been validated by patrons & Luxumbra has done a terrific job getting players to wake up.
Now, are you fucking ready?!
You can’t keep sitting on the sidelines; make space for MetaGame in your 2021 schedules.
If we reach Season 2 and the Top5 still contains players who have been inactive for months… I’ll be extremely disappointed.
If we reach Season 2 and I’m still earning 20% of all XP - fuck are the rest of you doing? There’s 149 of you.
Continuing regularly:
Mondays - Champions Ring - the 14 raid leads stand-up.
Wednesdays - Mid-week Storming, Feedback, AMA - open office, coworking.
Fridays - Community Gathering, welcoming new members & discussing things.
As always @ 10am PST / 1pm EST / 5pm UTC / 7pm CET / 10:30pm IST