Auryn Macmillan & Kei Kreutler: Zodiac – The Expansion Pack for DAOs #427

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution my name is sebastien today i'm speaking with kia kreutler and arun mcmillan they are co-founders of gnosis guild and today we'll be diving deep into uh dao's dao infrastructure dow tooling and sort of looking at um the the the breadth of things that people are doing with daos and what daos might reserve for the future but before we talk to kia and arun i'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week are your crypto assets sitting idle in your wallet start earning rewards and contribute to network security by staking with course one as taking provider securing five billion dollars in assets on over 25

decentralized networks including solana cosmos and ethereum course one has released the annual staking review for the year 2021. it contains over 70 pages of insights and analysis into some of the most important proof of stake networks right now you can go to chorus.one and download the report for free and if you've been a loyal solana delegator with course one make sure to check your wallets in the first ever major nft drop by any validator course one air dropped over 600 exclusive nxts to its solana delegators according to their delegation profile in december 2021 the nfts are also available on the secondary market on platforms like magic eden but if you missed on this airdrop don't

worry you can still participate in the upcoming air drops for cosmos chains by simply delegating to course one notes if you're interested in running your own branded nodes while they have a manage white label nord as known as a service offering that leverages course one's highly available and proven infrastructure enabling you to participate directly in decentralized networks so head over to chorus.one to start your staking journey and we're also brought to you by periswab with paraswap you can beat market prices every single block it's fast highly liquid and they just launched their e5 which has new contracts and a new api it has a more module infrastructure which is more gas friendly and now supports free approvals using ethereum's permit messages they also recently added support for avalanche polygon and bsc

and you can always use paraswap with your ledger right in ledger live so go to paraswap.io to get started kia and arun thanks so much for joining me today i'm really excited about this episode i spent the whole day uh just like reading i had like a million tabs open reading like everything i could about um about dao style infrastructure so like dao theory and collaboration theory on the internet and i think this is gonna be like a really um really cool episode so thanks so much for joining me today yeah thanks for having us really excited to be here so um yeah let's let's perhaps start a little with some introductions um you know how did you guys get into crypto and what's your background how do you

come to be working on dow tooling hypnosis cool so hey also thanks for having us on and i'm kia i'm actually a writer artist and former kind of front-end developer um i've been mainly interested in how cultural narratives of technology shape their use so i had a kind of long path through working on more open source projects open source mapping projects a lot of kind of more grassroots tech initiatives and i've been following ethereum and kind of the crypto space for a while and i was really interested in like what a site of an experimentation it seemed like so i think i was like passing through berlin in 2014 and i ended up at wikimedia which was a space where they'd

often hold meetups and it was before ethereum launch and it was basically a bunch of people trying to set up an early kind of client for ethereum and i'm not sure if any of us managed to get it working but there was a particular energy to that event that i think was not present in most of the tech meetups that i would go to at a time and it wasn't clear that it would be successful it wouldn't be clear that it would be speculated upon it was real just kind of renewed emphasis on forms of computation that were decentralized that were private hopefully and also that could really kind of change how not only software or finance operates but how organizations operate so i followed ethereum for quite some time um basically kept a tab on after the launch and as projects were built on

it and then i joined the space full-time in 2017 hypnosis so i've been there the last over four years and i've always had more of a focus on kind of what organizational change it will bring so i've been really lucky to work with boring um and basically co-founders guilds which has been incubated by gnosis to focus on governance and doubts and i uh i guess i stumbled into the blockchain space in in 2013 uh i saw a news article on uh on the deep web the dark web and kind of started poking around uh toll browser and found my way into various kind of marketplaces

everything was denominated in this weird bitcoin thing and so that that kind of was the start of the rabbit hole trying to figure out what that was and why it was valuable and why people were kind of selling stuff on the deep web for bitcoin um and i guess like shortly after that i found my way to a bunch of italics reasonably early uh writing and the thing that kind of immediately captivated me there were some of his early pieces on daos on the concept of dao's i was playing basketball professionally at the time and so that that was eating most of my time but this this kind of seed just grew and slowly consumed more and more of my uh my bandwidth over the kind of subsequent few years and

then in 2016 uh the dow project kind of sprung up and i immediately just kind of immersed myself in that uh founded the the dow hub forum um which kind of became the de facto home for the dallas community and uh and that kind of snowballed into a full-time career in dalles uh in all things dows uh so kind of yeah went through this this meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of the dow and then from that uh i did a whole bunch of work with with various different projects in the space kind of early on gnosis included back in 2017 and then spent some time with uh

with colony for a couple of years as well and then back to gnosis um a few years back and yeah since since being there uh have helped launch the notice tower and now founded uh no so skilled with with kia to to focus on zodiac this new kind of i guess standard and uh suite of tooling for kind of composable interoperable dowels cool uh yeah i mean i i i definitely like uh associate with uh you know what you're saying in terms of like being feeling like fully encapsulated by this new concept and this new technology i mean i remember

early in the early days around 2014 and 2015 i think one of the things that i found the most interesting about bitcoin and ethereum was that you know we didn't really have the word dao then but you know there was this concept of like those those things like you know those blockchains within in themselves being autonomous and um and being sort of organizations of people that were maintaining the ledger and and i think that for a lot of people that you know really resonate with them and um and then you know there's i think the first time that i ever kind of uh encountered this concept of you know autonomous sort of agents uh was an early mike hearn talk from 2013 or 2014 where i think he's at some google event

and he's describing this world where we have autonomous vehicles that are sort of self-owning and they're able to like you know buy their own energy and get on fast lanes and pay for things and receive payment and even like spawn off like new cars like by ordering new cars to sort of you know uh uh build build their self-driving business and and that just blew my mind and i i think that's what really got me excited about this whole space and about taos in general um you know what excites you the most about daos and what would you say is like the the sort of cutting edge uh of like dow technology today like what what are the most innovative things that people are doing with daos

so i think the i don't know maybe meshing the answer both of those questions into one the thing that kind of excites me most i think the kind of real cutting edge of dao's uh is the the potential and kind of reality of systems that uh produce some desired outcome from as an emergent result of kind of uncoordinated inputs and so you talked about uh say the bitcoin network or the ethereum network being these uh early instantiations of dells you know in large part before that they kind of concept or at least like the um the word dao was was in in ready circulation um but these networks are most certainly downs and they're dealt with these kind

of very very tightly scoped uh roles a very telescope kind of outputs that are very carefully engineered to be the result the kind of emergent result of a whole bunch of uncoordinated actors kind of providing inputs to the system i think there's this huge design space for uh essentially engineering other outcomes as emergent results from uncoordinated inputs quadratic voting quadratic funding in particular i think are two great examples of this where you have in quadratic funding's case the kind of desired outcome is a well-allocated pool of capital to some some sector of public goods and the way that you kind of

arrive at that that allocation is from the uncoordinated inputs of people contributing to projects that they value and i think kind of uh generalizing that idea of finding some desired outcome and then engineering a way to to reach that outcome through uncoordinated inputs is uh is going to be really crucial for dallas to continue to kind of achieve the the scale that uh i think a lot of people are hoping dallas are going to be able to as in push beyond the kind of theoretical of practical limits of of kind of more traditional firms yeah and likewise building on that i think it's interesting uh that you kind of broach doubts in terms of its

autonomous quality because i think that that's a quality that is much less emphasized today um we see it with kind of distributed ledgers but a lot of the social dials or even some of the protocols i was operating today it's much less at the forefront than it used to be because i would give a kind of early definition of what the idea of a dao was as something like an organization with automation at its center and humans at the edges so the idea that actions like how capital could be released or how protocol functions happen in an autonomous manner um and i think it gave root to a lot of interesting imaginations like you know stacks for kind of natural systems or deodons and the same way that we see legal personhood given to rivers and coral reefs etc and a lot of that discourse has kind of faded into the

background but i wholly expect it to re-emerge in the next couple of years as doubt bullying starts to mature what i'm most excited about is actually the kind of cultural ramifications of dao's um because i feel like it's kind of captured an energy of activism as well as um maybe not autonomous in the technical sense but autonomous in a more kind of approach to political organizing that groups can have a kind of more grassroots approach but still have as much if not greater than impact of kind of traditional firms or let's say corporations that operate at larger scales um so i'm really excited about just the kind of good-hearted energy going into the space um and really confident that people with kind of more political

science minded or potentially more social science minded can guide some of the doubts towards these better outcomes or to more impactful outcomes of course there are always um flops along the way and hilarious kind of missteps but i think it's promising much more so than other spaces that i see people working in today that's a really interesting uh uh way to look at it if i i guess i guess we i i still think of it as a decentralized autonomous organization but you're right like a lot of the dows that we see you know uh some being summoned today and and sort of organizing today are more just organizations of humans you know working together towards a common goal than something that's fully

automated and i think like you know the early dows like the dao maybe had more of uh of this philosophy of like fully automating you know for instance like a fund in in a sense and it was less so about like this grassroots sort of effort um you know when you think of something that's uh you know grassroots and that that brings together lots of different people you think of cooperatives and i wonder what are the parallels in your view like what are parallels between cooperatives as we as we know them like you know in most jurisdictions you have like you know a a stat like a sort of legal uh status for for uh for a co-op or a cooperative in france it's like a you know

associated cooperative or something like that in germany we have the same thing and so what what are the overlaps between dows and cooperatives as you see them sure so in a recent essay a pre-history of dao's i gave one definition of a dial that doesn't definitely does not apply across the space but potentially a kind of voluntary association that prioritizes let's say the operating principles of cooperativism um so when people are talking about co-ops they actually usually mean a specific legal structure with democratic member control and economic ownership um i say that does prioritize them as operating principles um basically to shift the space towards because well basically because it's a

they could emphasize co-ownership of contributors to the dao it's quite easy for those um who are contributing to um be able to have greater economic stake in what they're producing and this isn't something that we always see with traditional firms um so i think that does have the propensity to be kind of hyper capitalism but they also have a different propensity to be kind of member owned and basically by giving these definitions and patterns we can encourage them to go more towards the space um and just maybe a kind of more meta note on that level is that i think that we're at a at a stage where we can kind of put these patterns in place and say hey you should really look at how ownership is playing out in your dow because right now that's critically what's being

determined both ownerships within dows and also across styles so ownership and crypto networks and that basically by prioritizing co-ownership right now we can make sure that it doesn't become too too lopsided in the future and that more does take this to heart and i think one last note on that is that um there's also been a criticism in the kind of overlap with daos and co-ops that um the kind of mistaken belief that cooperativism or kind of co-ownership or democratic control um how can that touch the kind of base layer of global capitalism that crypto kind of glides on top of and i really think it's about a deep understanding of how technology develops in the cultural norms and basically pushing cultural norms at the right time and right now thousand co-ops

seen from like the recent fwb piece called um what can like thousand collapse learn from each other as well as um this is a long-winded response but as well as other pieces like um more shed manon's earlier work on dials and co-ops that i think is really important but really has only kind of come to visibility in its right time now so he wrote this 2018 paper um called fostering worker cooperatives with blockchain technology and basically in it he looks at the difference between a capital management and a labor managed firm and also the colony project so colony is a doubt platform um they've recently launched a new phase um and so back in 2018 um worship was writing about this and basically saw fundamental challenges that a lot of these labor managed firms

had um one was that they had difficulty bootstrapping funding sometimes for good reasons because it limits the amount of private investing they also had problems of kind of operating across different jurisdictions and they also had problems of operating at scale and basically by looking kind of closer to colony platform he said you know maybe maybe just maybe um these tools that are across jurisdictional that help with kind of alignment or coherence um would be able to aid cooperatives to be able to grow into a more global movement yeah i think that makes a lot of sense and i think perhaps like when i think of cooperatives like the people who are in cooperatives like you know i i i think that there's this there's such a

rejection of you know of hyper capitalism or even just capitalism and the the images that sort of blockchain and crypto conjures up i think in those people's minds just like totally uh goes in opposition with um you know what i think a lot of cooperatives um goals are and so you know there i think there may be also like a generational thing where like increasingly co-op what we see as cooperatives you know today like traditionally cooperatives may start forming into dows as uh you know the people in those that form those groups are uh more inclined to you know scale like beyond the boundaries of like you know national borders and jurisdictions and things like that and like seek funding

and this sort of thing i'd like to ask you like maybe just take a step back here first and like in the sort of brief history of of taos on ethereum can you describe sort of the arch of like how daos have uh evolved from like you know the initial the dao which i think is the most emblematic that a lot of people sort of remember as being like the first dow to some more recent ones like molok dao uh which you know inspired a lot of uh subsequent taos and now this sort of explosion of taos that are doing everything from you know buying nft portfolios to um you know funding projects uh to funding development what what does the sort of like history

of dao's look like yeah i think kia has some really great insights uh on this in her pre-history of dao's uh article so definitely worthwhile people checking that out in terms of uh maybe just a quick overview of the history of say looking down frameworks and technologies and whatnot yeah there obviously i think uh the cryptocurrency kind of networks uh bitcoin and ethereum and and a whole bunch of others to me are the first kind of really widespread instantiations of kind of downlight organizations in terms of i guess the other kind of broad category of downs these kind of less tightly scoped more uh organizational dowels as opposed to kind of really

really tightly scoped uh participation in terms of uh you know being a minor validator uh in in this uh protocol style down um yeah the dow i think was was probably the first uh or at least one of the the first instantiations of this type of dell um it was essentially a a mutual pool of capital that the intent was to allocate it and i think intend to uh you know attempt to kind of earn a return on it in some way it was fairly loosely defined uh by design just that i think it very much wanted that to be a an emergent thing for the the community to decide what they wanted to do with this

pool of funding um it was a reasonably complex system at least for the time uh and uh that is kind of part of the reason that it ended up uh having kind of an undiscovered exploit that that ultimately had it crash and burn and so molech was this kind of direct reaction to that this deliberately very simple con contract with very simple mechanics that allowed uh participants to very easily recover their share of the capital and leave at any point in time and the the kind of key innovation for for moloch was this rage quit mechanism uh so you as a member of amolek dao have uh shares and you can

redeem those shares for a relative portion of their of the dow's assets at any point in time and then around that mechanics that allow you to to do that at kind of critical moments whenever the dow passes a decision you have a cooldown period where you can rage quit uh if if you disagree with how the uh the decision went um other kind of in parallel to that a whole bunch of other uh dow frameworks kind of sprung up and developed in parallel for for several years aragon dalstack and colony were they kind of primary uh examples uh that spun up kind of

around the same time i think colony actually started building slightly before the dow but uh has has kind of been in development for a great many years and aragon spun up kind of shortly after the dow uh dow stack uh similarly i think shortly after the dao i think at the time it was called [Music] oh i'm uh i'm drawing a blank now and what it was it had a different name but uh nevertheless these kind of three three kind of separate approaches to creating dao's aragon very much kind of designed as an operating system for dows uh dow stack kind of more opinionated on on what the decision-making mechanism was introduced a kind of novel decision-making mechanism

in holographic consensus which is essentially combined uh token weighted voting and prediction markets to kind of modulate what the uh what the quorum for those votes should be and then colony introduced a really interesting reputation mechanism where you earn reputation for contributing to the organization and the kind of organization gets to define what reputation means within the context of that organization i think uh later on uh compound uh kind of made the realization that most of the dow frameworks were much more complex than what they needed uh to govern the compound protocol and so ended up

deciding to roll their own uh in the compound governance framework and the big uh i don't know innovation uh that they made was not really an innovation at all but kind of a revival of a centuries-old security technique and just having a time lock uh you know having having a window of time where things are queued up before they execute um and and making sure you have a way to kind of respond to things um in advance of them being executed um and compound being a kind of relatively simple on-chain mechanism for confidence uh proved to be a kind of winning combination for a whole bunch of protocols um

until gas prices uh started skyrocketing um at which point um we we started to see uh projects take kind of different uh different approaches to kind of mitigating that and i think that largely the the most popular approach was to essentially push voting off chain and kind of delegate the actual control to a kind of relatively smaller group of multi-sig signers or in compounds case to delegate vote weight to larger kind of protocol politicians that um that would were financially incentivized to to or at least had enough stake to to justify the gas cost of voting on chain i have totally

glossed over the uh the whole kind of molec ecosystem that evolved beyond the original molecule as well uh the the dow house guys spun up a molok v2 and an interface for that and that um on extire which is now gnosis chain became the kind of home for a whole whole kind of class of uh of dowels um and then yeah over the the last maybe uh year or so there's there's been a whole bunch of uh more uh more tightly focused or or kind of just different styles of dell frameworks uh starting to emerge a lot of them built on top of and around them i'm so

safe as a core and this is largely what we've been trying to uh trying to to standardize and accomplish with the zodiac framework yeah there's so much to unpack here but uh yeah i mean the notice of safe i think has been like you know instrumental to you know the success of and i mean the the ease of of um of you know people's ability to uh to summon dows um as well as like all these different frameworks that you mentioned um you know one of the things that you know came up and you know researching this episode and like talking with people who um you know who have been working a lot more closely than i have in like summing downs and things like that is that there's like an abundance of tools and

like in my research i was able to find like lots of different frameworks like you know um and um you know what what is the overlap between some of these tools and you know are we arriving at some standards um on you know how we um how we construct dows and um what you know is this abundance a good thing or does it end up actually like making things a bit more complicated in the end for people who are building down for building taos uh i think it's definitely a good thing i mean choice uh and kind of plurality of options is great because it's a good kind of forcing function for

um for tools to to develop in a way that actually serves users needs um and so for those people's uh you know real world requirements uh it obviously makes it more complex for someone new to the space coming in and trying to figure out what to do figure out uh what uh what framework kind of works will work well for them or kind of how they should go about making decisions but uh nevertheless i think that uh yeah that abundance of choices is a net positive um it's definitely part of what inspired uh zodiac as a framework uh trying to find a way to i guess mesh all of those things together in a

way or at least have a kind of common way for them to play nicely together um probably worth giving a quick bit of backstory on that um to to help kind of illustrate why um so in i guess late 2020 we started doing some research to figure out what the uh essentially how how we should set up the gnosis dow uh we had this desire to move a huge chunk of narcissus treasury into something that was community controlled and had a couple of really key kind of requirements one was that it would be well well kind of proven to secure vast amounts of funding two that we don't kind of unreasonably

restrict participation we don't price people out of participation um and three that we don't kind of unreasonably restrict our future choices we don't lock ourselves into into kind of one particular roadmap because of a choice that we make early on and we realized that none of the existing frameworks uh really checked all three of those boxes and the third one i think is is relevant to what we're talking about here in terms of unreasonably restricting uh our kind of future choices and so you imagine a scenario where say i'm brand new to the space and i come in and discover aragon and i said well this is this amazing dell tool i'm going to go from you know create a dell and then after six months of operating the dell space and having built up a community

and using this aragon dao the community decides hey actually we we'd really love to use our molecule more like it's much much more suitable for for our style of organization and so we want to migrate and so the migration process now is essentially they've got to spin up this new molok dao and populate it with with all of the users and then go through this kind of arduous process of making proposals to transfer all the tokens and all of the systems that uh that this dow controls you know if it's the owner of any other external systems uh to update any kind of external references to that dao probably on a bunch of websites they don't control and so there's this kind of really monumental coordination challenge of moving from one framework to another

and so the kind of key insight that we had with zodiac was that if we decouple your account and the mechanism that controls it we can make that migration process much less painful where if you imagine as a new organization you come in and you spin up a nurse's safe and then you say hey we we really love aragon we want aragon to be the the mechanism for our dell um then we plug an aragon dao into our noses safe and have the aragon dow controller safe but then same thing if six months down the road the community now decides hey we'd really like to be uh a molecule then we simply with one proposal are able to

uh plug in this new molecule as a module to our safe unplug the aragon dao and now all of a sudden we we are a molecule rather than aragon dao none of our assets had to move none of our kind of owner settings on any systems we control had to be updated none of the external references to our dow had to be updated it all kind of happens in one step um so we we can are much less restricted in our kind of future decisions by our current decisions just through that simple uh simple decoupling of your account and control mechanisms uh right so so essentially the accounts are and and and the and the governance tools and all of the other tools where people

interact with the with the dow are sort of like decoupled in this stack um can you describe like the well you know before we go into the stack maybe describe what is zodiac and then perhaps we can talk about like the different layers in the stack and how you guys are looking to modulize a lot of those aspects yeah so zodiac is is really the materialization of of our of this kind of key insight right that uh by decoupling these things we we enable a whole world of possibilities uh on on how you design and build uh dells so zodiac is really this kind of standard for and kind of set of tools built to this standard standard for

essentially how to build these composable and interrupt interoperable pieces of dowel tooling and so when i say dow tooling this could be the existing kind of dao frameworks that are kind of relatively large monolithic uh dowel like structures or it could be much more granular pieces of tooling for enabling specific functionality and the nice thing with this particular way of building dowels is the two aren't mutually exclusive you can have multiple mechanisms running in parallel being used for different types of decision making within the context of one organization so yeah the zodiac is really just this this standard for composable dell tooling um it's it's a specific kind of

set of contract interfaces that if you expose them then uh you're now kind of you can you can play nicely with all of the other tooling it's um a kind of library that basically has a programmable account at the center um we've built a lot of the interfaces around the gnosis safe because we know it's a trusted account and it's extendable open source but fundamentally framework agnostic and our tools mainly can be used through the zodiac app on your safe and what i like about kind of being able to kind of combine plug and play and stack them and also connect them to other dow platforms so not just a safe it can be a mola can be basically anything you dream of um is that it kind of

you know we saw with recent criticisms of web 3 that there's still platform centralization even if there's potentially protocol decentralization and we don't want to mimic with the platforms that we build the same type of kind of um user centralization that we've seen with web 2 or other platforms so by kind of having participants in daos get used to kind of plug and play their own framework where you can add a module that allows you to connect say a molecule on nervous chains windows is safe um but also to maybe add a delay modifier so that you have a time before transactions can be executed we'll go deeper into the stack but basically being able to set these up and add qualifiers to all the mods reorients i think both on a protocol level but also on a platform participant or user level

um the kind of relation to the tools that we use for dells so it's the idea that we can put kind of small components together to make custom setups we're not locked into one monolithic platform and we're not stuck there because everyone's using the same platform so zodiac is really about building bridges in the same way that protocols were about decentralization the zodiac approach is almost um kind of a platform decentralization approach to how we do governance in the future it is really an antithesis to a lot of the kind of platform governance or democratic governance tools that we saw that over into some really anticipated use cases in the past we want to let use cases emerge and then build the bridges to them that's really cool so so gnosis safe sits at the middle of this and then um this is integrated you know as

a ui sort of like in the gnosis safe interface um can you talk about the different modules that you've built and like what people can like what flavors that people can sort of like put into their into their uh into their zodiac dao yeah i think one uh key thing that that kia mentioned that's worth reiterating there is that we we kind of use the safe as our prototype for this as the prototype for uh what we call the avatar as in like the the thing that represents the dow on chain um but it is fundamentally uh agnostic to what that avatar is so if someone else wanted to write some different contract to to to function as an avatar to function as that that programmable account at the

center they absolutely could and we we think that this is a really important thing to to just be explicit about because we we want this to be a kind of open standard we want it to be something that other people feel free to to come and build on top of and we don't want it again to kind of unreasonably lock people any into specific solution we obviously think that the safe is the best solution and that's why we we use this as our as our prototype um but uh yeah it's it's it's a wide-open standard there and anyone can kind of implement whatever they like in terms of the the pieces that we've built we have a handful of um a handful of kind of additional modules

and modifiers that we've built on top of this to basically try to extend what what the dow eco system is able to do in some cases and in other cases just provide what we think are some fundamental building blocks um we've deliberately avoided for the most part uh replicating work in terms of voting and decision making tools because for the most part they they they already exist there's a whole bunch of really great dow tools out there in in aragon and molech and dalstack and colony and compound uh and so we we didn't necessarily feel the need to uh to try to replicate those things but we do have a handful of uh other tools that we built that again feel like kind of fundamental building blocks um the the first one was was very much

kind of needs to event was the thing that uh kicked off this this whole endeavor is our reality module and it's what underlies uh the the safe snap plug-in for snapshot which basically lets you take an off-chain vote from snapshot and bring it on chain to trigger kind of on-chain execution um so there's a bit of a confusing layer of names here uh in terms of snapshot the kind of voting platform safe snap that they can plug in to snapshot and then the reality module that lives underneath it that then plugs into the nose to safe there is a very good justification for that the separation of all of these names but it does uh it does lead to a bit of

confusion um so maybe we can dive into that really quickly but yeah essentially like at a high level what this does is let you take off chain uh votes and uh bring them on chain the reality module is kind of the key to this thing working and it plugs into basically the way that it brings off chain voting on chain is via an article called reality.eth hence the name the reality module because we're plugging into this reality.heath oracle reality.ethers is this really cool oracle mechanism that is not very widely kind of known about or understood so it's worthwhile diving too quickly essentially is uh an escalation game based oracle so what

that means is anyone can ask it a question and anyone else can come along and try to answer the question by putting down a bond you you put down a bond uh set the outcome to whatever you like and then anyone else can come and double the bond to change the outcome each time the bond is set a timeout it kind of resets and if at any point you get to the end of the timeout then the answer is locked in and so you basically play this escalation game until someone gives up and kind of loses their bonds and the way that the game theory plays out is at the top of the escalation game the bonds get so large that people have to coordinate around uh setting the bonds and thus have to kind of coordinate around which outcome is correct and so the shelling point for

the correct for the correct outcome is the the true outcome it's much easier to coordinate around a true outcome than a false one and so at the top of the escalation game it should always resolve to the true outcome that being the case at the kind of bottom there's very little incentive to set a false outcome because you're essentially just giving money to whoever comes and corrects you so in practice we very rarely see it uh move beyond the first step where someone just comes along and sets the true outcome i remember so we did an episode about this in 2014 because it used to be called reality keys and we had like i remember first hearing about this thing and just like this was one of the things

that got me like super excited about about the the idea of blockchains and like the types of decentralized sort of autonomous decision making you could make um so yeah yeah i mean you know episode 33 of epicenter is about this very thing yeah yeah yeah and it's not like it's been been kind of out in the wild for ages and it's uh it's been used for for things like the the omen prediction market it's the mechanism for for resolving um uh the those outcomes for their markets uh and was obviously a mechanism that we were comfortable with we had seen work in practice with large volumes of a large amount of money at stake and so that was the the reason for kind of landing on this the neat thing with it and again part of the reason for this confusing

confusing cacophony of names is that it could be used to bring in decisions from just about anywhere so we chose snapshot because that pattern of kind of snapshot plus notice safe was already really common but you could use it to bring outcomes from say a discord poll or a discourse poll or a twitter poll or you could flip coins and roll dice and you know whatever you want and it could you know as long as there's some reasonably easy way to kind of publicly verify the outcome then you can use this as a way to kind of bring that information on chain um so yeah this this is kind of our first uh module uh and has already gotten a pretty good bit of adoption and there's a whole bunch of projects out in the wild using this as the way of kind of

uh enabling cheap or free kind of voting for their participants but still kind of autonomous control over their uh over their uh assets um the the next kind of more fundamental building block uh was essentially a piece that we took from the uh the first version of the reality module and it's just a delay module so i talked about uh compound uh kind of reviving or reinventing this centuries old concept of a time lock and that's essentially what a delay module is it's just like making a very uh very small component that you can kind of put between uh a safe and and other modules just to delay the things that it tries to make happen

and so it creates a really good safety hatch uh for if you want to give you know an individual or a small group of people some uh ability to control uh the assets on behalf of the safe maybe to as a way of kind of mitigating the overhead of voting but you still want to have kind of the security of being able to know that we can stop these things if it turns out that they do something malicious then you have some mechanism by which uh you can decide like what what it takes to override such decisions like within our time delay yeah yeah so you have this kind of delay period and then um there is a an owner of that kind of delay modifier and the owner can basically skip any uh any transaction that gets enqueued and

so if for whatever reason the owner which is probably the dow it might be some other mechanism if the the owner decides that it's uh it's malicious then you can just trigger a transaction to skip that malicious uh transaction um then the the next one that we uh the next module that we worked on is um this exit module which essentially adds a molec like uh kind of rage quit functionality you designate an erc20 token and as your kind of organization version of a kind of share and then users can redeem any amount of that erc20 token for a kind of proportional share of the safes

assets so it allows that the kind of combination of a voting mechanism a delay module and uh an exit mechanism that allows you to create this kind of very molecular organization out of a bunch of kind of fundamental pieces then beyond that we have a handful of others that we've we've built here and currently working on i'm curious about the bridge module and the types of things you can do with the bridge module yeah okay that's a very important omission on my part um so yeah the bridge module is uh is essentially a way of uh importing uh they're kind of giving control of a safe

to um to an address on the other side of a uh of a bridge so essentially the use case that we're imagining here is um you have assets on mainnet but main that's too expensive to vote on so you want to kind of put your your decision-making mechanism somewhere else and gnosis chain formerly x-dire has kind of i don't know established itself as a bit of a home for dallas the the dao house community ecosystem kind of lives there colony and all of its styles kind of live there and then there's a whole bunch of uh of aragon dales that have been deployed there the garden style ecosystem will live there and so giving those dows the ability to control assets on mainnet is kind of a really key

piece to kind of allowing them to function in this multi-layer multi-chain ecosystem so yeah essentially the bridge module lets you set an owner and a chain id and say like and a bridge module contract or a bridge contract and just say messages passed from this chain by this address are allowed to pass through and control the safe uh or control the the avatar contract in that case so let's say like in the case of like um a contract on the ethereum main net and a um a controlling address like on xdi or even polygon or like some other layer two chain um does how do fees uh get paid on the main net at that point because i can see like a

use case here for defy where you might have some liquidity positions or you might have some d5 positions on mainnet but you want to control those from a different uh chain um in in that case who who pays the fees yeah so this very much depends on the the bridge that you're using in our case we're using uh in the examples that we've built out so far we're using the nurse's chain arbitrary message bridge in which case you on the gnosis chain side you would have your kind of dowel your decision making mechanism and it would pass a message to the amb contract on the nurses chain side there's a bunch of bridge oracles that are watching that and they would

when they see your message get passed in they would then kind of race to add signatures to it once you have a threshold of signatures from them you take that and you call and execute signatures function on the mainnet side and you pass in those signatures as a parameter so someone needs to take that but it's a it's a public function so all you need to do is have their signatures and you can trigger execution on the other side um yeah there's for the route like uh notice chained to mainnet you have to pay for it or someone has to pay for it going the other way it's it's subsidized because it's it's trivial uh the the cost but because of the costs on maintenance uh much less

predictable than it's uh it's harder to kind of subsidize longer term what we're really hoping to uh to develop and to see um see the kind of use case being is dows that essentially choose a a chain as their their kind of home chain but then are able to spin up a nose to safe on kind of each and every other evm compatible chain and bridge decisions to them so their their influence can kind of extend a long way beyond their chosen home chain uh a dow one nurse's chain might control a safe on main net and one on polygon and optimism and arbitrage and you know anywhere else that the safe ecosystem is deployed too interesting so with this you know recent i guess like in the last year or so

there's just like been a proliferation of evm compatible chains or layer twos and how do you foresee taos um like very much in the spirit of what you just said like how do you foresee taos uh sort of spreading across those ecosystems and what what's that gonna look like like i don't know let's say you you know you have like uh i don't know flamingo dial right okay well you know it's on main net and it also wants to be on these other ecosystems um what's that gonna look like for users and also you know perhaps technically like what kind of control mechanisms would they want to implement would it be like centrally um like centrally managed from one chain

then sort of like managing uh those sub dows or like thousand other chains or are they all operating sort of horizontally at the same level sure so i think as with all does because it's a wide open organizational design space at the moment there's not necessarily like one pattern or one design path that i think all dals will assume other than the fact that i do strongly believe that most dows will be multi-chain so i could see some example where a dao on particularly an art collecting or social dao um maybe wants to have a presence on multiple evm chains because maybe an artist they're collecting is primarily based on polygon they do governance layer on gnosis chain and then they secure their most um kind of

larger assets on mainnet and i think it would be really good also as a kind of like ambassador function for different dials who have presence on different chains and communicate between them because at each you'll find different communities and different kind of tool sets and also strengthen um the resiliency of the bridges between them both on a technical and also a kind of community level and even um so i'm on the board of regen foundation which is regen network is a cosmos suk chain um for ecosystem services and we've even been talking about yeah and i we've been talking with the evmost team about seeing about getting zodiac tools kind of deployed there and um i think really this kind of multi-chain presence will be hugely beneficial to

the ecosystem and also basically allow kind of different participants and i prefer the term like participant of our user um basically like different types of accessibility um so for say the regen network regen foundation community staking dials we'll have all different levels of kind of access and familiarity with protocol governance but we can really have the patterns and kind of acclimate to them and meet people where they're at especially if it's kind of chain specific applications or chain specific usability so you think that there may be like some some functions of the dao that would exist on one chain and some of the functions would exist on another chain and you may have like assets being managed like on on different chains and and i i i guess then that base my next

question is like what is the what do you foresee as this role of gnosis chain as uh as a as a as a place where you know lots of people are hosting dows do you think that like taos are becoming or will become one of the predominant use cases for gnosis chain so i think we've already seen that there and that the xci ecosystem has been really thriving with teams mentioned before like dao house as well as the garden style and one hive communities so in a way it already is very much a kind of doubt-oriented chain we also have things like circles which use the safe contracts at their core um so there is very much an idea of kind of like collective accounts being the identity

standard diagnosis chain um so i can very much see it progressing in this manner and even but also in the sense that i really believe that dao should be multi-chained so i wouldn't want it to become a kind of monopolistic um chain specifically focused on daos and i think a part of this can be shown in the ethos of also um nurse's chain trying to make it very easy for people who wish to to be able to um post their own node so working with dapnode and others and the way we started the conversation about chains kind of being their own dows i think gnosis chain would ideally like to kind of operate in that manner as well where there's a really kind of decentralized ownership of the chain itself and very strong cross-chain community as well so taking a step back here and and uh

coming back to sort of like you know dows as paradigms in uh you know in society i i wonder what types of you know existing structures you think are um right for transformation or transition uh into like dao formed sure so i think one we already touched on on co-ops but i don't know if it's necessarily from the kind of theory of change where it's like co-ops themselves transform into dao's but more that these kind of principles of existing organizations become more familiar among our ecosystem um i also think one thing that dao's happened to be very good at at the moment

and often not always to the best ends is pooling capital um or pooling some type of resources so i laugh because i'm thinking of spiced out which recently bought some ip um or i thought they bought some mic um but um but they tend to be good vehicles you see constitution dow you also think see things like climate out and i think that there needs to be a lot more thoughtful consideration around the kind of what you would call dow governance or corporate governance of these vehicles but you see it already i saw emerged yesterday like a huddle dao which is aiming to be um like a pack so political action committee specifically to um look at u.s regulatory landscape and crypto and specifically kind of advise um

policy positions so basically looking at these organizations that often need a certain amount of capital um to be bootstrapped and to be effective daos are very um kind of natural tools for these organizations right um in terms of having the best possible outcomes we also see this with things like the free assange style and other um things of basically being able to kind of quickly bootstrap resources to a narrowly scoped cause um but i think and what i'm hoping for is that it becomes more variegated where we aren't necessarily looking at financial capital of the resource that's easily pooled but as more kind of different um i mean this is a somewhat cringe and complicated term but natural capital or other forms of capital um become legible

on chain but they can be really good ways um to confirm mutual aid for different communities but to confer kind of large amounts of access um to different people not only kind of gathering but also distributing so i think kind of next-gen daos will have to focus more on the distribution rather than the kind of um gathering talking about distribution i think like one of the you know if you one of the things here that comes to my mind is um you know how daos can uh sort of distribute uh capital in you know the the real economy right so like the the the uh the friction between like

the crypto economy and like traditional banking still remains um and i think like if there was less friction there it would be easier for daos to you know perhaps finance um a lot more things so like outside of you know the crypto ecosystem which is like i think a lot of dowser um are are helping to contribute to and finance today um what are some ways that we can hope to see daoz uh have an improved or like uh yeah improved interaction with the real economy and like what are some of the barriers there that need to be broken down and um for like a more generalized uh type of uh application yeah i mean i think um

in terms of barriers that need to be broken down there's just a relatively few uh established kind of pathways for for essentially legal personhood for a dow or the ability for a for a doubt to um to tangibly own real world assets or interact with with the real world that says there's a handful of uh i guess trailblazers of dallas that have gone out and actually kind of established some kind of uh real real world entity that uh that's uh kind of rapping or otherwise kind of interacting with the dow and then also a handful that have kind

of explicitly gone the other direction and and become these uh kind of uh illegal entities and kind of defined very uh very you know well-structured participation agreements between members uh to to account for the fact that they are deliberately not seeking kind of incorporation or seeking kind of recognition by one jurisdiction explicitly i think um there's one there's been some really great efforts by um but yeah again a whole bunch of different uh actors one in particular has been really cool is the uh the koala model law uh which is kind of seeking to uh create a a model that different jurisdictions can

kind of adopt uh in order to to find a kind of common ground on how to treat uh these these kind of illegal dowels um so probably some jurisdictions starting to uh adopt that or something similar to that as a as a really great first step to enabling kind of really widespread uh uh legal personification or at least kind of legal interaction uh or interaction between kind of thousands and a lot of the kind of real world but uh also in terms of kind of people trailblazing or projects translating there's projects like uh uh opelus and and sparked out that have uh kind of gone the opposite direction and very kind of explicitly said let's

uh let's kind of set up uh colorado limited cooperatives uh when the cooperative associations and actually kind of bake those uh basically kind of the mechanisms of the kind of dow structures that we create into the uh into our operating agreements and then bake uh that the constraints of the dow into the constraints of the um the legal kind of uh wrapper that we're choosing into our kind of dowel structures and and kind of try to marry the two um and yeah i don't know that one is necessarily that they can have right or the wrong way to do it it's interesting just you can have both both threads being pushed forward in parallel by different groups and i think there's probably you know pros and cons of both uh obviously the

the idea of uh spinning up a legal wrap-up really gives you more immediate access to real-world things than uh than the alternative where you're kind of waiting on on some jurisdiction to to uh create some kind of recognition yeah i mean i i think the legal rapper uh that that some people and and like law firms have been able to sort of come up with is you know perhaps like uh a stepping stone to something that's a lot more uh um a lot more or organic to the to the to the dao um mod like structure and like into the functioning of a dao and so like that paradigm um and so i think

like what what's going on in wyoming is probably like the most interesting uh are there other places that uh that you're aware of where um jurisdiction like that the other jurisdictions that have uh started discussing or are looking into um you know dow personhood yeah i know the uh folkstopolis um are working pretty hard with the legislators in uh colorado to set up something pretty similar um i say similar and they'd probably be scowling at me now for saying somewhere because i think there's a whole bunch of uh issues that they see with the uh with the wyoming legislation and and uh a lot of what they're doing in uh in

colorado is kind of a direct response to that um but yeah i guess kind of the the the goal was to create kind of uh yeah an outcome where where dallas can have a uh a reasonable kind of legal personification um that uh i guess mirrors that the kind of um value assumptions that that a lot of web three organizations make although they kind of has has a similar kind of value alignment um i guess another example that i'm aware of is um the vermont legislation which actually was preceded wyoming as well uh the vermont's

blockchain based llc is another kind of legal uh rapper that you can spin up for for similar purposes uh d-og uh pioneered that um and uh i think maybe like in both of those cases in the vermont's case in the wyoming case uh they really just kind of show that kind of flexibility of llcs in general like really you can you can make an llc you can you can construct llc that does just about whatever you want and so it's more about uh i think how much uh how willing you want to go and do the kind of bespoke work to to create an llc that functions as you want it to

yeah i think i think in europe uh you know it's probably a little bit more complex and i mean i've been talking with people who are trying to find ways to um to create some form of rapper that would allow like you know taos to have legal personhood but it's not quite there yet and i don't think that if you know europe will be at the forefront of uh of this innovation typically the way that i've seen people approach it in in europe um has been through like a foundation model right where you would have uh i think generally people like to i tend to prefer like a swiss foundation um but there's a handful of other jurisdictions where people would spit up some kind of foundation and uh that foundation would kind of have no

direct tie to the dow itself that would be kind of uh as part of its operating agreement uh bound to decisions made by the dao bound to act in the best interest of the town would usually just kind of act on behalf of the dow as opposed to being kind of directly tied to it in the way that the uh the blockchain llc uh blockchain um based llc or the wyoming dow or this kind of up-and-coming um colorado based uh the legal rapper would aim to kind of more directly marry the two yeah no i mean like the swiss foundation models i think that has has been great for for a lot of organizations and lots of jazz i'm i'm i'm speaking more

specifically about like the the eurozone um because yeah there there are some barriers i think still like for you know dows that um need to operate and you know sort of like be fiscally tied to uh to to the eurozone uh being being in switzerland so i i'm hopeful that that things will will come out of the eurozone soon as we as we wrap up here like um what uh what kinds of things are you most excited about you know uh so like upcoming things that you see um in the you know sort of dow tooling space and um you know where where do you think like dow cooperation and organizations will be in like

four or five years from now as we look back sure so i know one thing as a team we're really excited about is taking private voting to daos um we've seen that both in the kind of bidding and voting process that privacy is really fundamentally important to any kind of voting or decision making process especially at scale um so we're excited about macia and um using zero knowledge groups basically to bring private voting to a thousand i think that that will exponentially kind of explode um the decision making and kind of realms that that was operated in because you have a fundamentally different dynamic and one that is fundamentally more aligned with our existing kind of um political and legislative systems uh so that's super exciting i'm also um very

keen on a kind of token design space and token experimentation and whether that's on a specific contract level or a token standards level i'm somewhat equivalent about but we've seen a lot of emphasis put on coin voting right for dows and my feeling is that we've kind of fallen into this pattern primarily because it was the easiest way to gather a signal from a large amount of people or a large amount of holders um that you believe are some way invested in the outcome of this decision and that it happened kind of almost by default as a way to easily signal large groups and now we've seen that kind of pitfalls and kind of collusion as well as um just general social norms that coined writing produces it's fundamentally plutocratic governance um so i think as we think

more about tokens as um separate kind of unbundling them from voting rights um we can look at them as kind of one person one vote and other governance rights um and also basically yeah plus coin voting is cheap civil resistance so there's questions of how we design civil resistance and other things into basic um kind of voting systems and whether it's token design of thinking through tokens as governance rights but also thinking through tokens as something potentially very different not even reputation something else that like doesn't exist or doesn't have a kind of clear analog in our current political systems i'm really excited to see what could come from there and yeah the general forms of decision making that that produces between private voting and

kind of non-coin voting alternatives on cheaper chains um will be amazing yeah i'd mirror that really excited to see kind of secret voting start to uh start to take off start to be more accessible uh hopefully we can help uh we have a really strong desire to help you know fix that problem help uh help kind of bring that into the world i think the other thing that i'm excited about is what i talked about at the start like this this design space of uh having desired outcomes be they can have an emergent result of uh uncoordinated inputs uh so mechanisms like quadratic funding uh that enable that across a variety of different contexts

so really excited to see that design space kind of take off see what other problems people are able to solve without resorting to kind of explicit coordination around those problems we we see a lot of discussion in the uh the dow space about kind of defeating molech and and usually people's suggestions to defeating moloch means stacking more coordination on top of on top of situations or solutions which is kind of paradoxical because obviously molecules the god of coordination failure you know so the more the more kind of layers of coordination you have the more opportunity there is for failure of that coordination and so i

think like designing systems that explicitly uh require uncoordinated inputs uh or kind of create the outcome that you want from uncoordinated inputs is uh is is the real key to us actually defeating moloch yeah i'd like to add a short thing to that i think it's really interesting um i think also and a little bit less of a kind of automated um approach but still really relevant if you look at earlier tools for online voting like lumio per se that were developed by a kind of decentralized network of people um it was funny chatting with the lumio co-founder um rob because he said basically he considers kind of voting like the last-ditch attempt at a group

of people to come to consensus like if you have to actually take something to a vote it means that there's um basically dissenses among the group uh so by i love the framing of like uncoordinated inputs and the kind of potential actions also i think there's too much emphasis potentially put on a coordination problem because coordination can lead to equally ill ends um so basically how like we need more tools to come to kind of coherent cultural consensus and then explicitly make those actions happen and there doesn't always need to be a vote or explicit kind of formal recognition in between that except in the kind of historical lens of how that decision came to be so i really appreciate more fuzziness brought into kind of um

decentralized autonomous systems to come that's that's a really that's really interesting and a great note to uh to end on and um but before we before we go um where can people find out more about uh gnosis guild and zodiac and all the tools that you've built and um yeah just get get more involved with everything that you guys are doing sure so you can find us uh on twitter at no says guilds and we also have a blog nososcale.mirror.xyz where we publish about the products we're updating as well as just general thoughts on dows and coordination um we're also in the midst of working on a nosa skills wiki which will house basically all of our product

documentation and our approach but also have a section of the wiki that aims to collate a lot of dao best practices or kind of a dao pattern language of basically how people if they find themselves in certain situations with those eg um you know your job is at this size you're using these tools what are good patterns and voting tools and decision making mechanisms you can use and we'd actually like to open up this wiki to other community contributors in the ecosystem at large so if that sounds like a project that any listener is interested in definitely get in touch about that and it'll be allowed soon great and we'll link to all that and your fantastic writing in the show notes aaron and kia thanks so much for joining me today it's been a

fascinating conversation and uh hope to have you on again at some point cheers thanks for having us sebastian thank you super lovely