DappCon 2023: Decentralised Governance for a Decentralised Secured Network - Raul Calvo

Transcript

okay thank you very much everyone for coming here and joining me to explain you a little bit about uh the current situation of Le taking especially concerning governance and why we do believe that we need a uh decentralized governance approach and we have to incentivize that speaking a little bit about the whole system and how we have confronted the challenges that it poses um so I'm just going to speak a little bit well first brief introduction about myself and obviously I had to explain you a little bit what are we doing H why I'm here speaking and moreover I mean I

think of all the points that I want you to H I want to touch today is why is this important for the whole ecosystem H who I am my name is R calvo obviously H I'm coming from Spain if maybe you you have fa it by my be beautiful accent um I please don't expect me to speak a lot or a ton about technical details because I'm antonial profession before joining web 3 or the web 3 environment I used to be a corporate attorney I used to set up corporate structures International structures and I used to advise and I still advising family offic investing in

crypto currencies H yes to feel a little bit about the mindset about the whole Diva team or the the people that has been behind Diva doing all the same I end up in Diva and in all this project because I was engaged by some ether ois and I was involved already in the ecosystem participating in projects so a one of the main things that I want you to or I want to transmit is that we are working on Diva to be a common good we never thought about it like a a commercial project somehow on even a commercial opportunity and we always face it as a as a common good for everyone so what is

Eva although I already spoke about it a little bit um is a leg seeking protocol the main difference of the main ER thing that set us apart to all options around there is that we are fullly integ we are a fully DVT integrated solution um although there are the projects are working there and they are presenting DVT as a separate solution of a middleware as all SSB we in Diva we think that it has to be an end to endend in order for everything to make sense because if we want kind of to fit in DBT within a another Ling protocol what we are going to get is uh not the optimal solution in terms of toonomic in terms

of the economic environment and in terms of efficiency at the end of the day because we always think AA as a software tool but the thing is that software tool needs to be as efficient as possible in order to be attractive um one of the main things that I think that also stand us apart is that most of the projects that you can see around there is like a bunch of Team putting together because they want to be competitive and thinking in the sense that like a okay we are going to launch this we are going to make this H app or we are going to do to make this protocol because we think that is going to be something attractive for the users in our case

it's a little bit different because it was a bunch of really ogs people who was in eum at the very beginning uh or people who was engag in sein that we're thinking on how can we improve the caran ecosystem okay we were on that on the verge of migrating from ethereum one to ethereum 2 or whatever you want to call it and we were thinking okay how can we improve this and make something that works better for everyone actually the idea to end up in a sort of project or H the way that we have ended up even our fun drives round it was more kind of aneg solution to validate a way in the market than H to think of it as

from a commercial point of view this is truly a a a really open source project in the wide sense of the word um and the second thing that I think set us apart a little bit is that we truly believe that validation not just a taking but validation that thing that put you with a machine and helping H make ethereum in this case more secure H needs to be accessible to everyone uh this is one of the core ideas behind our project and we really want that to be one of our core values if not the core value of the

project and and you can say okay this is all nice words we are talking about a common goods open sourcing something for everyone but why is this relevant okay the the S answer as everything in that has is related with theum is because vitalic say so that is a okay I don't want to give an explanation vitalik has been advocating for a making a shing accessible to everyone validation should be kind of accessible to everyone he has certain out about Li sing and he thinks that it needs to be controlled somehow uh because it Canute the network but at the end of the day

he's always advocating for the people to get involved in the ecosystem so so answer because Al say so but what I said one but TR to be told is not in it is not just because vitalic say so H it is because at the end of the day what we want or the people who has been engaged in ethereum for a certain period of time we want this network to be successful and also the networks within the ethereum ecosystem such as Noy chain or other chains that have been in ecosystem and share the same us as ethereum H we know that mea sensorship assistant network is

vital if you are not sensorship resistant you lose all the credibility and you are not useful as a public good um also another relevant point is that liquid sing we always H tend to speak about liid sing as defi or some kind of a new defi level and no we are talking about core infrastructure within the e ecosystem we are not doing I don't know leverage a sing or any other thing what sorry H we are not doing leverage of Sten or any other thing that may lead us to think that this is just an economic tool H we are doing core infrastructure this is a software that

is going to help ethereum to become more resilient and more ER actually more useful for everyone um and the last thing is that leging or in any sense a aing pools is and is known to be considered one of the best or the most used cases within the this new stake in economy of the this new sther whoop this is moving a lot okay H what the the networks are the the risk that the network May face

obviously the regulatory risk I think we all have seen H the risk that we are facing with a tala cash ER now open like three days ago four days ago I mean regat actown on teams that are building open source software is true I mean it's a reality it's not something that we are creating and it's very real so if a regulator thinks that e needs to be control I think we can give it for granted that they will do anything at disposal to try to control ethereum so we have to I mean to do something about it obviously I mean the other two major risk uh I think

are well known by everyone is someone who is willing to attack the network because wants to make some profit ER maybe validation is not the best way to approach or to make a profit out of it but it's something on the table if you can reorganized so you can say that you the transactions obviously there are ton of money to set out of there and there are always other attacks like just people that wants to prove that they can make the things for other thing let I don't know maybe a bunch of Solan Maxis they want to attack ethereum and to prove that ethereum is not that resilient and they decide to do something to to harm the network it is important and again I'm coming back to our ethos as a project

that we have and I truly believe that we have to en theorize that we are not just working in any in other area within I don't know sway development the ecosystem or in a global environment I don't know whatever we we and this is something that I honestly think we really have a chance to make a difference and to set an infrastructure that anybody can use and that should be uh something that is taken as a duty for everyone one that is working in this ecosystem like okay we are not here just to make money or just because we are thinking that is a nice way to I don't know improve our lives of our careers we really have a once in a

lifetime chance to set up a difference for everyone and maybe you think that this is absurd okay I'm doing a really small protocol within the whole e ecosystem but any little piece any a little bit that we can give to the community and to help to make this a solid ground for everybody to use and help to build public goods so be done and not because we just want to extract some profit out of it it's because we have to we we are committed by the trust that the people is putting on us to build something better um when we ased Diva we obviously I mean

as everybody else I was saying we were coming from the ecosystem already so we're looking around what was out there and what we found and I think this is obviously well known by everyone is that the L Market H was already almost monopolized by one actor H actually when we start thinking about Diva there were two main actors so there were two main actors H lier and centralized exchanges participating in somehow Le s and in terms of uh governance what we have seen is uh we analyze the the competition out there we analyze all the other protocols and we

have seen is h two different approaches of chain governance we tends to be EAS for everyone kind of to participate on it but at the end of the day generally it depends on Multi at that is controlling H behind and there are certain centralization risk or at least is what we detected and unchain governance we tends to be a little bit more decentralized in a sense because uh you are not relying that much in multi or something that is being executed um uh but the thing is what we have seen is that the things that were before us they they took certain H architecture decisions when implementing

that oent governance to solve the problems that were there at that time and maybe not thinking that much about that centralization risk they were more thinking on on safety of the users at the end on the resiliency of the protocol but uh that leave us an onchain governance with a myriad of committees multi oracles and cross dependencies that at the end of the day prudiz the a whole governance system um in terms of mar um Market diversity something that has been H pretty popular last days has been self-limiting the

self-limitation and actually is been debate in our own community in the diva Community ER is kind of the main approach there has been a strong debate late and a strong debate lately H about uh shall we a limit uh do we have to take this path or not and I always say to me it's extremely easy to say yes I mean why not let's self limit but truth to be told is either myself or anyone within my situation which is advocating for self limitation uh we are we are not holding that position in the market actually once Lio has say that they are not

self-limiting themselves okay we are going to commit to self limit but it is like the P so here okay we are a couple of kids trying to aim for Giants and try to self liit something that maybe I'm going to achieve in years um so yeah self limitation but if the leader of the market is not self limiting itself I mean there's nothing we can do on that front the we why and again I don't think this is a good or bad position I totally understand the Li's point of view or Lio community Point of View ER one the reasoning is that this is a market that

winner take most so they are saying okay most probably there is going to be one major actor within the ecosystem who is kind of control everything and if somebody has to be that actor why not myself that at the end of the day we are well intended we are mostly decentralizing the in the governance and at different layers so it's kind of I'm safe guard Regard in the whole ethereum ecosystem against other agents which maybe do not share the ethereum ethos as ourselves like I don't know coinbase or centralized exchanges so my personal take is yeah I mean I can of agree with their point of

view from a free of Market or from a laboral point of view I don't think that economies need to be intervene or the players in the market need to be intervene somehow if ER and I mean at the end of the day I don't think that is a net positive result for for a market but just to be told H I don't like a monistic market either if we are ethereum we or if ethereum becomes a market with just one single actor in one single sector of One Core infrastructure for the whole ethereum ecosystem we are fully dependent on that single actor so okay from maybe a ideological point of view I can agree with that

but when it comes to reality of the market I will say okay maybe something should be done you know I cannot to limit that ER that persp that perspective and last um I honestly and this is my myself as a lawyer talking here I don't really buy the idea of okay one centralized actor is going to geiz the whole environment because all the centralized actors are not ER really want to get into the ER into the regulatory exposure that is going to give us if they kind of control ethereum somehow I'm going to speed up a little bit because I um so we

tackle from the point of view of decentralized governance so we are not kind of self-limited Market we cannot enforce to other players in the market to self-limit themselves we as kind of put our best in self-limit ourselves and hope for the best to uh for the the for the rest to the the same as us so the thing that we can tole and that we can push others to tole is H to adopt a more decentralized approach in in governance and in our case what we did is to we set a plan based on three different points to tackle the the decentralization taking into account that at the end of the day

ER if we are launching a new protocol as ourselves you don't have to believe that the that community that fully decentralized Community is going to to be around and to ER be created from one day to the other they tend to follow people nobody wants to take the lead so we had to find kind of a middle ground to kind of push the people to get together and to H from that community that was going to take ultimately care of maintaining the diva protocol the our plan and or the three accepts our plan was based in in these three pillars which is let's create that Community from the ground app by selecting the people that has been involved in other

communities so they are mature enough kind of to take the lead within the community without needed us and terms of architecture we have seen that other people were taking decisions based on other thinking not just in setting up the decentralization from the very beginning uh maybe it's because in our case as I'm a lawyer and I've been insisting and pushing the team too much to kind of distribute at least the risk on setting up something out in a wild we are taking certain architectural decisions from a different point of view and uh first but not less important at the core contributors that were at the very beginning with the da protocol we truly believe that we have

kind of to step down a little bit and to H take the community Take the Lead it's not that they don't want the people to follow us we really want the people kind of to take the lead and help to take care of the protocol and the software that we are open sourcing and that we are giving to the poing good and the way that we are doing I spoke a little bit about this uh before is we have chosen the best people that we can found about there and in terms of Technical Solutions so something that we have given to the market we just changed a couple of line of codes within kind of the standard government contract and we created a de facto two token model any software developer here is going to say

okay you are not creating a two token model because it's going to be just one token with a different property I buy that but from a legal point of view the moment that a governor doesn't recognize a token that has not been delegated like in our case we are creating a def facto two token model because only the tokens are delegated count in terms of participated in governance um it seems to be working so far I'm going to speed up because I just have 10 seconds but it seems to be working so far I think we are on our way to achieve our goals to cre a solid Community a solid decentralized Community H in terms of the different points uh as you have seen I'm coming

with a te of Diva a t of samil laabs I don't have a bracelet of the H St Foundation yet but as you as you have it we are really decentralizing from the very beginning before releasing the protocol to mainnet and let's try to finish here H we want to improve a ton of things we are relaying too heavily in delegation because it's the only way kind of to get a community together at the very beginning at the early stage but we want kind of to make it more decentralized not rely that much on delegators H we are working extremely hard in creating a diversified geographical distribution of our validators of of all the validators this taking Foundation is running or is working actually in running programs to

H push the decentralization from a geographical point of view and our core value is we want the average user anyone ER without almost any technical knowledge to be able to become an etherum validator I just run out of time so jumping on the recup and thank you everyone for hearing me r l bit thank you Raul thank you Raul we we have a few minutes uh for questions yeah over here yes

Mona can you talk about uh the governance and curation process uh you touched on a bit and um what the strengths are um because obviously governance is quite a difficult thing to get right these days um like would' love to hear a little bit about the design yes I mean actually H the design well first of all thank you very much for your question um in terms of design is nothing that Innovative I mean the biggest difference that we have introduced is that we have kind of separated H instead of taking into account all the tokens ER in in terms of governance H so the generally is what it happens on all the projects

generally the founders early investors they have a kind of a leverage power over the governance so they can they can take over the governance at a certain point of time we have divided sa way between delegated and non- delegated tokens in terms of governance just delegated tokens are taken into account in order to delegate you have to carry out an onchain transaction pretty simple um so I was mentioning is just changing a couple of line of codes uh of code sorry um what is the thing that as long as uh we are either the co-founders their investors we are not delegating our tokens which is something that anybody can see on chain we are kind of limiting our influence over the

whole ecosystem we are refining to take any participation on delegating the token so far and so actually and I think is this graph one of the good things that we have have got er I mean doing this is that all that people that is there ER is people who were somehow a drop it with a token so it's people from other communities and as you can see Spirit distributed one of the things that we want to improve and I was saying is a delegation model although we are taking that delegation model because at the very beginning especially the people is not that active and they then they rather prefer to delegate into someone

is something that we want kind of to H push a little bit towards a more decentralized approach in the at a later stage thank you so much R that's that's time for us and we'll keep it moving here in about one minute thank you ra give him a round of [Applause] applause