Building a P2P DEX as a DAO

Transcript

my name is don masitis i am a founder and contributor at airswap this afternoon i'll be talking about the uh the current setup we have at airswap was launched in 2017 and um last year shifted into a dow for lack of a better term in 2021. airswap itself is a simple idea that decentralized exchange is essential and um peer-to-peer swaps are an excellent approach both for over-the-counter otc trading and as automated rfq or request for quote networks both using the same protocols and both fully decentralized airswap itself is owned and built by an

open source vibrant development community that is aligned on a simple mission to build and champion peer-to-peer trading technology so what is it that brings us together first let's paint a picture the metaverse that we've all been talking about is already here a set of technologies that enables the virtual to become the primary reality and it's full of missions missions coordinate collaboratives to build software create art play games effect change you can tune into and out of missions as often or often or as little as you like contribute a lot or a little

while retaining full control over your time and attention as you navigate and contribute to missions you level up your skills you earn compensation and achievements developing your ever evolving digital resume as an immutable record of the work that you've done this is your portable metaverse identity and it's uniquely enabled by decentralized technologies so how do we achieve this and what does it unlock this does mean good morning everywhere in the world um but it's more than a greeting gm is a sign on it is to say that you are online and

ready to fly the winds of the metaverse what do we need to get to where we want to be we need missions that enable anonymity meaning anyone can join from any place in the world using any identity meritocracy that is power to the builders the people that are actually providing value minimize trust that is pleasant surprises only and minimized friction to allow anyone to come and go with ease and this is within the context of sharing financial outcomes to actually come in um be able to do cool work with cool people and to actually earn for your efforts with as many uh with minimum

friction as possible so what's helped me think through this and i'd like to introduce theory in economics which is the principal agent theory which is also in other fields but essentially as productive online communities in our case a principal is an entity that controls funds and agents are those that actually carry out the work at the will of the principal a principal can be public or private a private that is anyone can purchase or acquire a token and participate in a vote that impacts the principle and therefore the work that's going to be done or a principle could be private that is

there could be a multi-signature wallet of owners that are collectively making decisions for the principal agents are the ones that actually doing the work are individuals or groups also represented by a single or multi-signature wallet which is how they actually earn further efforts generally you want your principal and agents to be as aligned as closely as aligned as closely as possible to ensure that each is working in the interest of the other and in some cases they can be the same people which is the case in our example so say you are a group of friends that you have some developers and designers

a product manager potentially marketer community manager and you can imagine a product or a feature defi protocol something that you believe is going to potentially generate fees something that people pay for a subscription the group of contributors that are going to be building this piece of software can form a multi-signature wallet where the contributors are the owners and in effect the agents are the principal so the interests are completely shared which then after you have developed the product and it starts to generate fees or subscriptions actually streams to the wallet instead of allowing people direct access

to those funds you could introduce a collective assessment process that allows your group of friends for a certain period of time to weigh the contributions of each other and that weight would be used to claim a reward commensurate to your actual impact which is very helpful for people say that you know you could have bi-weekly sprints or something and this one's more design heavy development heavy somebody was offline or on vacation so on any given epoch you could actually have uh people that are contributing more or less and so if you consider this

minimum viable dow which is enabling anonymous people to collaborate on financial outcomes then it's actually quite straightforward at airswap our setup is a little bit different we have a public principle which is a voting community airswap was launched in 2017 with a token and that token was at the time and is still used by market makers to announce their intent to trade certain tokens on the network but now by staking the airswap token you are also able to participate in votes and contribute to the direction of the project and we have contributors that include designers and

developers and pms and marketers and the like all kinds of folks who are working on protocols and products to achieve our mission in our case we have incentives for both contributors and voters protocol fees are streamed into a smart contract split out to contributors and to voters let's check out the architecture diagram quickly so in the center you can see the maybe you can't but there's a swap contract in the center where the trading protocol that kind of exists in the top right left all of the trades that go through the system actually are assessed with the protocol fee that go to a converter that splits

converts the the fees sends to contributors for the contributions through a process facilitated by a tool called coordinate by the urine community and another portion goes to a pool which is actually supporting the voting community for their time and effort in understanding proposals and voting on them and being a part of that process and that is facilitated by a product called codify activate by consensus and snapshot on the back end i believe we were one of the first communities using snapshot so how do we actually stay productive we have a structure that includes the ability to

make collective decisions bring on anonymous contributors our process for actually designing developing and delivering software includes four primary activities the the first is direction anyone can come in and actually contribute to the ideation and prioritization of work design we have lots of brilliant designers that work on visual design ux ui have done user research development those who are actually building and securing our protocols and products and delivery those who are connecting and welcoming

users integrations customers etc basically the outside world when a newcomer joins our community or drops into the discord or checks out the website you can actually select one or more of these activities to get looped into that that that that cycle and it all starts with a swap so airswap was i believe the first token swapping ui before the influx in the last few years but it has it has remained so and we continue to iterate on it the uh the community um cinch launching the dow has actually produced the um the most recent version of the protocols v3 just a couple of months ago and a new

primary website that is the center of new feature development for the community so there's all kinds of new stuff coming out now which is great behind the scenes or rather directly in front um we actually found a cool tool called gather which allows different teams to kind of drop into a space and like hang out around a table and chat about what we're working on just like you would in an office which has been really cool but i think this actually emphasizes the idea that productive teams actually do have kind of a comfortable size and on the left i believe is a developer sync on the right i think is a delivery sink

between eight and ten folks coming in at any given time um i think that actually structurally for us in the future these groups would actually establish their own private principle that is the developer squad would kind of have their own multi-sig wallet they would actually be able to make their own decisions about how their funds are used and they would be able to enlist not just themselves as first party contributors or agents but also third parties um so we would include uh the the public principle that we have which is driven by token holders and potentially to private principles for each main contributor group

so how's it been going since the launch last year the network has seen over 1.8 billion in volume with over 1.86 million in protocol fees distributed to participants in the decentralized governance process and to contributors 50-plus proposals have been implemented by 30-plus contributors maybe more entirely new protocols and gorgeous new products that have been built and delivered historically airswap has been recognized by st louis fed as the leading peer-to-peer trading protocol the mit technology review as protocol designed to survive and the stanford journal on blockchain

law and policy so with our current setup we've been able to achieve a lot and foresee many bright bright years ahead so a door is always open we welcome you to come by and drop us a gm let's build something that's entirely and uniquely enabled by decentralized technologies i personally believe that what we're working on is very important in terms of the actual peer-to-peer trading infrastructure and the tooling and protocols we're building but also the way that we work and the designs of the systems that are enabling us to collect

all kinds of people around the world to share in a mission and collectively rip the rewards so we may end up unlocking together a torrent of creativity um and may even find a new life form thank you [Applause] happy to take any questions or you can grab me anytime must've been very clear thank you have a great afternoon everyone

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