How to Scale a DAO

Transcript

so hello everyone my name is juan i joined maker dao a while ago after listening to a podcast by mariano conte and i started joining the forum and then the calls and the rest is history right now i'm a core unit facilitator at ses i think it sounds not great in the center that's what i heard but i promise that it's good so i am a korean facilitator at scs which means that i'm a point of contact between the makers our governance and this independent core unit and what se stands for is sustainable consistent scaling our mention is pretty much scaling the

dow and we do this by helping decentralize and remove barriers between the the work what needs to be done the people and the capital so before we get into what we do at maker and how we're there let's do a very brief history so the the objective of the foundation was always to to get to critical mass build a product which was mcd for multi-collateral diet and finally hand this to governors right so so the community can have the actual governance and the power to do that back in december we had the single collateral die which was the prototype then we finally launched the product

which was a multi-collateral die then the product started scaling so that went quite well for us and this year we had a lot of uh great very interesting news so the micro foundation announced that they were dissolving and returning the 84k mkr to the to the dawah with that in place what happened is that we started uh seeing a lot of these core units which are like guilds or teams being on-boarded to maker and what that means is that the protocol is actually funding them and these are chosen or elected by governance so by the community so where we are today um maker is one of the biggest

decentralized projects i don't want to to offend anyone but with numbers so this is a bit what we're at right so we have around 44 million in opex for for core units so that's how much money we're we're spending on on the different core units we have 87 direct contributors and that scaling as we speak there are a bunch of multiple units that are going to be onboarded now maker has some 40 million in profit that changes a bit with the with time the stability piece and whatnot and there's still a bunch of mkr that's being burned with the once the stability once the surface flapper is actually

filled so yeah the mips that's our framework what we put in place to make sure that governance could control this as of today we have 41 approved nips that's almost 7000 lines of approved processes that we that we follow for governance and again they're more coming to alleviate governance we we launched this delegation system not long ago so we have the delegates we have seven that are recognized so publicly available and seven shadow delegates which are anonymous so that went quite well it almost doubled the voting power overnight and almost tripled i think

so that was really really good for us and something that i wanted to talk about too is that scs has this incubator program so that what we do is that we have different teams and the objective is to is that they become independent core units funded by the by the governance so uh not long ago we had the first successful core unit being launched after this program the ses incubator which is the dark score unit focused mainly on on ux and governance right and yeah again we have more in process more coming we'd love to discuss that later as well and speaking of the core units these core units are independent teams completely funded by

the by the protocol and again elected by by governance we have 14 approved uh three were rejected and three are up to vote again as of today this is a list of all the core units that we have we try to group them even if they know folk specifically meets category but that's what we have and um and yeah some of them are very technical like protocol engineer or of course and some of them focus more on growth business development real world finance and what we wanted to discuss today is what happens once that you have this this growth

what are some of the challenges that we may encounter and how we do we solve for this for these challenges so again i already mentioned the the governance bandwidth the job goes that it's a full-time job to keep up with the makeup forum nowadays and it's it's probably a bit true it takes a lot of time to investigate everything there's a mid volume there's little knowledge technical knowledge that adds to that or unique coordination um so how do we how do we tackle these these challenges one that we wanted to focus on was the rising operating costs so these core units and this amount of people

means that the protocol is spending a lot of money to actually be able to to keep up and to attract the talent to retain it so there are different things that we've been working on again we're researching and we are building tools we're doing different things one of the things that we're focusing on is the core unit reporting so this reporting needs to improve a lot uh right now we we have different ways of doing it each korean has a different way but it needs to be a homogeneous process and that's ideally machine readable so anyone can pull them and and have these different i don't know probably layers or uis to

to work around that and finally needs to be automated so we're speaking with different projects different um external projects to make a dao to see if we can use some software or different types of software to to get there i mentioned already the the governance overheads so the delegates is a step in the right direction but it's definitely not enough and we are thinking about different core units that could monitor evaluate and learn and almost works as yeah not employees from the from the delegates but be able to help them and assist them in doing different types of research um the other one that's a bit more

[Music] applicable to the davos more than any other companies the the competition right so when you bring in more competition and more core units um you improve the quality but also you get redundancy so if one of these core units fail uh you have the other one that's almost ready to take over and again we can spend hours speaking about regulation and how to how to do that but that's probably a topic for later and [Music] probably the greatest solution is to increase revenues so in the case of maker we do that by issuing more dive and getting the fees from the stability piece so [Music] that's the obvious one the next one that we wanted to discuss

is the quality control so it's uh it's actually a challenge that i feel that most dials are facing today um so con the quality is not always the best you have different contributors doing different things and and ideally the dow gets the best that they can get for their for the money right so the first one that we're working on and we do this a lot in ses is building frameworks and making sure that different groups or different core units have like guardrails and and are there another solutions and and tools to be able to to work and to focus on what they do best

another one very important that we're working on is a separation of power so a bit like like a government or like a republic we want to make sure that we have a specific people uh riding these mips or loss for us people that are making sure that they are executed in the right way and of course people that are there to to do something if it's not executed the way it should be so we're trying to to build that in a decentralized manner and it's uh it's definitely something that keeps us up at night and then the the last three boxes that are a bit there on the side that they're quite important it's about governance and operations um

we have a lot of legal challenges that we're going to discuss more in detail we have anything else to do with budgeting with communication how to scale any type of marketing so so that's uh that's quite important for us and the things that sds is working on as well speaking about legal um there are a lot of things that we're seeing and discussing in the in the real world and how do we bridge this uh the dao with the with any type of government or we need any type of physical person that wants to contribute for that there are also things of ip intellectual property making sure that everything's under control

liability what happens if anything goes wrong regulations economic damage legal counsel so all these are super interesting questions that need to be solved in a way or another unless you go completely anonymous and no one knows who you ever are but that's probably not what most people want to do about that so what have we done regarding this the first thing that we did was the dye foundation so that foundation is completely independent for uni so it's a foundation who's whose objective is closer is that better

yeah so okay thank you so what i was saying the die foundation is is an independent [Music] foundation and it's so objective or mandate is to protect the ip from maker so anyone that creates anything for maker could donate the ip to that foundation and they would protect them to do that they have a core unit whose sole objective is to bridge the funding from the dao to the to the foundation um so that was a good step that we took last year and the other thing that we're working on so scs has a legal team there are right now two permanent

members and we are working also with the external contributors through grants and some cross down collaboration but one of the main things we're working on is a legal self-insurance fund so what happens if any of the contributors of maker has any type of legal problem should the dow cover for that or not who should be covered how much in which jurisdictions et cetera so those are things that we are researching right now and then yes i was mentioning the ses legal we're doing a lot of studies about jurisdictions feasibility studies and a bunch of research that's quite interesting and

we are continuing continuously publishing and we'll publish more very very soon so the i think is the last challenge that we wanted to discuss and is how you redefine a vision right so the current mission it was to scale that as a world currency and this was true until almost a month ago for me that the objective was clear is how do we make uh how do we mean more diet how do we make sure that people are using more diet there seem to be really clear ways forward one of them was real world assets of course it's bridging it with the real economy and the other one is anything that has it with derivatives market and this was great and i was sleeping

well at night until roon which is the previous ceo or this yeah the xeo of the of the foundation of the maker foundation post this very famous slash infamous post about making diet clean money so making sure that everything that has to do with the debt comes from green projects and green initiatives again we can get into this for four hours and discuss it over coffee but basically since money is always that you could choose to have a good debt in your pocket so do we want to we want to die to be that type of currency there are a lot of things a lot of

challenges that stem out of that so it's how do we how do we tackle those right one of them could be hire a hundred product managers and make sure that we were able to do that the other one is well is the vision what every single mkr holder wants if not how to make sure that that's right and what are the specifics how can we get there and make sure that everything is uh online and it's actually clean money and not just screen washing well we have find an impact vehicle as i was commenting before so what we need to do of it is do a lot of research attract talent and make sure that we are

on the right path to to do what the mkr holders actually want so steering the future um what we're really looking forward to now it's having a purpose driven down we want the diet to be one of the major currencies out there but having a purpose and making sure that there's something behind that and that we're doing some good to the world that's uh that's very important to us as well again how do we do that there's a bunch of things that we're working on between research grants the incubation program uh and everything that we try to do every single conversation that we try to have um and and that's yeah that's that's

pretty much it that's what we we're trying to do that's what ses is trying to do uh if you want to have a chat later or if you want to join virtually for maker now the forum.maker.com that's the url that's the mips if you want to check them out on our voting platform and if you want to see specifically what we're doing at scs join us at ses.maker.network or our discord and that's it thank you very much