Launching & Coordinating Decentralised Governance

Transcript

hello friends we are currently coordinating microphones but we are not good so the panel today is basically about launching dows um and launching and then coordinating humans and so basically um these are three amazing humans from three amazing dows and i am from fire eyes dow and so i thought today we would like have some interesting discussion on on what we think about dows collectively so the first thing the first question to open it up is what is the favorite so you know launching the dow and going through the steps that you guys have done what's like your favorite part or like a unique story that you guys have from your individual like decentralized governance or launching or coordinating your dow that is like your favorite

one-line pitch of coordination um well uh we actually don't have a dow at the graph we have a graph council is the main governance it's a 6-10 multi-sig we have external core dev teams that all contribute so the initial team that built the graph is just one of many teams and we have a really vibrant grants program which funds uh hundreds of individual projects and individuals to contribute to the ecosystem so for us it's really been a process of progressive decentralization where we've you know really enfranchised all of the contributors to participate and make

sure that they get rewarded uh proportional to their contributions and uh and that's allowed us to be really effective in this process of decentralization i think i guess this is like uh just one moment but it was a funny moment um when we decided back in 2020 that we were going to shut down our foundation we had to like break it to our lawyers um and we were on a call with them and we're like so we're gonna get rid of all of our entities and there was this pause for like 30 seconds and they were just like what in the [ __ ] are you even talking about and we're like no no like trust it's gonna work we're just gonna shut all of our entities down and they were like this is insane but it took us about

like i think two or three months to like get their heads around it and like get them to a point where they're like okay you may be you're still insane but like we'll let you do it um but it was it was just a really funny moment where they were like what have we gotten ourselves into um i would say not the funniest moment but like the greatest car unit we have right now car units are like these groups that provide services to the dao so actually we had the strategic happiness career unit and it is a managed by andrew a guy from the community who just thought okay maker is so serious you all agree that maker is

super serious right so he wants to bring memes and happiness and spread the joy between the community and the tao in general so that's awesome i'm super happy to have a career in it that helped us to be not so serious so let's like let's go into that you know so that idea of like happiness is like if you know if you work at a normal company and it's like a big tower in new york it's like you go to work every day and you sort of don't like the people you work with it's like bad vibes you know hopefully what we're actually building here is more peaceful and open and fun a lot of the time right so you know thinking about again being in like three pretty different places when it comes to like the decentralization or the defication

like what do you guys do as founders and contributors to like try and do that so when you're on a call like if someone sees something kind of not fun or not like bad vibes would you call that out or like how would you deal with your community not being as nice or fun as as you would like as a founder when you guys well as founders and as you know contributors how would you deal with that we curate all of the community calls uh because we have like a lot of different participants we want to make sure we make you know the most use of that time so for us i think uh you know people do the work kind of ahead of time and then on the calls we're just kind of just getting through everything so i think we're having fun but we're also

getting a lot done i think our culture mainly came from discord so you know through uh the bear market that was kind of one of the only cool places to hang out um and there was just like a vibe of like no one cares people don't give a [ __ ] like you know a lot of memes and just dumb stuff and so when we started formalizing governance and bringing community members in uh that kind of carried over but we definitely have had periods where we've had people on the council that were maybe a little bit too serious and i think it's like kind of self-policing right like you need the other people to sort of have a conversation with them and be like all right like chill out you're like being a little bit aggressive or whatever but you know it's coordination right

like people just need to like work together and make sure that everyone's kind of getting along as best that they can um but you know for me i try not to step in and be like hey don't do this or do this or whatever it's kind of up to the community to set the standards it's it's an interesting question because uh we have some like a group that moderates the conversation in the forum that is like the main tool we use in the dao but sometimes you can perceive that moderation could be censorship so it's kind of complicated like we all have got discussions in the forum and we try to be very respect respectful with others ideas sometimes like of course there are

trolls like uh recently there was a proposal in the forum from olympus dao and a lot of people who usually is not in the forum just came in and was just like trolling uh in the in the conversation so yeah you you know when someone is not part of the community that happens and but yeah we have a like a gov alpha group that is helping us moderating the discussion interesting and so like that was actually like three pretty different answers right in terms of like curating community calls and being like really purposeful with who's in the room and how it's been discussed you know and

then sort of like yellowing it and not really clear and sort of letting the ideas flow naturally and then sort of like a middle ground of you know wanting to yolo it but also being conscious of you know i mean we're all conscious but sort of a middle ground and so like do we do we think that we have different rooms in the future where maybe you have like a curated community call where people can listen everyone can listen but not everyone can speak and then you have a full yolo community call like should we should we be building different rooms for different people or should it just be always be one room totally yeah i mean i think the the tooling for dao is super immature um it's awesome like you know at lisbon i'm already talking to so many different teams that are building dow tooling and

things like just how you manage your community calls can be way improved like we shouldn't be doing the stuff on zoom shouldn't be doing the stuff on discord it should be a lot more fluid how you create these rooms how you create like permissioning whether it's token based or like contributions based um being able to actually like get credit for stuff that you're doing on the calls so yeah i think we should be designing like all new experiences and make it you know more fun and fluid i think for synthetics uh we've had this idea of like what is a legitimate process right within decentralized governance and what is not a legitimate process and so uh you know when we started off we had all of these uh kind of vestigial elements from the

foundation era where there was a group of people that had authority to do things and they kind of maintained that authority just by like the status quo it was just kind of momentum and so kind of picking those things apart and saying okay for our community calls like who has who has a legitimate role like who is legitimately allowed to uh to interact and who's not um has been something that we've tried to like leave up to the community but it is a bit challenging sometimes to like work out like it should it be the core contributors who are doing this should it be you know people on the council should it be any community member can say whatever they want um i think it has to be a bit of an organic process but it's it's definitely challenging yeah i think it's the same for us it's

an organic process and it's always evolving we are a dao and we are open to any proposal from the community and sometimes a proposal can like be to to change how things are being are done and that's okay if a maker holder support that idea we are well we have to go in that direction so it's an it's an always ongoing process yeah and i think what you want ideally is is to start with you know a process that's really open so that anybody can contribute and like if you have hundreds or thousands of people that are like part of your down you still want them to be able to like get into rooms talk have

discussions but then you know attention is finite and limited so having like curation mechanisms where you can kind of you know pull the best ideas in and still kind of you know curate down the line but you know open participation and then curation there's actually two things that i want to talk about but that made me think about one of so something that we're doing at fireeyes is being really conscious of it's really cool to be launching governance and tokens but if it's just you know four of us doing it it's actually not that cool and pretty centralized and so like going into the next year thinking about how we can build like fire eyes university right or like fire spawn or whatever we come up with like basically like a yc model for people inside of governance and one idea you know thinking about that curation is

um actually kyle from get coin uh said that like what they did at twitter was they would have these like open meetings where like a pre-agenda or like a large document would be like circulated to everyone everyone would throw in as like the whole community would comment and make threads and discuss and then like a curate curated group of people would come on and like actually talk about those comments and go through it and like get to new conclusions so you know like thinking about your daos and like the way that you communicate and coordinate you know do you guys have any other cool ideas like that that we can like start to implement as a wider ecosystem so that again you can have that curation but you can still have like a completely open yolo experience i think the loudest voice should should

always win yeah no i mean i i think i think that's that's the trick there there is a fundamental trade-off there so um you know i think uh you know it can be you know multiple stages you can have like some call so we have a community call where like anybody can speak and we're trying to actually get more engagement and then we have you know governance calls and like other calls that are just a lot more curated um and uh yeah i think it helps to separate it i think you know one one of the things that we did early on uh in synthetics was we made a decision in discord to have basically no moderation right which was was a controversial decision i think

at the time there were a lot of communities that were like pretty heavily moderated no price discussion no talking about like tokens no talking about like other random stuff and we just created a place where basically i mean in dgen trading which is one of the channels in our discord is probably one of the like most highly populated places in crypto right there's like thousands of people in there every day like hundreds and hundreds of messages and i think that while like making a space which is totally unmoderated and just chaos uh can be very distracting if you kind of put it in its own little spot and let people participate as they want they can kind of dip in and dip out it it's okay like you can get away with it um but you know if you just had every single forum

or every single discussion just opened to everyone it would be too chaotic now now that you mentioned this card i have a great announcement to make maker is now on discord guys we're not in rocket chat anymore that's awesome so yeah [Music] thank you i know i know so coordination is it's key it's super complicated uh also because we have the extended community the crypt ecosystem different career units so it's it's it's a challenge we are learning on how how how to

do it that's why we we are now on this card yeah so maker 2021 now on discord excellent and i think that was actually a conversation that me and kane had last week in new york and what keynes said was that he's deleting zoom right so like you can no longer have a any synthetic space call on zoom you have to have it in discord which is i think actually like a really interesting step because right now it's like if you're coordinating your data and it's like we do it on google hangouts sometimes and we do it on zoom other times or xyz platform there's actually like a lot of information that gets lost right like where who's writing down those notes you know that chat log of you know a lot of times on those calls there's like really good quality [ __ ] in the chat log that

just gets completely deleted when you end that zoom call and so like i was my opinion is basically like all that until we get better tolling you know maybe we get bit of tolling in the future we don't have to use discord but for now all dow should be using only discord for any communication at all i really just want web 3 native apps for all of this stuff and i just think like that needs to be a web 3 app right and like just the tools for coordination like why why can't that be a micro task or something pay somebody some crypto to transcribe the notes pay somebody some crypto to go through and like pull out the best ideas you know um i think that is where we should be going hopefully like sooner rather than later i actually wrote a prd specifically for

a product that would be doing like these kind of like zoom calls because i think you do benefit from high bandwidth communication i think you'd lose a lot out from that i mean when you can get people in a room you know at a place like you know listcon you can just do certain types of like you know discussions that are hard to do on zoom zoom is higher bandwidth communication than discord so i don't you know i think we do want to kind of have like the fullest expression of collaboration that we can have and then get the tools to catch up yeah i mean it wasn't just zoom for us we also got rid of slack so we said you know there's not going to be two places one where the core contributors communicate one where the community can you know communicate we're going to combine them

and as soon as you do that it just forces any a level of engagement and then all the community calls happen in discord all the conversations there um and it just i think kind of uh engenders this like much more transparent kind of idea that oh we don't go into this little place where we hide over here and have conversations then come and tell you community what's happening it's like the conversation's happening in the same place where the community exists and the more you consolidate that into a single platform like discord that it just has this momentum and it kind of becomes self-perpetuating yeah although we are new on discord but we have been always in rocket chat and rocket chat has always been open to

anyone who wanted to use rocket chat of course but yeah conversations are transparent maybe rocket chat or like chats in general i think are a little bit messy so that's why we have the forum and the forum for us is like okay if it's if it's on discord but you want to do something besides just talking about it you have to post it in the forum and that's the best way to like to communicate your ideas and get feedback from the community so i think i think it well the forum is open is transparent and it's the place where you can find the best

discussions ideas conversations about around maker and so that raises like a really good point of the forum right so while i was doing some research on our panelists i was looking at forums of different of all the different projects because i think discord is really amazing but discord is like so busy i'm in like 100 discords and everyone has like a thousand notifications and i get like a minor brain tumor every time i'm like opening discord and so a forum is at least like a more peaceful version so synthetics is a different example but so in the past 24 hours uh the graph has had three posts on the forum synthetics has had zero and makers had 12. so you know thinking about those different

stats is that something that you like are building for you know do you think do you think long tail communication is important do you think it should happen on a different platform you know what do you think about forums and what do you think about your place in that order i i would love for it all to be in a single place but we don't have the tooling yet you know for us the initial discussions start in discord usually then if you have a pretty well formed idea you create a post in the forum there you can have discussion we're soliciting feedback and we actively reach out to people and ask them hey you know can you share your thoughts and we want to get it captured in a single thread and then if an idea really you know has legs and somebody writes up an actual proposal

and that proposal is hosted on radical and then we have a snapshot pull and then uh it goes to a final council vote so i would love for all of those things to be in a single place so you can really like track it but the tooling isn't quite there um but we do put a lot of effort and we have like at least one person and there's actually more that are like full-time focused on facilitating governance uh because you know it is hurting cats you know you can have people that you know they're not just hanging out in the forum every day but if they get a ping you know they can jump in and and share their thoughts and see you know you can actively uh engage folks and i think that might be one of our secrets

yeah i mean we we we love uh uh you know as much participation as we can get i'm not uh uh i mean i am competitive but if you know we will give maker the number one spot there i'm fine with that i think with research forums and and things like that you know you look at like eat the research it does take like a lot of effort right there's a lot of communication overhead um for to ensure that people continue to use it because people will kind of go back to wherever they habitually are used to communicating and so if you try and kick them out to another platform you really need to do a good job of kind of incentivizing them to do it and i don't think synthetics does a very good job of that like i'm guilty of it i never go

there like it's just something that's like not that well used but i do think one of the valuable aspects of those kinds of research forms is it does force someone to like really think about what they're trying to communicate rather than just like yolo posting some random comment in discord they've got to actually go okay i'm writing a thing people are going to read it it's it's longer form typically and it's just a little bit more thoughtful but again if you don't do it you don't curate it then it's not going to happen um well we use a lot the forum because as i told you like yes we have like conversations on the chat but the forum is where you like can organize your

ideas and and convert your ideas into proposals and and at actions and that's what matters in a dao like you need people to like really do stuff so the forum helped us a lot with that the problem is that we use it that much that there's like a lot a lot of information so if you if you are not completely deep into maker it could be hard for you just like understand what's happening so i don't know i'm i just dream about like i don't know maybe a tick tock for forum thou something like that that i just like a swap and see on my feet what's relevant for me i need

like i should definitely do that like yes please they have yeah so this is a doubt we just made it down now and we are willing to fund tech talk for governance forums no problem if you want to build that come and see us after this and we'll actually make that happen it's okay so so then thinking about sort of like to flip the numbers of you know synthetics lost the forum you got zero but synthetics does win the total number of uh governance proposals submitted so synthetics has 187 synthetic improvement proposals that have been submitted over the since its inception uh the graph has four and since and maker has 60 right so four 187 and 60. so thinking about all of those different proposals that have

happened and the way of whether you would actually you know maybe some things can happen without it being a proposal so you have a different structure but you know do you think that as as contributors to dows that we should be maximizing just for the number of proposals or is there other structures that we can build where you don't need to have as many i think that's more a reflection of us being bad at doing things correctly the first time than it is anything else like how many of those are like repeat things where it's like okay let's try this again let's try this again let's try this again so we do have like a i think a you know a culture of like very fast iteration so we'll do like a small piece of something um so i think that probably contributes to our high numbers i'm

actually surprised it's not higher to be honest yeah um by the time something becomes a proposal usually for for the graph it's it's gotten like really far um so as an example you know a first step as i mentioned is you post on the forum and uh you know we just uh brandon our research lead posted an up like an upgrade proposal for uh curation the creation mechanism in the protocol and his initial forum post already had a whole like agent-based simulation you could go in and you could um you know actually like run this in a notebook and uh you know had a bunch of like tests and so that's kind of like a first step then we have a bunch of discussions so

you know by the time something lands as a proposal it's really something that basically everybody that could have eyes on it has already like you know you know stamped that it's it's ready to go to mainnet and then we just do that kind of for a final vote well we we have a very well established process about how to propose something and then you have like a time for comments then you have like a signal request a pull request an executive vote there there's a whole process for proposals but we also know that sometimes we need like another velocity for to solve things so we are just like trying to find the best way to treat like the very urgent proposals and

how how to think about these these like emergency proposals against like a a a proposal that could change the core of the protocol and could affect like uh how the protocol works so i think we are learning and trying to implement new processes yeah no it's interesting and it's interesting to look at like those forum posts and the distribution of forum posts and then looking at like the distribution of proposals and like i think maker wins i think maker comes first coming the top for forum post in the middle for proposals submitted and then you guys are maybe tied for second place on governor's participation but so in the last couple of minutes

like you know in 2017 we started launching tokens and they were utility tokens and you were going to pay for tacos with your tokens and they were pretty meaningless and like didn't i mean i'll actually make it launch in 2017 with not that so you guys win but you know there was a lot of [ __ ] um then we sort of you know waited a couple of years the number went down and we started focusing on governance and you know regardless of securities laws and like [ __ ] that i don't really care about you know thinking about how like the word governance is actually meant to you know what does that mean to you as you know contributors to something that has an equity company right well yes no and yes or foundation right foundation

and then no and then yes so you know we have these traditional structures that we have to set inside of well we have something called a governance token and so how do you guys think about that yeah so we don't have a governance token right for us uh you know grt is a work token it's used by different participants in the network governance is super important and i think it's it's the way that you make decisions right in the protocol it could be how you distribute resources protocol parameters upgrades to the protocol and you know we've always just thought about governance as you know the ideal state of governance is to have a meritocracy and there's a lot of ways that you can try to determine you know who's in the best position you know based on their knowledge or their

contributions to have more power in the system but that that's like a distinct problem that we're trying to get closer and closer to solving i think we were crazy enough back in the day to just yolo build a token that had cash flow and not give a [ __ ] about it um which was again kind of controversial now it's it's a bit more reasonable um it only evolved into a governance token later when we dissolved the foundation and started to hand governance over to the community so there was a period where it was like genuinely a token that only did a thing it acted as collateral you got paid fees for staking etc and then we had to work out a way to kind of back it into being a governance

token which i think in some ways was good because we had an existing governance framework that was kind of within our discord and within the community um but it's definitely created some issues where like the kind of architecture of the token doesn't really support being a governance token as well as it might um so we're redesigning uh the entire system v3 is going to have governance kind of enshrined in the token much more closely and it's going to be much easier to participate in governance that was that was alpha by the way just the v3 governance and magic synthetics is coming well yeah governance is super important for us as well because the future the protocol depends on on

governance and maker holders voting so the government's token this one of the most important parts of the protocol uh even with data saying that we are well recently roon in the forum a proposal to change the tokenomics of mkr and that also of course will will have an impact if it's approved by the maker holders it will have an impact on how the mkr token is treated by the community by governance and in the ecosystem in general so yes it's super important also we have like a i think uh we have die so it's different for the protocol to have like one stable coin and also a

governance token because we can use the stablecoin for like different things than what what we do with the governance token but i think like well we are a dao and everything can change so we'll see so i know we are now over time but i wanted to quickly touch on this so you don't think that uh grt will ever manage the protocol upgrades for the graph um not grt the token uh but we definitely want to have a dow that you know is responsible for upgrading the protocol but just not based on token voting but rather you know a different type of voting system

that's uh food for thought for everyone but so thank you so much to it for everyone for listening and hanging out and then also all of the panelists that like are wizards inside of the dow space and their own right and thank you guys so much