Octant: The Platform for Governance Experiments with Julian and James

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation on the Pod today we have Julian sawaskowski and James Karen of Octon auction is a platform for experiments in decentralized governance and regenerative funding developed by the gollum foundation so um Julian is an economist and founder of the Golem foundation and of octane he's a master's in international politics and economics from the Warsaw School of economics and is a member of the foundation council at the Warsaw Institution Institute for structural research he's leading the development of octane on all fronts and James Kieran is the head of community at octet so what is octet Octan is a testing ground for conducting governance

experiments that directly impacts the allocation of rewards from sticking of a hundred thousand eth from the gollum treasury so basically it was a platform developed by the gollum Foundation to test a few hypotheses around Community engagement participatory funding and user-centric governance basically they are running an experiment in order to to fund public goods and they're going to have 10 projects in the first stage that are going to receive funding based off of the amount of tokens that are staked on top of this treasury amount so uh what I think is really cool is that um is that they're they're developing novel mechanisms for funding public goods in and around their ecosystem octane seems like it is an interesting

place to build these type of experiments and the fact that Golem has a huge treasury that they're putting to use here is interesting as well so um you know on behalf of optimism CLR phone giveth git coin all of the publicist funding projects in the ecosystem I think it'd be fun to welcome octane another player to the chat so that's why this episode is about Octon Julian and James I think are just Giga brains who care so deeply about funding public goods and this episode is about that experiment so without further Ado I give you Julian and James Valley Dao is an open Global Collective working to find finance and democratize the governance of synthetic biology Technologies to protect the future of

our planet research and progress into synthetic biology is critically constrained by the world of nation-state regulations and bureaucracy from middlemen but the potential that synthetic biology has for the world is massive it can produce a world in total harmony with nature we can grow stuff using cells like software it's awesome and the best part is we no longer have to pull carbon out of the ground to grow and maintain civilization don't you think we should be funding this Valley Dow does and that's what they're here to do to try and make the solar Punk World of Tomorrow a reality today so join Valley Dao right now and save the planet at valleydow.bio Julian James how you doing right thanks yeah doing well so glad to have you so can you tell us what octant is accent is our attacking the

centralized governance and product funding and we see that as a experiment but of course like a experiment will with real plants so so so the idea is that we are um we are going to stake like the is that golden Foundation holds up to 100 000 and we are building octant as a governance tool for a dlm token holders to decide like what happens with the with the yield and the madness means that there is like a part of the funds that they can keep uh there is like a part of funds that goes to the matching funding to fund whatever uh the community decides to

fund uh the vote on what the fund happens with the self taxation by the users of uh their reward from from this is taking and I think that's the sort of description and and the the fun thing is that even with that very simple setup we have interesting like uh marginal effects because that means for example that if people do not want to self-exate themselves in general to support like the you know interesting project that the first person that decides to do that like decides on all the matching fund so the leverages is huge which can make prompt the others to join that game as

well and it is iterative so so we envisioned that that will be like a two weeks decision window after every like a three months uh long cumulation of of the stake uh during that decision window you will be able to change your vote so basically you will see how your vote Aggregates with what others do and well change your vote accordingly yeah and I think I would add to that too just stepping back uh a little bit of a higher level is that um we recognize that I I forget the stat that I saw one of the youth conferences recently the majority of dows more or less consists of a snapshot and multi-sig so uh we wanted to create this

more or less fertile ground to be able to test um different hypothesis around you know Community engagement uh participatory funding um different you know governance tools and Frameworks so that um getting real real-time feedback or real valuable data about what works and what doesn't work so that um you know developers can be really confident about the tools that they're building I I see that a little bit as you know experiment in economics now the truth is that if you run like a experiment you have to run it for real so like you know with the with the real money real people we are we are real public groups projects and of course that focus on at least at the beginning

is on like a car with Street um public goods like whatever that means of course because the definition is difficult got it so it feels like this is a testing ground for conducting governance experience experiments that are going to fund public goods and the first uh the the first Epoch zero is a is a one-time uh event where uh people can can stake tokens and then according to what they stake that'll be distributed to some amount of public goods and then from there you're going to iterate from there in in order to hit some sort of like local Maxima of what you're funding is is that your reductionist or is that a fair summary

of of what y'all are doing yeah I would step back and say that Epoch zero is is a pre-launch event so it doesn't involve glm it's um that's going to be a community boot shopping event that we are doing in order to find community members who are who more less care about uh funding public goods who are interested in and maybe um contributing to some um some of the experiments that we want to do with Octan down the road so the the epoch zero um event is simply going to be using an nft that community members who care about funding public goods or can be receiving through Live Events and virtual events um that's more or less how we're going to be Distributing it and then um there's going to be a vote

held on Snapshot that will um decide how uh how the funds are going to be distributed but yeah just stepping back there epoch0 is is separate from Octan and the the application that we're going to be subsequently launching after yeah Epoch zero will be snapshot and bull to see actually and only only with the consecutive Epoch one and Epic 2 will be moving to towards something uh much more complicated and interesting knowing can you say more about what inspired the need for this experiment um and where so the affinity for for public goods comes from you know what do

you really hope to accomplish by exploring this design space of acrostic a short answer and the long answer uh the short answer story is that you know as a foundation we have that pile of ease and we want to do something useful with it that would be both useful for Community Edge for glm token holders and I think that you know that application like really nicely combines those two uh because you know on the other hand like uh I'm not really I don't really fight fascinating projects that are only around the yield on on something and on the other hand our

obligation our liability as a column Foundation is pretty straightforward this is like a liability towards glm oven holders and the long answer is the that you know like personally I I joined that space because of uh everything related to uh governance and voting and also public goods funding they're so you know like a Golem crowdfunding itself the golden token sale happened in 2016 when I think like a lot of people including me thought about that as a way of like a rising Public Funding or pricing funding from the public on exciting Tech

projects and not necessarily as you know get reach fast I see your products as it evolves later on in the in the in the community so so so like that way of thinking at least I'm up some theme members and also I believe some of our community members and people who you know stamps on Golden break really early on is is present like all the time in things we do and how we think about the space so it feels like uh I heard in there uh it's a way to use your sort of your your eat treasury law which is quite massive for the public good um it'll be a way of of creating utility for for the glm token and then it's also

a way of kind of building public goods around the Golem ecosystem and a lot of this is just exploring the design space of collective intelligence and and how to collectively build an ecosystem yeah existing threads that I heard in there yeah yeah exactly so yeah this this area this this this topic is so proud that I don't even know where to start that like that the truth is that I I think we are in a very interesting point as a space right now exploring exactly the way it's how we can build this this parallel reality of ours like uh perhaps even something that like is like a Proto State and with that we need like a efficient mechanism to fund things to

making things happen and of course like to to make something happen you have to fund it and you have to decide like what you fund so so you you need like a really efficient and sustainable coordination mechanisms and I I think like the we as a space as a web free we have a lot of money and and we also have some coordination mechanisms but I think we are still struggling to combine the two in in in a efficient and sustainable way so this is like a attempt to explore Avenues how to do that how how that could happen with what we have um at the moment

so this first experiment uh kicks off in in the next couple months and then are you thinking about doing them quarterly how often will will the experiments be or is it too early to say well you know I we don't set any final date for that so at the moment I assume that that will be less perpetual and at the moment it seems that the three-month Epoch is like they make most sense for the number of reasons you have to balance like first do not ask Community engagement too often but also you know not let people forget about you and also you need to accumulate some of you from staking just to have something to vote uh around so so it seems from some simulations

reacted three months is about optimal balmy my that does that in the future if you turn that turns out that to be too often or so rare we'll see um yeah I I'm pretty sure that even with the like a 40 days queue now to the stake East uh we will be able to to launch in yeah in the third quarter just a step back that that's the key right now to to get a validator up up and and live is is about yeah I think 37 40 days something like that so join you do you want to mention that really quickly that we're we're starting to get some of those validators up or uh should we talk about that maybe a little bit later I think that's okay depending on uh when exactly will be on our like I believe we will be

Midway through that path you know it's happening like uh we we decided to go our own way with with staking so so basically building like the the custom step setup uh for that and yeah we of course want to do that hopefully uh what we talked about that amount of of Easter mistake I would invite the audience to check out octane.build which is a link to the the website for this experiment it's really quite a beautiful website that explains a lot of this stuff uh that'll be a link in the show notes where people can check out the octane experiment that you are doing and uh really excited to see more experiments in funding public goods and

uh Distributing ether Awards to the community and um I just think that this polarity of different funding mechanisms between quadratic funding and retroactive public goods funding and what protocol Guild is doing with the self-curating registry is quite interesting and this this feels like another tool in the toolbox for ecosystems if it's successful to help coordinate around what their public goods are so we'll be really excited to see how the first experiment goes awesome yeah we're really excited as well um I I think yeah you touched on a really good point there's this like blossoming uh funding public goods ecosystem that seems to be growing more and more with a lot of really intelligent people uh behind it that are building so

um a lot to be excited about there and and you know how would you compare the mechanism that octane is using which I which there's a there's a diagram of on the website and and I think that um it's quite elegant in that you stake and you get to use that stake in order to vote on where the funds go um how would you say that it compares to quadratic funding or some of the experiments that say optimism has done with retroactive public goods funding is there something new in the signal generation that you're trying to do in the in this mechanism um and if so what is it what is your North Star starting with similarities perhaps I I think that the word is similar that you

know like we we got some funds from Samuel we got some projects from somewhere and then we got people that have some voting mechanics to decide on the distribution so I I would say that similarity uh but then I think there are more differences than the similarities then at first we don't use quadratic funding for uh for the matching fund we actually consider that we might want to do that somewhere in the future because if you think about octane at the moment with all the things that I love about it about the idea and and even because of that I'm pushing it of course like the correct design auxent is is plutocracy

uh in a way because you know that this is a power the more Glam you have the more the other we lock the more power you have so that you know this is clearly uh ludicrous if we introduce like a quadratic um funding for for like a soft taxation part not for the individual reward part but for the self taxation part that would be less of plutocracy for sure and would have like a diversity diversity and will also you know Empower uh smaller players so so quadratic funding is something we are thinking about of course that needs some kind of like a Bitcoin passport or whatever else to ensure

um unicrest of the users but this is definitely something to consider in the future as for uh you know like a Bitcoin rounds or um or other mechanisms that are around I think the biggest difference between what we do and what what other things that happens that we we have like a built-in algorithm for the matching fund so so so so matching fund is not the subject of like the decision of of the dollars uh that is the consequence of of how octant is built so so in in details that works in a way that um the entitlement of the individual

um dlf holder is is linear so basically if you if you lock one percent of glm you've got you got one percent of uh staking reward as as your individual reward but then what goes to octant as a whole is take a square root of the of of that chart so if 25 of gla is locked in octane then uh half of the staking Revenue goes to octant and how it is for individuals and have this automatic pool and the rest stays in the pool to increase the uh the uh the rewards for the for the next so I would say that building mechanism is is the biggest

difference of course this is still somehow arbitrary because we stay the theory we can say you know head of the game folks we are we are taking the youth and and you know and and of uh and the fund but that's not our plan at the moment as I said we want to make that perfect yeah there's a um really beautiful hand-drawn diagram that shows how the accumulated sticking rewards go through octane in order to get to the public goods and then we can have a link to that in the show notes and I think of visual the picture is worth a thousand words about yeah exactly this is this is all simple but difficult to to describe also if you look in the favor like the math there is is pretty simple this is

like the you know like a adding and multiplying things all the time but you should try to formalize that uh it it becomes a little bit dense I'm wondering uh in a world in which you're maximally successful how does this thing change how does this change the incentive gradient of of the the people around you and the incentive grade of people in the space what do you really want to be six what do you what do you really want to achieve in the world in which you're maximally successful with this experiment well you know I I think the first measure of success will be that we have uh really active community that uh besides and what gets found in a in a reasonable way like uh whatever

reasonable means here uh because um uh well you know have it like the nice mechanism on on taking decisions is one thing and then having the community having people who use that in a in a in a reasonable ways is is something else and that might be the fault of the mechanism that might be a fault of the I don't know glm distribution that you know it will turn out that well in fact 95 of Supply is with the exchanges so we are doing that for no one and I don't think that's the case by the way it still have some connections with the with the with the with the community in that regard so I said I think that's

not the case but theoretically that's possible so I think the step number one is is to build like the the community that is really interested in in funding that public goods and I think this is like a good parallel you know with what we see with the uh democracy uh worldwide at the moment so so one of the main problems probably is that people are not getting involved or even if they are getting involved they are not getting involved in in a reasonable way so so so so so that's like the the first checkpoint and the second and I think that will be even more interesting is if

we are able to generalize the spending into not so obvious things because you know at the moment we have like a kind of obvious uh uh uh products on the list and and by saying that they are obvious I don't mean that they are that words our support on the contrary I think the by all means they are worth our support but this is like the easy way of doing that like a Bitcoin matching full yeah of course this is worth supporting you know we can throw everything there and use your expertise for that has to be distribute it further end of the story pretty the same story with the with a

lot of other projects we've got there but then I I think if you have like a decent uh decision taking mechanisms then you're able to to pick like a really great project and also fund them in a in a really reasonable way so do not give them too much not give them too little but just make them uh happen and make them successful and and that would be like the really great uh further out uh result and as for the motivations or of people who are in you know like obviously if you are glad again holder you will be interested to participate for the yield but I hope we will be able to convince people that this is really worth to self

taxate themselves to give back some of that yield to to make like a great things happen and and also that mechanism is something that I really want to see working and I will be happy to see working because libertarian I I think that you know people through coordination need to impose some restrictions on themselves as a community on the other hand but on the other hand I would really love to see that experiment in in cell taxation working and that people are able to to fund things got it so I heard um active Community funding public goods connecting the people who are creating value to

actually funding value and actively people showing up and sticking their tokens in order to do it yeah I think that will it'll be interesting to have you back in a year and see how the first couple experiments went and uh you turn this into a line not a DOT um James I'm wondering if you have anything to add uh I know that you're a little bit closer to this yeah um I I think uh just uh mentioning what we kind of alluded to in in the beginning there is that uh we have this this special pre-launch event that is not going to be um uh functioning through the app that we're building octane but it's just going to be a pre-launch event that that takes place on Snapshot um and and we're looking to to build a

community out of that there's some really exciting things that we have for uh anybody who wants to be able to participate in choosing how um the this large pile of eth is going to be distributed to our early stage Partners um we have some some really awesome projects that we're syncing with around this initiative called Epoch zero so that's going to be git coin uh you said protocol Guild they're one as well super modular ethereum cat herders uh eat Staker Colonel Dow drops drips clear fund and give it so we're really excited to partner with all these guys and and to um doubly Drive some impactful funding there way and so if there's community members out there that are

interested in participating in this process either join our Discord or follow us on on Twitter and there's going to be a lot more information coming out about how you can participate and then subsequently how you can participate in in Octon from there amazing well um for the audience you want to check out auction.build which is the website that for this experiment and I'm sure that'll be updated with more information as the experiment continues um is there anything that I didn't ask that you want to say and Julian maybe we'll start we'll start with you and then go to James well I I think for octant we've got let's cover it of course we can explore you know different Avenues of tech and of like a wet fruit space yeah about uh things I think auctions we've got covered more or less

yeah I I think we got that covered I I would say um as far as Live Events go we're going to be at eat Prague at finding the commons um at attending ECC and then also going to be hanging out with the get coin guys at shelling point so if anybody is attending any of those Live Events we would love to connect with you and maybe chat about ideas that you have um I think we have some some events uh planned later on this year as well I'm thinking Berlin but um yeah Live Events we would love to to meet any Builders or anybody who's interested in funding public goods and just chatting and meeting the community face to face at that opportunity is there we're looking forward to that um well thanks so much for appearing on

the green pill podcast excited about the octane experiment excited to have you back and talk about how the first couple experiments went and keep up the good fight awesome thanks so much for having us thank you very much peace and love [Music] thank you [Music]