@bvajresh, @ayao and I wanted to share a proposed structure for the $RLY Ecosystem DAO, which was informed by research across the space including Uniswap and Compound proposals. We previously shared a version in the #ecosystem-DAO channel in the Discord and are now sharing an updated version in the forum for feedback from the community. We would appreciate your thoughts on the below and ideas on how to improve.
$RLY Ecosystem DAO Summary and Purpose:
Summary: A decentralized, autonomous organization run directly by $RLY token holders to govern and distribute a periodically refreshed budget for the benefit of the $RLY network.
Objectives: Foster an organic, rich community-driven ecosystem of developers, creators, businesses, and service providers for the $RLY Network ecosystem.
Business Model: Annual grants from the Association, with the first grant totalling 20M $RLY and $2M USDC.
Primary DAO Activities: Funding projects, companies or individuals via grants to build on top of the $RLY Ecosystem, which includes:
Specific Projects: Build on $RLY, support existing projects for specific purposes, etc.
Community (Education): Get grants to build elements of the $RLY ecosystem that will help current and future members.
Product Launches: Applications of each launch must have prototyped a feature-full product. We would provide a ~$50K equity-free contribution based on specific milestones for your application.
Events and Hackathons: Sponsoring events and hackathons for people to learn about $RLY and build in the $RLY ecosystem.
Bounties: Funding $RLY ecosystem specific bounties.
Wave 1 RFP Priorities: This list will evolve over time as the ecosystem develops and categories are added based on various needs.
Applications and Integrations
Full-Feature Products
Open-Source Solutions
Content (Marketing, Educational and Research)
Events and Hackathons
Bounties
Operating Goals:
Onboard New Users: Onboard new uses measured by wallet growth
Optimize for Speed & Experimentation: Use the first grant to experiment, fund a bunch of concepts and work through potential governance issues so that we can iterate as needed.
Right-sized Governance: Ideally enable faster approval processes for smaller resource activities and more standard voting/consensus for larger grants or activities
DAO Tooling:
We will be using DAOHaus for our on-chain distribution of grants funding for this first version. Many existing DAOs utilize the Moloch DAO framework and it will allow the $RLY ecosystem to interact with and access other DAOs in the Web3 ecosystem.
Governance:
Objectives: Reduce friction, ensure the RLY community is easily able to participate, while also figuring out which decisions can be made faster vs. via token voting.
Options:
Committee Governance: Vote on an initial committee of ~8 members: 1 lead and 7 reviewers.
Reviewers process applications and operate a 4 of 7 multisig to disburse funds to grantees.
Members can be replaced if they are not able to meet the expectations of the governance process.
Community Token Holder Governance: Use a token holder governance process where the community votes on Snapshot with their $RLY holdings to approve grants. The funds are disbursed by the Ecosystem Grants DAO multisig holders.
Hybrid: Utilize a mix of Committee Governance and Community Token Holder Governance depending on the size of the grant request.
Proposed Thresholds for Grants Funding and Review:
Community Grants - $50k-$500K ($RLY Equivalent): initial application to a form, posting the proposal on governance forum, community vote to approve.
Proposed Timeline / Process:
We will organize grant recipients into four 3-month funding rounds. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis and any grants disbursed during a given 3-month period become part of the corresponding round. Round 1 will be for three months from the day the grants DAO proposal has been approved. For example, if the proposal is approved on 11/1/2021, Round 1 of the grants program will be from 11/1/2021 to 2/1/2021 and Round 2 of the grants program will be from 2/2/2022 to 5/2/2022.
As a condition of each grant, we will receive a quarterly report from each grantee until grant milestones are completed. At the start of the next season we will share the report of what happened the previous season and set the stage for the next season.
*** Committee Compensation**
We suggest compensation roughly in line with the initial Uniswap and Compound proposals - $4500 per month (expected ~20 hrs/week) for each individual lead (up to a maximum of two leads).
The time commitment for the reviewers is likely to be far lower. The compensation for reviewers will be $1000 per month (expected ~ 5 hrs/week) for each reviewer (up to a maximum of 7 reviewers).
Defining Success
Quantitative Criteria
Growth in Grant Applications over seasons
Growth in number of projects funded
Growth in new $RLY wallets resulting from new projects
Community Engagement (Discourse, Discord, activity, etc)
Qualitative Criteria
Improvement to Rallyâs positioning in the market
Quality of funded project outcomes
Grant Proposal Format
Your proposal should include:
What you want to build
Why you want to build it
The overall goal of your project
A detailed technical description of your project
A schedule including milestones and overall timeframe
How much funding youâd like to request
Your programming portfolio
A brief description of your team
Where youâve applied for other sources of funding if applicable
@GaryCoover@bvajresh@ayao thanks for this! this is an excellent framework that will take the RLY ecosystem to new heights. Iâm excited to see which kind of applications, projects, and inspiring ideas will come out of this
I think the RFP priorities are great, and if we can use @KevinChou and the rest of the teamâs knowledge to try and specify even more what kind of specific apps/infra is needed to be built, this can really help attract entrepreneurs.
I really liked the idea of tiered grants because moving fast is crucial and you canât wait for everyone to vote on a grant.
I think that as much delegation as possible to a small group of selected representatives is key to move fast with grant-giving (from my experience from other grant-giving DAOs, it is almost impossible for everyone to keep sync with the pace of grants, act thoughtfully and understand whatâs going on on a weekly basis while working full time and not dedicating a lot of free time to understand each grant).
I will lay out one thought for RFP - as RLY current home chain is Ethereum, and gas fees are exploding through the roof, plus L2s are starting to emerge, I think it should be a top priority to integrate into L2s and enable low fees for RLY apps built on Ethereum (especially as we are approaching consumer). Starkware just launched a partnership with TikTok through ImmutableX so they could be a good partner.
So saying something like âweâre looking for someone to build an RLY app on Starkware plus a bridge and are willing to grant them 100k RLYâ can be really useful in helping to accelerate this process (instead of an entrepreneur have to learn the problems in RLY from scratch and guess what should be built, which will take him more time).
Doing an RLY hackathon with prizes could be awesome.
I also think that an airdrop should be considered in the future to increase the number of wallets holding RLY and participating in the DAO. This should be carefully thought on because itâs a really leveraged move and can also be harmful, but generally, a good airdrop can change the life of any DAO.
Regarding the options for the governence I am in favor of a Hybrid model where the Community acts as one of the reviewers in your model.
Also it would be wise to have subcommittee members 1-2 that can act as replacement. If for some reason a few member suddenly drop out or are not able to vote we could lose the ability to function for a while.
Something that is missing from my point of view is a rule that forbids Rally Staff Member engaging directly for example by voting with Tokens. In the end we share a common goal but I believe the DAO should act as independableas possible.
This could be a little bit controversial but I am also in favor of stopping the funding for a project that already got a grant (5/7 reviewers approved). So that we have some kind of safety mechanism to stop montly payments if we need it.
@Lomo - I like the replacement suggestion. Should help overcome possible delays.
Can you clarify the rule forbidding Rally Staff Members engaging? Are you suggesting anyone that has a paid/employment relationship with the $RLY ecosystem should be ineligible from voting (presumably in the âCommunity Token Holder Governanceâ model)? Curious if thereâs precedence for this in DAOs / grant programs related to other projects.
On the ability to stop funding - we should review other DAOs / grant programs, but a more robust milestone system could achieve the same goal.
You can just blacklist Rally Staff member addresses to ensure that they cant participate. This is just my opinion to exclude them to ensure independence between the entitys. In the end the community should vote on it. You should also take into consideration to blacklist addresses from exchanges. Otherwise they have the ability to take over our DAO like they did with Steemit in the past.
Even with a robust milestone system you have to use oracles otherwise the smart contract wonât get the information. So i suggest a majority vote from the Committee. Another solution would be some kind of reward system for oracle participants.
Love this! One thing weâve discussed for grant proposal format for the Rally.io Dev Council is to require things like a commitment to provide things like adequate documentation and/or product marketing, and also include a roadmap/plan for ongoing maintenance and your business model so that we can assess if whatever is funded will be supported ongoing.
@GaryCoover Could you share the link to the smart contract you want to use? I would like to review it. I found a few different versions on the official DAOHaus site.
How will the committee be formed? What are the requirements for becoming a committee member? Will this vote be proposal based or some other means of voting? How do you ensure diversity in the committee?
The $RLY Ecosystem DAO is entirely community run, and is set up to be a grants/funding DAO to help businesses build on $RLY. Thereâs no âstaffâ from the initial core team, although the DAO is perfectly able to create itâs own distributed organization if itâd like to over time to pursue whatever goals it deems fit.
SuperLayer is a studio, meaning it hires new staff with backgrounds in engineering, product, and legal/finance to build new products on $RLY. The new products are entirely new ideas for creating social tokens and games that do not necessarily have anything to do with creators. The $RLY technology is now becoming more robust and can support other social use cases besides creators and fan communities, and SuperLayer is going to take the lead to build some of these new products. SuperLayer hopes to inspire others to build wholly new products on $RLY, and the DAO can help fund others who have promising ideas and teams.
I came across ERC1967 for proxie functions. I think this would be really useful for a DAO. We could basically vote on smart contract updates. Is it possible to include this? Etherscan has also support for this implementation.
Within DAOhaus the options for smart contracts are pretty straightforward, with Moloch Version 2 being the best option: https://daohaus.club/docs/devs/.
Seems like Moloch Version 2 can blacklist(jaile) people but there is no unjaile function. Could be rewritten to jaile multiple people in one transaction because otherwise this seems not really gas efficient. Are there any plans to change the code or will it stay like that?
We are currently in process of evaluating identifying potential reviewers and a lead, ideally optimizing for diversity in experiences that can ensure this group is best set up to evaluate potential proposals. Weâre hoping to complete identification, ensure interest from the candidates and share back the panel of candidates in the next few weeks.
Reviewer candidates should have experience in some or all of the following:
DAO Contribution
Grant/Investment Evaluation (Crypto or Non-Crypto Tech)
Product Background
Finance Background
Familiarity with RLY Community
To be clear, we arenât looking for candidates with everything above, but are looking to create a reviewer panel with a mix of these skills. Current Rally Staff, paid Community Ambassadors/Advisors, and Rally.io Council Members are not eligible. Please feel free to DM me on Discord with any potential candidates (@c00v).
