DAOs: The solution for Undoxxed projects.

Hello Folks,

Giuseppe here again for our weekly newsletter #4. This week I wanted to share a little more information about a topic that I consider fundamental for the success of a project in its early stages.

Recently, I’ve been disappointed by a project I thought had one of the best teams around. So I began to think about what could they have done better, and I concluded: having a non doxxed team is a really risky pattern.

Whitepapers sure can hold a lot of information, but as expected not everything written in there is achievable or has been done already. In this particular project, part of the mistake I made was to rely on a team that wasn’t properly doxxed. And, even though I think the major part of the team was committed to the project, we usually tend to forget that the owner of the contract (code) has the last word at the end (It’s usually the devs).

In this regard, problems such as communication are usually a common red flag among these kinds of projects that end up without the money. The truth is, the more I think about this, the more I’m certain a treasury (as proposed in previous newsletters) could have solved this issue.

It’s important to understand that what makes a community stronger (besides its community) are its funds. The governance over those funds can’t be absolute if the team wants to stay behind the scenes. Let me put it this way: How are you sure that your non-doxxed team is not going to run away with your 500k treasury wallet?

Thats a question you should ask yourself (one of the, if not the most important), even when you are completely sure they won’t, they are still virtual avatars. They don’t need to give away their profile to avoid any problems. It’s more “rewarding” for them to run away with everything and start over a new project than to fix a current contract/project.

So as we mentioned in the previous newsletter, here is where we think DAOs come into play. But first, let us explain what is a DAO in a more detailed way and how do they work.

What is a DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization?

From my last newsletter, I had defined a DAO as A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). In simple terms, this can be understood as a group of people with a shared wallet that can democratically execute actions with no chairperson.

To put an example to make this idea clearer, this means that if the majority of the Stakeholders would like to use the money available in that wallet in a specific way, they can put forward a proposal to the group (or the organization), and with the tokens or shares that they own, they can either accept or reject that action. The more tokens you own, the more weight your vote has.

Since DAOs fully run on the blockchain, this ensures that all stakeholders have the power to decide in a democratic way what to do. Going more technical a DAO is represented in the blockchain as rules encoded in a transparent computer program where everything is controlled by all the organization members without the need for any central government (because the rules are embbed into the code).

The most common DAO membership out there is the Token-based membership where (just by holding the token) you get access to voting based on the amount you have. This token can be traded permissionless on a decentralized exchange. Usually, governance tokens are earned through providing liquidity or some other ‘proof of work’, and those are defined by the organization.

The Power of a DAO in NFT gaming

NFT projects that include some way of gamification in their whitepapers are rising, however, we must take into consideration that in projects like this the value is built around the game. And once the speculation bubble ends, the lack of preparation and security comes to the surface. On this, I don’t think I have to mention the huge amount of games that have been delayed/paused due to errors that could have been prevented with the proper testing.

Contracts in the blockchain are public, anyone can copy/paste/deploy any contract that is already deployed to the chain. That’s the reason why there was a lot of “Wolf Game” copies (or some specific forks that tried) that had the same bugs as Wizards and Dragons (For those who don’t know what Wolf Game is, It’s one of the first famous games of the last year that became a boom in the industry for a while).

With no Dev power, there is nothing to do when a project has those errors (since you have no capabilities to fix those). So, sometimes it’s easier to leave a project than to create a new brand by reusing the code.

DAOs have the same capabilities as a normal wallet that executes actions, has funds and owns tokens. For that reason, DAOs can always provide a safe way to store stakeholders’ funds (the funds belong and can be controlled by holders rather than the dev team).

One of the first steps we wanted to take as a team is to start educating our players (~investors) about DAOs. One of our first milestones is to create a common DAO for the project that will own the treasury of the project (which will grow automatically from every transaction).

We want to reward players that enjoy the game and try to find interesting ways of strategy and playability around our ecosystem. Game rules are stored and managed on-chain. And, since we are not perfect as devs, contract owners usually deploy proxies to upgrade already deployed contracts.

If our project gets governed by a DAO, even the contract updates need to pass the same proposal flow to make the DAO execute that contract update that he is the owner of. On this regard, most DAOs make use of timers before executing any action to give time to stakeholders to take any action if needed.

In the upcoming weeks, we will be creating and testing how our contracts will interact with our DAO while discussing with the teams how are the shares going to be split. It’s important to mention that we are committed to helping the community that is always affected by projects or dev teams that run out with tons of piles of cash leaving those holders without a dime taking advantage of the lack of knowledge and trust. Therefore, we will have some amount of shares allocated for the community.

Before ending this newsletter I wanted to mention some updates that we’ve done these weeks with the team. As I mentioned before this is a Game and we want to deploy something playable and fun, where strategy matters but using all the potentials of the blockchain.

We’ve decided that we will be deploying our alpha in Unity to make our game more scalable and easy to play. We expect to start some testing with our contracts and a basic UI interface to see how contracts behave.

We are still having a lot of meetings to continually adjust our game thesis since the gameplay is been adjusted while the game is under test & development.

Hope you’re doing great.

Regards,

Giuseppe

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