Many Chains #1
Last Edited Time
Apr 4, 2022
Created time
Apr 1, 2022
Participants
Created By
Type
Created
Apr 1, 2022
Zoom Recording
Property
Property 1
Attendees
Emon (Solana), Sam (Interchain), Sebastian (Solana), Josh (Metagov)
Recap
We discussed the need to extend EIP-4824 DAOs to something more explicitly chain-agnostic. But DAOs look different on other chains, e.g. in Cosmos every chain is in some sense its own DAO, plus there are smart contract chains that host DAO-like things, plus Cosmos implements UNIX-style permissions, ergo is every permission group on a chain also its own DAO?
We then discussed the business case for chains like Cosmos and Solana to support the standard, and we reached consensus that having a super basic mechanism or data snippet for getting all the DAOs across different chains would be useful. Sam Hart (Cosmos): “If you were able to do what DeepDAO did [in Ethereum], ‘this is the way that Solana and Cosmos and NEAR DAOs are identified, this is a data snippet to get to an address that is the DAO’, that feels like it would be immediately useful.” We agreed to follow-up on this work async (so no weekly meeting yet), do some more homework, and build more momentum in Ethereum before revisiting.
Further, for chains like Cosmos and Solana to adopt, they would want additional buy-in from ecosystem players including large DAOs/chains and infra providers like Kepler (in Cosmos).
Other ideas discussed:
- It would be really valuable to “auto-integrate Tally” upon adopting the standard, but the current standard would need to get extended and we would need to work with Tally or other tooling to support this.
- Way of computing the balance sheet of a multichain DAO across all the chains it lives on. So a kind of accounting standard? But this is really difficult because you need to understand how these bridges work!
Minutes
Sebastian: still need to
- Sam: design space is quite large, the off-chain component might be able to be standardized, since it more directly deals with the semantics of what is a proposal and what is a member. Once you get into the on-chain components, you get gas, what is considered an eligible entity
- E.g. UTXO chains? Are those DAOs? An out-of-the-box SDK is a governance module that a token holder can vote on. So every Cosmos chain is a DAO in that sense. Then we’re developing a Groups module that is more akin to a Gnosis Safe, it’s not the entire chain. Then there’s the CosmWasm smart contract based DAO that I’m less involved in.
- If all these DAOs could get Tally support out-of-the-box, that would be a big win, instead of getting a team to set up a custom interface out of it.
- Sebastian: if we can describe the metadata, you can always create your own API, so there’s lots and lots of value in creating some standard around that metadata. Should we all be building the standard? The effort of trying could yield some results.
- Sam: let me give you an example of somethign that would be hard to support in a generalized way. We’ve talked about a proposal revision flow. There’s a lot of complexity there. There’s also an emergency withdrawal of a proposal. It would be hard to define these in a way that Tally could “out of the box”.
- But if you wanted to just what is on the balance sheet of all DAOs on Cosmos and Solana that is more achievable.
- Josh: In this context, are assets essential?
- Sebastian: I would think it is essential. I think being able to compare assets is essential.
- Sam: I would agree that having a comparison functionality would be really nice. We’ve considered DAOs that have no “assets” except the ability to cancel proposals.
- Sebastian: Yeah, agreed.
- Sam: if you’re going to integrate into Tally, you’re already well-beyond off-chain metadata. You need the kind of expected query structure.
- Josh: does this doesn’t already exist?
- Sebastian: DeepDAO already does this in some way, and they must have adapters for this. If I was approaching this, I would be building this metadata standard + these adapters and putting all of that into the standard. Subtleties here, i.e. through what bridge do those assets arrive, e.g. you need to know that wETH ~ ETH. The tricky part is, you compare the tokens, teh tokens have some value, but then if you don’t know the liquidity it’s hard to compare.
- Josh: what’s the difference between asking this question for DAOs vs. for arbitrary wallets?
- Sebastian: no real difference I think.
- Sam: I know NEAR really blurs this boundary, you can convert an account into a DAO. If that DAO is on a smart contract chain it might have sub accounts, so you might need to know about the account structure of the DAO.
- Sebastian: similar in Solana!
- Sam: in Cosmos, the situation is more analogous to groups in a Unix system (based on authorization/permissioning). There could be nested groups and overlapping permissions. So a DAO is a little bit less defined; effectively there are just groups with different capabilities. So you could say that the Venn diagram of those groups is the DAO, or each group is the DAO.
- Sam: I want all DAOs to be able to find each other; I want all DAOs to auto-integrate to Tally; reading the EIP it’s a little bit nebulous why a business is going to do this; what problem is it solving for them.
- Sebastian: discoverability I think.
- Sam: where I could see teh proposals being useful is for search. If the DAO has an address or a name or a one-liner, that might not be enough, but if you were able to search through all DAOs for “ukraine”, then you might be able to find all DAOs that were funding the ukraine effort and that could be quite interesting.
- Sam: we are already building some data, we need to get buy-in from client applications and explorers; everywhere where the data is already being exploited. It needs to have a business case.
- Josh: who do we need to talk to in Cosmos? DADAO people, myself, Kepler (their governance ecosystem).
- Sebastian: similar for Solana, I was talking to main contributors to the DAOs, and they have to see the value. Then I would start with them. And you need the business use-case for the standard. Do you want to talk to someone who can provide + expose that data to you? Can someone harness that data and sell it to providers? Someone will need to implement and maintain that data, essentially bridge to the individual chain. The largest DAOs in Solana are UXUT and Mango; talk to them? DAOs themselves, Solana Foundation, and potential data providers that can build the infrastructure to expose this common standard, and provide this data to others.
- Sam: it may be a little different for Solana. I know this case in Ethereum, the Gnosis Safe contracts can be used by the Gnosis Safe app, but there are other client applications that can use the same smart contracts. In the Cosmos case, those are completely decoupled; the entity that is developing the blockchain infra is not developing the client applications; those block explorers are doing a lot of the proposal construction. So in our case, you would need to talk to folks like Kepler (who is not developing the DAO backend, but at the end of the day would the ones who are implementing the metadata construction; that’s if you want the off-chain proposal structure). If you look in the CAIP repo, just the token standardization part is f-ing complicated. If you were asking what is the balance sheet of all DAOs, that is already very complicated, you would need to know about the bridges, figure out the wrapping, and map that to ETH price.
- Sebastian: +1
- Sam: if you were able to do what DeepDAO did, “this is the way that Solana and Cosmos and NEAR DAOs are identified, this is a data snippet to get to an address that is the DAO”, that feels like it would be immediately useful. Okay, here’s all the DAOs.
- Sam: you also need to say what chain it’s on, you need to get pretty familiar.
- Sam: I would like you to collect all the RPC endpoints (?)
- Sebastian: I need to do my own homework. + Given crazy schedule, can’t commit to a weekly meeting. Let’s keep it flexible.