Course Learning Materials
IOTA DAO Pioneers Session Two – Nov / Dec 2021
Session 2 prep
Welcome to the second week. We want to use this second week to focus on the complex topic of voting and “power”. Explore a lot of different approaches to establish “fairness” in DAOs and Crypto projects and dive deep into the topic to understand the opportunities but also the risks of the current voting/governance mechanisms out there.
Session 2 Discussion Items
For the IOTA Community, Present an Idea: How to DAO-it – Steps for Leaders to Promote a DAO to the Community
DeepDao, DAO Ecosystem Overview
Instapass
Single Sign-On Compliance for DeFi – to the question, would it be worth building a KYC solution for DID. Hundreds of use cases for DID w/ KYC so yes. Similar to DAO structures, one needs to build the bridge between the old world and the world.
adamski [cyberverse] — 11/15/2021
Building a KYC solution is not simply about building an app. There are regulations, data concerns, and a vast number of legal and privacy aspects that would have to be taken into account. KYC solutions already exist, no need in building something twice. The expense required to put into the development of a brand new KYC system would be way more than the expense of using an already existing one.
We could build a KYC system using open source libraries easily. But would it be a trust worthy system? Who evaluates the applications, humans? They would need to be paid. If it’s automated, then that requires AI, OCR, Image and Facial recognition, Image comparison algorithms, and some heavy GPU servers to maintain the analysis (NOT CHEAP). What level of accuracy would we accept for approval? 85%? If 85% is close enough, then how can we account for deep fakes in the system? Also, who is to say the system is trustworthy at all? Would you trust a KYC provider with no background in KYC?
…and that’s without going into the data privacy side of things, where are images stored, analysed, jsons of OCR Identity records, etc…
Absolutely we’d only want to tap into an existing KYC suite. Example mentioned above was https://www.jumio.com/
KYC processes cost the average bank $60m annually. Total costs for KYC processes range from £10 to £100 per check. In the UK 25% of applications are abandoned due to KYC friction. 4AMLD and 5AMLD increases both the frequency and scope of checks. https://www.fstech.co.uk/fst/mitek/Hyperion-Whitepaper-Final-for-Release-June2017.pdf
“Let’s Run The Experiment”: A conversation with Chris Dixon about DAOs and the future of organizations online
You cannot wait for someone to tell you what to work on in a DAO
Governance based on “proof of human work”
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition, by Steven Johnson (Author)
A fascinating look at how self-organizing systems are changing the world.
Polkadot
https://polkadot.network/blog/the-first-polkadot-vote/
https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referendum/34
https://polkadot.subscan.io/referenda/
https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/66
Uniswap
See Uniswap governing model from links below
https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/concepts/governance/process
https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/concepts/governance/guide-to-voting
https://app.uniswap.org/#/vote
https://snapshot.org/#/uniswap
https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/introduction
Concern as Uniswap-backed ‘DeFi Education Fund’ dumps $10M worth of UNI Sefear
— 11/16/2021
Two quick notes from thoughts:
- On the note of token distribution over time I recommend looking into readings related to the “pareto distribution”.
- On the direct democracy being used to hijacking DAOs, perhaps a well structured “constitutional republic” (similar to the US after being founded) is an option to mitigate pure democracy being hijacked by bad actors
An Explanation of DAOstack in Fairly Simple Terms
DAOstack is designed to catalyze the future of collaboration. It’s a platform for decentralized governance that enables collectives to…
boardroom
The Front Page of the Ownership Economy, Digital governance for open organizations – Boardroom facilitates simple and transparent stakeholder management of DAOs: distributed organizations and protocols
Constitutional Republic as a Model
I am absolutely in favour of dynamic tension as in your second point, “constitutional republic” – in fact I think it is essential to long term stability. I have been championing a three part system with a Constitution and Two DAOs, one for major decisions with a “1 Mi = 1 vote” approach, and a second one responsible for actually allocating funds to community projects with a “1 human 1 vote” basis, the only people being allowed to vote in the latter having established that they have made a tangible contribution to the Iota project by the method laid out in the Experimental Iota Web of Trust DAO proposal in the DAO manifestos thread. Does that match what you were suggesting?
Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution, by David Ronfelt, 1996 for Rand Corporation
YIP-61: Governance 2.0
A proposal to establish the future of yearn’s operational governance by extending certain of the Multisig’s[1] powers from YIP-41 (Temporarily Empower Multisig)[2] on a newly clarified basis in coordination with newly empowered autonomous contributor teams (‘yTeams’).
Decision making at Index Coop – a new approach to leadership, governance and decision making at Index Coop
Whitepaper – Wrapped DAOs structure for Iota Community Funding using an Iota Web of Trust, Author: @dumdave, (Iota Discord) 19 Nov 2021
Moving beyond coin voting governance
One of the important trends in the blockchain space over the past year is the transition from focusing on decentralized finance (DeFi) to also thinking about decentralized governance (DeGov).
DAO Starter Stack – herbst.eth Tweet
Constitution DAO: How to Build a DAO in 10 Days
A case study on how Constitution DAO formed, raised $48M+ in ETH, and *almost* bought the U.S. Constitution. Plus, some thoughts on the future of DAO tooling and governance structures.
Community DAOs

Crypto isn’t just a technology, it’s an internet-native economy. Revenue is tracked in ETH. Key decisions are made with community governance. Transactions are enforced on-chain through smart contracts. Treasuries are controlled via multi-sigs. And value is captured with tokens. DAOs are the native corporate structure of these crypto economies.
In Web3 Member Experience (MX) is as important as User Experience (UX): 30 questions to consider

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