DAOstack is an exciting blockchain technology project with a product launch this spring and a token sale beginning May 1.
Designed to catalyze the future of collaboration, DAOstack is a platform for decentralized governance that enables decentralized companies, funds, and markets to easily self-organize around shared goals or values. DAOstack is sometimes called an operating system for collective intelligence, or a WordPress for DAOs.
The platform includes a flexible smart contract framework, a friendly javascript developer environment, and an intuitive user interface that allows anyone to create or participate in a decentralized organization without technical knowledge.
Most of the expected proceeds from the DAOstack token sale will be reserved for management by a DAO fund, in which the community of GEN token holders will create proposals for the allocation of resources.
The Need
Historically, when there has been a need to coordinate large groups of people and point them toward collective action, humans have relied on systems of top-down hierarchy, as in corporations, governments, and militaries.
One major problem with top-down hierarchies is that they contain concentrated points of failure, since individuals can be subject to bad influence, bad acting, or simply bad judgment. Also, the interests of the powerful few are often misaligned with those of the less powerful many, leaving the decision-makers frequently incentivized to act against the common good.
An exciting alternative has arisen in the form of a movement toward decentralization, in which networks of peers self-organize to act collectively without such concentrated power centers. One such type of organization has become known as a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization.
Up until this point, however, DAOs have remained largely an abstract idea, not yet in practice except in a handful of limited cases. And the decentralization movement has not yet scaled.
One main reason has been the lack of effective governance solutions and software technology to coordinate decision-making among large groups in a way that is both efficient and non-fragile to corruption or bad acting. DAOstack provides that solution.
The Approach
When the originators of DAOstack set about to architect solutions for decentralized governance, they recognized that given the complexity of the problem, the best solutions would emerge only over time, especially since the needs of each DAO are going to vary.
So, first and foremost, they designed DAOstack to be not a fixed offering in decentralized governance, but rather a sandbox for ongoing experimentation, in which bits and pieces of governance infrastructure can be easily mixed and matched for each organization, like LEGO building blocks or WordPress templates.
They also wanted to offer multiple ways for users to interact with the system, so that it would serve the needs of everyone from blockchain-governance programmers to the most technophobic DAO participants. And they wanted to make it easy to build custom front-end applications based on the stack’s back end because they realized that many use cases would require their own interface.
With all these considerations in mind, the team built DAOstack from the ground up, modular at its core, and open-source throughout.
The DAO Stack
Arc
The base layer of the stack, called Arc, is a library of smart contracts implemented on the Ethereum blockchain, each of which represent functional elements that can be mixed, matched, and even modified to create the complete governance protocol for any given DAO. Arc is the product of years of research by some of the leading scholars in decentralized governance.
Arc.js
Arc.js is a JavaScript library that lets front-end developers easily build applications on top of Arc without being familiar with Solidity or the blockchain. With Arc.js, any organization or industry has the option of creating a custom interface suitable for its own use cases. DAOstack envisions ultimately hundreds or thousands of such Dapps (decentralized applications) deployed on Arc.js.
The Application Layer
Most users of DAOstack will not be blockchain developers or software engineers, but rather participants in decentralized organizations, and in some cases creators of them. These individuals will be interacting with the DAO stack primarily through the Dapps built on Arc.js and Arc.
There might be a Dapp for sports DAOs, in which fans collectively own teams and direct their actions; another for music services without the middleman, like a decentralized Spotify; and another for industry trade organizations. Sapien is using DAOstack to build a social news network, while Menlo is building a platform for decentralized funding of blockchain projects, and Cultu.re is planning a worldwide peer-to-peer identity and contracts system to parallel those of nations and states.
The first application being built on the stack is Alchemy, an intuitive user interface for budgeting and resource allocation for decentralized organizations. With Alchemy, anyone will be able to create a DAO in a few clicks, create an ERC20 crypto-token if desired, and invite others to participate in a hub of decision-making and talent-sharing.
DAOstack Use Cases
Collaboration
DAOstack can help coordinate decision-making among large groups working to produce an outcome, such as how much to value the contributions of individuals, or whether to invest in infrastructure. Imagine a film project of 1,000 artists, an open-source software project of 10,000 developers, a climate initiative of 50,000 scientists, or a collaborative news network of 100,000 journalists.
Asset Management
Many DAO use cases involve the management of assets and the allocation of funds. Imagine decentralized versions of venture funds, insurance networks, charitable funds, or real estate investment collectives.
Curation
Curation networks leverage the wisdom of the crowd to rank the quality of anything. Imagine decentralized versions of restaurant or hotel guides, similar to Yelp or TripAdvisor; article or video feeds, akin to social news feeds or Reddit; or website listings, like a socially curated Google search
The Collaborative Economy
DAOstack is designed to underpin not just individual organizations but an entire ecosystem of interoperable DAOs, able to share talent, ideas, and learnings. DAOs will even be able to act as members of other DAOs, creating a fluid “DAO mesh” or “internet of work”. DAOstack envisions tens or hundreds of millions of people are participating in this kind of collaborative economy – one in which no one wields a disproportionate amount of power, all are rewarded in proportion to the value they contribute, and everyone is incentivized to act in alignment with the common good.
The GEN Token Sale
GEN is an ERC-20 token and the native token of the DAOstack platform. Basic operations across the DAOstack ecosystem, such as boosting proposals into the collective attention, will require the spending or holding of GEN. GEN will be also be distributed to contributors of value through the DAOstack framework itself, incentivizing development, promotion and adoption.
Presale: May 1, 2018 at 4:00 am GMT
Main sale: May 8, 2018 at 4:00 am GMT
Hard cap: $30M
Total tokens: 60,000,000 GEN
Tokens to be sold: 40,000,000 GEN
Addt’l tokens reserved for the Genesis DAO, a community-managed fund
Whitelist: https://daostack.io
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