#DappCon22 : Day 3 - Why SZNS Uses Gnosis Safe, John Bisu

Transcript

we have John bisou from Seasons with the titled talk titled why seasons uses gnosis safe cool testing all right Jim uh so I'm John I'm one of the founders of Seasons where we're trying to make Collective ownership useful for everyone starting with the first service of a nft fractionalization which I'll dig deeper in as we proceed and I'm sure you've heard a lot of definitions about wait oh damn okay so my objective today is to provide some light on uh why dial tooling and infrastructure in general Still Remains

very nascent and why we chose noses safe to build on as a result and I hope uh throughout this conversation it provides some interesting even philosophical questions about dials for you to ponder while also giving you some information about seasons and what we do and why we chose gnosis safe so you've heard a lot about dial definitions throughout the conference I'll give you another one I think pals are just another type of organizations that have existed since the dawn of humanity but the unique identifier is that now you can codify rules of participation with smart contracts and that's unique because now you can have state changes on the organization based on code so people have structural barriers on what they can or cannot do

and it seems like for the most part we've come to this idea that for now the most fairest means of participation is through a democratic token holder voting and I'm going to pose a few scenarios to highlight why that's extremely primitive and why that requires us to work a lot more so for scenario one uh just to set the preface assume that this style has communicated very clearly to its users that this proposals with the 51 vote gets passed right and then assume that all of this knowledge has been efficiently communicated everyone who

joins the Dao is explicitly aware of this so this is like blinding me so I can't see the hands but uh if the dial has 100 million in his Treasury when somebody slowly obtains 51 and directs the altar himself through a governance proposal even though 49 49 said no how many of you think this is Justified raise your hands a few okay so how many of you think it's no not justified okay so more people saying no right so if you voted yes you agree with this notion of a procedural Justice right you have this idea that due to a fair notion

of process it doesn't really matter what the outcome is right for the people who voted no it's based on this notion of like a substantive or distributive justice where despite the process you care more about kind of effectively what the outcome looks like um and I'll come back to you know maybe how nurses safe and Seasons helps address this a little better next scenario suppose Alice makes a proposal which gets rejected with the majority vote and then should she be able to make the same proposal a week later who thinks yes okay uh who thinks no okay I was wrong I actually thought most

people would say no um so I'm going to change my script a little bit uh just kidding um okay so I personally think at face value it should be no you can't just keep bombarding proposals until you think it can be passed uh something relatively similar happened with um tribe where they first voted to make um the uh users of the fuse exploit whole but then there was a second proposal that kind of said no and then people started wondering okay well can you start having proposals that just cancel out the first one because it didn't get executed in time and uh all of these I think point to kind of how

uh we as a community have built these dowel Primitives with not enough thought of exactly how process around proposals and governance should be passed like law making for different governments for Millennia has been iterated on and different countries have different governance models right like the US has uh something called a bill before a legis passed into a legislation and it's exactly like a proposal and if you read into like how laws are made it's very similar to like you know what we're doing like we're trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of like organizational governance corporate governance and uh

the it ties back to the opportunity of the definition of dials where now you can have Smart contracts that Define what let's say an executive order um might look like like in the U.S the president can miss you executive orders that are relatively arbitrary and and wide in scope and it's become it becomes a point of legal discussion of whether a certain executive order is Justified or not you can make things simpler in terms of that organizations by obviously codifying it and this is why um you know we are building in the space I'll explain what we do a little more but in terms of some of the options that are available to build on daos today there are a lot I chose these as

examples because I think it highlights some of um I guess the more prominent movements like Aragon I respect them a lot they've been tackling the dial problem since the very beginning even still like uh last few months they announced this uh attempt to create a new set of smart contracts as the case that they think is more suitable for the dollar landscape today compound as you know has this amazing set of governance contracts that other people have forked nouns Now is really prominent they use a fork of compound and then opens up one also now released kind of like not now well been a while but based off of compound where it's a little more modular and they also

allow for you to build your own governance contracts with interesting Primitives where now you can specify certain types of voting power based on a combination of tokens or other contracts um but if you roll your own contracts it's a lot of effort right not everyone has the technical knowledge of building a uh being able to deploy a set of contracts for their Dao that's just why you have some other Dow tooling services that allow you to spin up dials quickly but again kind of the parameters that you have are very like uh primitive so like an example is these are you have this notion of a voting delay voting period and a quorum and that's usually kind of what exists across Downs today and then

there's in a molec dial is a they popularized this notion of a rage quit where anybody who doesn't agree with a proposal that's about to be passed can call this function in the exit Pro rata based on their contributions um and I might go back to that I'm realizing I'm talking a little too slowly so so where'd the season come into play uh quickly so we started with this platform called axi tree where back when actually Infinity was on ethereum it was a platform to borrow and lend axes so uh back then to you to like actually get started with axis it was like 300 per axes and then people in the Philippines uh obviously could not afford them so we built a service where

they could borrow it for free or an SLP and then share the SLP with the renters and then they moved away from ethereums were like oh [ __ ] what are we going to do we're not going to go to Ronin um no shade but you know we like ethereum and so we thought we had this idea of um moving from uh this General we had this idea for axi tree where people would have access together and then you would lend it out to people that let's say they're participating in tournaments if they win in the part tournament the prize pool goes back into the owners and they distribute it right and the generalized model is collective ownership of nfts now you have we wanted to build a model where multiple people can own nfts and I think the zero to one

moment for web3 in the context of owning assets is that now you can share ownership without a centralized party you have different kind of like platforms today that do something like let's say fractionalization of a car the issue shares based on the value of a collector's car but the maintenance and the management of that car is done by a trusted party right for digital assets it's a little different you can actually through a thousand smart contracts make rules uh Fair and codified so for Seasons what we do is we use the nose to save uh very quickly so our first service is nft fractionalization and the fractionalization as a concept is super clear right you take a very high value

nft break it into smaller tokens that represent the value of the nft and then uh the differentiator with us is that you are able to now govern the nft and the idea was that you know take the Doge nft that was fractionalized which is the most popular form of fractionalization in nfts today the only thing that they have the ability to do is wait for a buyout because the Vault contract only takes that function in right so we wanted to kind of explore a model where ownership as a fraction owner was a little bit more meaningful and our idea was that you put the nfts into a Nosa safe and we mint erc20s that represent the value of that on the

ownership of that nose is safe so that people can perform any kind of arbitrary actions and some of the actions that you might do as a fractional owner of a certain nft is voting together to let's say add an nft to the collection or listing it for sale or we have some custom contracts like bountyboard which uh takes in a certain nft in return for a collection token and then you can also craft kind of like arbitrary transactions uh using the safenet module which I think now they're calling reality um so why notes are safe for us our first use case is holding and managing assets right so there is no we thought there's

no other better platform for customing assets than nosif gnosis and we really identify with kind of the approach that they're taking with zodiac in terms of making governance very modular we are hopefully and we're excited to kind of contribute to the ecosystem by perhaps making some modules of our own and helping the ecosystem grow in terms of managing nft assets and I'll dig into this soon in terms of I I think what we are going to see in terms of dials are just additional alternative like governance philosophies to come into practice uh political product token voting is I think again very primitive and doesn't really suit uh I would say all of the use cases of

dials so what others can we have I think one an election process that is better defined like right now there is no uh any dial that supports like delegation for example like ens it's very simple you just have tokens you delegate to a certain person right and what do they do then they can you know use those votes in terms of getting some actions passed in the DNS protocol um this having some sort of an election process if we do want to mirror some sort of like a representative government governance system like we have in uh many governments today uh would allow for dials to be able to like function

more effectively uh I also don't necessarily think that dials need to be purely Democratic like dials are organizations like you don't have every single person running Apple like nothing would get done they wouldn't have the best hardware like they do today in the same way that I think dials can just simply have an autonomous way of putting leaders in place and again what's the zero to one moment for web three you can have a peaceful Cuda thought right this whole peaceful transfer of power that people have tried to achieve with governments now you can achieve at least in the digital world by providing with code uh individuals with let's say veto power or room power removal power of

putting that decision maker out of the system uh and then fourth is a reputation system of arbitrators I pointed to uh this uh what is this chart uh graph where we have this notion of a season style so reality.if is a type of mechanism where uh it our it through a bonding mechanism it determines whether a proposal is valid or Not Right But effectively it ends up being kind of like a bidding process of who's willing to stake more and risk more in order to verify that this Oracle is true right uh we currently provide this like arbitration ability or

service where you would deploy a dial on Seasons or fractionalize on Seasons because you get to avoid the um let's say one of the attack factors of just constant bombardment of proposals right or a malicious proposal um but we think there is significant opportunity for us to improve on that model where you do have a system of arbitrators where it's not necessarily just us I think there's still like very there's significant value in um different nodes being able to establish reputation for their services and I think it is ideal to have not just us but let's say other arbitrators come

into our system and provide these services and people can choose and have the flexibility of deciding which arbitrators to use and then in terms of challenges and opportunities ahead I think there's a lot to do in terms of like dial participation this is something that we're trying to tackle so when nfts are fractionalized you are a fractional token holder you now get things done by governance right and it's not and governance takes so much effort time and mind share you simply don't have the ability to go through every proposal so for our from our perspective how do you make that life cycle more manageable and easier uh those are current platforms don't do that yet I don't think so but

we will get there uh dial infrastructure um again it comes back to why we choose notices safe I think a lot of other platforms try to roll their own contracts and like build like a lighter version of a gnosis safe if you will um I I think rather than putting effort into kind of maintaining a contract a set of contracts like that I'd like to work with an ecosystem that has a lot of I think I think the gnosis team has put a lot of thought into the products that they've built and it's part of uh growing together as an ecosystem in terms of I don't know why I ended with regulatory because nobody likes regulatory but I think as you know I think we're all seeing throughout the

years regulation becomes clearer and dials will also start to be categorized into some sort of you know regulatory kind of environment and I'm you know personally excited to see some more clarity there so that we can provide the best services for our users um and then before questions please come visit our booth where you'll get a refractionalized Apache penguin which I love and uh we're giving a lot 20 worth of these tokens so come visit our booth and you'll be able to vote on some proposals uh based on the management of this pudgy and we'll add a few things in there and follow me on Twitter jlfe I'm trying to get 10K but it's very far away uh thank you and I'll take questions

thank you John yeah we have about five minutes for questions yes what's an example of a module that hasn't been built that you're interested in pursuing or developing um uh we we're playing around with this idea of a guardian so how do you set some leaders in place that you know can have certain actions that they're able to do so like every gnosis safe has some sort of like a safe owner right and the safe owner can just do everything in the nurses safe we remove the safe owner when we deploy our Factory contract but

that owner can be set through governance right but I think what would be nice is if we have a module approach of having certain Guardians that can have let's say the ability to list the nft and that's kind of a function that they have unilaterally without governance I think that will be interesting to build thank you hey um thanks very much for the talk I'm fully behind the idea of using wallet abstractions for dial tooling um this question might therefore be a little bit off topic but I'd be interested in your opinion so we had a speaker earlier on in the day talking about um contributions to dials and you've been

speaking about governance and those I think are like two of the three important components for Dows the third I think is collaboration and kind of forming a collective mind meld on Direction and it's related to what you're talking about about representative leaders and so on but I feel like a lot of that is not kind of covered by a tooling right now at least web3 tooling obviously there's you know discourse Discord and so on um what can web3 engineers and the web 3 Community do to improve collaboration in Dao's I don't know that's a tough question we'll talk about it afterward yeah I'll pass on that well I mean yeah I

don't know if I can provide any original uh kind of thought but in terms of maybe just on the topic of collaboration maybe so um we you know we're still exploring what it means or what kind of actions that fractional token holders really want and it's not entirely clear to us that um certain owners just want collaboration all the time right like one of the kind of use cases for fractionalization is just exposure to the nft right so usually if you think that this person who created The Collection is a better nft collector than I am and therefore I will put some buy some of the collection tokens you want the management of that to be largely curatorial right not necessarily through collaboration so

um I think it would be maybe to answer your question directly it would be based on the use cases that you see all right um so yeah hopefully we can build it please show us some love you know um we just launched our public beta so anyone can create a collection um and the first use case is nft fractionalization where you take some nft and then create a collection token out of it we also have you know this thing called dial season where you can launch like a gnosis safe that is governed through the collection token it's like a no code dial deploy right and then we will be launching something called pool Seasons where you can pull

money uh pull eth with your friends to buy a certain nft um yeah thank you cool thank you John