Staking for common good - an experiment in participatory public goods funding / Wlodek Gogloza

Transcript

[Applause] hello uh thank you for the invitation thanks thank you for being here uh it's definitely one of the most exciting conference with the within this ecosystem I've ever been to and I travel a lot and to participate in many conferences so it's a privilege I hope you will find my presentation also interesting inspiring and fun so I will be talking about a new project by Gollum Foundation where we'll be using uh staking rewards to find some very very cool projects okay 2022 is widely considered within our

bubble as the year of Dallas last year we've experienced a rapid growth in number of decentralized organization in the number of individuals in or at least wallets involved in them as well as the amount of funds that are managed through some sort of decentralized mana and this remarkable search is often described in crypto media as Cambrian explosion the thing is that this term is misleading because it suggests that what we are experiencing is a rapid boom that brings about a multitude of competing approaches when this is really not the case

um in real reality the variance of organizational structures and governance mode within the dial ecosystem is very very limited uh most of those follow familiar Blueprints and rely on a very narrow set of governance Primitives I think it can be safely said and accurately is that which is probably even more important that the governance model of the vast majority of dials can be described as snapshot plus multi-sig and don't get me wrong I'm not criticizing any organization any doubts for choosing to follow a well-established path there are actually very good reasons why we often decide to use something that has been already

tested that we deciding to use the well that's that Frameworks these Frameworks are easy to deploy they make the deployment process smooth fast unproblematic they help users feel comfortable which means it makes onboarding quite easy and obviously they reduce operational risk so there's really nothing wrong in having this attitude of letting others there's some novel ideas first before deploying it in our own production setup but from this ecosystem standpoint the fact that so

many of us rely on the same tools actually is a huge huge loss it's a lost opportunity to experiment to gain knowledge and to do something Innovative and blockchain I ecosystem which we are occupying is actually a perfect environment to test new ideas to build new institutions like entry barriers are obviously pretty low exit is much easier than anywhere else in in the world blockchains provide transparency thanks to which we are able to analyze everything that happens within our organizations um much in much more detail than outside of the blockchain ecosystem so by using

the same designs we are actually limiting our potential for learning and we're missing out on understanding what works what doesn't and why things fail so if we like to um leverage the potential that blockchain provide us to the fullest possible extent we should start experimenting and should be experimenting much more uh enter octant this is this new project by Gollum Foundation that I teased a moment ago it's a novel platform for running experiments in the centralized governance and uh while introducing Octon to you I will first explain or present a sort of a meta experiment in

the participatory public goods funding that we'll be running within this platform and then I will also explain how the same setup can be used to run more narrowly focused experiments in the centralized governance so let's start with this metal Grant experiment however you want to call it we are in the fortunate positions of sitting on a very very large pile of Eve and very soon we'll be staking 100 000 if and the staking 100 000 Eve obviously generates a lot of rewards and every 90 day we will be turning a

predefined amount of this rewards to Octane Community thus providing a budget for experimentation um the octane's reward ball the actor experimentation budget is going to be divided into two mainstreams user rewards and much rewards to have a say how octant operates users will have to lock nine at least 100 glm for an Epoch lasting 90 days now glm is an erc20 token native to the Golem Network you can easily acquire it in many exchanges centralized or decentralized the more glm you log into Ultra octane smart contract the higher your users

reward will get and you bigger your say in how an octant reward budget is allocated is and what is like really important is this time locking setup is completely non-custodial you have full control over your funds your funds are not pulled together with resources of others you can unlock your glm at any moment you choose however if you'd like like to say how octant operates you need to keep your glm locked in for 90 days and once this 90 days Epoch and users with valid logins we have uh two week long allocation window during which they

will be able to make a decision whether they want to keep their user rewards to themselves or donate it to public goods causes chosen from the list created by Octan community and if you choose the latter if you choose to donate your rewards then your donation will be magnified from a much matching rewards the donations will go to Project proportionally the matching rewards will go to Project proportionally to users allocations so up to this point it's basically very simple setup right but we actually made some twists in it

to make it more fun more engaging and more meaningful so first of all in order to be eligible to receive funds and in order to be able to allocate them to different causes users will have to be active there is this allocation in window if they do nothing then basically they're part of users rewards will go back to octanta and will be used for risk taking and similarly uh if in order to receive donate Community donations a project will have to pass certain predefined threshold of community allocations donations below this threshold will go

back to octant and will be used for restaking and this twist turns this game into a multiplayer game because in order to have an impact on actually what's going on you have to observe what other users are doing how your favorite projects are doing whether they are above or below the threshold and you need to react accordingly and in order to for you to be able to react accordingly we are making allocation decisions completely free there are no gas costs involved so you can change your decision as many time as you want as long as the allocation window is open so you can

think about this design as an experiment in voluntary taxation in coordination okay here we are interesting in answering questions such as what makes people actually give to public goods causes how does matching funding influences users decisions are people observing what others are doing within the app are they coordinating in groups and so on and we believe that these are like really important questions and we believe that answering them in a like real life setting with real resources at stack will actually benefit uh the whole ecosystem the whole ethereum Community but this is not where

the experimental aspect of Octon ends each Epoch will also provide us with the opportunity to test various governance Primitives and in order to enable this kind of experimentation we are actually making a octant modular and easily upgradable to oversimplify things a bit you can imagine Auckland as like free Independent by interconnected modules one is responsible for e-staking the another is responsible for this gnm time locking mechanism and the third one is responsible for the governance over Auckland budget and why we want the first two modules to be stable the third one is upgradable thanks to this we are

able to introduce various changes to the governance mechanism without losing continuity of state and without user disruption thanks to this setup we can play with various for example matching funding systems without asking users to migrate their tokens to a different smart contract because we changed some small things in our network setup and this modularity will enable us to play with matching funding systems with delegation Frameworks will enable us to test as the various and disabled solution identity solution so on and initially we will be running this experiments on our own

to test various hypothesis as we as a foundation have but our ultimate goal is actually make this platform available to Outsiders and let them run experiments to test Day ideas uh you can imagine octant as experiment as a service okay here how could could the service could work in practice like Foundation allocates certain amount of if from staking towards um octant uh just like as in the example I explained in the before there's an open call for proposals for design of governance experiments that

influence how the budget is distributed among the public goods and various public goods causes in order to submit a proposal you have to lock a certain amount of glm with us the highest bidding proposal wins and the experiment is executed within octant environment obviously again I'm oversimplifying a bit because there will definitely has to be some kind of review process because we'll need to make sure that your experiment is not in any way endangering the staking part of the whole setup and that glms that are locked by users are also not in any danger but that that's the basic idea okay so uh where are we now octal is already live on sepolia

testnet it's publicly available and anyone can play with it uh is go to octon.app and connect your wallet we are still making some tweaks to the UI and ux also making some changes at the back end but basically all the crucial functionalities are there are worked have been tested have been audited it's basically various soon to be in launched on on the mainnet since this is a test net we are using test if and test glm which you can get for free from our our faucet uh the epochs are really short they're like 24 hours long the

allocation between those are even shorter and as maybe you can see the screen behind me instead of using actual public goods because as we are using historical Moon missions as as placeholders and we are hoping to launch this app on the ethereum main map at the very beginning of August and what is important is that the version that we're going to be launching on the mainnet is just an MVP we still believe that there's a room for improvement and we're actually eager to hear your ideas how we can improve our design to make it even more useful to the ethereum community and we are mostly interested in ideas

how we can gamify uh this whole experiment because the sad and fortunate reality is that governance design generates a lot of interest only when the governance process is for some reason contentious in like normal circumstances evil people who are like very active in the governance all the organization does or otherwise don't spend a lot of time thinking about what the what is a different outcome Between Difference like delegation Frameworks or or matching funding systems and and as so on unfortunately a research like this even though it's like really important

beneficial and necessary for us to actually Advance as a state do not generate a lot of readership and do not generate a lot of excitement and we believe that in order to make people care and make people interested in mechanism design we need to think how we can turn governance into engaging experience okay so this is why we are thinking how we can maybe use nfts pull-ups and solvent tokens to make it interesting more interesting for users we are also thinking about introducing like game levels that are unlocked once certain

achievements are obtained by users and so on so if you have like any ideas how this X experiment can be more exciting to the user how more engaging and thus more meaningful when it comes to the results please do not hesitate to contact us a we are still like pretty early in the process and B uh we take this upgradability very seriously and we intend to use it to fold the fullest possible extent so chances are that if you have a good idea it's going to be implemented sooner than you actually may even help okay so uh if you uh like what you've

um what I said you think that it's a good idea uh please follow us on Twitter it's basically handle is octaned up um next week we will allow and announce a special pre-launch event that we are calling Epoch zero and during this Epoch zero we will be Distributing one million uh dollars worth of if among various public good causes and since this is a pre-launch Epoch it will happen outside of the app you won't have to lock any glms with us and the vote win will happen on Snapchat we're trying to make this familiar as with this setup as familiar as possible so that there's no need for any

onboarding and anyone can be included so if you would like to participate in this Epoch zero and you would like to distribute part of this um amount um to your favorite project please follow us on on Twitter and then we will announce when the epoch starts how you can participate and what projects I can receive your support okay so uh that's basically it uh if you'd like to know more about octant uh the like description is at Octan build it's like a general introduction the app

itself is available at octant app if you are more interested in like backbones of of this project ideas behind it math behind we are we are calculating users rewards much rewards and so on and then go to docsoctant.app and for more information about Golem Foundation where we got our if and stuff like this go to golondat Foundation um okay if you have any questions I'll try to do my best to answer them if if my answer won't be satisfying then please come to our booth uh we have our like community relations directors some

developers with us so thank you [Applause] any questions uh actually cannot really see you that well I know that there are some people here which is like really encouraging Sunday I know that the party was like pretty crazy like oh at least I heard that it was crazy like you know I'm a boring academician like what do I know about parking oh yeah yeah yeah my wife is also at our booth yeah okay

yeah what will be the uh what do you what kind of governance experiments do you plan to have running first so um we are starting with a setup that is very very simple and actually very very close to what many other dials are doing like you know we basically using coin voting linear distribution and stuff like this so but obviously this is just the start and just just to make the onboarding as easy as possible but we would like to move to something much more advanced much more exciting and one

of the first experiments we would like to run is in quadratic funding but in order to actually introduce quadratic funding into this mechanism uh we need to first play with some identity and item civil Solutions so probably the very first experiments that will be run running will be testing various antisable tools that are already available in the community but we are actually also in contact with some developers working on some stuff that has not been announced yet but they are eager to actually test it in like live environment that is as close as possible to to what actually happens in organizations I think the

most important the most valuable thing about octant is that we are running experiments not in some artificial setup but in a setup that very closely resembles what actually happens in Dallas there are real resources at stake and we're talking about uh the large resources as you can imagine returns from staking 100 000 if is actually quite a lot of money uh so the the we believe that results of the experiments run in this platform are going to be quite quite meaningful yep what do you think about like the accountability in funding the public

goods for instance like in let's take the example of Bitcoin after the matching fund there's no monitoring or accountability process which is implemented in the platform yeah do you have any plans like addressing disease so yeah that's definitely an issue uh we have not come up with a like a solution for it right now we will be starting with grieving grants for like General operations uh so you will basically uh there will be a review process um for being whitelisted to be included in the Octan potential beneficiary pool we'll be looking what the organization is doing what is the track record

probably at the very beginning will will not be funding any like one of projects because then there it definitely has to be an ongoing review maybe there has to be some Milestone uh there definitely has to be some Meister setup and then there's going to be some monitoring at the moment we we have some ideas uh how to do it but um we don't want to do it our own as a foundation and since we don't have yet Community because the project has not been yet launched like uh the the there's just uh the overhead would be the way way too high for us but yeah it's it's an excellent point I'm now that uh

um a project like uh ours and projects who basically try to fund public goods within the ethereum ecosystem and not only here uh actually struggling quite often with monitoring uh of Grant recipients okay anyone else okay [Music]