Decentralized Futures: Societal - Helping To Decentralize Polkadot with Advanced Treasury, Governance, and Member Management Systems

[gfox]

Hey Everyone!

My name is Graeme Fox - Co-Founder & CEO of Societal. Societal is a parachain project that makes it easy to organize, govern, and grow on-chain communities. On the Societal chain, we are building a streamlined SaaS application that will be the ideal platform to run any Polkadot community’s operations and governance. The projects that can use our platform include the creator economy, protocols, social clubs, gaming, DAOs, and more.

Background

As it stands today, the Polkadot ecosystem does not have the creation, governance, and treasury management tooling that other major blockchain ecosystems do. Additionally, the systems that parachain teams currently have access to have seen a number of governance based attacks.

Here is an informative thread outlining some of these recent governance hacks. Mangata Finance also had a similar governance based attack, where an individual elected multiple wallets into council positions, ultimately controlling the entire council and chain. Information on this case can be found here and here. Darwinia Network also experienced a governance based attack, where the attackers took control of the council and extracted large quantities of tokens. ChaosDAO recently performed a governance attack for educational purposes on Avail, where they were in control of 99.995% of the token supply. These cases demonstrate that there are many types of attack vectors that teams need to be aware of when launching a parachain. This creates a hurdle for new teams building with the Polkadot SDK, and distracts them from building and deploying their core product. Failure to protect yourself from these attack vectors can have fatal consequences for the project and community. Societal’s platform can prevent these attacks from taking place.

What We’re Building

Societal will provide an easy-to-use governance, treasury management, and operational toolkit for decentralized organizations and communities in Polkadot. By building these products, we hope to push the decentralization efforts of the Polkadot ecosystem forward.

We will provide parachains with a range of different governance systems, allowing them to select the system that best suits their community. By providing these governance systems, teams will be able to deploy faster and have better engagement with their communities. As mentioned above, managing a governance system can be a large lift for teams to do properly. With Societal, teams will be able to use our platform to manage their community grants, ecosystem rewards, bounty programs and more, all wrapped together in a single application.

Societal has already completed the majority of the development of our product and will soon be ready to start onboarding users. In the near future, decentralized organizations within the Polkadot ecosystem will be able to manage their governance, treasury and members using Societal.

End-User Product Overview

About Societal

Track Record/List Of Accomplishments To Date:

• Attended Inaugural Polkadot Blockchain Academy
• Inaugural Polkadot Relayers Secured
• Three Web 3 Foundation Grants — Grant 1, Grant 2, Grant 3
• Accepted to Substrate Builders Program - Chains Track and Completed Milestone 2
• Multiple Polkadot Panel Discussions - Academy Alumni, ETHDenver
• Rococo Testnet Deployment
• Product Walkthrough Videos
• Scytale Academy Graduate
• Accepted to Berkley Blockchain Accelerator 2023
• Cross Ecosystem Engagement Initiatives

In-Depth Project Information:

• Societal Website
• Societal Whitepaper
• Societal Docs
• Societal Product Demos
  
  

Final Thoughts

The Societal team has been committed to building in the Polkadot ecosystem for the past few years, and we hope that the community sees the value in what this project will bring to the table. We would love to hear the community’s input on our proposed project, and are more than happy to answer questions. Chat soon!

[Birdo]

wen launch ;)?

I’ve been watching you and the team build this for some time and I’m excited to see it roll out and gain traction. Do you have a date for when the first version will ship?

[gfox]

Hi @Birdo,

Thanks for the comment! Awesome to hear that you are excited to see Societal roll out. We are planning on launching near the end of Q1 next year and are looking forward to getting our product out to the ecosystem.

[Kratist0s]

Hello

Good to see you guys here! I personally believe it’s crucial we have DAO tooling for normal people available on Polkadot.
We have a number of NFT communities who would most likely find this project useful!

Goodluck

[alexandra.dumond]

These are great news! Looking forward to it!

[Shenanigrahams]

Big fan of this team and would love to see the product shipped. A strong DAO backend makes for stronger future DAOs.

Won’t you let the kids of tomorrow have the building blocks they need to build their castles?

LFG guys! The product looks clean.

[distractivekatie]

I really like this idea and would love to see better toolkits for this kind of thing in the eco. The downside of a comprehensive governance function is that it’s hella complex and nearly impossible for teams to manage.

I 100% agree that these governance-based attacks are a problem, and it’s reflective of a lack of utilization of the system. How many parachain teams do you consider to be ‘serious’ about their decentralization plans/integrating functionality like this?

Couple quick questions (I just did a quick skim of the whitepaper so I apologize if I missed these):

• Why parachain? Why not just make a dapp?
• It seems like you’re mostly targeting the builder teams (compared to gov end-users) - what’s the % mix of those audiences you’re looking for? And if it’s just builders, how sustainable is that?
• How is this experience going to improve the cross-parachain experience, if at all? Right now, these governance experiences are separate but it would be really cool if you could, for example, initiate opening of HRMP channels between parachains (since each would need to pass governance).
• Is there a value add for Polkadot/the relay chain directly?

[gfox]

Hi @distractivekatie, thanks for the comments and questions! Glad to hear that you like our project idea.

To answer your first question, I believe that a lot of parachain teams are serious about decentralization. We have directly spoken with nine parachain teams that are interested in using our product. The teams know that decentralization is important but do not want to implement the complex systems that are currently provided and dont have the time to build out their own solution.

Additionally, while our initial product is focused towards parachain teams, we do not see that being our only clients. We have also spoken to NFT projects, DAO and social clubs to name a few. From speaking with these projects, it is clear that a simple governance and treasury management solution is required in the ecosystem.

Here are the answers to your other questions:

• Why parachain? Why not just make a dapp?

  • We decided to go with a parachain for two main reasons. First, we did not want to manage multiple deployments across many chains, be subject to their XCM integrations, or take on the counterparty risk. Second, since we focus on governance and treasury management, we wanted to be independent. This way ideally no projects would not work with us because we are deployed on a chain that they are competing with.

• It seems like you’re mostly targeting the builder teams (compared to gov end-users) - what’s the % mix of those audiences you’re looking for? And if it’s just builders, how sustainable is that?

  • We are targeting existing projects right now as we have seen the greatest demand from them. They are also currently ready to integrate with us and start paying for our service. We do however have already built the capability for anyone to create a decentralized organization on our platform. So while we are focused on existing projects right now, we do plan to push out to new decentralized organizations in the future.

• How is this experience going to improve the cross-parachain experience, if at all? Right now, these governance experiences are separate but it would be really cool if you could, for example, initiate opening of HRMP channels between parachains (since each would need to pass governance).

  • We believe that our platform will greatly increase the cross-chain parachain experience. On our platform you will be able to use our governance system to manage the treasury of your organization on another chain. Therefore, organizations can reside on any chain they want and still use Societal to manage their governance and treasury. Additionally, we plan to do integrations with DeFi on other parachains, so organizations can actively manage their treasury with our platform.

• Is there a value add for Polkadot/the relay chain directly?

  • There are two value-adds for Polkadot. First, we plan to launch as a parachain or purchase blockspace from Polkadot. This will depend on when we are ready to launch and how far along Polkadot 2.0 is. Second, Polkadot has also talked about removing the governance from the relay chain and we believe Societal would be a great home for it.