GenesisDAO: A New Wave in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
Introduction
2017 was a pivotal moment in blockchain development. ENS went live. Almost forty years after the Internet Engineering Task Force published the first specs for DNS — the giant on which shoulders the Ethereum Name Service stands.
You, as you are reading this right now, might be one of those people telling your grandchildren decades from now that you used to paste the underlying addresses into your browser-extension instead of human readable names.
This is the current state of blockchain. We are still creating the fundamental building blocks of our industry. Basic infrastructure within the world of blockchain that people can start using to get going.
We are close to solving the initial problems of our industry such as energy consumption and scalability. The next challenge for the blockchain ecosystem is to provide the infrastructure and tooling for builders and entrepreneurs to not only build their vision but to as well move problems out of their way.
Today we want to introduce you to Genesis DAO. By the name you might have guessed that this is infrastructure for DAOs. We are building a system parachain that serves as a common good.
It’s built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs: We’ve been there. We want to help entrepreneurs to focus on their idea, on product market fit and on building something of value — boldly going where no man has gone before.
You don’t want to figure out the details of governance at that stage, but you don’t want to close doors as well — but creating a DAO nowadays is hard.
You have to select your homechain wisely, figure out the legal difficulties and more often than not there is this little twist in your project that renders an existing solution impossible and you have to reinvent the wheel.
Genesis DAO aims to solve this problem by taking advantage of some of the unique properties of polkadots ecosystem and parachain design that allows us to apply separation of concerns not only on the protocol level, but also on the ecosystem level itself.
The role of system chains
Historically, building DAOs requires heavy commitments to a specific chain and development of features on top of skeleton frameworks or template builders such as OpenZepplin governance.
This in turn led to significant costs occurring in development, legal structure and voting mechanisms. As of today, launching a DAO alongside your crypto project remains a mission.
Polkadot has, since its inception, shipped multi chain as a first class citizen and brings a robust cross chain messaging format to the table.
We see XCM as a shift in the way blockchains interoperate.
10+ years after Forbes announced the API revolution for the Client-Server Architecture of Web 2.0; cross chain messaging is setup to move blockchains into platforms that can abstract away its complexities and specializations behind a sharp interface that protocols on other chain-ecosystems can utilize by tapping into its XCM specifications.
Genesis DAO is among this new wave of emerging platforms and provides DAOs as a Service.
We are separating your business from governance. You can opt to launch your protocol wherever you see fit and you can have your protocol token on those chains as well. While your governance happens on Genesis DAO, you can send the tokens to all other chains and you will be able to maintain voting capabilities on the remote chains.
An extension ecosystem
A group of people surrounding Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were quite busy at Bell Laboratories shaping the world as we know it today. They invented a milestone in programming languages — C, the breakthrough operational system Unix, the first shell, UTF-8 and a long list of others that alone would have been enough to receive a Turing award.
How were they so productive? Of course, the density of talent at Bell Labs was as high as within the Beatles (before John married) — but one tiny detail helped drive them. And that can be summed up in one word: focus; finding out what holds the application together in its innermost folds and excelling at that. It takes writing programs that do one thing and do it well. Today, this set of guiding principles is popularly known as the unix philosophy.
This fundamental building block of system design is what guides substrate development today. The ecosystem of polkadot is a set of domain-specific chains that focus on building the infrastructure for the web3 universe.
At Genesis DAO we are committed to the unix philosophy.
We are focused on the domain of DAO management with the core components of creating and running DAOs, overseeing token issuance and DAO treasury and having a rocksolid proposal and voting infrastructure.
However, DAOs can have small and granular requirements that do require small tweaks and adjustments. Sometimes on-top protocols like Yield Aggregators require additional functionality. Some of those changes may be deal breaking for technical use cases or legal reasons and therefore a hard requirement for newly founded DAOs. Some extensions such as vesting wallets can be useful to others.
Genesis DAO features a smart contract layer that is what plugins and extensions were for CMS, Shops in web2 — a smooth way for third parties to extend the core functionality for a chain.
In the same way as the big web2 protagonists like WordPress, Magento and many more concentrated on their core functionality (CMS, Shop), we are concentrating on basic governance and building a plugin and ecosystem layer on top with easy-to-write ink! plugins.
Announcing testnet
Genesis DAO has received and completed a grant from the web3 foundation to build the core infrastructure to manage DAO governance within a substrate-based chain.
You are welcome to try it out and explore the functionality yourself. The Main Repository is a good place to start digging into the tech and documentation, whereas you might as well fund yourself from Alice & Bob on our Testnet and try it for yourself on our Website: genesis-dao.org.
Outlook
The GenesisDAO team is currently working on the implementation of an extendable plugin-style DAO ecosystem, which will enhance smart contract extensions.
This upcoming feature will pave the way for more dynamic and customizable DAO ecosystems. You can read more about the exciting things to come in our treasury proposal.
Looking further ahead, GenesisDAO has plans to utilize a unique Cross Consensus Message (XCM) implementation that will enable cross-chain voting. This feature will separate the business logic from the DAO logic, providing projects the freedom to build on their preferred chain while enjoying the full benefits of the DAO ecosystem.
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