The Spaced Out Thoughts Development Foundation is evolving from an informal entity to a DAO (a Decentralized Autonomous Organization) in order to establish a self-sufficient, trustless organization with the goal of incentivizing development of Digicus, a platform to make smart contract development as easy as possible.

A DAO is an abstraction over a smart contract and a smart contract is simply (a bit tongue in cheek, we know) a collection of functions autonomously executed in a VM running sidecar to a blockchain, operating on a shared set of data, maintained by the underlying network. Why consider a DAO over a traditional web2 organization?

  1. public visibility: all actions, rules, etc. are in the open for anyone to read
  2. strong preference for as many nines as possible: blockchains typically operate at an availability rarely seen in conventional tech, paramount for operational governance of an organization
  3. operating in a resource constrained environment is not an issue: while we get (2), a tradeoff is we have to accept an exceptionally constrained execution environment in terms of resources, speed, etc.
  4. automated transfer of value: we can leverage oracles to define goals, linking rewards to these goals, automatically transferring rewards upon successful completion

Functions

[Function 1]: Incentiviation of Work

Progress is not free. Thus, the primary purpose of this DAO is to incentivize work. We expect two types of contributors:

  1. core: folks interested in ongoing work. These people will be members of the DAO, have voting rights, and receive an ongoing salary based on the value they provide (as voted on by their peers).
  2. ad hoc: spontaneous workers. These folks will contribute when they have spare time, but not necessarily in a continuous or ongoing manner.

Based on these two types of workers, funds will initially be allocated as follows: 75% to core contributors and 25% to ad hoc contributors. This law will be codified.

In order to facilitate the distinction between core and ad hoc contributors and in order to define tasks and criteria for completion, we will be leveraging a Github Oracle (to be developed).

[Function 2]: Prioritization of Funds

Since this work is open source, we expect four sources:

  1. core sponsorship: angel/anonymous/supporter funding. This category of funding, while similar to (3), grants fractional voting rights similar to a board member in a traditional, stock based organization.
  2. ad hoc sponsorship: while this work is open source and free to use and free to fork, we are the subject matter experts and thus we are the ones most able to ship functional features in a reasonable timeframe. Thus, we will allow third parties to post request for work proposals. These will be very similar to how we post ad hoc work requests, except that the source of funding will come externally instead of out of the DAO’s internal account.
  3. foundational sponsorship: ongoing and future grants (i.e. Stellar Community Fund)
  4. fee for service: it is often said that the creators of tooling, especially tooling that enables insight into the core functionality of a service, often have the best understanding of how those services work. We expect that over time we will develop Soroban expertise that we can lend out to the community for a fee (consultation work). A majority of fee for service rewards will go directly to the DAO member who handles the request, however a small percent will go back to the DAO to support further development.

Time and money are both limited. We will democratically decide:

  • how to spend our capital (money and time)
  • which ad hoc requests and fee for service requests to address in what order
  • who is best to address these requests

Membership

As noted, a DAO is supported by two resources: money and time. Based on how folks contribute and how much they contribute will define what privileges they receive.

membership tiers of DAO

Tokenomics

TBD

Operating Philosophy

  1. Voting power is earned: votes will be proportional to stake (time and money invested) with a preference for time
  2. We serve the greater good: everything is public
  3. Optimize for developer happiness (borrowed from the Rails Doctrine): when competing priorities arise, this is the tie breaker, “what will make our users happier?”
  4. Avoid flame wars at all costs: we make technology and tool decisions based on group consensus and what is best for the job, avoiding basing purely on personal preference at all costs

Contract Design

As stated in the introduction, this is just an initial basic sketch. We fully expect the design to change as oru assumptions and understanding evolve. Furthermore, the source of truth is always the code. We will do our best to maintain this document, however, please always consult the code as well, especially for particular implementation details.

architecture of DAO


Components

[Corpus of Work]: a Github repository that functions as the source of truth for work. Here each instance of work will have a timeline, a set of well defined deliverables, and a reward (optionally we may assign to a user).

[GH Action]: maintains the state of the oracle contract

[Github Oracle Contract]: maintains the state of relevant Github information such as work, work progress, work details, etc.

[DAO Contract]: leveraging the oracle, facilitates voting, proposals for new work, reward distribution, etc.

[DAO Hub Backend]: surfaces information from the DAO contract to be consumed by other services. Likely will also include the hosting a Horizon and a Soroban RPC service as well.

[DAO Hub Website]: a visual of the pertinent information from the DAO contract. Will have basic functionality to interact with the contract as well.