
Permissionless Hierarchy : A new way to look at DAOs.
DAOs are the biggest misnomer of web3. They don’t work, and no one seems to know how to make it work. Here, I present a view to challenge the way we look at DAOs to begin with. The take-away for me from 2 days of DAO discussions in Amsterdam is nobody has figured out how to manage the chaos to get anything useful done in a DAO. DAOs are today just a glorified Discord channel with no clear route to be either Decentralized (what does that even mean?) or Autonomous. “DAO” is a marketing gimmick....
Request to build - Decentralized NFT based lending protocol
A completely decentralized protocol that lets people borrow money from the treasury by producing an NFT. This is to be built on top of LooksRare, because LooksRare is decentralized and hence infinitely composable.Borrow at floor priceProduce an NFT from an NFT collection on LooksRare. The maximum amount you can borrow against the NFT is the minimum floor price of that collection over the last 30 days. You can only deposit verified collections’ NFTs - for securing the protocol. Open to any oth...
Request to build - A decentralized Audit Marketplace mechanism design
Auditing wait times on top audit firms are 9-12 months and expensive. We need something that is more participative and allows for new and yet-unproven security auditors. Here I propose a decentralized audit marketplace that turns the auditing process into a prediction marketplace.1. Select a juryA jury is usually reputed security engineers. This jury doesn’t do the audit itself, but only signs off a reported vulnerability as a real bug. There are 5 jury members selected for every audit. They ...
Founder [Questbook (YCw21)](https://questbook.xyz) Writing about things that need to be built in web3

Permissionless Hierarchy : A new way to look at DAOs.
DAOs are the biggest misnomer of web3. They don’t work, and no one seems to know how to make it work. Here, I present a view to challenge the way we look at DAOs to begin with. The take-away for me from 2 days of DAO discussions in Amsterdam is nobody has figured out how to manage the chaos to get anything useful done in a DAO. DAOs are today just a glorified Discord channel with no clear route to be either Decentralized (what does that even mean?) or Autonomous. “DAO” is a marketing gimmick....
Request to build - Decentralized NFT based lending protocol
A completely decentralized protocol that lets people borrow money from the treasury by producing an NFT. This is to be built on top of LooksRare, because LooksRare is decentralized and hence infinitely composable.Borrow at floor priceProduce an NFT from an NFT collection on LooksRare. The maximum amount you can borrow against the NFT is the minimum floor price of that collection over the last 30 days. You can only deposit verified collections’ NFTs - for securing the protocol. Open to any oth...
Request to build - A decentralized Audit Marketplace mechanism design
Auditing wait times on top audit firms are 9-12 months and expensive. We need something that is more participative and allows for new and yet-unproven security auditors. Here I propose a decentralized audit marketplace that turns the auditing process into a prediction marketplace.1. Select a juryA jury is usually reputed security engineers. This jury doesn’t do the audit itself, but only signs off a reported vulnerability as a real bug. There are 5 jury members selected for every audit. They ...
Founder [Questbook (YCw21)](https://questbook.xyz) Writing about things that need to be built in web3

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In web2, they who control the App on the users’ phones control the distribution.
But they who control the UI in web3 don’t necessarily control distribution.
Most of the UI is an interface to interact with smart contracts. Anyone can build a version of their own UI to interface with the smart contract. For example, you can use uniswap from uniswap.org, metamask, rainbow … all the same. They use the same smart contract underneath. So, even though the user interfaces are fragmented, the value is still accruing to the underlying smart contract - UniswapV3.
The way UIs are built in web3 are using indexers like Graph Protocol. Whenever an update happens on the smart contract, the update is reflected in Graph Protocol. Graph Protocol then gives a way for frontends to query and display this data.
For example, each time a swap or transfer happens on any Token, an event is emitted.
The indexer (like graph protocol) catches this emit and converts it into something that is query-able via an API. Many time implementing complex schemas, that are otherwise hard/impossible to do on the smart contract directly.
So indexers, naturally tend to index the main contract. No matter what UI you use to interact with that contract, globally people are using the same data - because of the contract that’s universally accepted as the one to be indexed.
When data is cheaply available, many interfaces can spring up. But all of them must adhere to the same index (aka subgraph) from the indexer - because that’s how they’ll have the latest data.
When they are adhering to the same indexer and subgraph, they are in turn adding value to the contract that is emitting those values. So the value will accrue to that contract that is emitting the events.
Counter examples are ofcourse people launching their own UI and contract - like sushiswap and 1inch.
But there is a new important role in the ecosystem to be the indexed contract. You can swap out uniswap and use sushiswap as your swapping mechanism and stay consistent with the events you’re emitting - so all the downstream products work as is while you redirect value accrual under the hood.
In web2, they who control the App on the users’ phones control the distribution.
But they who control the UI in web3 don’t necessarily control distribution.
Most of the UI is an interface to interact with smart contracts. Anyone can build a version of their own UI to interface with the smart contract. For example, you can use uniswap from uniswap.org, metamask, rainbow … all the same. They use the same smart contract underneath. So, even though the user interfaces are fragmented, the value is still accruing to the underlying smart contract - UniswapV3.
The way UIs are built in web3 are using indexers like Graph Protocol. Whenever an update happens on the smart contract, the update is reflected in Graph Protocol. Graph Protocol then gives a way for frontends to query and display this data.
For example, each time a swap or transfer happens on any Token, an event is emitted.
The indexer (like graph protocol) catches this emit and converts it into something that is query-able via an API. Many time implementing complex schemas, that are otherwise hard/impossible to do on the smart contract directly.
So indexers, naturally tend to index the main contract. No matter what UI you use to interact with that contract, globally people are using the same data - because of the contract that’s universally accepted as the one to be indexed.
When data is cheaply available, many interfaces can spring up. But all of them must adhere to the same index (aka subgraph) from the indexer - because that’s how they’ll have the latest data.
When they are adhering to the same indexer and subgraph, they are in turn adding value to the contract that is emitting those values. So the value will accrue to that contract that is emitting the events.
Counter examples are ofcourse people launching their own UI and contract - like sushiswap and 1inch.
But there is a new important role in the ecosystem to be the indexed contract. You can swap out uniswap and use sushiswap as your swapping mechanism and stay consistent with the events you’re emitting - so all the downstream products work as is while you redirect value accrual under the hood.
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