Madhavan MalolanPermissionless 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....
Madhavan MalolanRequest 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...
Madhavan MalolanRequest 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
Madhavan MalolanPermissionless 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....
Madhavan MalolanRequest 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...
Madhavan MalolanRequest 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 ...
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Founder [Questbook (YCw21)](https://questbook.xyz) Writing about things that need to be built in web3
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Most web3 developers are writing code that is centralized. They’re just writing web2 code in Solidity. Be careful when you’re overpaying for “web3 developers”.
I randomly pulled out 10 projects written in Solidity. 9 of the 10 surveyed projects are centralized.
If you’re writing some code that is really decentralized, you shouldn’t be having to rely on the person who deployed the contract to act honestly, or for that any person to act honestly at all. It should be impossible (not hard - impossible) to be able alter the course of expected action just because the community trusted you to act honestly always.
Closely related is Censorship resistance. You shouldn’t need anyone’s permission to execute certain action that is otherwise supposed to be for “all” users. Conversely, someone shouldn’t be denied access by an arbitrary authority to be able to access an action because of action/inaction outside the contract itself (e.g bribes).
If you are writing a contract, if other contracts cannot use your contract without your permission to build on top, your contract is not composable.
Most web3 developers are writing code that is centralized. They’re just writing web2 code in Solidity. Be careful when you’re overpaying for “web3 developers”.
I randomly pulled out 10 projects written in Solidity. 9 of the 10 surveyed projects are centralized.
If you’re writing some code that is really decentralized, you shouldn’t be having to rely on the person who deployed the contract to act honestly, or for that any person to act honestly at all. It should be impossible (not hard - impossible) to be able alter the course of expected action just because the community trusted you to act honestly always.
Closely related is Censorship resistance. You shouldn’t need anyone’s permission to execute certain action that is otherwise supposed to be for “all” users. Conversely, someone shouldn’t be denied access by an arbitrary authority to be able to access an action because of action/inaction outside the contract itself (e.g bribes).
If you are writing a contract, if other contracts cannot use your contract without your permission to build on top, your contract is not composable.
Interestingly none of the contracts i studied violated this. Probably because of the design of Solidity itself - it is actually pretty hard to write code such that it breaks composability. You have to really give thought to it.
I spent less than 30s per contract, so my analysis are bound to be inaccurate
I looked at code that has their last commit > 1 year ago, because some contracts start as centralized and destroy centralization after stabilization
Many of Questbook’s (where I work) contracts also fall in the above category
Interestingly none of the contracts i studied violated this. Probably because of the design of Solidity itself - it is actually pretty hard to write code such that it breaks composability. You have to really give thought to it.
I spent less than 30s per contract, so my analysis are bound to be inaccurate
I looked at code that has their last commit > 1 year ago, because some contracts start as centralized and destroy centralization after stabilization
Many of Questbook’s (where I work) contracts also fall in the above category
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