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 ...
Founder [Questbook (YCw21)](https://questbook.xyz) Writing about things that need to be built in web3
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I think we routinely keep talking about bringing 1B users to web3. It’s a wrong mental model, and we end up building the exactly wrong products.
Unlike web2, you don’t have to wait for platforms to mature (become trustworthy) and expose their APIs (become composable). You can build on products that are nascent - because you can trust them by looking at their code, you can compose on them because smart contracts are composable by default.
What this enables is accelerating digital innovation.
People can compose on top of other products without having to re-invent the stack. At Questbook, we routinely build on top of nascent products. Gnosis safe (~3 yr), Graph protocol (~2yr), Orca (<1 yr). We don’t fear them going out of business. Because even if the company shuts down, the smart contracts will live forever.
In web3 you don’t have to rebuild the stack, you need to build on top. If designed well, you can build a product that captures value from the products built on top of yours.
If you don’t have to rebuild the stack, you can spend the same time moving the fringe forward.
Could we have had self driving cars by now, if all the companies weren’t building the stack from scratch and recording footage from scratch?
Web3 provides for not just open sourced code, but open sourced services.
We not only know what code is being run, we know exactly how it is being run. We know it cannot be shut down.
In web2 open source, you have to fork a repository and host it yourself. For many important projects hosting is non-trivial. So is maintenance.
So, fortunes have been made in providing open source code as a service. Redhat, Mongo, Heroku - all take open sourced code and provide a service, abstracting away the complexities of running and maintaining a service.
Web3 makes hosting open source software a commodity.
In my view the biggest problem isn’t bringing the next billion to web3. We need to bring only the 10M developers to web3. They will take web3 to the Billion. Or maybe not - as long as we short circuit the cycles of innovations, web3 has already done it’s job in the world.
I think we routinely keep talking about bringing 1B users to web3. It’s a wrong mental model, and we end up building the exactly wrong products.
Unlike web2, you don’t have to wait for platforms to mature (become trustworthy) and expose their APIs (become composable). You can build on products that are nascent - because you can trust them by looking at their code, you can compose on them because smart contracts are composable by default.
What this enables is accelerating digital innovation.
People can compose on top of other products without having to re-invent the stack. At Questbook, we routinely build on top of nascent products. Gnosis safe (~3 yr), Graph protocol (~2yr), Orca (<1 yr). We don’t fear them going out of business. Because even if the company shuts down, the smart contracts will live forever.
In web3 you don’t have to rebuild the stack, you need to build on top. If designed well, you can build a product that captures value from the products built on top of yours.
If you don’t have to rebuild the stack, you can spend the same time moving the fringe forward.
Could we have had self driving cars by now, if all the companies weren’t building the stack from scratch and recording footage from scratch?
Web3 provides for not just open sourced code, but open sourced services.
We not only know what code is being run, we know exactly how it is being run. We know it cannot be shut down.
In web2 open source, you have to fork a repository and host it yourself. For many important projects hosting is non-trivial. So is maintenance.
So, fortunes have been made in providing open source code as a service. Redhat, Mongo, Heroku - all take open sourced code and provide a service, abstracting away the complexities of running and maintaining a service.
Web3 makes hosting open source software a commodity.
In my view the biggest problem isn’t bringing the next billion to web3. We need to bring only the 10M developers to web3. They will take web3 to the Billion. Or maybe not - as long as we short circuit the cycles of innovations, web3 has already done it’s job in the world.
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