__________________________________________________________________________________________

(1) On those initial set of default DAO features, the petitioners want to add additional ones as to give issuers (the bank) more power in their relation with users (members). The issuer will gain more control over what a token owner can do with its tokens. This, of course, as always, in the name of security and convenience. To, of course, protect the token, previously owner, now mere user. In practice, what this aims to do is make tokens up-gradable by default as to be governed by their corresponding DAO. Like those exist in practice, at this point in time, and as if DAOs are the sole or most popular type of token issuer or, finally, as if the social consensus they decry is not in fact and by any definition already decentralized governance.

(2) I do not think for a minute that I am exaggerating when I say there is an important shift here the signers are pushing: from assets that users own in the fullest sense of the word to assets that are governed over in common. This distinction is one that the signers seem to totally ignore. Defaulting to the second is highly problematic as it, among other things, could:

• declare open season to chain sanctioning regime (land of the free will get ideas)

• restrict permissionless innovation and composeability (slippery slope)

• push costs on the users under a false assumption of DAO structural maturity

Now, there is nothing wrong with altering the character of a token on comunitarian grounds. There’s nothing in itself evil with central banks changing interest rates. I am by no means an american libertarian nutcase. I abuse such governed tokens daily in mechanism design. But, a line needs to be drawn somewhere when talking defaults. My hot take here is that perhaps giving sanctioning power over assets that have as primary purpose value conservation or speculation seems like a breach of contract.

An Illegitimate imposition I would say. I would also dare to ask as to why is user choice here illegitimate? Is the consent invalid because the implications of the choice are seemingly undisclosed? But how are upgrade-able tokens better in that regard? Isn’t the sense-making burden they introduce much more demanding than the current signal-by-use mechanism? Isn’t it also, given the state of understanding of tokens as DAOs, a centralizing vector that is seriously prone to queen-make the highest briber?

On the island, south of The Park, there are two iconic places about 5 miles away from each other that are instantly recognizable by movie lovers if not the entire English speaking world. The first is a piece of public infrastructure shrouded in romance where briefcase trading spies rub shoulders with runaway lovebirds. The second, a place of raw intelligence and vertical concentration of power where global shadow throwing games are played. These are not La Défense and Garre du Nord, nor Bankenviertel and Main Hauptbahnhof, but inexorably Grand Station Terminal and Wall Street, of Manhattan, New York.

What these pairings have in common is the contrast they generate; contrast perhaps best summarized by their regard of time. Time is an unforgiving monarch in train stations and is respected as such through omnipresent and out of reach ornate clocks. In finance, time is public information, the most perishable typeof there is, ornate at its best on individual wrists. This different rapport to time is indicative of different worlds. The reality of the train stations is generated by passengers permissionlessly committing along the train station protocol with the clear objective of A to B. On the counterpart, if Margin Call got it right, Wall Street is the premier MEV hub of the global economy where agents engage adversarially with no shared value proposition to optimize for. When not accepted as an intermediating truth, time becomes a competitive dimension. This cripples the possibility of coordination for added value games and plunges Wall Street in a narrow paradigm where the accrual of value is extractive and predominantly the product of frontrunning the bell by bell actualization of shared reality. The assumption that permeates this text, if any, is that the skyscraping trenches of Wall Street are dead weight in an economy that operates its books as public infrastructure. Conductive Finance aims to be a contribution in the direction of this more accessible and freer market that can capitalize on these inefficiencies.

Conductive Finance aims to rebase value investment on the dynamics of purpose by leveraging accessible, trustworthy and consciously imparted ledgers in predictable, standardized and understandable ways.

Why trains?

For one, it is impossible to imagine the past 200 years without trains. Their economic impact cannot be understated nor their strategic use in all nation state affairs. The American experiment going west, the from mine to port lines of Africa, the signing of the 1918 armistice, Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience, the historical, the mundane, the unfolding of the modern world is bound by trains.

The unique competitive edge of the train for travelers was not its comforts but the unspoken socialization of security costs. In this same way, the train as an investment vehicle reduces risks by declaring its purpose, aggregating stakeholders and advancing towards its specific, time limited or not end in predictable, deterministic ways.

Anna creates a train for A (now) to (a desired future state) B, and you traveler, fully aware of its operating parameters (be them immutable or governable), buy a ticket and join the ride. As with any train ride the ticket gets you in a space with other travelers. Being in means you can contribute to keeping the train in good working order or on the contrary, agitate a mutiny in case you feel the trains derailed from its original destination. As for value, the rules of any train apply. You get your full ticket’s worth by traveling to the station printed on the ticket. Oopsies do happen, and as with any “left the stove on” situation you can jump out. That can hurt, but it’s reassuring to know the doors are not locked between stations. Among other things, Zombies can also happen and you do not want to stay for very long on a zombie-ridden train, do you?

So, to summarize, no slick hair wiseguy lingo, just a train, a ticket and if desired, a community of stakeholders. No cloaks and daggers, only ticket based permissionless travel on an immutable or governable train.

If you are yet to be convinced, here’s some other things that spring to mind:

• Railways are the OG of Network Effects

• Stations are Community Events

• Trains are Memeable and Metaversable

• Implied Predictability

• Scale Agnostic

The disposition of trains as rolling financial vehicles is:

• flexible enough to contain permissionless bootstrapping of enterprising effort

• transparent and deterministic enough to make scams easily identifiable

• easy to understand, explain, depict, measure and compare

Lastly, and most importantly, the train ride is probably the most culturally universal protocol. However, if it so just happens that you’re a train hater, you can think of Conductive Finance as a publicly owned stock exchange (protocol), trains as listings and ticketed passengers as board member level stockholders.

Design Paradigm

Looking backwards, there are a few deliberate choices or emergent themes that ought to be mentioned.

Slow is better

Finance, being more consequential than food, is at its best cooked and served slowly. Just because we can eat fast food everyday, does not mean we should. Slow food is healthier.

Fast finance, the type that renders investment in cost externalization and server proximity profitable, is arguably a race to the bottom. The argument here is that financial instruments that are accompanied by reams of descriptive text and are leveraged at the speed of light are unlikely to be consistently conductive of good.

Under the assumptions that

• Finance serves peoples

• Speed increases risk

• Performance is relative

Conductive finance aims to be finance at human speed. The purpose of financial vehicles needs to be evident to and under the control of the humans it serves at all times. For something to be good, it has to be at least accommodating of a desirable future state of affairs. For something to stay good, its emergent state has to be predictable and to the largest extent at the whim of those agents that hold the targeted state of affairs desirable. Conductive finance wants to be consistently conductive of good, and as such limits maneuverability towards the desired destinations at speeds never greater than that of the humans it serves.

Conductive finance is your friendly and religiously good neighborhood finance, the kind that always waits for the granny to safely cross the street, all while sacrificing nothing of comparable importance.

Configurable permissionlessness

The core belief that shapes the protocol and that stands as the starting point for subsequent choices is that transparency, simplicity, built-in time delays and incentives can be instrumentalized in such a way as to create a trust minimized, anti-(rugpull)-fragile environment. The implementation makes a deliberate effort in upholding this thesis while providing sufficient flexibility to cover a variety of not yet imagined use cases. Good UX, analytics, standardized risk assessments and change tracking fueled by arbitrage opportunities or ticket burning will hopefully prove to be sufficient as to foster an accessible, healthy and value-focused investitional environment.

Immutable Transparency

Every action related to a train is indexed and transparent. Meaningful change can occur only through the protocol. Asymmetries can be quantified, risks can be measured, cross-project benchmarks, KPIs and ratings can be derived, curated and rendered commonly. New, fast paced and configurable proposals will necessarily be higher risk rated than less configurable slower paced ones. The intention is for train events to become valuable notifications on the passenger’s phone.

You can’t be [credibly] neutral on a moving train

The figurative ‘train ticket’ is an NFT that potentially grants access to vehicle steering and use of it as collateral. But the point here is not what you can do with an NFT, but what it means to be on a train. Any ticket as it is arguably the case with most forms of property is by its nature exclusive. You can prove ownership over something only insofar you can yield it in ways others cannot. Buying a stock is in many ways similar to becoming a member of a political party. Both are exercises of power that skew a distribution in a particular direction. The NFT ticket is not only a binary proof of one’s belonging to the stakeholder pool but a quantifiable public pledge of allegiance.

The Not So Obvious

Announcing in the EVM world what transactions will take place when, and according to what rules is likely to lead to potentially complex gaming. It is important for train listers to be aware of it and keep things simple. With novel logic come uncanny attack vectors. Transparency and predictability in train function execution should limit the impacts of value extraction on active value creation and accrual. However, protocols are like public spaces, you can anticipate flows and shape it to favor certain types of movement but you can hardly ever predict what weirdos will do. For example, it’s a stretch to think that when the christian God designed the seas it anticipated that dudes will part them and their own son will walk on one.

Small Picture Thinking

Towards a world where the average worker of Mumbai, Buenos Aires or Chișinău is infinitely more likely to go on lunch break and end up by the end of it as an inspired shareholder in the city’s newest New York style hotdog stand.

Evan’s Pizza

Anna, noticed a month after moving from New York to Evansville that there is no source of quality pizza in her neighborhood. It just so just happens that Anna always wanted to manage a pizzeria. So as one might expect, Anna decides to pursue this perceived communal need for quality pizza even though she has only 5% of the projected initial investment. She needs a seed round. So she researches the viability of such an operation and comes up with a budget and business plan. She also prints some flyers that briefly describe her audacious plan and points to Evan’s Pizza website that presents her business plan.

Now, Anna is not only business smart but also a web3 dev. She knows that using the traditional lawyer and paper intermediated route to raise the $95k she needs from the townspeople is impossible if not outright illegal. She is also aware that taking the easy venturing capital way out would mean that the business will be constrained by number go up logic, it will sypohn money out of Evansville and, caeteris paribus, generate significantly less sales than if she would manage to get lots of investors from within the community.

In order to set herself up for success, she deploys an ERC20 called Evans Pizza Coin (EPC) with a capped total supply of 101.000. She mints 6000 to herself as payment for the work and as the value corresponding to her initial investment of 5000 DAI. Now, she distributes her flyer in the mailboxes of all neighbors and goes on to present her project to local meetups. This gives all pizza lovers affected by the potential new venture an opportunity to buy-in at the ground level, from uniswap as a 10 DAI ‘retail investor’ or as an active, 1000 DAI governance participant, EPC train ticket holder.

Evan’s Pizza Coin Train

Anna’s ticket

Anna stakes her 5000 EPC on block 114358626 for 2016000 blocks (targets to commit for 50 stations [weeks]) and receives the right to claim the 10080000000 shares (distance * bags amt.) of the generated pool yield beginning with the first station after the destination block. Anna is a founder and long term investor.

Joe’s ticket

Joe buys 300 EPC tokens from Uniswap. He creates his ticket on block 14361331 for 5 stations. At the time, he’s the second investor. He knows the project is going to likely be a success and rise, at least temporarily in value. Being a rational actor, he buys 300 EPC and stakes it for 5 stations with a 3x buyout clause. Joe is a trader or short term investor.

Outcomes

There are many differences between Joe and Anna. Anna is committed to solving a communal problem and concentrates on conducting capital in its direction. Joe is more nihilistic, looks to accumulation of capital as an end In itself and as such advertises a 3x valuation for his EPC holdings. Both might not reach their stated yield shares maturity block as at any station they can be offboarded by getting their ticket flagged when the EPC / DAI TWAP (time weighted average price) is above their target price. Anna uses her ticket as collateral, and as such grants aave protocol burner privilege. Joe might see a shinier train somewhere else 1 station in and burn his ticket to pursue that instead. Both might reach their target station and offboard with the corresponding yield or the pizza shop might fail 5 weeks on food safety grounds and they might lose 90% of their investment.

Trainworks

Describing the projected dynamics and considerations at play in this wannabe public good, permissionless and rugphobic investment sequencer is not a trivial task. So the aim below is to outline its main moving parts by listing some of its pulleys and levers in the hope that it will circumvent the need to categorize and articulate the many budding what-ifs that guided the non-procedural, iterative design approach this is a product of.

createTrain(
       address _yourToken,
       uint64[2] memory _cycleParams,
       uint128 _minBagSize,
       uint256[2] memory _initLiquidity,
       bool[2] memory _levers
   )

You cannot have a ticket without a train.

_yourToken: You cannot have a train without an ERC20. _cycleParams[0]:You will set the minimum distance between trainStation(s). _cycleParams[1]:You will set the minimum number of Stations for Ticket. _minBagSize: You will set the minimum ERC20 deposit balance per Ticket. _initLiquidity[]: Optional initial liquidity deposit _levers[0]: Can this configuration be later changed by the trainOwner? _levers[1]: Can anyone or only ticket owners flag tickets for arbitrage?

function createTicket(
       uint64 _stations, // how many cycles
       uint256 _perUnit, // target price
       address _trainAddress, // train address
       uint256 _bagSize // nr of tokens
   )

One EOA can have one ticket for each existing train.

_stations: you want to travel with us for how many stations ma’am? _perUnit: at what price per _yourToken you feel comfortable being offboarded? _trainAddress: on what train? (train id and _yourToken/baseToken uniswap pool address) _bagSize: how many of _yourToken will you deposit in the baggage wagon?

   function burnTicket(uint256 _nftId)
       public
       nonReentrant
       returns (bool success)

A ticket holder can burn their ticket and get back their deposited ERC20, or what remains of it if capital expenditures were part of the deal.

function flagTicket(uint256 _nftId, uint256 _atPrice)

Anyone, or as per Evan’s Pizza Coin Train configuration only fellow passengers can flag your ticket for arbitrage in the next station at a price. For the love of slow finance, the price needs to be above the ticket’s _perUnit, the price at the time of flagging needs to be above _atPrice and if this is to ever be execute, the _perUnit needs to be under the station to station TWAP when trainStation() is executed.

function requestOffBoarding(address _trainAddress)

offBoarding needs to and can be successsfully requested by an address if and only if their ticket’s destination block is smaller than the minimum block of the next trainStation(). A successful request results in the ticket being added to the offboarding array which is later iterated for a refund of _bagSize + corresponding yield in the upcoming trainStation().

List of all (current) 11 public state altering functions

Sighash   |   Function Signature
ad4e526a  =>  updatesEnvironment(address,address,address)
2ce2b2a7  =>  changeTrainParams(address,uint64[2],uint64[2],bool[2])
ab16e18e  =>  changeTrainOwner(address,address)
9e33e5e6  =>  createTrain(address,uint64[2],uint128,uint256[2],bool[2])
3d6672d1  =>  createTicket(uint64,uint256,address,uint256)
d323be3c  =>  trainStation(address)
a476b73d  =>  burnTicket(uint256)
bfe4fd2a  =>  assignBurner(uint128,address)
f5328c23  =>  requestOffBoarding(address)
b5c55b3f  =>  conductorWithdrawal(uint64,address,uint256)
86fb8c62  =>  flagTicket(uint256,uint256)

External Incentives

Why would anyone flag a ticket for arbitrage? They receive the price difference of the flagging [(_atPrice - _perUnit)*bagSize] if still valid at trainStation() time. It’s a bit of a gamble so it might not be ideal for mempool frontrunning. Also, there’s an incentive for flagging as soon as it is profitable since only one such action per ticket, per intra-station period is possible. Last but not least, train owners can make it such that only ticket holders can flag a ticket.

In FUD we trust

Where the profit motif cannot be avoided in finance instrument design, there’s FUD. And like it or not, venturing capital and traidoors are roaming the web3 streets to get a nut. The attractive, ~0 cost for participation extractive opportunities that should keep these people entertained while the builders build “fully automated luxury gay space communism” are not enough to also keep the lunch break investors safe from themselves, at least not in the ways Elizabeth feels it warranted. To keep everyone happy, the protocol cashes on testing the faith of the ticket holder by spamming them with every small suspicious move or change in train health metrics. If the ticket holder gives in to FUD (for risk tolerance, opportunity costs reasons or by not being sufficiently aware of the decisions made on that train) and burns their ticket, the corresponding yield shares of that ticket are claimed and redeemed by the protocol treasury. The protocol gathers sel-sustaining resources through its immune system.This should prove sufficient to sustain future protocol iterations. If there’s no RUGs and FUDs, mission accomplished, there’s no need for a new version.

Collateral Beauty

If, let’s say Evan’s Pizza keeps its transactional records on chain, is “digitally transformed” (all its business metrics are dashboard in real time), sells pizza NFTs and makes and serves the corresponding pizza only when such an NFT is burned. What fundamental decentralization problem we might have just solved? We do have a pizza NFT, one that under a holistic pizza bond approach might resist inflation, obviously, but what should be even more obvious is that the pizza NFT can be sold. So, if you buy a crypto asset with fiat from a pizza shop that you can in turn sell or exchange for any other crypto asset, doesn’t that make the pizza shop a fiat onramp?

What makes it a public good

The jury is still out on this one and computing its adherence to a definition is pointless. What’s not beside the point of the attempt to categorize it as a public good is that it hopes to not only serve and empower wannabe pizza parlour owners and hotdog stand operators, but also to facilitate more resilient and inter-connected communities. Hopefully, one day, supporting local businesses will mean not only spending your money there but also actively investing it. This will lead to more responsible engagement for the betterment of public space but also to healthier, less carbon-intensive supply chains. And that’s good, and it’s good for the targeted public and can be seldomly expressed as good publicly, with no need to sell Moloch on it.

https://github.com/parseb/conductive.finance1

DAOs are failing, forward, but still, failing. Most of the old guard is not doing too well. (DXdao, Aragon, etc.) Others are mostly permissioned (multisigs), governed by other entities (foundations) or too dense for the light to intuitively get in (Maker). Principal agent problems, mismanagement, failure at equitably recognizing and retaining contributors are some of the issues that plague the space. Carrot on side, some of the innovators and most experienced of proposal driven governance actors have rugged themselves. It is clear, the ever-present default, proposals, are not it.

Solution

Disincentivised, anarchic, execution agnostic, continuous governance. Possibly the first maximally decentralised and economically coherent DAO structure.

Fugido is a Decentralised Organization protocol that instrumentalizes fungibility to facilitate fully trustless and explainable collective efforts. It accomplishes this primarily by means of three low-complexity devices: membership, majority vote and inflation.

Fungido is a type of DAO where DAOs are composed agents constituted for enacting change. Such an agent is to be considered both decentralised and autonomous only if it can initiate and execute actions without systematically depending on the consent or input of any one atomic party. Notionally, this exigence applies to its processes as well.

An organisation is a membrane that moves forward. This, “organisation”, necessitates determinations of belonging and inter-subjectivity within a systematising order.** **

1. Membrane. An organ that employs binary determinations to separate between in and out. A good way to think about it are access badges. All access badges constitute an organisation’s membrane. Fungido membranes are a list of tokens and required balances. Maintaining membership depends on satisfying these criteria. Membranes are versatile, can be hardened, loosened or used to define specialised organs or autonomous sub-sections.** **

2. No movement without energy. Directed energy expenditure is a precondition for any forward. Energy is fungible, convertible, divisible and storable. Can be concentrated or diluted. Can be measured and transferred and most importantly, can explain power relations. In Fungidos, energy expenditures take the form of local fungible token allocations that settle to a central, still fungible, store of value. This consolidates anarchic local movements into discernible unitary agents. ** **

Design Assumptions

Governance costs. Changing direction expends energy. The need for governance should be strong enough to justify the energy expenditure. Buying, holding, selling a token are, I would argue, forms of governance participation. Fungido takes this understanding and places it as its operating core. As such it lacks the hallmarks of contemporary DAOs. It has no treasuries, no top-down budgets, no defaulting to proposals; unless it wants to. What it does use instead is belonging criteria and fungibility operations. This amounts to a minimum viable structure, non-prescriptive about sense-making and without central points of failure.**

**

Why no proposals

And this is the key reason and possibly the most obvious differentiator between Fungidos and any other DAO structure I know of. Fungidos do not use proposals. Not by default and importantly not as a one-size fits all vehicle for consensus, recognition and redistribution.

A big problem with proposals is that they have hidden costs that increase exponentially with size. Governance forums are akin to ad-hoc parliaments, delegates are representatives, discussions are public consultations, and proposals, laws. Looks like it works, the familiar sights of government at work are emitted. But this is a tragedy. This highly skeuomorphic default is irrevocably tethered to paper based bureaucratic primitives. This limits what a DAO is and renders much of the current experimentation useless. Internet native organisations should look more like networks than parliaments. The sore point being that it blocks the natural agility of digital value and demands of human agents to seek approval as a first step when it should be the case, as I think the core concept implies, that contribution should be permissionless and continuous. To summarise, proposals are skeuomorphic and paper era nostalgic devices, they externalise costs to participants and arbitrarily condition recognition and redistribution.

Core Structural Component

There are four types of building blocks that in the current implementation are deployed through the same function, three of which reuse the same DAOinstance contract. The base instance, which is expected to act as the main entry port that custodies the entire balance of the root base value token. SubDAOs which are the same, the difference being their Base Value Token is also the Internal Value Token of their immediate parent. Lastly, endpoints, of which there are two types. The first is the same as the above with the difference being that they have only one member and their only purpose is to act as a sink for rewarding individual agents in local contexts. The second type and the only one that does not use the DAOinstance contract is a (gnosis) safe endpoint. This multisig is initiated with the members of its immediate parent as owners. All safe default rules and capabilities apply. Its purpose is to address any arbitrary needs and uncertainties.** **

Majoritarian Pluralism

Fungido relies on majoritarian decision making. However, since it does not have textually articulated proposals, all latent changes are broadly speaking up to vote at all times. There’s two main types of fungible token votes in all instances. First, a vote to change the in-use, enforceable, membrane. Second, a vote to change the annual inflation rate, or, for consistency: speed of movement. These changes enter in effect when a simple majority is reached. An agent can express multiple preferences which stay dormant until triggered by a simple majority; these altogether paint a range of politically feasible states that add predictability.  ** **

The pluralism part is that any member of any entity can deploy a sub-entity with arbitrary conditional access of their choosing. The membrane  can be defined in such a way as to create uncensorable autonomous zones free from token holder dominance. It as such grants space for plurality of expression within existing contexts. The result is that affirming the need for novel or controversial direction cannot be censored by the majority. Sure, the big bad whales can meet behind big bad doors to coordinate as to change the membrane and kick out the initiator from higher-level participation, but they cannot eject the initiative body or prevent members from allocating resources to it. Crucially, being ousted by means of membrane redefinition from the higher levels does not affect one's ability to keep their gained or deposited fair share on exit as deposit and withdrawal operations are membership agnostic.** **

The fact that membranes can be changed and autonomous zones can be created is of nature as to foster sufficient flexibility in order to accommodate and containerize specialised external work or cross-dao collaborations. This all arguably gives minorities a good shot at protecting their interests. Afterall, there is no exclusivity anywhere it the system. The root value token can be used by an unlimited number of DAOs. So, any minority interest can always exit and/or instantiate their own. Totally separate organisations will compete for the same value pool or coordinate around specific opportunities such as up-cycling proposal driven entities that use the same token.  ** **

Fungibility and Inflation

I mentioned fungibility and inflation a lot above but did not explain their purpose. I will repeat, it is important: energy is fungible. Fungidos function on the basis of permissionless energy allocations. So, if you want to govern, you have to pay. The innovation here is pay to govern, or rather govern by paying. An equally viable approach, if you want to govern and not only do you want so but importantly need to, is to govern by working. The latter, if done successfully might suffice as income. To summarise. Energy is fungible. Moving anything in any direction necessarily involves an energy expenditure. The movers can start moving at their own cost in hopes of retroactive peer or outcome compensation. They can stop and start so on whatever they want, whenever they want to, but it is not unreasonable to assume that volunteering has its limits and suitable payment can accelerate desired change.** **

Fungidos have one requirement. They need at the time of initiation to be provided with a value base under the form of an ERC20 token. The in protocol deposited such tokens, referred to hereafter as Root Value Token (RVT), are the fuel that powers the organisation. All redistributed value eventually settle back to it. The fuel is metabolised to energy, used for movement and eventually converted back to RVT exchangeable value to be leveraged in the external economy. The direct subject of redistribution however is not RVT but its corresponding Internal Value Token(s) (IVT). Each Fungido has at least one IVT. The relationship is as follows: an IVT can be minted in exchange for a Root Value token. This is true for the core unit entity that settles all RVT withdrawals. The relationship is 1-to-1 as one RVT will always get one IVT. The same is true across all instances irrespective of their level. But there’s a catch. Rather two of them. First, one’s entity IVT is their descendant’s Base Value Token (BVT). BVT is the exact same as RVT, but as the name implies, it does stand as a base of value, but only for higher level zones, and not for the structure in its entirety. All BVTs and IVTs settle as, and can be priced in, the originating RVT.

The second catch is what I have so far mentioned in passing: inflation. Inflation determines the speed at which energy is expended, income issued, or to keep the metaphor going: is the metabolic speed. This anarchically governed issuance is also not unlike state run deficit. It primarily functions as a self-regulatory mechanism but also tempers the risks associated with token governance as it renders “classical attacks” unprofitable. The reason being that internal tokens, inflation over time given, are always in greater numbers than their underlying base. The depositors can swap IVT back to BVT and eventually RVT, however, this operation will always incur a loss as internal tokens act on withdrawal, as shares, and, inflation over time given, 1 IVT < 1 BVT. This is how everything is paid for. Internal tokens are Wrappers on deposit at t0 and shares on withdrawal at t+1. The difference of value, captured through inflation, is the totality of what the movers, shakers and producers are paid with.** **

Sense-making

In the digital, but more so in fully transparent and deterministic environments: ‘action produces information’. Trust or uniquely identifying traits are not central in markets, transport or any systematising, expectedly deterministic order. What programmable blockchains can do is be a canvas that makes it possible for any operating logic to be encoded as a finite bell-curved range of possibilities which lends itself to habitual summary. And having been endowed with a view as to what is in the interest of the collective and individual, as well as information about the latest actions and future likelihoods, one can eventually instinctually project and continuously adapt to outcomes more efficiently. Firms where all actors are owners and can to different but known degrees directly influence the distribution of resources and the story it tells about itself are possible. This is how this kind of ship is steered: for each level or independent body an inflation rate is operationalised. Like interest rates in the economy, but decided on directly by taxpayers to the known, quantitative degree to which they pay taxes.

This is the global view. The local picture is foundationally composed out of the same two pieces as in the case of all other instances: inflation and membrane. Inflation is the metabolic speed, or rate of value distribution as compensation for past or future effort. The membrane is the boundary which serves to define the organisation and clearly delineate what and who is in or out and to what extent. The membrane also customises the experience of being in as it is reasonable to expect for it to point agents to locally relevant means such as tools, workspaces and communication channels.

Back to action produces information, there is a wide range of likely relevant types of signal. One is the preference profile of co-members. The extent to which one’s allocations coincide with personal gain will likely matter. The extent to which different agents’ preferences coincide over time is also likely to raise eyebrows. This overall results in sybil-indiferent yet context relevant identity in the sense that internal allocations are semi-fungible: it does matter who makes the allocation. In some instances, particularly for new initiatives, small, symbolic allocations are likely to become norm. Conversely, the reduction of a particular preferred flow by an attention worthy agent will likely become a shelling point for critical engagement on the merits and future of specific efforts or directions.

Neutrality and Collusion

"Essentially, a mechanism is credibly neutral if just by looking at the mechanism’s design, it is easy to see that the mechanism does not discriminate for or against any specific people. The mechanism treats everyone fairly, to the extent that it’s possible to treat people fairly in a world where everyone’s capabilities and needs are so different."

-V.B.

Fungidos are neutral to the degree the underlying value base is. Fungible things, in general, are neutral. Their distribution fully conveys their potential for equitable outcomes. Nothing can compete with known inter-dependent quantities as generalizable vehicles for describing state of affairs and their potential. And, since most of the described actions impact resource distributions, and there is no choice but to “put your money where your mouth is”, intentions are hard to hide. This helps not only with collusion resistance but also with self-awareness and generalizable benchmarks. And, since the overall philosophy is “pay to govern” and all movement is redistributive by nature, it is unlikely for bribes or any other such economic attacks to hold much sway.

Limitations

Since the speed at which energy reaches its point of consumption depends on inflation rates along the path, all questions pertaining to when and if something will happen are constantly renegotiated. Also, there is no default execution engine. What, how and if execution occurs is left up to the distributors as value is in the eye of the beholder. Fungidos do not have fixed inflection points, milestones, KPIs or exclusive roles. At least not by default. Legitimacy and authority will tend to be conjunctural, to loosely follow the money and its corresponding narratives.

Lastly, it is unknown at this time who are the many potential operators that are at home in this perceived uncertainty. It will likely initially be adequate mostly for open source software development as well as any of the other more swarmy and permissionless activities. Grants programmes are also likely a well fitting use case.** **

Implementation

The structure and everything outlined above evolved within the linked implementation. As such, it never had specifications, it is not audited, it is not sufficiently tested or good looking, nor does it hold any regard for gas efficiency. If one is to wonder why things as they are the likely answer is: for no particularly good reason but that it looks like it works and changing it would have required more energy than available. That said, I have no clue if this specific implementation will work in practice. And while I have developed several clients for it in the past, none so far are sufficient to intuitively command the attention of the user. At this moment I guess the target audience is limited to mechanism design geeks. Principal agent limitations are to be blamed.

https://github.com/parseb/fungido

DIO? Decentralized Internet Organisations are anarchically constituted membranes that move towards a continuously defined forward.

tldr; wut wallaw? Self-replicates, uses "guild.xyz"-like authorisation and coordinape-like circles to determine its identity and direct its energy. No proposals.

How does it work Membrane The membrane determines if an agent is within or outside the organisation. It is constituted out of a list of tokens and balances and, provided an agent satisfies them as eligibility conditions, associated with a membership token. The membership token gives one access to all internal functionality of that specific entity and it can be revoked through the fault of the possessor or change in eligibility conditions. Each sub-DAO instance is independent in its determinations of membership. As such external specialised work or other DAOs can be appended. The membrane is expected to link to metadata such as social media communication channels or membership-gated workspaces.

Movement Movement occurs through agent-driven initiative and retroactive, contiguous allocation of resources. Resource allocation is a feedback mechanism. Whether taking the form of a separate working space (subDAO) or within an existing one, insufficient allocations for or dwindling support in favour of other, potentially more pressing efforts, is to be interpreted as feedback reflecting on the work in context. Initiating movement or calibrating energy allocations is primarily available only to members. Local power is proportional with an agent's stake.

Value Flow

Pluralism and Versatility

Majority vote driven governance is not known for granting much room to emergent, novel, potentially destabilising diversities of expression. While the base decision mechanisms for the definition of an existing space (membrane and identity changes) within WalllaW relies on circumstantial majorities, the right to create new autonomous spaces within contexts is bound by simple membership. It is as such likely for a type of 'majoritarian pluralism' to be the norm given that the parameters one can use to define what constitutes a majority are boundless.

The layout formed by the ways in which value quite literally trickles down might be of concern. I will not be able to stress this enough, but, any such space has the capacity to perform almost any arbitrary action an ethereum account can. That means, among other things, that a sub-DAO can at any point migrate outside the field of gravity of its incubating parent. [...] While this opens the door to a very wide range of security concerns, it is nonetheless a capability worth fighting for. Time delays, or more creative protection mechanisms can work to this end.

A hypothetical example of versatility: 5% MKR$ owners create a WalllaW for the purpose of running experiments that do not find their place within the core organisation. They do their thing, but also retain their ability to vote as a block within the original, dominating governance process. One aspect worth entertaining here is what happens when such a block vote becomes decisive. What WalllaW means for dissent and coalition building given that preferred resource allocations highlight the operating ideology of agents should also be considered.

Anticapture

Economic Resilience There's a set of beliefs and assumptions that grounds the security model of WalllaW. Among those is that "DAOs are for uncommon shared interests". As such, DAO governance, participating in it, is not for profit but for the advancement of said shared interest. It follows that it not only can but also logically should operate at a loss. In WalllaW there is no direct economic benefit for purely formal participation. Quite the contrary.

While capital deposits do increase one's swaying power, they do so at economic cost due to inflation. You not only get let’s say, .9 of same token value, but also likely provide an advantageous exit opportunity for others given that any new deposit is a deflationary event. Governance costs and one ought to participate in governance only if they believe their input is valuable to the extent they are willing to sacrifice economic value to make themselves heard. And that should by no means be controversial. There is a cost to you reading this as there is a cost to keeping up with interminable chains of opinions and proposals. Governance is for those that care enough to accept some economic downside for the future progress to be brought upon the collective through their input. For all others, holding the token should be good enough.

Social Resilience Membranes are what primarily defines the identity of a (sub)DAO. A membrane can change and a member can find itself outside of it. Member or not, they are entitled and can access their legitimately gained share of capital. Members can coordinate outside of pure majoritarian consensus and migrate and legitimise another entity in the face of attacks. A closing of rank of sorts. And the cool thing about it is that just as well as it can reconfigure for immune purposes so it can for merging or cross-DAO coordination simply by using the same membrane id.

And this is exactly what I want to also do below. Take the shapes and words I prefer and frame fungible tokens (ERC20s, coins, cryptos etc.) as belonging to the class and categories of things I know. I am a DAOist and when you’re a DAOist, everything is a DAO. As when you’re a capitalist, everything is capital. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Etc. etc. If at all convincing, one has to ask themselves the degree to which our biases and defaulting instincts damage the prospects of meaningfully using new cryptographic, economic and computational capabilities.

Decentralized

For an ERC20 token to be decentralized it has to have more than one balance owner. But even if they have only one owner we can give it a pass for several reasons. First every DAO we know of likely started with one member. Secondly, an ERC20 that has throughout its lifecycle only one owner makes no practical sense to the extent that its fungibility can be brought into question. Decentralization is natural to fungible tokens.

Autonomous

Autonomy is a tricky and, imo, has no place in defining what we know of today as DAOs. Its central role is likely the result of the need to advertise properties belonging to the underlying infrastructure. That aside, what are the ways in which a fungible token is autonomous in the same way and extent to which we think of DAOs as autonomous? Fungible digital tokens are a collection of account associated balances that can only operate changes by means of known, unbreakable rules. In short, it operates deterministically and by doing so it reduces the likelihood of confusion and dispute. Consequentially, it has no need to legitimize and is free from external interference.

Organization

Organization, at this time and age, does not mean much but entails a whole lot. I will spare you the details, but the simplest way to maybe put it is that this sentence is an organisation of words. So, here’s the things that “organization” implies: belonging and belonging criteria, and some kind of relationship among those that belong as well as an implied legitimization of the systematizing order. Any ambiguity or dissolution in any of these things and what you are likely to observe is anything but organisation. Back to our sheep; the shepherd is the smart contract. The shepherd color codes the sheep to reflect their owner, secures the daily orderly routine and execute easter-time activities.

If you didn’t keep up, the sheep are the tokens. But there’s a catch here and a crucial difference between fungible digital tokens and sheep or ‘real world assets’. The digital fungible tokens exist only insofar as the ownership relation exists. The token is the relationship. There is no relationship without the token and no token without the relationship. The amounts are but relational intensities that might just let us infer the degree of indebtedness of the shepherd as a service provider or the time of the year.

If you’re not yet convinced that fungible tokens are a sub-genre of DAOs, I’m unlikely to further push you along this righteous path; but here’s a few more things to entertain when thinking about tokens. First, when people think about cryptocurrencies they also think market and price and exchange and pump and rug, but none of these are constitutive features of fungible tokens. Crypto coins, as conveyed above, effectively exist only insofar a relationship between two or more agents exists. Anything not about quantitatively expressing relationships is necessarily perverse monkey brain fugazzy.

So what are “Cryptocurrencies” for?

Fungible tokens are for codifying relationships that benefit from being explained in absolute terms by means of relative amounts. When this happens in an immutable context that can only mutate deterministically (...), all the owners of the token are or can be thought of as being members of an organisation. What a fungible token owner does with its tokens affects both other members individually as well as, potentially, the issuing organisation. So, that said, I don’t know about you; but if I can’t mind my own business due to your business, that gets me pondering over the likelihood of us not only potentially being in the same business but very much so in the same organisation.

Here’s a very personal, slightly weird, unsolicited and seemingly random detail to kick us off. As I get closer to finishing a prototype I have so far invested an insignificant chunk of my brittle life in, I came to realize that the type of DAO it produces is not as “first principles” as I thought it would be but rather quite opinionated. I’m not going to bore you with the 3AM existential crises that accompanied it and the envy on the people that “are in it for the tech” that tries me at 4AM as I write this… but the thought that all my work will never be used or understood as to be constitutive of a wider body of work got me asking myself, what are really DAOs for? My DAO is for sure not a group chat with a bank account. Why would a group chat need a bank account? Nor is it really the simple organisation which I tried to previously reduce to ‘a membrane that moves forward’. A DAO needs a third thing. It needs a shared interest; and the only interest ‘a chat with a bank account’ has is about the money. And that goes in circles. You don’t make chat groups with bank accounts for the sake of the money you put in the bank account of the chat group with bank account…

The point is that DAOs need a shared interest. A common interest is not good enough. It’s common to be in the chat group for the money. It’s common to go into the coal mine from 9 to 5 for a salary. It’s common to be a field hand on the estate and common to seek to accumulate potatoes. The uncommon thing would be to actively pursue an interest with others in the same situation. The uncommon thing would be for the slaves on a plantation to have a shared interest. The common thing is for them to individually try to survive. The dangerous thing would be for them to share in and coordinate around an interest. You might ask something like - but surely the coal miners have a shared interest in the orderly functioning of the mine and the slaves… . Please continue. There’s a jump in there that the political left has historically struggled with: if only the workers would realize! In another register, what you are confronted with is a cold start problem best portrayed by the observation that: “workers don’t write”.

So what’s the difference between a shared and a common interest? Omg, so excited you asked! Well, for our purpose and best I can do for now, common interests are kind of like the inertia that acts on individual atoms, it’s common, it’s gravity. It’s not money, but the desire for money. The effects of money are those produced around enacting the common interests of the holders of money. The instrument or mechanism, money, is an interest you share in. Possessing is caring. Owning money, storing world affecting potential in the premier reserve currency of the world, the US dollar makes one a bearer of a shared interest in the supremacy of the US navy. Owning ETH makes you share an interest in the flourishing of the ethereum ecosystem. Whatever it may be, simply bearing it is generally sufficient as to prove some degree of allegiance. You have stake. Your balance is proof of stake at t snapshot in time. Now if you want to enroll in the Navy or stake your ETH as to act as guarantor for the trustworthiness and uneventful working of a particular computing node in the network, well, now that’s the spirit! I salute you! 🫡 Such efforts need recognition and, of course, redistribution.

To recap. If you have EUROs, US dollars or ETH in your wallet, you benefit from and are signalling alignment with the purpose and direction of said opt-in instruments. Opt-in here is crucial. Like Money (more or less) shared interests are opt-in. The moment they stop being so, they become common or obligations. DAOs  are opt in, and the best way to opt in is to hold the asset which that entity uses to throw its weight around. If you want to enroll in the navy of that waterver shared interest, join the DAO. Stake your DAO coins on the idea that all this DAO needs is your input, your perspective, your resource allocation and analysis. You might be wrong. You might get donoWalled and pay for the wasted attention. Or your efforts might be recognized as work by your peers and rewarded as such. If that is so, Congrats! You are a DAO governor!

Anyway. That’s what I wanted to get ‘out there’... (like I’m important enough to use that expression) the distinction between common and shared interests. Which, I could have done a better job of driving home. But anyway, it seems useful, now, at 5AM. And if I was not clear enough, DAOs are for shared interests. For missions where your neighbour doing well is good news. Where there’s more than an exchange at stake. Where there’s values. DAOs don’t make sense for plantations or mines. They make sense for structuring resistance against extractive practice and concentrated ownership. They might also make sense for constituting increasingly shiny, better plantations to later revolutionize against. And if you’re in a chat, that needs a bank account or in a bank account that needs to have a chat; a DAO is overkill. Just use a multisig or venmo or revolut, vkontakte, weibo or use rai. Be careful about the latter though, moving it around with the other involved parties is likely to result in a DAO.

Stone money known as “Rai” are large stone disks, sometimes measuring up to 4 meters, with a hole in the middle that was used for carrying them. It was and still is used as a trading currency.

So that’s what DAOs are for, shared, uncommon interests. 
Which… is it just me or that sounds hella creepy? ‘Special interests’ sounds better? Anyway. Stop being a baby and eat the got-damn bugs already!

Governance and Police

Governance is hard. Much of its historical development revolves around fantastic myths or recurrent thought experiments that storyboard a hypothetical transition between a causa sui state of natural liberty and the apology of contemporary power aggregation. Undoubtedly, there is much use to be drawn from Moloch as well as the contractual tradition in deconstructing the clichés of DAO governance. Articulating yet another social contract however is not of much use in conceptualizing governance proper to an era where byte-solid agreements are deterministically enforceable inside infallible, for the people, by the people machines. As such, the soon™ outlined governance structure was inspired by unicellular organisms. In particular, by the contrast between the popularity of post-scarcity narratives and the fact that we know very little as to how unicellular organisms work. The need-to-become-driven behavior of stem cells or the careless byte of a lacrymaria olor are fascinating yet very much still black boxes. So it’s kind of weird that we can’t seem to be able to discern the inner workings or predict the whatabouts of the simplest of critters but we buy into the narrative that we are so coll as to be able to spawn sentient agents on a whim. Regardless of how you harmonize these facts, what I want you to entertain for now is the thesis that compute-mediated breakthroughs seem to happen through the use of signal-accommodating structures.

Be them encoders, transformers or regenerating tissues, cell networks are ultimately as dumb as a riverbed. What makes them remotely intelligent is their capacity to take a useful form in a particular environment. All intelligent things are affected by their experience. Neurons, be them biological or computational, do their own thing. They receive and produce signal, and by doing so, they uniquely and irreversibly change their world. As neurons in the brain, so shall perhaps humans coordinate in compute-mediated, need solving networks. DAOs as autonomous biological organisms. Why not?

DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organisation. There’s not much of a point in lingering as to what exactly that entails. For now, a literal and open-ended definition should do fine. Better yet, assume a maximalist, purist stance, whatever that may be. With it, and with any significant knowledge of the DAOsphere it should be obvious that there’s no such known viable structure in existence. Anyone holding the prospect of DAOs as a significant potential development for human coordination will agree with this blunt assessment. Lots have already given up on it. Most others embrace and promote counter-intuitive compromises that ultimately render the advertised destination unreachable. As a believer in technology-powered decentralization since before DAOs were a thing, I find this - as if nothing were at stake abandonment - deeply upsetting.

And here’s one of the problems. The contributor that does that which it is in its nature, namely, contributes - without asking for permission - is never recognized or compensated for doing. “Acting as if one is already free” or behaving in a DAO labeled structure as if it is already decentralized, never yields expected results. There’s always, at best, a presumptuous evaluation and at worst, a ring to kiss and boots to lick.

The thing that people get wrong most of the time is that they equate decentralized governance with no leadership and total flat hierarchy. […] In the absence of formal hierarchy what you end up getting is shadow hierarchy and that makes it harder to participate because people don’t know where to go or what panels exist for them to actually be able to participate. So they have to work around kind of unspoken centers of power in order to actually contribute and I think that’s ironically counterproductive to having decentralized governance. I think we need to split apart this idea of leadership and decentralization. They are different topics.

Chris Ahn - Bell Curve Podcast

Subjective experiences aside, in the best of cases, there’s a process. A form to complete, a rubber stamp to get for a forum to post on. The familiar warm embrace of bureaucracy, a competent operator’s default, while providing a reassuring handle on things, ends up excluding a range of types of being and boosts the commonality of endorsed and ultimately predominant value judgments. Page-bending innovation however requires diversity. Commission filtering or more generally any type of process based gate-keeping limits the likelihood of wildflower cross-pollination. There’s simply no cool novel idea coming anytime soon out of the British parliament. Not because those people are unintelligent or incompetent, but because they overwhelmingly are the product of the same formative funnels. Overwhelmingly receptive and excitable by the same signals. Sharing in their desires and restrains, their potentiality overlaps, forms and actualizes a finite range of demeanors; ways of being, saying and doing.

The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. […] Policing is not so much the "disciplining" of bodies as [much as] a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed.

Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement

As a mater of principle, in any Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a contributor should not need anyone’s approval to contribute and be eligible for compensation for any arbitrary effort. What effort ads value and is rewarded, ought to be determined in an unintermediated fashion by the decentralized network of autonomous agents that form the organization. Prioritizing direct value generation to the detriment of politicking and ‘selling yourself‘ as an intermediary recursive loop will likely unlock unprecedented productivity. This is largely unfeasible today; not because something is truly missing, but because the structuring of human activity defaults to a policing paradigm. An uncomfortable and scary leap away from police driven structures is needed to overcome this limitation. Perhaps then *drinks hopium-aid*, by being attunable to the noisy powers of the crowd, one can point to DAOs as on a path to materializing the idealist’s dream of rendering the value extracting corporate model obsolete.

A Membrane that Moves Forward

A Membrane

All autonomous things and organizations have two things in common: a membrane and the ability to move forward. For the thing, the membrane is what separates, or has the power to separate, the thing, from all that which is not the thing. An organization’s membrane is abstract and sparse as it’s typically formed out of a multitude of things. Cars, buildings, tools, employment contracts etc. But perhaps the most illustrative thing that constitutes a modern corporate membrane is the totality of in-use access badges. They determine who can access and excite an organisation’s movement organelles.

Forward Movement

The moving forward part is quite straightforward. If it’s alive, it moves, “forward”. I for one do not judge as to what any living thing chooses or is drawn towards as its forward. What this forward can possibly be, is, and how it is to be approached, is forged in power machinations identifiable by the word governance. So, forward movement is any change in state or disposition. A merged PR. A new dank meme. All such things count as movement if the externally identifiable enactor is the organisation and the act itself posits the composed body or its perception thereof, in a new light.

What is a DAO

A Decentralized Autonomous Organisation is a social, political and administrative unit that functions such that the initiation and execution of any known action does not systematically depend on the consent or input of any identifiable atomic party.

What is DAO Governance

DAO governance is a cooperative undertaking that serves in sourcing and embodying a common good through the direct participation of its constituent distinct knowers.

In Defense of ‘Coin Voting Governance’

If there’s overwhelming consensus over something among the graduate students of DAO governance is that token voting does not work. This is such a prevalent and consistently held position that vitalik.eth not only wrote about it extensively over the past five years but also reasserted it recently as a mathematically provable certainty.

A token in a protocol with coin voting is a bundle of two rights that are combined into a single asset: (i) some kind of economic interest in the protocol's revenue and (ii) the right to participate in governance. This combination is deliberate: the goal is to align power and responsibility. But in fact, these two rights are very easy to unbundle from each other. […] the borrower has governance power without economic interest, and the lender has economic interest without governance power.

(vitalik.ca)

The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of governance decentralization. Coin voting is attractive because it feels credibly neutral: anyone can go and get some units of the governance token on Uniswap.

(vitalik.ca)

It’s hard to deconstruct any specific, devoid of context claim in vitalik’s writings on the topic in good faith. What I unreservedly take issue with is the maybe implied blanket statement that token voting is simply irredeemable. In my view, such a claim is necessarily the product of a series of generalizations and assumptions. As a disclaimer, I am irreverent and ignorant to the relevancy of any mathematical certitudes (🔊) here.

Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, all critiques of token voting seem to refer to what I would much rather call proposal-based governance, as PBG seems to be its inseparable default. I also differ as to why I think it is so appealing. It most likely has something to do with it being easy to follow. More importantly, a quantifiable common denominator of legitimacy in direction setting makes its processes debugable and diagnosticable. Token voting given, legitimacy can be abstracted and analyzed as the settling of differences in exercised power over time. And that’s likely something only fungible tokens can do. On the offensive, I would caution that a departure from such quantities is of a nature as to likely foster a long term increase in the incidence of obfuscated collusion. I am also generally skeptical as to the conservation of legitimacy capacity of any non-responsive structures. The point being: legitimacy is not static, but context-dependent. Contexts shift. That is, all movement should visibly, continuously and consequentially erode or reaffirm the legitimacy of the police. When this happens transparently in a permissionless, deterministic system, the police is no longer needed.

If that’s not a convincing enough take as to warrant giving token voting another chance, there’s more to it I dare say than the coupling of economic interest and responsibility. They can perhaps also couple recognition and redistribution (🔊). Recognition and redistribution are the two central things on which legitimacy and identity ultimately rest. These are the things that all organizations do and all individuals are sensitive to. Sure, different amounts of petting and feeding might apply, but the point remains, we all yearn belonging and relative prosperity, and distance from water-muddying aporia-inducing philosophers that have been only ruining the vibes for the past 2000+ years.

This coupling and eventual reconciliation of recognition and redistribution in an on-demand, self-adjusting, anti-fragile structure is potentially of nature as to

“enlarge the purview of democracy to encompass not just decision making within a predefined political zone, but more fundamentally democratize the very process of definition and demarcation, the very frames that constitute the political.”

For clarity, even though I am not convinced by the overall case for the dismissal of “coin voting” as fertile ground for rooting experimental governance in; I did not engage on any of the constitutive claims of the overarching case. While I can’t yet see how the known vulnerabilities of token voting significantly disable the framing I am working on, there is a very significant chance they do apply. All I am saying for now is that proposal based governance is a square shape and token governance is a round peg. The two went on sufficient dates as to conclude they are not a match. So it’s quite possible that both are carrying toxic baggage but so far only coin voting has taken any heat for their disappointing performance. I don’t feel comfortable writing it off just yet. The claim is not that it is not fundamentally flawed, but that it simply did not get a fair shake.

If none of this is particularly convincing, I have one last but not least powerful argument to make. It is quite straightforward and goes like: WHAT ABOUT IT? Does it look like its behavior is premeditated by committee-curated neck elongation proposals? I think not!

End of Part I

We have so far stated the goal of coming up with a governance arrangement that makes the basis of power distributions accessible to layman summary and judgement. Toward this end we defined organizations and DAOs, as types of membranes that can move. I insinuated that token voting is likely a keystone in designing signal determined and driven structures. In the second part, I will attempt to prototype a token driven governance mechanism that can potentially address some of the identified deficiencies of DAOs by reconciling recognition and redistribution under the umbrella of Majoritarian Pluralism.