NEAR founder Yilong put forward a proposal to build Ecosystem Treasury DAO (Ecosystem Treasury DAO) at the NEAR Governance Forum on June 17. The proposal includes the selection of DAO members, and the NEAR Foundation will provide up to 200 million NEARs and potential funding directions. The proposal is now being solicited from the community. If there are no significant issues before June 30, a voting call for the initial members of the ecological fund DAO will be opened.
Preface
The NEAR ecosystem is growing at an explosive rate, and currently there is no single organization that can effectively manage it. This is the importance of decentralization, not only in terms of technology and community, but also in strategy and use of funds. In order to manage the ecology of NEAR, a DAO of DAOs (DAO of DAOs) method is taken into consideration: DAOs are DAOs that serve specific unions, projects, or other funding purposes. The foundation of this DAO of DAOs method is the ecological fund DAO: the DAO that allocates funds to the first-level sub-DAO and determines the direction of ecological investment. It is the long-term goal of the foundation to transfer this ecological role from a single NEAR foundation to a decentralized organization. This will help increase transparency, allow more people to participate, and be more flexible in making some decisions.
Proposal body
Establish a DAO to serve as NEAR’s ecological capital pool to enable ecological growth. DAO members will be selected from pseudonyms or known participants through the pledged NEAR. In order to make the funds more widely used, the ecological funds DAO will not directly allocate funds to projects and individuals, but will allocate funds to other DAOs. The members of the ecological fund DAO will focus on the use of funds and do a due diligence on the sub-DAOs that receive the funds. DAO members need to select a “Chair”. The Chair is responsible for organizing members to formulate top-level strategies, filter information on various proposals, and promote the timeline of DAO decision-making.
The ecological fund DAO will pay the Chair’s work remuneration, because the chair’s work requires full-time input, and may also need to organize a team or hire other DAOs or project parties to do research. The remaining DAO members will not get paid because they are already holders of NEAR, but the ecological fund DAO can also establish relevant incentive mechanisms in the future. The Chair also needs to be responsible for disclosing the distribution of funds to the community, such as participating in the Town Hall to make a display of the use of funds and related results.
About the allocation of funds
The NEAR Foundation will allocate funds to the initial members of the DAO through public funding. The initial members will be non-anonymous individuals in the ecosystem. The initial amount of funds will be 30 million NEAR. If the ecological fund DAO does not encounter any problems in its operation and receives widespread support from the community, it will be able to obtain the remaining funds from the ecological funding of the token distribution plan (the total number of ecological funding does not exceed 200 million).
About technical details
Due to the technical limitations of staking and lock-up contracts, it is difficult for us to start a continuous commissioned election. Compared to rolling or continuous voting, having a certain voting period makes the entire process more controllable. We will deploy a delegating smart contract DELEGATION. On the first day of each quarter, the current order information will be snapshotted and sent to the DELEGATION contract. Everyone can register as a candidate for DAO. Candidates need to prove that they have at least 10,000 NEARs, introduce their roles in the ecosystem (validators, developers, investors) and personal information (Twitter, etc.), and introduce what they want The role played in the ecological fund DAO and other content that I want to share. Each account that has pledged NEAR can call the delegate method in the DELEGATION contract to vote for a certain percentage of its votes for a candidate.
When the pledge information is updated every quarter, the number of votes will be reconstructed based on the snapshot information. For example, if a user pledged 100,000 NEAR in the first quarter and 50,000 in the second quarter, then he voted for candidate A The number of votes will be halved in the same proportion. At the end of each quarter, voting takes effect, candidates are re-ranked and DAO members may change. In order to strengthen communication and information exchange, DAO members should use the NEAR Governance Forum (gov.near.org) to discuss matters. In addition, a dedicated telegram group may be established and the Chair organizes a meeting every two weeks.
In order to avoid falling into the “tragedy of the commons” trap: too many participants, many people are not active and inactive. The members of the DAO will be restricted to the top 21 with the most votes. DAO’s decision will be determined by voting, and the number of voters shall not be less than 11 people. Chair is appointed by DAO members through voting, unless the existing DAO decides to replace Chair, the position is valid for a long time. The Chair does not necessarily come from the 21 elected members of the DAO.
Regarding the direction of potential fund allocation
The community has proposed some DAOs, and they have the opportunity to receive funds in the first round of voting cycle of the ecological fund DAO:
- Liquidity DAO: Provide liquidity incentives and other needs for DeFi in the ecology;
- Market DAO: Fund unions and let them help ecological projects gain market attention. NEAR already has a number of such labor unions. They are more efficient and decentralized media in the ecology in terms of gaining market attention and disseminating project information. In contrast, the NEAR Foundation is not so effective in doing the same work in the ecology;
- Funding DAO: Provide funding for developers in the ecosystem. This is a supplement to the existing NEAR Foundation funding plan, and it is also a more convenient way of expansion and more transparent funding;
- Union DAO: Provide funds for various unions in the ecology.
Searching and sorting out potential funding targets and ensuring that DAO members make timely decisions are the primary tasks of the Chair. The Chair also needs to urge the funded DAO to organize KPIs and report relevant information to the ecosystem at the end of each quarter. Just as a venture capital company collects investment information and tells LP after investing in a company, ecological funds DAO is obliged to inform all NEAR holders of fund usage information. Using this information to learn and improve the ability to make decisions is also very helpful to the ecological fund DAO.
Next step
The proposal of the Eco-Fund DAO will be open for discussion before June 30, 2021, absorbing opinions from the community. At that time, if the proposal is not too problematic after discussion, the technical implementation will begin. In the voting phase, if the number of votes reaches 66% of the total pledged tokens, the NEAR Foundation will release funds. If the number of votes does not reach 66% 30 days after the voting is opened, the NEAR Foundation will be responsible for collecting information, understanding why most of the pledges are not involved, and giving feedback to the community to re-polishing a plan. The goal of the voting process is to select a group of initial members who can represent the participants in each sector of the NEAR ecosystem, including validators, project parties, DAO operators, strategic investors and thinkers. The NEAR Foundation will also recommend some different types of candidates to make the initial members of the DAO more balanced.