Franken DAO Focus Group #1 Recap & DAO Thoughts
The Franken DAO is being built together as a community. The first focus group was a success and a bunch of improvements were made to the DAO.
What a wild few days it has been in Crypto - FTX, Binance, SBF, the broader market hemorrhaging… I hope everyone is taking care of themselves, and to friends who had money locked up in FTX, it is not the end (even though it may feel like it).
Onto lighter matters: the Franken DAO’s construction and building this together as a community. Thank you to everyone who showed up from around the globe on Monday night (US time) and spent roughly 90minutes with us chatting and vocalizing their ideas. It was a very healthy discussion and a lot of progress was made together. The inaugural DAO focus group was a big success and we certainly plan to have a few more before the DAO officially gets unveiled.
In this blog post, I’ll provide an in-depth recap on most of what was spoken about in the meeting and what decisions were made. The discussion on Monday night centered around 5 main topics:
What is the purpose of staking inside the Franken DAO?
How is voting power earned? What is the community voting power metric? How is it calculated?
How is the committee formed? Should there be a 10th man?
What are the requirements imposed on committee members?
What is the current proposal process?
Okay, I’ll quit lagging, let’s dive into the good stuff.
What is the purpose of staking inside the Franken DAO?
Staking inside the Franken DAO will act as a gate mechanism for holders to enter and leave the DAO. Once you stake your FrankenPunks (FPs) or your FrankenMonsters (FM), the wallet you staked with will be granted Voting Power (VP). This will come at 1:1 for FPs (based on your evil score) and 1:0.5 for all FMs.
The Franken DAO will also have two more peels behind the initial layer of a required stake, the first is the DAO will also have a staking window. This window will last every Sunday for the entire day, 12:00am to 11:59pm. Holders will only be allowed to stake during this time. This is for one main reason…
Reduce impulsive (and sometimes toxic) participation in the DAO. If members really wish to be a part of the DAO, they will take the time to stake during the staking window. If not, the idea or emotion will pass, and each party will carry on better for it.
The second peel is that we will have a staking lock-up for those who are interested. At the moment, we will allow holders to lock their FPs for the interval of 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, and a month. Each will come with their own boost in VP. I will go deeper into this in a future blog post.
If you do not choose to lock up your FP, at ANY time, holders can unstake their FPs or FMs from the DAO. Due to our commitment to keeping all actions in the DAO fully on-chain, staking will require paying a gas fee. However, we will be refunding gas fees for every action taken in the DAO - including staking. Each week, every holder is entitled to one refunded stake and one refunded unstake. The DAO feels that any more could be viewed as exploitative.
How is voting power earned? What is the community voting power metric? How is calculated?
Voting Power (VP) is earned by a holder staking their FrankenPunk (FP) or FrankenMonster (FM) into the DAO. Each FP will earn roughly 1 VP (depending on Evil score and staking lockup) and each FM will earn 0.5VP. All FPs and FMs will be aggregated on a per-wallet basis. So if you have 10 FPs and 10 FMs, your wallet will have roughly 15 VP.
Community Voting Power is a multiplier that is earned through positively contributing to the Franken DAO. There are three metrics that we are able to track on-chain (each of which are variables):
Amount of final governance proposal votes the wallet has participated in the last 10 proposals (75%)
Amount of proposals the wallet has submitted (15%)
Amount of passed proposals the wallet has submitted (10%)
The multiplier is a little confusing so read carefully. The multiplier is wallet specific, not FP or FM specific. The multiplier does not extend to the holder’s entire wallet, it extends to one FP (and if they don’t have an FP, their FM) inside the wallet. That means if you own 10 FPs, it will only multiply the Voting Power of one FrankenPunk.
The multiplier, when maxed out has the capability of fully doubling (this is a variable) the voting power of one of your FPs.
You may be asking… why create a multiplier like this? Great question, here’s a great answer.
The goal of the multiplier is to drive groundfloor engagement. For holders who own 1,2, or 3 FPs, with some consistent participation in the DAO can vote like they have double, 50%, or 33% more FPs than they actually have. THIS IS GREAT! Even if you’re a small holder in the DAO, you have ability to have a large impact, and as you do, we’ll reward you with more VP.
How is the DAO committee formed? Should there be a 10th man?
This was one of the most engaging segments of the DAO focus group. I appreciate ‘Van_Ruben’ for bringing up a great idea in the 10th man, there were many other good ideas as well.
The committee will be formed on a 3/3/3 process. Three will be active team members, three will be appointed community members or individuals, and three will be elected community members/FP holders. In the focus group, we all felt this was a fair way to create the initial committee makeup.
Now something to point out is that, the committee is NOT there to approve or pass proposals. They have no say (besides their own VP) to assert whether or not a proposal should pass or not. The committee is their to ensure that the DAO is not maliciously attacked or scammed by irrational actors. This could look like a proposal to liquidate the DAO or proposal that looks like it will pass but as new information comes out, the proposer is not who they seem. That is the only on-chain purpose of the committee!
Now in regards to the 10th man, on its own right, its a great idea but I don’t think it’s a great fit for our DAO. The idea is that the committee has a 10th member who is there to make the committee look closer if they are in complete agreement, 9-0. A 10th member would come in and say, “Maybe this isn’t as great as it seems” or maybe we’re missing something. Now in this context, the 10th member would essentially be asking if we are sure that it is a scam, or are we sure that this proposal will liquidate the DAO? I think the context of the proposed 10th man was in relation to the committee having some type of power to pass proposals, which they will not. So I don’t think this is something we should move forward with.
What are the requirements imposed on committee members?
A few great questions were brought up here…
How much commitment is expected?
What’s the process for committee members who aren’t active?
Will the committee have incentives?
I think these types of questions reflect the engaged participation of our community, which I love to see.
Going through each for a moment, as I see it, the committee is expected to have no day-to-day responsibilities. They are expected to have a meeting at worst, twice a month. The meetings are to discuss current proposals, the DAO’s direction, where they feel a good use of funds will be, and comment to the community about their thoughts. In the best world, I would love to see a blog post made after each of these meetings, being the leaders they are seen as to the DAO and the community at large. They are lastly expected to be on-call within a 24-hours notice to block any maliciously passed proposal in the DAO.
The process for removing inactive committee members should be a strict two-strike policy. If you miss a committee meeting without warning or fail to respond/vote in the on-call 24-hours period twice in your term, you are removed.
And lastly, I believe this last question is for the DAO to decide. Should committee members have incentives? Should they be paid? If so, in what?
I see benefits and drawbacks to both sides.
What is the current proposal process?
The proposal process that was outlined in the original whitepaper is as follows:
Start a discourse thread -> Start a 2-day snapshot proposal (heatcheck) -> Start a 7-day on-chain governance proposal (final).
From a timeline standpoint this would take roughly 10-14 days to successfully complete. Initially I thought this to be too long, and potentially beating a dead horse. However with conversations in the focus group, I think this is the perfect length. If a holder or outside party submits a proposal to use >$20,000, it should take them at least 10 days to get the proposal passed. It should receive scrutiny from the community. This is healthy business practice.
The only proposed change that I think will make the first step easier is integrating the new ‘forum’ threads inside Discord. This will bring the first step in-house and make it easier for our community to talk about proposals and submit new ones. The upvote feature is similar to Discourse and allows the DAO to carry on as business usual.
I can confidently say that the proposal process is set.
Concluding Thoughts
Now… I think that is enough for today, and for the first blog post in a while on the Franken substack! I appreciate anyone who made it all the way to bottom in one go, you’re a monster.
I also want to give a special shout out to Van Ruben, Big Saggy, Sky, IceBurg, Ghost of Harvard, Alvis, Roro, Ken, Steezy92, and Adam, who were all active in the DAO focus group and vocalized their thoughts. Thank you to everyone who showed up and saw how we conducted business or learned more about the DAO!
There will definitely be more focus groups coming in the future.
Upcoming topics will be:
Treasury management
Proposal Guard Rails
DAO interest-groups
If any of these interest you, please come and share your thoughts.
Until next time, stay evil folks!
Best,
Nelson / Doctor