Since we released the original white paper about two years ago, Dora Factory has built many interesting infrastructures and gadgets to empower open-source communities and hackers’ ventures worldwide. Many have interfaces on DoraHacks.io, some are being independently developed. Here are a few examples:
- Open-community Grant DAO protocol enabling blockchains to fund its ecosystem developments and public goods.
- Extensive research into privacy and collusion resistance in decentralized governance and voting. Pushed adoption of protocols like DoraHacks-MACI across the crypto world. Now we are engaging in more advanced research in privacy and collusion resistance technology in community governance.
- Provided the most comprehensive protocols for open source funding and community governance so far in crypto/Web3.
- Engaged vcDORA community in critical community governance like Dora Grant DAO.
- DAOrayaki evolved from a media DAO towards a decentralized media / content curation platform.
- Funded and supported open source communities around the world, in crypto, Web3, and quantum computing.
In the meantime, the DoraHacks.io platform has made significant breakthroughs as a hub for multi-chain innovation. The trend will continue as the global hacker community grows and as the adoption of crypto increases.
The reason why we started with building a governance tech stack at Dora Factory was because of a lack of foundational tools to scale open source funding and community governance, which is critical to the future development of the crypto ecosystems and open source communities in general.
With the current protocol stack, the platform is ready to grow for another 10x - 100x in terms of annual funding amount and number of communities onboard. Now is the time to make it clear what will happen at Dora Factory in the next few years and present a clear roadmap. What we have built during the past two years is now a stepping stone to fulfill the goal of creating the digital infrastructure of an everlasting hacker movement for everyone.
There are three parts of the upcoming roadmap: decentralized venture fund, public good staking, and an interplanetary crypto settlement network.
Now dive into them.
Note for forward-looking statements: not all of the following initiatives will succeed, especially the third. However we will make sure all roadmaps are maximally explored and try our best to increase the excitement level of each endeavor. If we succeed in any one, we add something valuable to human society. If we fail (one or all three), we contribute a piece of knowledge.
Decentralized Venture Capital
By far, venture capitalism is the most effective way to fund early-stage tech ventures. However, human technology is inevitably more powerful over time, thus more dangerous over time. The second amendment cannot offer rights to own nuclear warheads. As a result, new tech will more likely be controlled by smaller groups of people. No matter how inclusive ChatGPT claims to be, Microsoft as a single entity controls at least 49% of it.
We need an alternative to offset the centralized future. The hacker movement is a grassroot movement in its core. A decentralized venture capital should allow as many people as possible to explore and implement possible new technologies. In one way, it pushes the progress of human innovation. On the flip side, it creates competition to tech monopolies. The global open source community is a foundation of it, but the lack of funding forces GitHub to seek funding from established VCs and eventually got acquired by Microsoft, and obviously the exact same happened to OpenAI, which claimed to be non-profitable and anti-monopoly during its early stage.
From a nutshell, a decentralized VC needs to do three things:
- Provide permissionless access for every hacker who wants to build something new
- Provide permissionless access for everyone who wants to contribute
- Can self-sustain for a long time
We start with what is now Dora Grant DAO, a venture grant community governed by vcDORA, and gradually iterate it into decentralized venture capital.
Ideally, the DAO’s reserve reaches a level that a risk-free or risk-adjusted yield of the reserve capital alone can fund all ventures from the hacker community annually, similar to a university endowment fund.
There might be two end games of this endeavor other than complete failure. It could become a protocol that can be generalized. In this case, we will deploy the protocol on DoraHacks.io and make it freely accessible for every decentralized venture fund, just like existing protocols like Grant DAO and Hackathon. It could also turn out to be not replicable. If that is the case, we will make sure the fund is accessible for everyone who can legally join.
Public Good Staking
The fundamental value of blockchain ecosystems comes from democratization of the otherwise closed financial system. Every blockchain transaction carries some value, and blockchain infrastructures provide security as well as various functionalities to enable valuable transactions. By continuously creating value, a blockchain network can sustain itself and further develop its own infrastructures via ecosystem public good funding. Currently, a vast majority of network incentives go to network security, and we argue that a significant part of it should be used to fund ecosystem ventures and public goods via a bias-resistant system of distribution, as we described in block incentive driven ecosystem funding. Public Good Staking is a practical solution to it.
We started to build basic technology and capabilities in early 2022. Now public good staking has already been adopted by several ecosystems and is being further adopted quickly. The total locked value (TVL) of Dora Factory Public Good Staking has reached $300,000,000 as of February this year, consisting of validators from multiple ecosystems, large and small. With public good staking, we are able to fund multi-chain innovation, allowing many more hackers to be able to build their own ideas and start their own ventures.
Next, we will do three things.
- increase capacity of public good staking
- build infrastructures to allow consumers to participate in public good staking validators
- create protocol suites to decentralize PoS network staking and governance
Dear Doge - An Interplanetary Settlement Layer
Space economy is going to be at least as large as the earth economy, and it’s where hackers and open source developers should be allowed to build. As for now, there are extremely limited space economic activities, and certainly no interplanetary financial activities at all. This will quickly change.
When the multi-planetary economy comes, it’s important to bring open financial ecosystems beyond earth.
There are a lot of activities that can happen in space. Transactions can be initiated from different locations in the solar system, including Mars, the Moon, Earth, asteroids, and their orbits. Transactions can be initiated by humans and robots, and they can go from any point to another point.
Consider human’s permanent settlement on Mars in the next two decades, creating space factories, space-orbit power stations, mines, scientific experimentations, large-scale constructions, moon bases, space militaries, space hotels, tourism... Transactions will happen between any two end points on Mars, Moon, Earth, or anywhere in between. The max distance between earth and Mars is roughly 402 million kilometers. Any communication takes about 22 minutes to arrive, creating significant delays for transactions.
In order to bring blockchain assets to space, we need to create an interplanetary settlement layer. It requires a very different kind of infrastructure. Because of launch costs and communication costs, it’s economically unfit for Nakamoto consensus to settle interplanetary blockchain asset transactions. On the other hand, as communication is delayed by physical constraints, we need new protocols that can handle communication delays so that interplanetary transactions can be settled.
There are less details that we can provide for this endeavor. Arguably this is the one that is most likely to fail.
As Dogecoin is now the most promising to become the first cryptocurrency to have outer space utilities, we call this mission “Dear Doge”.
In short, the Phase-II of Dora Factory is:
- Create a self-sustained, permissionless venture capital to fund hackers’ ideas indefinitely.
- Build all necessary infrastructures for public good staking.
- Expand the crypto economy to multiple planets in the solar system by building an interplanetary settlement layer.