Ventuary-DAO — The first DAO on Waves Platform

6 min readJul 17, 2019

Introduction

An organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by shareholders and not influenced by a central government — Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

We can see a lot of examples of DAOs, where people are supporting innovations to be implemented in different public blockchain ecosystems. The first DAOs were Dash and Bitshares, others are The DAO, Digix, Aragon, District0X, and MolochDAO. Despite the fact that The DAO has been hacked DAOs, have a huge potential to help different groups of people collaborate.

More than one year ago my team — Ventuary was involved in the “blockchain hype”. It was a crazy time, thousands of projects were overhyped and raised an incredible amount of money. But the vast majority of them weren’t actually startups with sustainable business models or weren’t technologically advanced. It was a time for ratings and aggregators, but most of them were actually corrupted.

We started thinking: “how It must be changed with blockchain and smart contracts”? Our goal was: bringing transparency and automatization to the fund-raising campaigns.

Long story short: a couple of months ago my team has won the Waves Labs grant for Ventuary Lab (2k WAVES). The purpose of the grant was described as: “Implementation of Token Curated Registry (TCR) protocol for event organizers”. Exactly after that Waves Labs & Dev Rel announced dev “RIDE for dApps” bounty program with four tracks. I’ve solved two of them: 1. DAO for collective investments, 2. Prediction market dApp (like Augur).

The Waves Labs program aimed to support developers is a great opportunity for the entire Waves ecosystem to be more advanced and attractive. But, frankly speaking, the process of applying for the grant and the process negotiation wasn’t actually fast, transparent and comfortable. Many other projects, especially projects with active community and supporters weren’t able to use the “community power” to win a grant or attract Waves Lab's attention.

It’s an obvious solution: to build the first DAO on Waves Platform to support other developers by grants and by donations from the community. The Ventuary-DAO — flexible decentralized autonomous organization leveraging the wisdom of the crowds and patronage of grant-makers to benefit innovators and community.

How it works

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UB4NjUb5yDA__IV9bMSh-40JPMqkb4ZG/view

I. Proposal

If you have an awesome idea and you’d like to implement it and be supported from Waves Labs for implementing it, you should fill the special form for proposal called “canvas”. There are some basic questions about your dApp or idea:

Ventuary-DAO project canvas for “Coupon Bazaar” dApp

Project name
Project description
X-factor — something which makes your idea cool and distinguished from others
Problem (like all blockchain games are mostly gambling dApps and they’re pretty boring for users)
Solution
Why DLT & smart contracts needed?
Go to market strategy (how are you going to attract first users)
Impact on the community (including perks for supporters from crowdfunding stage)
The current state of development
New features or MVP description (should be implemented at the “demo day”)
Demo day
Tags / Topics
Crowdfunding cap goal
Crowdfunding end date

The canvas body is able for edits at any time. The blockchain networks will keep all data changes.

II. Moderation

The pre-moderation is required for any public services with UGC (user-generated content) to prevent users, visitors from “bad” content: spam, scam, porno, etc. The Ventuary-DAO is a decentralized application, and it means that TCR (token curated registry) protocol can be used for decentralized private voting to delist or feature new proposals.

When a proposal will reach at least 2 positive votes from the Ventuary-DAO community members it will be accepted for the crowdfunding stage. All voters are randomly chosen by our algorithm and they don’t know each other.

To incentivize users to participate in the moderation process the simple betting mechanics are used in Ventuary-DAO. Selected users have two hours to make a decision about whether a new proposal should be listed or not. Those who are not in the majority of votes might lose a small stake of WAVES. There are only two majorities possible: YES (feature) and NO (delist). Those who are in the “soft” majority will receive the shared stake of those who lose the challenge.

III. Crowdfunding

All featured projects are available for crowdfunding. Ventuary-DAO members are able to donate different amounts of WAVES to support the proposal and its owner. There are two incentivization mechanics: 1. Proposal owner makes some perks, discounts, bonuses or goods for those who supported him (like Kickstarter), 2. Supporters will be rewarded 10–50% of their donations when the proposal will receive a grant from Waves Labs or from another grant-makers (“whales”).

To increase chances to attract attention from Waves Labs and help project owners to win, grant supporters should write a small review and attach it to the donation (message like: “Why this proposal should be supported from Waves Labs?”).

There is also a tool for “stabilization” of overhyped proposals. Users are able to bet (with critical review attached) against projects if they think that project isn’t so good to be supported by Waves Labs.

IV. Grant receiving and rewards to supporters

If there is no grant from grant-maker within certain time interval (5 days after crowdfunding ends) project owner is able to withdraw collected positive fund from supporters (minus “negative” fund from bettors with the reward for bettors: 50% of the amount of their bets).

The best case is: the owner of the proposal won a grant from Waves Labs! All supporters will be rewarded automatically from Ventuary-DAO’s dApp account. Bettors will lose their betting funds.

How to become a Ventuary-DAO member

To work with web dApps on the Waves Platform, Waves Keeper must be installed. If not, just follow the instructions on the website. Make sure that your current active account has enough WAVES to pay transaction fees and deposits.

I. If you’re already invited by existing DAO member

Just be sure that you’re already logged in with the right Waves account in Waves Keeper. Invited account must be active in the Keeper to see “Sign Up” form automatically. Fill the form and you’re new Ventuary-DAO member now.

II. If are not invited

Ask existing Ventuary-DAO member to invite you (here). You can find all of them on the “community” page with their contact information.

Participate in Waves activities, fill forms, proposals, surveys, etc and you’ll be invited by special personal link.

This approach is important to protect Ventuary-DAO members from bots or users with strange behavior: aggressive, spamming, scamming, etc. We are always able to check who invited whom and do some additional verification and moderation (later).