The networks only capability is to allocate money. It’s an investment vehicle.
1. Destination
To be the most impactful investment vehicle in the world following the people’s vision for the world. What most impactful means, is subjective, defined by the group and should change over time. If individuals make these decisions we will never become the most impactful investment vehicle in the world.
What is this impact? What is this vision? Defined by network participants.
2. Carriage = Needs:
Founders & core team:
Me
Front end dev: Writes code that runs in the browser and interacts with smart contracts on the blockchain. Uses libraries like Web3 js, Ether js & frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, etc. Preferably with some experience in incentive design.
Smart contract dev: Writes smart contracts in Solidity, Vyper or other smart contract specific languages that are deployed on a blockchain.
A dev/crypto specialist: can connect the front end and smart contract but also understands the crypto space, L1, L2, new innovative things and other crypto related technical things. They spend more time designing and thinking then actually coding.
Meme: Mission driven investing. People join the network based on missions they want to pursue and/or believe in.
Protocol: A decentralized protocol that allows individuals to coordinate around missions to pursue and allocate money to. The product itself is a dApp. The website is showing clear and simply the different mission we are following.
Investors: people and institutions that will buy the token on exchanges. Increased demand for a fixed supply of tokens leads to an increase in token value and therefore contributes financial capital to the network.
We need a monetary policy that is responsible for creating and distributing tokens. This process is secured and guaranteed by miners or validators who:
1) execute an in itself worthless activity with no intricate value (calculations, hodling/staking a certain amount of token, winning an auction for a jpeg etc). The activity becomes valuable because it secures the network. The activity also needs to be simple, verifiable and not cheatable (calculations, amounts, auctions etc). It is easy to define who won and who didn’t and there is no way to cheat.
2) have initial costs that serve as an alignment incentive and protect against bad actors over time (hardware for mining and electricity, 32ETH, amount of money spent for jpeg). These costs increase over time.
Miners and Validators guarantee the production of capital of the network. After going through the kind of process described above a reward in tokens is distributed. How much depends on the monetary policy. These tokens are then used for voting on investment decisions, in the name and vision of the whole network. This guarantees the platforms functionality.
A third party developer could be anyone interested in seeing the networks missions succeed. The platforms initial design (discussed later on) allows for the discovery, discussion and proposal of ideas, people, projects and companies. That’s the input. Third party developers will initially be physical or legal persons giving input. These persons represent the human capital of the network. Their incentive is to see the missions which they care deeply about to succeed. Their input represent the useful applications for the network.
Deploying capital to those useful applications creates utility for users. Users being the the projects and the companies the money is invested in.
Over time this process creates a community of users which adds towards updating the meme (including missions the protocol is pursuing) and the protocol (efficient functioning of the protocol). At the beginning this will mostly be done through normal feedback. Over time the community should completely take charge of the meme + protocol and the founder should disappear from the picture and become just an other community member.
3. Right -left: Incentives and network design
The permission to enter or exit the network:
At no time, people are forced to join the network and at no time participants are forced to leave the network. The network is permissionless. In fact, as we discussed previously, you can join the network as a validator/miner, investor, third party developer or user depending on what your means are and what the criteria for each type of participant is. As long as these are met, nothing can hinder your participation.
Decision making:
The network needs to make decisions in different scenarios. There is two:
selecting which projects should be put up to a vote.
voting on which projects should be invested in.
For the first one we can use a ranking mechanism such as used on reddit. In order to avoid extreme manipulation through one person using multiple accounts or bots to upvote and/or downvote we use email sign up as in traditional online platforms.
For the second point we use quadratic voting, so that the voting truly reflects how much the participants value each option. There are downsides when it comes to quadratic voting but some of the proposed adjustments are sortition and prediction markets. Upvoting and/or downvoting + aligned incentives within the network as a whole, can in a first instance be seen as a viable replacement of prediction markets for good or bad and successful and unsuccessful ideas. Sortition could partly be achieved through a sponsorship process of some validator supporting your input to be put up for a final vote + aligned incentives within the network.
Decision making processes for networks is an experimental field, where a lot of changes and adjustments will be done over time. When building and launching we need to observe and if needed adjust it, from day 1.
Resilience through delegation of votes:
Since network participants are aligned for the long-term success of the network we don’t need a mechanism that forces people to delegate votes but gives them the possibility to delegate votes in case they truly believe some participants will take a better decision then they would themselves. This can be based on performance of certain participants over time or reputation or both.
Learning for the sake of learning:
For a network to learn efficiently and in a balanced way, every participant should be able to give some input if wanted. At the same time this input needs to be useable by the rest of the network. For that we need a mechanism that makes the best input and learning come out on top.
There is three different layers to it:
Chaos - layer: The place for the mission interested public to join and to share anything. This will be done through Discord. Literally everyone can join.
Idea maze - layer: The place where ideas get discussed, refined and ranked. This will be done through Discourse. Only people who identify through email login can join and participate.
The real selection of projects to join the missions - layer. Proposals get submitted and voted on. This will be done through our website. Only token holders have access to voting.
Other general requirements and trends to be aware of while designing and building:
Decentralization: the investment vehicle exists thanks to remote work tools and the possibility for distributed consensus.
The tools we are using are composable with the rest of the newer system referred to in this post.
Once designed and built, there should be a simplicity to use the platform which is incomparable to anything else you experience in the investment world. The outcome of the investment process should feel like magic.
4. Building the dApp
The front page with the vision will be wiki style or video built with Java script. There will also be another page with the missions we are currently following. There will be a possibility to connect with your wallet. You need to hold a certain token to connect. The smart contract to create the token could be created on manifold.xyz (?)
Connecting the website and the blockchain will be done using Moralis (?)
Same as on Nouns, the website will also have a DOCS, DISCOURSE and DAO tab.
DOCS: just a link to the notion app. Here you have all the info.
DISCOURSE: just a link to the discourse app.
DAO: is the on the website itself.
That’s all for now. Time to start putting everything into one product.
Good examples of how to design notion and discourse are on nouns.wtf.
To be:
To be monitored from day 1: voting and decision making mechanisms
To be defined before launch: monetary policy and consensus /governance mechanism.
To be proved or disproved: early on, most investments will be in ideas and small teams (AVC about partnerships).
Interesting read and progressed thoughts vs. the past! As you rightly say … it is time to put the HANI platform / product together and learn on the way.
There is a saying like “building the plane while flying”. I wonder whether there is still something to be constructed before take off (the engine, the cabin, … a min amount of fuel ?) or is the plane ready? Who needs to be on board as of day 1? The pilot (I would say yes), the stewards (may be not needed at this point), very few, but talented and dedicated passengers …. and who could join later while the plane is in the air already but needs ongoing care and improvements?
May be these questions are too old fashion? Mostly, I think, the developers need to get on it. Later future passengers who share the mission will hear about it and decide to join the journey! Good luck!
Interesting read and progressed thoughts vs. the past! As you rightly say … it is time to put the HANI platform / product together and learn on the way.
There is a saying like “building the plane while flying”. I wonder whether there is still something to be constructed before take off (the engine, the cabin, … a min amount of fuel ?) or is the plane ready? Who needs to be on board as of day 1? The pilot (I would say yes), the stewards (may be not needed at this point), very few, but talented and dedicated passengers …. and who could join later while the plane is in the air already but needs ongoing care and improvements?
May be these questions are too old fashion? Mostly, I think, the developers need to get on it. Later future passengers who share the mission will hear about it and decide to join the journey! Good luck!