I talked about the human-assisted onboarding process for Colony in the last post. I felt it was a very sincere way of validating that I am a human while teaching me the basics of how to use and navigate the Colony platform. I left it at that. I should have waited until my onboarding with Governor was complete because…
I am blown away. Seriously blown.
Governor DAO uses a Proof of Existence onboarding platform that is the result of a joint venture with Finnovant. Or as Telegram Channel Moderator puts it “say-tec API is FINNO - Say-tec with a web3 integration and ability to "speak" with a contract – GDAO”.
What’s it like? Well, it involved putting your Metamask wallet on the Rinkby test net, which is a minor pain in the ass, but… minor. A simple webapp with instructions and a GUI that access your mic and camera. To onboard, you repeat “the best things in life will always be free,”5x, which is a pretty good mantra anyway. Your face and voice print are recorded, hashed, compared and stored on chain.
What do you get for onboarding with Governor? Well, you get an invite to the exclusive Telegram chat for starters. Yes, a chat full of human, real, live, verified humans. That means no bot or trolls, right? Eeeeh, well, there is a bit of playful trolling. And moderator bots save everyone some work. But, it’s a great place to hang out with people who are cryptosavvy enough to be worth your time.
What else do you get for onboarding? Well, if you stake 50 GDAO tokens, you get an NFT and some voting rights! This is in line with their mission to increase human interaction with the DAO. Up for vote is the management of the treasury and so on. Contrast this with Colony DAO, whose DAO keeps on ticking whether your vote or not.
So, time for me to get going as a responsible member of both DAOs. I’d tell you all about the experience if I had bought in. Yep, I choked. I didn’t pay the paltry entrance fees to become a part of a governance revolution. Why? Barriers to adoption are strong in crypto.
________________________Getting Staked on Colony DAO (or not)_______________________
For Colony, I swapped for ETH for DAI on KuCoin. Nevermind the gas fees to move ETH. Colony folks directed me to an xDAI bridge and right before I pulled the trigger to send DAI from KuCoin to xDAI bridge, I spied the withdrawal fee from KuCoin (20DAI). I was unaware of thie drawback of using KuCoin. Not Colony's fault, I guess. Still, I’m happy to spend money in the quest for knowledge, but not that much money on the right to not have to vote on issues I barely care about (or understand).
I chatted with Jack Du Rose about this on Discord, illustrating how accessible and involved he is in the space. Like a true founder, he said xDAI is a workaround and that I should be able to use regular DAI “soon”. So, we shall wait for the DAI implementation to test out governance on Colony DAO.
__________________________Getting Staked on GDAO (or not)______________________________________
What about voting on GovernorDAO? As I told you before, I already have my Proof of Existence confirmation complete and am plugged into the Telegram Humans Only chat community to see what is up for discussion. GDAO has a discussion group on Snapshot where the Wallet-linked voting happens.
The issue up for debate was how much of a deposit fee for outside participants (those who have not conducted the PoE verification. One side maintained that getting PoE’d was pretty easy and a high fee (~5%) would be a pretty good incentive to knock it out. The other side stuck with the idea that lower fees for outside participants would encourage outside investment. The lower-fee camp won with 96.3% of the GDAO voting for a 3% fee. The 5 Percenters getting the remaining 3.7 percent.
Notice I didn’t vote. I would very much like to participate in GDAO by staking GDAO tokens. They are available on Uniswap. I sent some more ETH to my Metamask, then connected to Uni. I was going to swap ETH for 75 GDAO and before I hit “confirm” I spied the gas fee: $175 worth of gwei. Nope. Hard nope.
________________TL;DR______________
I’m all for new methods of governance; anything is better than the mediocrity and corruption in the current systems. For an inclusive and frictionless governance system to evolve, the smart contract space needs to evolve away from ETH and it’s high gas fees. I’m not sure if ETH2 will solve this (or if ETH2 will even materialize). I’d happily bet on the ETH-killers coming out of the wilderness (Cardano, Sol, and even oldsters like Signum or Bitcoin) with smart contracts. The mature stage of GDAO and Colony are yet to be upon us, I and feel both will be excellent competitors when DAOs are ready for mainstream adoption.
