DAO Day 3: State of Proposals

The DAO is only three days old, and I had to rush to write this article as things are moving so fast it’s becoming nearly impossible to keep track of everything. Most importantly, we’re seeing the first Proposals up for voting, so thought I’d use this blog post to take you through a high level overview of what’s available… well at least today (I imagine tomorrow there will be three times as many tools!)

What you can vote on

As you know, the Curator must add Proposals to the whitelist before they can be voted on. These Proposals are submitted using a formal process and are then stored here on the DAOhub forum for review by the community and eventually the Curators (here’s ours). Right now, we’re waiting until the 7th of the month, when a regular monthly report on new Proposals will be made public, which will give summarize the communities review and response to the Proposals submitted.

But if you’re following sites like dao.report, you might be wondering how can there be Proposals already up for voting if the Curator has not whitelisted anything yet!

This is because The DAO’s address and the address of the Curator’s multisig are integrated into the whitelist by default. It’s therefore already possible to vote on Proposals that relate to the Curator and The DAO’s operational settings.

It’s also possible to make ‘dummy’ Proposals to the DAO Token holders. They require a 2 ETH Deposit which will be returned if they reach 20% quorum. Sure, these votes are non-binding, but it’s a great way to ask questions to the community: in fact it’s the only way to query the people that really matter and ultimately will make all the decisions: the DAO Token Holders.

Asking questions, setting parameters

In a sense, until Proposals such as ours are whitelisted, the first usage of The DAO is as a 100% indisputable surveying mechanism. Someone jokingly posted ‘Do you believe in God?’, but others have submitted more serious questions, such as “Should curators only whitelist projects that are related to DAO security for the next 4 weeks?”… that one might be worth pondering a bit!

By the way, if you want to submit such a Proposal, I suggest you attach a link to a PDF describing the proposal in detail and also include the checksum of that PDF in the description. This way, you’ll have more room to write and describe your solution in detail; single line Proposals may struggle reaching quorum as they might be too ambiguous.

The second usage is to set the operating parameters of The DAO itself. For example, voting on the Proposal deposit costs, which currently are set to 2 ETH. Too high? Too low? You decide (Proposal #17 if you’d like to vote).

You can see the list of current Proposals at https://www.myetherwallet.com/#dao-Proposals, but also on https://dao.report/, and on https://vote.daohub.org/ and http://etherscan.io/token/TheDAO#Proposals and… well, you get the point, this has gotten quite popular, and it will be very interesting to see the various approach taken in the UI/UX of these projects going forward.

Keep calm, and DAO on.

Crypto might move at the speed of light, but The DAO is an entire different beast altogether. We think it’s wise to take things one step at a time, setup the parameters carefully, craft voting tools, learn how to use them, and of course develop new, exciting Proposals before the backing of projects begins in earnest.

Finally, if you need help, we recently we donated our slack to The DAO but we’re of course very much still around — so come and say hi, and don’t hesitate to ask questions: https://thedao.signup.team/