Alliances and the Interoperability of DAOs

Interoperability is a common promise in crypto today. The idea of IOTA becoming a multi-asset ecosystem has become part of our regular, daily conversations in the community. Within a few months, the tokenization framework will make all of this possible with literally a click of a button. Tens of thousands, if not millions of new projects all with their own native currency could potentially rise up and play a role in defining this new normal.

The team at SoonLabs challenged ourselves to contemplate and innovate around an important question when it came to the obvious game-changing technology being developed by the IOTA foundation.

How will DAOs best operate in a world with billions of unique tokens?

Our answer might surprise you.

You see, we think that DAOs are the future of organizations. We think they will become more common than an LLC, INC, GBMH and all of the regional and global variations in-between. They will be small and agile or global and immense. They will involve intimate neighbor football clubs and intercontinental consortiums of open-source developers. The one thing that they will have in common is that most will have their voting rights enshrined into a token. Some of them may use the same token, others will choose to create their own token, there will be configurations of all shapes and sizes.

Now if DAOs were able to do everything by themselves, within the confines of their own community this would be the end of the article. But that’s not how the world works, especially not the web3 world. A decentralized world will thrive only if we have one thing and this is, you guessed it, interoperability! The only way for a decentralized world to truly thrive is for it to function across protocols, tokens, and structures by seamlessly collaborating and working together.

Reputation Ledger Recap

The concept of the reputation ledger is to log member contributions on-chain and was never meant to be a one size fits all solution. Having a central authority determine the value of a unified reputation system would:

1. Defy the ethos of decentralization
2. Never scale to millions of spaces and billions of users
3. Create a rigid bottleneck in an otherwise flexible platform

One of the biggest challenges most people have on the platform right now is looking at a member and seeing what you perceive as “true reputation.” Someone may have 73 badges and 9,000 XP, but you don’t know if they acquired all that by spinning up their own spaces or other nefarious means.

Our new release solves this.

Enter Alliances

Let’s go back to our member who has a bunch of badges and a ton of XP. You head on over to their profile to learn where they earned all this reputation. Oh wow, it turns out that all of the spaces where the member obtained this reputation is of no significance to me. I don’t recognize any of these spaces and honestly, a lot of them seem fake.

We have people asking us, “Why don’t you control how badges and XP are distributed?” The answer is simple: This is a decentralized system! The Soonaverse is a protocol that anybody can build on top of, however they see fit. But what we can do is design the protocol to bring legitimacy to spaces that are handing out reputation responsibly and obfuscate spaces that aren’t.

The solution that we created is so ground breaking that it has the potential to redefine the entire DAO industry and we call it Alliances or more accurately Space Alliances (we have Spaces, our mascot’s an astronaut, you get it). The concept of the Soonaverse Space Alliance is a simple one. 2 Spaces on the Soonaverse can establish a rate of exchange for its XP and badges. That’s it.

Wait? That’s it? Ok, maybe that’s too simple. Let us explain.

Since XP is tied to a “token of value” or what is commonly known as a governance or DAO token, a rate of exchange creates the ability for a DAO to recognize another DAOs best practices or lack thereof by attributing a weight to the conversion of their XP.

The implications are that DAOs can now exchange reputation and value (via XP) with other DAOs! So, the incredible effort you put into building up reputation through badges and XP can be leveraged within other DAOs via your connection or Alliance.

How do you form an Alliance?

When you open up a space that you’re a guardian of, you can now scroll down and create a “New connection.” This allows a space to make a one way relationship with another space and recognize the reputation that they’ve distributed.

For example, I may understand that the “IOTA Content Creators” space is a legitimate organization and they only give out badges and XP when people actually contribute to the IOTA community via content creation. In this instance, as a space guardian, I could create a connection with the “IOTA Content Creators” space:

The “1” listed in the image above represents a 1:1 reputation weight. If I thought they were a legitimate organization, but they were issuing a little too much XP then I could lower that reputation weight down to 0.5. Therefore, the XP earned from the “IOTA Content Creators” space would still be recognized in my space, but carry half the weight.

The significant part about this new connection feature is that you don’t need to wait for the other space to approve your space before it becomes active. Since it’s a one way connection, you can connect with as many spaces as you’d like.

Why do we do this? You might choose to recognize XP from other DAOs and spaces even if those other DAOs and spaces don’t want to connect with you… Or even know you exist!

But once both spaces connect with each other, then you officially have an alliance.

(Note: If a space you’re connected to starts issuing way too much XP and you don’t believe the weight you initially established is true anymore, then you have the ability to change that weight at any time. Moreover, if you don’t want to recognize that connection anymore, then you can break the connection entirely.)

How Are We Initially Applying Alliances?

Alliances are robust and serve many purposes. We’ll outline a few use cases below, but implore all of you to see if you can come up with additional ways to leverage this new feature.

Viewing a Member’s Total Reputation

Now when you go to a member’s profile to look at their reputation, it automatically defaults to all spaces:

This means that you’re viewing the member’s reputation across the entire Soonaverse. This can include spaces that you aren’t familiar with.

But with the new alliances feature, you can choose a specific space to see just their reputation in that particular space. Furthermore, you can check the connections box and see the reputation for that space and all of that spaces connections as well:

A healthier and more true picture of reputation. A reputation that the viewer recognizes as legitimate.

Additionally, when you’re in a particular space and look at the members tab, you’ll only see the XP that applies directly to the space that you’re in. The same applies when you go to the awards section as well.

On top of that, when you go to the main discovery page, you can go to the “Members” tab, choose a space, check the “Include connections” box, and view the total reputation for all members based on that criteria:

Voting on Proposals

Voting flexibility is a key component to a well functioning space. A lot of spaces will choose a simple one member = one vote model. But for other spaces, they may want to reward their more active members with more voting power.

This is where weighted voting comes into play. The guardians of a space may choose to implement a proposal where voting weight is based on a member’s total reputation inside the space. Or they can take it one step further and apply that voting weight not just to the reputation inside their own space, but also all spaces that they have connections with. This is powerful because members with more recognized reputation get more of a say in the space.

This can be used to reward members that are active inside your entire community (spaces you have connections with) and not just your singular space. This can encourage members in spaces that you have connections with to be more active inside your space.

We see a future where spaces begin to work with each other, so we wanted to make collaboration as easy as possible. *Federations now enter the arena*

Federations: A DAO of DAOs

Now that you have a firmer grasp of the disruptive force that a simple conversion rate paired with the concept of XP and reputation can have on all DAOs, we would like to expand on that further with a future feature we call “Federations”. Simply stated Federations are DAOs where the members are other spaces.

Think of this like a fleet of starships. You can have DAOs that are small fighters or frigates, others that are huge star destroyers, and even massive planetoids. They all agree to fight (vote) for the same cause with varying levels of rights and roles based on their size, capabilities, and resources. That is how a federation of DAOs would operate.

A federation of DAOs could act as standards making bodies for Web3 organizations, collect resources for urban planning initiatives, or represent an entire sector like NFT artists. Participation and membership would be voluntary and governance dictated by the configuration of the DAO. One DAO, One vote; All member votes; Representative Voting will be configurable. Imagine the possibilities!

What’s even more mind blowing is that DAOs can be a part of multiple federations. This expands the utility of a DAO and gives their community access to projects, people, and goals that are far beyond the scope of their own agendas. This could have an incredible impact on one of the most pressing issues among DAO communities, governance, and participation. A broader spectrum of influences and goals creates more engagement and therefore relevance and impact on membership.

Instead of guardians, these federations will have “Celestials”. Celestials are the guardians of the federation. Federations will have treasuries that they can spend from, forums they can discuss issues on, and proposals they can vote on.

Federations will be able to raise funds for their treasuries and distribute funds to their coalition of spaces. The spaces inside that federation will be able to vote in their representatives to become celestials in the federation and will be able to vote on how these funds are spent.

While each space in a federation may have its own token, the federation itself could have a native token as well. All with different tokenomics and all different use cases.

The idea of Federations is a powerful concept that hasn’t been fully explored yet. A good example of a future federations could be a federation for a protocol that’s maintained by multiple DAOs. We could make a Soonaverse Reputation RPC Federation and we could all decide on the further development of the protocol.

We hope you’re as excited as we are to see the many different directions that people take Alliances and Federations in. The possibilities here are truly endless.

So, “How will DAOs best operate in a world with billions of unique tokens?”. Like all things decentralized the answer is “together” we will do it together. Now with Alliances, accomplishing that via the Soonaverse has gotten so much easier.

Visit the Soonaverse and take Alliances for a ride or better yet take the journey together with your favorite DAO. Happy travels.