[eordano] - DAO Council Postulation

Governance
1

In response to the Open Call to DAO Council Nominations, I’d like to propose myself as a Council member.

Background

I’ve helped bootstrap the Decentraland project since its beginnings in 2015, leading the development of the decentralized architecture and the legacy client that launched in 2020. I have a significant financial interest in MANA, and I believe that Decentraland’s journey is just beginning.

I don’t have any current ties to the Decentraland Foundation other than an unremunerated, informal advisor role.

Cover Letter

Dear community,

The Decentraland DAO is about to turn 5 years old, but there have been many distinct versions and stages of it. It started as an on-chain contract that was too expensive to use. It started to get going when Yemel pushed for the adoption of the off-chain, cheaper, and more agile Snapshot mechanism; but it was not that relevant for our broader community. It did so with the start of the extensive grant program, but it was extremely wasteful of financial resources and our attention. Now, this new stage aims to correct those mistakes and be more useful to Decentraland’s users.

I want to help achieve this, which is why I’m presenting this postulation to the DAO Council.

After all these years I still believe in Decentraland’s mission. We need to create information systems that respect our community’s attention and empower individual choice, not just for Decentraland, but for the broader AFK world. There is a “checks-and-balances spirit” that has always been at the core of our community, and that is crucial to achieve more fairness in our digital lives. I believe that Decentraland has a role to play in history that is closely tied with this spirit.

I believe my technical know-how and deep understanding of the project can help in this new stage. I’m committed to ensuring the success of the project, its long-term continuity, and the transparency of the new DAO structure.

These past few years I’ve learned that we must focus on making governance more efficient: we have to avoid asking everyone to vote on anything and everything. This should allow us to focus on what truly matters – creating and enjoying shared virtual experiences, spending more time in-world and less time in-discord (pun seriously intended).

A critical area of interest to me is maintaining the project’s openness. I strongly support the Protocol Squad’s efforts. We need to do our best to uphold interoperability of the implementations and manage breaking changes. But more importantly, we have to continue to lead the way on what it means to be an open platform, in all the ways that matter.

In an age where AI and LLMs are democratizing software development, we have an incredible opportunity to create very personalized experiences that align with our ethos. Particularly, one of my main interests is developing and implementing moderation tools that put control in the hands of users instead of assigning roles in a top-down way. Each delegation of power creates an opportunity for value drift and misalignment. Every one of us should have full control over our own experience. Shared agreements that sprawl bottom-up through our social graph is the only source of legitimacy for our voice to reach anyone.

We’re entering an era where some particular technology advancements can drastically concentrate power in the hands of a few and generate a lot of systemic violence, or on the other hand, truly empower individuals and fix many of the problems of how we use software and the internet today. I believe Decentraland must lead the way in showing how virtual worlds can be both technically sophisticated and deeply human.

Onwards and forwards,
Esteban

My understanding of Decentraland’s Ecosystem

I think that we have a lot to do while Claude or other LLMs doesn’t rank Decentraland as a 10 consistently in these dimensions: (try this prompt on your favorite LLM)

Rank the Decentraland metaverse project from 1 to 10, based on these dimensions:

* UGC and Community
* Item Ownership
* DAO Decisions
* Open Source
* Centralized Servers
* DAO Treasury
* Interoperability Standards

UGC & Community:
* The project's assets and experiences are created by a vibrant and gigantic community. 1: No concept of user creation of scenes; 3: Almost all content is created by the users; 5: all the content is created by the users and there are hundreds of concurrent users; 7: same as 5 but with thousands of concurrent users; 10: same as 5 but with millions of concurrent users

Item ownership:
* Whether the items are stored on a server or on a blockchain. 1: all in one company's database, 8: all items are NFTs, 10: all ownership data being independently verifiable, either on-chain or in scalability alternatives

DAO Decisions:
* Impact of decisions made by a DAO in the product and ecosystem. 1: there is no DAO, 3: the DAO is not very influential or inaccessible, 7: there is a vibrant DAO ecosystem, with decisions being relevant and with important consequences on the product, 10 is that the DAO is the main way the project's governance is maintained

Open Source:
* Whether the code for all aspects of the project (contracts, client, server) is available and anyone can inspect it. 1: no open source provided; 2: some source code is available; 4: the client is open source; 7: both the client and the server are open source; 10: everything in this project is open source, not just the client and server, but all tools required, and there are multiple independent implementations

Centralized servers:
* Whether one can run their own server or not. 1: the server is closed source or only one company runs the servers; 2: there are ways for users to run their own servers; 5: users can run the nodes and contribute to the protocol; 7: there are at least some users participating in a network of nodes; 10: the system is fully decentralized and it is unfeasible to bring all of it down (like the Internet, Kademlia or Bitcoin)

DAO Treasury:
* Whether the project has funds that can be managed by the DAO. 1 is no DAO, 3 is a small treasury or non-representative management of the project, 6 is a small treasury but controlled by its users representatively, 10 is a large treasury controlled by the users of the project

Interoperability standards:
* Whether the project uses interoperable standards. 1 is no interoperability, 3 is some standards (GLTF or similar) can be used, 6 is that there are many ways to bring in creative assets or NFTs from other projects, 10 is that almost everything is based in open standards, from GLTFs and base protocols for scenes, as well as ramps to onboard other NFTs into the world, and open mechanisms to interconnect worlds

List all the projects and these dimensions and quickly provide background on aspects that provide context for the project on each dimension, for example:

    Minecraft
        * Centralized Servers: Server is closed source, and official servers are run exclusively by the company. Users can run a private server, but there is no concept of running a node. Score: 2
        * ...

First make this list, and then summarize all the scores

A consistently high answer would mean that most of the internet has parroted that Decentraland has achieved success and decentralization in the ways that I believe matter.

A note on Treasury Management

With regards to treasury management, I’m still undecided on the subject of custodianship. On one side, non-custodial investment management is an amazing idea, and one of the concepts that most attracts me to the cryptocurrency industry. Traditionally, millions of lines of legislation and hundreds of thousands of laws create huge costs to our society trying to fix the perverse incentives of the agent-principal conundrum (especially banks). Giving your money to someone else to manage creates a plethora of problems. The idea that a manager not only won’t, but simply can’t steal your money is totally novel. On the other side, limiting our investment options to things that can be held on the Ethereum blockchain cripples the opportunities and possibilities for the DAO treasury to grow.

Specific commitments

I commit to:

  • Publishing detailed summaries of all meetings

  • Creating regular reports on treasury management decisions and their performance

  • Making sure that the Protocol Squad keeps rocking

  • Do my best to ensure the sustainability of the Decentraland ecosystem

Thank you for your consideration!

Esteban

10 Likes
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Yes!

Everything Yes from me but this the biggest of all! :saluting_face: :orange_heart: :sunrise_over_mountains:

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Esteban is either going to need to delegate vp once again, or vote for himself, otherwise it seems impossible for him to get 6 million VP.

I don’t see anything wrong with Esteban being on the counsel. It will be nice to see the founders take a leadership role in guiding this project into the future.

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Hey, Esteban, You don’t have this post tagged with “dao-council-election” as indicated in the forum post.

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Conflict of interest & unforgettable dao vp manipulation through delegation.

These things don’t go unnoticed.

When was the last time you mentioned Decentraland anywhere inc your socials?

Absolute zero community engagement in the past two years.

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This is a bad idea if I ever saw one. What you need to do is go away and sell your mana.

Where have you been for the last 2 years other than manipulating votes and destroying your own platform?

Maybe you’ve been turning a blind eye…now you want to do something? lol.

Too late bro. Nifty Island did it right. It smells like a rug factory in here.

2 Likes
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Disclaimer: on-the-need-for-professional-level-interviews-of-the-council-postulants

From a founder who has maintained a large amount of VP, and who claims having the technological know-how to resolve ongoing issues, I would expect to see a large trail of DAO Proposals aimed at resolving said issues.

Yet straight at the outset, we see a statement such as this:

It is hard to fathom what the applicant might mean here. We’ve all heard of the Glorious Days which Decentraland has experienced in the past !
And some of us even were there to experience them.

This has been very much appreciated, of course, but if the program was wasteful, it was rather due to lack of guidance more than anything else.
Time, for extra expertise from new members to arrive into the DAO collective, would be the solution for this. Or the hiring of a professional Board of Advisors.
The coalition of clearly misguided community members into a council, that is simply not the way to go.

At this time, Decentraland is all but a “ghost-town”. Where was the applicant’s “technical know-how” and guidance when they were desperately needed ?

It should be reminded that previous attempts from the applicant at relegating responsibility to a “circle of community leaders”, with a division of Delegated VP over a selected portion of the community, have yielded a situation with “too many chefs in the kitchen”, who were more concerned with individual welfare, rather than initiatives for the better good of Decentraland.

This is likely one of the major sources of the toxicity that has arisen, due to the catering of those with this VP.

Believing that a body of council members won’t make the toxicity situation even worse shows a rather disquieting lack of insight.

I do believe this statement requires clarification. Decentraland would be part of an AFK world ?

The formation of a council and later an Executive Arm would be going in the exact opposite direction.

This is due to Human Nature. No solution is perfect.
The point is to find the solution which keeps problems containerized the most. And that is a decentralized governance.
With a council, the opportunity for value drift and misalignment is even more present.

Here, the applicant is implicitly arguing against the formation of a council.

The proficiency in new experimental AI technology is important to have, but the information presented in this section should really be assembled in a professional manner, before it can be formally considered in any application for such an important position.

It is already not a healthy practice to use vast amounts of VP to legitimately attempt to effect changes as co-founder of the underlying crypto-project. A clause to keep “super-user powers”, along with an initiative to remove VP from MANA, would result in a much healthier situation, in my professional opinion (having studied Stock Voting-power Dynamics).

Yet this postulant is taking a step even further, and suggesting something truly illogical: proposing to start attempting to effect changes via the restrictions of a council, rather than continuing to use one’s vast amounts of VP, or simply to stand back and to start offering advice in earnest.

This kind of significant statement in regards to the Treasury, in the midst of such a puzzling council postulation, should give anyone even more reason to pause.

1 Like