DAOs and Network States
Superteam and Balaji are announcing a new Solana Hackathon Track.
TLDR: We have a new track devoted to DAOs and network states at the latest Solana Hackathon, hosted by Superteam and judged by Balaji. If you’re building a new or existing crypto community, or building tools for one, we invite you to compete for $100k in prizes at solana.com/grizzlython.
Now, the NTLDR (not-too-long-did-read) version.
For twenty years, we’ve been liking, poking, and tweeting at each other on social media. But man does not live by threads alone. There’s an entire dimension of human existence that has been missing from social media — the economic plane.
Yes, yes, of course you are pestered with ads. But that’s a one way thing. The platforms are getting the economics out of you. Your economics are missing. Your property rights are too. You aren’t really able to create wealth directly on social media, aside from maybe getting a small share of ad revenue.
You can create information, though. You can send anything from the tiniest text file to the largest dataset to anyone online. Or many anyones. And you can collaboratively edit with them, anywhere, at any time, in no time. Indeed, we now take for granted that any person on the internet can create and send information across borders in many ways — from writing simple emails to running sophisticated peer-to-peer programs.
But you still can’t easily create value. It takes days to open bank accounts, send international wires, or start companies. You can’t gather a group of friends from around the world into a group chat, hit a button to start an organization, hit another button to accept international wires, and start selling software within seconds.
Yet.
Cryptocurrency is changing that. Anyone with a Solana address can now send and receive funds to anyone else with a Solana address, within seconds, anywhere in the world, without any previous setup. So at least the transaction part is there. More than there, in fact, because very complicated financial transactions are now routinely facilitated on chain by smart contracts.
The next step is to move from individual transactions and smart contracts to fully on-chain organizations, which are in a sense collections of many contracts. And that brings us to DAOs and network states.
DAOs and Network States
What is a DAO? The acronym stands for a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, but that’s a historical artifact. Most DAOs aren’t impartial bits of decentralized code running autonomously on a blockchain. They’re more like tokenized communities, online groups with a crypto component that have economic goals alongside purely social ones. They aren’t there to just make small talk, they want to do bigger things, like funding open source development or contributing to longevity research.
Of course, you can do this kind of thing via a “paper” company or nonprofit, an entity where the underlying documents are based on pieces of paper and written in legalese. But that’s like sending a paper letter rather than sending an email. You can of course send paper if you must, but it’s so much more efficient to send an email — so easy to send across borders, to send to many people, to send programmatically.
So too for entities. Translating your articles of incorporation into on-chain contracts is like turning an opaque file cabinet into a queryable database. You’re turning a mass of paper into something programmable, digital, agile. Each paper contract becomes a smart contract. And it automatically works across borders, because anyone who can read code can see what that smart contract does.
At least, that’s the vision.
We want you to help make that vision a reality. Because we see a continuity from starting a new community or a new company to starting new cities or ultimately even a new country. To get to anything on the scale of a network state though — to something capable of managing the digital resources of millions of people — we’ll need a whole new toolchain for managing digital communities.
That’s where you come in.
We’re calling on people building a new or existing crypto community — or building tools for one — to enter Grizzlython. Specifically, that means three kinds of entrants:
Founders of new crypto communities
Teams running existing crypto communities, like DAOs and aspiring network states
People building tools for crypto communities
You might not think of yourself first and foremost as a community builder, but if you have an active Discord forum, you might be a fit. Ideally your community (whether new or pre-existing) has as many of the following characteristics as possible:
An expressly stated mission
A social media presence
A member recruitment and onboarding process
On-or-off-chain governance
A leadership team or founder
A crypto component within the community
The capacity for collective action
A dashboard to measure progress of the stated mission
The more of those qualities that fit your community, the more “real” it is. It should have real purpose, real metrics, real leadership, and real money. And if it does, it’ll be in need of real tools. That’s why in this hackathon track we want to see community-oriented tools built on Solana for:
treasury management
multisig approval
social key recovery
community dashboards
crowdfunding
token gating
identity management
crypto tasking
Discord and web2 integrations
and more
Basically, tools for all the practical problems one encounters when running on-chain organizations.
Ideally, any contracts you write will use Solana’s capacity for composability, so that they can be used together. A good hackathon project might involve mirroring a cap table on chain, then using that as input to calculate a liquidation waterfall, and then using that as input to a contract that handles payouts via SNS.
You could even show a proof of concept for “automated M&A” by having one mocked-up on-chain entity acquire another and distribute proceeds according to that waterfall. A toy project, yes, but the next big thing starts as a toy…and on-chain structures are quickly getting legal recognition in more jurisdictions, from Wyoming to Tennessee.
Why should you do this?
Well, we think this is pretty innovative — putting organizations on chain and making them programmable is the next level up in abstraction from smart contracts.
And we think it’s pretty impactful — hard to think of something more impactful than writing the code that runs the organization itself.
But we’ve also helped things along with some pretty incentives — because you can win a share of $100,000 in prize money just for this track if you build something great.
You can get started here: solana.com/grizzlython
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