A proposal for a Zcash DAO Mechanism

Community Collaborations
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With the ongoing discussions regarding the Dev Fund and the governance of the community, I have drafted a proposed mechanism to implement a DAO using Zcash shielded addresses with the following considerations in mind:

  • It does not require ZSAs, programmability or protocol changes
  • It does not require wallets to do any development
  • It can be used by anyone with a laptop and a Zcash wallet
  • It does not enforce any particular type of governance model
  • It supports sub-DAOs (it’s recursive! – Haskell joke)

The motivation behind this proposal is that we can implement a structure to organize ourselves with existing tools. Would it be better if we had ZSAs, smart contracts and signed memos? Of course! But if humans were able to organize themselves using quills and papyrus, we can start with the tools we have now and build from there.

A Zcash DAO Mechanism

TL;DR:

  • Use 3 unified addresses to record DAO data:
    • Membership
    • Proposals
    • Votes
  • Use minisign signatures to validate membership, that only members can submit proposals and that only members can vote.

This was heavily inspired by the On-chain accountable voting proposal from ECC.

I would love to hear feedback on these ideas.

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Would there be any group/community interested in using an implementation of this idea?

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I can’t speak for @ZecHub , but am willing to try it out myself. I love working with these ideas in practice.

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Given the Dev Fund situation, we’re trying to focus our attention on work that will have the greatest impact.

If there is no demand for it, we can focus elsewhere.

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I have completely missed this amazing post / idea :person_facepalming:

That’d be one great use of the dev fund!! cc @aquietinvestor