The vision of MetisDAO Foundation has remained the same since Day 1: we are determined to build robust infrastructure to backbone and power the Web3 economy. Over the past 12 months, we’ve been on a journey of building, making mistakes, learning, and refining our approach to realizing our vision. The Foundation is coordinating with several community developer teams and utilizing the bottom-up approach to convert the infrastructure of Metis into concrete products, which will be presented in three layers:
- Smart Layer 2 — A solid, scalable, cheap, and decentralized technical infrastructure to act as the transaction layer, which is secure enough for everyone to use, smart enough to support the sudden increase of user flow, and robust enough to run and sustain DApps and the Web3 economy.
- Reputation Power (RP) — The most fundamental and decentralized identity infrastructure in the Web3 world, to demonstrate each member’s credibility, trustworthiness, level of engagement across multiple chains/ecosystems/metaverses, and their social contribution to specific areas.
- Decentralized Autonomous Company (DAC) — An individual-centric, decentralized framework to support and facilitate every person’s collaborations in the Web3 world, which will be on-chain, Reputation Power based, and open for community members to co-build and co-govern.
With the optimization of network and infrastructure components, new product launches and mass adoption will be the key and focus for the 2nd half of 2022.
To start things off right, we will highlight the fundamentals of the organization’s structural evolution.
Decentralization and the Evolution of the Governance Model
Decentralization has always been a core focus of the Foundation, but we keep looking into what kind of decentralization we hope to achieve, or to what extent can decentralization reach? We have witnessed various use cases and practices in different projects.
Most projects will create a DAO, manage funds via multisig wallets and make decisions via DAO member voting. Community members submit proposals and initiate voting to influence the decision making process. Typically, these are the two most popular scenarios:
- The project team opens part of the decision making to the community. However, people have to “bribe” whales in order to pass proposals, and small token holders don’t actually have any say regarding the decision making process. In this way, this is still centralization.
- Or a community completely owns the project, but most community members are only token holders not putting much skin into the project. Although it looks like everyone can participate in the project operations and governance, there is a lack of intrinsic care. Either the project’s efficiency is greatly compromised, or it loses direction as most community members only care about short-term returns. Some projects leverage delegation as a way to solve this issue, but there are no methods to define the criteria of a qualified delegate. Community members are hesitant to delegate their voting power to someone they don’t know or someone without a history of project contribution.
Despite recent progress in Web3 governance, our current models still limit our potential. How do we develop the tools for individuals to participate in an impactful,representative, and accessible community?
As an experiment to explore more possibilities, the MetisDAO Foundation will employ two structures for governance: Commons and Eco Nodes.
Commons
Common members can make proposals. Anyone in the community can create a DAC and become a Common by staking Metis tokens and accumulating veMetis for future decision making power. You can invite other people to join your Common which increases voting power. You also have the freedom to choose which Common to join depending on your contribution interests, and you can quit if you are not satisfied with a Common’s decision. Common members who choose to quit lose their associated veMetis.
With this approach, every single person can exert their influence or have the freedom to choose which Common to support, which also provides a way for small token holders to gain leverage against whales.
Eco Nodes
Eco Nodes will be the 2nd structure, and the voting power will be decided by Reputation Power badges.
Commons can grow into Eco Nodes if they contribute to the growth of the Metis ecosystem. There will be a short list explaining the contributions, such as increasing TVL, generating transactions, introducing business leads, helping with tech development, marketing, and more. These contributions will be recognized and demonstrated by various Reputation Power badges. When the Eco Nodes make decisions, the Reputation Power represented by these badges will be calculated in the voting system.
Procedure
The procedure for these governance structures is as follows:
- Common members can propose MIPs (Metis Improvement Proposals)
- MIP passes the voting threshold
- Eco Nodes cast their votes for final decisions
Starting from Q3, the Foundation will start to experiment with this governance structure, and we are planning a 12 month transition period to full implementation.
In Q3, a small number of whitelisted Eco Nodes will kick off the experiment with limited MIP execution. The whitelist will open again in Q4 for more participants, and the categories of MIPs involved will expand.
The Eco Nodes included in the whitelist for Q3 include:
- Smart Layer 2
- Metis Web3 Identity: Reputation Power for Web2 and Web3 users
The Eco Nodes included in the whitelist for Q4 include but are not limited to:
- DEI (DAC Economy Initiative): build the DAC infrastructure to support the sustainability of the Web3 economy
- Metis Studio: incubator for Web3 applications
- Genesi DAC: the onchain investment DAC to provide funding for eligible teams within the Metis ecosystem
More detailed arrangements and documents will be released. Any Commons with a specialty in marketing, business development, liquidity provision, consulting, or more can start to contribute and accumulate the related RP badges now.
Technology Advancements
The MetisDAO Foundation is leveraging the most advanced technology to innovate and be user friendly. The recent integration of distributed storage with MemoLabs is one example of our commitment to accelerating the development of Layer 2 technology and bringing mass adoption to Web3.
A Fully Decentralized Layer 2
In the Layer 2 infrastructure, the Metis Layer 2 team is solving one of the most challenging parts in the traditional Optimistic Rollup technology, which is heavily reliant on one Sequencer to process all transactions. This design is very centralized and susceptible to a single point of failure. People also have to trust the team won’t behave maliciously.
The Metis Layer 2 team will introduce a set of mechanisms in Q3 to implement the decentralization outlined in our technical whitepaper, which includes Verifier Staking, our Peer Network opening to the public, and the launch of the Sequencer Pool.
The Metis Sequencer Pool will open for community participation. The smart contract can choose which member can be the next Sequencer, ensuring that Sequencer positions rotate efficiently instead of remaining with just one person. The Metis Layer 2 team will release the cloud deployment code for both the main and peer nodes, enabling everyone to run a Metis node with high security and efficiency.
In the meantime, the Metis Layer 2 team will keep developing our Smart L2 and adopting top notch solutions (distributed storage, ZK rollups, etc.) to make the technology more robust, secure, cheap, scalable and eco-friendly.
Also in Q3, the Metis Layer 2 team will integrate the BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) aggregator, which is a smart contract wallet that uses BLS signatures and aggregated transactions to reduce gas costs.
The team is also continuously working on the on-chain fraud proof part of the rollup design, which is planned to be released in Q4 of 2022.
Polis, the Gateway to Connect Web2 with Web3
The mission of Polis, our middleware, is to empower Web2 businesses to integrate Web3 tools easily and seamlessly.
In Q3, the Polis team will expand and provide fundamental support for the Reputation Power system, which will enable projects and developers to deploy RP smart contracts and issue RP Badges. Polis will also integrate with the BLS wallet to give users more functionality, like the ability to combine several operations in one transaction, at no cost.
Also in Q3, Polis will integrate with Memolabs’ decentralized storage solution, which allows NFTs to store data by paying native tokens on Metis.
In Q4, as part of the efforts to facilitate the no-code deployment for Web2 developers, the Polis team will provide smart contract templates and API support. Additional login integration and expansion to multiple networks are also planned.
Incubating Web3
Web3 is human-centric. No matter how Web3 evolves, a trustless economy needs methods to establish recognized contributions. To serve the goal of creating the backbone for a prosperous Web3 economy, the MetisDAO Foundation is incubating two major Web3 products, the Reputation Power system and our DAC framework. Reputation Power allows individuals to collaborate and build credibility based on shared goals and community values. The DAC framework expands the ability of Web2 organizations to conduct business in the spirit of Web3.
Reputation Power, Decentralized Web3 Credentials
The Reputation Power (RP) system that the MetisDAO Foundation is incubating enables social traceability in Web3, which provides rich context to each member’s social provenance. Through RP, everyone can get a glimpse of each member’s level of engagement in the multichain ecosystem and understand their social contribution to specific areas.
- Credentials in Web3: Each member will start the Reputation Power journey by minting unique Social NFT Badges, which will serve as the medium to store all the member’s interactions in the multichain ecosystem
- Achievement & Engagement rewards: All DApps can design and release NFT Badges. Each NFT badge can symbolize an achievement or acknowledgement of a member’s engagement. All members will need to meet the criteria set by each DApp to be eligible to claim an NFT badge.
- Levels of Trustworthiness: Members can start to accumulate Reputation Power, which will be recorded in the Social NFT. This number can serve as a way to recognize the member’s contribution, community rapport, and engagement level in the ecosystem.
Through Reputation Power, the MetisDAO Foundation provides the value proposition of Soulbound Tokens as Vitalik described in his paper, “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul.” RP is implemented as a set of three concrete products, including:
- Matrix: the user interface to mint one’s own Social NFT and showcase social engagement and capabilities
- Matrix Station: the frontend for DApps to distribute NFT badges to different users through their unique strategies
- Polis: the backend for DApp developers to deploy NFT badge smart contracts and issue NFT badges
In July, the Beta version of Reputation Power will launch for small scope testing. Invited DApp devs can deploy NFT badges to the following chains: Ethereum, Andromeda, Stardust, Rinkeby, and design multiple levels of DApp NFT Badges. Whitelisted users can mint their Social NFT and check their personal profile on Matrix. In Q3, the Metis RP team will launch the MVP version of the RP.
In Q4, the Metis RP team will consider multichain deployment and encourage developers to build social applications based on the RP metadata, also the Metis RP team will expand into more social elements, including decentralized identities in different ecosystems. We will continue to refine the algorithm which determines one’s Reputation Power.
DAC v2.0: an Open, Decentralized and Onchain Collaboration Framework for Everyone
DAC v2.0 will evolve as the Portal for decentralized collaboration tools and new Reputation Power based mechanisms.
In July, the Metis DAC team will launch a beta version of Portal v2.0 with a new user interface to create a DAC, stake, manage memberships and treasury, endorse Reputation Power badges, accumulate veMetis (voting power) and conduct voting. And the MVP version will be released in August.
The new Portal interface is an open framework which enables 3rd party developers to launch their applications for DAC infrastructure in Q3. Applications under development by 3rd party developers include: Bounty and Bounty Market, Task Board, Communications, NFT minting, and several more. Reputation Power will be deeply embedded in the collaboration process, especially in scenarios of establishing working relationships, performance review, and arbitration.
With the open standards, documents, and APIs available, along with marketing and incentive programs, the DAC team will release the DAC MApp Store in Q4. The MApp Store is a hub for Metis Applications, similar to an app store on a smartphone. Community developers will submit applications and workflow templates and earn revenue based on their usage or subscription base. Creators, thinkers, entrepreneurs and builders will have unbridled potential to thrive in a synergistic environment.
Moving Towards Mass Adoption
With the enhancement of the Metis Layer 2 infrastructure, including Documentation, Faucet, Explorer, Oracles (Chainlink, DIA, Witnet, API3), Random Number Generators (API3, Witnet) and many more, the MetisDAO Foundation is building the best Layer 2 for DApps, businesses and new ideas to launch and run on Andromeda.
Although the market is going bearish, may the builders never stop! To better support innovative builders, onboarding large and established projects, and build a prosperous ecosystem, the Foundation will continue to provide ecosystem development programs with the following focuses during the 2nd half of 2022.
Builder Mining
The Builder Mining program is dedicated to encourage long term builders in the Metis ecosystem by rewarding these builders for their contributions. Based on the feedback from the community and developers, the Builder Mining program will evolve to include more elements in the reward system, including TVL, users, marketing exposure, and more. Dedicated Builder Mining rewards have been reserved and transferred to Andromeda to be distributed based on new criteria down the road.
Web3 Grants and Genesi DAC
The development of a real Web3 application is still quite difficult. We believe it’s not a simple migration of Web2 applications onto the blockchain and issuing tokens. The Foundation views Web3 as a synergistic economy, instead of a bunch of unrelated applications. Web3 should be decentralized, individual-centric, Reputation Power based, with an embedded and sustainable economic model.
To continue to build a robust ecosystem, the Foundation will launch several new grants programs in Q3 for Gaming, Metaverse, Defi, Infrastructure, and Innovative Collaboration within our ecosystem.
Genesi DAC, as the core booster for Metis ecosystem development, will be more closely involved with these innovative projects and provide funding, network, and industry resource support.
Community Ecosystem Governance (CEG)
The CEG program is an important component of the Metis decentralization structure, which empowers the community to make decisions regarding onboarding new projects. For projects new to the Metis ecosystem, this is a great way for them to gain exposure to the Metis community members, educate and interact with them through project launches. During the past few weeks, 15 projects have passed the CEG process and became official Community Verified Projects (CVP).
In Q3, the CEG program will continue to evolve to include more benefits for projects who finish the process, such as dedicated marketing support (Twitter Content, Twitter Spaces, AMAs, Medium articles, etc.), bonus builder mining rewards, and more.
The CEG program participants (both the projects and community members) will also receive different Reputation Power Badges.
Evolution of Eco Nodes
As stated in the governance structure, Eco Nodes will play an integral role in the Metis ecosystem development process. The MetisDAO Foundation will coordinate the initiative and collaborations, and provide support through funding and incubation for these Eco Nodes. Eco Nodes will operate independently and collaboratively to encourage community engagement and ownership of the ecosystem. The following Eco Nodes will be our first iteration, with more to come:
- Metis Web3 Identity
- DEI (DAC Economy Initiative)
- Metis Studio
- Marketing specific Eco Nodes
- Liquidity Provision specific Eco Nodes
With clarity of purpose and action, we are well on our way to building the future of Web3. Thank you for your continued support. The path of sovereignty is one we must walk together.
