DeVox is Decentralized Lobbying

A Lobby3 Unincorporated Nonprofit Association (UNA) product, DeVox is flipping the Citizens United decision on its head and giving people the power to organize political and financial support around the issues they care about most. DeVox provides US citizens the ability to easily start campaigns around those issues, then collect signatures and donations, all while ensuring transparency and donor governance over how donations are spent. The first two DeVox Campaigns will be built around petitions against DARA IL HB3479 and The Restrict Act S.686. Lobby3 UNA is organized to bring the innovation of web3 technology into the realms of civics, lobbying and advocacy.

While DeVox would facilitate social movements of all kinds, political or otherwise, one of its key potential use cases is as a platform for grassroots support of political candidates. In light of this, Lobby3 aims to officially launch DeVox in time for the 2024 presidential election cycle.

As a symphony of smart contracts, legal entities, and Lobby3 professionals, DeVox is purpose-built to give political candidates a new path to positive earned media coverage and a direct line to the voice of the people, which they can use however they prefer. When candidates publicly support donor petitions, donors can choose whether or not to advocate for candidates, creating a temporary DAO focused on socializing and supporting that candidate’s public work.

Each DeVox campaign will mark the genesis of a new community, enabling people who are passionately aligned on issues to find each other, and providing access to educational resources to support their advocacy efforts.

In a perfect future, politicians would say what they mean, and mean what they say. DeVox allows us to build that future. For a visual representation of DeVox, please see our vision deck.

Why DeVox? Why Now?

People are tired of pouring their time and hard-earned money into empty promises, where answers are vague and accountability is non-existent.

DeVox creates a media-cycle conversation between candidates and constituents, and will help produce real policy outcomes by rewarding the policymakers and people who work behind the scenes to elevate good policy proposals with verifiable community support. Lawmakers who take action to support the values of web3 to decentralize economic opportunity, eliminate barriers to financial inclusion, combat poverty, and advance the human condition.

DeVox also incidentally creates a web3 onramp for web2 users by utilizing account abstraction for self-custodial wallets, and by limiting voting and governance capabilities to web3 users, thereby incentivizing web3 education. The goal here is to remove complexity for web2 users, but to nonetheless unify them with web3 users toward shared beliefs and causes.

Prior Gitcoin Funding

Of the DAI which Lobby3 received from previous Gitcoin matching rounds (GR14 and GR15), we have made the following disbursements (more details available here).

• Set aside 7,500 for legal counsel for entity formation (2,500 paid so far).
• Donated 5,000 for the Smart Contract Research Forum to run their public goods student workshop series, which is presently ongoing.
• Set aside 15,000 to support and guide Holonym’s development of Holo, a zero-knowledge identity verification tool which is foundational to DeVox (11,250 paid so far).
• Donated 5,000 to the Climate Solutions cause round in GR15.

Our initial funding for the DeVox MVP came from the remaining ETH we had from token mint. This ETH constitutes the Lobby3 Legacy Community Fund, whereas the DAI from prior Gitcoin rounds constitutes the Lobby3 Legacy Executive Fund. Both funds are held in the same multisig, and are referred to as “Legacy” because they existed prior to the entity formation process we are now finalizing. Any donations received from this Gitcoin round would go toward the new Executive Fund for the Lobby3 UNA.

Lobby3’s holistic on-chain presence can be tracked here.

How Lobby3 Plans to Maximize Your Contribution

Lobby3 has started developing DeVox smart contracts, legal structure, and operational policies using money raised from NFT sales and a previous gitcoin round, but we know we don’t have enough to reach our 2024 election cycle goal. Our general expenses include:

• Engineering: Lobby3 has allocated 30 ETH (~$55k) to UX/UI and Smart Contract development. Estimates project we will need 120 ETH (~$200k) to deploy the DeVox MVP.
• Contract Audits: Audits can range from $20k to $100k, depending on what auditors are looking for and how many edge cases are covered. Exact costs will be evaluated as smart contracts are written and audit proposals are evaluated against those smart contracts.
• Legal Counsel and Litigation Costs: Campaign finance is convoluted, giving those in-the-know the ability to halt our operations if we’re not in perfect compliance. Further, if DeVox is successful, Lobby3 will need to be financially equipped to defend itself from parties who oppose this democratic vision. Maintaining compliant operations throughout development as well as ensuring legal protection in the event of litigation is crucial to the project’s success.
• Advocacy/Lobbying and Education Support: Until DeVox and decentralized civics achieve house-hold recognition, we will need to front-run campaigns by covering travel expenses for advocates/lobbyists educating candidates, lawmakers, party leaders, etc.
• Full-Time Staff Base Salaries: The three Lobby3 UNA Directors are each currently working full time, and have received 9 ETH last quarter in retroactive compensation, but are willing to forgo future salary to continue supporting DeVox, if necessary.
• Tools and Subscriptions: Google Apps for business, DocuSign, contract deployments, domains, discord server maintenance, bot development, social media, and other
• Branding and Marketing: To reach web2 users DeVox needs a trademark brand people can rely on. Lobby3 will buy ads, support distribution channels, support events, etc., to educate the general public and to counter anticipated misinformation propagated by boomer media. We will also conduct further market research to better understand the key users of DeVox.
• Miscellaneous: Lobby3 will need miscellaneous work, from bounties, to artwork, to tech support, to writing, to organizing.

DeVox vs The Status Quo

No more pouring money into black holes with empty promises. DeVox will meaningfully impact the 2024 election by giving candidates a new source of funding and a direct line to the voice of the people they were elected to represent.

DeVox users will be able to write, sign, and donate to campaigns, which can be collectively mobilized as on-chain advocacy campaigns. Donors to these campaigns will have governance rights over that donation pool, and will be able to decide, within the constraints of legality and compliance, how their donations should be deployed. Those who wish to donate to political, societal, or environmental causes, but are disillusioned with the lack of visibility into and control over how their donations are used, will find DeVox a refreshing approach to this problem.

Candidates will no longer have to rely on polling to gauge public opinion. With DeVox candidates know if their constituents are with them on the issues they care about most because:

1. constituents are confirmed as US Citizens residing in a candidate’s jurisdiction using zero-knowledge identification (zkID),
2. constituents will have made known their position through the donation of their hard earned money/speech,
3. constituents will have actively governed the allocation of any funds.

For a candidate, knowing their voting constituents have strong opinions about a topic is more likely than current polling to affect their actions.

Lobby3 Background

Lobby3 was founded in the first quarter of 2022, and championed by Andrew Yang as an innovative experiment in web3-native advocacy. The mission was, and still is, to advocate for socially impactful applications of distributed ledger technology, and to use this technology to facilitate such advocacy - a two-fold mission which lends itself to positive feedback and dogfooding.

Being a grantee in the Crypto Advocacy cause round in GR14 and GR15, and being a donor to the Climate Solutions cause round in GR15, we at Lobby3 can appreciatively attest to the impact of this technology as applied to public goods. We are lucky to be in a position where we do not need to optimize our operations around ROI for investors, but instead can enjoy an ultimately nonprofit autonomy. Our spending history of the DAI from previous Gitcoin rounds can be seen in this public spreadsheet.

Our experimentation with on-chain governance, through various levels of decentralization, have taught us a great deal about how we can best operate an advocacy organization on-chain. Lobby3 is in the process of establishing an Unincorporated Nonprofit Association in Wyoming, and applying for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. We believe this organizational model will enable us to balance the ethos of web3 with the compliance imperatives of advocacy regulations in the US.

While Lobby3 is a US-based organization, and while our managed instance of DeVox will be focused on the US, DeVox itself will be open-source and forkable by any other advocacy group who wishes to augment the protocol or gear it towards a different national jurisdiction or regulatory regime. Building open-source and uncensorable tools to empower communities can have a radical impact, but this impact can only be sustainable if we can minimize compliance risk by observing the relevant regulations and figuring out how to reconcile our goals with these regulations.