Context

In this bulleted overview, we will tell a story that hits upon these three key points:

1. Moloch is a significant archetypal image for the web3 + metacrisis community to align around, "our common enemy."
2. The Moloch story spawned the Moloch DAO contracts and the DAOhaus community dedicated to iterating upon them.
3. The Metacrisis community should coordinate using a Moloch v3 DAO to empower our collective struggle against multipolar traps and human coordination failures.

The Myth of Moloch

• Moloch is a Canaanite/Carthaginian lesser god to whom children would be sacrificed to secure success in times of war, an allegory for destroying the future in exchange for short-term gains.
• An early cultural reference is to Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl.
• The poem was elaborated into a game theoretical and technological thought experiment by Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog: Meditations on Moloch
• The blog was adopted and adapted to the web3/DAO ecosystem by Owocki and Soleimani in an early Bankless conversation.
• Bankless continues to iterate upon the meme in recent conversations as a foundational alignment target for the whole ecosystem.
• Even Daniel Schmachtenberger has taken up this meme.

The Evolution of Moloch DAOs

• MolochDAO was launched at ETH Denver 2019 to provide a minimally viable DAO structure as a direct response to the tragedy of the commons.
• At the same time, DAOhaus launched Pokemol to provide a user friendly interface for summoning Moloch DAOs.
• DAOhaus v2 launched the following year, expanding upon the UI and contracts to provide increased composability to DAO architecture.
• DAOhaus, as part of Moloch Mystics (a group composed of gigabrains from across the Moloch ecosystem), launched Moloch v3 (code name Baal) at MCON 2021.
• v3 greatly expanded the composability of the architecture to allow for numerous new integrations.
• DAOhaus + Moloch v3 have since reoriented towards a developer facing open source SDK while continuing to iterate upon our own internal metagovernance modalities to solidify these important public goods for the Ethereum ecosystem..

Moloch v3 as the One True Choice for Metacrisis Coordination

• Spencer Graham has produced some excellent work charting the evolution of DAOhaus dreaming deeply and broadly upon the potential of Moloch DAO communities.
• Moloch DAOs are capture resistant. An Anticapture Framework is essential for insuring efficient, action-oriented decision making, equally important for socialist organizations to consider alongside more lunarpunk communities.
• Because digital democracy/governance is about action, more than mere decision making.
• Moloch DAOs have numerous significant properties that attend to the horizontals of the Metacrisis conversation.
• These properties proliferate into numerous governance patterns for any/all needs of a community.
• Moloch/DAOhaus v3 have more composable features than ever, built on top of the same battle tested contracts, by the same community as day one.
• DAOhaus has used the Moloch framework for our own community sourced fundraising and has introduced new community-centric crowdfunding primitives to empower communities and projects to bootstrap themselves.
• Because what we believe informs how and what we build. This is how the metacrisis will be solved, by focusing on going far together.

Moloch v3 as the Solution to Metacrisis Horizontals

As outlined on the Metacrisis forums, the horizontals/generator functions include:

• multipolar traps
• coordination failure
• plausible deniability
• perverse incentives
• rivalrous dynamics
• information asymmetry
• moral hazard
• exponential growth and embedded growth obligations

Allow us to attempt to briefly address these points from the perspective of DAOhaus' ongoing experimentation with Moloch DAOs.

Multipolar Traps / Perverse Incentives

• Competition itself is not the problem. We need to design governance architectures that invert the multipolar trap "race to the bottom" into a commons preserving "race to the top." DAOs facilitate potent collective sense making that allows us to "raise the sanity waterline" for the whole ecosystem, to leverage game theoretical dynamics that reorient our collective seeking towards alternative incentives.

Coordination Failure / Rivalrous Dynamics

• We believe in the importance of Practical Pluralism and pluriversal designs. These are the strategies, integrated into a Moloch DAO framework, that will unlock our capacity to transcend coordination failures. We are "programming our values into our money" and DAOs supported collective economic value alignment. How do the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell the world about what we are doing align to create a coherent representation of the real and powerful value that we’re generating?

Plausible Deniability

• DAOs are the key to unlocking a new era of effective digital democracy. Blockchain ensures the integrity and consistency of our governance. Migrating away from noisy cross talk in incoherent forums towards clear on-chain ratification will empower autonomous individual actions and clear collective momentum.

Information Asymmetry / Moral Hazards

• This is a serious problem not unique to the DAO space, but more of a hyperobject that collective sense making tools like DAOs are best equipped to approach. The web3/DAO space is not free of the same moral hazards that plague the rest of our civilization, although we do believe they are the best approach towards solving these difficult socio-cultural problems.

Exponential Growth

• “We are carefully and deliberately designing our transitions.”

Moloch v3 Project Scope for MetacrisisDAO

TL;DR

We think of DAOs as an ongoing open source experiment in collective sense making. To this end, they provide an excellent entry point for onboarding folx into the complexities and complications of coordinating in the web3 ecosystem (and beyond). When met with a variety of options for how to integrate web3 theories and tools into the metacrisis conversation, DAOs provide an important first step toward lucid and pragmatic on-chain digital democracy at the early phases of community formation. We propose a minimally viable DAO structure for the Metacrisis (would-be) DAO to instigate and accelerate the collective decision making abilities of the community.

Problem(s)

• Metacrisis "DAO" has no way of ratifying its core mission.
• It is not clear who is and is not included within the metacrisis conversation, or how membership to this group is allocated.
• There's no funding for compensating contributions from the community. Participation is voluntary and the community suffers from a lack of positive incentive for participation.
• There is no clear way for the exclusive conversation happening amongst a few to interface with the wider, distributed decision making of the wider population of curious would-be participants.
• There is no mechanism for tracking the history of contributions or incentivizing sustainable operations. Contributions remain ephemeral and ultimately invisible.

Hypothesis

• Ratifying vision and values with on-chain mechanics will strengthen community alignment.
• Providing a token allocated membership will clarify actionable proposals from general community noise.
• Forming a DAO around a treasury that emerges from member tribute, towards the allocation of collective capital and having "skin in the game", will encourage increased and sustained attention and participation.
• DAO voting mechanics allow for accepting funding from the widest range of sources will inject diversity and ensure decentralized governance of community priorities.
• Creating a clear correlation between the soft (off-chain) ideation emerging in the forums with the hard (on-chain) decision making ratified by the DAO will be essential to justifying the actionable steps the community hopes to take.
• Implementing a mechanism for tracking contributions, rendering actions visible, accumulating reputation, allocating knowledge capital as a collective memory, and forming clear community identities will facilitate more effective sense making and variegated decision making.

Solution

• Provide an on-chain constitution ratification mechanism.
• Provide member shares and loot shares that differentiate voting rights from sentiment signaling rights within the community, clarifying who can make decisions and generally illustrating a process for how decisions are made.
• Propose a framework for how member shares and loot shares might be allocated, based on participation, reputation, and other on-chain credentials.
• Bootstrap the MetacrisisDAO community with a Yeeter campaign as a conjoined effort of crowd funding, community self-funding, and VC incubation.
• Introduce signal/sentiment voting via a simple token curated registry implementation to invite the large community to steer the high level objectives of the project and allow the permissioned share-holding members to execute proposals that are rooted within pre-decided priorities.
• Implement a minimally viable reputation system: a combination of Gitcoin Passport for sybil resistance, Govrn or Coordinape for contribution tracking, and Hats Protocol for role assignment and permissioned access. This will serve as a bridge between the soft and hard layers of the DAO.

Goals

• Guide the community through foundational decisions for the DAO design, including any custom features they might need.
• Onboard everyone from the MetacrisisDAO forum.
• Deliver a custom Moloch v3 DAO to support this preliminary functionality, including:
  • User friendly onboarding flow.
  • A clear proposal process that unlocks action from the community
  • A safe/treasury configuration that allows for decentralized decision making on funding priorities.
• Provide educational support to empower users to take advantage of the DAO functionality.

Build Phases

Phase 1: Discovery - 1 Month

• Probe and explicate the specific frictions within the Metacrisis community that inhibit action.
• Map user flows to optimize for decision making and maximizing transparency among community members.

Phase 2: Design - 1 Month

• Propose strategies to the Metacrisis community to vote on, including:
  • Custom app development
  • Custom onboarding flows that accommodate for web3 noobs
  • Custom proposal types
  • Custom UI at an appropriate fidelity to minimize cerebral overload and maximize for transparency/visibility
• Provide justification for these designs based on evidence sourced from phase 1.
• Generate a prioritized backlog of tasks to execute the build.

Phase 3: Production - 2 Months

• Execute the phase 2 backlog.
• Agile and iterative UX/UI design and testing.

Phase 4: Onboarding & Education - 2 Months

• Facilitate onboarding of community members, new and old.
• UX testing to fine tune details.
• QA and bug squishing.
• Documentation of the entire architecture

Work Ethos

• We believe in the importance of working in public. HackMD, Miro, Figma, Github, and other tools will be publicly accessible.
• We intend the DAO build to become an open source public good DAO template for other communities to adapt to their own needs after we ship the finished product for the Metacrisis community.
• We encourage community scrutiny, critique, audit, and feedback of our designs. This will be necessary for the success of the project.

Funding Goal

• $60k
  • Discovery sprint
  • Community R&D
  • DAO design
  • DAO build
  • Features and integrations
  • UX, testing, iteration, documentation