Demos Motivation

The Demos structure is built upon an understanding that certain responsibilities must be maintained by a centralized team, while others can and should be delegated to token holders directly.

Much of this philosophy is derived from lessons learned at Governor DAO, the predecessor to Demos and the sister project responsible for the first iteration of OnlyMeID. Governor DAO was incepted as a fair launch, community-driven “unrug” of a previous project, CoinBreeder DAO, which exit scammed in Q3 2020.

Both Governor DAO and CoinBreeder DAO, at a very high level, are built around the ethos of “helping others do decentralization better”. This abstract, wide-sweeping mission spans the ability to help others launch DAOs, tokens, and NFTs - through a combination of proprietary products and services, community evangelism, and consulting-style professional support.

While Governor DAO carries many exciting and noteworthy achievements, its limited resourcing as a fair launch DAO and form-less structure also translated to many shortfalls, most of which can be summarized as an inability of community members to perform meaningful work, properly incentivized, independent from a core team.

This imperfect relationship can be exemplified: Governor DAO offers services like token launch support (full-stack engineering, economics, DAO setup, etc.) Projects must be vetted by the service provider to ensure fair play and the potential for a working relationship. Providers and clients must negotiate on terms like pricing, timelines, concrete deliverables, etc. In pursuit of supporting the mission, community members independently engage potential clients without the expertise to vet the client or the information and skills to negotiate the service package. The team is required to backtrack to the top after a handoff from a community member and feels obligated to pursue a tangible outcome due to allegiance to the community. This process is even more cumbersome than if the team had performed every step of the equation themselves.

In practice, this translated to an increasing burden of unprioritized, non-scaling, undelegated-able TODOs on a team with decreasing size and dwindling resources. As markets deteriorated, even the successful engagements surrounding consultation could not fund the project at a great enough capacity to compensate a team and incentivized token holders.

Per the guiding points above, Demos intends to set expectations from inception so that the community and team understand exactly how the two entities work alongside one another and that the community members are properly directed + incentivized for the work they can best benefit the project by performing.

The findings with Governor DAO are consistent with DAOs as a whole. Demos intends to unlock a system that works efficiently and equitably - and in a manner that exemplifies the hypothesized good qualities unlocked in a tokenized model.

Outside the DAO space, Demos utilizes a token ownership model to improve upon the shortcomings seen through the widely popular Curve “vote escrow” model, plus older systems like Sushi’s “xSUSHI” vault model.