Lilac

Currently, decentralized governance lacks sustainable participation and is systematically undervalued, despite the importance of quality governance in ensuring the success of protocols and initiatives. Making deployments to core contracts and voting on important decisions often require a large sum of tokens, concentrating power in the hands of the few. Those who do receive governance tokens through protocol participation are not incentivized to participate in governance, making DAOs less decentralized and less efficient.

This is where Lilac comes in. DAOs are now able to incentivize an active governance community by discovering and rewarding their top contributors. Lilac leverages on-chain governance activity to provide a reputation score for members, enabling DAOs to view how engaged each of their members are. DAOs can then commit to distribute some portion of token supply to members over time, weighted by the value of the outcome of their contributions. This allows them to incentivize and reward high-quality, frequent contributions, and ensure that the most engaged contributors are the ones getting rewarded while encouraging similar activity from the rest of their members.

Our application allows DAOs to track contributions using our API endpoint that calculates reputation scores based on their on-chain deployments and executed proposals. We have also built a web app where DAOs can search for the reputation score of any of their members, and users can view their reputation score on their profile and get an overview of their activity and contributions which led to this reputation score. Currently, our reputation function assigns weights to how significant contributions are considered initially, but eventually aims to reward contributors according to generated impact over time. Upon receiving their reputation score, contributors can claim tokens proportional to their score.

We’ve also integrated with Lens Protocol to publish contributions and create a contributor profile for each member. Posting on Lens also allows the community to verify off-chain contributions such as marketing, community, or graphic design projects. Lens also opens the door for tracking group governance contributions, encouraging open collaboration. Because we understand that decisions around the relative value of different types of contributions and scores are inherently political decisions, our framework is explicitly built to be as customizable as possible, so every DAO can have an individualized solution. We calculate our reputation score based on a variety of data points, such as looking at members’ activity in on-chain votes, Github contributions, governance proposal executions, and core contract deployments. The application is also built to support bringing off-chain contributions to a user’s reputation, by having the user post about their project on Lens and allowing the community to recognize their work, while using those posts to track reputation score.

While centralization and concentration of power can be more efficient and better at achieving the goals of a company, decentralized governance is worth achieving due to the importance of serving the community you impact. A decentralized team that incentivizes solo or third-party contributions can also work on projects that the core team may not have the bandwidth to do, or engage more with a protocol’s community. Essentially, Lilac helps DAOs and protocols achieve this vision :)

Liliac consists of three different components - our frontend, our reputation function and activity API, and Lens integration.

Our frontend is built primarily from React.js. Users can view their score, as well as events affecting their score. We use WorldCoin’s identity protocol to allow users to become verified, and each user can only have one verified profile at a time. Front-end authentication integrates “Sign in with Lens”, which allows users to sign with Metamask, generating a web token that gives them permission to access certain Lens GraphQL API calls. The API calls required writing modules and mutations with the Apollo client. Lilac integrates profile creation, profile retrieval, publication search, and posting on Polygon testnet.

Our server is built primarily with Node.js and Express. We use MongoDB to store data about our users and their actions. We also use GraphQL to get on-chain data from protocols using The Graph’s API’s, interpret that into our format for storing actions, and then record it in our database. Our queries are lazy - we don’t actively listen to updates from all our users but instead only sync updates on demand. For certain protocols, we also integrate with their GitHub or their governance API’s to produce further insights into user contribution. Our server also contains configurable algorithms for calculating reputation scores, each with different weightings and considerations.

We’re super impressed with what our team built, since our working initial APIs allow us to expand and build a more complicated reputation function, as well as supporting different types of contributions with Lens. There are so many possibilities for how this can continue in the future, and we’re glad we’ve established a good base for that.