MeritDAOcracy

This public good project is an innovative approach to DAO governance, by making it merit based. As an alternative to whale accumulation of voting power through governance tokens, we are channeling the voting power to those DAO members who complete bounties.

The idea of MeritDAOcracy is to give DAO contributors a Soulbound badge that grants them governance points - along with their bounty payments. For an enhanced gamified experience, the user can level up by accumulating badges from across different DAOs.

First, the user connects their wallet, and optionally their Lens profile. The initial screen allows them to choose which DAO to contribute to. Once in the DAO dashboard, the user can see the available bounties and both their monetary and merit rewards. Once the task is completed and approved by the DAO, the user receives the monetary rewards alongside a badge that has governance points attached to it. Later on, in the same DAO dashboard, the user can click on the proposals tab to view the currently running community votes. When a proposal is clicked, the user will be able to see who has voted for which option and how many badges those people own. Finally, the user can proceed to vote on his preferred option.

We built MeritDAOcracy on Polygon, because of their low gas fees, and their compatibility with all the Ethereum tools and to benefit from its security. For the smart-contract development we used Hard-Hat, Piñata with IPFS, OpenZeppelin and experimented a bit with thirdweb. The front-end has been built in react and integrating ethers.js.

To build an MVP for this hack, we focused on the creation of a Badge Factory that delivers a Soulbound Token (SBT), together with the monetary reward of the bounty. Together with this, a front-end that interacts with the different bounties and proposals was made. The next step would have been to develop the merit-based governance.

To connect the wallet, we are using WalletConnect v2. We chose this provider, because its multi-chain feature allows users to benefit from MeritDAOcracy in DAOs across multiple chains, at the same time.

Once the wallet is connected, we would fetch data to show which DAOs this address is a member of. For this we would be using some of The Graph's sub-graphs: initially DAOstack’s Alchemy, Aragon Mainnet Subgraph and juicebox.

Additionally, the user can link their Lens Profile. By linking it to the profile, the users will be able to display which DAOs he belongs to, as well as display and post the badges they have won. Additionally to this, by integrating Lens with Lit Protocol, we can integrate token-gated access to DAO proposals and certain posts.

The badges would then be linked to a dynamic SBT that we would create with using Chainlink's dynamic NFTs through the Keepers. This NFT would be used for the general profile, that aggregates all the points gathered through badges across DAOs and allows for a gamified experience in which the user levels up.

The data of the badges and these other NFTs and Lens posts with attachments will be stored using IPFS.

We had a very diverse team, with different skillsets and reduced development power - we only had one dev with little Web3 experience. However, we impressed ourselves with how much we actually managed to achieve. Our dev deploying his first smartcontract was something we hoped, but had relatively low expectations for. We managed to combine different skills within the team to come up with a solid and innovative product, and develop the assets to visualise and play around with.