Country (ConstitutionDAO), State (WyomingDAO), City (NYCCoin), & Polkadot Parachains offer Economic Freedom from Gas Fees. Plus, Nvidia's Practical Vision of the Metaverse
Bits of Signum | 11.19.21
We the People of the United States
A steady drum beat of excitement among pretty much anyone touching emerging technologies like crypto and gaming grew to a 17,000 person collective called ConstitutionDAO. The idea was that an open, decentralized collective would own and share a real copy of the US Constitution with a symbolic vision of sharing it with all Americans. Even at our Esports awards investor event yesterday in Dallas, it was an exciting topic of discussion - people who had not even been involved in crypto in the past were genuinely excited. The DAO says that they were the first DAO Sotheby’s has ever worked with.
Alas, one billionaire, Ken Griffin, has paid $43 million and won.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this moment in crypto history will be remembered for bringing even more millennials, Gen-Z, artists, gamers and just average Americans into the asset class.
I was especially proud of my son, who bid with this dedication to his grandfather, a second generation Italian, who was known for his strongly patriotic belief that the United States offered equal opportunity for all to build wealth in this great country.
This is the zeitgeist - if you need a teach in on why GameStop happened, here it is.
Polkadot Parachains Exhibit A: Acala
Thursday was a monumental day for the Polkadot ecosystem: Acala officially secured the first parachain slot on Polkadot, and news outlet Coindesk interviewed Gavin Wood, Polkadot Co-Founder, Co-Founder / CTO of Ethereum and creator of Solidity coding language. In the interview, Wood highlights Polkadot’s capacity to “herald a newfound freedom from the economic constraints of Ethereum smart contracts.” Wood is pointing to the reliance on a single currency to process transactions on the network. Imagine if every time you did a Google search you had to pay Google a tenth of a cent for electricity. In the Polkadot ecosystem, developers can build customized blockchains with their own rules that still benefit from Polkadot’s shared interoperability, security, and governance.
Polkadot parachain auctions kicked off on November 11, 2021 after the completion of a full external audit of Polkadot and the deployment of several functional parachains on Kusama. Acala is a DeFi hub for Polkadot, founded to bring cross-chain decentralized finance to the Polkadot ecosystem, and is already deploying its application to help drive efficiencies for its partners. For instance, Current, a modern-banking application, is leveraging Acala to combine both traditional and decentralized financial within its banking product. Additionally, Project Venkman, an e-commerce engagement solutions provider, and Acala has partnered to provide businesses with branded community crypto tokens and treasury management tools to deliver users tokenized reward points for their purchases. Acala shares Polkadot’s security, governance, and consensus capabilities.
Acala’s deployment as the first parachain on Polkadot kicks off the final phase of the platform’s rollout. Polkadot projects competing for parachains can elect to bid on a slot with up to 96 week lease. At the end of the lease term, all of the crowdfunded DOT is returned to participants. According to Parallel Finance, as of today, more than 85M DOT have been contributed by over 105,000 users. Moonbeam, Astar, and Clover currently lead the next auction. All teams that secure parachain slots are scheduled to officially launch on the network at the same time in mid-December.
Wyoming DAOs
This week SGC attended Understanding Wyoming DAOs, a call hosted by author Jamiel Shiekh and Wyoming lawyer Bob Cornish, an extremely helpful teach in on the nuances of Wyoming’s DAO bill and the first form of legalized DAOs.
On July 7th, Wyoming passed a bill making DAOs legally recognizable in the state, providing some of the first regulatory framework on what these smart-contract based communities can and can not do. DAO stands for “decentralized autonomous organization,” and refers to a group of people from all around the world who make decisions about a common goal without a central entity, encoding their rules and decision history transparently on the blockchain.
According to the panel, Wyoming bill allows a DAO to be formed as an LLC, giving them the same rights that a Wyoming LLC has, such as owning physical assets and and establishing it as for-profit or non-profit. Wyoming DAOs also allow U.S. citizens the ability to vote on an organization’s actions without holding shares, something previously impossible in the United States.
Like an LLC, a DAO needs to have a managing member. The other members may remain anonymous, but most conduct KYC AML checks on all members. Additionally, the entity must include “DAO” in the name, and the type of governance, whether it is through a token (algorithmic) or individual membership, must be specified at the time of creation. Some believe that this centralization around managing members defeats the purpose of a DAO, but we would argue that this action appears to be a regulatory compliant step forward.
This bill is the first regulation that we have seen on how DAOs can operate relative to other individuals, companies, and governments. Generally, we hear the term DAO thrown around more loosely, with many serving the purpose of decentralized venture capital - somewhat like an investment club (see above ConstitutionDAO).
Wyoming is exploring new ways DAOs can connect people. CityDAO, is a legal LLC in Wyoming that formed as an experiment on DAO-owned physical assets. The DAO has purchased 40 acres near Cody, Wyoming for around $100,000, using initial funds raised from the first tiers of Citizen NFTs. The DAO reportedly has over 1800 ETH in its treasury, equivalent to roughly $7.3M. Citizens may vote on what to do with the land, while not having a legal claim to it. The land is legally owned by the DAO’s 8 multisig owners.
NYCityCoin
New York Mayor-Elect, Eric Adams, is supporting the launch of NYCCoin, a STX based token similar to MiamiCoin, which has reportedly grossed $21M in revenue for the city of Miami. Further backing up the growth of Web3 in New York City, which previously enforced restrictions on crypto trading, Adams is reportedly taking his first three paychecks entirely in Bitcoin. After NYC, City Coins is reportedly planning to launch in Austin, Texas. Vocal leaders like Eric Adams and Francis Suarez continue to advocate for Web3, and although Miami has a head start on being an innovation hub, New York is pushing for the ecosystem to grow.
Nvidia’s Practical Vision of the Metaverse
The COVID pandemic accelerated adoption of the metaverse by forcing us to work and communicate digitally from our homes. We are frequently asked for examples of Metaverse apps, and as boring and practical as it sounds, we usually say, We were Zoomed into the Metaverse!
Building on this idea of a practical metaverse, Mytaverse is a social platform aiming to be the center of the metaverse for business professionals, improving on Zoom by giving users avatars with their projected faces, as well as 25 environments to meet in. Their platform will be accessible in-browser, and powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. So far, the platform has been tested by companies like PepsiCo, Dassault Corporation, and Zaha Hadid Architects. While it may not seem as interactive as the metaverse we have seen in movies, bringing 2D communication to 3D is the next logical step to a practical metaverse.
Photo from the Asian Sky Media virtual conference
Even more importantly, NVIDIA is pushing the practical metaverse with Omniverse!
Omniverse is a framework in which people virtually collaborate in a shared space using XR (Extended Reality) to do anything from having a meeting, to digitally recreating factories, to improve assembly efficiencies. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in the GTC 2021 Keynote speech that the Omniverse aims not to be a game engine, but a planetary one.
Photo from BMW’s virtual factory experiment in NVIDIA’s Omniverse
While on the subject of realistic digital worlds, Meta Platforms (Facebook) showed off their haptic glove prototypes. These gloves are reminicint of hardware like the Oculus headset. Through a series of air bubbles on the surface of the glove, mimics real-world sensations like shaking someone's hand or holding a pen. We see Nvidia’s practical vision of the world as more likely than an idea that we will all be covered in gadgets.
Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!