jakiro
Preface:
DAO is the focus of several Empower Labs members.In the past period, we have collected information on multiple different types of DAOs, learned their goals, types, operating models, legal structures, underlying contracts, etc., and also discovered some stories behind these DAOs.
Compared with various product features, technical details, contract code and other seemingly hard-core research topics, what interests us more is how these DAOs were formed, what evolutions have been experienced, and what made them develop common goals.What kind of soul is active on the contract code.
As the beginning of the DAO series, today we bring the story of MetaCartel to everyone.
1. Birth
On September 27, 2018, the young man Peter Pan organized a video conference, and 21 people from all over the world, including him, attended the conference.
Peter once mentioned his thoughts about Meta-Transactions on Twitter.
Surprisingly, many people are interested in this thing.So Peter chatted on Telegram for two weeks, and everyone agreed that this thing was a big deal and could discuss whether it could be done in cooperation.This meeting was their first collective meeting, and Peter named it Community Meeting No. 0.
The word Meta is not a very good translation, it usually refers to self-direction, for example, Meta Learning means learning how to learn.Many places translate it into “me”, and I don’t like this translation.
Ethereum wallet users need to transfer money in Ethereum currency as fuel fee, otherwise the transaction cannot be issued.The goal of Meta-transactions is to allow third parties to help users pay fuel fees, so that users’ transactions can be completed.Paying fuel on behalf of others is a transaction that helps users complete transactions, which is also the reason why it was named Meta-transactions.This is undoubtedly a useful feature.
During the one-hour meeting, everyone introduced themselves, discussed the technology implementation plan, and discussed making a demo application at the Ethereum Denver conference a few months later.Another girl contributed her already paid code hosting account for the group.At the end of the meeting, everyone discussed the name of the group, and Peter gave three alternatives:
FullMeta Alchemists– The English name “Fullmetal Alchemist” is taken from the famous Japanese manga “The Alchemist of Steel”.
El Cartel de las Meta– MetaCartel in Spanish.Cartel refers to a market alliance formed to operate prices. It often appears in antitrust cases, and here it is obviously a humorous expression of meme nature.
Long Range Ballistic Transactions– Long-distance ballistic trading, an unknown name.
The name is obviously not everyone’s focus. The relevant discussion lasted only 1 and a half minutes. Peter was unable to even explain the meaning of each name in detail. Everyone decided to vote for one after the meeting.
Peter put the entire video of the meeting on youtube the next day. It has been almost three years now, and the video has only been played 199 times in total.However, the dismal number of views cannot conceal the significance of this meeting.Peter then changed the Telegram group name to MetaCartel, and an organization that wrote a lot of highlights in the history of DAO development was born.
2. Growth
Peter didn’t know what kind of monster this group would become in the future, after all, it was less than a year since he entered this circle.He was in charge of training UX designers at a company at that time, and like many people, he was attracted by the 17-year bull market and entered the circle almost at the highest point of the bull market.However, compared to most people, Peter is more good at learning, thinking and expressing. Just half a year after entering as a enthusiast, he wrote the wonderful “Before the Birth of Bitcoin”, a long series of articles in his spare time.This series details the development of the asymmetric encryption field in recent decades and the magnificent crypto-punk movement, which are the inner spiritual sources and cryptography support of the Bitcoin community.(There is an incompletely translated Chinese version of this series of articles, but this version has lost a lot of interesting things in the original text. We are organizing a re-translation, hoping to bring this wonderful series of articles to everyone)
With more and more knowledge of the crypto field, Peter finally chose to leave the design industry and devote himself to this new world, and his time was almost synchronized with the founding of MetaCartel.
Just a week after Metacartel was born, Peter ran to San Francisco, when there was an Ethereum-themed hackathon.The seven members of the group were able to meet for the first time.They worked all night and completed two demonstration projects that were implemented using the Meta-Transactions principle, one of which also won second place.
October 31, Prague, the 4th Ethereum DevCon Conference.More people from the Metacartel group finally had the opportunity to get together offline.Many of them didn’t know each other, and they introduced each other several round tables to discuss relevant standards and other issues. They also successfully attracted many newcomers to join. That night, as many as 57 people gathered to have dinner.
On November 1, MetaCartel members exceeded 100.
3. Change
There are far more than one team trying to implement Meta-Transactions.In December, the TabooKey team made a breakthrough in this direction, attracting the attention of the entire Ethereum development community.At this time, MetaCartel’s own solution was not made.
In February of the following year, the Denver Ethereum Conference was another grand event for the Ethereum ecosystem.Although the market was already a deep bear at that time, the enthusiasm of developers was still high, with more than two thousand participating.There are many interesting things in this conference. The organizer developed a simple wallet system and only stablecoins that can be used on site for each participant. Whether buying water or hot dogs, it can only be completed through this wallet.Zerion presented their one-stop DeFi management platform at the conference, and Chainlink released a bounty program to create applications using their oracles.There is also a young man named Ameen who released the Moloch protocol used to create DAOs and started an organization called Moloch DAO based on the protocol.(This is another interesting story, we have written an article about it and will be published soon)
Two members from the TabooKey and Gitcoin teams jointly introduced a piece called Gas Station Network (GSN), a basically completed Meta-Transactions system.Almost all the characteristics of this thing are consistent with what Peter conceived at Conference 0, and the presentation time is the same, but the team that was created is not MetaCartel.The project was eventually funded by the Ethereum Foundation.
Afterwards, a total of 8 teams, including MetaCartel, decided to start a gas station alliance project based on the existing foundation to provide Ethereum with Meta-Transactions infrastructure.Due to the multi-team collaboration, the project was split from MetaCartel.Most of the members of the group suddenly found that they had nothing to do.
Although things were gone, the team did not disperse.
“Everyone still likes to get together, even if there is nothing else to do.” Peter recalled that time.”At this point we realized that we had an interesting culture inadvertently formed. Everyone felt the power of getting together to work together due to their shared interests.”
“Cooperate with each other, help each other and succeed” has become the core value of MetaCartel.
In the end, everyone decided to give the group a year to see if it could continue to grow and find other interesting things to do.
Well, who doesn’t want to hang out with a bunch of interesting people to make trouble?
4. Transformation
For the past 20 years, Planet C has been under totalitarian rule by two rulers of Continent A, Jeff and Wacker.However, things quickly changed, and as Santosi-led army called eternal power swept the world, most of the people were liberated.
Things calmed down for three years until one day the five independent kingdoms split from eternal power.Since then, Star C has suffered from war…
Does this sound like the beginning of a worldview made up by some poor game planning?OK, this is not the original text.This is the original text:
The crypto world has been under totalitarian rule by AWS Continental co-founders Beff Kezos and Wark Munderberg for the past 20 years.However, this situation quickly changed, and under Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous Internet army known as the “Bitcoin Power” swept the land and liberated many people from their influence.
Things calmed down for three years until one day five independent kingdoms split from the power of Bitcoin: EOS Empire, ETH Alliance, Tron Legion, SQL Continent, Dog Republic.Since then, the crypto world has been tragically damaged by war…
Isn’t it interesting?
This is actually the beginning of the Newsletter “Game of DApps” that Peter is responsible for maintaining. Starting from March 2019, he began to systematically track DApps on each main chain in a humorous way.At the same time, there is also a podcast program called Wizard of DApps, hosted by Peter and jointly launched by the MetaCartel community.In the past two years, this show has interviewed almost half of the well-known teams in the Ethereum community.
From then on, MetaCartel’s focus has transformed into new applications and UX innovations on Ethereum.Throughout February and March, they were discussing the transformation into a DApp incubator.
Peter is a good at organizing the community and he has a great interest in the progress of DAO.Remember the Moloch DAO mentioned above that was launched at the Denver Conference.It was a donor DAO, serving the construction of Ethereum 2.0 infrastructure.Peter talked several times with Moloch’s sponsor Ameen, before applying to join, but the proposal about him was quickly rejected – the first rejected proposal in Moloch DAO history.
The reason for being rejected is –poverty ……
Although there are no clear written regulations, the initial members of Moloch DAO donated 100 Ethereum.Everyone also regards this number as a default standard.Peter touched his wallet and he could only take out 10, although Ethereum was only more than one hundred dollars at that time.
I was unable to join Moloch DAO, but Ameen himself and Moloch co-sponsor James Young encouraged Peter very friendly and said that you can completely fork Moloch to set up your own DAO.James also joined MetaCartel and was willing to provide technical assistance.
Peter was moved.
Many people regard this as a key event in the establishment of DAO by MetaCartel, but I don’t think so.MetaCartel itself is a community that is very close to DAO and has corresponding values. Whether Peter is rejected by Moloch DAO or not, MetaCartel will sooner or later initiate its own DAO.
At the end of April, James Young heard that Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation would intend to donate to Moloch DAO, so he quickly reminded Peter that you need to announce the MetaCartel DAO before the news was released, otherwise everyone would think you are here to take advantage of the popularity.
On May 2, Peter published an article titled “Ethereum’s first-mover advantage is threatened.”The article proposes that the EOS community has a $1 billion fund promised by blockone (well, now we know that Peter blamed EOS wrongly), and Tron has a $100 million DApp special fund established by Brother Sun, and even Binance is building chains.In the Ethereum community, support for application layer innovation is seriously insufficient.So, let’s change this.This article was named “MetalCartel DAO Creation – Part 1” (but in the end it was only this part)
On May 8, Peter published an article on Fork MolochDAO, officially announcing that it will fork Moloch DAO to create a DAO focused on funding for application-layer innovation.Then Peter began to use his communication talent to talk wildly about his ideals with members of the Ethereum community to gain support.
On May 12, Vitalik announced a donation of 1000 ETH to Moloch DAO.
On June 5, James Young helped MetaCartel deploy DAO contracts to Ethereum.By this time they have received support from 9 teams including Matic Network, NuCypher, SpankChain, Gnosis, AdEx, The Graph, Abridged, Odyssey and more than a dozen individual contributors.
MetaCartel DAO has officially launched as the first supporter deposited Ethereum.
5.MetaMeta
MetaCartel DAO operates as an endowment fund.On the one hand, this is because the code of Moloch V1 is only supported for donations, and it is also because doing so will save a lot of legal and tax troubles, so that this DAO can be started quickly.
In early July, MetaCartel DAO held its first membership meeting.Peter updated the status of the time with everyone. The union bank had received 500 donations from Ethereum and was expected to reach 600 by the end of the month, worth about $180,000.
Their main challenges come from resource allocation and how to keep members engaged.The meeting proposed that DAO members should freely combine their interests to form working groups including design, development, market, DApp, data, community, etc. to handle different tasks in order to divide the work.The working group itself is also a highly autonomous model.
At this time, MetaCartel DAO was still an endowment fund of only more than 100,000 US dollars, with only more than 20 official members, which is undoubtedly an extremely ambitious plan.Soon they began donating to projects that were optimistic, and donating to 15 projects throughout 2019, including the now famous Zapper and DAOhaus.
The MetaCartel community is not just about Metacartel DAO.They continued on the Wizard of Dapps podcast, set up an online hackathon called Demo Day, and helped several other communities launch DAO.After the release of the Moloch V2 contract with more functions, they launched a Venture DAO, a profit-making DAO, and registered a limited company in Delaware, USA and bound it to the DAO. In real lawA fully compliant structure.
Believing in the future of DAO, the MetaCartel community decided in 2020 to turn its focus into a DAO incubation and position it as an aggregator and connector for various community organizations.Remember the original meaning of Meta – Self-pointing.If we understand Cartel as an organization, MetaCartel has really become an organization for the organization.
The MetaCartel community itself is a DAO without a contract.
In August 2020, Peter joined 1kx, a well-known investment in the field of encryption. Due to his busy work, his energy to MetaCartel began to decrease visually. The Wizard of DApps hosted by him was even suspended for half a year and only resumed in June this year..But this is no longer so important, DAO has never been alone.
Now, a large-scale ecosystem has been formed around MetaCartel, and it is still expanding rapidly.
(This is an old picture from 2020, and it’s much more now)
The story of MetaCartel is temporarily finished, but the story of DAO has just begun.
In fairy tales, Peter Pan is Peter Pan, a child who will never grow up.He brought the kids to Neverland to experience joy, adventure and growth.The kids will eventually leave when they grow up, but Peter is not worried because there will always be new kids waiting to take risks with Peter Pan.
(Full text ends)
I try to write the article as vivid and easy to understand as possible, but I must admit that most of the content of the article is still boring and has some difficulty in understanding, especially for friends who don’t know much about the blockchain field.If you have read this, it means you have a considerable interest in DAO and these stories, allowing you to overcome these obstacles.
Since you have read this, I want to tell you that this is actually an advertisement for recruiting members of a community –
Empower Labs is a passion-driven blockchain industry research and incubation organization with core members including blockchain veterans, industry experts and senior coders.We believe that the rapid development of blockchain technology will burst out with a large number of innovations, and these innovations will eventually empower the entire world and make mankind better.We are gathered together for research because of our enthusiasm, and the current direction is focused on the large-scale adoption of DAO, metaverse, and public chain technology in industry scenarios.
However, we believe in the power of the community more, so we need more enthusiastic about new things (not limited to the blockchain field) and friends who are interested in open collaboration will participate and help.Blockchain originates from technology, but beyond technology, there is a possibility that interesting things can collide in any direction.
Interest-based community collaborative research may produce something more interesting than business goal-oriented research.Metauniverse, cryptography, smart contracts, investment, law, even management, literature, sociology.Some areas are very close to blockchain, while others do not occupy the edge.But even if some areas seem far away, it is not a bad thing for insightful friends to gather together to talk about some fantasy fantasies.A collision of opinions between members from multiple backgrounds and across fields will surely spark a lot of sparks, and blockchain technology will sooner or later become ties with most fields.
If you are passionate about exploring new things and think that you have the ability to think independently and discover information, welcome to join this community.Hopefully you make your choices because of interest and enthusiasm, because for a foreseeable period of time,Joining this community and participating in relevant collaboration and research will not bring you any direct financial rewards.But we are sure you will meet a lot of interesting people and a lot of interesting things happen.
A new world is ahead and everyone needs to explore it together.
