Snapshot and HAL on improving participation in DAOs

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews with nathan growth of snapshot and manlio the co-founder of hal together on the show gentlemen welcome and thank you for taking the time thank you nathan all right guys let's kick it off there's so much to talk about in such little

0:24time we're going to focus this conversation around dao's decentralized autonomous organizations the growth of dows throughout 2021 and i think 2022 and how will be an expansive year for that and how they are turning into the future of internet organizations i would love to kick it off nathan by hearing a little bit about uh yourself how you see dows right now why you see

0:49them as so exciting and the potential that they have and how snapshot fits into the dows in the blockchain ecosystem um well ashton thank you very much i'm super glad to be here super glad to be talking about those so yeah as you said decentralized autonomous organization i think the idea behind ours and why we think they're going to be really exciting and the development is going to

1:13be super interesting to follow in the next year is because of kind of two big qualities that does have so first daos are networks uh instead of hierarchies like you know all the organizations and so that means you can have so much more innovation and so many more good ideas that organically come up and allow daoist to really quickly invent new things and new

1:37even business models that we couldn't think of before and then second is the inclusiveness of dao's i think is an incredible strength because when you think about how much talent there is throughout the world the fact that the barrier of entry is incredibly low that anyone can just you know with an internet connection and a computer join a discord join a community be part of something

2:01and be rewarded for that and quite often and handsomely rewarded for that for that participation that's an incredible amount of innovation and so snapshots what we do is we try to work on the sides of those that are maybe less easy and and work less well than traditional organizations and one part that's often pointed out as more problematic is the decision making

2:26because when there's no boss it's harder to make sure that you know a right decision will be made in a timely fashion so what snapshot does is it offers infrastructure voting infrastructure to all of these decentralized organizations in a way that is very transparent you know it's all open source all of that type of stuff and that allows for free anyone to come and participate

2:52in governance of of the organization and snapshot is is really about that it's about making governance super flexible you know from voting with nfts to voting with tokens to voting with you know today i was talking with proof of humanity who's voting on a one person one-vote basis so super interesting what's going on sir you know this is uh the mission of snapchat

3:14making sure that this organization can be really quick and make the right decisions great intro nathan and yeah you're right once you move from that hierarchical structure to something that's more level playing field there's so many other questions to be answered with regards to participation good actors bad actors and there's so much i want to dive into but

3:36i also want to include manlio here we're talking about the participation rates in dao's how do we get dows right in terms of building a company and having the people inside of that organization be able to have their say and make sure that everyone you know sort of gets what they want or at least comes to an agreement i would love to get a little bit of information from you

3:59on your perspective on dows these initiatives uh that your teams are working on and just about how in general and how that fits into the blockchain space okay thank you ashton um well first of all thank you for inviting us here there is pleasure let me backtrack just one second so i can tell you a bit about how to give you a bit of context for this so hal is an easy to use automation tool

4:24that connects centralized and decentralized technologies what does that mean i think we're all familiar with this kind of landscape you have centralized technology which is either web 2.0 as we know it on the one hand and then on the other hand you have this new exciting word of web 3.0 which is fully decentralized but it's kind of running in its own little world

4:46running in its own little bubble so to say and we believe that we need to connect to glue together in fact these two word as much as we can if we want the decentralized word the new word to thrive uh we have written a bit of actually marco has written some um philosophy piece about this it's called the gluing manifesto so if your listeners want to google the glory manifesto you can you

5:08can learn more about the vision behind how but basically following this vision the idea that we really had was okay how do we allow companies and traders and doubts to basically connect centralize and decentralize to point into real-time activities on blockchains without writing code without being too technical just allowing all these people to kind

5:29of join uh the web three revolution that's the idea behind the hull and that's why we created hull and we decided to partnership with different uh dapps and projects such as snapchat i'll just give you a quick example of what of the things that we do with hull so um a simple example would be say ave okay ave is like the biggest protocol for landing borrowing money on

5:53d5 and one of the problems that everybody has nowadays to track their health factor okay that's a very common issue to have if you're if you have a collateralized deposition another so in normal condition what you do is that you go on the website and you have like a tiny uh bit of information that tells you the state of your loan and if it gets too under

6:15collateralized you have to hurry up and and do something about it otherwise it is being liquidated so what hal does and this is just an example is it lets you basically connect this piece of information that is on chain which is say my health factor or another with traditional tools such as email or slack or telegram or the stuff that we used to use basically

6:37in order for people to be uh well to to stay on top of their health factor and to connect those two bits together the second thing that we did well we did many different things actually but the project is natural that we're doing is trying to solve uh what do it doing our little bit actually to try to solve um a problem that daos all over the place have and

7:00the problem is really to do with humans so taos as nathan was telling us are really exciting because they were new technology and this new technology allows you to do so many different things but essentially doubts are still built on top of human beings and you know human beings they have the same issues uh that they had two ties in 2000 years ago when democracy was born so to say

7:22and you know one of one of the issues to remove friction which is exactly what natura does so you want to make it really easy to people or for people to vote um on on those proposals then that was snapchat does brilliantly um and the second thing is you want to keep people in form okay and this is where hal comes into play so right now it's naturally is really good at solving

7:45the problem how do we make it really simple and inexpensive for people to vote on on those proposals and hal is is doing the second bit which is how do we inform people because you know even in a democracy if people don't know that they can't vote there's not much they can do right so it's really important to keep people up today so the partnership that we have

8:06with snapchat is we developed this plugin that different dials can enable on the snapchat website and by clicking the plugin you get redirected on the our website and you can well basically that allows all the members of your dao to subscribe to notification to put push notification directly to email telegrams like twitter discord you can create bots with

8:28this kind of stuff and this you know it's just our tiny little contribution from a tech perspective to make dow voting and participation really inclusive great yeah you know what i think that technology is really useful especially you know for myself uh people that are in dao's are generally pretty familiar with cryptocurrency and they're in the space there's so much

8:54going on that you just miss the uh you know there's a vote and if there's a short time frame you just completely miss it because there's just so many things so to obviously uh have incoming notifications for that is going to be really useful now with this partnership are you guys partnering with specific dows you're just leaving open technology for any

9:18dows to come and start utilizing it or how are you approaching the market with this no i think we want to keep this as open as we can for everybody really so we started with a trial actually with the guys that are there so at the beginning it was only the the avid the avidao but no we want to really keep the same spirit as snapshot has which i mean perhaps nathan can can

9:44elaborate a bit on that but from our hand we are enablers like we we think of ourselves as technology enablers so our mission is to empower people to being able to you know just like really vote uh really staying up to date with dow's decisions and and in order to do that it's important to keep the system as open as flexible as possible definitely nathan you have any comments

10:07on that as well yeah absolutely um i think as melania said you know it's incredibly important to us that everyone can benefit from this there's so much to gain you know at this stage of development by leaving everything open and making sure everyone can access it and even the the code around plugins like these or or you know the code that governs snapshots it's all

10:33open and uh anyone can check it out i think you know the way we think about participation and you know democracy endows is pretty simple especially about participation there's kind of two things you can do to raise participation in your dao you can either increase your members impact uh and that's not something you know as as infrastructure provider we can work on

10:58you know it's on a dowel level you have to give your community meaningful discussions and meaningful meaningful decisions they can make but the other thing you can do and that we can absolutely work on is reduce the costs associated with voting you know and cosp can be many different things it can be money time attention effort and you know i think some uh you know

11:22either snapshot or how works on that side making it inexpensive easy you don't need to pay attention every day to your snapshot page to make sure that you're not missing anything we'll take care of this for you and all you have to do is come participate and vote so lowering the entry barrier rather than you know keeping a walled garden around your dallas covenant

11:49definitely nathan great point and i want to further elaborate on that in the dao ecosystem as a whole it's still very early days in 2021 we're seeing the emergence of popular taos but before that there really was just discussion you know all it's been around since the dao in over five years ago now but we're really only seeing people starting to join dao's now

12:15and we were hinting at how 2022 could be one of the biggest years for dao's do you think that this participation and the initiative your team is working on is one of the main pain points that's gonna push uh you know solve those problems to push more people into dao's and maybe there's any other pain points you can touch on why you think 2022 will be the

12:37most important year for the growth of dows into mainstream well um kind of the the easy definition of a dao is a group you know an online group with a bank account and this is not really a new idea there's always been online groups that share financial interests but that was adds so much more to this and i think

13:04one of the reasons i think those are are going to explode in the next year is simply because we are finding out every day new ways taos can solve coordination problems and i'm always super impressed to see the kinds of problems that dao stick on it's it's incredible problems there's dowels around climate change they're doused around universal basic income there's

13:28dowels around every kind of big problems that's you know mostly at heart human coordination problem and i think the impetus is behind that movement it's unstoppable it's we found a way to make magic internet money and with that magic internet money we now need magic internet societies to govern these bank accounts you know

13:54and to me it's it's kind of the natural evolution of crypto and it's not an evolution that you know destroys what was before it's an evolution that builds on what was before so i think that's the most interesting part about it and the biggest pain points at the moment is you know like any kind of community digital or or you know in the real world it's about

14:20if you're participating if you feel shared interest and you know common goals then you know you're full on that and you're going to wake up in the morning and the first thing you're going to do is check out discord and see what happens during the night and you're going to feel incredibly like part of something and to make sure that you feel part of something you've got to participate in

14:43many different ways and if it's a very serious investment darrow's that is discussing like multi-million dollar deals that that also works you know if you feel part of it if you're voting on investments or if you're voting on you know your nft dao whether you you're going to make avatars in the metaverse of your nfts and whether those metaverse nfts are going to be worth

15:09voting power all of that is something that's going to make you feel more part of your community so i think the biggest pain point at the moment is how do we bridge that kind of digital the kind of natural digital gap that happens between people you know if if we're both in front of a computer and not in the same room together we won't really be able to coordinate in

15:34the exact same way except if we've got the right kind of tooling to do it so if you you know it's funny you reference uh the dao incident and that it was five years ago i can't believe it was five years ago at this point but uh if you think about like the state of doubt tuning at the moment i think the only dow project that existed was called uh i think it was hypnosis

15:56actually yeah i think gnosis might have been the only kind of dow tooling solution around and at the moment uh the dow tooling ecosystem is just incredible to be honest great insight keep going man leo if you have any yeah no sorry yeah i just wanted to say that i really agree on what nathan is saying and if i can piggyback on that for a second i think you're touching a really important

16:21point and which is um you know i did score the house as i was mentioning earlier are made of people right and people have and they share the same needs you know people they need to we figure out quite early on as a species that if we collaborate if we get together we can get a lot of stuff done that we couldn't do on our on our own um but at the same time if the size of the

16:44group scales too much then it becomes or really hard to coordinate and all sorts of problems when like of meaning arise as well and and i think that's why you know so many people are kind of this affectionate when it comes to well you know modern day democracies and so on that kind of representation there is starting to break down a little bit the amazing thing with dao that you're

17:06witnessing is that by reducing and distributing the kind of collaboration that you have among people you can start to think with all sorts of different kinds of collaborations that simply were not feasible in the past right because because until like a few decades ago you could only coordinate at that level with people from your own town or college or country and you know

17:29even at that size the meaning starts to break apart a little bit so those in some sense are kind of taking that theory back but as nathan was saying it's really important for us to um at the same time focus on the tech side of it to provide the best tech tools possible for this self-organizing organization to thrive and to coordinate great points for both of you thank you

17:55so much for that if the viewers are looking to learn more about how your firms are helping grow the dow ecosystem and how to utilize this technology to get the notifications to make sure they're participating in taos and just about dows in general what's the best way to learn more about this partnership that your teams have been working on well i think the best way is to

18:19what get involved in any dowsing or find it out that is supporting something that you care about get involved and then you'll naturally stumble upon probably snapchat and and and hal as well uh so what i would recommend is yeah get involved in a dow subscribe to snapchat notifications uh engage with the discussions on discord and forums and whatever that happens um

18:43you can find more info about how specifically at alex why is that and you can follow us on twitter at hull team and i'll leave it to nate and for the snapshot details yeah same i think if you want to get to know more about dao's you gotta plunge right in there's no real way of doing it uh yeah doing it other than that so if you want to follow a snapshot

19:08uh we're on twitter at snapshot labs come join the discord as well sounds great i'll leave all the links to that you guys just mentioned in the description box below as well and i i the dolls that i'm in i'm gonna go check for snapshot and how right now uh so thank you guys so much for coming on i really appreciate the discussion about dao's looking forward to following up in

19:342022 uh to you know revisit these uh discussions that we've had and to see how close we were to the target i'm sure that there's going to be so much in store i really appreciate both of you coming on and let's follow up in the near future