A BaaS Platform for DAOs — Ink Finance: For DAOs That Are More Than Social Groups (part2.)
Ink Finance is positioned as the most powerful DAO tooling platform in the Web3 world. It provides highly customizable and individually operated backbones for DAOs, each of which coherently integrates a comprehensive set of organizational, operational, and financial tools.
From an IT perspective, Ink Finance is a typical BaaS, or Blockchain as a Service, platform. Its no-code and one-stop facilities allow on-chain organizations to fulfill the needs of organizational management, decision-making, fiscal control, and financial services throughout all aspects of their lifecycle, freeing them from the cumbersome burden of seeking and assembling different dApps, which is not only difficult but also vulnerable. The following paragraphs will go over some of its key features and advantages.
The Integrity and Scalability of On-chain Execution
As can be seen in the previous discussion, INK aims to provide an integrated operating framework in which the loopholes between decision making and the execution of the decisions can be closed.
Obviously, not all decisions in an organization can be executed on-chain, but to the extent that they can, particularly in the area of fiscal and financial management, INK will make sure that DAOs on the platform can on-chain execute the results of all critical financial decisions (such as treasury creation and revenue audit), thereby giving financial governance true integrity, traceability, and accountability. The cumbersome and insecure process of DIY, which is typically done by manually putting together different incoherently developed dApp tools, shall be totally avoided.
Once the goal of governance integrity is set, the major design objective is to achieve scalability. Since each decision is based on the DAO’s self-defined proposing and voting process, INK has built in an expandable dictionary of proposal types with fully itemized metadata, with each item representing an article of a proposal. Also defined in the metadata of such proposals is the sequence of steps in an execution that can be recognized by a corresponding ExecutionManager, which will invoke the various related ExecutionAgent to go about executing. The security is guaranteed because no one can invoke any ExecutionAgent without the ExecutionManager explicitly “peeking” into the voting results and the itemized metadata, which are immutable records on-chain.
For example, when a Treasury Operator sets up a payment schedule, it is treated as if he has made an internal proposal that can only be voted by the Treasury Multi-signers. After the multi-signing, this schedule becomes a resolution with its unique ID on-chain, which is the only acceptable execution authority for the TreasuryPaymentAgent.
With such a resolution-to-execution regime, as long as INK keeps adding to the dictionary the definitions of on-chain executable proposals, and their associated sequential control flow definitions, the platform can rapidly deploy new solutions with the necessary scalability to support the growth of the entire DAO sector.
Organizational Structure on INK Platform
Taking a chapter from the history of corporate evolution, one can see that most DAOs today are at a fairly early stage, and this form of organization is still in the process of continuous practical evolution. It is very difficult for any organization to imagine that a set of fixed operating rules can be formulated in advance and deployed on a blockchain network that could ensure long-term effectiveness as the DAO continuously pivots and adapts.
Many DAO facilities derived from certain use case backgrounds have encountered bottlenecks when used across various collaboration modes, such as when their users are factioned into sub ecosystems or blocs in different countries and regions. These DAOs are forced to seek their own operational facilities, or to awkwardly assemble many different incoherently produced dApps (an independent multi-sig wallet, plus a generic proposing and voting protocol is a typical example).
Positioned as a platform to support sustainable evolution and growth, INK strives to be both comprehensive and flexible, while upholding the principle of integrity and decentralized transparency. Its effectiveness has been confirmed by many of its early customers with versatile business scenarios and operation modes.
- Formation of meta DAO and sub DAOs. This feature delivers the balance of hierarchical control, specialization, and autonomy, forming a flexible and customizable organizational structure to generate efficiency while preserving and maximizing the meta DAO value.
A meta DAO is like a controlling group or an umbrella company in the traditional world. It encompasses the brand recognition, and the top-level (or protocol level) development and resource management. The utility definition and the monetization scheme of the meta token falls into this category.
Sub DAOs are like subsidiaries of a controlling enterprise in the traditional sense. They are set up to carry specialized sub ecosystems that can represent regional or task-specific communities. For example, a sub DAO can be set up to focus on social and marketing, with its very specific governance, management, and incentivization rules reflecting its autonomy. Such a sub DAO may want to further allocate its resources and delegate tasks across several geographical sub sub DAOs. Other realistic sub DAO examples include the developer community for a protocol, an NFT investment community within a metaverse, a royalty financing community within a media IP DAO, etc.
INK’s powerful and flexible facilities enable the establishment of various administrative and economic relationships of the meta-to-sub DAOs and sub-to-sub DAOs, Even on-chain merger & acquisitions can be handled with elegance on the INK platform.
2. Multiple Mechanisms for Sybil and Whale Resistance. Whether an ecosystem consists of one meta DAO or many sub DAOs, Sybil and “whale” resistance is always a challenge on blockchain.
INK’s first line of defense against Sybil attack is through a highly customizable staking mechanism. While assigning an explicit governance utility to a DAO’s meta token, it raises a substantial barrier of members using multiple wallets to recycle the same tokens in voting.
Meanwhile, INK integrates with the best decentralized biometric identity protocols (such as Humanode) to securely verify members while maintaining their privacy. This mechanism can be used to maintain the connection between users’ decentralized roles on all deployed blockchains and their biometric identities, ensuring a one-wallet-one-person governance basis. Other widely accepted DID solutions can also be added to INK’s technological stack for DAOs to choose from.
For transparency of critical roles, such as multi-signers, the auditors, or even normal members in KYC-required applications, INK integrates with the best decentralized legal identity protocols (such as Astra).
Regarding the governance rights at sub DAOs, it is critical for them to operate under various autonomous models that are resistant to the interference of the meta-level “whales”. INK has devised a badge mechanism (more on this in the later discussion) allowing sub DAOs to develop their own whale-mitigating schemes while still operating under the meta DAO’s banner.
3. Formation of Committees and Manager Duties. This feature can be used by any DAO at any level of hierarchy.
A DAO on INK platform is always created with a Board (with its creator as the only Board Member), and a virtual Public Voting Committee (to act as a proxy for voting integrity). From there on, the Board can use the top-level proposing/voting process to establish, change, and abolish other Committees (see later discussions).
The top-level proposing process is also responsible for creating different managing duties that are assigned into the different committees. Duty is a DAO-level construct that must satisfy the DAO-defined identity verification requirement, and Duties are created on-chain by smart contract.
Each Duty-holding Manager is appointed to a specific position in a Committee. Intra-committee procedures, such as the setup and signing off of transfer schedule, are associated by code with the different Duties within the Committee in question.
4. A rich set of DAO member functionalities.
Any member of a DAO can find any activities involving themselves that are initiated and processed by the different Committees in the DAO. The most common task of a DAO member is to participate in the public voting. When they vote, they are required to pledge the staked meta token of their DAO. It is up to their DAO to decide what kind of reward they will get from the staking, but the general setup assures the reward will be more than sufficient to cover the gas cost of casting votes.
Other exemplary activities include collecting rewards granted by the Community Board, buying and redeeming investment fund shares that are issued by the Investment Committee, or making donations to the DAO’s Treasury. Most of the critical activities and statistics regarding the DAO are all available for DAO members to browse and check.
To continue reading, please click: Meet the Needs of Governance, Economy, Finance & Regulations — Ink Finance: For DAOs That Are More Than Social Groups (part3.)
