Have a comprehensive understanding of the Dora Factory project features, products, token economic model, and competitive advantages and disadvantages.
Original title: “First-class warehouse [public due diligence] in-depth report: Dora Factory”
Author: First Class
Dora Factory is based on Polkadot’s multi-chain DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure (DAO-as-a-Service), the product has actual user data, high community participation, and backed by DoraHacks, it has a certain user base at the beginning of its establishment , Which is ahead of the similar competitors of Polkadot. The overall route of the project is clear. It belongs to the early stage of Polkadot Ecosystem and has first-mover advantages.
This research report is a free research report (non-wealth code research report) sponsored by Dora Factory. The content of the research report is completely written independently by the first-class warehouse. The first-class warehouse strives to ensure that the content of the research report is true, neutral and objective, and at the same time to avoid any readers Misleading, any free research report sponsored by the project party does not provide any investment-related advice. This research report aims to help readers quickly and in-depth understand the project and help everyone make better investment decisions.
Project summary
A DAO is a group organized around a task that is coordinated through a set of shared rules implemented on the blockchain. Due to the outbreak of DeFi, the new token issuance method of liquid mining has indirectly triggered the issuance of DeFi governance tokens. Looking back at the current emerging DeFi projects, community governance tokens seem to be the standard for all DeFi projects. On the one hand, we have seen more and more DeFi projects combined with DAO governance. DAO is gradually becoming the core structure of DeFi projects in the world; on the other hand, not all projects have the energy to develop and maintain. A DAO governance platform, then as the industry continues to develop, the industry’s demand for governance rises, which will inevitably give rise to a large amount of demand for governance tool platforms.
At present, the value of the global DeFi market locked in is about 41.3 billion U.S. dollars, and the total asset under management (AUM) managed by DAO on Ethereum is also as high as 877 million U.S. dollars. If there is a platform that can help project parties who need DAO to establish a programmable on-chain governance protocol platform, provide one-click on-chain governance services, and effectively integrate the modular needs of different project parties. Then its development space and potential are undoubtedly huge. And Dora Factory is currently working in this direction.
Dora Factory is hatched by DoraHacks, and most of its members are also from DoraHacks.
In the early stage, Dora Factory relied on the support of the DoraHacks global hackathon activity and HackerLink platform incentive plan on Polkadot. It was ahead of similar competitors on Polkadot and has a certain scale of ecological foundation. However, in the later stage, how to transform its own advantages into a winning trend and form its own ecological moat requires continuous and deep cultivation by the project party in the later stage to implement the current theory.
In terms of products, Dora Factory’s product design logic is self-consistent, and product applications have actual needs. At present, HackerLink has developed the first batch of key on-chain governance modules of Dora Factory, and there are actual user data, and community participation is high.
In terms of funding, Dora Factory has received investment from many investment institutions in the early stage, and the funds are relatively sufficient, and there will be sustainable financial reserves for future use of the project. The code base is currently not open source.
In terms of token model design, the DORA token model is reasonably designed and has actual needs.
The DAO track is still in its early stages, and the DAO project on Polkadot is in a blue ocean. Although the overall quality of Dora Factory is good, we still need to continue to pay attention to the subsequent delivery of specific products, as well as the changes in the track and competitive landscape.
Basic profile
Project Description
Dora Factory is based on Polkadot’s DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure (DAO-as-a-Service), an open and programmable on-chain governance protocol platform based on Substrate, providing a quadratic for a new generation of decentralized organizations and developers Pluggable governance functions such as voting, curve auction, Bounty incentives, and cross-chain asset management. At the same time, developers can submit new governance modules to this DAO-as-a-service platform and receive continuous incentives.
Basic Information
[1] The market value ranking refers to the team’s disclosure of 18% of the tokens circulating in the early secondary market, and it is roughly calculated by combining the current currency price of $18.34 and the CoinGecko circulating market value ranking list.
Detailed project
team
Dora Factory is hatched by DoraHacks .
DoraHacks is a decentralized global geek community. With the mission of connecting Hackers around the world, it provides services and infrastructure for Hackers. It is deeply involved in the ecological construction of Dora Factory. Since the incubation of the DoraHacks community in 2014, hundreds of Hackathons have been held around the world, providing more than 20,000 developers with the opportunity to communicate with hackers, accumulatively producing more than 1,500 projects and radiating 300,000 developers . So far, DoraHacks has won the support of 737 investors and successfully raised $230,420.
According to the DoraHacks team, in 2018, DoraHacks established communities in 15 cities in 8 countries (the United States, China, India, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany) and organized 31 blockchain hackathons . In 2019, DoraHacks hosted the largest hackathon in Chinese history, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution Hackathon” in Beijing. More than 500 top developers participated in the event. Since its development, DoraHacks has become one of the largest developer and geek communities in China.
HackerLink under DoraHacks is one of the main developer platforms in the blockchain field. It provides global developers with functions such as grant, Bounty, Hackathon, BUIDL, and developer files. Currently there are BSC, HECO, Flow and other areas. The blockchain ecology encourages open source community developers through HackerLink.
funds
So far, Dora Factory has completed two rounds of private equity financing and one round of public equity financing, of which the total amount of private equity released is 2 million, and the unit prices are respectively 2 US dollars, 4 US dollars and 6 US dollars. The specific financing amount has not been disclosed yet.
On February 7, 2021, the first round of financing was led by HashKey, NGC Ventures, DFG, SNZ Holdings, AU21 Capital, Axia8 Ventures, Digital Renaissance Foundation, Candaq Group, Delink Capital, Cabin VC, LD Capital and DoraHacks Ventures participated in the investment.
On March 1, 2021, the second round of financing ends. Participants include Fundamental Labs, Signum Capital, CMS Holdings, Hypersphere Ventures, ID Theory, OK Block Dream Fund, LongHash Ventures, PAKA, Incuba Alpha, Spark Digital Capital, NEO EcoFund , Zonff Partners, SevenX Capital, Lancer Capital, Private Capital, Gate.io, Horizon Capital, Kernel Ventures, JRR, Infinity Labs, Lotus Capital, BlockRock Capital, Cumberland, The LAO and DuckDAO participated in the investment.
On March 21, 2021, Dora Factory completed the public offering of DORA in DuckSTARTER. The issuance quota is 12,500 pieces, accounting for 0.125% of the total, and the unit price is 8 US dollars per piece. IDO raised a total of 100,000 US dollars .
From 20:00 on March 22nd, 2021 to 20:00 on March 24th (GMT+8), the LBP of DORA will be performed on Balancer. The starting price is 25 USD/piece, the initial weight is set to 96:4, and the ending weight is set to 45:55. The initial liquidity was 900,000 DORA and 937,500 USDC. During the LBP period, the transaction price of DORA was in the range of $18-$52, and the transaction volume reached 47 million US dollars. In addition, according to the team’s disclosure, the final number of tokens sold on LBP is approximately 420,000 . Based on a conservative estimate of the average transaction price of $20, the team has collected approximately US$8.4 million in this LBP.
On March 24, 2021, Dora Factory Balancer LBP ended and liquidity was injected into Uniswap. The initial liquidity was 500,000 USDC and 25,000 DORA, and the initial exchange ratio was 1 DORA: 20 USDC.
From the participation of more than 30 investment institutions mentioned above, there are many well-known blockchain investment institutions in the industry such as HashKey, NGC, Fundamental Labs, and Hypersphere. In addition, combined with the private placement of DORA tokens, IDO, and LBP, it is roughly estimated that the team will raise approximately $16.5 million in total. The Dora Factory team currently has sufficient funds and will have a sustainable financial reserve for future use of the project.
Code
The Dora Factory code base is not open source yet.
product
The vision of Dora Factory is to build a set of on-demand DAO infrastructure, by developing corresponding tool kits for developers to empower DAO organizations that develop in its ecology.
Concept elaboration
Before introducing Dora Factory, we need to briefly understand what DAO is.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organization) was still a rather mysterious concept in the understanding of many people. In the past two years, the DEFI project has gradually moved towards community governance, which has deepened more people’s understanding of DAO. In its essence, the DAO is a group organized around a task that is coordinated through a set of shared rules implemented on the blockchain.
So why do we need to use DAO?
In the blockchain, when an agreement is created, it is difficult and impossible for developers to do everything, so the follow-up of the project will inevitably encounter many unknown factors, especially the more complex the agreement, the more places that need to be corrected in the future. Based on the concept of blockchain decentralization, DAO was created to promote a new economic cooperation and participation model without capital and power orientation, and to help blockchain protocols deal with unknown issues.
As a participant of DAO, users can make suggestions and proposals for project changes, and then vote and execute them.
Why choose Polkadot instead of Ethereum?
With the release of incentive governance tokens by Compound in 2020 as the tipping point, DeFi has developed rapidly, and then community governance tokens seem to become the standard configuration of all DeFi projects, and everyone is using DAO to complete daily operations and discussions. However, with the rapid development of DeFi applications, on-chain transactions have become more frequent than ever before, causing on-chain transactions with low economic driving forces to be crowded out, such as DAO governance voting. It should be noted that Snapshot solves this problem to a certain extent through the off-chain gas governance aggregator. But Snapshot is essentially off-chain governance, and we need to believe that it will not do evil.
On the other hand, almost all public chains want to do DeFi, but the current DeFi ecosystem of Ethereum is more complete and mature, far surpassing other public chains. As a general open platform, Ethereum can be used as a place for voting. But for other public chains, the DAO on Ethereum cannot directly cross-chain to help the governance of other chains. Then, for public chains with DAO governance requirements, you need to build them yourself, or wait for the subsequent maturity of cross-chain technology.
In addition, at present, Ethereum has entered a bottleneck period, and Ethereum 2.0 is still full of great uncertainties. Perhaps a more scalable, more customized, and developer-friendly infrastructure is needed. So far, Polkadot may be an option.
The current ecological development of Polkadot is still in a very early stage. From another perspective, the Ethereum ecosystem is like a pilot field. The projects and models that have been market-tested in the Ethereum ecosystem will be moved to Polkadot, which will be the rapid development of the Polkadot ecosystem. As a development booster, Dora Factory is currently trying to become a part of this booster. It will serve as a parallel link into the Polkadot ecosystem and build the underlying DAO infrastructure for Polkadot.
The official Dora Factory also mentioned that it will develop a parachain on Polkadot for the following reasons:
- Cross-chain DAO asset management;
- Sharing the security brought by Polkadot;
- Realize the modular development of core business functions (Pallets component).
In addition, Dora Factory will also be committed to the multi-chain ecology in the future. After the multi-chain ecology is completed, it will support cross-chain based on Polkadot.
Dora Factory
Dora Factory consists of three parts: Polkadot factory, Ethereum factory, and a virtual bridge . Every DAO organization will have a vault to keep its digital assets. Stakeholders of the DAO organization can deposit, withdraw and manage assets in the organization.
Polkadot Factory
After the Polkadot mainnet function is fully implemented, assets will be able to move on the Polkadot parachains, and the DAO organization of Dora Factory can manage their respective tokens from all the Polkadot parachains. This also means that all Polkadot startup projects can use Dora Factory to manage their DAO organization.
Above we also introduced that Dora Factory will develop a parachain on Polkadot. In addition, Dora Factory provides the following underlying functions and modules by default: create DAO organization; release DAO organization; cross-chain asset vault; pledge, tax and bonus system; payment; protocol layer governance.
On top of the underlying functions, the Dora Factory parachain as the underlying architecture provides consensus services to verify token transactions and support components. Parachain will adopt POA (Proof of Authority) consensus at the beginning. As we all know, the current DAO is far from achieving the vision of decentralized autonomy, and most DAOs are actually related to the corresponding project parties, companies or foundations. In most cases, this is not a problem, but a necessity. Because the process of achieving decentralization cannot be accomplished overnight.
Dora Factory first adopts the POA consensus transition, which can solve the trust problem of the initial node to a certain extent, which is convenient for development.
After the mainnet is officially launched on Kusama , it will switch to NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake, Polkadot’s standard consensus mechanism) consensus. At that time, holders of parachains will be able to participate in network maintenance: nomination and verification will receive network rewards.
Figure 2-1 Dora Factory bottom functions and modules
From Figure 2-1 above, we can see that through the underlying functions provided by Dora Factory, anyone or team can develop application components. Ideally, as Dora Factory’s infrastructure becomes more and more complete, more developers can be attracted to join Dora Factory, and more developers developing in Dora Factory, a DAO organization, will further promote its ecological development, thus forming A positive cycle.
Ethereum and BSC factories
Dora Factory will deploy sub-factories on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain in the future. A sub-factory is a group of factory contracts that build smart contracts for a single DAO organization. Before all the functions of the Polkadot mainnet are implemented, the team also encourages smart contract developers to create DAO components on Ethereum and BSC to verify the concept. The client front end will allow the creation of DAO organizations on Ethereum and BSC.
Virtual bridge
In the first phase of Dora Factory, the DAO organization must weigh the pros and cons and choose which public chain to develop on-Polkadot, Ethereum, or BSC.
According to the Polkadot white paper, eventually there will be a bridge to connect Polkadot with other major public chains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin through a relay chain. It is expected that the cross-chain problem will be solved by then. For convenience, Dora Factory will build a simplified virtual bridge to introduce tokens outside of the Polkadot ecology into the Dora Factory parachain, so that the DAO organization can store (non-polkadot) tokens in a cross-chain vault. assets.
Figure 2-2 Dora Factory Virtual Bridge
Hackerlink
Hackerlink is an online blockchain developer platform built by DoraHacks.
HackerLink developed the first batch of key on-chain governance modules of Dora Factory, which can be regarded as the team’s first official front-end entrance. HackerLink provides many governance tools on the developer chain, such as quadratic voting, developer bounties, BUIDL and online hackathons, etc. In the BUIDL section, other teams can demonstrate their new projects to investors and other developers .
HackerLink just held Binance Smartchain’s first online quadratic voting community Grant, BSC Grant 1. The team received a total of US$800,000 in community donations. Since this event went live, more than 100 new geek teams and developer projects have submitted applications for the program.
In the future, Dora Factory will also cooperate with partners such as Binance Smart Chain, Huobi Eco-Chain HECO, OKExChain, Kusama, Polkadot, ETC, Filecoin, Avalanche, the Graph, and Solana. Developers such as quadratic voting and online hackathons Community building activities.
Summary: Dora Factory is incubated by DoraHacks, and most of its members are also from DoraHacks, which are early practitioners in the industry. At the same time, the project received investment from many investment institutions in the early stage, with sufficient funds. The code base is not open source yet. In terms of products, HackerLink developed the first batch of key on-chain governance modules of Dora Factory, with actual user data and high community participation. In addition, there is a pilot field in front of the Ethereum ecology, which can save a lot of detours for the development of similar projects in the Polkadot ecology. On the whole, Dora Factory’s product design logic is self-consistent and there are actual needs, but in more specific situations, you need to wait for Dora Factory’s DAO as a service infrastructure to be officially delivered before you can make further judgments .
development of
history
Table 3-1 Dora Factory Progress List
status quo
We mentioned above that Dora Factory is hatched by DoraHacks. Currently, DoraHacks is cooperating with Binance Smart Chain, Huobi Eco-Chain HECO, OKExChain, Kusama, etc., to jointly hold a hackathon and the online quadratic voting developer community Grant program. And these partners will have a certain probability in the future to directly choose Dora Factory as their DAO platform. If it is successfully implemented, then this will undoubtedly greatly promote the early ecological construction of Dora Factory.
Table 3-1 Community population statistics
Note: The data in the above table comes from the operating data of the DoraHacks social media account provided by the team. The data was collected at 10:00 AM (UTC+0) on March 26, 2021.
Based on the above statistics, we can see that DoraHacks has a certain influence in the geek community around the world, and a considerable number of hackers and developers have been aggregated through early community operations. From this point of view, this is undoubtedly a strong advantage of the project for the start of Dora Factory’s early projects. For the DAO project, there is still a relatively small group of people, how to grow bigger and stronger in a small circle, the user base is particularly important. Dora Factory is backed by the ecology of DoraHacks. If it can successfully convert some developers into its ecology and participate in the construction of the ecology in the early stage, then it will be a good start for the project.
future
Based on the roadmap disclosed by the team, Dora Factory will mainly carry out the following tasks in the future:
1) Migrate key components to substrate;
2) HackerLink integration: bounty tasks and bonuses;
3) Run the quadratic capital injection bonus component on Kusama;
4) Launch the POA consensus parachain network on Rococo and Kusama;
5) Release the independent client front end of “On-demand DAO”;
6) Started to provide “On-Demand DAO” service for the DAO organization on Kusama;
7) The network consensus protocol of the Kusama platform is upgraded to NPoS;
8) Deploy the “On-Demand DAO” service on the Polkadot Parachain mainnet;
9) Started to provide “On-Demand DAO” service for DAO organizations on Polkadot’s mainnet;
10) Open the cross-chain vault;
11) Remove root permissions.
Summary: DAO governance is still a relatively marginal requirement for most users at present. In contrast, blockchain practitioners, community enthusiasts and cryptopunks are more likely to understand the original intention of these products and use them. Dora Factory is supported by the DoraHacks Global Hackathon and HackerLink Platform Incentive Program, which can closely unite global hackers, cypherpunks and open source developers. There is a strong developer community support. And these developers and users are likely to become the first batch of users and communicators of Dora Factory, and even participants of Dora Factory. In the early days, Dora Factory quickly established its own image in the industry through its parent company DoraHacks’ years of hard work in the global hackathon, attracting a certain number of seed users, which can be said to have completed a good cold start.
However, the Dora Factory project has been in a short time since its establishment. The future development of the project will mainly depend on the scale of the ecology and the delivery of specific products. It should be noted that according to the team’s disclosure, Dora Factory’s DAO-as-a-service infrastructure is planned to go online around June 2021.
Economic model
Token supply
The token symbol of Dora Factory is DORA, and the initial supply of tokens is 10 million DORA.
Token distribution
In the first phase, Dora Factory will issue the standard ERC-20 token DORA. DORA tokens will be used in various Dora Factory products. The total supply of DORA tokens at this stage will be fixed.
In the second phase, after the launch of the Dora Factory mainnet, network staking and network rewards will begin, and 10 million DORA tokens will be linearly inflated each year to reward network validators and community developers. It should be noted that DORA will only be issued linearly after the mainnet is officially launched, and before the mainnet is launched (including the Ethereum/BSC factory phase and the testnet phase, there will be no additional issuance).
Table 4-1 DORA token distribution
From the distribution of DORA tokens in the above table and the corresponding information disclosed by the team, we can see that approximately 18% of DORA tokens will flow into the secondary market in the early stage. One year later (April 2022), 4.3 million tokens are expected to be released, accounting for about 43.0% of the total (the release of tokens without accounting for reserves, public appropriations, and community appropriations).
Analysis of currency holding addresses
Figure 4-1 Analysis of DORA currency holding addresses (data deadline 2023.26)
As shown in Figure 4-1 above, according to the Ethereum block explorer, as of March 23, 2021, there are 512 DORA holding addresses, and the top 100 holdings account for 99.62%.
On the whole, there are currently fewer token holding addresses, and the holdings are relatively concentrated, and most of the tokens are mainly concentrated in the hands of the team.
Token role
Dora Factory is jointly governed by DORA token holders. DORA is a functional token that consolidates network consensus. Users and token holders use DORA tokens for pledge, mining and payment. Developers participating in network construction will receive DORA token rewards. According to the team’s white paper, DORA has the following functions:
DAO pledge
On Dora Factory, if you want to create a DAO organization, you must pledge 100 D ORA tokens on the chain. After the DAO organization is dissolved, the pledged DORA tokens will be released. In the future, as the number of DAO organizations grows and the value of DORA changes, the pledge fee required to create a DAO may also become a fixed price. This can be achieved through the integration of price oracles by off-chain workers, or directly using the ready-made oracle services of other parachains.
Validator pledge, mining and inflation
Dora Factory will initially adopt the POA consensus and will migrate to the NPoS consensus after subsequent deployment to Kusama. (In the Polkadot network) validators and nominators maintain the operation of the parachain by confirming transactions and publishing blocks. As a result, validators and nominators will receive token rewards from inflation. In addition to inflation, transaction fees will also be allocated to validators and nominators; network usage fees (taxes) paid by users and DAO organizations will be allocated accordingly to all addresses that have pledged DORA.
DORA will issue an additional 1,000,000 tokens per year unless the community votes to pass another overwhelming majority plan. Therefore, unlike Polkadot, DORA is issued linearly from 10% in the first year. The inflation rate is increasing year by year. 2% of the tokens issued by inflation each year will go to the Dora Factory central treasury (Treasury), and the rest will be distributed to nominators and validators
Network usage fee (taxes)
The components are chargeable. The DAO organization will have to burn DORA tokens (or pay a fee) to use charged components (of course there will also be free components). The network usage fee is
Taxes and fees charged by Dora Factory from the DAO organization. Taxes and fees will be allocated to all pledge addresses accordingly.
Network rewards
The network will reward validators, component developers and entrepreneurial builders. The validator is rewarded from inflation and taxes paid by the DAO organization. DORA pledgers who are not validators are rewarded from network usage fees. Developer rewards come from (paid) component income.
Transaction Fees
All transactions on the parachain will be forced to levy a small fee. Transaction fees will be allocated to the nominator and verifier.
Governance
Unlike traditional Internet SaaS (software as a service) platforms, Dora Factory is governed by a community of DORA holders, rather than a private company. The governance body is divided into two: governance DAO (The Governance DAO) and council (Council). Governance DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization for all DORA holders. The council is the core development team responsible for the project roadmap before the root authority (sudo) is removed.
Governance DAO is the self-built DAO of Dora Factory. After the Dora Factory mainnet goes online, the governance DAO will be presented in the Dora Factory client front-end interface. All DORA holders are members of DAO, and all pledge addresses can vote on proposals (we call them DORA voters).
Governance procedures will be initiated in the following situations:
a) Authorize major parachain mainnet upgrades: Any major parachain mainnet upgrade (such as parachain consensus mechanism, governance rules, mining and pledge rules, etc.) requires a two-thirds majority of DORA voters to pass.
b) Authorized community bonus: Dora Factory will continue to launch multiple rounds of quadratic capital injection bonuses to encourage new ideas and new components to optimize the platform. The community can donate DORA to their valued projects according to the quadratic capital injection mechanism. The community bonus will be led by HackerLink. All community quadratic capital injection bonuses require a simple majority authorization of DORA voters.
c) Council: In addition to governing the DAO, Dora Factory also has a council, responsible for fulfilling the development roadmap and executing key operations. The council also has the right to make small-scale changes and upgrades to the platform, and add functional components according to the process of adding components.
d) Adding components: components (Pallets) can be developed by Dora Factory developers, or they can be any community developer (or team) anywhere. Mobilizing the developer community to invent all kinds of DAO components is critical to Dora Factory. On Polkadot, components can be developed and tested freely on the local substrate node. When adding components to the parachain, its safety must be guaranteed. A component (whether from Dora Factory’s core R&D team or community developers) must be thoroughly tested and security audited before it can be submitted to the Dora Factory testnet. The components will stay on the testnet for a period of time before they can be online in the Polkadot Parachain of Dora Factory. This process is carried out by the board of directors.
e) Public bonus: The council will also have a public bonus for funding new ideas, mechanisms and algorithms related to on-chain governance; necessary DAO components; key development kits, etc. The approval of the public bonus decision requires a simple majority of the board members.
f) Bounty task: Users and core developers will propose certain functions and improvement ideas. HackerLink will release public bounty tasks accordingly. Both DORA core projects and community projects can issue bounties. All bounty tasks will be connected to GitHub to manage the workflow on GitHub. Various cryptocurrencies can be used for bounty payments. Small features and improvements that are not enough to reach the public bonus level may be released in the form of bounty tasks.
g) Root authority and election: Before the root authority (Sudo) is removed, the board members are appointed by the Dora Factory Foundation. After the root authority is removed, the members of the board of directors will be elected by DORA voters. The election rules will be hard coded into the governance component and added to the governance DAO. At that time, the Dora Factory project will enter the stage of decentralization and autonomy.
Figure 4-2 The role of DORA token
Summary: The token symbol of Dora Factory is DORA. The tokens are mainly used for pledge, network usage fees, network rewards, transaction fees, governance, etc. The total amount is 10 million, and most of the tokens will be gradually released in the first two years come out. And after the launch of the Dora Factory mainnet, network staking and network rewards will begin, which will linearly inflate 1 million DORA tokens every year. The design of the token model is reasonable, and the token has actual demand.
competition
industry analysis
Overview
The subdivision track of Dora Factory is DAO on Polkadot.
The concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was formally put forward in 2015. The market still lacks a unified definition of this concept. The description in Wikipedia is: DAO is a computer An organization that is coded to run rules is not affected by the central government, and its financial transaction records and procedural rules are stored on the blockchain.
It can be divided into three elements: “decentralization”, “autonomy” and “organization”. “Decentralization” means decentralization of power, or running in a distributed infrastructure; “autonomy” means the automatic execution of rules by smart contracts, and “organization” means an entity. Entrepreneur Philipe Honigman interprets DAO as “a tool for coordinating human activities.”
In the current practical application, the hot spots of the DAO project are concentrated in the following modes: voting system, fund distribution agreement, dispute arbitration court and cooperative game.
The voting system is divided into the voting system that is only used within the project and that supports other DAO organizations to use its voting system. The former, such as the current emerging DeFi project, involves the on-chain voting system at the beginning of the project design, but it is only used by the project itself; the latter such as Aragon What Dora Factory will do in the future is not only that the project party can use its voting system internally, but other DAO organizations created in the network can also directly apply its modules or conduct governance voting.
The fund allocation agreement refers to the reasonable allocation of development funds through the DAO organization to better encourage developers to build infrastructure for the project. The most representative one is Moloch DAO.
The dispute arbitration court hotspot is promoted by Aragon, which aims to move matters that cannot be solved by smart contracts to the court, and the jurors of the court will vote for arbitration.
Cooperative game, the so-called cooperative game is to benefit at least some people without harming anyone’s interests. This concept Pool Together has already done it.
Looking at the current DAO platform, in fact, the function is still relatively single. In the vision of Dora Factory, it is hoped to use Substrate to build a DAO-as-a-service infrastructure, use DORA on this infrastructure to empower this infrastructure and inspire developers, and to allow DAOs that call different governance modules and functions to be implemented at any time Call these functions pluggable anywhere.
Development status
The DAO’s vision is very beautiful, and it is precisely because of this that in 2016, the founder of the mountain “The DAO” was able to grab 160 million U.S. dollars with decentralized VC and became the largest ICO in history at that time. However, it is a pity that The DAO died before leaving the company at the time. At that time, hackers used the loopholes in The DAO’s smart contract to steal nearly 70 million U.S. dollars worth of Ethereum tokens, and the Ethereum hard fork was carried out shortly thereafter. As a result, DAO has gradually withdrawn from the public view before it has flourished, and the DAO field is still very niche. The DAO on Polkadot is still a blue ocean.
But for the actual organizational system, DAO is still full of potential charm of change. With the rise of DeFi, the community governance represented by Compound and Year Finance once again carried the banner of DAO, which indirectly triggered the subsequent issuance of DeFi governance tokens. However, not all projects have the energy to develop and maintain a DAO governance platform. As the industry continues to develop, the demand for governance in the industry rises, which will inevitably give rise to a large amount of demand for governance tool platforms.
Competitive product comparison
Since the DAO of Polkadot has just started, many projects are still relatively rough, there is no actual product to compare with Dora Factory, and it is not easy to accurately subdivide the projects in the field. Therefore, in this chapter, we will first compare competing products from other blockchain ecosystems, especially the DAO project in Ethereum.
GitCoin
From the perspective of developer community and developer DAO governance, GitCoin is undoubtedly the main competitor of Dora Factory.
Gitcoin is a decentralized application built on the Ethereum network. Although Gitcoin has “coin” in its name, it does not issue tokens. Gitcoin provides a community for developers to collaborate through bounties in open source projects and monetize their skills. In addition, Gitcoin also provides an open platform for projects to apply for funding from the community and the Ethereum Foundation. Its vision is to support various open source projects through the blockchain and promote the development of the open source movement, supported by ConsenSys.
Simply put, Gitcoin tokenizes the open source collaboration mechanism on Github, and allows developers to obtain economic returns and rewards.
Aragon
Aragon is a DApp on the Ethereum blockchain that allows anyone to create and manage any organization, such as companies, open source projects, NGOs, foundations, hedge funds, etc. Aragon Network, also known as Aragon is a digital management organization controlled by tokens. In essence, Aragon Network is an ecosystem that allows arbitrary organizations, entrepreneurs, and investors to collaborate efficiently and securely, without technical loopholes and malicious participants. The Aragon Network chain organization will be built using Aragon Core, which is composed of a solidity language decentralized autonomous organization DAO and a web-side decentralized application DApp.一开始，Aragon Core 会专注于资本化的公司类组织，但它的模块化功能也足够适应其他种类的组织。
目前Aragon 已经提供去中心化自治公司DAC，即Decentralized Autonomous Corporations 的管理机制搭建方法，支持投票、预算、制定规章制度，以及其他功能。
DAOHaus
DAOHaus 是基于MolochDAO 框架推出的DAO 服务平台，用户可以在DAOHaus 上加入已有的DAO 组织，也可以创建属于自己的组织并邀请成员其他成员加入。（MolochDAO 是由以太坊早期开发者Ameen Soleimani 等人发起的一个开源社区治理协议，初衷是通过去中心化治理的方式为以太坊上的基础设施建设提供开发资金，从而解决以太坊2.0 开发缓慢等问题。）
其投票方式和Moloch 一脉相承，其治理流程包括：工会银行、怒退、工会踢、提案等。
- 若用户想要加入其生态中的某个DAO 组织，需要提交一份带有个人信息的提案，写明自己可以质押的代币数量，以此来换取股份（share，决定其投票和收益的权重）。
- 发起提案之后，由组织内的其他成员投票，经过投票期、缓冲期、处理期，通过投票结果来决定是否同意该用户加入组织。如果大部分成员同意，则用户进入组织。
- 若提案失败，则将该用户质押的代币如数归还。如果组织内有不同意提案结果的成员，可以选择怒退，销毁股份，赎回等量的质押代币。
当前DAOHaus 支持的DAO 组织类型有：Guild （工会）、Club （俱乐部）、Venture （风投）、Grant （资助）以及Product （产品）等，用户在创建组织时将根据组织类型来设置参数，包括该组织支持的代币、一天时间可以受理的提案上限、提案周期、缓冲期、奖励等等。
Snapshot
Snapshot 是一个链下无Gas 多重治理客户端，易于验证，且保护结果。由Balancer Labs 的Fabien Marino 推动，它允许基于代币的项目在那里发布提案，让代币持有者在链下投票，而不需要进行区块链交易，即不需要支付Gas 和交易费用。提案和投票以签名信息的形式存储在IPFS 上。
并且在2020 年9 月，Snapshot 与Aragon 合作，计划新增链上治理的能力。通过组合Aragon 的工具后，Snapshot 或许可以演变为一套完整的治理解决方案，为有治理需求的项目提供低成本且安全的工具集。
竞争指标分析
目前Dora Factory 的产品仅上线了HackerLink，其核心的DAO 即服务基础设施计划计划于2021 年6 月附近上线，因此目前我们也是主要从已有的产品及相关数据进行简要对比。
二次方投票
二次方投票是购买投票的系统，每增加一票，票价就是前一票的两倍。换句话说，用钱买票，但收益递减。Vitalik 在这方面提出了一个称之为「二次方锁币投票」的二次方投票变体，通过将持有的代币锁定k 的平方的时间，持有N 个代币可以让你进行N * k 次投票。这一修改好就好在它随着时间的推移调整了激励措施：更多的投票权力要求投票者长时间坚持自己的决定。在代币化的世界里，进出某个社区的难度很小，因此这一点尤其重要。
Gitcoin 的核心功能与Dora Factory 类似，都致力于是采用二次方投票的方式对项目进行众筹及Grant 的配置。Gitcoin 初衷是解决以太坊生态中的公共产品（Public Goods) 融资低效的问题。作为以太坊的「军火库」，Gitcoin 通过二次方投票已帮助过数百个项目完成起步融资。
对比Dora Factory，其在近期刚举办的BSC Grant1 中也使用了二次方投票，让BNB 的持币用户为BSC 最新生态项目投票支持。最终吸引了80 万美金的社区捐赠，他们被分配给了108 个BSC 生态新项目。有1 万多个地址参与到了本次线上Grant 的投票环节中。
此外Dora Factory 在北京与币安智能链合作的黑客马拉松中也使用了二次方投票，5000 多位社区用户为19 个项目投出了1 万多票。大赛奖金池本来只有1 万多美元，但是社区投出了8 万美元。变成了一个奖金池接近10 万美元的线下黑客马拉松。
虽然Gitcoin 成立较早，在业内有不错的口碑及生态，短期内难以被超越。但从Dora Factory 近期刚刚起步就取得的规模来看，同样具有一定的竞争力。
治理费用
Dora Factory 是基于波卡的多链DAO 即服务基础设施。因为是前期主要是在波卡生态上开发，所以其链上治理成本天然优于像Aragon 这类的在以太坊上开发的DAO 项目，后期以太坊二层问题如能有效解决，那么在以太坊链上治理Gas 费用也会大幅降低。
而Snapshot 由于治理过程是在链下所以无需Gas 费用，但在链下治理中，一个提案开发者同意了，矿工可以反对，用户也可以反对，达成决策的效率相对较低。而链上治理的话，能够确保整个流程是透明公开的，整个治理流程是可审计可追溯的，而且一旦达成决策，任何人都无法阻止其执行。
生态规模
据Aragon 官方信息显示，目前Aragon 平台中创建的组织数量超1,700 个，管理资金总额过9 亿美金，生态建设较为完善，有实际的业务数据支撑，发展至今Aragon 已然成为以太坊生态上DAO 赛道的龙头。
据Gitcoin 官方数据显示，目前在其平台上每个月有161,206 名活跃的开发人员（但只有1% 创建了链上交易），赏金任务的完成率达到78.9%。自2017 年11 月推出以来，Gitcoin Grants 已举办过9 期捐助计划，覆盖了1588 个项目，总计284,503 名捐赠者参与，产生324,386 笔完整交易，累计帮助项目方筹得1012 万美金。是目前当之无愧的以太坊「军火库」。
目前已有606 个项目使用Snapshot，基本包括了目前业内所有知名的DeFi 项目。其通过无Gas 投票解决了去中心化自治组织运作和治理的最大痛点，也许可以促成一种分层治理结构的全新实验。
DAOHaus 生态中最常见的组织是风投类型的DAO 组织。该社区筹集的金额已经超过了2000 万美元，其中，1000 万美元分配给生态系统中的各个DAO 组织，以支持其发展。
而相较于Dora Factory 由于起步较晚，目前生态规模是远不及上述几个项目的。虽然从前期举办的二次方投票的数据结果来看，Dora Factory 拥有一定的社区参与度，但后续仍需要项目方做出更多的努力才能迎头赶上。
其他指标
此外我们关注DAO 项目还可以从治理机制效率、社区参与率与公平性这几个比较重要的维度出发，去评判一个DAO 项目的优劣。
治理机制效率：提案投票周期的长短即社区执行一次治理提案所需要的时间，DAO 项目治理周期通常比较长。因为将权力下放至社区，执行或通过某项提案的时间势必比由少数人抉择的中心化组织要长得多。如果决策周期过于长久，可能对项目的发展速度有所影响。Aragon 目前的平均一次治理提案的时间在一周左右
社区参与率：由于一个人可以拥有多个地址，无法统计精准的参与人数，所以区块链中社区参与率通常指对提案进行投票的代币数量占比。将权力下放至社区也就意味着决定项目发展方向的权力掌握在社区手中。健康发展的生态系统往往离不开社区的支持，社区参与率低说明此提案没有得到充分的仲裁，大多数成员更倾向于投机，他们可能只是持币待涨，但却漠视社区的发展与建设。此外，社区人数可能也是影响参与率的因素之一。如果一个项目本身人数比较少，往往都是同一拨人对提案进行投票的话，说明并没有达到去中心化的效果。
治理机制的公平性：指的是DAO 平台提供的治理机制（如争议仲裁）在何种程度上平衡各方的应得利益。在链上治理的投票过程中，假设目前的提案内容为「是否要引入某项加密技术」，如果密码学家和普通持币者的投票权重一样的话显然是不公平的。但是链上意味着我们无法判定哪些参与者是专业人士，哪些是普通人士。所以，根据持币来划分权重反倒是最容易执行的。目前大多数DAO 项目的治理都是采用「一币一投票」的形式，当然这种形式的公平性仅仅是相对于中心化的决策而言。
上面我们提到了像Aragon 这类的通用型DAO 项目，如果未来跨链问题能够解决，那么像在以太坊上深耕多年的诸如Aragon 这类的通用型DAO 项目，迁移到波卡，这无疑会对波卡生态上的DAO 项目产生一定的冲击。
目前整体上来看，Dora Factory 要实现的愿景与Aragon、Gitcoin 此类的通用型DAO 项目有许多相似之处。那么后续用户为什么选择你而不是其他的DAO 平台，就要比拼项目之间的其他指标。一个旨在让持币人进行包容性参与的有效治理体系，必须具备用户体验好、摩擦小、且以去中心化和公平公开作为基础的特点。
行业前景
2020 年，流动性挖矿成为了协议项目向早期核心用户分发代币的创新激励机制，即用户不需要购买代币，只需添加相应的LP，就会获得代币奖励，而这些代币经常是一种治理代币。随着DeFi 的发展，产生了越来越多具备治理价值的代币。以Maker 和Compound 为早期代表，在过去的一年里，我们看到越来越多的DeFi 项目开始了去中心化治理。项目使用开源代码进行决策治理，并且将行动和资金情况都记录在区块链上以供任何人查看。采用DAO 的治理方式逐步成为当今世界DeFi 项目的组织架构。
截止撰文2021 年3 月23 日，全球DeFi 市场锁定的价值约413 亿美元[3]，而在以太坊上通过DAO 管理的总资产AUM （Asset under management）也高达8.77 亿美元[4]。去中心化治理创造了一个无需信任、没有边界、透明、可访问、可互操作并且可组合的组织。随着未来DeFi 的进一步发展，我们可以预计将会有更多的DeFi 项目与DAO 的治理方式相结合，DAO 正在逐步成为当今世界DeFi 项目的核心组成架构。
DAO 是一个大规模的社会实验，开放式的去中心化治理方式是值得追寻的未来，这片森林也吸引了无数开发人员为之奋斗，虽然目前DAO 产业仍不成熟，也还面临着诸多挑战和困难，但这并不能掩盖其巨大的发展前景。或许在未来的某个时间点，我们将可以看人们从固有的中心化治理到DAO 治理的大规模迁移。
总结：Dora Factory 属于波卡上的DAO，目前该行业虽然还处于一个很早期的阶段，但DAO 本身就具有巨大的发展潜力。Dora Factory 前期在波卡上依靠DoraHacks 全球黑客松活动和HackerLink 平台激励计划的支持，在起步上已经领先于波卡上的同类竞品，但后期如何将自身的优势转化为胜势，形成自己生态的护城河，还需要项目方后期持续的深耕，做出具有亮点的产品。
参考资料：
DoraHacks 成员信息，
https://www.linkedin.com/company/dorahacks/?originalSubdomain=cn私募轮情况，
https://dorafactory.medium.com/dao-as-a-service-infrastructure-dora-factory-closed-seed-funding-2970bb46afe5
https://dorafactory.medium.com/dora-factory-closes-second-round-of-private-sale-57e44e31c038Dora Factory 白皮书，
https://daorayaki.org/dorafactory1-0/HackerLink 官网，
https://hackerlink.ioDoraHacks 官网，
https://dorahacks.com/Dora Factory LBP，
https://pools.balancer.exchange/#/pool/0xc2acf2760945af149ac11cc8a2845f3d1ec59b99/aboutDora Factory 持币地址分析，
https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/0xbc4171f45EF0EF66E76F979dF021a34B46DCc81d《「激进市场」和二次方投票| 用市场本身去监管市场》，Dora Factory
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/-JJrxharX4cOMtuVzUunDQ《A beginner’s guide to DAOs》，Linda Xie
《Introducing DORA: All Tokenomics that you should know》，Dora Factory，
https://dorafactory.medium.com/introducing-dora-all-tokenomics-that-you-should-know-38f93851fe38
