Edition 7: In Facts, abstracts and impacts

• 🔥 The New Stuff: Impact, Revocability, Merging and Airdrops

• 🏛 The 101 Stuff: Its nothing to do with weed

• 🧠 The Deep Stuff: An optimistic look at the future (don’t worry pessimists, its not real)

• 🌎 The IRL Stuff: Imaginations and Storytelling

• 📜 The Long Stuff: KO has called, and Rohan will answer! (kind of)

The big KO - Kevin Owocki, co-founder of Gitcoin – challenged us newsletter monkeys to consistently update and publish knowledge on Impact DAOs. So, we’re announcing below our humble contribution to this endeavour, published on Mirror, soon.

The debate over DeSoc and SBTs is still getting airtime. Questions involve ‘revocability’ and ‘consent’ (I might drop a token into your wallet to denote a truth, like ‘Sidney spoke at Eth Denver’; but Sidney might not consent to that truth being the true thing she wants known about her, from her wallet), among others. However, in-public iterations to the original concepts in the paper is encouraging so far. For those of use accustomed to academics, everyone’s seemingly playing nice and being constructive (mostly).

No idea what SBTs are? New to SJ? Try our 101 of the original paper by Ohlhaver, Weyl & Buterin.

The first Ethereum merge test-run was completed yesterday.

Proof-of-Stake, here we come: predicted to reduce energy consumption by up to 90%, increasing security, and rewarding hodlers of Eth via staking at the Ethereum Foundation. Don’t drop your trousers yet though: the full implementation timeline is two years, and this is only stage 2 of that journey.

One of Ethereum's issues is its expensive. Verifying transactions when many others are trying to verify theirs eats the network. This can, at its worst, send costs so high that some blockchain use cases become non-viable, erecting insurmountable barriers to global adoption for Eth (average gas fees in April were 1/3 of the average monthly salary in Ghana, for example).

There are however, a number of solutions being worked on.

One such solution is Layer 2 Blockchains. These are built on top of existing blockchains (referred to as Layer 1 e.g. Ethereum). But the design/infrastructure of the Layer 2’s allows for higher transaction throughputs at significantly reduced cost to Layer 1s.

Optimism is a Layer2 Blockchain built on top of Ethereum and holds a special place in the hearts of regens for one big reason: Optimism committed to give all profits made from sequencing to fund public goods. Amazing!

All was going well, Optimism announced an airdrop of $OP to reward early adopters, regular users, DAO voters and Gitcoin grant donators. But your community's true level of commitment (and perhaps, will to sacrifice) to your cause will always be impossible to accurately assess. Add to this that airdrops are hard to pull off, and projects have some work to do.

The highly anticipated airdrop ended up something of a regen disappointment. The Optimism claim page crashed under high traffic, communication with the public was accused of being off, and then, someone forgot to add a pause function to the smart contract. Within the first 24 hours 84% of the airdrop had been sold off. First launching at $4.50 the token then dropped to between $0.80 - $2.00 with $135m traded on Binance alone in the first day.

The Optimism team debriefed, got some sleep and started the post-airdrop work. But worse was on its way. A partnership with Wintermute was created to help provide liquidity for $OP trading. Wintermute provided Optimism with a multi-sig wallet into which to transfer 20m $OP tokens. They tested it, then sent the whole bag. The only problem was that Wintermute had not deployed that multi-sig to the Optimism Layer 2 chain; the same chain that the 20m $OP transfer had just been transferred on.

Sounds complex? Don't worry, here's the TLDR: some opportunist noticed an error, quickly created a wallet and claimed the 20m tokens for their own. The hacker has so far sold 1m (circa $1m at the time) tokens and Wintermute’s open letter reportedly remains unanswered. It's another sad moment where the spirit of public good creation is undermined by Machiavellian tendencies.

We're suppportive of Optimism (we hold no tokens) and we're sending positive vibes out to the team. Courage to build doesn't always equal unmitigated success, but we at SJ feel that long term, being brave, learning from mistakes, and remaining true to purpose will deliver on Optimism's intention to provide crucial public goods funding. Keep going guys.

William Gibson said: “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

It’s as true in crypto as it is anywhere, so we’re happy the conversation around genuine pluralism and diversity in regen is gaining momentum.

Point of mo’ returns: What is a Schelling Point?

Some have asked us if the name of this newsletter references a Germanic predilection for purple palm tree delight.

We’re sorry to disappoint stoner-friends: ‘Schelling Joint’ is a play on the concept of a Schelling Point, referring (‘reefering’?) to a convergence point for a disparate collection of individuals. Put simply, it’s a (metaphorical) place we are likely to agree that we can begin a journey from, even if none of us know each other.

The game people often use to play this out is to ask: if we were all in New York, and we knew nothing about each other, and had no way to communicate, how and where would we find each other, and when? After a few iterations, you might land on: ‘under the clock at Grand Central Station at 12 Noon. This is because the probability of others choosing the same point at that time, is high. And it’s so defined, you could find each other there.

It’s basically a way of predicting the likelihood of cooperation, probabilistically (even if we don’t know we are using probability to figure this out). This is sometimes over- simplified to: ‘a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication’. But this underdoes the potential, and slightly belies the intention of its use in regen. In regen, a Schelling Point instead denotes a theoretical point of departure that we can coordinate around, when solving a problem in society or approaching a challenge. It’s a coordination fix.

That’s why approaching the creation, sustenance, and viability of public goods as a problem of coordination leads to the appearance of the concept of Schelling Points so often. And by the way we really want to be at the next one of these.

During our first 7 weeks of SJ, we’ve covered the up and downsides, the origins and explanations, the trials, and tribulations of regenerative cryptoeconomics. It’s all been about what’s happening. What we haven’t covered, is what’s not. The mythology.

Fiction is important to societal change in so many ways. Whether it’s the relationship between some of the strangest pillars of Silicon Valley and Atlas Shrugged, the connection between the science fiction of our childhoods and the future we build, or in the meta sense of every company (or human organisation) really being nothing more than an imagined story.

One fictional story by Kim Stanley Robinson (perhaps now for the author, regrettably), has become canonically important to some followers of (and contributors to) regen. The Ministry of the Future is an optimistic and profoundly effecting vision of how the world might come together to solve its coordination problems to counter what is, no doubt, the greatest threat to survival in the history of human existence: climate change.

A major event in the literary fiction world when the book arrived – drawing praise from Barack Obama to Bill Gates - attention sharpened even further in March and April, when the prescience of the first chapter of the book (written in 2019) came into grim focus, with a deadly heatwave in exactly the place Robinson storied they may arrive first. Ministry of the Future is a ranging phenomenon of a work, at the same time inspirational and terrifying. And it’s likely to be remembered as a seminal pillar in the regen canon for many years to come.

Any alternative vision of the future requires imagination, a point Phoebe Tickell made eloquently on the GreenPill Podcast some weeks back. With imagination we can envision alternatives: systems, economies, narratives.

The infrastructure of Web3 provides some amazing possibilities in governance, transparency, ownership, and programmable money. Yet it doesn’t come pre-packed with imagination. Human contributors have to bring that to problems of coordination we face.

Dream DAO member Oliver Yehlik’s recently addressed this imagination deficit in the context of climate change solutions, in his post “cultivating collective imagination of humanity’s bright future.” Oliver is just 18 years old but has passionate wisdom.

Here's a digest:

• Global problems, such as climate change, often have conflicting discourse.

• How we view our own power in relation to these global problems also appears to be contradictory

• Creating new narratives requires a wider view

• A wider view has to include those that have been marginalised through exclusionary conceptions

• Creating new narratives will also require a deep understanding of the human emotions within the dynamic.

• Storytelling, art and music can aid this emotional work, to create better togetherness and to induce inclusivity.

• The choice of what stories we tell is important, we must begin to tell new stories

• Stories may not provide all of the answers or the solutions but they provide the energy to stay in the fight.

A nice article Oliver!

Evaluating knowledge on Impact DAOs

Kevin Owocki challenged the blogosphere to consistently update our knowledge on Impact DAOs. Great idea, likely needed, and in theory, what could be a better living, breathing review of regen work in practice than some kind of weekly feature?

We thought about it. Asked: how can we help? What could our contribution to creating live networked (distributed?) documentation on who Impact DAOs are, what they do, and how well they’re doing it? Statically, we think the Impact DAO book describes 100+ Impact DAOs very well from the POV of a moment in time.

But, our world is impact. Our meatworld that is. Over 40 years between us in trying (and failing) to create change. Writing about this, researching it. Turning it into numbers and records. So, we thought our contribution could be this: use our experience in the non-profit world, including one PhD thesis, and one published work, in combination, to try to sketch out the experience of challenges that ‘impact’ IRL has experienced and suggest some ways that regen might overcome these (on & off-chain). So that errors of the past can be learned from and overcome.

Therefore, in a move that will infuriate all the marketeers that subscribe to SJ, we are going to divert your attention elsewhere and write an article for mirror.xyz on the lessons that regen can learn in monitoring and evaluating impact. We’ll give these challenges names and concepts, tabularise them, direct to further research and line it all up against possible avenues for solutions so that regen projects and third parties seeking to measure the performance of regen work can learn and innovate. For now, this can be our only contribution, in fairness to the organisations involved.

What are some of the things we are going to look at?

• Why measuring impact for non-profits has mostly failed

• The problem of attribution

• Local ownership

• Change, time, and space

• And lots more…

The TLDR is this: monitoring and evaluating impact, on chain or off chain, will encounter some major hurdles and resistance. Concisely sketching out the issues and suggesting possible routes to overcome them could be useful to those who create living resources for Impact DAOs later. So, let’s do it.

Article (Name TBD) will be out on mirror.xyz on Tuesday 30th June 10am CET.

We are keen to improve this newsletter and a core part of that is listening to the readers.... you! So if you have some feedback of what we could improve or even what you love DM us on twitter

Thanks for reading!