The game decentralized autonomous organization Game7 launched a new tool Wednesday that aims to help reduce the ultimate cooperation problem: social loafing.
Although it may seem that, due to their futuristic name, DAOs improve some of the fundamental issues that plague all organizations, this is not the case. As Game7 core contributor—and self-proclaimed “lead janitor”—Jonathan Allen explains, DAOs have a free-rider problem.
Many DAOs—groups of people who come together online to achieve a shared goal—offer a cryptocurrency when launching to raise capital and attract participants. But sometimes it attracts people who are just looking to make a profit, not necessarily those who want to stay in the DAO long term, Allen said. luck.
This can create problems for these DAOs later. For many, one token is equivalent to one vote on any proposal, so those who get tokens early can have a big influence on its direction even if they are inactive. Because of this, new members of the DAO may feel that their votes have no effect and become discouraged from joining the organization.
The new Game7 product, summon, intended to solve this problem by using a soul-bound token—an immutable type of NFT that can track a person’s reputation. The Summon protocol assigns each member of the DAO a soul-bound token, which keeps a record of their participation and changes based on their contribution.
The more a member contributes, the more XP they get, which increases their ranking and voting influence in the DAO, and which enables them to unlock more rewards. These statistics are all tracked by the platform automatically, which also takes into account the core members to decide who will actually participate.
“We think if we implement this more nuanced system, you can fix a lot of early balance problems, like hoping that the first 100 people in my Discord who bought tokens will join in five years and go contribution,” said Allen.
The summon was built by Game7 DAO members, and they will test the platform first in a closed alpha in their own organization before letting others try it. But Allen said the goal is to open it up as an open-source program with a possible software-as-a-service model for specialized features.
Allen said that Summon is not intended to replace other tools used by The DAO for operations, such as Discord or the off-chain voting platform Snapshot, but instead exists alongside these platforms and helps the DAOs will focus on their main principles of cooperation and decentralization, Allen said.
“Summon really wants to meet your community where they are,” he said.
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