ETHAmsterdam Frietjes — yip, Fries!
Bicycles, Canals, Cheese, Clogs, Fries, Flowers and DAOs, lots and lots of DAOs.
The Ethereum Foundation and Devcon team came together and organized a collaborative Ethereum week in Amsterdam. ETHAmsterdam ran from the 18th to the 25th of April. The DAOist was set to host the Global Governance Gathering — or GGG22 on the opening Monday, the 18th of April as well as Tuesday the 19th, at the legendary Tobacco Theater, right in the heart of Amsterdam. DXdao passed an on-chain proposal to sponsor the GGG22 as a Patron Sponsor. The agenda for the Devconnect week was jam packed with events hosted all over the inner city. Contributor’s days were filled with a multitude of presentations and workshops and they unwound to fun filled nights of happy hours and mixers.
This was another amazing opportunity for DXdao contributors to meet up IRL. The DXdao squad attending ETHAmsterdam was made up of a number of new contributors as well as seasoned veterans. While committed to decentralization, meeting IRL shores up relationships and strengthens collaboration.
Before you ask, “Sunny” did not make it to Amsterdam 😳 This however is no reason to be sad, we have a very cute new member of the community that we will be introducing at the end! 😍
There were just so many exciting happenings involving DXdao that it was not possible to make this recap any shorter.
GGG22
Day One
GGG22 started with a “brain-storming” “mixer” style event on Monday with access limited to key sponsors and attendees. There were no presentations or workshops of any kind and this was done with the intention of manifesting coordination between the DAOs. The main hall was laid out in such a way that all Patron Sponsors had their own tables and were center stage. This afforded sponsors the opportunity to be seen by all the attendees and sponsors and engage with a multitude of projects to explore opportunities for collaboration. DXdao, being a Patron Sponsor, was thus set up in the main hall. On display were the Copenhagen Flames shirts (which turned out to be very popular again) and contributors were ready with their Carrot Awareness Flyers. DXdao contributors mingled, greeted old friends and made new connections. The Carrot Awareness Campaign was a wonderful conversation starter and well received by attendees as an early opener on the first day.
Day Two
Day two of the GGG22 was set in a more traditional conference style manner, with presentations in the main hall and workshops in the conference rooms. Attendance was also open to the larger web3 community and was at least double in relation to the first day.
Nailing it!
DXdao was out in full swing on the second day! As a Parton sponsor, DXdao was entitled to a special activation and hosted a DXdao Nail Salon. Attendees could go and have their nails adorned with the unique GGG22 decals specifically designed for the event. This was a huge success and there wasn’t a moment where someone wasn’t waiting in line for an opportunity to have their nails done.
It was not all swag and nails. DXdao also had key contributors presenting on the main stage and hosting interactive workshops in the conference rooms. Let’s dive in!
Contributor Love
First up was Melanie who co-hosted “OPEN HOURS: Building healthy teams” with Loie from Gitcoin, Lenka from MakerDAO and Monica from Status.
Contributor Experience and on-boarding into the web3 space is a hot button issue for many DAOs and leaders right now. This workshop provided attendees the opportunity to interact with leaders in the Contributor Experience realm and gain valuable insights into dealing with issues they face in their own communities. As a leader in Contributor Experience, Melanie identified many issues communities face with multiple solutions and actions they can take to overcome these hurdles. It’s noted that communication was singled out, but for now no more will be said. Melanie has assured me there is more to come on this, so we won’t let the cat out of the bag here. Stay tuned!
Boosting the A in DAO
Chris carried the autonomous flag on the main stage and raised the compelling issue of DAO sovereignty (autonomous control & ownership) during his presentation on “Sovereignty in blockchains and DAOs: The emergence of internet-native sovereignty”.
Chris covered what sovereignty means in the real world faced by DAOs and to show that this sovereignty is possible in the DAO space, Chris presented two distinct areas in which DXdao distinguishes itself in terms of DAO sovereignty from other DAOs, namely sovereignty over the treasury and front-end ownership. He also demonstrated the day to day operational processes of this sovereignty to clarify these claims. It was a thought provoking presentation and leaves plenty on the table to discuss and explore.
The Carrot, definitely!
Sky hosted a “Workshop: How DAOs Can Use Community Incentive Tools” and introduced Carrot. Carrot was quickly recognized by the participants for what it is. One of the most interesting and innovative community incentive tools to date. While there are a host of tools out there that can be used to determine if a contributor or contribution is good, bad or mediocre, there are few tools if any that are as decentralized and autonomous as Carrot. Carrot’s strength lies in the fact that the campaign resolves in a truly decentralized manner through the decentralized oracle, reality.eth, based on predetermined accepted conditions that can also be determined in a decentralized manner. So good! So powerful!
Participants of the workshop totally loved Carrot and the potential it holds. They immediately raised the stakes by suggesting use cases with far greater reaching potential beyond simply adding additional followers to a Twitter account. While I could go on and on about Carrot and how well it was received I will end by saying that I found it interesting that during the workshop one of its first use case suggestions was in motivating communities towards positive climate change action and that this use case came up multiple times in other discussions with unrelated parties. It was suggested during the workshop that Carrot could be used to encourage the unfollowing of either one or a collective of fossil fuel companies. There were also other suggestions to drive action for social betterment incentives for the greater community good, like food protection, poverty eradication etc.
The general consensus during the entire week was “We love Carrot!’. I would venture to say that while we did not get many of the accounts of the awareness campaign to follow the DXdao Twitter, the campaign from an exposure point of view was a major success.
The rest of the week
Livepeer Panel: “Decentralized Governance: Past, Present, & Future”
At the Livepeer event Sky was part of the Panel: “Decentralized Governance: Past, Present, & Future” with Chris Eberle from Yearn which was Hosted by Shannon Wells from Livepeer. This discussion was all about decentralization and the strength that it gives products and organizations in the current environment as well as the importance of striving for maximum decentralization as early on as possible for newer organizations looking to organize a DAO and build web3 products. This was a good governance discussion by veterans in the space and they shared valuable insights to new and wannabe DAOs.
Schelling Point: How DAOs Can Use KPI Based Community Incentive Tools
At the Gitcoin Schelling Point event, Sky introduced Carrot. Sky laid out the background and key elements that make up Carrot and then presented its past use cases both by DXdao and the broader DeFi community. Giving the Atlantis World grant as a recent use case example employed by DXdao. Pointing out the uniqueness and power of Carrot’s incentive and liquid mechanisms. All leading up to the point that Carrot, with its KPI and liquid elements, makes Carrot not simply mining, but mining 2.0, with seemingly unlimited use cases. Sky used the DXdao Twitter Awareness Campaign experiment as an IRL example of a new use case for Carrot. At the end, Sky invited other communities or individuals to feel free to reach out and discuss and collaborate o:n other possible use cases for Carrot.
DeFi Day
At DeFi day Simon Emanuel Schmid was presenting “Putting the De in DeFi”. Simon invited John for a special guest appearance to present DXdao, Swapr and talk about why decentralization is important to DXdao. Afterwards, in a demonstration they published the Swapr subgraph to the decentralized network.
And now the moment you have been waiting for…
The newest member of the DXdao community…
Nimi
ETHGlobal hosted the ETHAmsteram Hackathon from April 22nd to April 24th. This was a massive event with over $400k in prizes up for grabs and the opportunity for teams to hack on 50 different projects. The hackathon was a grueling 36 straight hours, lasting from Friday night, all through Saturday and ending Sunday morning after which the closing ceremony was held and the winners were announced.
The judges received a whopping 165 submissions and only 13 finalists were chosen. The word “winners” was not used as the event organizers felt that they did not want to promote an environment of winners and losers because the effort and commitment from all the teams was of such a high quality.
We are VERY proud to announce that the DXdao team was chosen as one of the 13 finalists!
For their magnificent submission of nimi.eth.limo!
Nimi.eth allows users to host content on their ENS domain with a few simple steps on the dapp by combining ENS, IPFS and Lens. DXdao has consistently been a proponent of ENS domain hosting and has now opened the door for countless individuals to host content on their ENS domains.
Nimi quickly became a favorite and many attendees have either deployed content on their ENS domains or advocated for it to be done
You can find the official ETHGlobal Nimi showcase page here and watch the teams on stage presentation here.
Well done to John, Dave, Zett, Adam and Milan for an excellent showing and giving us Nimi!
No more!
While there still may be something that could be covered in this recap I will end off with some personal thoughts. ETHAmsterdam was a really big WOW moment for me! I have been a fan of DXdao from the moment I discovered it, but seeing the different contributors in action, both on the stage and off the stage and experiencing the feedback from the community first hand was just a phenomenal experience! I take my hat off to all the DXdao contributors, from those who ran workshops and gave presentations to those who attended them. You are all extremely knowledgeable and dedicated to pushing DXdao and DAOs in general, forward in the space. I am extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to be a part of the ETHAmsterdam DXdao squad.
I leave you with a few shots of Amsterdam…
