Soul in Code: The Story of a DAO

Foreword:

DAO is the focus of many members of Empower Labs. In the past period of time, we have collected information on many different types of DAOs, learned about their goals, types, operating models, legal structures, underlying contracts, etc., and also discovered some stories behind these DAOs.

Compared to seemingly hard-core research topics such as various product features, technical details, and contract codes, we are more interested in how these DAOs were formed, what evolutions they have undergone, what made them have a common goal, and what kind of souls are active in these contract codes.

As the beginning of the DAO series, today, we bring you the story of MetaCartel.

1. Birth

On September 27, 2018, Peter Pan organized a video conference, and 21 people from all over the world, including him, attended the meeting.

Peter once mentioned the idea of ​​Meta-Transactions on Twitter.

Surprisingly, many people were interested in this thing. So Peter created a group chat on Telegram for two weeks, and everyone agreed that this thing was promising and they could discuss whether they could work together to make it. This meeting was their first collective meeting, and Peter named it Community Meeting No. 0.

The word Meta is not easy to translate, it usually refers to self-direction, for example, Meta Learning means learning how to learn. Many places translate it as "meta", which I don't like.

Ethereum wallet users need to use Ether as a fuel fee to transfer money, otherwise the transaction cannot be issued. The goal of Meta-transactions is to allow third parties to pay fuel fees on behalf of users, so that users' transactions can be completed. Paying fuel on behalf of others is a transaction that helps users complete transactions, which is why it is named Meta-transactions. There is no doubt that this is a useful function.

In the one-hour meeting, everyone introduced themselves, discussed technical implementation plans, and discussed making a demo application at the Ethereum Denver Conference in a few months. There was also a girl who contributed her paid code hosting account to the group. At the end of the meeting, everyone discussed the name of the group, and Peter gave three alternatives:

FullMeta Alchemists – taken from the English name of the famous Japanese manga "Fullmetal Alchemist".

El Cartel de las Meta - Spanish for MetaCartel. Cartel refers to a market alliance formed to manipulate prices, which often appears in antitrust cases, and here it is obviously a humorous expression of meme nature.

Long Range Ballistic Transactions - Long Range Ballistic Transactions, a confusing name.

The name was obviously not the focus of everyone's attention. The relevant discussion lasted only 1 and a half minutes. Peter was not even able to elaborate on the meaning of each name. Everyone decided to vote for one after the meeting.

Peter put the full video of the meeting on youtube the next day. It has been almost three years now, and the video has only been played 199 times in total. However, the dismal number of views cannot cover up the significance of this meeting. Peter then changed the name of the Telegram group to MetaCartel, and an organization that wrote a strong and colorful stroke in the history of DAO development was born.

2. Growth

Peter didn't know what a monster this group would become at the time, after all, it was less than a year since he entered this circle. At that time, he was responsible for training UX designers in a company. Like many people, he was attracted by the big bull market in 2017 and entered this circle almost at the peak of the bull market. However, compared with most people, Peter is better at learning, thinking and expressing. After only half a year as an enthusiast, he wrote the wonderful "Before the Birth of Bitcoin", a long series of articles in his spare time. This series details the development of asymmetric encryption in recent decades and the magnificent cypherpunk movement, which are the inner spiritual source and cryptographic support of the Bitcoin community. ( There is an incomplete Chinese translation of this series of articles, but this version has lost a lot of interesting things in the original text. We are organizing a re-translation and hope to bring this wonderful series of articles to everyone )

With more and more understanding of the encryption field, Peter finally chose to leave the design industry and devote himself to this new world, almost at the same time as the establishment of MetaCartel.

Only a week after Metacartel was born, Peter went to San Francisco, where there was an Ethereum-themed hackathon. The seven members of the group met for the first time. They worked all night and completed two demonstration projects using the principles of Meta-Transactions, one of which won second place.

October 31, Prague, the 4th Ethereum DevCon Conference. More people in the Metacartel group finally had the opportunity to get together offline. Many of them didn't know each other yet, so they introduced each other, held several roundtables to discuss relevant standards and other issues, and successfully attracted many new people to join. That night, as many as 57 people gathered for dinner.

On November 1, MetaCartel had more than 100 members.

3. Changes

There are many teams that want to implement Meta-Transactions. In December, the TabooKey team made a breakthrough in this direction, which attracted the attention of the entire Ethereum development community. At this time, MetaCartel's own solution had not yet been developed.

In February of the following year, the Denver Ethereum Conference was another grand event for the Ethereum ecosystem. Although the market was already in a deep bear market at the time, the enthusiasm of developers was still high, with more than 2,000 people participating. There were many interesting things at this conference. The organizers set up a simple wallet system and stablecoins that can only be used on site for each participant. Whether buying water or hot dogs, it can only be done through this wallet. Zerion demonstrated their one-stop DeFi management platform at the conference, and Chainlink launched a bounty program for creating applications using their oracles. There is also a young man named Ameen who released the Moloch protocol for creating DAOs and launched an organization called Moloch DAO based on the protocol. (This is another interesting story. We have written an article about it and will publish it soon.)

Two members from the TabooKey and Gitcoin teams jointly introduced something called the Gas Station Network (GSN), a basically completed Meta-Transactions system. Almost all of the features of this thing are consistent with what Peter and his team conceived at the 0th meeting, and the presentation time is also the same, but the team that made it is not MetaCartel. This project was eventually funded by the Ethereum Foundation.

Afterwards, a total of 8 teams including MetaCartel decided to launch a gas station alliance project based on the existing foundation to provide Meta-Transactions infrastructure for Ethereum. Because it was a multi-team collaboration, the project was split off from MetaCartel. Most members of the group suddenly found themselves with nothing to do.

Although the matter was over, the team did not disband.

"Everyone still likes to mix together, even if there is nothing else to do." Peter recalled that period. "At this time, we realized that we had inadvertently formed an interesting culture. Everyone felt the power of working together because of common interests." "Cooperation, mutual assistance, and success" became the core value of MetaCartel. In the end, everyone decided to give the group a year to see if it can continue to grow and find other interesting things to do. Well, who doesn't want to get together with a group of interesting people to do things?

4. Transformation

For the past 20 years, Planet C has been under the totalitarian rule of Jeff and Wacker, the two rulers of Continent A. However, the situation soon changed, and most of the people were liberated as the army called the Eternal Force led by Saint Tosi swept across the world.

Things were quiet for three years, until one day five independent kingdoms split from the Eternal Force. Since then, Planet C has been devastated by war...

Does this sound like the beginning of a worldview made up by some poor game planner? Okay, this is not the original text. The original text reads:

For the past 20 years, the crypto world has been under the totalitarian rule of AWS Continental co-founders Beff Kezos and Wark Munderberg. However, this situation soon changed. Under the leadership of Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous Internet army known as "Bitcoin Force" swept the land and liberated many people from their influence.

Things were quiet for three years, until one day five independent kingdoms split from Bitcoin Force: EOS Empire, ETH Alliance, TRON Legion, SQL Continent, and Dog Republic. Since then, the crypto world has been devastated by war…

Isn’t it a bit interesting?

This is actually the opening of the newsletter "Game of DApps" maintained by Peter. Starting in March 2019, he began to systematically track the DApps on various main chains in a humorous way. At the same time, a podcast called Wizard of DApps was born, hosted by Peter and jointly launched by the MetaCartel community. In the past two years, this program has interviewed almost half of the well-known teams in the Ethereum community.

From then on, MetaCartel’s focus shifted to new applications and UX innovations on Ethereum. Throughout February and March, they were discussing the transformation into a DApp incubator.

Peter is a person who is good at organizing communities, and he is also very interested in the progress of DAO. Remember the Moloch DAO launched at the Denver conference mentioned above? It was a donation-based DAO that served the construction of Ethereum 2.0 infrastructure. Peter talked with Ameen, the founder of Moloch, several times, and then applied to join, but his proposal was quickly rejected - the first proposal rejected in the history of Moloch DAO.

The reason for the rejection was - poor ......

Although there is no clear written rule, the initial members of Moloch DAO donated 100 Ethereum. Everyone also regards this number as a default standard. Peter felt his wallet and could only take out 10, even though the price of Ethereum was only over $100 at the time.

He failed to join Moloch DAO, but Ameen himself and James Young, co-founder of Moloch, encouraged Peter very kindly, saying that he could fork Moloch to establish his own DAO. James also joined MetaCartel and was willing to provide technical assistance.

Peter was tempted.

Many people regard this as a key event for MetaCartel to establish a DAO, but I don’t think so. MetaCartel itself is a community that is very close to operating in a DAO way and has corresponding values. Whether Peter is rejected by Moloch DAO or not, MetaCartel will launch its own DAO sooner or later.

At the end of April, James Young heard that Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation intended to donate to Moloch DAO, and quickly reminded Peter that you need to announce the MetaCartel DAO before the news is released, otherwise everyone will think you are here to take advantage of the popularity.

On May 2, Peter published an article titled "Ethereum's First-Mover Advantage is Threatened". The article pointed out that the EOS community has a billion US dollars in funding promised by blockone (well, now we know that Peter blamed EOS wrongly), Tron has a $100 million DApp special fund established by Sun Ge, and even Binance is working on the chain. In the Ethereum community, support for innovation at the application layer is seriously insufficient. So, let's change that. This article is named "MetalCartel DAO Genesis - Part 1" (but in the end, there is only this part)

On May 8, Peter published the article "Forking MolochDAO", officially announcing that Moloch DAO will be forked to create a DAO that focuses on funding innovation at the application layer. Then Peter began to use his communication talent and talked about his ideals with members of the Ethereum community to win support.

On May 12, Vitalik announced a donation of 1,000 ETH to Moloch DAO.

On June 5, James Young helped MetaCartel deploy the DAO contract on Ethereum. At this time, they had received support from 9 teams including Matic Network, NuCypher, SpankChain, Gnosis, AdEx, The Graph, Abridged, Odyssey, and more than a dozen individual contributors.

With the first supporter depositing Ethereum, MetaCartel DAO was officially launched.

5. MetaMeta

MetaCartel DAO operates in the form of a donation fund. This is done partly because the Moloch V1 code only supports donations, and also because doing so will save a lot of legal and tax troubles, so that the DAO can be launched quickly.

In early July, MetaCartel DAO held its first member meeting. Peter updated everyone on the status at the time. The union bank had received 500 Ethereum donations and expected to reach 600 by the end of the month, worth about $180,000.

Their main challenges come from resource allocation and how to keep members enthusiastic about participating. It was proposed at the meeting that DAO members should freely form working groups including design, development, market, DApp, data, community, etc. according to their own interests to divide the work to handle different tasks. The working group itself is also a highly autonomous model.

At this time, MetaCartel DAO was still an endowment fund of only more than 100,000 US dollars, and there were only more than 20 formal members. This was undoubtedly an extremely ambitious plan. Soon they began to donate to the projects they were optimistic about. In 2019, they donated to 15 projects in total, including the now famous Zapper and DAOhaus.

And the MetaCartel community did not just stop at Metacartel DAO. They continued the Wizard of Dapps podcast, held an online hackathon called Demo Day, and helped several other communities launch DAOs. After the release of the Moloch V2 contract with more functions, they launched a Venture DAO, a for-profit DAO, and registered a limited company in Delaware, USA and bound it to the DAO to make a structure that is fully compliant with real laws.

Because of its belief in the future of DAO, in 2020 the MetaCartel community decided to shift its focus to the incubation of DAOs and position itself as an aggregator and connector of various community organizations. Remember the original meaning of Meta - self-direction. If we understand Cartel as an organization, MetaCartel has really become an organization for organizations.

The MetaCartel community itself is a DAO without a contract.

In August 2020, Peter joined 1kx, a well-known investment institution in the crypto field. Due to his busy work, the energy he devoted to MetaCartel began to decrease visibly. The Wizard of DApps hosted by him even stopped updating for half a year and resumed in June this year. But this is no longer so important. DAO has never belonged to one person.

Now, a large-scale ecosystem has been formed around MetaCartel, and it is still expanding rapidly.

(This is an old picture from 2020, it is much bigger now)

The story of MetaCartel is over for now, but the story of DAO has just begun.

In fairy tales, Peter Pan is Peter Pan, a child who never grows up. He takes the children to Neverland to experience joy, adventure and growth. The children will eventually leave when they grow up, but Peter is not worried, because there will always be new children waiting to adventure with Peter Pan.

(End of the article)

I tried to make the article as vivid and easy to understand as possible, but I must admit that most of the content of the article is still boring and difficult to understand, especially for friends who don’t know much about the blockchain field. If you have read this far, it means that you have a considerable interest in DAO and these stories, allowing you to overcome these obstacles.

Since you have read this far, I want to tell you that this is actually a community member recruitment advertisement -

Empower Labs is a passion-driven blockchain industry research and incubation organization, with core members including blockchain veterans, industry experts and senior coders. We believe that the rapid development of blockchain technology will lead to a large number of innovations, and these innovations will eventually empower the entire world and make humanity a better place. We gather together for research because of our passion, and the current direction focuses on DAO, metaverse, and the large-scale adoption of public chain technology in industry scenarios.

However, we believe more in the power of the community, so we need more friends who are passionate about new things (not limited to the blockchain field) and interested in open collaboration to participate and help. Blockchain originates from technology, but it transcends technology. Interesting things may come out in any direction.

Compared with business-oriented research, community-based collaborative research based on interests may produce more interesting things. Metaverse, cryptography, smart contracts, investment, law, and even management, literature, and sociology. Some fields are very close to blockchain, while others are not so close. However, even if some fields seem to be far away, it is not a bad thing for insightful friends to get together and talk about some wild fantasies. The collision of views among members from multiple backgrounds and across fields will surely produce a lot of sparks, and blockchain technology will sooner or later be bound by most fields.

If you are passionate about exploring new things and think you have the ability to think independently and discover information, you are welcome to join this community. We hope you make this choice out of interest and passion, because joining this community and participating in related collaboration and research will not bring you any direct economic returns for the foreseeable future. But we are sure you will meet many interesting people and have many interesting things happen.

A new world is just ahead, and we all need to explore it together.