On August 27th, DoraHacks’ founder Eric Zhang spoke with Robbie from The Rollup about decentralized governance and funding public goods in the Cosmos ecosystem. DoraHacks previously launched a grant program, the "AEZ Quadratic Grant," which utilizes pioneering on-chain community voting and governance mechanisms to provide vital funding for early-stage public goods projects in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Below are the key takeaways from the interview. You can watch the full interview at: https://x.com/DoraHacks/status/1828485174419702161
DoraHacks, The Rollup, and Public Goods Funding
Eric began by providing a brief history of DoraHacks. Established a decade ago, DoraHacks' mission is to build a global community and hackathon platform focused on empowering open-source developers, incentivizing them to independently design and build new products. Today, the DoraHacks.io platform integrates various on-chain mechanisms for decentralized governance, allowing decentralized communities to directly participate in the incubation of key projects and the allocation of funding pools.
As a staunch supporter of Cosmos, DoraHacks is committed to developing fundamental tools and infrastructure to enable democratic and fair community governance in the Cosmos ecosystem. Based on this, DoraHacks launched the Atom Economic Zone (AEZ) Quadratic Funding Grant. This is an important initiative by DoraHacks to fund public goods in the Cosmos ecosystem, highlighting DoraHacks' commitment to supporting long-term projects and the healthy development of the ecosystem.
The AEZ grant program was initially funded by on-chain validator yields; later, with the passing of Cosmos governance proposal 917, the Cosmos Hub and Atom Accelerator (AADAO) provided funding to support the program for 10 rounds.
Media platforms like The Rollup itself can be seen as a public good project as well: it provides educational content and aggregates the latest information to help users understand key concepts in the Cosmos ecosystem and the entire Web3 industry. This also qualifies The Rollup as a grantee, having participated in the AEZ Quadratic Funding Grant from the beginning. From this perspective, The Rollup agrees with the idea that "community support is itself an integral part of open source project development."
Exploring Innovations in Community Governance: Quadratic Funding and MACI Voting
The conversation delved into the specifics of Quadratic Funding (QF) and Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI), which are at the heart of the community governance tools developed by DoraHacks. These mechanisms promote fairness and privacy in voting, ensuring direct community participation in critical decision-making processes while mitigating the influence of large stakeholders (whales) and ensuring democratic resource allocation.
What is Quadratic Funding?
As a method of community voting in the AEZ grant program, QF allows all community members to vote for grantees using ATOM. The QF algorithm is designed to mitigate the excessive influence of whales while incorporating sybil attack resistance, resulting in a more equitable distribution of funding. The ATOM used for voting also directly supports the grantee teams. Robbie pointed out that, taking tax payment as an example, in the real world, people often cannot choose where their money goes when contributing to funding pools, clearly lacking participation in democratic decision-making.
The key concept behind QF is Quadratic Voting (QV), where voters do not have to choose a single option but can weigh their votes and costs to more comprehensively express their preferences, naturally leading to more diverse outcomes. Eric believes that this voting method has great potential to be applied in various real-world scenarios.
The Significance of MACI Voting
Eric explained that MACI was initially conceived in an Ethereum community blog post as a simple anti-collusion infrastructure. Applying it to voting is just one use case that DoraHacks has developed and utilized as an alternative to QF in the AEZ. In MACI applications, there is always an operator whose public key is used to encrypt on-chain messages (in this case, on-chain voting information), meaning that neither voters nor grantees can estimate the results based on on-chain data before the voting ends. After the MACI voting ends, the operator tallies the votes and publishes them along with a zero-knowledge proof, proving that the voting results are true and accurate while concealing the identities of all voters.
In the context of voting to determine funding allocation, voter anonymity is crucial to prevent collusion - not only are voters' identities private, but they also cannot prove to a third party how they voted. The user-friendliness of MACI in the AEZ grant program is also a highlight: DoraHacks has adapted the MACI voting system to the AEZ ecosystem by whitelisting more than 1 million ATOM stakers' addresses, enabling all members of this ecosystem to participate in voting. In the recent two rounds of voting, thousands of voters participated.
This extremely user-friendly form of direct democracy clearly appealed to Robbie, who commented that this genuinely community-centric governance model is a true use case for DAOs. Furthermore, by utilizing on-chain validator yields to directly fund public goods projects in the Cosmos ecosystem, DoraHacks has established a public goods funding model with a positive feedback loop, demonstrating the sustainability and longevity of this funding program.
Looking Ahead: aMACI and Beyond
While much of the conversation focused on public goods funding, the future applications of the tools and infrastructure being developed by DoraHacks could look very different.
Eric stated that decentralized governance is essential for all decentralized communities, and more efficient governance leads to more efficient community development. The MACI voting framework itself can be used by anyone and is currently accessible through the Dora Vota network - a Cosmos appchain dedicated to governance, developed by Dora Factory.
Eric went on to mention a flaw in MACI: the identities of participants are not hidden from the operator. If the operator is compromised, the entire project falls apart. This is why the Dora Factory team is developing an anonymous MACI (aMACI) governance product. In an aMACI voting round, users can register new keys to hide their identities from the operator, making the process truly and entirely anonymous while maintaining integrity through zero-knowledge proofs. This infrastructure will soon be deployed on Dora Vota and made available to various networks within the Cosmos ecosystem in the near future.
This development is particularly exciting because it brings about a truly trustless and genuinely decentralized protocol, which Eric believes few teams in the entire Web3 space can achieve. DoraHacks hopes that with the launch of the aMACI governance product, it will open doors for other use cases in decentralized governance, as well as new tokenomics, new products, and new functioning network states.