Moloch DAO

Basics

• A DAO dedicated to funding in the Ethereum ecosystem.
• More can be read on their Github.
• From this article (27-3-2020):

"Building off the premise of a “Minimum-Viable DAO”. Ameen summoned the first Moloch DAO on Feb 14th of 2019 — kicking off the subsequent Year of DAOs. Since then, Moloch has gone on to fund over 20 critical Ethereum infrastructure grants to the tune of nearly $300,000."

• From Token Tuesdays (11-12-2019):

"Launched as a side project at last year’s ETH Denver, Moloch was the first attempt at a Minimum Viable DAO. It wasn’t sexy, but it worked. It followed almost all the core tenants of the original DAO with one major change - Rage Quitting.

As you may recall, one of the biggest issues with the DAO was how difficult it was to redeem your funds from the bank. In the event that the DAO funded a proposal you didn’t agree with - your shares were diluted and there wasn’t much recourse. With Moloch, the idea of a “grace period” was introduced - allowing people who didn’t agree with the outcome of a proposal a set amount of time to withdraw their shares before they were diluted.

As for the mission, Moloch was hyper-focused. Their target was funding ETH 2.0 development and seeing as it was entirely grant based, there was no legal issues due to a lack of profit expectations.

Lastly, shares were non-transferrable, more closely aligning the views and coordination of the DAO as a whole.

Within the first few months of deployment, Moloch collected over $1M of funding, including 1k ETH grants from Vitalik Buterin, Joe Lubin, Consensys and the Ethereum Foundation.

Moloch Forks

What we quickly began to see was the creation of new DAOs like MetaCartel which utilized the Moloch framework. These “forks” allowed for new communities to have different focuses while using the same processes (tribute size, voting period, grace period, proposal processing, etc.) to reach their common goal.

All in all, we’ve seen 40+ unique Moloch forks with a total of over 200+ unique members. While these numbers are by no means staggering, it’s showing promising signs of traction. Funding is being dispersed to talented teams, effectively allowing the community to continue experimenting in order to find solutions that work."

• Update (27-3-2020): "100 Moloch forks being created to date Some of the more notable initiatives like MetaCartel, Raid Guild, Rocket and Orochi have collectively aggregated more than 200 proposals, all of which have led to over 300 unique members testing the cutting edge of DAO coordination."

Upgrades

Moloch V2

• From this article by DeFi Rate (15-2-2020):

“Moloch v2 is an upgraded version of MolochDAO that allows the DAO to acquire and spend multiple different tokens, instead of just one. It introduces the Guild Kick proposal type which allows members to forcibly remove another member (their assets are refunded in full). It also allows for issuing non-voting shares in the form of Loot. Finally, v2 fixes the “unsafe approval” issue raised in the original Nomic Labs audit.”

Moloch v2 extends MolochDAO’s operations from grant-giving to investing in an unlimited number of assets. New use-cases included:

1. Specifying a tribute token and a payment token, which can be any whitelisted ERC20.
2. Payouts in stablecoins to skip share issuance and pay external contractors without awarding membership shares.
3. OTC token swaps with the guild bank.

Similarly, two new proposal types were introduced, both of which follow the same voting mechanics as standard proposals (no quorum, simple majority rules), including:

1. Whitelisting new tokens to be eligible as tribute
2. Removing DAO members via Guild Kick."

• Has been built by, among other community members; Raid Guild, DAOHaus, Pokemol and Odyssy.
• From the V2 announcement (27-3-2020):

1. "Multi-Token Support; Moloch v2 DAOs can now hold up to 200 different assets, as opposed to just one.
2. Funding Proposals; Instead of receiving shares for proposals, those wishing to receive funding can do so in any of the DAOs assets — such as ETH or DAI — without having to ragequit shares. This means a proposal can request 1000 DAI to completely mitigate volatility that arose throughout the two week processing period.
3. GuildKick; Getting sick of someone who’s clearly going against the DAOs best interest? GuildKick allows members to force a ragequit upon someone else through a unique type of proposal. The kicked member’s shares get burned, and they receive their pro-rata share over the DAOs underlying assets.
4. Open Submissions; Anyone, including those who are not members of the DAO, can now submit proposals on their own, as opposed to relying on a DAO member to submit it for them.
5. Trade Proposals; Hoping to have effective treasury management within a DAO? With trade proposals, DAOs can swap their underlying collateral, for example turning Dai into a transferrable, interest-earning asset like Chai.
6. Voting Updates; Once a proposal is submitted, it is marked as an ‘Unsponsored Proposal’. Any member of the DAO can choose to ‘Sponsor’ that proposal, effectively moving it from the Unsponsored queue into the Voting Period. From there it follows the same process as in V1."

Moloch Mystic

• From their blog (10-8-2020):

"Moloch Mystics has emerged as a joint production effort between LexDAO and Raid Guild Ethereum contract developers to make it easier and less costly for Moloch DAO members to form guilds, collect capital, and access external contracts for liquidity and other blockchain-native investment opportunities, in a memetic effort dubbed “More Modular Moloch” (v3)."

These will bring more functions and cheaper transactions.

How Decentralised is it?

From this blog (10-3-2020):

"Most Moloch DAOs to date have been permissioned systems, meaning to join these DAOs & accumulate DAO shares, a user is known to some extent. Although this permissioned structure clearly sacrifices a large amount in decentralisation, there’s been a huge gain in the alignment of the given community.

If the requirements to ‘join a community’ are to purchase an ERC-20 token on uniswap (Every token community) vs the requirements to join a community are to apply to join a permissioned group, then once accepted ‘pledge’ ETH to receive DAO shares. There’s a significant barrier to entry for joining the second community rather than the first. However, when we look at outcomes, with no direct financial incentive (Like holding large amounts of a speculative token or being paid a salary), Moloch DAOs have been able to deliver consistently impressive outcomes."

Investors

• Got itself funded in the first round and second round of Gitcoin Grants.

Community Members

• Ameen Soleimani; summoner
• Eva Beylin, contributor
• Cooper Turley; contributor (according (as of 1-2020) to his own bio on his DeFi Rate)

Partners

• Is named as part of the MetaCartel ecosystem (as of 1-2020 on the website)