The Lab Rats of Grindery DAO 1

The Lab Rats of Grindery DAO 1

There are any number of reasons why someone, or a group of people, would want to launch a DAO. Some DAOs are organized around providing infrastructure, like Aragon who provides open-source infrastructure with governance plugins for other DAOs. Others are organized around performing various tasks around a particular theme like RaidGuild and the medieval-style verbiage they use for their design and development agency. Some are built as one-offs, while others are in it for as long as they can operate. We built one to achieve a goal: painless payouts.

Back in 2018, when Grindery began, we wanted to create a way to circumvent the costs and inefficiency of conducting global payouts via banks, by doing payouts on the blockchain. As it turns out, we were too early to make that happen efficiently. But that didn’t stop us from starting down that road.

We started with a “legacy” product called gWork - a platform that initially allowed non-Web3 organizations to manage contracts and payment requests. Over the past years, we’ve transitioned to now being able to empower DAOs and Web3 projects to do the same, via that tool. 

Earlier this year, we launched Grindery Nexus, a decentralized protocol we’re building that allows us to build a more integrated, more powerful dApp. Developers can easily create plug-ins and extensions that allow their dApp users to configure integration between w2 and w3 apps without code. 

Our goal is to use capabilities provided by web3 technologies to improve traditional payout processes. The goal is not simply to replicate nor to build “the best web3 payout process” but rather to create a better payout process. Period.

 

Drinking Our Own Kool Aid

The Kool Aid

To show how this is done, we decided to serve as our own lab rats, so to speak, put our money where our mouth is, and established Grindery DAO 1; an experimental DAO setup with payment processes using real payouts for Grindery in August 2022. 

The best way to demonstrate a process is to go ahead and do it. Therefore, we built a DAO and decentralized our own payments. 

 

The Lab Rats

Grindery DAO1 was composed of 30 willing and curious participants and two sub-DAOs. Of those 30 participants, 8 of them (divided evenly between the 2 sub-DAOs) made payment requests to the Grindery DAO1 via their respective sub-DAO, while the remainder made their requests to the main DAO. This way, we were able to explore how the process worked with both a main DAO and a sub-DAO involved in the process.  

 

 

The First Sip

To prove our use case, it was as straightforward as:

  • Establishing the parameters of the Grindery DAO1 payment cycle to independent contractors worldwide. In this case, all payments in USDC via Safe triggered payments.
  • Authenticating the payee as a user with Metamask.
  • Payment was triggered by an internal control model that utilized Safe governance rules. For example, 3 of 5 owners must approve for payment to release.
  • The pre-payment documentation of payment request was automated to publish in a Slack channel for peer and customer review. This supports the approvers process.
  • Contracts and payment requests were set up in the gWork app.
  • Those with payment requests installed Ping; an app we built to enable in-browser deposit notifications to a wallet.
  • Grindery DAO1 payment cycle to other organizations utilizing the same process.

This allowed us to confirm and verify learning on our products, including Grindery Nexus and gWork, with a view to improving them and demonstrating that it’s possible to create better, built in public, tailor-made payout processes for any DAO, using Grindery and other technologies. 

This proof-of-concept also gives us insight into how to best build comprehensive training materials for future users of Grindery products.

The result of this payment cycle gave us the ability to capture this process in a use case of Grindery DAO1.  Not only have we captured that use case, but we have also tested it and proven it successful. Like any successful experiment, no one was harmed, and nothing was tested on unwilling participants. Just a group of proud and promptly paid lab rats.

 

Wrap up

With Grindery DAO1, we have taken the traditional payment process, transformed it via Web3 technology, and built a decentralized payments platform that greatly decreases centralized bureaucracy, while keeping the security intact. At the same time, due to the inherent instantaneous nature of cryptocurrency payments, we’ve eliminated the latency of transfer.

As we wrap up DAO1, we look forward to making some improvements in the implementation of DAO 2. This includes improving the Grindery Nexus user interface, improving gWork UI/UX, enhancing the Gnosis Safe confirmation process, and improving sub-DAO payment structure, among many others.

We have taken the payment system out of the global banking system and put it entirely in the hands of the individuals and companies, where it belongs: Payments without banks.


Want to learn more? Contact us.