DAOrayaki Research |Alchemy：A Decentralized Application for Budgeting, Collaboration, and DAO Management

DAOrayaki

6 min readJun 8, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount：200 USDC

Category: Ethereum, DAOstack, Alchemy, DApps, Collaboration

Contributor：朱莉, DAOctor @Daorayaki

Launch time：March，2017

Chinese Version:：https : //daorayaki.org/alchemy-yu-suan-xie-zuo-he-daoguan-li-de-qu-zhong-xin-hua-ying-yong-cheng-xu/

1. Introduction

Alchemy is a Dapp (decentralized application) built on top of DAOstack, a platform for decentralized governance of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

Alchemy is a budgeting and resource-allocation tool for decentralized organizations. It is an interface that enables thousands of individuals to coordinate towards a common purpose, by proposing and deciding on how to spend funds in alignment with their goals and values.

Some example use cases for Alchemy include decentralized venture funds, charitable funds, innovation funds, a budget proposal system (like Dash but more sophisticated), or prioritizing features for an open-source project.

2. Team members:

2.1. contributors

There is not that much information about the Alchemy dev team from as far as we know, major contributors on the Alchemy are listed below:

l Dor Garbash — — Alchemy lead

Steward at Terran Collective. Ph.d in social computing. Creating systems for collective awareness and collaboration is his passion.

l Stratis Karadakis — — Marketing Manager

Digital marketer, entrepreneur & blogger. Passionate about free thought, free speech and free market.

2.2. Partners

l DXdao — — The DXdao is a decentralized organization initialized in May of 2019 and has over 400 unique stakeholder addresses.

https://dxdao.eth.link/#/

l Polkadot — — Polkadot development is on track to deliver the most robust platform for security, scalability and innovation.

https://polkadot.network/

2.3. Developer

l The development team are available under following Github：

https://github.com/daostack

3. Alchemy Core products

3.1. Why did build Alchemy

Alchemy aims to support an alternative method of allocating resources within large organizations. Today, it is usually a small groups of executives who decide on the allocation of funds within organizations. This traditional approach to budgeting has a number of limitations that Alchemy seeks to overcome:

l Slow & Rigid:

Organizing meetings and committees is expensive, and often only a small number of decisions can be made. The larger an organization becomes, the more formal structures are typically put in place. These lead to a decrease in agility and less autonomy for employees, slowing decision-making and, ultimately, slowing innovation. For example, a survey of 400 corporate recruiters has shown that hiring decisions today take an average of 63 days, up from 42 days in 2010. This often serves as a bottleneck that reduces the decision-making capacity of an organization, or forces a very centralized structure where decision-making power is only given to very few people.

l Top-down:

the drawbacks of hierarchical, centralized, decision-making structures are becoming very known in today’s business world. Although “flat” organizations, agile teams and employee empowerment are becoming increasingly common, these new concepts are often not implemented when it comes to resource allocation processes, and often involve complex human practices that are hard and slow to implement.

l Corruptible:

When there are only a small number of decision-makers for a large project, bribery and influence on decisions by interest groups becomes easy. Research shows that the leading indicator of corruption in public megaprojects is first and foremost project size, whereas complexity, lack of transparency, and uniqueness are secondary causes.

3.2. How does Alchemy work

l Empower community members

ü Anyone can submit a project proposal to a DAOProposals include a project description and budget

ü Proposals can be anything from contractor projects to policy changes

l Make community meritocratic

ü Proposals are passed by community voteEach decision is the product of group-wide collaboration

ü Voting power is distributed to the community as “Reputation”An individual’s Reputation total dictates the decision-power of their vote

ü Members who contribute more earn more ReputationPassing a proposal rewards the proposer

l Coordinate any number of users

ü Alchemy handles huge numbers of proposals by boosting the most value-aligned proposalsParticipants in a prediction market predict which proposals a DAO is likely to passThe top proposals become “boosted”

ü Boosted proposals are easier to passInstead of a 51% majority, boosted proposals require only a relative majority, eliminating gridlock

ü Even with very high activity levels, Alchemy DAOs are able to efficiently pass value-aligned proposals

l Provide transparency and security

ü Financial and voting data processed on a blockchainBlockchains are immutable ledgers secured by software nodes all over the world

ü Records are both publicly available and extremely secureBlockchains are by nature publicly readable and cryptographically tamper-proof

4. Reputation Distribution

DAOstack’s governance protocols, which are highly modular and customizable, act also as the mechanism by which reputation (and tokens) are distributed. For Genesis Alpha, They will be using the Genesis protocol, which includes the following parameters:

l Contributors can increase their reputation by:

ü Creating proposals that get accepted by the DAO

ü Voting in favor of proposals that get accepted by the DAO

ü Staking in favor of proposals that get accepted by the DAO

l Contributors’ reputation might decrease by:

ü Failing to follow through on a proposal that they created and has been accepted by the DAO

ü Creating a proposal that does not get accepted by the DAO

ü Voting for a proposal that does not get accepted by the DAO

Since authority in DAOs is decentralized, a DAO’s mission cannot be enforced from the top down. Instead, there are two key parts to achieving a mission like Genesis’s:

Align its stakeholders through common interests.

Generate a coherent social consensus, or in game theoretic terms, a “Schelling point” around which people will naturally act.

For now, They propose to focus on a few core stakeholder groups, with the following target reputation distribution after one year:

Roadmap

Alchemy Earth is the latest version of Alchemy, a platform where users can interact directly with DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) powered by DAOstack, making collaborative decisions about budgeting, policy, and anything else necessary for their organization. There are three basic actions users can take on the platform: proposing, voting, and staking.

5. Funding

Genesis needs funding in order to attract a strong community of developers and contributors. At its current stage, Genesis receives monthly funding of $40,000 USD equivalent from DAOstack. The goal, shared by both DAOstack and Genesis, is to increase funding up to $70K/month by the end of Q1’2020 with contributions from other entities. Members of Genesis 1.0 will govern these funds in line with the mission of the DAO.

As stated prior, They believe the best way for Genesis to accomplish its mission is to form a community of stakeholders with skin in the game, the group with the strongest vested interest in this mission. In the following model, value is designed to flow through to the GEN token, so any GEN holder that promotes the functionality and adoption of the DAOstack protocol and the DAO ecosystem around it is contributing to the increase of the GEN utility. They introduce two ways for participation, both involve a combination of locking GEN tokens and receiving reputation (voting power) in Genesis 1.0:

l Lock GEN for reputation

Monthly reputation auctions will be held for a year in which stakeholders can decide how much and for how long they wish to lock their GEN tokens. In every auction, the monthly reputation minted is distributed between all GEN lockers, in proportion to the amount and time GEN locked, with the ability to lock for up to 24 months.

l Funding module to bring more funds into Genesis 1.0

They have initiated work on a funding module that needs improvement. The plan is for LGN to be minted at a predefined price per token. For this module, contributed funds are sent to a contract controlled by Genesis 1.0 and configured to release the funds gradually to GenDAO 1.0’s wallet over a predefined period.

6. Contact Information

Official Website:https://alchemy.daostack.io/

Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/TN3uBj86c1fMe2MJ

Github：https : //github.com/daostack/alchemy

Welcome to submit your DAO research and send it to this email address:daorayaki@dorafactory.org ,Share the 10,000 USD grant pool!

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