DAOrayaki Reserach |Orca Protocol: A lightweight Community Minting and Management Platform

6 min readJun 18, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee /7 Yes

Grant Amount：200 USDC

Category: Orca Protocol, DAO, Governance, PODs, proposal management, gas efficiency, on-chain voting, Aave Credit Delegation, Aave Governance, Solidity, ENS

Contributor：Jones, Julie, DAOctor @Daorayaki

Chinese Version:

https://daorayaki.org/ghost/#/editor/post/60bf30c957761003de362649

Launch time: Orca Protocol joined the blockchain community on December, 2020, and supposed to be launched in 2021 spring season, but according to the team it coming later this year.

Brief Overview about Orca Protocol

The Orca Protocol is a lightweight community minting and management platform, empowering on chain communities to create, shape, and act in ways according to their values. The needs and shapes of these organizations vary dramatically and existing DAO frameworks lack the adequate systems or flexibility to accommodate the range of use cases.

I.Background:

There is not that much information about the Orca Protocol since it’s a new project that has not been settle down yet clearly it is a protocol that concerns DAO governance and proposals management. It is no secret that existing DAOs have a usability problem. DAOs have traditionally been either overly complicated or not robust enough. Moreover, the current governance framework lacks ways to meaningfully manage hierarchy and permissions leading to voter apathy and misaligned voter incentives. On-chain governance has simply not reached its full potential. While traditional DAOs are interested in managing the thousands and potentially millions of actors in a single space, Orca protocol team is more interested in managing the many actors through modular working groups called “pods”.

By structuring an organization into smaller, more effective action units, (pods in a modular, lego-like build), organizations can better govern, organize, and manage themselves. In this modular system, organizations (through collective decision-making) decide their own checks and balances system while also allowing for collective ownership, group autonomy, and flexible hierarchical structures. Furthermore, Governance is an extremely complicated and usually a subjective/biased mechanism. Through the Orca Protocol, an objective modular governance tools are possible to build for organizations to build their own governance system.

II.Team members:

- Julia Rosenberg — Co-Founder of Orca Protocol and the Founder of Overlly, previously worked as Corporate Development, M&A at Acreage Holdings for nearly one year, and as research and development part for Lloyd Harbor Capital Management, LLC and Archutas Ventures.

- Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/JulzRoze

- John Sterlacci — Co-Founder of Orca Protocol Currently, worked as an adjunct instructor at Binghamton University.

- Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/johnsterlacci?lang=en

- Daniel Thompsom — Software Engineer at Orca Protocol with a background in research and languages. Daniel uses his fascination with the intersection of language and technology in his approach of coding, delivering creating and innovative solutions. An enthusiast of blockchain, as well as the disruptive nature of decentralized applications, and aim to use Web3 technologies to reshape digital communities.

- Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/fl0ridadan

- Steven Valeri — there is not much information available about Steven Valeri but as far as we can see from his Gitub profile he is more likely to be a Software Engineer at Orca Protocol currently.

- Github profile: https://github.com/stevenvaleri

- Gressha Mehta — Product Design at Orca Protocol, previously at Apple, Uber, and Spotify. Mehta is skilled in creating emotion-invoking and interactive experiences for people using the power of story. Currently, she is working as a product designer at Orca Protocol, while in the past she worked at Apple as a Technical Project Coordinator, Uber as a UX Designer, and Spotify as a Brand Designer.

- LinkedIn Account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gresshaa

III. What is coming behind Orca protocol?

Simply put Orca Protocol is designated for gas-efficient, Sybil-resistant DAO implementation using ERC1155. The protocol features a simple UI dashboard to manage DAO proposals and allow on-chain voting for on-chain assets, all secured using Gnosis Safe.

1. Orca Pods:

Orca is made up of pods: organizations that consist of a fixed number of member tokens each representing a single vote. Each pod is linked to a multi-sig vault to securely hold shared on-chain assets.

Pods are flexible and built modularly to accommodate infinite use cases including project governance, pooled investing, community management, and so much more.

2. How it’s made:

This project is build using Javascript and Solidity. To set up the Orca Protocol dev environment, Orca Protocol team used Hardhat/Waffle, and mainnet forking. In addition to ERC1155 to track the membership tokens, and when it comes to rules, they are stored as Structs that get packed into transactions and executed at runtime. Each pod is connected to a Gnosis Safe instance, and transactions are relayed through the safe. Furthermore more, the first integration included ERC token ownership, AAVE vote delegation, and AAVE proposal delegation. Each of these was encoded into rules to be executed by pods and tested against AAVE Mainnet fork. Additionally, tenderly was used for some of the more complex debugging.

3.Orca Protocol and NFTs:

NFT art volume shot up over $200M in March this year on some of the largest marketplaces, only to fall 50% in April. To detractors, this is the “end of NFTs”. However, art is the tip of the iceberg and we are rapidly seeing new user cases for NFTs.

The growth of NFTs led to the appearance of five new frontiers for NFTs that shift NFTs creating to a usage phase, below we brielfy list these frontiers:

Proof of Patronage: NFTs are keys to exclusive content & opportunities.
Co-creation & Collaborative Ownership: Rather than passively consuming content, fans now create content.
On-Chain Reputation & Identity: NFTs that uniquely identify past actions & allegiances.
Discovery & Curation Platforms: Platforms to find, discover, and organize NFTs.
Financialization of NFTs: NFTs are financial assets.

One of the five new frontiers for NFTs is the “On-Chain Reputation & Identity” as mention above, which are NFTs that uniquely identify past actions & allegiances, people will earn non-transferrable NTFs like “badges” based on actions they have taken. The NFTs that people own will be a unique fingerprint that identifies them based on their past activities. This reputation history will be used as an on-chain identity to unlock new opportunities. Thus, Orca protocol has become used this kind of reputation history as a “Proof of Membership” where it gives out NFT-based membership to working groups like a grants commitee for a governance protocol. These NFTs ca be used as credentials to unlock on-chain permissions or activities, like type of budger members can command.

IV. Contact Information:

Official website: https://www.orcaprotocol.org/

Discord: https://discord.gg/SuwhTX4s

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