DAOrayaki Reserach |Tally: On-chain Governance Dashboard

DAOrayaki

7 min readJul 7, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount：200 USD

Category: Tally, Decentralized Governance, Vote Delegation, Proposals, Data Analysis, On-chain governance

Contributor：Jones, 朱丽白，Daoctor@Daorayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/tally-lian-shang-zhi-li-yi-biao-pan/

Launch time: Tally idea were thought about in 2016/2017 by both Rafael and Dennison to come later on, in 2020 summer as a real project.

Overview About Tally:

Tally is an application that servers at empowering user owned governance through a voting dashboard, governance tooling, real time research and analysis, and an evergreen wiki, where Tally can be used to review data on governance systems, active and past proposals, and individual delegates or token holders. In addition to that the Tally app also supports direct voting and vote delegation, helping users put their governance insights into action.

I. Background:

Rafael Solari and Dennison Bertram worked out of a New York City-based crypto coworking collective called Crypto NYC. At the time, during the 2017 ICO boom — they met a lot of projects building DAO tools. In 2016/2017, they came across a lot of people thinking about DAOs, but it didn’t yet feel like the time was right. It’s really hard to build infrastructure for communities and organizations that didn’t yet exist.

However, in the 2020 summer, both of them realized that though something fundamental had changed: the communities and organizations suddenly exist! DeFi governances are DAOs. Today they are figuring out how to manage billions of dollars. The future that Rafael and Dennison were excited about in 2017 is now real. So, that’s how Tally was born.

For this reason, they built a governance app for voting, delegating, and creating proposals for on-chain governances like Compound and Uniswap with the goal to make on-chain governance work.

What went into building the Tally?

According to Dennison, every product is a journey, and if products builders are a startup, the path they take is never very clear. In crypto builders start a project on a Monday, and by Friday either the SEC is calling it illegal or the builder is getting profiled on the WallStreet Journal as the Oracle of TopShotNFT collecting. Everything changes so fast that it’s important to find a vision in the future and accept that teams are not only building for an opportunity, but that they are actually building the opportunity at the same time.

For Tally, that means it has to help jump start the DAO flywheel. In other words, protocols will build and fund tools to make governance work. Those tools will let even more teams and communities build DAOs, who can then contribute even more to the ecosystem. In a new space like DeFi, Tally can’t just think about acquiring users and customers, it has to make new users and customers possible.

At Tally, the core decision of what should be focused on is that governance should be like a Lego. If it’s a standard shape and size, then an unlimited number of things can be built on it. Taking for example the ERC20 spec. The interoperability of tokens, and the permissionless interoperability of money have made all of DeFi possible.

To that end, the team decided to start with building tooling around Compound Finance’s Governor Alpha contract. It’s simple. The governance is 3 contracts total, easy to reason about, and secure. After six months the team became more and more clear and about their idea: Compound Governor Alpha has become the defining building block for DeFi Projects and beyond. Tally have been active in giving back to the community as well by supporting efforts to create testing and development tools in the Graph Ecosystem.

What business model Tally follow?

Currently, Tally team is not sure yet! As they mentioned this goes back to Brian Flynn’s Treasure map, where they knew the opportunity is out there, but they still aren’t all the way there yet. Tally team wants to find a balance to the sustainability of themselves as a company as this ecosystem keeps growing. Also, how this team could create value that doesn’t detract from the vision of Web3? Of decentralization?

II.Team members:

l Rafael Solari — CTO & CO-Founder at Tally, Rafel worked as an Engineer at the Namebase company for nearly two years where he built out the API and USD payments. Also, before that he was known as a Data Engineer for Jobr, Inc where he spent more than 3 years as an early engineer.

l Dennison Bertram — CEO & CO-Founder at Tally Governance, Dennison is an avid futurist, artist and serial entrepreneur with a keen eye for the future of technology and its social impacts. He is known as an early block-chain technologist having founded the first Bitcoin Exchange for Czech Crown (BuyBTC.cz), a renowned fashion and commercial photographer that has shot for some of the world’s top names in Fashion and Commerce such as Nespresso, Heineken.

III. What Tally aims to accomplish: On chain vs. Off Chain Voting.

What is On Chain Voting?

On chain voting refers to governance systems where individual votes are submitted as transactions, and recorded directly on the blockchain. Submitting on chain requires users to pay a transaction fee for each vote.

Smart contracts can be designed to execute proposals automatically based on the outcome of on chain votes, removing the need for a trusted third party or cote team to enact vote results. Examples of on chain voting systems include MakerDAO, Aave, and protocols built on Compound’s governance framework.

Benefit of On Chain Voting:

- More secure than of chain voting.

- No trusted third party required to count or enact votes.

- Passed proposals can be executed automatically.

- Works well for approving protocol changes or other high-risk votes.

What is Off Chain Voting?

Off chain voting refers to governance systems where individual votes are not submitted as blockchain transactions. No transaction fees are necessary for off chain votes.

In token weighted voting schemes, users are prompted to sign messages with their wallet to vote, and the resulting data is stored via a decentralized file storage system such as IPFS or Arweave. While this storage mechanism reduces risk of vote tampering, a trusted third party is still. Needed to accurately count the votes and enact the results on chain using admin privileges. The most prominent off chain voting system, Snapshot, has been adopted as a voting tool by several protocol including Yearn Finance and Sushiswap.

Benefits of Off chain Voting:

l No transaction fees required to vote.

l More participation, particularly from smaller holders and wider community.

l Off chain votes can be recorded via decentralized data storage systems, reducing risk of vote tampering.

l Works well for sentiment pools or other low risk votes.

IV. Functionalities behind Tally:

1. Tally brings Greater Transparency:

In an effort to tackle the transparency issue, Tally’s interface provides a clear overview of each projects’ governance activity — as seen in the screenshot below:

Then at the proposal level, Tally provides access to who has voted and how. The app does this by connecting the user’s address to their social account, highlighting exactly VC fund, celebrity, or podcast is voting and why.

Compound, Uniswap, Indexed Finance, PoolTogether, Radicle, Idle Finance, Inverse Finance, and Unslashed Finance are all on there in addition to others.

2. Tally Allows Users to set up alerts:

Instead of having to do a research every day to know what’s going on and when, users can opt in for email alerts to be notified when a new proposal is up for them to vote on.

3. Tally Provides Better UX:

The powerful aspect of decentralized applications like these is that anyone can call the functions, which means stakeholders can vote directly from the Tally application of website. There is no need for an API access, users just need enough gas ($ETH to pay for transaction fees).

V.Contact Information:

Official website: https://www.withtally.com/

Discord: https://discord.gg/DYwEuNas

Github: https://github.com/withtally/

Medium: https://medium.com/tally-blog

Twitter: https://twitter.com/voteWithTally

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