Ameen Soleimani, CEO of Spankchain, comes on the show to discuss his latest effort to fund Ethereum development through the decentralized autonomous organization MolochDAO. He describes how it works, plus we cover competition in the smart contract space and whether we’re seeing the emergence of Ethereum maximalism.
Full show notes are back on Forbes.com! See the full recap of this week’s recap of the episode at http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2019/03/18/how-could-ethereum-development-be-funded-perhaps-through-this-decentralized-autonomous-organization/.
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Episode links:
MolochDAO website: MolochDAO.com
MolochDAO on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MolochDAO
MolochDAO white paper: https://github.com/MolochVentures/Whitepaper/blob/master/Whitepaper.pdf
Moloch Github: https://github.com/molochventures/moloch
State of Ethereum 2.0 report: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PS0k9MaKPdPwEw3Uh9rq7USjq7LcSpT6ICQUXRij4YE/edit#heading=h.kdbgcss2wsc
Ameen’s tweet storm on MolochDAO: https://twitter.com/ameensol/status/1084652403889065989?s=19
MolochDAO tweetstorm with update on members, etc.: https://twitter.com/MolochDAO/status/1100516720563806209?s=19
MolochDAO presentation at ETHDenver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abTRJZcmPwI
Post by Dino Mark, Vlad Zamfir and Emin Gun Sirer, A Call for a Temporary Moratorium on the DAO: http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/05/27/dao-call-for-moratorium/
Ameen on the importance of ETH price: https://twitter.com/ameensol/status/1090319128810815489
Ryan Zurrer’s position on ether fund recovery: https://medium.com/@rzurrer/evolution-dogma-a-proposed-path-towards-ether-fund-recovery-9810f213e8ee
r/Ethereum decision on moderators: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/azyqdu/a_statement_call_for_discussion_from_some_of_the/
Ameen on the timeframe for developing Ethereum 2.0 relative to development on potentially competitive chains like Polkadot: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ajc9ip/ama_we_are_the_eth_20_research_team/eewscyf/
Transcript:
Laura Shin:
Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin. In case you haven’t heard, I am going to be doing a live podcast recording with Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum for the first Unchained Live, sponsored by Quanstamp. It will be in New York City on the evening of March 20 at Columbia Journalism School’s Joseph D. Jamail Lecture Hall. We’ll be discussing Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, governance, and so much more. We’ll have food, giveaways, and audience members will have a chance to ask questions. If you missed your chance to buy tickets, check out the live stream, which will be available on the Unchained Podcast Facebook page at facebook.com/unchainedpodcast. The discussion starts at 7 p.m. eastern time. If you’re listening to this episode after the live stream has happened, you can watch the video post-event, at the same link, facebook.com/unchainedpodcast. I look forward to meeting attendees and seeing participation from our live stream audience.
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Laura Shin:
My guest today is Ameen Soleimani, CEO of SpankChain. Welcome, Ameen.
Ameen Soleimani:
Hi, Laura. Thanks for having me.
Laura Shin:
You’ve been a sort of Ethereum gadfly recently, agitating for all kinds of change, but before we get into your gadfly activities, briefly tell us what your involvement with Ethereum has been to date.
Ameen Soleimani:
I got into Ethereum in 2016, towards the beginning, started learning about it, going to meet-ups in SF. I worked at ConsenSys for about a year after that, and then I left and started SpankChain where I’ve been working until today.
Laura Shin:
And so, in recent months, some of the things that you’ve been doing are that you commissioned the Kyokan report, which had a number of criticisms about Ethereum’s transition to version 2.0, you’ve been forming a DAO to facilitate and fund Ethereum development initiatives, and you’ve been trying to remove one of the moderators from r/Ethereum. What problems do you see with Ethereum today that are motivating you to do all these things?
Ameen Soleimani:
For me, it’s, you know, for SpankChain we depend on the system, this infrastructure, and we’ve invested a lot both financially and in learning about developing on it, and I want to see it succeed and I want to see it grow, and I want to see it remain competitive, and so for me, what is motivating all of this, is a desire to see things happen faster, and to prepare us for the sort of, maybe cultural shifts that we might need to go through as a community in order to be able to do that. So, the state of Eth 2.0 report, you know, I hadn’t been paying much attention to the Eth 2.0 development, but then once the specs started coming out and we were able to learn more about it, I thought, you know, let’s look into this, and try and find out more and see where we can contribute, and so we didn’t know where to start, and so the Eth 2.0 report was just the start in that direction.
Laura Shin:
What were the problems that the report identified?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. So, we talked about, a little bit of lack of coordination happening on the engineering side, so like the spec is being developed by an elite team of researchers, it’s Vitalik, Justin Drake, and Danny Ryan, and Danny Ryan’s been acting as sort of liaison between the researchers and the rest of the engineers, but there’s sort of gap in the engineering management, because there’s a lot more that goes into building a client than just the spec of, you know, that comes out of the research, and no one is really owning that part of it, and Danny wasn’t even really, even though he was sort of, unofficially, the lead, he hadn’t been widely acknowledged as the lead with both the responsibility and power that a position like that comes with, and so what our report pointed out was that, you know, maybe it asked the open question, like, maybe he should be in charge, and maybe we should be coordinating a little bit better in order to move things faster. We’ve sort of gotten into this decentralize everything ethos, and the people who are building rival chains are quite centralized in their development, even though the output of their effort is a decentralized system, and so maybe it’s time to make some compromises to centralize more of our development in order to accelerate to their pace.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. And also, from some of what was described in the report, it seemed like there was a lot of redundancy, like duplicate work, or things having to be redone by people or work wasted because of poor communication, things like that. So, those were the problems you identified in the report, but now we’re going to switch to talking about Moloch DAO. What are the problems you’re trying to solve with Moloch DAO, and are those different from the ones identified in the report, or the same?
Ameen Soleimani:
We want to help pick up the pace on Eth 2 development, and so that means trying to make, you know, submit proposals to the DAO that will fund efforts that might’ve otherwise gone unfunded, or to provide additional funding for efforts that we collectively believe in. So, the first one is actually, I submitted just recently, and it’s to pay Kyokan back for the report that we commissioned, and so that’ll get voted on over the next week, and then it’ll be funded subsequently the week after that.
Laura Shin:
How does Moloch DAO work?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. We tried to build the simplest possible DAO that would be able to coordinate a group of people and their capital in order to allow them to vote on how that money is spent, but try to be as secure as possible, and to do that, we wanted to emphasize simplicity of the system, so the way it works is that you can, there’s only a couple ways of interacting with it, you can submit a proposal, you can vote on a proposal, you can process a proposal once it’s done, and you can also then exit, so when you submit a proposal, you specify the amount of ether that you’d like to contribute, right now, the guild bank only holds ether, and then you also request a number of shares, and the shares will be newly minted if that proposal passes, so once you submit a proposal, which can either be for funding, if you want a grant you just don’t offer any ether as tribute, and if you want to, you know, provide capital, then you do offer ether as tribute.
Once a proposal is submitted, it goes into a voting period which lasts seven days, it’s a no-quorum, simple majority vote, so even if there’s just one yes vote, that’s enough to carry the day, and then once the seven day voting period is done, there’s a seven day grace period, and so during the grace period, anybody who did not vote yes, if they voted no, or didn’t vote, let’s say they think they don’t want to spend their money on this proposal, they can actually rage quit, and what that’ll do is they take any number of shares that they have, and they can liquidate them and get their proportional share of ether from the guild bank and they can do this for up to all of their shares, so it’s completely voluntary, and then at the end of the grace period, once a proposal’s processed, those shares are minted and everybody who is, you know, remaining in the guild is diluted in order to pay for it. And so, it creates this system where we can pool our money, and then proportionally dilute ourselves where we also have votes relative to how much money we put in, or have earned, through this proposal process if we’re getting grants for contributing our labor to the guild, and so that’s how it works in a nutshell. There’s a couple other things in terms of the game theory, but that’s the review.
Laura Shin:
And who can join?
Ameen Soleimani:
So, you have to…only members can submit proposals, so not everybody can just, you know, submit a proposal if they want, but if a member submits a proposal for you, and then you are voted in, then you’re in.
Laura Shin:
And what do you hope to accomplish? Like, you mentioned that first project which was just to pay for this report that was already commissioned, but that seems like a very small, you know, kind of thing to do, so kind of big picture, what’re you hoping comes out of Moloch DAO?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. So, this is like the zero to one, right, so it doesn’t look very significant, but it’s mostly intended to prove that the system works. I think over the next couple months, we’ll see a couple more proposals go out, you know, sort of in the same low thousands range, because right now, we just sort of completed the founding, which has 22 members that committed 100 ether each, so there’s 2,200 ether, about 275 plus thousand dollars going into this, that’s the starting position. I think this could end up with, you know, several millions or tens of millions or possibly even more, dollars, maybe not this version of the contract, but something like this in general, because the ultimate, sort of, vision for this is, well it comes from the realization the Ethereum does not have inflation funding currently, and so that means all of the funding for development has to come on a voluntary basis from people who already have ether, which means making it easier for people to pool their ether and spend it on the things that they want is really important, and so we have sort of two, you know, missions here, one is like, do useful things, and then the other is, show people that we can do useful things in order to scale up how much useful things we can do. And so, I can see this paying, you know, salaries or bonuses from teams, I could see it commissioning contract work to pay for development tooling as Eth 2.0 gets closer, I could see it funding 1.x efforts, I could see it funding Layer 2 stuff, like state channels and plasma, trying to focus more on where others are focusing less on.
Laura Shin:
Let’s just, because you know, you described how it works, kind of quickly, let’s just unpack it a little bit. So, essentially, there’s five proposals that can be submitted per day, each proposal then has seven days during which the members can vote up or down on it, and after it’s voted on, then there’s a seven day grace period during which members who, I guess, vehemently disagree with any particular proposal can rage quit, meaning they can exit Moloch DAO or they can actually, I guess, rage quit just a portion of their shares if they, you know, just don’t want all of their money going to fund that project or whatever it is, and then after that, the funding goes to wherever it’s supposed to go, but then at that point, is there any way, because like, so I guess in a foundation normally when they make a grant then they have these different reporting requirements to ensure that the goals are met, do you have any function like that with Moloch DAO?
Ameen Soleimani:
No. We don’t have a function like that. Somebody could run away with the money. There’s ways of addressing this though, for example, when typical grant bodies make these grants, like, it tends to be for very high amounts, the coordination cost is really high, so they only want to do it every few months or maybe even, like, over the course of a couple years, but in this one, if there’s a risk that the person you’re giving a grant to might not deliver, then what you can do instead is offer smaller incremental grants, and have one be every month, for example, and so that way, you know, if at any point somebody runs away with the money, then it’s only for a month’s worth of money, and I think in the future we’ll probably have, like, managers for specific types of tasks that are more trusted members of the guild itself, that then, you know, can even allocate and potentially withdraw the rest of the funds if they see that there’s some sort of foul play.
Laura Shin:
And it also seems like what you were describing, where you could kind of, mete out the grants, they could even be performance based, like, you know, once you hit this milestone, then we could give you more money, that kind of thing?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. For sure.
Laura Shin:
Another thing I want to unpack a little bit more was the rage quit function. So, let’s say that I’m a member, and I generally tend to vote yes, and I generally really like everything the guild is doing, but there’s just one proposal that I really, really hate and it’s been voted in, if I rage quit all my shares, then I run the risk of the members not voting me back in? But then what if I decide, okay, I’m going to rage quit all of my shares except for one, then after that point, how easy is it to increase my shares after that proposal has been adopted and is paid for? Like, if I want to kind of increase my holdings again?
Ameen Soleimani:
I think the answer is, I don’t know, because nobody’s ever tried it yet. I mean, if you rage quit all but one of your shares that means, as far as the DAO is concerned, you’re still a member, which means you can still submit proposals and vote on them, so it means it’s slightly easier than if you would have to exit completely and then ask somebody else to submit a proposal for you to get back in, but you’re still going to have to convince all of the other members that they should let you back in, given that you just sort of turned your back on, you know, them and the proposal that they just accepted, even though they tend to maybe vote on the, you know, even if they might not agree with something that you’ve put forth and voted yes on, they’ve still been on the hook for paying for it, so I think it’ll be difficult, and I think it might end up that you’d probably have to pay more than you tried to dodge in order to get back in, that seems like it might be the equilibrium point.
Laura Shin:
And then, there’s two ways of getting shares, one is to just essentially purchase them, you know, by submitting ether to get a share, but then what about if you submit work instead of money, how does it determine how many shares you get?
Ameen Soleimani:
So, whoever submits a proposal determines the number of shares that are being requested at the time, so it’s up to you to come up with a proposal that you think that the members will approve of, and then get it voted in. So, there’s some amount of coordination that needs to go on off-chain where, you know, you have some price that you figure out and then determine and then put it down, because if you’re submitting something for, you know, you want a grant and it’s too high, maybe people vote no, and if it’s maybe, if it’s too low then you might get it, but you’re unhappy with it, so the same types of negotiations need to happen where somebody in the guild who acts as your champion, they might, you know, talk to people, say hey, will you vote yes on this if it is 10,000 dollars, and they’ll be like no, that’s too high, I’ll vote yes if it’s eight, right, and so then you’ll determine what you think you can get passed and then you’ll submit that proposal, and then once you, if it does get passed and you receive the shares, the newly minted shares, then it’s sort of on you to decide if you need that liquidity immediately, because if you don’t, then you can continue to stay in the guild and then vote on new proposals that come out, though you will also be diluted proportionally from the amount that you got in the grant, but you could also pick any point on that spectrum, you could rage quit, you know, 70 percent or 80 percent and keep some in, or you know, all but one share in order to make it so that you don’t have to rely on somebody else to submit future proposals for your grants.
Laura Shin:
Okay. That’s actually really interesting because then it’s sort of like, you can either be paid in actual money or in power to then allocate more funds. So, one other thing that I wanted to ask about is that right now the price of a share is one eth, will that value remain constant, or will the value of shares rise and fall?
Ameen Soleimani:
So, that’s entirely up to the members. I think that it’s likely going to stay there for a while. I think that it could go up over time, if members think that there should be, you know, a coordination cost paid by the person who’s trying to join because everybody else needs to spend some of their time and energy voting them in, and additionally that, you know, every new member presents some sort of risk to the organization because somebody could spam the proposal queue, for example, and then make it so that the existing members have to adapt and because there’s no upgrade mechanism, and there’s no way of kicking anybody out, at least in this version of the contract, what we would have to do is everybody rage quits, and then we deploy a new contract and then everybody moves to that one. That’s the upgrade mechanism.
Laura Shin:
There’s something about it that has echoes of the DAO from 2016, and then the ensuing Ethereum hard fork, but like this would be much cleaner, and it’s like essentially, like a planned function, so…one other…
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. Go ahead.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Yes?
Ameen Soleimani:
I was just going to say, there’s similarities between, like, this kind of rage quitting and hard fork governance, where like, when you have something like Ethereum where the only governance system there is, is like, you know, you hard fork, and then every single node on that network needs to decide to move over to the new fork at the same time, and that’s how the network stays together, and rage quitting in this is sort of the same, it’s like, we can upgrade, and then you can choose whether or not, at that time, you’d like to continue being a part of this or not. Maybe future versions of the contract will have upgrade mechanisms built in, we left it out in the first version because, you know, we wanted it to be maximally simple and it wasn’t necessary, at least at this time, but you know, I kind of like it.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I imagine also, and this is actually a question I had for you for later, but we can talk about it now, I just imagine in a way, part of the reason you did that was because as we know from the previous DAO, these things can be very unpredictable and can go south very, very quickly. So, what lessons did you learn from the DAO from 2016?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. We are heavily inspired by the DAO of 2016. The DAO was actually my first week at ConsenSys, which was hilarious, Joe walks in on a Friday, the DAO hack happened, and like, buys everyone tacos and beer and we’re just sort of hanging out, and it’s like the calm before the storm, and then the next month, like, all hell breaks loose, and people start getting confused, and there’s a hard fork, and there’s a soft fork, and like, you know, all this stuff is going on, and then eventually, you know, we hard fork and move on. This all happened, like, in a month, it was a crazy time, but it happened because, you know, not only was the DAO hacked and that was terrible, but like, the gain theory of the DAO was quite flawed, and this is pointed out in detail by Emin Gun Sirer, a professor at Cornell, among with many of his fellow researchers, and they prepared this post called, A Call for a Moratorium on the DAO, and it had two major suggestions, and the first one was that you have post-vote grace periods, so that people have a chance to leave after a vote takes place, and the second one was instant withdrawals, so that at any time you can leave with the amount of money that you have a claim on, and we implemented both of those as sort of the guiding principles of this, right, we knew that we wanted security, but we also didn’t want to lock people in.
Like, when you were trying to leave the original DAO, there was an attack that somebody could do, I think it was called The Stalker Attack, and basically you create this child DAO for yourself, but when you create that child DAO and then you can withdraw from that, and the child DAO has your proportional share of the original DAO tokens and the ether and stuff, well, somebody could follow you into your child DAO, and they could keep doing that forever, there’s essentially no way to get rid of them, and this is exactly what happened, so there were further complications beyond just the hack, and we wanted to make sure we learned as much as we could.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. So, just going back to the shares, one other thing, or not the shares, but just how the Moloch DAO works, you mentioned earlier that right now the guild only accepts ether, but I read that you guys do plan to allow the guild to accept other tokens, so how would that work in the future, like would you even accept tokens that at least you, or some people in the community perceive to be competitive to eth? Like, for instance, I saw some tweets from you recently where you seem to view Polkadot maybe as a competitor to Ethereum, so would you allow dots to be used in the guild bank?
Ameen Soleimani:
I mean, it depends on what everyone decides, right? It’s a decentralized system, the decisions are made by vote, if we all pull a bunch of ether, and you know, then sometime later, we decide, hey, we’re going to upgrade to a new contract, it’s going to also allow ERC-20’s, and then we all rage quit, we move all our eth to this new contract, right, and then, people start submitting proposals, but instead of ether offered as tribute, they offer dots, or atoms, or what have you, then it’s on everybody to decide at that point, and it’s actually on an individual proposal basis if we keep most of the current system the same, like, you know another way of doing it would be to white list those tokens and then decide, you know, what can be accepted in general, and then do that as a one-time decision, but you could see this transcending Ethereum, that’s one way this might play out. It might be that this type of organizing structure is effective enough that, you know, and maybe there are positive sum ways of working with other, you know, blockchains that make it worth it to allow them to join.
Laura Shin:
That’s really interesting, but I guess, if I imagine how that would play out, I feel like it would be very strange to have different blockchains managed by the same organization, like, I would imagine there would be just, you know, other Moloch DAO’s or however you want it, as other DAO’s for other blockchains, but we’re getting super theoretical and this is like, we don’t even know if this is going to work, so…
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. I think it’s way more likely that people will fork it and like, I think I’m going to put a giant, like a title on this that says, steal this code, because I really want to see more experimentation. I don’t think that everything is going to be in this DAO, you know, this instance of the DAO, like the specific contract, I think people are going to run with it, and make their own DAO’s for their own types of, you know, coordination that they want to see, and we’ll all learn a lot from each other, and over time, maybe these things will grow in ways that they’re compatible.
Laura Shin:
And one other thing I was wondering about the shares, and this is just kind of a small technical question, but I notice that you built the shares so they’re not transferable, so out of curiosity, how does that work on the back end?
Ameen Soleimani:
It’s just the number on the contract, it’s not a ERC-20 token.
Laura Shin:
So, you don’t get a token…well no, but they have to have something, like in a wallet somewhere, right?
Ameen Soleimani:
Well, it’s saved by your key. So, when you join you have a key, and the key can never change, that’s your member address, and when you, the member address is the only thing that can rage quit, but the DAO also has a mini-permission system built in, so you can have a delegate key, and the delegate key can be the same as your member address, or it could be a different key, and that allows you to have, you know, maybe like a multi-sig as your member key and then like your MetaMask as your delegate key, and the delegate key can do two things, it can vote, and it can submit proposals, so you can have the sort of separation where like, you know, one key doesn’t necessarily have to have a lot of money, it can be a little less secure because it can’t withdraw the funds that you’ve deposited into the DAO, but the other key could also be like cold storage that you use to withdraw the money if you need to, or change the other key if it gets compromised.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Okay. So essentially, like, there’s a way where you can use or exercise your shares on different devices? Is that what you’re saying?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Okay. But you can’t sell them. One other thing is, I was just wondering, with the Moloch DAO, how do you mitigate the influence of whales, because couldn’t this just sort of be dominated by large bag holders?
Ameen Soleimani:
If we vote them in. And so that’s sort of the beauty of it, is that we have to accept that, you know, having a whale join would be really great, right, because it would mean for everything else that we wanted to do, you know, somebody else is picking up a lot of the bill, that said, the whale would also be able to influence votes, and so if somebody comes in and just, you know, throwing an example out there, like, exceeds 50 percent of the total shares and we vote yes to allow them in, then they have complete control over all the votes, however, all of us can leave at any time, so the second that they vote on something that we don’t agree with, that we don’t want our money spent towards, like, any individual member can leave. So, I think having this be completely voluntary, allowing the option to leave at any time, gets around a lot of the game theoretic problems with pooling capital, especially for something like grants in the first place. The thing that everybody’s most concerned about when you ask them to put money in something like this is, will I get bullied by the larger voters in the system? Is there a way for them to get me to use their power to fund something that I don’t agree with, and if you can leave at any time, the answer to that’s no, and it then also makes it so that, you know, people who might otherwise be able to control this thing, they don’t even have an incentive to try and do the types of things that would get you to leave, because they know you can, but if you can’t leave, then they do. See what I mean?
Laura Shin:
I do. I do. But it’s just one of those things where, until we see how it plays out in the wild, I’m not fully confident it’s going to work, so…
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. I’m also not fully confident it’ll work. I treat this as an experiment, and I try to put as many safeguards in place, but I think that, you know, the most likely failure cases like, you know, it gets spammed, or somehow fizzles out, but I think that no matter what, there’s a lot to be learned from this, because ultimately, Ethereum is a coordination platform, and what we should expect is like once we have these coordination platforms, like, as the cost of coordination itself drops, the most disruptive opportunities are the ones that require unprecedented levels of coordination, and so that’s what I’m like most excited for about Ethereum in terms of its impact on the world, and I see this as, you know, one high stakes experiment that we can run to further Ethereum itself, and also further our ability to coordinate on top of it.
Laura Shin:
We’re going to continue discussing a few aspects of Moloch DAO, as well as the importance of the value of ether after the break, but first a quick word from our fabulous sponsors.
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Back to my conversation with Ameen Soleimani of Moloch DAO. Earlier you mentioned inflation funding, and that is something that a few other blockchains have, for instance, eCash I think 20 percent of the block rewards goes towards development. Is that something that you think should happen on Ethereum, and if so, is there any mechanism by which Moloch DAO could make that happen?
Ameen Soleimani:
So, my answer is yes, but I do think it should happen, but I don’t think it should happen right now. Part of the reason is that as soon as you start suggesting inflation funding, everybody’s heads who’s listening is going to go, well who’s going to manage the money, you know, like, this is a conflict of interest scenario, like, how are we going to decide who gets the money and like, who actually is doing the most important things for Ethereum, right, and so like, without having a way to address that question, it’s dead in the water, and so for me, something like the Moloch DAO is also important because it gives us the ability to practice. We haven’t tried, except for the DAO, really organizing around our common interests and around furthering Ethereum in this way, and that’s something that would be required, right, if inflation is being allocated, it’s being allocated to somebody, some organization, some set of decision makers that have the trust of the community and are expected to then be accountable to the community and also use the money properly to pursue the interest of Ethereum and so like if we, you know, we basically need to prove that DAO’s work, first, and Moloch is absolutely in its current form, not designed to handle inflation funding because, you know, if a giant pool of capital just sat inside the guild bank, any of the members could just rage quit and take their share of it, so you don’t really want that, that’s not really what I had in mind when I designed this, but there’s actually an EIP that was authored by Kevin Owocki of gitcoin about inflation funding and I’m contributing to that and we’re trying to think about ways that we could evolve the mechanisms that Moloch uses to be more suitable for something like that.
Laura Shin:
Actually, just one question about the inflation funding. Obviously, bitcoin is an example of a blockchain that has been successful in incentivizing developers to continue to work on its development, despite the fact that they do not get paid for their work, why do you think that is?
Ameen Soleimani:
So, I think Ethereum needs to evolve more than bitcoin does, I think the point of bitcoin is kind of that it stays the same, there’s not a whole lot to do, maybe I’m missing something or being naïve, like, I think the lightning network stuff is really interesting, and it ends up still being, you know, people that made their money on bitcoin that have large bitcoin holdings that end up funding this stuff, right, or it’s like very profitable businesses that end up building on it. So, but like compared to Ethereum, especially if Ethereum’s, you know, building smart contracts, and competing with all the other up and coming smart contract platforms out there, like, it has a lot to do with developer experience, like there’s a reason that I’m building on Ethereum and not bitcoin, and it’s because, like, I can’t write something like the Moloch DAO in bitcoin where I can write it in solidity in 400 lines, and so the time that it takes me, the effort that is required to develop something like that that is secure, that is, you know, works as intended, matters, and you can put a price on that, and if that price goes down a lot for rival smart contract platforms, then it’s going to make more and more sense to build on those instead of Ethereum.
Now, there’s a whole host of other factors, right, the security of the chain, the network effects, open source libraries, stuff like that, but we need to compete on basically all of those axes and that takes a lot of development effort. Like another way of thinking about this is like, bitcoin doesn’t have a roadmap, right, like, it’s just supposed to do its thing, whereas Ethereum has a roadmap, there’s proof of stake, and beacon chains, and 1x stuff, and there’s even a roadmap beyond the Eth 2.0, right, there’s an Eth 3, and maybe an Eth 4 on the horizon, and so how are we going to pay for all this, like, either eth moons, or we figure out a way to pool our money, or we use inflation to do it, those are like the only three options that I can see.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. I mean, there’s so many interesting comparisons to be made, I guess, because, so earlier when you were talking about how it’s harder to program on bitcoin, for that reason, it’s even more remarkable that there has been continued development on it without any inflation funding, but yeah, I don’t know if I, I mean I guess, in a certain respect I do see what you mean about the Ethereum roadmap, like, maybe some of what Ethereum is trying to accomplish is just bigger in scope, but obviously, bitcoin development does continue, and there is a lot of work being done on layer two, that kind of thing, so you know, it’s not really like an apples to apples comparison, of course, but it is kind of like an interesting counterpoint. One other thing I wanted to ask about was, how does Moloch DAO work with the Ethereum foundation? Are the two completely separate, or are there instances in which both of you guys might be working on the same, or funding the same thing?
Ameen Soleimani:
Short answer is, I don’t really know yet. I’ve gotten closer to some of the members of the foundation, thus far, nobody from the foundation has, I think there’s one member of the foundation that’s also joined the DAO, but you know, none of the sort of executives like Vitalik or sort of the higher up people, and I think they want to have that separation exist, maybe they’ll join something like this in the future, maybe they’ll call it something else to be more palatable, but I think that ultimately, they’re going to be complimentary, so Moloch could fund things that the EF either isn’t paying attention to, or we could both fund some of the same people in the sense that like, Moloch could give somebody a grant, and they could do a follow on, or they could give people grants and we could give them bonuses, right? And I don’t think this is going to be seen as like, stepping on their toes, for example, because I think that as far as the EF’s concerned, like, I don’t think they want to exist forever, I think they’ve actually been pretty clear about this, that like, they want the space to grow, and they want the EF to remain roughly the same size, or maybe shrink, and so over time it’s going to become more and more of, you know, the ecosystem’s responsibility to take care of itself, right?
If you look at the beginning of Ethereum most of the people who are working on the protocol, who are working on the tooling, and so forth, like, they were paid by the foundation, and that’s very much no longer the case, so we’re already on this trajectory where the foundation is becoming less and less relevant, and so Moloch DAO is just one other effort in that direction, not to make them irrelevant, but to prepare, you know, the rest of the ecosystem to become self-reliant.
Laura Shin:
And you mentioned that there are 22 members so far, who are some of them?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. So, it’s a pretty broad group. It’s developers in the space, as well as some executives, so for example, it’s myself, Cassandra, who used to run the ECF, Sam Cassatt…
Laura Shin:
Cassandra Shi?
Ameen Soleimani:
Cassandra Shi, yeah. Sam Cassatt, who’s the chief strategy officer at ConsenSys, there’s a developer on Eth 2, named Joseph Delong, there’s James Young who is working closely with me at SpankChain, and AdChain before that, Arjun Buptani, who is the CEO of Connext, Martin Koppelmann and Stefan George the CEO and CTO of Gnosis, Giorgio from district0x, Mark DAgostino from Grid+, a couple early eth buyers, Griff Green, I think he, you know, he has PTS DAO because he wrote the original DAO, his comments in our group are hilarious.
Laura Shin:
I like that, PTS DAO.
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. So yeah, it’s a pretty good group. I’m excited because, partly because, like, the coordination is, you know, the sort of, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, sort of thing, like, we have some of the most invested in the space, in terms of, you know, personally, their companies, their reputations, their holdings, but also, those who’ve been around like a very long time, and really want to, you know, don’t plan on going anywhere and really want to see this grow and take Ethereum to the next level.
Laura Shin:
So, let’s now switch to talking about the value of ether, you have this, I think somewhat maybe uncommon philosophy that the value of ether is important, and that the chain should try to maximize its value. Why do you think the price of eth matters long-term?
Ameen Soleimani:
It’s absolutely nuts that this is an uncommon view, first of all. Second of all, the price of eth matters, like first and foremost, because of the security of the network. If eth is worth more, the network is harder to attack, like, full stop, that’s the point of all of this, like, if we build a network worth one dollar, then to attack it, somebody doesn’t need to spend very much money, right? The more it costs to purchase enough ether to meaningfully disrupt the system, the more secure it is for everybody building on top of it.
Laura Shin:
And so how do you think Ethereum should try to create that value?
Ameen Soleimani:
I see Ethereum as like this, you know, I see like smart contract platforms in general as the sort of like internet of blockchains, right, and everybody, maybe even bitcoin, we’re basically all competing on, like, the amount of settlement value that goes through the chain, so when you stake in a proof of…a stake system you get rewards from the transaction fees and from the inflation rewards, and what you’re trying to optimize for is that you want the most value to be settled on your chain, and so maybe that means directly on your chain, like, if I trade with somebody on Uniswap, right, if I’m trading as a reserve pool, if I’m trading on 0x and these transactions are actually happening from one Ethereum account to another, that’s settlement on chain, but it could also be that, you know, I run a plasma chain, totally off-chain, and some people from Ethereum have transferred their value into that plasma chain, and that plasma chain is still secured by Ethereum in the sense that, like, we can exit onto Ethereum and withdraw our funds at any time, well then every time that plasma chain checkpoints its hash onto Ethereum, that transaction matters, that is more value that is being settled, somewhat indirectly, but still on Ethereum, and so you imagine this network, and if you’re in like, the greatest number of shortest paths of value transfer, right, if your chain is also in between many chains where people’s money are on some chain and they want to transfer to another chain, that’s how you accrue value, that’s how you accrue value in the sort of, like, you know, discounted cash flow analysis, right?
The other way you accrue value is, you inspire people who believe in your money. Ethereum can accrue monetary premium if everybody believes in Ethereum’s future and does not want to sell, no matter what, right, that’s another way of going about it, and so I think these two things are both really important. One of them has a lot more to do with community philosophy, and the other has a lot more to do with, like, building interoperability into Ethereum, building effective layer two systems to bring plasma chains that accrue a lot of value themselves to connect with, and use its security, and some of it comes from, you know, the network effects around building on Ethereum in general, and maintaining Ethereum as the most secure chain, because everybody sort of wants to build on the most secure chain, which has a nice feedback loop.
Laura Shin:
So, I’m going to put words in your mouth just for a second, and you tell me if I’m right or wrong, but if I’m going to pull together kind of like all the stuff that you’ve been doing trying to make these changes happen on Ethereum, and your philosophy about the value of ether, in a way it almost seems to me, like, the reason why you want to help change happen more quickly on Ethereum, or facilitate it, is because you view Ethereum’s path to success as, essentially like, getting as much activity on Ethereum, or related to Ethereum as possible, and that’s why the value of ether is important, because that will be a reflection of that activity. Is that kind of a way of tying those two things together?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. This is what’s important for the long-term value accrual to Ethereum.
Laura Shin:
Now I want to ask you about something related. As you know, in recent weeks Ethereum core developer, Afri, actually I don’t know how to pronounce his last name, Schoedon, was driven from the project after he tweeted, Polkadot delivers what Serenity ought to be, change my mind. Were you on the side of people who thought Afri should be kicked out of Ethereum, or on the side of people who thought he should’ve stayed?
Ameen Soleimani:
I wasn’t really paying attention, to be honest. I thought that he was looking for a reaction, and he got one. I don’t think it’s what he expected. I think he made really important contributions to the space, like he was delivering code for Parity, the client, he was building the Gorli Testnet, he was acting as the release manager, like, these things are all important, way more important than any idiot on Reddit’s voice, so, no, I wouldn’t want to have seen him kicked out, and he wasn’t kicked out, like, he could’ve told all of the angry Redditers to go fuck themselves, and stayed on, but he decided instead to quit. I don’t know what he’s doing now, I don’t know if he wants to come back, but it is harder to come back after you sort of declare that you’re quitting something, and you know, I also, I’m not happy with whoever it is in the community that’s like, being super agro, like the stuff about calling for physical violence is never appropriate and that stuff should be moderated, but I also don’t think that it makes sense to look at those comments made by anonymous people on Reddit, and like, have that reflect the whole community, I think that’s a bit unfair, as well.
Laura Shin:
And what’s your take on a similar situation where I guess some people have been trying to ostracize the Aragon after they announced that they plan to deploy their smart contracts on Polkadot. What’s your opinion on that?
Ameen Soleimani:
I knew about that a long time before they publicly said anything about it, but I mean, if you get the goodwill of the community by saying that you’re going to build on Ethereum, and contribute to a chain, then you should also expect that, like, if you stop, you know, some of that goodwill might go away. I don’t necessarily think ostracizing is the best strategy there, I think we still want to be welcoming, but we should take a hard look at ourselves, and try to figure out what is the technical reason that’s motivating this, and like, can we address that? Like, is it that they prefer Polkadot people, in which case, there’s sort of nothing to be done. Is it that they prefer to build on substrate? Is it that they prefer to operate their own layer one? Oh, well in that case, great. Let’s figure out how to provide them the tools for doing that on Ethereum 2, if we, you know, have the wherewithal and the time to do that, then great, and if not, then maybe it’s like a, hey, we’re still friends, but like, we get that you’re either hedging or committing to move on, and that’s how it is. I don’t think they should be ostracized, I think they’ve done a huge amount of work in the space already, and I think that should speak for itself.
Laura Shin:
So, like I know you’ve been calling for the removal of one of the r/Ethereum moderators, and from your tweets about that I actually would’ve thought that maybe you would’ve agreed that Afri should be kicked out, or that, you know, I mean, I guess you did kind of say you understood why some people might be trying to ostracize Aragon, so like, how do you kind of square your position about the r/Ethereum moderator, on the Ethereum subreddit, it sounds like you have a more moderate tone about some of the others that are trying to experiment on other chains.
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. I mean, we’re talking about a guy named Ryan Zurrer, he is a director of Polkadot, and the Web3 foundation, I don’t know exactly the organizations that, you know, between who’s Polkadot, who’s Web3, but he’s been working with them for, I don’t know, three months, six months, something like that, maybe longer. I don’t think it makes sense to have competitors, like, people who have started to focus far more on competitors being moderators of the subreddit, that was the only point I was making. I don’t fault Ryan for doing what’s in his best interests, I think that it makes a lot of sense for him to basically leverage the goodwill that he’s already earned in the community as much as he can in order to, you know, make friends and attract people to Polkadot, but I also don’t think that it makes sense for us, you know, who are still focused on Ethereum to elevate his voice in giving him this position of status that the moderator position is.
We had a discussion about whether or not that is the case, and it seemed that that was like one of the biggest disconnects between the community and the moderators. The moderators didn’t see themselves as, you know, getting any sort of points for doing this, they saw it as a chore, some task, you know, an administrative function, something rote, whereas in the community, we looked to these people for guidance for, you know, to be examples of how we should act, how we should discuss things, and when Ryan continues to bring up, like, fund recovery, and then calls everybody who disagrees with him a bunch of trolls, and like completely ignores the, you know, points I was making about him being sort of duplicitous in how he approached the Ethereum community publicly, and how he did it, you know, privately, when he was trying to sell me dots, his reaction was like, to deny it and try to gaslight me and pretend like it never happened and that I was making shit up.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. And just for the record, he views your conversation as you trying to lure him into certain positions and then, you know, telling the story differently from how it happened, so you know, I think there’s two sides, and so it’s just kind of funny that I think both of you view the other person as having…you’re both accusing each other of doing things, and yet, each of you think that that person has done that to you, so…
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. That’s normally how this goes.
Laura Shin:
Hey listeners, this is Laura jumping in here after we recorded. I reached out to Ryan Zurrer to get his response to these allegations and he said, about recovery of frozen funds, that he never called those who oppose it, trolls, that he respects their position, but doesn’t feel that the issue has been closed, and that he’s allowed to support fund recovery. He also pointed me to a medium post from July 2018, that lays out his position in which he makes several points, but one is, quote, dogma surrounding immutability severely disincentivizes innovators from taking otherwise reasonable risks to build the technology of the future. I’ve linked to this post in the show notes. As for the description of the phone call, Ryan wrote via email, quote, in a short call that I had with Ameen, which was my only interaction with him, he was clearly trying to entrap me the entire time. He lamented his scalability issues and asked directly how I think Polkadot could be a better option for him than Ethereum and led the conversation in this direction. Ryan then goes on to say that he views Polkadot as experimental, but that it has some very interesting design features, quote, such as the ability to plug and play your consensus and security model and build your own chain, specifically for your users/use case. Ryan doesn’t believe that everyone should abandon Ethereum, but that it is prudent for developers to understand Polkadot and explore it, and he views the two projects as more synergistic than competitive. He says, quote, just because a team or dev experiments with Polkadot, does not make them disloyal to Ethereum, and they should not be ostracized, again, that is a maximalist view and unhealthy, as it leads to the online bullying that I, and others, are suffering from due to our desire to experiment.
Now, back to the show.
Ameen Soleimani:
I mean, long story short, I think Taylor Monahan, CEO of MyCrypto, like, really brought the community together because she took my request to have him removed, like, you know, and then instead of acting on it, she did the far more reasonable thing, which was to try and create a policy where everybody, and not try to create a policy, but try to drive a community discussion about policy that would be used to govern our Ethereum moderator privileges in the future so that she could do this in a scalable way, and doesn’t have to deal with it every two weeks when we all get our panties up in a bunch about getting some other mod removed, right? Which makes a lot of sense, and I totally support it, and the one policy request that I made was to have mods be at least primarily focused on Ethereum projects, and not competitors, which I specified would have proactively removed Ryan when he started focusing on Polkadot, with no sort of drama, right, it’s like a, hey man, we can see that you’re focused on something else now, we’re going to remove you as mod, it’s not really that important, but you know, anyway, like, there you go, have a nice day, right?
But it wouldn’t have removed Afri because he was still focused primarily on Ethereum, even though he was working for Parity, which gets money from Polkadot, like Parity itself also got, you know, a five million dollar grant from the EF, so he’s like, you know, at least in some sense getting paid by the EF, and working primarily on Ethereum, so I don’t think it would have proactively removed Afri, that policy would have required him to leave, or be asked to step down in the way that it would for Ryan. Now, when Afri said, I quit, I’m done with Ethereum, then maybe the mods would have removed him for inactivity, but it also wouldn’t remove any of the other mods because they’re all working on, you know, status, or being paid by the EF like Hudson and Alex Van de Sande on stuff, or like, running MyCrypto which is one of the most widely used wallets in Ethereum today.
Laura Shin:
Hi listeners. Again, it’s Laura jumping in with Ryan’s response. He says, quote, the idea that someone has to be majority focused on Ethereum in order to be a mod, is Ameen’s opinion, and I respect that even if I don’t agree. If someone worked outside the space as their day job, does that mean they can’t be a mod? Clearly not. Ryan then goes on to say that he’s been a big Ethereum supporter since day one, that his largest crypto holding by a significant margin is eth, that he was the sponsor of the DAO whitehat group, that he’s been a mod since 2016, and has faithfully executed his duties in that role, that he’s invested and indirectly helped dozens of Ethereum projects including rewriting the original Maker DAO white paper with the team and advising it through its development, among other activities. Then he says, quote, the fact that I support other experiments in the space should not take away from the contributions I have made and will continue to make in Ethereum, nor do they preclude me from being a moderator of r/Ethereum, as has been decided by the other mods. And just to clarify what that means, there was an announcement on r/Ethereum that no current mods will be removed at this time, and that they will remove moderators when, and if, they are not upholding their duty as a moderator. I’ll also link to that in the show notes.
Back to my conversation with Ameen.
Laura Shin:
For years I’ve been interviewing various people who have said things to me about how they gravitated toward Ethereum after having unpleasant experiences with the bitcoin community, and a lot of those people kind of like, decried bitcoin maximalism or any kind of maximalism, and obviously we’ve seen over the years that Ethereum has been very welcoming to other projects, so for instance, zCash and Eternity went to Devcon 4, but I feel like in recent weeks we’ve seen a sort of Ethereum maximalism emerge with the Afri situation, people are getting really mad about Aragon deploying on Polkadot, so do you think that is true? Do you agree with that? And if so, what do you think of that attitude?
Ameen Soleimani:
Do you think I’m an Ethereum maximalist?
Laura Shin:
Well, actually, that’s a question for you. Are you?
Ameen Soleimani:
No. I’m an Ethereum, I don’t know if there’s a good word for this, maybe like preferentialist, or something, like, I prefer it. I’m not categorically for it, I don’t think it’s like the one, you know, chain to rule them all, I think it is in the lead, I think it could sustain its lead indefinitely if we play the game right. I have…also, it’s a little bit different when you’re an investor and when you’re a developer, when you’re working on a project, like, I only have time to invest in so many ecosystems, right, like I can’t learn EOS development and TRON development, and Ethereum development, and Polkadot development, I sort of have to pick, right? So like, it doesn’t really make sense to talk to, or accuse devs of maximalism just because they like one chain over another, or like they’ve invested, for me, a large part of this is just me trying to protect my investment, right, not just like the financial one, but like, it would take a long time for me to figure out another chain and how to build on it, and make all new friends, and it’s more convenient for me to contribute to the chain I’m on, and as I specified in the thing, I think Polkadot’s going to do really well, not have anything to do with Ryan, I think maybe he’s done a decent job of business development, but mostly because of Gavin and his, you know, army of like, fanatical open-source contributors that ship code every day, and so we purchase dots, I, you know, was pretty transparent about that. I plan to maybe poke around and learn Rust and work in their ecosystem, too, but like, I’m pretty conflicted.
When you ask about the stuff, it’s not like just a question of technology either, it’s also a lot about community. The Ethereum community has thus far embraced SpankChain, right, they give us opportunities to talk at their conferences and everybody has sort of come around to our mission being one that they support, and that’s really important for me, that’s really important for the community of adult performers, that they see that we’re accepted and that this is actually different than how they are used to being interacted with by the mainstream culture, right? Ethereum is different because it is welcoming and that is part of why it makes me want to protect it, and part of why it makes me want to, you know, hesitant to go to other communities where maybe they don’t feel that way. See what I mean?
Laura Shin:
So, I feel like you’re kind of wavering a little bit, so I’m just going to ask you, like, so do you think that somebody can be for Ethereum plus also at the same time, experiment with other chains? Or do you think that’s not possible?
Ameen Soleimani:
I started having open relationships recently.
Laura Shin:
Wait. You mean, like, in your personal life? Or do you mean for?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. In my personal life.
Laura Shin:
Or do you mean for your blockchain life? Oh. Okay.
Ameen Soleimani:
No. I think it’s opened my eyes to a lot of things. I think maybe we should decentralize relationships in general, but I think this kind of experimentation is fine. I think that obviously if you’re more on one side than another, like, you shouldn’t expect to, you know, be in a sort of management role in the other side, so l don’t know what, Ryan hasn’t like, stepped down or something as a mod, given that he’s far more a Polkadot maximalist than an Ethereum maximalist, and I think maximalism is sort of like a term that people use to describe, like, the incumbent now, it’s sort of lost all meaning, like it’s supposed to describe the fanatical, far end of the spectrum, but it’s basically being used to describe anybody that prefers one chain over another, so I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with using other technology, at the end of the day, like, most of the reason that I started building on Ethereum was because I could write smart contracts on it, and then what kept me here and what made me fall in love with it is that the community is amazing and the culture is incredible, and it’s really hard to replicate anywhere else.
Laura Shin:
If Ethereum 2.0 fails, what do you think the reason will have been?
Ameen Soleimani:
So, a couple things. One, Eth 2.0 could fail if eth drops precipitously and everybody runs out of money. Eth 2.0 could fail if there’s coordination problems and it gets delayed longer and longer and then people get discouraged. It could fail because of scope creep, so like people trying to jam too many things in into release, and not underestimate, underestimating the complexity of doing so. I don’t think it’s likely that Eth 2.0 will fail, I think that everybody working on it is super committed to seeing it through, and collectively, we do have the resources to see it through, it’s just that the timeline’s a little long for my personal liking.
Laura Shin:
And is there any way that you think the Ethereum roadmap should be changed so that Ethereum is less likely to lose its lead?
Ameen Soleimani:
I think that there are, but they’re not obvious to me right now, so it’s more of like a wait and see. I think like the beacon chain is pretty much the focus right now, and is enough of a bedrock that it needs to happen no matter what, maybe…
Laura Shin:
That’s kind of like stage one of the three step roadmap to Ethereum 2.0?
Ameen Soleimani:
Exactly. It’s like the first of the three stages, which are called Phase 0, 1 and 2, because people like to start with zero in this case. So yeah, Phase 0, it should be, you know, its test nets are up right now and should be out before the end of the year, and the plan is that Phase 1 should be out by the end of the year the next year, 2020, and then Phase 2 would be out the year after that. I don’t think it will take that long, I think with better coordination we’ll be able to do it much faster, like 30 percent faster.
Laura Shin:
Oh, really? Even though so far everything has been delayed?
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. I think like two years is a good target, not three.
Laura Shin:
Okay. All right. Well, we’ll see how it all plays out, and we’ll definitely see what happens with Moloch DAO, hopefully it won’t see the same fate as the DAO.
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. I spent a lot of nights writing tests, just like, please don’t be Stephan Tual, please don’t be Stephan Tual, and you know…
Laura Shin:
Who created the DAO, or was not the creator, but I guess one of the ring leaders.
Ameen Soleimani:
Yeah. I don’t know what he’s up to now, but like, yeah. He went through some stuff.
Laura Shin:
All right. Okay. Well, this has been a fabulous discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people learn more about you, and Moloch DAO?
Ameen Soleimani:
MolochDAO.com is the website that just went up, and we’re on Twitter @molochDAO.
Laura Shin:
Perfect. All right. Well, thanks for coming on Unchained.
Ameen Soleimani:
Sure. Thanks for having me, Laura.
Laura Shin:
Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Ameen and Moloch DAO, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you don’t have tickets to the first Unchained Live, don’t forget to tune in Wednesday March 20 at 7 p.m. eastern on Facebook.com/unchainedpodcast to catch the live stream of my interview with Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Raelene Gullapalli, Fractal Recording, Jennie Josephson and Daniel Nuss and Rich Stroffolino. Thanks for listening.
