Kadena has built the framework for the first DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organization, on its public blockchain called dao.init. As Kadena’s ecosystem continues to grow, the creation of a DAO will allow for the broader community to provide their input in a decentralized manner. The DAO will serve two purposes, 1) allow for the Kadena community to submit and decide on proposals that aim to advance the Kadena ecosystem and 2) establish a decentralized process that can govern the addition of new features to the Kadena platform itself.

One of these features was the main motivation for creating a DAO in the first place: decentralized bridges. It will allow the Kadena community to be involved in how the bridge is designed, and what staking/locked up KDA needs to be in place for decentral signers to be trusted.

This DAO is also meant to aid in the construction of a better DAO. The next DAO will be community-driven, have staking & an economic model, and have much greater authority over the entire Kadena platform.

Please note: DAO.init is a work in progress. Before launching to mainnet, we want to get community feedback on its process and features. See the DAO.forum discussion below.

The DAO has two main parties, the Guardians who submit and approve proposals and the Ambassadors who can freeze the entire DAO in place. A Guardian is a participant of the DAO who submits proposals for the improvement of Kadena’s ecosystem. This includes adding features to the existing DAO for more capabilities or submit proposals to use the DAO’s funds to increase Kadena’s awareness such as community marketing initiatives. Since Guardians have powers that will affect the ecosystem, one must lock up 500,000 KDA. This is the only requirement, and this version of the DAO does not have rewards. That said, Guardians will have an outsized impact on the future of KDA, including the ability to build this DAO’s replacement. Once a proposal has been submitted, there is a 1 day cooldown period before guardians can approve and execute it. Proposals only live for 3 days, after which they time out and are no longer executable.

The Ambassadors’ task is to determine whether or not a proposal can be executed, with two actions they can perform. First, Ambassadors can choose to not vote to freeze the DAO. Second, with a majority vote, Ambassadors can choose to freeze the entire DAO from executing anything for 7 days if they deem it to be harmful to the Kadena ecosystem. In this case, the proposal times out. In order to become an Ambassador, a Guardian must register an individual as an Ambassador into the DAO. By building the DAO with two parties with different roles, we have set up a system to approve proposals that benefit the goal of our ecosystem and its community.

To aid in the discussion process, the dao.init will launch with dao.forum, an on-chain “reddit” for discussing proposals. The forum isn’t unmoderated however all moderation actions are logged publically. The forum members are initially drawn from the dao.init, with Guardians as moderators, and ambassadors as normal members.

By allowing the community to voice their ideas on initiatives that will improve the Kadena ecosystem via the DAO, we’re paving the way for a stronger, more decentralized community than ever before. Since we have only launched the testnet version of the DAO platform, there are many ideas, improvements, and proposals that the community is hoping to share. Please be sure to visit our Telegram or Discord to voice your input as to what the first proposal should be (or to get an account on dao.forum).

Before we launch the DAO and forum, we’d like community feedback. Some topics which we think people will have an opinion of: