Spatio

Posted on Feb 27, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

Minimum Viable Participation - Token Gating.

by Matthew Park

Spatio is prioritizing NFTs and other tokens as utility tools to gain access and/or pay for a service within DAOs, and social tokens for overall security that is invested by all participants and members of a DAO fractionalized in the treasury.

On one hand, we have machines. The Turing complete universal computer has infinite memory and time. Now, you can access the internet from anywhere and forever changed humanity.

On the other hand, we have tokens. A token is a symbol or expression from one to another. From our linguistic connections - “a gift for you as a token of my gratitude” - to tangible exchanges - consumer economy - tokens have existed far longer than 1983 as a social trust between people. That’s when everything molded together. In 1983, David Chaum put electric money, this imaginary fiat that represents trust, into an electronic payment method - Digicash - as the first step for man in scaling lightning-fast social relations further than just immutable physical tokens that are geographically restrained to one place.

These two aren’t objective - In fact, that’s why Ethereum exists, because we now create tokens - value - that can represent nearly anything compatible with both the ability to access the internet from any time and send programmable ‘trust’ from anywhere. Truly, EVM is a quasi-Turing-complete state machine, because all executions are limited to a finite number of computational steps thanks to gas. Beautiful thing is that there is no hardware support, no physical machine that Ethereum depends on - it’s completely virtual.

In a sense, communities have always existed, token have always existed - but with the machine and autonomous models, humankind can reach new boundaries, together.

Slock.it, a retrospective is known as the OG ‘DAO’, literally called ‘The DAO’. They combined distributed tasks to ship a line of open-source tools for ETH devs who were in turn part of the community and were decentralized property-sharing and services similar model to Airbnb. In short, they had the Universal Sharing Network idea bootstrapped with the EVM for their community - a distributed superpower. Their byline was quite literally rent, sell, or share anything - without the middlemen.

Slock.it has since been acquired by blockchains.com, although the DAO died off a month after it came into existence.

Collab.land is a prime example of integration; managing and automating onboarding of people into your different group chats and guilds. It’s all determined by the individual token holding and the required tokens to join a community that holds the ‘gates’ of the space open or closed. If individuals sell the token, the bot boots them - all circles back to commitment and not to make a hold and sell coins to make a quick buck. However, Collab.land isn’t built natively. The bot extension for discord comms and telegram chats is easily receptive to spam, unsolicited personification, and false portrayals by scammers - making it fragile and damaging for hyper-long term growth of DAOs (among other things).

Plus, different fake servers portraying themselves as official big names are leading to fake collab.land services to drain the wallets.

What does TGL (Token Gated Logic) do for communities and why should DAO’s, creators, fans, communities, cults, friend groups care?

Because it ensures individuals have skin in the game to the communities they end up joining - token are the proof of work for committed individuals. Fetching tokens is what many platforms and protocols do - and increasingly being used for accessibility. But let’s be honest - tokens can be utilized for far more.

We went from messaging protocols like this:

However, there is much more that can be done:

For both individual users and groups of users, we are focusing extensively on the latter to build great SaaS for DAO’s rather than staying lingering on DAO tooling. At Spatio we spotted stark differences between unlocking a token gate like guild for encryption, versus a natively built token gated platform.

DAO’s don’t need structure - they need culture. We need to cater SaaS models that help the flow of culture growth to snowball into autonmous cooperatives, without it feeling like it even exists. Tokens + native environment = usefullness for cultures to bootstrap funding, rights, and aligning ecosystem. The latter three needs can be further individualized upon addition of other uses of the token(s). Tokens are just tooling, they are ‘powerful cultural norms’.

  • Voting rights and the digital distributing power as democratic as possible and laissez faire as possible. Private voting is also a cornerstone of democracy, translating that for digital communities to use could be incredible.
  • Unique interoperable collection, not only specific to a DAO’s NFT’s, but also a blend of other DAO tokens? We could give people the ability to stake certain tokens in a NFT if it represents the DAO collectively - that could be a good place to safelock a fraction of the market cap of one community. Better methods of emergency ‘refunds’ - or recovery backdoors to reverse transfers that can be activated by a owner control - could also be secured because no one knows if and when a zero day hack could take place. Or even burning them through burning supply.
  • Equity tokens - making better treasury mechanisms, retention of tokens over time and no cost during transfers/conversions, etc - safe lock tools integrated on the website?
  • Digitial attestation and identity preservation of users within a DAO - do we make this private to each user, or open for everyone to see - do people really want a open contribution or active spotlight list.
  • People can move extrensic governing assets and use them as itnrinsic assets that are governed on chain - this removes counterparty risk. Almost like moving from a LLC to a non-profit title (but on-chain and distributed power!).

Deliverables that Spatio is prioritizing:

  • How tokens can help with ‘unknown unknowns’ because we all know the cautionary tale of incredible communities falling through because of a management shortage (even temporary) because truly authentic and strong communities know how to get back up on their feet.
  • Governance and voting mechanisms adapting to different intrinsic DAO needs take time to develop.
  • Standards are vital in secure smart contract design, to ensure security and efficieny of code, leveraging NLP algorithms can spot in errors and bugs within the contract for all DAO’s because when a DAO deploys a contract, Spatio as a platform is a liability for that DAO in ensuring that one mistake does not target other communities security as well.

Official Website: spatio.app

Twitter: @spatiodao