Dialogue with the founder of Rabbit Hole: the development of reputation DAO tools
Original source: Seed Club Podcast
Original compilation: Kxp, BlockBeats
Seed Club is a Web3 Accelerator project helping the community get started, which itself operates as a DAO. Seed Club will complete a financing of US$15 million at a valuation of US$150 million in May this year, with participation from USV and Multicoin Capital. Seed Club Podcast is a podcast under Seed Club, which mainly discusses DAO, social Token, NFT, etc., and has dialogues with promoters in the encrypted social field.
This episode of the Seed Club Podcast features Brian Flynn, CEO and Co-Founder of Rabbit Hole. It mainly discusses reputation DAO tools, and current advantages and disadvantages. At the same time, there were many discussions on Nouns DAO, how to build value in DAO, its importance and challenges, and the direction of future efforts. Jess Sloss co-founded Seed Club. BlockBeats translated it as follows:
Jess Sloss:Hi everyone and welcome to the Club Podcast In the second season, today we have the honor to invite Brian lynn, the co-founder and CEO of Rabbit Hole. Welcome to join, Brian. Before entering today's topic, can you please give a brief introduction of yourself?
Brian Flynn:Hi everyone, I am the CEO and co-founder of Rabbit Hole Founder. When Jess and I first met in 2018, I was working at Opensea, working at Dapper labs. Today I founded Rabbit Hole, mainly to educate people on what is really Crypto-native, and how to build new protocols and DAO. We have worked with many protocols, such as Uniswap Compound Aave, and helped them acquire users and contributors.
Jess Sloss:First I want to talk about reputation, why do you think we should care about it? How does reputation change in Web 3?
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Brian Flynn:We can use credibility to simply evaluate a person’s reputation, such as Twitter The number of fans can be used as a measure of trust, although it may be counterproductive if it reaches a certain number. However, this is still a new field that has not been explored. I am also thinking about how to deepen trust among people in the Internet age, especially With more and more users choosing to remain anonymous.
Jess Sloss: I still remember when social media first became popular, there was a platform called Clout, which would show your reputation on different platforms. Looking at it now, the biggest challenge of reputation building is how to balance its simplicity and practicality, have you encountered any problems in actual operation?
Brian Flynn: We want to tell the protocol platform that we have high-quality users. For example, our 3,500 users have helped to close a transaction of 6.7 million US dollars, just because we use DeFi certificates. But when we want other communities to use these certificates, I found that what they want is not only high-quality users, but their own certificates, with their own reputation certificates. The core problem now is that many communities do not want to share their reputation credentials in order to retain users, or even give community members reputation credentials, which makes it difficult to attract high-quality contributors.
Jess Sloss: I also want to chat with you about the airdrop The question, that is, how to distribute ownership in the form of Token in the community, can it help the platform attract high-quality contributors?
Brian Flynn:In my opinion, in Token distribution On the issue, it is difficult for us to evaluate from the user's point of view. Now many platforms are imitating Uniswap to reward early users with airdrops, but now there are also innovative projects such as Optimism that conduct continuous airdrops, but I think all of these involve the same question, that is, how do we distribute Tokens to those who really contributors. Most of the current airdrops are issuing Tokens based on people's past achievements, not their future potential, so I like the concept of reputation because it can measure how much a person will contribute in the future. If we can make accurate predictions on this point, then we can further improve the rationality and sustainability of Token distribution.
Jess Sloss:It’s true that there are a lot of teams working on it right now This question, but I wonder if there are other considerations besides reputation? How can we better design frameworks that reward future achievement?
Brian Flynn:I see that many teams have introduced Governance system, as the basis for judgment of team members. In this way, members start to care about whether they really have governance rights, whether they can participate in voting, use multi-sig, make proposals, and so on. However, for many newly released protocols, this system is in name only, and we often see the same name repeated in multiple places. This is because those who are more influential tend to enjoy higher social capital and therefore have more voice. Therefore, the question we need to think deeply now is how to ensure the effectiveness of governance after we introduce reputation. After all, the existing governance system still relies heavily on social capital, which is what we need to solve in the next cycle question.
Jess Sloss:I always like to use Gitcoin as an example recently , They solved the problem of funds in the market changes by issuing Tokens and ending conservative policies. During this period, their CEOs also made many difficult decisions. But for many users, it is difficult to figure out who the active representatives are most credible without conducting in-depth research, because there is basically no reliable basis for judgment. Gitcoin once designed a scorecard, but it is difficult for us to extract useful data from it. So we now need a set of feasible reputation algorithms to help us judge who to trust when we encounter difficulties.
Brian Flynn:I think that in addition to subjective reputation, we also The focus should be on reputation in an objective sense. We can now make subjective judgments through some of the work of the contributors, but now it seems that some subjective information is of little value. We should pay more attention to the basis in the objective sense, such as whether he has put forward a successful proposal— - Such objective information is difficult to capture, but it is more valuable. I believe that reputation will continue to develop in this direction in the future.
Jess Sloss: Yes, so we need to build with high trust With high-degree DAOs, they can also serve as a strong reputation basis, and are more efficient in governance, and can also be integrated into other reputation systems.
Brian Flynn: Exactly, now we can't just create A successful proposal requires another DAO to prove that you can complete the proposal as the final test.
Jess Sloss: Now for Nouns, you want Not only is the proposal successful, but also whether it can actually create value and contribute to the reputation of community members. Is this idea actually implemented now, and can it bring value to DAO? I know this is a difficult thing to do, and very few companies are doing it, but it can actually help build a reputation framework, so I am also very bullish.
Brian Flynn: Indeed, although the current on-chain proposal It's still in its infancy, but it's still evolving. Interestingly, people are building governance standards for reputation, and Nouns and Compound are both pioneers in this area.
Jess Sloss: You mentioned the problem of expanding DAO before , and how to make DAO better than traditional enterprises or start-ups in terms of expansion by building a coordination layer. What I am curious about is, what difficulties are we currently facing, and what efforts will Nouns make?
Brian Flynn: We have to admit that in terms of capacity expansion, the company More advantages than DAO. Companies have been able to scale to 10,000 people, and DAOs are still trying to figure out how to scale to 50 people — I think it's all about attention. If you can complete a task with a lot of energy in a short period of time, then you must have a good output. I think coordination is still the biggest challenge for DAO development in the future, and we are still using Web2 tools to attract new members and build new ideas. So, I'm curious to see how Web3 tools can change Nouns and scale them to what extent.
Jess Sloss: I think this was you earlier today tweets, we in Web3 Social are not thinking about how to take ownership of data and content, but finding new ways of coordinating with others. Looking at it now, we still face the problem of information asymmetry. Although some members have ownership, they have less information than real investors, so what else can we change in the toolset?
Brian Flynn: I think in the last bull market The biggest innovation is the Token threshold, which allows everyone to express their opinions under the same incentives. But even so, it can be hard to tell the good from the bad. Some people may be very active and keep promoting their views, and thus gain an audience; while others may not be afraid to speak out, even though they may have good ideas. So, we now need to design a tool that allows people to start constructively participating in the work, rather than simply throwing out ideas. One of the methods I thought of recently is to set up bulletin boards in the community, where people can use their NFT to propose ideas or vote for different ideas, so that the problem of focus can be improved. Eventually, good ideas will surface, and bad ones will go unnoticed. In this way, we can effectively organize the organization, instead of a lot of ideas left unattended like Discord. Discord is a bit too formal, you have to constantly defend your idea, and worry about whether it will end up not getting any attention. That's what I've been thinking about these days.
Jess Sloss:I feel that Nouns is as weak as other DAOs , only good at expanding the size of the treasury, but unable to deploy them reasonably and effectively. In addition, Nounsz does produce new ideas faster than other DAOs, although the size of the treasury is slightly inferior, but I think this situation will definitely improve in the future.
Brian Flynn:The biggest problem with Nouns right now is that although it Governance is efficient, but the quality of proposals is worrisome. This is because the DAO lacks restraint in spending money and is always doing all kinds of marketing, but there are no people who really want to create value for the underlying Token.
Jess Sloss:I haven't seen anything about Web3 yet Hacker News articles, the existing ones are all about the content of Web2, but this kind of vision about ownership, money and governance is of great benefit to the improvement of social structure, and it is also a new perspective of observation.
Brian Flynn:Yes, I also helped develop the Nouns' governance system proposal, if you are interested, you can take a look.
Jess Sloss: You talked about how you feel now A lot of governance is more like a show, because basically 98% of the proposals will pass. Is this because the proposals really do a lot of background work, or is it because the proposals tend to be made by people with a higher level of trust? What methods does Nouns use to avoid this kind of showmanship in governance?
Brian Flynn:I think we need urgent things right now One is to achieve anonymity, so that each new member can have a level playing field, regardless of the reputation they have previously accumulated in Twitter. For example, if you let God V join the DAO, then everyone will only listen to him; and if anonymity is achieved, then everyone can express their opinions and propose freely. Because, we have to design corresponding tools to truly guarantee the realization of anonymity.
Jess Sloss: When we first met, both In the initial stage of the Crypto business, we have experienced many ups and downs. You have worked in many cutting-edge Crypto companies, and later established Rabbit Hole, formed your own team, and had a lot of intersections with Seed Club. But I've been wondering, what interesting things would happen if we were just getting into the crypto space now?
Brian Flynn: The first thing that comes to mind is, I was all about writing NFT analysis articles and didn't buy anything, so I might be richer like you said, but it's also a different choice for everyone - some people just want to do the right thing , while some people only think about making money.
Jess Sloss: Well said, but now with With the development of Crypto and Web3 fields, there are more and more opportunities in front of us. Is the previous route still applicable? For start-up companies and builders, what are the things they should focus on?
Brian Flynn:This question is very good, I recently I am also thinking that the companies established in the last bull market cycle are basically solving the problems in the previous cycle, such as establishing a company by setting the Token threshold, or thinking that only a 20-person DAO can be established instead of a 5,000 or 50,000-person DAO. In my opinion, we now need to dismantle many of the misconceptions that we previously took for granted, such as the fact that ERC20 governance is the best way to transfer ownership. We still have a lot of issues to iron out before we enter the next bull market so that we can build a solid foundation.
Jess Sloss: After the last cycle, we have absorbed I have learned a lot of experience and lessons, and now I have actively launched many innovative projects like Nouns. But in the Crypto circle, whenever something becomes popular, other projects will rush to imitate it. However, because they don't understand the specific working principle, they often just make false imitations. What I am curious about is, where is the innovation of Nouns?
Brian Flynn: There are indeed a few things worth mentioning. In the last bull market cycle, many people wanted to solve the problem of fairness in token distribution. Nouns is the first project to really solve this problem, giving every creator a fair chance to get tokens at least initially. If this model can be successful, it will be a new token distribution model that can ensure fairness when people start participating. In addition, the SVG on the chain is also a brand new field, which can support the dynamic generation of NFT and give it ownership, which is a function not available in ERC20. Before this, people wanted to buy because they felt close to a particular item, and that item could represent their ownership in the community, not just because of the item itself. Those are the two things I want to share with you today, the others may have been talked to you before.
Jess Sloss: So the CC0 agreement is also a very important part of it Yeah?
Brian Flynn:Yeah, I have the same attitude Look at CC0 and EVM. Looking at it now, many blockchains are created on the EVM because it will be easier for developers to enter existing markets or existing applications. Similarly, many people are now also designing glasses on Nouns, and there is already an internal community, and this is one of the benefits of using CC0. Therefore, my opinion is that Nouns glasses have become a symbol of the entire Crypto movement, and they are no longer the logo of Bitcoin or Ethereum.
You have a slightly different idea, can you talk about your views on speculation and its adverse effects?
Brian Flynn: This week I also took some time to reflect In the past, especially these few bull market cycles. In the first bull market cycle, there were only a series of Tokens but no products. In the last bull market cycle, speculative products with no practical utility appeared. I hope that in the next bull market cycle, Token can be combined with practical products. Nouns is the first non-speculative Token I have seen. Although speculation can indeed attract people into the ecosystem, if there is only speculation, we have not actually done anything effective, which is inevitably putting the cart before the horse.
Jess Sloss: I agree with you, I think I The definition of speculation is too broad. In my opinion, if someone founded a company, even if there is no liquidity, he may be involved in speculation; and some cautious activities that use liquidity, such as Token airdrops, may also be a kind of speculation in my eyes. The danger of speculation is that it can distort value and cause losses to users. At the same time, I am also optimistic about the future, believing that there will be more and better tools and ways to create value. However, it seems that we still face many difficulties in terms of publicity to the outside world. Recently, many venture capitalists and thought leaders have stood up to explain the dynamics of Web3, but doubts and doubts are still emerging no matter on Hacker News or Twitter. Why is it still difficult for us to pass the value of Web3 and Crypto to the public? What about those who are already in these fields?
Brian Flynn: I have done related experiments, I Get a friend to ask me about the value of Web3 and so on. I finally found that when a person has been in this field for a long time, it is difficult to explain the core points to skeptics. Even with professional training, they may not be able to explain the essence of smart contracts and blockchain in concise language. Moreover, this situation will become more and more obvious the length of time you are in the field. Therefore, I now prefer to use metaphors to explain these abstract concepts, and the effect is very significant. Now this is also one of the principles that Rabbit Hole works on. We want to let people really feel the magic of Crypto, not just tell them things and concepts that people already know.
Jess Sloss: We need to tell stories that matter, But the purpose of doing this is not just to convince skeptics, but to get the approval and publicity of those bigwigs in the circle, which is far more important than convincing skeptics. You know, we're in a bear market, is there anything we can be optimistic about right now? Have we achieved anything in the last cycle that will help future growth?
Brian Flynn:In the last cycle, we learned What is the Crypto primitive, why are NFTs here, and why are DeFi and DAOs here. However, we still don’t know where NFT, which has removed the speculative attributes, will go, nor how the DeFi protocol will develop in a sustainable direction. These are things we need to figure out in the next cycle.
Jess Sloss: In addition to your regular tweets, I know you also have the habit of writing articles, can we see more thoughtful articles in the future?
Brian Flynn: Now many articles are members of Rabbit Hole It can only be seen, but we will open more to the public in the future, and with the development and changes of the bear market, we also need to figure out the next market trend in time.
Jess Sloss:Okay, Brian, I heard you just It is mentioned that Rabbit Hole has many open positions, where can you see them?
Brian Flynn: You can follow my personal Twitter account @ Flynnjamm or the official Rabbit Hole account @rabbithole_gg. You can earn on-chain tokens to improve your reputation on our official platform, which also features our current open jobs.
Jess Sloss: I hope you will have your own TikTok in the future Account, I believe that there will be users who will follow you, and I also hope that all listeners will actively join Rabbit Hole.
Brian Flynn: Now TikTok has some in-depth information about Web3 Thinking can help you survive the distress caused by the bear market.
Jess Sloss:Thank you for joining us today, Brian.
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