Pocket Network’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) launch roadmap is well underway, so we thought it would be helpful to recap what has happened so far and what you can expect moving forward.

Recap

Earlier this month, the Pocket DAO was seeded with its initial voter set, consisting of trusted partners who have worked closely with us prior to launch:

• Skillz
• MetaCartel Ventures
• Blockwall
• Saturn Network
• Pocket Network, Inc (PNI)

We, the contributors to Pocket Network, are united together in the mission to build censorship-resistant technology that will lay the foundation for reorganizing the world’s institutions towards a more equitable, hyper-connected, interplanetary future 🛸https://t.co/3t3uFOYjAq

— Pocket Network (@POKTnetwork) August 3, 2020

These founding Voters then unanimously approved the Constitution, a legal framework that was carefully constructed by our Governance Lead, Jack Laing, based largely on the foundational work of Gabe Shapiro’s DAO Charter template. You can see that moment in our Discord!

A beautiful crypto-legal construct carefully designed by @POKTnetwork and @JackALaing for censorship-resistant digital infrastructure 👏💙✊ https://t.co/39DF1g5Xb1

— phil_h (@phil_h) August 4, 2020

This Constitution will lay the foundation for more robust and flexible governance in the long-run, enabling members to challenge each other on actions which they believe violate the rules or principles of the Constitution, with the help of Aragon Court. For more details on this and other aspects of our DAO’s design, as well as its underlying strategic philosophy, check out the Lean Governance Thesis. In this, Jack explains how we’re using the modular Lean Trias Politica to future-proof Pocket Network’s governance by balancing flexibility (optionality of future governance designs) with legitimacy (conformity of new governance designs to the established accepted ruleset, e.g. our Constitution).

We've been dropping so much and moving so quickly I don't want people to miss this "Lean Governance Thesis" as it applies to so much more then just Pocket.https://t.co/xnx3SapczS

By the wizard himself - @JackALaing— Patrick (@patrickpresents) August 8, 2020

After the Constitution was approved, the Pocket DAO voted on the first Parameter Update Proposal (PUP), to change the value of the SlashFractionDoubleSign from 0.05 to 0.000001, after our CTO and Lead Protocol & Blockchain Developer observed false-positive double signing (an issue being actively addressed by Tendermint) that was resulting in overly severe punishments for nodes.

✅ Seeding the Pocket DAO 🌱

🌶️ @VENTURE_DAO🏗️ @SkillZBlock🪐 @SaturnProtocol🕊️ @BlockwallCap⛳️ @POKTnetwork IncThe first 5 members of the #PocketDAO have all approved and signed the constitution 📝In essence, a #Web3 declaration of independence from Web2!— Pocket Network (@POKTnetwork) August 3, 2020

Moving Forward

Refining the Constitution

Gabe Shapiro has joined the Foundation as an advisor and is now helping us to take our Constitution to the next level. We can’t wait to see the result!Note: before any amendments are official, the DAO will need to approve them.

Growing the Seed

The Pocket DAO is now in the “Growing the Seed” phase of the launch roadmap.From here, the initial members of the DAO, who have also been designated as “Champions”, can:

• Vouch for new Voters, where a community member will qualify as a Voter if a Champion advocates for them in the #champion Discord channel and at least 50% of Champions emoji react to their message favorably
• Vouch for new Champions, where a community member will qualify as a Champion if the Champions pass a supermajority vote in Aragon to mint them a CHAMP token

In this phase, there is a cap of up to 50 voters. If you want to join the Pocket DAO and be one of Pocket’s first protocol politicians, find a champion who will vouch for you!

Opening the Voter Set

Starting October 1st (target date), we will begin opening the voter set completely.In addition to being vouched for by Champions, prospective Voters will have the option to:

• Play a series of gamified quests to earn their vote
• Pay extra for a “trust-minimized stake” in the DAO.

Unlocking the Full DAO Functionality

The full DAO functionality as envisioned in the Constitution and the Lean Governance Thesis are not available today, due to dependencies with product releases and development on our own side.As soon as the products are released, you can expect to see the following functionality become available to the DAO:

• Conviction Voting for continuous signaling on grants and economic parameters
• Peer-to-peer enforcement of the Constitution, using Aragon Agreements
• Discord-native interactions with the DAO, using Abridged chat bots
• A Pocket-native Governance Dashboard
• As well as a number of other innovations we’ve got cooking in the Governance R&D lab!

Stay tuned!