Name of Project / DAO / Company – Y Grant
QuakerDAO (University of Pennsylvania alumni/students)
Application type
Product Launch
DAO overview
QuakerDAO is a KYC-DAO comprised of current students and alumni of the University of Pennsylvania. By KYC-ing all members of the DAO, we will have the ability to make real world donations and investments otherwise inaccessible by notable institution types. These will be industry-defining actions, illustrated below:
- First ever DAO to donate to a university
- Firt ever DAO to donate to a hospital
- First ever DAO to donate to a major nonprofit
QuakerDAO aims to build this DAO on Harmony One for the following reasons:
- EVM compatibility
- Interoperability with Torus for social account creation and login (widespread appeal!)
- Low fees (very important for DAO proposals and votes)
- Harmony One’s leader is a UPenn alum (:
Tokenomics + How To Buy
- Periods for buy-in participation will open up periodically sporadically (one month purchase windows)
- Over the course of the first period a new Quaker Coin can be purchased (known in crypto-land as “minting”) for 1 ONE token
- To participate, individuals send crypto to DAO wallet address
- For future participation periods, this number will incrementally increase (i.e. 10 ONE for round two)
- Voting power for treasury allocation is based on # of Quaker Coins
- All investments made by the treasury will feature the names of all involved UPenn students/alum (on-chain data or through Medium blog post)
- The DAO will make a note of KYC-verified funds as a separate number from non-KYC-verified funds and will use those numbers in a discretionary way when investing/donating to entities (i.e. KYC-funds will be towards real-world investments and donations, non-KYC’d funds will be used to degen to build the treasury)
- Special prizes will be awarded to the top token holders of each participation period
o For example, the top 3 token holders and top 3 token purchasers after period 1 will receive an invite to dinner with UPenn administration leadership - Airdops from other crypto projects will be awarded to token holders
- Token holders can sell any/all of their coins on open market at any time regardless of minting period
o Note: Selling of any Quaker Coin at all completely disqualifies the person from receiving all intangible benefits in the future, forever
Allocation Rules
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Any use of funds less than 3% of the treasury can be made at the discretion of a treasury manager
-
Any use of funds between 3% - 5% of the treasury require majority approval from the council
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Any use of funds more than 5% of the treasury require a DAO governance vote
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If more than 40% of the treasury’s allocation is changed in a given calendar year, then any allocation afterward of any size requires a DAO governance vote
Logic: These processes for treasury management ensure quick decisions for time-sensitive alpha opportunities that can’t be front-run, with DAO votes for larger issues.
Participation Steps
- Need to pass screen with a UPenn verified email to purchase tokens (KYC requirement)
Initial Ideas For DAO Treasury
- Membership NFTs similar to organizations like Rug Radio - membership NFT is the gateway for access to the community, which offers benefits like: specialized network, access to deal flow, access to future projects (tokens, NFTs, etc)…
- A series of PR-generating donations that highlight both the DAO and Harmony One Network
- Investment stake to major UPenn startup competition winners in partnership with UPenn
Proposal Timeline
Goal is to deploy on Harmony One Mainnet by July 2022.
Assumptions
- DAO tokens are on Harmony One, transferable, mintable
- Use Gnosis as the multisig backend for Tribute DAO
Smart contracts
- Investigate upgradability
- Implement KYC based on email
- Onboarding - Add mapping to existing contracts to check whether a name+Penn email address hash checking to allow onboarding only once
- Further mint for an existing member should be done through the Tribute page
- Connect Gnosis multisig at a proposal level with TributeDAO
UI
- Implement KYC based on email
- UI page to take name and Penn email address, and
- sends to the Penn email address a message signed by the DAO
- Check the hash above against repeated onboarding
- Does everyone has a @alum.upenn.edu address?
- Email and other personal details storage on Arweave/ARDrive
- Offchain KYC backend - takes the messaged signed by the DAO and verify that it was signed by the DAO and then return a message to UI
- How to make this onchain and secure
- UI page to take name and Penn email address, and
- burn/guild kick mechanism (smart contract exists, need to write UI)
- Add Torus config
- Talk with Torus team to add Harmony config by default
Deployment
- Figure out how to deploy on a secure cloud server
Liquidity
- Make up plans to bulk purchase Harmony tokens and transfer tokens so members can onboard
Team
There is a very large, decentralized team of over a dozen individuals contributing to the formation of this DAO. With that said, its leader is Bo Cui, a University of Pennyslvania MBA student and Law school graduate.
Bo is a maker, tinkerer, and a perennial technology enthusiast. With a law and computer science education, Bo led and closed multibillion dollar acquisition and private equity investment deals by day, and learned Tensorflow, Solidity, and OpenCV at night. Never once trusted his data with or participated in Web 2.0, Bo is ready to help herald in the new age of Web 3.0.
Bo wants it to be known though that the leadership is meant to be on a rotational basis and not tethered to any one person in perpetuity, to act as a true democracy.
Proposal ask
$10K to (1) find engineering resources to build out initial MVP of DAO and (2) help fund initial token participation rewards.