The Power of GOVdao and UBI Plus
An ‘Economic Consensus Engine’ That Can Run The World
The Opera Launchpad has successfully launched its first project, GOVdao, which has raised over 1,000,000 FTM in its first governance proposal.
In addition, the Opera Launchpad welcomes its sister project, UBI Plus. UBI Plus will share the ‘economic consensus engine’ technology that the GOVdao project is developing.
The following is a brief and casual illustration of the technology that will power both GOVdao and UBI Plus.
The Protocol
The economic consensus engine of GOVdao allows two or more parties to provide incentives to each other to get something done. This can only happen on decentralized and autonomous smart contracts where no one entity has any authority over any other.
This two-way incentive mechanism transforms simple blockchain transactions into something much more productive.
If we compare this to how today’s crypto works, we are not just using consensus to transact value but to produce value.
UBI Plus will implement this mechanism as a type of game where everyone is able to extract value from the system. Some players will be satisfied with doing nothing but receiving a share of 10% of the reward pool while other players will be incentivized to provide for them by going after the much larger reward pool.
On GOVdao, this is reversed.
On GOVdao, everyone is creating some kind of economic value, either by producing something of value (a small % of users) or investing in people that do (the majority of users).
GOVdao will make it possible to offer a privately-funded universal basic income (UBI) scheme, powered by incentives, in UBI Plus.
With GOVdao itself it will be possible to do the unimaginable, such as build a house with $5 worth of input, process e-commerce transactions in an entirely new way, improve any kind of system, and create anything.
Organic Consensus
Traditional blockchains have a winner-takes-all consensus approach that invalidates most of the resources used in the validation process. GOVdao will use a multi-tiered, dynamic algorithm where every ‘vote’ in the consensus mechanism forms part of the composite picture of consensus. This all-take-part approach ensures that there is no loss of productivity or idle resources, and is more rewarding for more participants.
Further, as the nature of human-based consensus is to evolve without end, the picture of consensus changes each week, never needing to reach finality. Yet, there is no way to undo any transaction.
One-To-Many
Bitcoin was like the invention of the telegraph, a one-to-one medium that allowed someone to ‘send a message’ to a distributed ledger.
Ethereum was like the invention of the telephone, a one-to-one medium that extended the functionality of the telegraph in new and exciting ways.
GOVdao is like the invention of radio, a one-to-many medium that allows anyone to produce value for much larger groups.
The Problem With Consensus Among Humans
It could be said that humans are inherently unable to reach decisions without some kind of authority involved. To take a recent example, the wonderful communities in the ope.fund forums have been unable to come to an agreement regarding how OPE and UBI airdrops should be distributed among them. Even the OPE community itself has been unable to reach consensus about UBI airdrops, and vice versa.
The OPE and UBI airdrops are the first decentralized airdrops in crypto, where each community gets to decide their own snapshot dates and airdrop allocation, collectively.
Reaching consensus is actually hard when everyone is on the same level. Humans are dynamic creatures, each with their own motives and ways of thinking about problems. That is why we naturally desire to select a representative to act on our behalf; to serve as a kind of stand-in to our own authority and help make sense of the complexity.
In crypto, we lean towards centralization. Think of the number of crypto projects that preach decentralization while using centralized tools such as Twitter, GitHub, Telegram, and Amazon Web Services? We’re even talking about it while typing this on centralized Medium. And if Infura, the provider of much of Ethereum’s infrastructure (owned by a private company) went down tomorrow, it would take most of the Ethereum ecosystem down with it.
Why is real decentralization so hard? It’s because it doesn’t work when humans are involved. That is why we need autonomous smart contracts to help us reach consensus for us. But not only that, we need to solve the incentive problem.
We have done that with GOVdao. Humans can provide the inputs and GOVdao makes it all happen, distributing rewards to participants in the process.
Next Steps
Opera Token will focus on getting communities organized, helping build the Fantom ecosystem and informing users about what’s going on, and planning for the release of the GOVdao protocol (which we hope will be no later than August 2021).
Over the next 3 months, GOVdao will be our main focus.
The Opera Launchpad will then switch to being completely run by the autonomous GOVdao smart contracts. Automated everything, for extreme efficiency and productivity.
Until then, we will be on the lookout for Fantom-based projects that want to bootstrap their own development, just as GOVdao did for itself. For the integrity of our newly-developing ecosystem and until GOVdao is released, however, we prefer projects that have known devs (which is not as easy as it sounds). This helps us continue our mission of helping to make Fantom as scam-free and as awesome as we can.
GOVdao itself will be permissionless, of course, and anonymous devs and regular Joes and Janes can launch whatever they want. GOVdao is designed to be resistant to “rug-pulls”, scams, and malicious behaviour.
If you know of any projects that are looking to get off of the ground, let us know!
