The EverKit team has conducted an interview with the Broxus co-founder Sergey Shashev. From the interview, you will learn more about Ever DAO, the platform development history, goals, etc.
Nikita: Can you explain what EVER DAO is and how it works?
Sergey Shashev: This is how it all came about: Governance 2.0 was announced long ago and a special sub-governance was created for its development. Then things got kind of stuck in a sort of limbo; we were waiting for decisions to be made by initial members of the Alliance and development stopped. At that time, I said, “Look, we have a successful DAO for the Bridge, we can take that and use it in other ways.” About two weeks ago, I took part in an AMA session where I suggested that we release Governance 2.0. In order to do this, we built a fork off of the Bridge DAO and that has become the Ever DAO platform. Essentially, this is a place where anyone can come and submit their proposals to the community. In order to submit a proposal, you have to have 100,000 tokens. In order to reach a consensus, the proposal has to get 500,000. The voting mechanism works via staking wEVER. We were thinking of creating a special governance token for the DAO, but we don’t really see the point in it. Technically speaking, Ever DAO works in the same fashion as the Bridge DAO: proposals are submitted and then they are up for a few days so everyone can see them and has time to vote on them. I am going to talk with the initial members with the aim of making decisions arrived at via Ever DAO equal in authority to decisions made by initial members. Moving forward, we will be further developing the functionality of Ever DAO.
N: A question about the legitimacy of voting at the present moment: what status do DAO decisions have? Initial members will have to obey successful proposals? They are the ones who sign off on transactions, aren’t they?
SS: Initial members don’t sign off on transactions. Initial members sign off on money transfers to payment wallets. Initial members do not sign off on every partnership that is established or anything like that.
N: But they sign off on withdrawals from the giver, right?
SS: Yeah, they sign off on withdrawals from the giver. I think everyone will be for the DAO.
N: It still hasn’t been fully discussed yet?
SS: I have discussed it with the Alliance and with EverX, but, no, not with all of the initial members yet. I want to start off light by dealing with partnerships. Ideally, the DAO will be able to get rid of all the unnecessary partnerships that we currently have so only the good ones remain. Then, as we move along, new initiatives will be created for the DAO. Step by step, I hope, the DAO will move into the role that the initial members have now and decide things for the ecosystem.
N: You said that you were thinking about developing a new token for the DAO. From where I stand, there is a bit of a problem with the current model. There is a lot of money currently in staking, around 23 million locked in, and if people want to vote they are going to have to take that out. So they will be forced to choose; use your money to earn or use your money to vote. Do you think that is a problem and do you have a solution for that?
SS: From the point of view of the holder, yeah of course this is a problem. It would have made sense to create a stEVER token for this purpose, but it hasn’t been developed. It is possible that a solution will be developed whereby users can use these tokens as collateral, or they can be farmed. The community can come up with a solution to this. As it stands now, it is like a social experiment. What will people choose: making a profit or influencing a decision?
N: I have an idea, though I am not sure how realistic it is: perhaps the equivalent of the wEVER staked to participate in the voting process can be put into real staking?
SS: We want to make that happen so one part of EVER is liquidity-driven, but this is something we have to do more work on.
Editorial note: Part of the blocked liquidity in Octus Bridge is used by Bridge DAO for earnings. But EVER, which is on wEVER bail, is not used for earnings at the moment.
N: Governance 2.0, as far as I know, was an idea from EverX, can you tell us what you know about development?
SS: As far as I know, development stopped a few months ago.
N: When you talked about it with initial members, were there any that were against Ever DAO?
SS: No one was against it, there were just those that wanted to use stEVER.
N: What kind of future development do you envision for Ever DAO? How realistic is the prospect of migrating the giver contracts to DAO contracts?
SS: I think we will be able to get there. The first step is to make sure this entity has its own budget. That will be easy enough. We can get 10 million from the giver for that. And from there the DAO can become a good incentivizer, especially concerning partnerships.
N: Can you comment on whether tokens from the community will only be able to decide something if the alliance and EverX are on opposing sides of a vote?
SS: Well, the community by itself won’t be able to overcome the alliance and EverX together, that’s true. But EverX’s tokens are in a dark node and taking all over them out will be problematic. Just like the alliance’s tokens are in farming, multisigs, Crystal Hands, etc. Even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t be able to withdraw all of those tokens in a week because there are hundreds of nodes in the farming pools alone.
N: Do you think that stEVER will be realized?
SS: If we had stEVER everything would be easier. However, the way it works now is actually more fair because the alliance and EverX aren’t going to be able to participate on a massive scale.
N: On the other hand, there are not a ton of people who just have money lying around, most of the funds in the ecosystem are locked in somewhere.
SS: Yeah there isn’t a ton of money lying around. In the early stages, DAO solutions won’t be monumental. But, for example, if we have votes that affect the NFT Alliance that will be interesting and get a lot of people involved. I think it will take a couple of weeks for everyone to get the hang of things and then we will be seeing really significant votes that can shake things up.
N: If we are talking about the NFT Alliance, there are initial members there as well, and steps need to be taken so that votes are legitimate. Let’s say if the community is overwhelmingly against a transaction, initial members shouldn’t be able to sign off on it.
SS: Well, that is the essence of the experiment right there. The DAO mechanism has to gradually achieve legitimacy. In order for that to happen, everyone needs to understand that the DAO is changeable, that the decisions that are made there are changeable and that true discussion is happening there. We need to build up the complexity of accepted solutions. Gradually this mechanism will move from the initial members framework to the framework of the DAO. Of course, we could wait to do that until Governance 2.0 has been released…
N: We have already been waiting for two years.
SS: It is likely that there just wasn’t time. Events are happening around the world now at an alarming pace.
N: Let’s get back to how it works now. Back to the first proposal and to the fact that it takes 500,000 for a proposal to pass and 100,000 to submit. Do you think it should be left that way? The Bridge has 140 times more emissions.
SS: We developed this as a clean fork from the Bridge DAO, there wasn’t time to alter the operating mechanism. Now that it has been established we can have votes on how Ever DAO will operate, what the minimum should be for participation, the minimum for consensus, etc. The DAO itself will be able to determine the laws by which it will operate. It is going to be clear who is who here. Because when people write things in a chat, no one really knows who is writing. But if someone is implementing a solution, I would take note of who it is.
N: Concerning the first proposal, why were the conclusion of partnerships and the airdrop combined?
SS: I wrote the proposal. The airdrop will be distributed to everyone who participates.
N: I came across a question in a chat that I wanted to share: Will the more wEVER you stake for a vote result in receiving more QUBE tokens in the airdrop?
SS: Yes, of course, but it won’t be directly proportional. For example, let’s say I vote with a million tokens and you vote with ten thousand. That doesn’t mean that I will receive 100 times more tokens in the airdrop. I will receive more, but not on that scale. And it should be noted here: if someone tries to get more in the airdrop by voting from multiple accounts we are going to detect it. We will be checking for this, and if you try to do that you won’t get anything.
N: A bit of a philosophical question to wrap things up: what kind of social changes do you think this experiment will bring to the community?
SS: I expect that instead of writing pages and pages worth of messages in different chats, the community will channel this energy into something more constructive. People will start learning how to express their points of view, formulate proposals and be able to discuss these things amongst themselves. People will learn how to lobby for things. In general, I anticipate the level of elaboration in proposals to rise. We need to remove the hypocrisy in the community. This way of doing things where the loudest people in the zoom call and the people that write the most in the chats are right about everything — we have to leave this behind. We need to establish a model where people aren’t just screaming at each other in chats, but rather where they take responsibility for themselves and the community and put proposals together and vote on them.
N: Yeah. The more interested you are in a project, the more weight your voice carries.
SS: Of course, and you will be able to convince more people of what it is you believe. For example, let’s say you, Nikita, say “I want to release a media outlet in Thailand. I think that if we popularize Everscale in Thailand, I’ll be able to find partners there and we will be able to release a wrapped stable coin that will unseat Tron. In order to do this I need this many resources.” Then you argue your case, and find people willing to support you. Eventually, you put it up for a vote. Then I go to Ever DAO and I see that a proposal is up, it was announced by Nikita and that 50-100 people are in favor of it with a sum of 7 million EVER staked behind them. I think, cool, there must be something to his idea if he was able to get that much support, that many people to vote for it. This is something that I will be able to trust to a greater degree because it has gone through the DAO filter, reinforced by assets.
N: Yeah, that is true. Would you like to add anything else?
SS: As for the DAO, I think we’ve covered everything pretty comprehensively. The world has changed. The role and possibilities of crypto and blockchain in this world have grown significantly during this time. Financial institutions no longer trust each other, and what is even more important is that regular people no longer trust financial institutions either. Siloing finance through centralized organizations was necessary in the past but it has run its course, and now what it is causing is inequality. The need for decentralization in this sphere has never been more acute. And changes are happening at an accelerated pace, faster than anyone, myself included, anticipated. I say let’s rebuild the world on Ever DAO.