Dora Factory 1.0: DAO-as-a-Service Infrastructure for On-Chain Governance and Open Source Ventures
Since the iron-fisted manager of Matsushiba Factory retired, the factory turned into a chaotic anarchy and production stalled. One day, Dora received a letter from Doraemon, one of his best friends, requesting help to resume productivities in the 22nd century. Dora is compassionate about future human beings and decided to restructure the Matsushiba Factory from building robots to building ventures and rename it “Dora Factory”.
Dora is the curator of the great hacker community of the 21st century, how could he manage Matsushiba Factory in the 22nd century? He humbly inquired with the prophet from Phuket, who told him ventures will be organized in the form of DAOs, and he needs to build the right infrastructure for them.
Dora has already built a collection of useful tools to foster developer communities and problem-solving ventures, such as quadratic funding grants, on-chain bounties, bonding curve fundraisers, global hackathons series. Now he decides to build a unified infrastructure to allow anybody, not only him, to create tool kits for DAOs to plug and play, because only when he mobilizes the coding ability of the entire developer community, can he can rebuild Matsushiba Factory when the time comes.
Building robust infrastructures and killer DApps, developer communities are crucial building blocks of every blockchain ecosystem. Yet, present-day blockchain projects often lack lasting mechanisms and effective toolkits to manage and incentivize their open source developer communities. We believe that this problem can be solved by a crypto-native solution: a programmable DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure specializing in developer community management, curation and incentivization. Dora Factory provides an infrastructure with features that allow blockchain ventures to fully realize the potential of the hacker community for the benefit of their projects. Designed as a layer-2 infrastructure on Polkadot and Ethereum, Dora Factory provides solutions to all Polkadot-native, Ethereum native projects and beyond.
🌲 Vision Statement
Dora Factory is an open-source, community-driven venture builder with the mission to empower hackers by creating tools for decentralized venture organizations to thrive.
Since the birth of the Open Source Movement, open-source developers and projects have been growing at an exponentially increasing speed. Now there are more than 190 million open source repositories and 40 million open source developers on GitHub alone. The development of the blockchain ecosystem adds another block to the movement — incentivization. While GitHub is managing open source code, there is no sound infrastructure to facilitate incentive schemes. Dora Factory is here to help.
We envision every open source project can become a venture, and every open source venture can become a venture DAO to create and manage schemes like funding, grants, various governance rules, bounties, and many more. On-chain incentives can be achieved via a set of decentralized fund management and incentive management protocols.
So far, every open source protocol / blockchain project needs a developer community. However, when open source movement and open source DAOs come together, we will see an explosion of open source ventures in the years to come.
The vision of Dora Factory is to build a DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure that empowers every DAO with the right toolkits to better engage with and incentivize open-source developers and hackers on their way of building the next venture.
✨ Highlights
DAO-as-a-Service
At Dora Factory, curators can freely launch DAOs and add different pallets in an ad-hoc manner based on their specific needs.
Programmable Infrastructure
To implement new features, useful pallets can be created by developers and added to Dora Factory parachain runtime or Dora Factory Ethereum layer-2 through governance. DAOs may manage functionalities by adding pallets based on their needs.
Powered by Developer Community
Backed by DoraHacks Global Hackathon Series and Hackerlink Grants, Dora Factory engages global hackers, cypherpunks and open source developers.
Infrastructure for On-Chain Governance
Specialized in community governance, Dora Factory prioritizes features that optimize vital daily processes in DAO management, including quadratic voting, grants, bounties, funding management, fundraising schemes, and many more.
⚓️ The Infrastructure
Dora Factory consists of three parts: a Polkadot factory, an Ethereum factory, and a virtual bridge. Each DAO will have a vault in which its assets are held. DAO stakeholders will be able to deposit assets, withdrawal assets and manage assets of the DAO.
On Polkadot, DAO functionalities can be added via pallets. On Ethereum, DAOs will deploy individual governance smart contracts through the Dora Factory contracts. Dora Factory will allow developers to submit custom-developed pallets and factory contracts.
The Polkadot Factory
When Polkadot fulfils its mission, assets should be able to move around easily between Polkadot parachains, a.k.a. Dora Factory DAOs will be able to manage tokens from all Polkadot parachains, therefore all Polkadot ventures can use Dora Factory to manage their DAOs.
Dora Factory will be developed as a parachain on Polkadot for several reasons:
- Cross-chain DAO asset management
- Shared security with Polkadot
- Ability for modular development of core service features (Pallets)
There are a few low-level functions and components Dora Factory provides by default:
- Create DAO
- Release DAO
- Cross-chain Asset Vaults
- Staking, Tax and Reward
- Payment
- Protocol Level Governance
Upon the basic level, there can be as many application-level pallets one can think of. These pallets can be developed by anyone or any group. Underlying the infrastructure is the Dora Factory Parachain which provides consensus to validate token transactions and powers the pallets. The parachain will first use a POA network for development purposes. It will be switched to a NPoS network prior to its official launch on Kusama network. By that time, the parachain token holders will be able to participate in the maintenance of the network: nomination and validation and get rewarded from the network.
Client Frontend
The Client Frontend will be an interface to access the on-chain DAO-as-a-Service. It will allow DAO curators to 1) create DAOs, 2) release DAOs, 3) deposit assets to cross-chain vaults, 4) withdraw funds from cross-chain vaults, 5) add pallets to perform DAO governance and DAO behaviors.
The Ethereum and BSC Factory
Dora Factory will deploy sub-factories on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. A sub-factory will be a set of factory contract that produces smart contracts for individual DAOs. Before Polkadot is fully functional, we encourage smart contract developers to build DAO pallets on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain for proof of concepts. The client front end will enable DAO creation on Ethereum and BSC.
The Dora Factory Virtual Bridge
In the first stage of Dora Factory, DAOs will have to choose which infrastructure they want to build on — Polkadot, Ethereum or BSC depending on their relevance to these public chains.
According to the Polkadot paper, eventually, there will be bridges that connect Polkadot replay chain with major public chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Therefore the cross-chain problem is automatically solved. However, for our own convenience, Dora Factory will build a simplified virtual bridge to bring tokens outside the polkadot ecosystem into the Dora Factory parachain so that DAOs can store token assets in the cross-chain vaults.
🔧 Use Cases
Specific features (use cases) can be added to the blockchain runtime as pallets or produced by factory contracts. DAOs can apply Pallets based on their needs.
There are infinite possibilities of pallets that can be developed. And because of that, unlike other general DAO infrastructures, Dora Factory will allow developers to create pallets for the network and get rewarded. In the first place we can imagine the following pallets that every DAO can choose to use:
Voting Pallets
- simple majority voting
- direct democracy
- representative democracy
- liquid democracy
- quadratic voting
- futarchy
Fundraise Pallets
- quadratic funding
- bonding curve fundraiser
- dutch auction
- direct donation
Incentive Protocol Pallets
- bounty
- open source curation markets
- tipping
Dispute Resolution Pallets
- arbitration
- court
Admin Tool Pallets
- Member management
- Profile management
- Asset visualization tools
📚 Example DAOs
Any organization or groups that need on-chain governance can use this network. Some of them are really cool in the future.
- A fund to support open source quantum computing library developments
- A public chain’s developer community
- A Defi project’s governance body
- Any open source project’s contributor DAO
- A DAO capital to invest in multiple blockchain projects
- A multinational corporation that embraces DAO to manage part of its team
- Hobbyist developer groups to explore new ideas
- Hackathon & event organizers to manage funds
- An association of crypto artists
- A decentralized media directly funded by viewers
💰 Token Economics: DORA
The native digital cryptographically-secured utility token of Dora Factory (DORA) is a transferable representation of attributed functions specified in the protocol/code of Dora Factory, which is designed to play a major role in the functioning of the ecosystem on Dora Factory and intended to be used solely as the primary utility token on the network.
Dora Factory is governed by DORA holders. DORA is the non-refundable functional utility token that binds the network together, with important governance functions. Users and holders of DORA can stake, mine and pay for services/products within the ecosystem with DORA tokens. Developers who build will be rewarded with DORA token incentives. The initial total supply of DORA is 10,000,000.
DORA will be used as the medium of exchange between participants on Dora Factory. The goal of introducing DORA is to provide a convenient and secure mode of payment and settlement between participants who interact within the ecosystem on Dora Factory, and it is not, and not intended to be, a medium of exchange accepted by the public (or a section of the public) as payment for goods or services or for the discharge of a debt; nor is it designed or intended to be used by any person as payment for any goods or services whatsoever that are not exclusively provided by the issuer. DORA does not in any way represent any shareholding, participation, right, title, or interest in the Foundation, the Distributor, their respective affiliates, or any other company, enterprise or undertaking, nor will DORA entitle token holders to any promise of fees, dividends, revenue, profits or investment returns, and are not intended to constitute securities in Singapore or any relevant jurisdiction. DORA may only be utilised on Dora Factory, and ownership of DORA carries no rights, express or implied, other than the right to use DORA as a means to enable usage of and interaction within Dora Factory.
Creation of DAO
Every DAO on Dora Factory may be created only by a user staking 100 DORA tokens on-chain. When the DAO is terminated, these staked DORA tokens will be returned to that original user. In future, when the number of DAOs grows and the value of DORA changes, it may be necessary to peg the number of DAO tokens required to be staked to a fixed value instead. This can be achieved by implementing a price oracle with an off-chain worker, or simply using an existing oracle service provided by some other parachain.
Validator Staking, Mining and Inflation
DORA also provides the economic incentives which will be distributed to encourage users to contribute and maintain the ecosystem on Dora Factory, ensuring that every participant is fairly compensated for its efforts. Given that additional DORA will be awarded to a user based only on its actual usage, activity and contribution on Dora Factory, users of Dora Factory and/or holders of DORA which did not actively participate will not receive any DORA incentives.
Dora Factory will first be a POA network, and transfer into an NPoS network when deployed on Kusama. Validators and nominators would be required to spend computing resources to maintain the parachain by verifying transactions and producing blocks. To incentivise these parties to provide these resources, validators and nominators are rewarded with new DORA tokens from inflation. Besides inflation, transaction/network fees (tax) will also be collected from users as a fee for using the network, and then distributed to these validators and nominators, proportionate to their work performed.
The inflation is 1,000,000 DORAs per year until a super majority of the community votes otherwise. Therefore, unlike Polkadot itself, this is a linear inflation starting from 10% in the first year. Inflation rate is decreasing every year. Among the tokens generated from inflation every year, 2% will go to a Dora Factory Treasury, the rest of DORAs generated from inflation will be distributed to the nominators and validators according to their work performed.
Network Fees (Tax)
Pallets can charge fees in DORA. DAOs will have to spend DORA tokens (or pay fees) to use pallets (there can be free pallets!). Network Fees paid by DAOs are taxed by Dora Factory. This tax will be in turn distributed to all users who have participated as validators or nominators and provided services to secure the network.
Network Rewards
The network rewards validators, pallet developers and venture builders who each perform different activities to contribute towards the overall development and maintenance of the network. Validators are rewarded from inflation as well as tax collected from DAOs. Non-validator DORA stakers are rewarded by network tax. Developers are rewarded by pallet income.
Transaction Fees
A small transaction fee will be imposed on all transactions on the parachain. The Transaction fees collected will be distributed to all users who have participated as validators or nominators and provided services to secure the network.
Validator Staking, Mining and Inflation
Dora Factory will first be a POA network, and transfer into an NPoS network when deployed on Kusama. Validators and nominators maintain the parachain by verifying transactions and producing blocks. As a result of that, validators and nominators are rewarded with tokens from inflation. Besides inflation, transaction fees will be distributed to validators and nominators, network fees (tax) collected from users and DAOs will be paid proportionally across all addresses that staked DORAs.
The inflation is 1,000,000 DORAs per year until a super majority of the community votes otherwise. Therefore, unlike Polkadot itself, this is a linear inflation starting from 10% in the first year. Inflation rate is decreasing every year. Among the tokens generated from inflation every year, 2% will go to a Dora Factory Treasury, the rest of DORAs generated from inflation will be distributed to the nominators and validators.
Network Fees (Tax)
Pallets can charge fees. DAOs will have to “burn” DORA tokens (or pay fees) to use pallets (there can be free pallets!). Network Fees paid by DAOs are taxed by Dora Factory. The tax will be proportionally distributed to all staking addresses.
Network Rewards
The network rewards validators, pallet developers and venture builders. Validators are rewarded from inflation as well as tax collected from DAOs. Non-validator DORA stakers are rewarded by network tax. Developers are rewarded by pallet income.
Transaction Fees
A small transaction fee will be imposed on all transactions on the parachain. The Transaction fees collected will be distributed to nominators and validators.
DORA Token disclaimers
A small DORA are designed to be utilised, and that is the goal of the DORA distribution. In fact, the project to develop Dora Factory would fail if all DORA holders simply held onto their DORA and did nothing with it. In particular, it is highlighted that DORA: (a) does not have any tangible or physical manifestation, and does not have any intrinsic value (nor does any person make any representation or give any commitment as to its value); (b) is non-refundable and cannot be exchanged for cash (or its equivalent value in any other digital asset) or any payment obligation by the Foundation, the Distributor or any of their respective affiliates; © does not represent or confer on the token holder any right of any form with respect to the Foundation, the Distributor (or any of their respective affiliates), or its revenues or assets, including without limitation any right to receive future dividends, revenue, shares, ownership right or stake, share or security, any voting, distribution, redemption, liquidation, proprietary (including all forms of intellectual property or licence rights), right to receive accounts, financial statements or other financial data, the right to requisition or participate in shareholder meetings, the right to nominate a director, or other financial or legal rights or equivalent rights, or intellectual property rights or any other form of participation in or relating to Dora Factory, the Foundation, the Distributor and/or their service providers; (d) is not intended to represent any rights under a contract for differences or under any other contract the purpose or pretended purpose of which is to secure a profit or avoid a loss; (e) is not intended to be a representation of money (including electronic money), security, commodity, bond, debt instrument, unit in a collective investment scheme or any other kind of financial instrument or investment; (f) is not a loan to the Foundation, the Distributor or any of their respective affiliates, is not intended to represent a debt owed by the Foundation, the Distributor or any of their respective affiliates, and there is no expectation of profit; and (g) does not provide the token holder with any ownership or other interest in the Foundation, the Distributor or any of their respective affiliates.
Notwithstanding the DORA distribution, users have no economic or legal right over or beneficial interest in the assets of the Foundation, the Distributor, or any of their affiliates after the token distribution.
To the extent a secondary market or exchange for trading DORA does develop, it would be run and operated wholly independently of the Foundation, the Distributor, the distribution of DORA and Dora Factory. Neither the Foundation nor the Distributor will create such secondary markets nor will either entity act as an exchange for DORA.
🏡 Governance
Unlike Internet SaaS platforms, Dora Factory is governed by the community of DORA holders.
There are two governance bodies. The Governance DAO and the Council. The governance DAO is a DAO of all DORA holders. The council is the core development team that is responsible for the project’s roadmap until Sudo is removed. DORA would allow holders to propose and vote on governance proposals to determine features and/or parameters of Dora Factory as well as protocol improvements and new product development, or even changes to the governance process itself, with voting weight calculated in proportion to their token holdings.
The Governance DAO is a DAO launched on Dora Factory. After Dora Factory’s mainnet launch, the governance DAO will be presented on Dora Factory’s client frontend. All DORA holders who have staked tokens will be able to vote on various issues and proposals (we call them “DORA Voters”). For the avoidance of doubt, the right to vote is restricted solely to voting on features of Dora Factory and/or changes to the governance process; the right to vote does not entitle DORA holders to vote on the operation and management of the Foundation, its affiliates, or their assets, and does not constitute any equity interest in any of these entities. The DAO is not intended to be any form of joint venture or partnership.
There are several situations where governance comes into play:
Approve Major Parachain Mainnet Upgrade
Any major upgrade of the parachain mainnet (parachain consensus, governance rules, mining & staking rules) needs a ⅔ majority vote from DORA Voters.
Approve Community Grants
There will be ongoing quadratic funding grant rounds to support new ideas to improve the infrastructure and creating new pallets on Dora Factory. Community can donate to projects they deem important with DORA and a matching fund will be distributed to the projects based on the quadratic funding scheme. The community grant will be hosted on HackerLink.
Every community quadratic funding grant needs to be approved by a simple majority vote from DORA Voters.
In addition to the governance DAO, Dora Factory has a Council, which is responsible for implementing the roadmap and executing key operations.
The Council also has power to make minor changes and upgrades to the infrastructure, and add pallets based on the procedure of adding pallets.
Adding Pallets
Pallets can be developed either by Dora Factory developers or any community developer (group) from any place. Mobilizing the developer community to invent DAO pallets is critical to Dora Factory. On Polkadot, pallets can be developed and tested freely on local substrate nodes. When a pallet is added to the parachain, its security must be ensured.
A pallet (either developed by Dora Factory core dev team, or by community developers) needs to go through a thorough testing and a security audit before it can be submitted to the Dora Factory testnet. The pallet will reside on the testnet for a certain period of time before it can be compiled into Dora Factory’s Polkadot Parachain. This process is facilitated by the council.
Open Grants
The council also controls an open grant which supports new ideas, schemes and algorithms of on-chain governance, essential DAO pallets, important toolkits. In order to make a decision to issue an open grant, a simple majority must be reached among the councillors.
Bounty
There will be certain features and improvements proposed by users or core developers. An open bounty program will be hosted on HackerLink. Both core DORAs and community projects can issue a bounty. Every bounty is linked to a GitHub issue so that workflows can be managed on GitHub. Many types of cryptos can be used for bounty payments.
Smaller features and improvements that are not within the scope of open grants might be posted as bounties.
Sudo and Election
The councillors will be appointed by the Matsushiba Foundation until Sudo is removed. When Sudo is removed, councillors will be elected by DORA Voters. The rules of election will be then hard coded into a governance pallet and be added to the Governance DAO. At that time, Dora Factory will enter DAO governance.
🚗 Polkadot Factory Roadmap
🔽 Migrate key pallets to substrate
🔽 HackerLink Integration — Bounty & Grant
🔽 Run quadratic funding grants on Kusama
🔽 Launch POA parachain network on Rococo and Kusama
🔽 Release Independent Client Frontend for DAO-as-a-Service
🔽 Start DAO-as-a-Service for Kusama DAOs
🔽 Upgrade network consensus to NPoS on Kusama
🔽 Deploy Parachain Mainnet on Polkadot
🔽 Start DAO-as-a-Service for Polkadot DAOs
🔽 Enable cross-chain vaults
🔽 Remove Sudo
RISKS
You acknowledge and agree that there are numerous risks associated with acquiring DORA, holding DORA, and using DORA for participation in Dora Factory. In the worst scenario, this could lead to the loss of all or part of DORA held. IF YOU DECIDE TO ACQUIRE DORA, YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE, ACCEPT AND ASSUME THE FOLLOWING RISKS:
1. Uncertain Regulations and Enforcement Actions
The regulatory status of DORA and distributed ledger technology is unclear or unsettled in many jurisdictions. The regulation of digital assets has become a primary target of regulation in all major countries in the world. It is impossible to predict how, when or whether regulatory agencies may apply existing regulations or create new regulations with respect to such technology and its applications, including DORA and/or Dora Factory. Regulatory actions could negatively impact DORA and/or Dora Factory in various ways. The Foundation, the Distributor (or their respective affiliates) may cease operations in a jurisdiction in the event that regulatory actions, or changes to law or regulation, make it illegal to operate in such jurisdiction, or commercially undesirable to obtain the necessary regulatory approval(s) to operate in such jurisdiction. After consulting with a wide range of legal advisors to mitigate the legal risks as much as possible, the Company and Distributor have worked with the specialist blockchain department at Bayfront Law LLC and obtained a legal opinion on the token distribution, and will be conducting business in accordance with the prevailing market practice.
2. Inadequate disclosure of information
As at the date hereof, Dora Factory is still under development and its design concepts, consensus mechanisms, algorithms, codes, and other technical details and parameters may be constantly and frequently updated and changed. Although this whitepaper contains the most current information relating to Dora Factory, it is not absolutely complete and may still be adjusted and updated by the Dora Factory team from time to time. The Dora Factory team has no ability and obligation to keep holders of DORA informed of every detail (including development progress and expected milestones) regarding the project to develop Dora Factory, hence insufficient information disclosure is inevitable and reasonable.
3. Competitors
Various types of decentralised applications and networks are emerging at a rapid rate, and the industry is increasingly competitive. It is possible that alternative networks could be established that utilise the same or similar code and protocol underlying DORA and/or Dora Factory and attempt to re-create similar facilities. Dora Factory may be required to compete with these alternative networks, which could negatively impact DORA and/or Dora Factory.
4. Loss of Talent
The development of Dora Factory greatly depends on the continued co-operation of the existing technical team and expert consultants, who are highly knowledgeable and experienced in their respective sectors. The loss of any member may adversely affect Dora Factory or its future development. Further, stability and cohesion within the team is critical to the overall development of Dora Factory. There is the possibility that conflict within the team and/or departure of core personnel may occur, resulting in negative influence on the project in the future.
5. Failure to develop
There is the risk that the development of Dora Factory will not be executed or implemented as planned, for a variety of reasons, including without limitation the event of a decline in the prices of any digital asset, virtual currency or DORA, unforeseen technical difficulties, and shortage of development funds for activities.
6. Security weaknesses
Hackers or other malicious groups or organisations may attempt to interfere with DORA and/or Dora Factory in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to, malware attacks, denial of service attacks, consensus-based attacks, Sybil attacks, smurfing and spoofing. Furthermore, there is a risk that a third party or a member of the Foundation, the Distributor or their respective affiliates may intentionally or unintentionally introduce weaknesses into the core infrastructure of DORA and/or Dora Factory, which could negatively affect DORA and/or Dora Factory.
Further, the future of cryptography and security innovations are highly unpredictable and advances in cryptography, or technical advances (including without limitation development of quantum computing), could present unknown risks to DORA and/or Dora Factory by rendering ineffective the cryptographic consensus mechanism that underpins that blockchain protocol.
7. Other risks
In addition, the potential risks briefly mentioned above are not exhaustive and there are other risks (as more particularly set out in the Terms and Conditions) associated with your acquisition of, holding and use of DORA, including those that the Foundation or the Distributor cannot anticipate. Such risks may further materialise as unanticipated variations or combinations of the aforementioned risks. You should conduct full due diligence on the Foundation, the Distributor, their respective affiliates, and the Dora Factory team, as well as understand the overall framework, mission and vision for Dora Factory prior to acquiring DORA.
