1. Proposal Purpose:
The purpose of this proposal is to implement Lighthouse, an on-chain DAO-scale reputation protocol, that can be used to establish reputation-weighted voting and can be extended to other areas of decentralization and DAO automation.
2. Grape Proposal Overview:
Overview
Dean’s recent medium article “Measuring DAOness and the Transition of the Grape Team” (Measuring DAOness and the Transition of the Grape Team | by DeanMachine | Jun, 2022 | Medium) laid out a need and vision for a more decentralized DAO by identifying chokepoints and overcoming these through robust tools and incentives.
His recommendation was to deploy a reputation-based voting weight, that represents individual involvement and uses it to complement pure financial token based governance, thereby preventing the DAO from being controlled by anyone with the financial ability to purchase more Grape.
In order to accelerate and realize this vision, we propose the use of Lighthouse, a reputation and credentialing protocol that allows DAOs to capture, value and activate member contributions.
Lighthouse can enable the capabilities described in the article, thereby saving a tremendous amount of time and effort in developing it.
Goal
Lighthouse will work with Grape and commits to:
Helping create a framework and tooling for reputation-based voting;
Giving Grape the ability to issue attestations and/or issue non-transferrable reputation tokens as a countersignature for contributions made by members;
Experimenting with automated attestation evaluation and valuation;
Offering members increased transparency on the contributions made by other members and the value attributed to them;
Providing extendable APIs that can be used to expand on the vision of reducing chokepoints around decentralization and DAO automation
Lighthouse Implementation
To use Lighthouse, Grape would elect a number stewards (members of a multi-sig) that would be responsible for evaluating contributions (and potentially valuing them).
In its simplest form, Grape publishes a form by which members can submit their contributions (and potentially request compensation in reputation or native tokens).
The elected stewards would then approve, reject or potentially adjust the value of contributions based on their quality and importance. Submissions of contributions and decisions regarding them are logged on-chain.
This approach allows Grape to build a library of attestations - approved contributions and their optional corresponding values. These attestations can then be used in myriad ways from issuing non-transferable reputation tokens for reputation-weighted governance to managing roles and credentials across Grape’s DAO tooling.
Trust and Transparency
The Lighthouse UI is transparent for all DAO members and all information is tracked on-chain. Any member can connect his or her wallet and access a dashboard of all members that have been issued attestations or reputation tokens.
Members can also view the list of stewards, the mutli-sig quorum, all sources of reputation, submitted contributions and apps in which Grape uses attestations and reputation.
Automation and Experimentation
Lighthouse would also enable Grape to extend reputation attribution from a manual process to an automated one. Using Lighthouse’s Attestation API, Grape would be able to issue attestations for objective activity like on-chain transactions and votes or dapp interactions.
Because attestations do not require reputation to be attributed, Grape can learn from existing attestations and attribute reputation later, in order to conceive and experiment with fair, automated attributions.
Extensibility
Dean’s article highlights the need to measure DAOness through two key vectors, namely decentralization and automation. While weighted governance is a good start, chokepoints can exist in other areas of participation-driven collaboration.
To facilitate experimentation with this, Lighthouse also provides an Application API. This API allows Grape to read attestations and build applications that leverage reputation in novel ways like leaderboards, gated access, badging, role assignments, reputation NFTs and so much more.
Achieving Decentralization and Autonomy
Reputation can bring trust and transparency to a more decentralized Grape. Lighthouse can facilitate this, while bringing a high level of transparency to the contributions made by members and how the community decides to value them.
Pragmatically, reputation-weighted voting would imply that either the value of attestations or the reputation NTTs would impact the voting power of $GRAPE. For example, a member with 1,000 $GRAPE and 0 $ntGRAPE could have a reputation-adjusted voting power of 0, whereas a member with 100 $GRAPE and 100 $ntGRAPE could have a reputation-adjusted voting power of 100.
Contributions would be submitted using a specific form for each contribution type. These would arrive in a queue and pass through a fully transparent evaluation and valuation process governed by the community-elected members of the multi-sig. For example, marketing efforts on Twitter could require a link to a tweet.
3. Stakeholders
DeanMachine, Takisoul, BillysDiscord, Kirk, Dim Selk, DyNite, Jahris
In order to implement Lighthouse, the Lighthouse team would work with members of the Grape community, specifically members interested in designing attestation types, attestation values (e.g. normalized NTT distribution values) and integrations with objective sources of reputation. This would occur in 2-3 phases, beginning first with attestation types.
We suggest organizing weekly working groups of 3 to 5 members twice per week over 2 weeks. This committee would be responsible for defining the fields necessary to issue attestations. Over the subsequent 2 weeks, we would begin attributing standard values for these attestations, ultimately leading to an initial reputation value system that can evolve with new attestation types or community-driven modifications to existing attestations and their values.
Finally, the Lighthouse team would work closely with developers on integrations of objective sources of reputation without attributing values. Once enough objective attestations have been collected, the community would meet once again to build a reputation value model on top of these objective attestations. Ideally, for this final piece, 1 or 2 developers would work with the Lighthouse team.
4. Costs/Resource Requirements:
In order to issue on-chain attestations, communities must pay for gas. Each attestation requires a gas fee that can vary, but amounts to about $0.001 per attestation on Solana. This would facilitate approximately 10,000 attestations at a total cost of about $10.
The implementation of Lighthouse will be done at no fee to Grape DAO, and Lighthouse can guarantee support of the implementation for a fixed fee of 5,000 $GRAPE per month for a period of 6 months after which the service agreement can be re-evaluated by either party.