Societal - MVP - Phase 1
- Team Name: Societal Labs Ltd.
- Payment Address: Ethereum - USDT: 0xcDcCF94f10d8A7165C1A336DD3795430a6CDE530
- Level: 2
Project Overview
Overview
Societal is an all-in-one Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) creation and management platform. Societal allows all types of groups or communities to build their own online, transparent, and decentralized organization. Societal bundles all of the tools required to create and manage a DAO in one place. Creators will be empowered to construct a DAO with fungible, non-fungible, or a combination of governance tokens. Societal also offers DAO management tooling features like treasury management, specialized governance, task boards, legal structuring, and accounting. This removes the need to utilize siloed platforms to manage the operations of a DAO. Whether a creator is looking to build a DAO for their organization, raise and deploy investment capital, or decentralize governance of an NFT project, Societal has the necessary tooling for a seamless end-to-end experience.
Utilizing Polkdaot’s layer-0 infrastructure and ecosystem, Societal will provide DAOs with both maximum functionality and a cohesive user experience. With features including agnostic token compatibility, zero gas fees, a freemium entry point, and a SaaS-based membership pricing, Societal combines best-in-class features into one vertically integrated product. With integrations into DeFi, privacy, and identity protocols, Societal will enable web3 organizations to seamlessly transition and manage their DAOs into the future.
The Societal team has been building in the Polkadot ecosystem for the last year. While at a previous Polkadot project, the Societal team noticed a lack of integrated DAO tooling - not only in the Polkadot ecosystem, but in the broader web3 industry as a whole. After analyzing how we might transition and manage our previous project into a DAO, there was no clear path. This, along with the team being both members and council members of various DAOs and noticing the lack of infrastructure, we decided to build a solution - Societal.
Project Details
Societal Labs has been designing the product vision of the Socital platform for quite some time. We will go over the project details and blockchain architecture in this application and provide references below for more in-depth context.
In Societal's final state, it will offer four main services; Create, Transition, Transfer and Manage. Create will allow any web3 user to create their own DAO. Transition will allow protocols to progressively move towards community ownership. Transfer will allow DAOs to transfer their DAO from an expensive siloed chain to the Sociteal platform. Manage will provide DAOs all the required product features to manage their organization, whether it is a small investment club or a large community-governed protocol.
Societal will offer a wide range of features to create and manage a DAO. The features are split into three categories; Operations, Treasury, and Governance. The Operations features are: job & task boards, payroll, customizable feeds, legal tooling, on-chain reputation, and web & mobile application. The Treasury features are as follows: treasury wallets (multi-sig), DeFi integrations, on-chain cap table, accounting and private asset integrations. The governance features are: zero gas fee governance, proposal calendar, built-in governance models, governance treasury execution, and private voting.
Societal will vertically integrate with projects to advance its tech stack and product offering, something not seen in most web3 projects today. For example, Societal can integrate DeFi services by working with projects like Acala, Parallel, and Composable Finance, which will allow for active treasury management for DAOs managed with Societal. For private assets and voting, projects like Manta and Phala can provide privacy-enabling functions like zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environments to make this possible. For on-chain credentials, projects like KILT and Litentry can provide KYC and member credentialing services that can be used by DAOs for governance and recruiting.
The Societal platform will host a vast network of DAOs and eventually offer a Cross-DAO Marketplace. DAO’s onboarded onto the platform will have access to a network of individual DAOs, along with any associated sub-DAOs or guilds. When a DAO has a task that needs to be completed, they will have the ability to post this task to the entire Societal network. This will reach the collective network of sub-DAOs or guilds that may have the ability to complete the required work. The interconnection of DAOs on the Societal platform will open up never before seen opportunities in collaboration across the web3 DAO, sub-DAO, and guild ecosystem.
Finally, Societal plans to progressively transition into a DAO itself. Once the token is launched, a community-run treasury will grow over time until the entire network is owned and operated by the community.
For more information, please refer to the following resources:
- Societal Whitepaper here
- Societal Docs here
- Societal Testnet Requirements Doc here
- UI Mockups (High Res.) here
UI Mockups:
Ecosystem Fit
As it stands today, the DAO landscape within the Polkadot ecosystem is not as mature as other ecosystems such as Ethereum and Solana. This is due to insufficient DAO creation and tooling infrastructure in the ecosystem. Currently, the Polkadot ecosystem does not have the creation, governance, treasury management, and payroll tooling products as other major blockchains. By building these tooling products on Polkadot, both the Polkadot DAO landscape and the broader DAO management tooling space is primed for innovation by utilizing the unique technical abilities that Substrate provides.
The target audience of the Societal application are web3 users who require a platform to easily create and manage their DAO. Using the technical capabilities that Substrate provides, Societal will design our chain to be token agnostic, allowing current MetaMask users to easily connect to our chain and start using the governance application right away. By doing this, our project will meet the needs of the Polkadot community to create their own DAOs and have the tools to manage them as seen in other ecosystems.
The projects like Societal in the Polkadot space are Polkassembly, SubDAO, and DoraFactory. Societal differs from these projects in multiple ways. First, Polkassembly is not building their own parachain and is only a governance platform for large Polkadot projects. Societal wants to allow any web3 user to create their own DAO - not just catering to large established protocols. SubDAO has recently been focusing on smart contract deployments on multiple chains and does not appear to be building a parachain. Societal will build its own parachain and use the technical capabilities of Substrate to be truly token agnostic, connecting with widely used wallets such as MetaMask, to avoid doing multiple chain deployments via smart contracts. Dora Factory is similar to Societal in the sense that they are building their own parachian, however we plan to offer zero gas fees and a SaaS based pricing model to enhance our user's experience. Societal will also seek to integrate with other parachains, having cross-chain smart contract execution.
Team
Team members
- Graeme Fox
- Tyler Gellatly
- Max Kudinov
Contact
- Contact Name: Graeme Fox
- Contact Email: graeme@sctl.xyz
- Website: https://www.sctl.xyz/
Legal Structure
- Registered Address: 707 5 St SW Unit 500, Calgary, AB, Canada T2P 0Y3
- Registered Legal Entity: Societal Labs Ltd.
Team's experience
Graeme Fox is the former Director of Business Development at Ruby Protocol, a privacy project building with the Substrate framework. During this role, he gained extensive knowledge of both the Polkadot ecosystem and its technology stack. Prior to this, Graeme was the Lead Product Manager at Connectus. During this time, he was in charge of both internal and external development teams that created a web-based application using a MERN stack development, along with a supporting phone application on iOS and Android. It was during this role when Graeme was first introduced to blockchain development, as the main product line integrated with the Corda Blockchain to allow for automatic and secure payments following the completion of specific KPIs. Graeme has held other engineering roles in the past and holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Dalhousie University. He lives and breathes the entrepreneurial mindset, being involved in early-stage startups for the last four years.
Tyler Gellatly has been building and scaling early stage start-ups for the last 4+ years. He was employee #1 and Director of Operations & Partnerships at Cuboh (a YC-backed SAAS middleware operating within the ghost kitchen industry) More recently, Tyler helped found Ruby Protocol, a novel privacy protocol building on the Substrate framework, and is still involved in a strategic advisory capacity. Currently, he sits on the DAO council for the Illuminati Collective, which currently has a 1000 ETH treasury under management. Tyler holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Victoria, specializing in corporate strategy and finance. A well-rounded business operations leader with a background in finance, operations, capital fundraising, and strategic partnerships, Tyler is mission driven to bring web3 communities together at scale by utilizing blockchain technology.
Max Kudinov is the CEO of Magic Powered, a software development firm building multiple web3 projects. Max has a passion for governance projects and was the Project Lead for the development of Astro DAO, an all-in-one DAO creation and management platform built on Near. From this experience, Max has excellent understanding of Rust and how he would like to improve upon the Astro DAO project. Max has highly experienced web3 and rust developers on his team, ready to start the development of this project.
Team Code Repos
Org:
Please also provide the GitHub accounts of all team members. If they contain no activity, references to projects hosted elsewhere or live are also fine. Team:
Team LinkedIn Profiles (if available)
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/graemefox/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/tngell/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-kudinov-395595152/
Development Status
Before applying for the Web3 Foundation Grant, the Societal team conducted the following research:
- Reviewed the list of ideas that the Web3 Foundation could be interested in Funding here, our focus was on governance and treasury management UI
- Reviewed the list of improvement proposals and the one that stood out the most for our current roadmap was XCM library & tools
- The focus for Societal will be automatic cross-chain smart contract execution following an approved governance proposal on the Societal chain
- Spoke with Robin Ejsmond-Frey and Amit Joshi from the Parity team regarding the development of Societal and the Web3 Grant application
Development Roadmap 🔩
Overview
- Total Estimated Duration: 4 months
- Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 3 FTE
- Total Costs: 30,000 USDT
Milestone 1 — DAO Factory Pallet
- Estimated Duration: 2 months
- FTE: 3
- Costs: 20,000 USD
The main delivery of this milestone will be the DAO Factory Pallet. This pallet will allow someone to create a DAO on the Societal Network, where the DAO consists of a governance token, treasury and governance system.
| Number | Deliverable | Specification |
|---|---|---|
| 0a. | License | Apache 2.0 |
| 0b. | Documentation | We will provide both inline documentation of the code and a basic tutorial that explains how a user can (for example) spin up one of our Substrate nodes and create a DAO. |
| 0c. | Testing Guide | Core functions will be fully covered by unit tests to ensure functionality and robustness. In the guide, we will describe how to run these tests. |
| 0d. | Docker | We will provide a Dockerfile(s) that can be used to test all the functionality delivered with this milestone. |
| 0e. | Article | We will publish a tutorial that explains how to create a DAO. |
| 1. | Substrate module: DAO Factory | This substrate pallet will create a DAO. While creating a DAO, the user can create a token for the DAO, setup a treasury and select a governance system. |
| 2. | Client Modules | Minor UI updates will be made, to allow the user to interact with the pallet. However, the major UI creation will be completed in milestone 2. |
Milestone 2 — Governance & Treasury Dashboard
- Estimated duration: 2 months
- FTE: 3
- Costs: 10,000 USD
The main delivery of this milestone is to have an easy to use and interactive UI for users to create a DAO and manage its governance and treasury.
| Number | Deliverable | Specification |
|---|---|---|
| 0a. | License | Apache 2.0 |
| 0b. | Documentation | We will provide both inline documentation of the code and a basic tutorial that explains how a user can (for example) spin up one of our Substrate nodes and send test transactions, which will show how the new functionality works. |
| 0c. | Testing Guide | Core functions will be fully covered by unit tests to ensure functionality and robustness. In the guide, we will describe how to run these tests. |
| 0d. | Docker | We will provide a Dockerfile(s) that can be used to test all the functionality delivered with this milestone. |
| 0e. | Article | We will publish a tutorial that explains the UI of the Societal platform and how to use the application. |
| 1. | Client Modules | We will create a client facing UI that will interact with the Societal chain. The main function of the dashboard will be for the creation of the DAO, and manage its goverance & treasury. |
| 2. | Substrate chain | In this milestone the Substrate chain will be built and the necessary pallets will be implemented. The pallets that will be included are: DAO FACTORY, System, Support, Executive, Assets, Authority Discovery, BABE, Balances, Democracy, Elections, Referenda, GRANDPA, Indices, Membership, Multisig, Nicks, Proxy, Scheduler, Transaction Payment, and Treasury |
Notes: Please note that the list of pallets is not exhausted. Some pallets may need to be added or removed from the MVP. However, based on my initial research the pallets listed above will be the required pallets for the Societal chain.
Future Plans
Societal plans to secure fundraising and expand the development team. After the completion of the milestones stated above, Societal plans to expand the product offering by implementing a DAO Market Place and a Mobile App for DAO management. Ideally Societal will be able to secure another Web3 grant for these milestones, along with integrations for private voting and identity voting based on links to the RFPs. From there, Societal would also like to apply for the Substrate Builders Program, establishing itself at the go to DAO and governance platform. Finally, Societal will progressively transition into a DAO itself and release control to the community.
Additional Information
How did you hear about the Grants Program?
Societal heard about the Grants Program from our time building in the Polkadot Ecosystem.
Additional Information:
- Work you have already done?
- The information provided in this application encompasses most of the work done on this project. Other work done on the project has been based around design, website development and fundraising.
- If there are any other teams who have already contributed (financially) to the project?
- Yes, all the founders of Societal Labs have contributed financially to the project.
- Previous grants you may have applied for?
- No other grants have been applied for.