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Societal

  • Team Name: Societal Labs Ltd.
  • Payment Address: Ethereum - USDC: 0xcDcCF94f10d8A7165C1A336DD3795430a6CDE530
  • Level: 2

Project Overview 📄​

This is the second grant for the Societal Labs team, after the sucessful submission and merge of our first W3F grant.

Overview​

Societal is a specialized blockchain for the creation and management of Decentralize Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). 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 past two years. 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.

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 Protoype Demo here
  • UI Mockups (High Res.) here
  • Societal MVP Article

Ecosystem Fit​

As it stands today, the DAO landscape within the Polkadot ecosystem is not as mature as other ecosystems such as Ethereum. 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 are 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
  • Oleh Kalenyk
  • Alibek Sansyzbayev

Contact​

  • Registered Address: Brookfield Place, Suite 2700, 225 6 Ave SW, Calgary, AB T2P 1N2
  • Registered Legal Entity: Societal Labs Ltd.

Team's experience​

Graeme Fox is the Co-Founder & CEO of Societal, a specialized blockchain designed for the creation and management of DAOs. He was accepted to inaugural the Polkadot Blockchain Academy, held at Cambridge University. Graeme is also a volunteer at the Canadian Blockchain Consortium, where he holds a role on the web3 committee. Prior to this, Graeme has held many roles in and out of web3. In web3, he was previously Head of Product at Ruby Protocol, a privacy project implementing Functional Encryption to combat Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). Prior to web3 he 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 five years.

Tyler Gellatly is the Co-Founder & COO of Societal and 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.

Team Code Repos​

Org:

Team:

Team LinkedIn Profiles (if available)​

Development Status 📖​

Societal has already been working on our project and has completed our MVP. The two main repositories of the Societal project are the societal-node and the societal-client. These repositories represent the societal blockchain (built with substrate) and the UI. To date or MVP includes the following features: Create a DAO with its own governance token, elect council members, create proposals, and vote on them with your MetaMask wallet.

Development Roadmap 🔩​

Overview​

  • Total Estimated Duration: 3 months
  • Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 2 FTE
  • Total Costs: 30,000 USDC

Milestone 1 — Add Reservable & Lockable Traits to Asset Pallet​

  • Estimated Duration: 1.5 months
  • FTE: 2
  • Costs: 15,000 USDC
NumberDeliverableSpecification
0a.LicenseApache 2.0
0b.DocumentationWe will provide both inline documentation of the code and a basic tutorial that explains how a user can spin up one of our Societal's nodes and interact with the Reservable & Lockable Asset Pallet.
0c.Testing GuideCore 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.DockerWe will provide a Dockerfile(s) that can be used to test all the functionality delivered with this milestone.
1.Substrate Module: Reservable & Lockable Asset PalletThe main delivery of this milestone will be adding the 'ReservableAsset' and 'LockableAsset' Traits to the current Substrate Assets Pallet. By doing this, fungilbe tokens generate from the new Assets Pallet will have the same Reservable and Lockable features as the chain's native token from the balances pallet. These fungible tokens may then be used with the current Substrate Democarcy pallet, allowing DAOs create on Societal's chain to have similar feautres to Polkadot's Governance v1.
2.Client ModulesA minor UI will be made to allow the user to interact with the new Asset Pallet and show that the functionality works. However, the major UI creation will be completed in milestone 2.

Milestone 2 — UI To Display Functionality​

  • Estimated duration: 1.5 months
  • FTE: 2
  • Costs: 15,000 USDC
NumberDeliverableSpecification
0a.LicenseApache 2.0
0b.DocumentationWe will provide both inline documentation of the code and a basic tutorial that explains how a user can spin up our Substrate client and test the functionality of the interact with the Reservable & Lockable Asset Pallet via Societal UI.
0c.Testing GuideCore 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.DockerWe will provide a Dockerfile(s) that can be used to test all the functionality delivered with this milestone.
0e.ArticleWe will publish a tutorial that explains how to use and interact with the Reservable & Lockable Asset Pallet via Societal UI.
1.Client ModulesWe will create a client facing UI that will interact with the Reservable & Lockable Asset Pallet. The main functionly of the UI will be to show how the fungilbe tokens generated from the new Assets Pallet can be used with the current Substrate Democracy Pallet. This will allow DAOs that have been created on the Societal network to have similar features to Polkdaot Governance v1 system, that only parachains can use right now.

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 Dapp Market Place and a subscription pricing mechanisim. Societal has also applied to be a part of the Substrate Builders Program. Finally, Societal plans to launch its own parachain and be the go to DAO Creation and Mangament platofrm.

Additional Information ➕​

All information already included in above.