"Wandian Chat" is an AMA live broadcast event launched by Blocklike, regularly inviting founders and KOLs related to popular exchanges, promising projects, and hot topics to join the live stream. So far, over 30 heavyweight guests have been invited, including He Yi, co-founder and CMO of Binance, Sun Yuchen, founder of TRON, Cao Jing, co-founder and CEO of BitMax, and Guo Hongcai, also known as "Master Bao."

"Wandian Chat" has over 40 blockchain media outlets jointly promoting each live broadcast, with more than 30 communities simultaneously broadcasting, reaching an audience of over 100,000. The highlights of the live broadcast will be compiled into materials and disseminated on Blocklike and 8-10 other media platforms to share the guests' insights.

This AMA is the 39th episode of Wandian Chat, with the theme [Polkadot DAO: Open On-chain Governance Infrastructure]. This time, our guest is Steve Ngok, the head of the Dora Factory ecosystem.

Here is the content summary of the AMA

Xiao Wan: First, please introduce yourself briefly. What interactions have you had with the Polkadot ecosystem before?

Steve: Hello everyone, I am Steve Ngok (Twitter ID @DAONgok).

I am a partner at Dora Factory and DoraHacks, along with Eric Nobita and Penny Wang. I am glad to be here at Wandian Chat to share our project, Dora Factory!

I am the head of the ecosystem at Dora Factory. Eric is our chief architect, and Penny is our operations head.

In addition, we are also the founding team and partners of DoraHacks and DoraHacks Ventures.

DoraHacks is a global geek community, and DoraHacks Ventures is the investment and incubation fund of DoraHacks.

DoraHacks Ventures is a seed fund startup accelerator aimed at discovering and nurturing exciting post-hackathon projects.

Before introducing Dora Factory, we need to talk about DoraHacks.

We started incubating the DoraHacks community in 2014 and gradually developed it into the largest developer and geek community by 2017. In 2018, we organized 31 blockchain hackathons in 15 cities across 8 countries, becoming one of the largest blockchain developer communities in the world.

In 2019, we held the largest hackathon in Chinese history, the "Fourth Industrial Revolution Hackathon," in Beijing, with over 500 top developers participating.

Hackathons are the soul of the DoraHacks community. In previous hackathons and hacker events, we witnessed the birth of early projects like Matic, Acala, Phala, Darwinia, ChainX, Bandot, Manta, xDefi, Apron Network, and Zenlink. During the early days of the Polkadot ecosystem, DoraHacks accompanied these projects in their early growth as a developer community.

In December 2020, we held the only Polkadot hackathon in the world that year, which took place in Hangzhou. This event also allowed us to experience the complete process of applying for the Polkadot treasury and appreciate the smoothness of the on-chain governance process.

Our team began researching Substrate and the technical underpinnings of Polkadot relatively early. We indeed saw the technological superiority of Substrate compared to Ethereum's underlying technology during this process. We will provide more detailed introductions later. This is also the original intention behind our initiative to create Dora Factory as an on-chain governance DAO infrastructure for Polkadot.

Xiao Wan: How do you understand DAO governance? What dimensions and frameworks can we analyze it from?

Steve: You must have heard of DAO.

DAO is the future form of all organizations. We can think of many examples of DAOs—open-source developer teams, DeFi protocol community governance, public chain developer communities, venture capital organizations in DAO form, etc. They can all be DAOs, and many already are. In the future, more institutions can exist in the form of DAO organizations, such as non-profit organizations, crypto artist groups, large event organizations, hobbyist groups, decentralized media, and more.

Any organization or group that requires on-chain governance can be a DAO and can utilize the underlying and core on-chain governance modules of Dora Factory, many of which may become incredibly cool organizations in the future:

1. A fund to support open-source quantum computing development
2. A developer community for a public chain
3. The community governance body of a DeFi project
4. An autonomous organization for contributors of any open-source project
5. A decentralized venture capital organization investing in multiple blockchain projects (which is quite common now)
6. A multinational enterprise or government department using DAO to manage part of its team
7. Various interest groups exploring new ideas
8. Hackathon and event organizers managing funds
9. An industry association for crypto artists
10. Decentralized media established directly funded by the audience

So, what DAO mechanisms do these organizations need? Taking voting as an example:

• Simple majority voting
• Quadratic voting
• Collective leadership
• Direct democracy
• Representative democracy
• Liquid democracy
• Futarchy

For us, DAO is not just a voting machine. A DAO should be a complete and rich set of on-chain governance solutions. To this end, we can build an open infrastructure where all DAOs can freely and plug-and-play call governance functions, which is what we refer to as DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure.

Substrate provides us with a unique underlying architecture that allows us to build an open platform for on-chain governance protocols.

Most DAO platforms on Ethereum are primarily voting machines, so they cannot meet many of the current needs of DAOs.

With Substrate, we can build DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure, using DORA to empower this infrastructure and incentivize developers, allowing DAOs that call different governance modules and functions to plug and play these powerful features anytime and anywhere.

Dora Factory provides a large playground where all organizations can easily create DAOs and prepares a wealth of cool on-chain governance features to meet the key needs of DAOs in governance, fundraising, collaboration, management, and more.

Xiao Wan: How far has the Polkadot DAO ecosystem developed now? What direction will it develop next?

Steve: The overall Polkadot ecosystem is still in a very early stage, and there are very few projects in the DAO track, with only a handful of projects having products.

With the launch of the Kusama and Polkadot mainnets, more large and small ecosystems within Polkadot will require specific functions and modules for DAO governance.

Dora Factory provides a large playground where all organizations can easily create DAOs and prepares a wealth of cool on-chain governance features to meet the key needs of DAOs in governance, fundraising, collaboration, management, and more.

We believe that the vibrant global developer community of DoraHacks and HackerLink will help Dora Factory grow into a prosperous ecosystem. We will incubate a large number of high-quality on-chain governance tools and products and provide necessary and high-quality services in many related fields of DAOs.

Xiao Wan: We know that Dora Factory is based on Substrate, programmable, and an open infrastructure for DAO-as-a-Service. So, what components make up Dora Factory? What roles do each part play?

Steve: Many of our products will be deployed on Ethereum/BSC, but over the past period, as we have deepened our understanding of Substrate, we have indeed seen some technical advantages of Polkadot.

Dora Factory consists of three parts: Polkadot Factory, Ethereum Factory, and a virtual bridge.

On Polkadot, DAOs achieve governance functions by adding on-chain governance modules called "Pallets"; on Ethereum, DAOs achieve this by deploying smart contracts one by one. Dora Factory allows developers to submit self-developed components and factory contracts.

Once the Polkadot mainnet's functions are fully realized, assets will be very easy to move across various Polkadot parachains, and the DAO organizations of Dora Factory will be able to manage their tokens from all Polkadot parachains. This also means that all Polkadot startup projects can use Dora Factory to manage their DAO organizations.

For the following reasons, Dora Factory will develop a parachain on Polkadot:

1. Cross-chain DAO asset management
2. Shared security brought by the Polkadot network
3. Modular development of core functions (Pallet components)

Dora Factory provides the following underlying functions and modules by default:

1. Create DAO organizations
2. Publish DAO organizations
3. Treasury for cross-chain assets
4. Staking, tax, and bonus systems
5. Payments
6. Protocol layer governance

On top of the underlying infrastructure, you can imagine various application-layer on-chain governance modules called "Pallets." Anyone or team can develop them.

This is the design intention behind Dora Factory's playground-like open infrastructure.

Xiao Wan: As we know, the voting mechanism of Dora Factory is quadratic voting. Can you explain why you chose this mechanism?

Steve: Quadratic voting is an important concept in radical markets and an improvement over traditional voting mechanisms of one person one vote and one dollar one vote.

In quadratic voting, the cost of voting increases linearly. For example, the cost of the first vote is one dollar, and the cost of the second vote is two dollars, so the total voting cost is a quadratic function of the number of votes.

Our quadratic voting is the latest governance module, and I believe we are one of the teams that understand the quadratic voting mechanism and product design best.

We used quadratic voting in BSC Grant 1, allowing BNB holders to vote for the latest ecological projects on BSC. Ultimately, it attracted $800,000 in community donations, which were allocated to 108 new projects in the BSC ecosystem. Over 10,000 addresses participated in the voting phase of this online grant.

This was a large-scale on-chain governance activity, a big party for the developer ecosystem!

We also used quadratic voting in the hackathon we held in Beijing in collaboration with Binance Smart Chain, where over 5,000 community users cast more than 10,000 votes for 19 projects.

The prize pool for the competition was initially only over $10,000, but the community voted for $80,000.

It turned into an offline hackathon with a prize pool close to $100,000.

So, in the Dora Factory network, we will continuously design new DAO governance modules for different governance scenarios with our community developers, allowing users to directly experience these tools and the gameplay they are applied to.

For example, quadratic voting, on-chain joint curve open-source developer donations, and Futarchy are all directions we are researching and engineering.

Xiao Wan: Compared to other Polkadot DAO governance infrastructure services, what are your highlights?

Steve: Probably that Dora Factory has both products and users.

As we just mentioned, on our flagship product Hackerlink, we are collaborating with partners such as Binance Smart Chain, Huobi Eco Chain HECO, OKExChain, Kusama, Polkadot, ETC, Filecoin, Avalanche, The Graph, and Solana on quadratic voting and hackathon community building activities.

In the past month, tens of thousands of people have participated in the quadratic voting community governance of Dora Factory.

We will also provide more fresh perspectives in the DAO field. Recently, we have been researching topics such as witch attacks, collusion, and Futarchy, and we will share these latest research insights on DAOrayaki, our incubated decentralized media.

Xiao Wan: We know that a new product will soon join the Dora Factory product line. Can you share its current status with us? What are your next plans?

Steve: The online blockchain developer platform HackerLink of DoraHacks has developed the first batch of key on-chain governance modules for Dora Factory. It serves as our first official front-end entry point. (We are a Polkadot ecosystem project with real products and active users!)

HackerLink provides many high-quality developer on-chain governance tools, such as quadratic voting, developer bounties, BUIDL, and online hackathons, promoting global blockchain open-source entrepreneurship and innovation.

HackerLink just held the first online quadratic voting community grant for Binance Smart Chain, BSC Grant 1. We received a total of $800,000 in community donations. Since the launch of this event, in less than 10 days, over 100 new geek teams and developer projects have submitted applications for the program. It has been a very popular event, with many new projects emerging.

We are also supporting BSC Grant 2, co-hosted by BSC and The Graph, on Hackerlink.

At the same time, we are holding the first quadratic voting grant for Huobi Smart Chain HECO, HECO Grant 1.

Regarding Polkadot, we are building infrastructure from the ground up and have many exciting developments. We have submitted our first Web3 Foundation Grant. You can check the details of our grant on GitHub:

https://github.com/w3f/Open-Grants-Program/pull/227

https://github.com/w3f/Grant-Milestone-Delivery/pull/104

We are also migrating MolochDAO from Ethereum to Substrate, and our DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure will be launched around June 2021. (As long as Kusama doesn't delay, we won't either.)

In terms of community, DoraHacks just completed a new event in the global hackathon series from March 6 to 7 in Beijing, with over 20 new geek teams, including Magi NFT, joining our event!

We will also hold an online hackathon in Singapore from April 10 to 11.

Our community developer Goda Takeshi hosted the first IBDO issuance of xDefi's XDEX on his self-developed joint curve fundraising platform PentaLaunch on March 19. It sold out in less than ten seconds.

PentaLaunch will be the second core governance fundraising module for Dora Factory after quadratic voting!