DistributedTown: Retroactive Introduction

Ok, let’s be honest: for a passionate, hyper-active, 1-year-old project — we know, we’ve definitely taken too long for an “Intro about DistributedTown.”

Sure, I could have started a year ago by saying, we are working on a solution to unify the DAO & Governance spaces. A DAO for all DAOs, designed as an NFT of NFTs (a multidimensional asset) — based on mutual credit, and a skill-based economy, that allows anyone to launch a self-sovereign, self-sustainable city-state on the Blockchain.

But, what the hell am I talking about? Exactly.

Sure, what I mentioned above is a loyal representation of what DistributedTown is today — but what does it even mean?

So indulge me with this: the longer we waited, the more the project expanded, the more concepts there were to talk about — so you can guess why, fast-forwarding one big, fat, fast year, we gave up on the “perfect beginning,” and just opted for this historical overture. We chose to do it so that we could start talking to you, to our partners, to our beloved, fragmented, not-yet-distributed world. And once we begin with this conversation, we will be able to unbundle all the sexy features we’ve been building for you.

Now enough with the meta-narrative, and let’s get things started with the Milestones of DistributedTown.

Milestones:

August ‘20:

• Alex and Milena start working on DistributedTown: “a DAO for DAOs, using a Mutual Credit system to create self-sustainable community hubs.”

The initial, limited scope was:

1. To launch a permissionless, self-sovereign network of DAOs where local and digital community members could exchange skills and resources with each other.
2. Each Community member would have their own universal identity, based on Skills & Contributions rather than personal data.
3. Each Community would have a set amount of Credits (96 000 DITO) to guarantee accountability and cross-community interoperability.
4. Credits would be distributed based on each member’s individual skills and the P2P contributions provided by each individual to the Community and the network at large.
5. Credits would be unlocked (& usable) once completed a few gigs (P2P tasks for other members).

Alright, that was already quite an ambitious (read, premature) product scope — but that’s not the point. More importantly, if you’ve been around lately, you might have noticed that right now (Aug ‘21), everybody is talking about DAOs. Suppose you’ve really been around, though. In that case, there’s the chance you know someone who’s patiently waiting for a mythological “DAO revolution” to take place.

In fact, already in Aug ’20, there were quite a few solutions out there, leveraging on the concept of DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to try to achieve a similar goal. But, of course, the very idea has been around the Ethereum space since 2016. And it has always been astonishing, too.

A DAO can let members cooperate with each other in a permissionless, unsupervised fashion — as an open, anachronistic, belligerent challenge to the status quo.

Unfortunately, that’s not what DAOs actually did back then (nor they do it now, for that matter). Nonetheless, this is not the topic of this article. We will explore the Tragedy of the DAOs in a separate story. For now, let’s just get back to our DiTo Overture.

September ‘20:

• The team is part of the Apollo Acceleration Program (organized by @Gitcoin + Filecoin Foundation).
• We onboard Lorenzo as Solidity Dev.
• Partnership with @Textile, and first prize from Filecoin + Textile:
  Best Idea for solving Humanity’s biggest challenges.

October ‘20:

• Join ETHOnline (@ ETHGlobal) and win a new Textile prize:
  Best use of Mailbox API (for automated “Signals” between communities)

Best use of Mailbox API” for automated “Signals” between communities

• Partnership with Indorse, and win first prize (1 BTC) @ “Post-Covid Hack” — together with Socio-Economic Inclusion Challenge.

Winner of the Social-Economic Inclusion Track

November ‘20

• Partnership with Polygon (then Matic)
• Grant: Matic Build&Earn

Back then, just like everyone, we were struggling with scalability issues. And yes, you guessed it right: Smart Contracts allow the seamless creation of mighty new standards that will enable anyone to do things previously unheard of. But. Whenever you actually deploy those new decentralized standards in gushes over the free world — the reality of Ethereum gas fees may crush both your noblest ambitions and your non-custodial wallets alike.

So, here we are on a call with Matic. They invite us to launch our product in their ecosystem, join their grant program, and deploy our contracts in a massively faster and exponentially cheaper network. So, what would you like us to say? Well, Matic obviously became one of our main partners, and since then amongst the most loyal.

DiTo <> Matic: the partnership begins.

December ‘20

• We get invited to the Blockchain for Humanity (B4H) Award — we make new friends and end up winning the competition for an outstanding initiative that elevates humanity*

An outstanding initiative that elevates humanity.

• : agreed, this probably sounds much cooler than it actually is, but still — since it sounds cool, why not share it :)

January ‘21

Back in January, we had won a few prizes. We had designed & built a Mutual Credit network of self-sustainable communities. But as of January 2021, we still needed these Communities to have easy access to funds from outside the network itself. To be precise, access to funds coming from the traditional finance world. To do that, we thought of a brand-new approach to Quadratic Funding.

Practically, Quadratic Funding distributes money from a central pool of funds to the projects receiving more external donations. In the Web3 space: more donations = more transactions from unique 0x… addresses. The higher the number of donations, the higher the share of funds allocated. Quadratically.

As you probably guessed, this doesn’t always work since donors could create infinite 0x… wallets, to manipulate the pool of funds.

Nonetheless, let’s skip yet another gigantic backstory here, as we will talk about traditional vs. continuous Quadratic Funding in a future piece.

For now, let’s just say that this is the reason why we started to build Q2T (the Quadratic Treasury). And that Q2T shifts the paradigm, moving from a Quadratic Funding based on donations to a Quadratic Funding based on the Milestones actually achieved by the individual projects.

The Q2T Team 🚀

Summarizing:

• We join MarketMake (powered by Aavesome) and launch Q2T (the Quadratic Treasury): which brings non-repayable loans to DeFi — and the first continuous, Sybil-resistant Quadratic Funding for Public Goods.
• Evgenij joins us, focusing on Solidity (Quadratic Distributions), integration & testing.
• We start a long-term partnership with ChainLink, and we end up winning AAVE AAVEngineer Award and Best Project on Chainlink.

Another shill — apologies :)

March and April ‘21:

• Chainlink Hackathon & SkillWallet.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you already know that we had already started building our own ID standard. The SkillWallet, that is. The SkillWallet is a portable ID for pseudonymous membership — based on skills and contributions instead of personal user’s data. Today (August 2021), the SkillWallet is our first product — and as you’re already guessing, we will be writing plentily about it.

For now, it’s enough to say that, thanks to the SkillWallet, we can do incredible things — such as introducing on-chain analytics or a Web3-native standard for cross-protocol Profit-Sharing.

So here we are in April:

• We rock the Chainlink hackathon.
• We entirely redesign our Smart Contract suite — so that not only the SkillWallet but all native DistributedTown’s protocols are minted as NFT assets (sort of multidimensional dawn).
• DiTo slowly turns from a colossal project to a Product Suite — where a much higher degree of abstraction lets every protocol be integrated and used out of the box.

May & June ‘21

• We join Encode’s “Hack the System” hackathon.
• We release Q2T on Polygon Main net, win Encode’s second place. And the best project on Polygon.
• Mike joins us as Frontend Lead, officially breaking our Frontend Curse*.

*: yes, if you’ve been around for a while, you already know that Web3 Frontend Devs are mythological creatures.

July & August ‘21

• Join HackMoney with d-Pad Café, which uses the SkillWallet to let any Decentralized Protocol deploy a Web3-Native Profit-Sharing Agreement.
• Start a valuable partnership with Covalent, and develop the first functional External Adapter using Covalent + Chainlink.
• Win Chainlink, Covalent, and Superfluid prizes.

The rest of these two months have been entirely dedicated to the SkillWallet:

• SkillWallet joins Tachyon Acceleration Program with ConsenSys Mesh & Filecoin — receiving the guidance and the funds needed to grow.
• We develop our off-chain signature mechanism (to sign transactions by simply scanning a QR-code), and our Mobile App. Together with a Native Governance protocol using Commitment and a role-based membership.

Today

I know, I know: I tend to talk too much. No wonder it took me about a year to even start writing an intro, right?

Thank you for bearing with us this long, though. Before letting you go, here’s a quick summary of everything:

1. Alex & Milena meet & start working on DistributedTown (DiTo): a mutual credit network of self-sovereign city-states.
2. They design and build new Web3 standards and win a few prizes along the way — while onboarding some great people and partners.
3. DistributedTown slowly morphs into a suite of Products:

• SkillWallet: Membership IDs, based on Skills and tied to a Community (DAO).
• Q2T: sybil-resistant Quadratic Funding for Public Goods, and non-repayable loans to DeFi.
• d-Pad Café: fair launchpad and web3-native profit-sharing agreements on Polygon.

From a System based on Money — to a System based on Value.

As of today, we are about to launch our SkillWallet v1. So feel free to join us as we build a more open world (and gift to our community pioneers the first NFT IDs ever in existence).

Also, many of the things we touched upon in this article will be expanded and broken down into separate ones: let’s enjoy them as they come.

That said, if you didn’t hate everything you’ve read so far, stay tuned for what’s to come: we may not have made the world a better place just yet, but we are working on it :)