5 ms·

DAO votes to join Blender Development Fund as Patron member

100 points by madjin 5y ago

beepbooptheory 5y ago
Take the money and run!
wlesieutre 5y ago
For context, Patron member is at €120K+ per year, and this puts them as the 7th one. Other patron members are GPU manufacturers (Nvidia/AMD), game engines (Epic/Unity), Facebook (pre-Meta, but presumably for VR reasons), and AWS (no idea, publicity move to promote AWS use by game studios?). Decentraland fits in there alongside Meta.
- pen2l 5y ago
  AWS is easy to understand, it provides cloud-rendering: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/solutions/cloud-rendering-farm/ https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/solutions/cloud-rendering-farm/ Thinkbox/deadline is pretty mature and as I understand it is actually already being used by a handful of big shops.
- AndreasHae 5y ago
  AWS might be because of Lumberyard, their fork of CryEngine
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    Right, that makes sense. It's now evolved into O3DE, but last year when they joined the BDF Lumberyard's license required games to use AWS for servers. https://o3de.org/ https://o3de.org/
dmix 5y ago
Anyone tried decentraland? Any good?
- monkeydust 5y ago
  Yes and No. Reminded me of Second Life but worse. Good video overview here https://youtu.be/z5-QaCq9mh8 https://youtu.be/z5-QaCq9mh8
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  I take regular tours around it to see what's going on. And the general answer is not a lot. Largest percentage of developed plots are NFT showrooms, some for sale, some just showing off (which is totally valid in my mind). Some trying to sell wearables for your in-world avatar. There's some casino operations, the largest being a poker room which seems to where the most people congregate. There's a crafting game where you have to collect materials that are doled out slowly enough that it takes days to make anything. A couple of very mildly interactive "rides" for lack of a better term. A number of largely abandoned...I don't know...architectural phantasies? Places where someone built weird/interesting things because they could. There's a lot of hype around trading the virtual land, but the prices are all out of whack with the utility. Far, far too little land at far, far too high prices. People are dreaming of being virtual landlords, but it's hard for me to see that playing out well for them. The software development is glacial compared to the rest of the crypto world. My opinion is that the project as a whole on a dead end path, but I check in once or twice a week to see if anyone is doing anything interesting with their little piece of it.
mangecoeur 5y ago
Always glad to see funds go to a great and well managed Open source project like Blender! That said, looking up what the hell is 'Decentraland' and how it works is to dive into a dystopian nightmare. Cutesy illustrations tell you: 'Decentraland: it's like a second rate RPG, except instead of in game currency you have to use your actual cash to participate in a tech-bro pyramid scheme where each coin has the climate impact equivalent to burning down a substantial area of rainforest'. Blender foundation should insist on getting cash up front ;)
- choward 5y ago
  I just find it funny that people are using this to escape all the problems of the real world by implementing all the problems the real world has in a virtual world. I do have to give people credit for coming up with one of the most elaborate pump and dump schemes of all time.
- dkersten 5y ago
  I looked into Decentraland about a month ago (because someone I know was going on about it) and to me it looked like what I remember Cybertown [1] was circa 2000, except with NFT's. I wasn't very impressed, even visually, it looked quite dated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- vvpan 5y ago
  You will only see a dystopian nightmare when that's what you are looking to see. * A DAO is a lot of people who are looking to create common good via small donations and common participation. This was the goal and ideology of Ethereum from the moment it was conceived. And here the DAO is helping out a beautiful open source project that has benefited many people, so Ethereum is delivering on its ideological promise quiet literally and objectively. Very dystopian, right. * What Decentraland is is beyond the point. If you don't like Second Life and all that (I have zero interest personally) it has nothing to do with your argument. People enjoy it and here they are supporting to keep it free (as in freedom). * I do not see how "use your actual cash" is a negative argument here. Having all platforms be absolutely free made the user the product and lead to an actual dystopian nightmare which is the current control of all user data by like two corporations. New methods of governance, monetization and user-owned data are what's needed to prevent a dystopian nightmare. Decentraland is making progress on all of those. All of those, btw, are part of the ideological vision of Ethereum that I mentioned above, so once again - it is doing the intended job. * Climate impact is an old argument, we can argue about it for hours and not get anywhere. But Ethereum is switching off PoW within the next few months and many projects have already moved to L2 which does not rely on PoW consensus for every transactions. Again, you see only the things you are looking for. People coordinating major funding for a large open source project while having democratic say over the platform they are using to you seems like an accidental byproduct but it was the primary goal all these years.
ksec 5y ago
I really need to find the time to go and learn what DAO is. But if anyone could do a ELI5 would be great.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Decentralised autonomous organization. Picture a corporation, but instead of a board and CEO the shareholders vote on what to do directly. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I could come up with a better analogy.
  - brighton36 5y ago
    That's the brochure description. The evidence would suggest that this is a run of the mill cryto ponzi.
  - garrickvanburen 5y ago
    That’s consistent with my understanding. They seem to be functionally identical to a Board of Directors or how a co-operative might run. Though as I understand, with potentially a very large number voters in ever-changing cloaked identities (as voting right tokens could be continuously bought & sold). Today, in the real world - DAO’s are an LLC coordinating on Discord, or Zoom, or other common communication tools. That DAO coordination happens fully in cyberspace is promoted as a unique differentiator to how businesses run today. In my experience, the key unique characteristic of DAOs are that you may not know who you’re doing business with.
  - ajross 5y ago
    Also instead of a legal entity with the ability to petition the government for redress of grievances, it's just a bunch of data emitted by some smart contract code. This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf. I mean, just to take this particular mostly-harmless situation as an example: that membership in the Blender Development Fund presumably includes some amount of official input into how the money gets spent. What if the DAO has specific desires or expectations, and Blender simply chooses to ignore them?
marmada 5y ago
Can someone w/ more crypto experience explain how a DAO actualizes its decisions? For example: Here, there was a vote. Now what? Will Blender setup a wallet that can accept ETH? Will the DAO then vote on a transaction that sends money from the DAO to Blender's ETH wallet??
- aeolian 5y ago
  I'm not sure about Decentraland specifically, but typically there will be a subset of the DAO members who actually control the DAO treasury in a "multisig wallet". Say they have 10 signatories, they might have a requirement that 8 of the 10 signatories approve a transaction to either send ETH to Blender, or do the necessary swaps to give Blender USD. The signatories have committed to execute the will of the DAO. Voting happens "off chain" using a tool called Snapshot (https://snapshot.org/#/snapshot.dcl.eth https://snapshot.org/#/snapshot.dcl.eth). If people hold some Decentraland tokens/assets, they can vote, and their vote is weighted in proportion to their holdings. This isn't without its problems: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html If you want to learn more, I wrote a blog post on DAO tooling 101: https://blog.juicebox.money/dao-tooling-101/ https://blog.juicebox.money/dao-tooling-101/
  - nightpool 5y ago
    That's pretty funny, that's basically identical to how standard corporations work, except instead of "signatories" you have "corporate officers" and instead of "off chain voting" you have (very thoroughly-regulated!) "shareholder proxy statements".
    - vvpan 5y ago
      Well that's the point actually. It is a lot like shareholder/board of directors voting. Except that the DAO requires virtually no bureaucracy to get up and running. So if, say, you and your local community wanted to start an organization to fund some common-goods project you can do it in a few minutes, provided you have people who are onboard with the vision and have a little money to put in. After that all voting and movement of funds is transparent. The code replaces corporate structure. There are unsolved problems like vote-buying and all that, but then other mechanisms would kick like "rage-quitting" (a term used officially by some DAO systems) by which DAOs can dissolve and funds be withdrawn by contributors. Plenty of research projects on the table, but benefits are already being reaped, as in this Blender case.
endisneigh 5y ago
"Create, explore and trade in the first-ever virtual world owned by its users." > "Join our Discord" In all seriousness, congrats to Blender for getting some more money.
cblconfederate 5y ago
I assume this is Decentraland looking to attach itself to popular open source projects for publicity. It's actually good if it works for them, but i dont get their product. Very few people use it, their worlds look childish and nobody is in them. Yet somehow they sell their parcels for millions. In contrast, opensimulator.org is open source, self-hosted, decentralized, much more beautiful, has an active and happy user base of thousands, and it gets $0 in funding from anyone. The main developer doesnt even get any donations. how does that make sense
- zucker42 5y ago
  Blockchain mania.
vvpan 5y ago
Lots of people asking about DAOs. So here are a couple of resources you can look up. To look at a large list of different DAOs with info about what tech stack they run, how big the treasuries are, etc., look here: https://deepdao.io/#/deepdao/dashboard https://deepdao.io/#/deepdao/dashboard Here is a good article written in layman's terms (it's CNBC after all) about the concept and current landscape of DAOs: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/what-are-daos-what-to-know-about-the-next-big-trend-in-crypto.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/what-are-daos-what-to-know-a... If you want to get a peek into organizational minutiae that DAOs deal with the CabinDAO does a great of documenting it. For example: https://creators.mirror.xyz/Le68ptgaqsBh1g6w8UqqVL2kIrA_Lqn37bELMO-W_-0 https://creators.mirror.xyz/Le68ptgaqsBh1g6w8UqqVL2kIrA_Lqn3... And here is a mega-collection of resources on the ever-evolving landscape by a16z: https://future.a16z.com/dao-canon/ https://future.a16z.com/dao-canon/ I am a happy member of two DAOs in case some people think it is a conflict of interest.
- thrixton 5y ago
  This is great, thank you. My understanding is that most jurisdictions seem to equate the ICO / tokens as securities and as such should be regulated in a similar manner to an IPO. Do you have any good links on that or what is your experience?
  - vvpan 5y ago
    I have not yet seen a governance token, such as ones issued by DAOs, get under fire. From what I inferred over the past few years only very specific tokens are considered unregistered securities so I stopped worrying.

100 points by madjin 5y ago

Take the money and run!

For context, Patron member is at €120K+ per year, and this puts them as the 7th one. Other patron members are GPU manufacturers (Nvidia/AMD), game engines (Epic/Unity), Facebook (pre-Meta, but presumably for VR reasons), and AWS (no idea, publicity move to promote AWS use by game studios?). Decentraland fits in there alongside Meta.

pen2l 5y ago
AWS is easy to understand, it provides cloud-rendering: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/solutions/cloud-rendering-farm/ https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/solutions/cloud-rendering-farm/ Thinkbox/deadline is pretty mature and as I understand it is actually already being used by a handful of big shops.
AndreasHae 5y ago
AWS might be because of Lumberyard, their fork of CryEngine
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  Right, that makes sense. It's now evolved into O3DE, but last year when they joined the BDF Lumberyard's license required games to use AWS for servers. https://o3de.org/ https://o3de.org/

dmix 5y ago

Anyone tried decentraland? Any good?

monkeydust 5y ago
Yes and No. Reminded me of Second Life but worse. Good video overview here https://youtu.be/z5-QaCq9mh8 https://youtu.be/z5-QaCq9mh8
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
I take regular tours around it to see what's going on. And the general answer is not a lot. Largest percentage of developed plots are NFT showrooms, some for sale, some just showing off (which is totally valid in my mind). Some trying to sell wearables for your in-world avatar. There's some casino operations, the largest being a poker room which seems to where the most people congregate. There's a crafting game where you have to collect materials that are doled out slowly enough that it takes days to make anything. A couple of very mildly interactive "rides" for lack of a better term. A number of largely abandoned...I don't know...architectural phantasies? Places where someone built weird/interesting things because they could. There's a lot of hype around trading the virtual land, but the prices are all out of whack with the utility. Far, far too little land at far, far too high prices. People are dreaming of being virtual landlords, but it's hard for me to see that playing out well for them. The software development is glacial compared to the rest of the crypto world. My opinion is that the project as a whole on a dead end path, but I check in once or twice a week to see if anyone is doing anything interesting with their little piece of it.

mangecoeur 5y ago

Always glad to see funds go to a great and well managed Open source project like Blender! That said, looking up what the hell is 'Decentraland' and how it works is to dive into a dystopian nightmare. Cutesy illustrations tell you: 'Decentraland: it's like a second rate RPG, except instead of in game currency you have to use your actual cash to participate in a tech-bro pyramid scheme where each coin has the climate impact equivalent to burning down a substantial area of rainforest'. Blender foundation should insist on getting cash up front ;)

choward 5y ago
I just find it funny that people are using this to escape all the problems of the real world by implementing all the problems the real world has in a virtual world. I do have to give people credit for coming up with one of the most elaborate pump and dump schemes of all time.
dkersten 5y ago
I looked into Decentraland about a month ago (because someone I know was going on about it) and to me it looked like what I remember Cybertown [1] was circa 2000, except with NFT's. I wasn't very impressed, even visually, it looked quite dated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
vvpan 5y ago
You will only see a dystopian nightmare when that's what you are looking to see. * A DAO is a lot of people who are looking to create common good via small donations and common participation. This was the goal and ideology of Ethereum from the moment it was conceived. And here the DAO is helping out a beautiful open source project that has benefited many people, so Ethereum is delivering on its ideological promise quiet literally and objectively. Very dystopian, right. * What Decentraland is is beyond the point. If you don't like Second Life and all that (I have zero interest personally) it has nothing to do with your argument. People enjoy it and here they are supporting to keep it free (as in freedom). * I do not see how "use your actual cash" is a negative argument here. Having all platforms be absolutely free made the user the product and lead to an actual dystopian nightmare which is the current control of all user data by like two corporations. New methods of governance, monetization and user-owned data are what's needed to prevent a dystopian nightmare. Decentraland is making progress on all of those. All of those, btw, are part of the ideological vision of Ethereum that I mentioned above, so once again - it is doing the intended job. * Climate impact is an old argument, we can argue about it for hours and not get anywhere. But Ethereum is switching off PoW within the next few months and many projects have already moved to L2 which does not rely on PoW consensus for every transactions. Again, you see only the things you are looking for. People coordinating major funding for a large open source project while having democratic say over the platform they are using to you seems like an accidental byproduct but it was the primary goal all these years.

ksec 5y ago

I really need to find the time to go and learn what DAO is. But if anyone could do a ELI5 would be great.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Decentralised autonomous organization. Picture a corporation, but instead of a board and CEO the shareholders vote on what to do directly. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I could come up with a better analogy.
- brighton36 5y ago
  That's the brochure description. The evidence would suggest that this is a run of the mill cryto ponzi.
- garrickvanburen 5y ago
  That’s consistent with my understanding. They seem to be functionally identical to a Board of Directors or how a co-operative might run. Though as I understand, with potentially a very large number voters in ever-changing cloaked identities (as voting right tokens could be continuously bought & sold). Today, in the real world - DAO’s are an LLC coordinating on Discord, or Zoom, or other common communication tools. That DAO coordination happens fully in cyberspace is promoted as a unique differentiator to how businesses run today. In my experience, the key unique characteristic of DAOs are that you may not know who you’re doing business with.
- ajross 5y ago
  Also instead of a legal entity with the ability to petition the government for redress of grievances, it's just a bunch of data emitted by some smart contract code. This is going to turn out to be important the first time a DAO gets significantly scammed. Someone's going to take the money and run, or otherwise violate the "contract" that the DAO thought it was "enforcing", and... there won't be anything to do. There won't be any way to fix it. The smart contract doesn't handle the edge case of having to hire a lawyer on its own behalf. I mean, just to take this particular mostly-harmless situation as an example: that membership in the Blender Development Fund presumably includes some amount of official input into how the money gets spent. What if the DAO has specific desires or expectations, and Blender simply chooses to ignore them?

marmada 5y ago

Can someone w/ more crypto experience explain how a DAO actualizes its decisions? For example: Here, there was a vote. Now what? Will Blender setup a wallet that can accept ETH? Will the DAO then vote on a transaction that sends money from the DAO to Blender's ETH wallet??

aeolian 5y ago
I'm not sure about Decentraland specifically, but typically there will be a subset of the DAO members who actually control the DAO treasury in a "multisig wallet". Say they have 10 signatories, they might have a requirement that 8 of the 10 signatories approve a transaction to either send ETH to Blender, or do the necessary swaps to give Blender USD. The signatories have committed to execute the will of the DAO. Voting happens "off chain" using a tool called Snapshot (https://snapshot.org/#/snapshot.dcl.eth https://snapshot.org/#/snapshot.dcl.eth). If people hold some Decentraland tokens/assets, they can vote, and their vote is weighted in proportion to their holdings. This isn't without its problems: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html If you want to learn more, I wrote a blog post on DAO tooling 101: https://blog.juicebox.money/dao-tooling-101/ https://blog.juicebox.money/dao-tooling-101/
- nightpool 5y ago
  That's pretty funny, that's basically identical to how standard corporations work, except instead of "signatories" you have "corporate officers" and instead of "off chain voting" you have (very thoroughly-regulated!) "shareholder proxy statements".
  - vvpan 5y ago
    Well that's the point actually. It is a lot like shareholder/board of directors voting. Except that the DAO requires virtually no bureaucracy to get up and running. So if, say, you and your local community wanted to start an organization to fund some common-goods project you can do it in a few minutes, provided you have people who are onboard with the vision and have a little money to put in. After that all voting and movement of funds is transparent. The code replaces corporate structure. There are unsolved problems like vote-buying and all that, but then other mechanisms would kick like "rage-quitting" (a term used officially by some DAO systems) by which DAOs can dissolve and funds be withdrawn by contributors. Plenty of research projects on the table, but benefits are already being reaped, as in this Blender case.

endisneigh 5y ago

"Create, explore and trade in the first-ever virtual world owned by its users." > "Join our Discord" In all seriousness, congrats to Blender for getting some more money.

cblconfederate 5y ago

I assume this is Decentraland looking to attach itself to popular open source projects for publicity. It's actually good if it works for them, but i dont get their product. Very few people use it, their worlds look childish and nobody is in them. Yet somehow they sell their parcels for millions. In contrast, opensimulator.org is open source, self-hosted, decentralized, much more beautiful, has an active and happy user base of thousands, and it gets $0 in funding from anyone. The main developer doesnt even get any donations. how does that make sense

zucker42 5y ago
Blockchain mania.

vvpan 5y ago

Lots of people asking about DAOs. So here are a couple of resources you can look up. To look at a large list of different DAOs with info about what tech stack they run, how big the treasuries are, etc., look here: https://deepdao.io/#/deepdao/dashboard https://deepdao.io/#/deepdao/dashboard Here is a good article written in layman's terms (it's CNBC after all) about the concept and current landscape of DAOs: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/what-are-daos-what-to-know-about-the-next-big-trend-in-crypto.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/what-are-daos-what-to-know-a... If you want to get a peek into organizational minutiae that DAOs deal with the CabinDAO does a great of documenting it. For example: https://creators.mirror.xyz/Le68ptgaqsBh1g6w8UqqVL2kIrA_Lqn37bELMO-W_-0 https://creators.mirror.xyz/Le68ptgaqsBh1g6w8UqqVL2kIrA_Lqn3... And here is a mega-collection of resources on the ever-evolving landscape by a16z: https://future.a16z.com/dao-canon/ https://future.a16z.com/dao-canon/ I am a happy member of two DAOs in case some people think it is a conflict of interest.

thrixton 5y ago
This is great, thank you. My understanding is that most jurisdictions seem to equate the ICO / tokens as securities and as such should be regulated in a similar manner to an IPO. Do you have any good links on that or what is your experience?
- vvpan 5y ago
  I have not yet seen a governance token, such as ones issued by DAOs, get under fire. From what I inferred over the past few years only very specific tokens are considered unregistered securities so I stopped worrying.