By Geoff McCabe, LightningWorks Founder
Why do we need a DAO?
The main motivation for creating a DAO is to give a clear and independent voice, budget, and power to LightningWorks Portal Holders. Those who bought our Genesis Mint want to be involved with the success of LightningWorks, its associated studios, stories, games, and entire ecosystem of products and projects.
Portals are here OpenSea:
https://opensea.io/collection/lightningworks-portal
My experience at Divi taught me that empowering your super-fans is a key part of the success of a project. And, if they are unable to take concrete action, they will be very vocal about what founders and team are doing.
A DAO can give them not only a voice, but resources as well, to spend how they want in the way that they want. If they don’t like the team’s marketing initiatives, they can try something different. If they want a piece of tech built, they can get it done on their own rather than waiting for our roadmap.
Portals
We are dedicating one-third of all the new minted Portals to give to the DAO.
This allocation is explained in deal here: https://www.lightningworks.io/blog/extra-genesis-mints-what-how-and-why
The DAO can use them how it wants, such as:
- Sell them to raise money to spend.
- Use them to mint its own comic stash to sell.
Comics
The DAO will receive comics in a variety of ways that it can sell or barter to achieve its goals.
Portal Mints
The DAO will own some portals and thus will have its own allocation of every comic produced.Free Mints
Each portal gets free Platinum Collection comics and can get airdrops and free mints too.Test Mints
During the testing of our tech, we often use comics that are generated from our smart contracts, and when we’re done with those, will donate them to the DAO.
Donations
We believe that passionate fans of LightningWorks will donate cool stuff to the DAO to help with fundraising.Store
The LightningWorks DAO can have its own comic store that can operate in two ways:
Digital Comic Store
Use its Portals to sell comics and the free stuff that’s generated through airdrops and free minutes.Merch
The DAO should be able to sell its own merch, and it’s a perfect outlet for our fans to donate their fan art for use to raise money for the DAO. T-shirts, coffee cups, etc will be bought up by fans.
Crowdfunding
Once the DAO gets going, it should be able to do its own crowdfunding to raise money for itself. Board members or fans will donate their time or art for contests and other initiatives that benefit the collective.
Partnerships
A large, active DAO has value in its sheer numbers and passion. NFT, Comic, or Crypto communities will be interested to partner with our DAO in a variety of ways, and will be willing to offer something in return.
LightningWorks DAO Wallet
https://opensea.io/LightningWorksDAO
0x8de1a51efDa1305ad328a1F6af047039cd71561E
Lightningworksdao.eth
Who is in the DAO?
Anyone can join the DAO, but only Portal Holders can vote for the Board and Initiatives.
The ability to vote gives a very strong use case and creates new value for the Portal Holders.
Voting within the DAO
Votes will be directly related to the TIER and the RARITY of that Tier, in proportion to its actual likelihood.
So expect something like this:
Common - 1 Vote
Uncommon - 3 Votes
Rare - 9 Votes
Epic - 27 Votes
Legendary - 81 Votes
Those with more than one portal can vote with every portal they have. We intend to build tech to make this easy so someone can vote once with their full voting power of the portal collection.
Who is NOT in the DAO?
We believe that there’s power in diversity and multi-polar power structures in this context. So Founders and LightningWorks team members will be encouraged not to join the DAO, since we want the DAO to be run by different people with their own ideas and resources.
Since the ONLY technical requirement for voting in the DAO is owning a Portal, and voters can remain anonymous, there’s no actual way to enforce this, but it should be understood by all that an essential characteristic of the DAO should be that its power structure is independent of the LightningWorks team.
DAO Charter and Values
The DAO itself gets to decide what it wants to be and how it will help the LightningWorks Ecosystem to thrive. There are some core elements that should be understood about how it should function:
Fun
Primarily this is about fun. How do we maximize the enjoyment that LightningWorks gives to every stakeholder? Fans, team, partners, and the DAO itself. If it’s not fun, something is wrong.Grace
Let’s focus on the highest forms of being… love, compassion, patience should be key elements of our everyday.Efficiency
Don’t get too bogged down with bureaucracy, rules, and control. Let’s remember not to overcomplicate things. Keep it simple, light, and efficient, so it can be fun.Creativity
Let’s keep an open mind and remember that we are a blend of art and technology, and both are advancing at a rapid pace. We may need to reinvent the DAO every year or two, to take into consideration the ever-evolving nature of what we’re involved with.Love
We must not forget to treat each other and our creations with love and respect, so that we can keep passionate about what we’re building together.
What does the DAO Vote on? (Electing the Board)
Board
The primary purpose of the DAO’s voting will be to elect a board of its representatives that will represent its interests. We are thinking of starting with THREE and then upgrade to five, then seven as needed. Possibly the board members would be voted on to fulfill specific roles once it’s needed, such as marketing, publicity, legal, art, etc.
The Chairman
of the Board will be given access to the LightningWorks DAO wallet, so he or she will be able to allocate the funds.
Initiatives
- In some cases, the Board may choose not to make decisions but to leave it up to the DAO to decide. There are benefits to involve more people and hear more voices. Difficult decisions that may get a lot of pushback are good ones to give to the masses to vote on, but smaller issues or those that are technical in nature should be made by experts on the board and not given to a mass of voters.
Challenges with DAOs
Many people passionately love the idea of DAOs, but in my experience they never actually work effectively. There’s still so much work to be done by decentralization fans to figure out how to make them work. DAOs don’t really solve the problems of corruption, politics, infighting, etc that we all wish they would.
There’s really no substitute for having VETTED EXPERTS who are MANAGED and can make RAPID DECISIONS and are RESPONSIBLE. I put these words in all caps that seem to be missing from DAOs.
Still, we feel the need to try because their potential is so great, and they make sense for various use cases. In my opinion, they aren’t a replacement for government or companies, but are best used in conjunction with them to do what they do best, which is:
Community
They create structure for a passionate community to rally around.Voice
They give a voice to anyone who wants to participate.Decentralization
One of the key components of decentralization to assure that an asset isn’t considered a security by the SEC, is to make sure that the value of that asset isn’t mostly controlled by a single entity. Having an independent DAO with the power to influence the price helps us ensure that LightningWorks Portals and other collectibles don’t get labeled as securities.
DAO Technology
To make our DAO as fun and effective as possible, we need several pieces of tech to be built. These include:
Web Page for Votes
This is where Portal Holders can go to get the latest news, discussions, and register their portals to vote, when required. It will be a page within the existing website, probably at lightningworks.io/dao so that anyone can easily find out about it and learn the joys of participation.
DAO Voting Made Easy
Rather than having to manually send blockchain transactions, our tech should make it easy. Users will be able to pre-verify their various wallets with their portals, and then vote with all of them at once with a single click. We think we’ll get a lot more participation in what actually matters, if the actual voting process itself is easy.
Chat Apps Wallet
We’ve already got our stuff into a WhatsApp and Telegram bot wallet, so we should be able to make it possible to use the same Apps for the DAOs. Users will be able to see the latest news, vote tallies, and participate through these chat apps. The easier we make it, the more people will do it.
Legal Considerations
The legal definition and status of DAOs isn’t well defined and may vary from country to country. We are exploring new ground with a vote. Therefore, there could potentially be some legal risk to both the companies involved, and DAO board members, who might get held legally liable for their actions.
KYC
Because of the potential legal risk, board members, especially the Chairperson who has access to DAO funds, will need to be KNOWN as to who they are.
Foundation
It may make sense to set up a legal entity as a non-profit Foundation that creates an entity that’s understood by the world’s governments and legal system, once it’s big enough to matter. This is something that probably the LightningWorks company would pay for.
Indemnification
The board members should be indemnified by the LightningWorks company to reduce their risk to a minimum. In the early stages, we don’t see much, if any risk, but as this all grows in scale and value, this could become an issue.
Summary
The LightningWorks DAO presents a unique opportunity for portal holders to actively participate in and influence the direction of LightningWorks' ventures. It offers a blend of creative control, economic benefits, community building, and a platform for expression, making it an attractive proposition for enthusiasts and investors alike.
