ICON DAO is all about decentralized autonomous communities. It’s right there in their name.
“We think this decentralized community structuring is a good fit for all sorts of communities and collaborative groups,” says co-founder Eunielle Yi. “We really want to help them become DAO-like groups. That’s why we started ICON DAO as well.”
ICON DAO was launched by the CAN Foundation, a group of developers who lead the blockchain initiative Community Alliance Network, or CAN. CAN aims to empower autonomous communities and enable mass collaboration, an ambition they are bringing to ICON through ICON DAO.
For them, the DAO is only natural.
Yi says, “This kind of decentralized group has always been there since the very beginning of human groupings, but the tools and means have differed.”
Nothing new or strange
Though headquartered in Singapore, ICON DAO’s team spans the globe with operation houses in Seoul, Vietnam and the United States.
Its parent organization, CAN, has extensive experience in the community sector, having worked for over a decade with popular communities such as Viki.com and Vingle.Â
“Communities are the key to businesses and collaborations. We want to help them to collaborate in a better way with effective decision making and other online tools to cater to their needs,” says Yi. “That’s why we started the Community Alliance Network.”
Yi explains that communities are very autonomous and willing to help one another. They set their own rules and create their own worlds. She says that online and offline communities engage in precisely the same consensus-based decision making as blockchain protocols, but lack the technical knowledge and support. Though the current online and mobile tools these communities use are centralized, the ways they use them are decentralized.
CAN looked at the DAO sector for a long time and found it a good fit. Unlike traditional top-down organizations, DAOs involve people interacting with each other according to a self-enforcing open-source protocol such as a smart contract. From Blockchainhub Berlin:
“As opposed to traditional companies that are structured in a top-down manner, with many layers of management and bureaucratic coordination, DAOs provide an operating system for people and institutions that do not know nor trust each other, who might live in different geographical areas, speak different languages, and therefore be subject to different jurisdictions. Instead of legal contracts managing the relations of the people, in the Bitcoin Network, all agreements are in the form of open-source code that is self-enforced by majority consensus of all network actors. DAOs do not have a hierarchical structure, except for the code. Once deployed, this entity is independent of its creator and cannot be censored by one single entity, but instead by a predefined majority of the organization’s participants.”
CAN is teaching communities and organizations about the benefits of DAO. “We want to educate them that this is the DAO,” says Yi. “It’s not very strange, or different, or scary, but a very natural community design and the technical improvements help their communities flourish.”
Opening the network to all
As a P-Rep, ICON DAO will contribute to the ICON community its extensive arsenal of tools and technologies in order to help transform the network’s community into a well-organized, well-governed DAO. They want the ICON network to operate as a DAO so that all community members can freely and actively contribute. The team also wants to open all operational and financial issues to the community so that ICONists can look into them transparently and give feedback.
That’s not all — ICON DAO wishes to transform itself into a DAO as well, to become a decentralized, autonomously organized node.
The team’s tool box includes the CryptoBadge reputation system, Code in Force programmable governance system and Community Bank community fund system. These tools are already in use or being tested in organizations such as popular social networking website Vingle and global relief and advocacy organization World Vision.
ICON DAO will also create a community grant in which they contribute 10-20 percent of their Representative Rewards to the ICON community by rewarding and supporting ICONists nominated by the community for their contributions to the network.
“We think there are a lot of hidden contributors in a network or business,” says Yi. “This applies to ICON as well. We see a lot of superstars like trending DApps or leading P-Reps, but we don’t see individuals or advocates of ICON who do their job from the ground level.”
A long-time partner
Early investors in ICON, CAN is also an active partner of the ICON Foundation, consulting on projects and participating in discussions about DAOs.
Indeed, ICON itself aims to transform the ICON Republic into a fully functioning DAO, and ICON incubator ICX Station sees DAOs as the proverbial next big thing.
As a P-Rep and partner, ICON DAO is there to help.
“We strongly believe in the entire network and ICON’s vision, value and community,” says Yi. “For us, this is a very natural step. As an early investor and a builder, we want to actively participate in the network’s expansion. One thing the ICON community and ICON Foundation needs is technical assistance, especially for this full decentralization stage. We want to contribute our talents to the full decentralization of the ICON network so that it can operate as a whole public network at the global level.”
She also encourages ICONists to examine each team carefully.
“Again, we believe in the vision of ICON to connect decentralized networks and supporting full decentralization of the network, but we don’t want this P-Rep election to be a way of populism or capitalism,” she says. “I want to ask the community to look into the team and read through the campaigns and proposals and also the sincerity of the teams so that they can properly evaluate the right team and right P-Rep to support.”
