Habitat at the Crossroads 🚵
Just four months passed since Habitat released the first DAO framework on a rollup. Many things happened since then. Releasing new features such as custom virtual ERC-20 tokens for token governance or community incentives for LP and HBT stakers.
But the most important progress has been made by friction with reality. By getting the word out via EthCC in Paris or by reaching out to big DAOs such as Sushi or Yearn. Connecting with other DAO builders and creators (e.g. Commonsstack/Token Engineering Commons/Gitcoin Governauts/Hackathons) helped to gain further clarity.
The team added to these insights through individual user research. By talking to small communities as well as newcomers in the world of transparent and decentralized organisations on Ethereum. This feedback is translated into Habitat V2 and currently worked on.
The vision for Habitat is and was always to build a framework that is flexible and scalable enough to onboard new DAOs and their unique organisational structures.
Through these months we came across various takeaways and a steep learning curve that we shared mainly via Habitat's public chats. All the feedback gathered led to questioning some parts of the early Habitat vision itself.
Takeaways of an DAO framework (hosted on an application specific optimistic rollup)
doesn’t plug into existing on-chain workflow (mainly multisig setups)
more education required
implementation risk too high (technical complexity)
delayed on-chain execution (1 week)
increased withdraw time when challenging the rollup
DAOs explore community sentiment with informal off-chain tools
DAOs prefer agility over security until now
Our goal is to built tools for DAOs that have a purpose and a place, we always have those goals in mind while building the Habitat framework. Though sometimes, we miss the forest for the trees or to be more precise, building too far into the future while missing the present.
The stated goal for a governance rollup framework builds on roughly the following assumptions:
Most activity need on-chain security assumptions and finality.
Governance will happen at scale, with minimum >10k transaction per day.
A lot of savings for users.
Clearly, this didn't play out yet and are still assumptions about the future. This also misses the fact about individual risk assessment for each potential DAO running on that platform.
On the contrary to Habitat V2, this hackmd includes some examples on how Habitat could go forward while still delivering the core values of supporting web3 communities.
Background Resources
The path forward 🛤
The team and the Habitat Community as a whole should decide on what's best for the Habitat DAO and current market conditions. Based on the feedback but also keeping in mind what the future may hold. Therefore, we came up with 4 non-exclusive options. Please note that anyone can and should propose different pathways if not listed here.
Option A
Stick to the original plan and deliver Habitat V2. Enable modular support of voting mechanisms to cover many different organisational tools.
Option B
Follow the feedback we gathered so far and integrate more into the existing ecosystem like gnosis multisig setup by building purpose-built extensions for these tools.
Option C
Migrate Habitat to established rollups such as Arbitrum or Optimism. This moves the focus away from the scaling infrastructure and allows higher focus on DAO tooling.
Option D
A combination of A & B. This needs to be spec'd out together with everyone. It's advisable to contact more DAOs in the space to gather their view of these issues.
In general, the team is super bullish about the DAO space and its potential. The runway is still looking good to further develop and improve Habitat. We are simply curios to get your thoughts on this issue. 💌
ℹ️ Important:
With every option considered the HBT token will continue to have its utility and value. The ground rule stays: Better adoption of Habitat - higher growth of HBT.
Please let us know about your thoughts on each of the options in the Habitat channels on telegram or discord. We are going to open a signaling proposal in the next days after gaining more feedback. In the meantime we will continue working on V2.