This post presents the thesis behind microdemocracies.com, an easy-to-use tool to create blockchain-powered groups from a mobile phone. Once created, group members get access to an anonymous message board, where they can share and support each other’s ideas without fear.
Summary
Blockchain technology can potentially offer enormous value to ordinary groups of people around two clear use cases: one is letting these groups handle money (stable coins) collectively and transparently, and the other is letting them have anonymous voting/messaging experiences.
These features are costly to obtain with current solutions (laws, contracts, and bureaucracy), and thus, are only feasible for well-established entities like companies or large communities. Blockchain, on the other hand, makes them trivially simple.
If we bring these features to people in a way they can easily use them, they will. This is why we have built microdemocracies.com. It makes the process of creating a new group simple and accessible from any mobile phone and offers these groups anonymous proposals and voting out of the box.
Postpone DAOs, bring blockchain-powered groups
DAOs as a concept have overpromised and underdelivered. In practice, the only DAOs that remain active are “treasury-driven DAOs”. These are held together by a large treasury that is gradually spent/burnt by DAO members. Yet, once the treasury is gone, the DAO will likely go with it.
If you think about it, DAOs were condemned to fail from the start. They represent a utopian future that might be possible with blockchain technology, but that is so distant from the current way people interact with each other, that they are simply not useful solutions to most groups of people today.
In retrospect, it’s possible that the concept of “DAOs” has negatively impacted the adoption of blockchain tech in groups of people. By focusing on the radical innovations of DAOs, we’ve let the obvious use cases of blockchain tech for groups of people pass under our noses.
Starting with simple use cases and bringing people onchain might become a fundamental block on top of which other, more complex experiences, closer to the concept of DAOs, can be incrementally adopted.
The would-be-group that never was
Blockchain tech brings solutions to two problems regularly faced by normal groups of people.
-
How to handle money collectively and transparently.
-
How to have anonymous interactions like conversations or voting.
In both cases, the moat of blockchain tech over the traditional approach to solving these problems is efficiency and regulation arbitration. This is a moat that has proven crucial for the adoption of blockchain in sectors like international payments or finance.
Handling money as a group of people is extremely complicated using the current system: Groups need to be constituted as legal organizations under contracts and laws and then create expensive bank accounts managed through extenuating bureaucratic processes.
Anonymous voting and communication is also an extremely slow, expensive, and bureaucratic process, and thus, only implemented for large and consolidated communities and executed sporadically.
If you are a company or a town, the process might still be worth it as the only way to solve your problem, but for many other would-be groups of people that are just starting, or that are not as consolidated, these costs essentially dissolve the group before it even emerges.
Make it easy, target normal people
This finally leads us to our approach: We want to bring tools that use blockchain tech to would-be groups of people who want to handle money or vote anonymously but do not emerge because of the huge costs imposed by the current infrastructure.
Bringing these tools to people requires three different steps: building the tool, of course, but also making it easy to use by people not familiar with blockchain tech, and, finally, marketing/distributing it so that these groups feel compelled to use it.
Some examples of the would-be groups of people that will use our tool are listed below. Notice something key, none of these use cases are for crypto-natives:
-
People who study at a school or work at a company and want to talk/denounce sensitive subjects.
-
People who live in a neighborhood want to promote a new project that would be useful to all.
-
Immigrants of a common origin/culture who live in a new city and want to fund new spaces for them to meet.
-
A group of people that don’t know each other but use the same public infrastructure every day, for example, people who use an underground passage that is always dirty and smells bad.
-
A school class that decides to raise funds for their holidays.
Aim for short-lived groups
We have designed the tool and plan to do the marketing so that it invites these groups to emerge around a clear and concrete need that can be satisfied if only they either organize or raise funds. The simpler the problem, the better. We want to promote success cases.
Instead of promoting long-term endeavors, we want to promote short-lived, engaging, and gratifying experiences. This would make the use of blockchain tech even more necessary, as long-term endeavors have more time and resources to devote to bureaucratic processes than short-lived ones.
Once we target our audience, we can address the two main challenges they will face:
-
Bootstrap the group: How can we make it so that it is as easy as possible to create and grow the group by normal people, while in the background they deploy a smart contract for it?
-
How can we make the group move into action as soon as possible by offering them a unique feature not possible anywhere else?
Anonymity as the initial focus
To solve these last two questions above, we have built microdemocracies.com. A web app that allows anyone to start a group, invite others, and start using an anonymous board (gated to group members) to share their thoughts with others fearlessly. Other members can anonymously support messages posted to the board, which in practice serves as an anonymous voting experience where anyone can make new proposals.
We decided to give priority to anonymous communication over handling money because that’s the natural order of actions in groups. First, they connect, communicate, and converge, then they might consider money. Handling money is always a big decision, while, instead, posting a message on the board is almost zero-cost for a user.
The app is accessible from mobile phones. It works with wallets like Metamask, but doesn’t explicitly mention blockchain. If the users do not have a wallet ready, they can get one directly in the app using a custodial and embedded wallet linked to their email address. From their point of view, they just logged in with their email.
The app also uses account abstraction, so that actions do not require funds to pay for gas, and users can migrate their custodial wallet to a noncustodial, more secure one, at any time.
The app uses Zero-Knowledge cryptography, in particular the Semaphore SDK from the Ethereum foundation, to have secure anonymous messages and votes gated to a group of people. It works like a charm.
The result is a minimalistic experience that works.
MVP / Prototype
(or simply try it out at microdemocracies.com)
Join us
If you believe a microdemocracy could be relevant in your community, contact us. You can help us make a useful and powerful tool.