Updates to EnDAOment Criteria

Ferns in New Mexico, shot by the author

A lot has changed since we first published the Regen Network Whitepaper in October of 2017! DAOs have taken off as a mechanism of blockchain governance, and numerous tools and conventions have been developed.

We’re ready to launch our first two Community Staking DAOs on Regen Ledger—with Commons Stack and OpenTEAM.

Following the “built-in-public” ethic, we’d like to revisit the original enDAOment criteria and have an opportunity to reflect on what has shifted in the past few years.

Here’s what we had written in the whitepaper:

5.5 Community Staking Pools

30 million $REGEN will be placed in the Community Staking Pool at genesis block, split between no less than three constituency groups.

Criteria for a constituency DAO formation (taking over keys):

  • Signed by no less than 10 addresses that are verified by Regen Foundation and the Validator Set
  • KYC/AML: Organization in good standing in approved legal jurisdiction of incorporation (list pending)
  • Ratify a statement of fiduciary responsibility for ecosystem health clause in corporate bylaws of organization of signer.
  • Exclusive use of network through DAO Agreement: The organization must sign a legal document stating that they do not and will not personally hold or manage any $REGEN for any reason (e.g. that they will restrict their interactions with the network through the DAO that they belong to and manage). Note: if this is discovered to not be true, this organization will be removed from the constituency governance DAO by vote of the DAO.
  • Drafting and adoption of DAO operating agreements
  • Legal reflection of DAO operating structure: DAO must be incorporated in appropriate legal jurisdiction and have contracts with Regen Foundation outlining the appropriate responsibilities and rights.

Like any staked entity on the network, a DAO can both be slashed and will earn block rewards and fees and can vote on what to do with those fees ensures that this community is deeply aligned with the shared value generation of the network.

Before these DAOs have come online, the Foundation will steward these token pools by delegations to approved validators. The approval process of these validators will follow a strict selection process which will prioritize:

  • Security and competency of operation (no delegations will be allowed to operators running purely cloud-based set ups)
  • Rating of support of bootstrapping the network (performance in test nets and longevity of testnet participation)
  • Distribution of stake to ensure diversification security

All of this stake will be validated as close to genesis as possible. Redeligation will occur for security and any actions deemed abusive to the community (such as fee gouging). Until which point the DAOs are formed, Regen Foundation will abstain from voting tokens reserved for future constituency DAOs (promise of no overrides). 

What does the process look like now?

Each new DAO signs a “Grant Responsibility Expenditure Agreement.” This agreement was originally drafted before we planned on using it for the enDAOment process. Token grants used in the formation of DAOs are rather unusual, in that they’re permanent endowments. This document was originally written like a normal grant agreement—assuming funds would be received, spent down, and the grant would be concluded. The agreement has been updated to take into account the permanent nature of these grants. Given this direction, we’ve renamed the part of the document that articulates the purpose of the grant as the “charter.” This term better articulates the weight of DAO formation.

To look at an example, Common Stack’s charter outlines the Foundation’s grant for the following purpose:

for Stewarding the Community Staking DAO, Ambassadorship (e. g. curation, research collaboration, events and speaking opportunities, AMAs, content creation), Strategic Advisory Support (e. g. case studies from the Token Engineering Commons launch, community staking DAOs incubation with the Trusted Seed and/or Donor Advised Funds, explore synergies in crypto-philanthropy and using Giveth), and support the launch of multiple DAOs/Commons deployments within Regen Network via advisory support and community cross-collaboration, communications, events, and promotion.

The grant document has also been updated with various disclosures. As these token grants are permanently locked, Regen Foundation does not have the ability to rescind grants. That said, if a DAO shifted to malicious activity, etc. Regen Foundation or another community member could bring about an on-chain referendum for token holders to consider whether or not that DAOs funds should be confiscated (just as any blockchain can do, such as during the infamous hack of “the DAO” on Ethereum in 2016). Additionally, as outlined in the grant agreement, recipients commit to publicly publishing financials and updates, so that the larger community is aware of their contributions and status.

One of the legal requirements we’ve realized in the DAO formation process is that, as these are technically grants, we need a non-profit fiscal sponsor on the receiving end (although this non-profit can be a pass-through entity). In the cases of our first two DAOs, there is an affiliated non-profit. With future DAOs, we will likely encounter scenarios where we need to recruit non-profit community members to serve as fiscal sponsors to receive a DAO grant, and foresee this as a place we need to grow additional network capacity.

We’ve also learned that incremental token grants complexify DAO administration, as, in the current codebase, locked wallets can only receive an initial transfer of locked tokens. Each additional grant requires a fresh wallet with no transaction history. There may be work arounds—such as future upgrades to the codebase, or a DAO simply having multiple REGEN wallets.

On the pattern level, we’ve realized that there are at least two meta types of DAOs: bioregional (organized around a geographic location, such as the Amazon) and guild (focused on an arena, such as remote sensing). We’re still exploring the implications of these distinctions. As our Board Director, Kei Kreutler, pointed out on her recent interview with Epicenter, the one thing that she’s confident DAOs will be in the future is multi-chain, and we anticipate both bioregional and guild DAOs integrating other aims and communities (Commons Stack is a good example of this, in that their DAO already lives on xDai/Gnosis Chain, so this REGEN grant will bring them into the Cosmos SDK space).

We had imagined a set of selection criteria in October 2021, and set their “expiry date” for February 2022. So now is the time for review and design of the next generation of metrics.

Are you interested in participating in co-evolving these criteria, and the way in which DAOs enter and move through the enDAOment pipeline? Please join our bi-weekly governance calls at noon Eastern on Wednesdays. Reach out to us on Discord or Twitter to be added to the calendar invite.

Whom Does Regen Foundation Serve?

A photo taken in 2015 at WIRRED by the author
Oral edition of the blog post, read by the author

Our team is currently going through a branding process led by better world blockchain marketing agency, LOA Labs. The following is the result of a reflective writing process on the vision of Regen Foundation. Vision speaks to the image of the world we aspire to co-create, and whom we serve. In the spirit of open-source process and community cooperation, reflections and comments are appreciated.

The envisioned future that Regen Foundation aims to co-create

In the broadest sense of the term, agriculture has become the single largest contributor to ecological regeneration across the planet. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) have surpassed biological product revenue as the dominant mode of agricultural income. Land stewards—from smallholder cacao growers in Ecuador, to ranchers in Australia, to indigenous nations of the Taiga—have been able to flip commodity/PES markets on their heads, so that they set the prices of their products and receive a living wage for their work. Land stewards have organized within their communities to develop true bioregional commons, and have invested in common infrastructure that contributes both to local self-sufficiency, as well as the ability to participate in high-value global markets.

Millions of scientists, Web3 engineers, and artists everywhere are receiving livelihood support for their contributions to a myriad of ever-evolving EcoCredit methodologies, dApps, and cultural content built on Regen Ledger and within the surrounding community. Along the way, scientists, land stewards, software developers, cultural creators, and consumers become ever more intimately aware of the animistic life force of their places. They come to recognize how, through their own lived experience, they’re able to feel shifts in the livingness of the world around them and understand its connections with their actions.

Indigenous nations have become the most powerful political actors globally. They steward the largest contiguous blocks of land of any nation, and their political sway has surpassed that of former global powerhouses such as the US, China, Russia, India, and the European Union. This has resulted in a meteoric efflorescence of biodiversity hotspots, reversing the decades-long Holocene Extinction. Indigenous peoples have been able to restore the lifeways of their ancestors in a way that brings their lives deeper meaning, enhances their autonomy and agency in the global theater, and serves as a touchstone of inspiration and wisdom for all peoples of the world.

The Rights of Nature movement has had sweeping legislative victories across the globe. Whereas formerly multinational corporations were the most powerful individual actors—rivers, glaciers, forests, and other natural entities have taken the helm. Along the way, people have recognized their peership with non-human beings. Humans have re-established treaties and accords with Salmon Nation, Beaver Nation, Panther Nation, Redwood Nation, Coral Nation, and countless other keystone species both legally and culturally. No longer are humans in the lonely position of the only sentient beings on Earth; they’re surrounded by the boundless wellspring of clear-sightedness brought by the more-than-human elders that have been awaiting our remembrance.

Maturing Autonomy: Separation Between the Founding Legal Entities of Regen Network

TL;DR: Regen Network Development, Inc. and Regen Foundation no longer have crossover in personnel.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Since our inception, Regen Network has been committed to decentralization. Today marks an inflection point on this path. I have resigned from the Board of Directors at Regen Network Development, Inc. (“RND”) and Gregory Landua, CEO at RND, has resigned as a Board Director from Regen Foundation. Regen Foundation directors, officers, etc. don’t own any shares in RND. Gregory and I were the only personnel who crossed over between entities, and now each entity is autonomous from the other. I will continue to serve in my post as President of the Board of Regen Foundation for the time being.

Even during the period where we did have Board crossover, Regen Foundation has taken precautions to ensure an arm’s length relationship between entities. Regen Foundation’s Conflict-of-Interest Policy and our Token Ownership & Trading Policy can be found via the links.

This moment marks a milestone in the maturation of the ecosystem. A year ago I left my staff post at RND and wrote a retrospective on the previous three years. Looking back over the year since, we’ve launched mainnet, passed a governance proposal  to expand the validator set to 75 nodes, the Foundation has hired its founding Executive Director, and we’re poised to launch our inaugural Community Staking DAO with Commons Stack. I can’t wait to see what this next chapter holds for both Regen Foundation and the Regen Network ecosystem as a whole!

Welcoming New Validators into the Expanded Set

Upgrading the Community Staking DAO Allocation Delegation Strategy

TL;DR—After opening up the question to community input, Regen Foundation will be expanding its delegation policy for the next 10mm REGEN delegated to include the 25 new validators in the set.

A pretty nature photo I shot in Wales in 2011. Hopefully it leaves you more inclined to click on this post!

On August 8th, Regen Ledger’s validator set was increased from 50 to 75, via governance vote #3. In anticipation of this move, we at Regen Foundation published a three-month retrospective on our Community Staking DAO delegation strategy, and opened up a forum discussion for how we might upgrade this strategy in light of the expanded validator set.

Regen Foundation is working to distribute 30+mm REGEN (~28% of the current token supply, held in this wallet) to Community Staking DAOs. In the interim, the Foundation is delegating a portion of these tokens.

On the other side of an AMA and forum discussion, there’s a clear consensus that Regen Foundation should expand its delegations strategy for this pool to validators 6 through 75 in the rankings (from the previous 6 through 50)—”Option 2″ from the forum discussion. This will take effect during our September and October delegations (5mm REGEN each).

Currently allocations are determined by placing in the rankings (essentially a bell curve) and equalizing for commission (down to 3%). There is an interest in factoring in other metrics, such as reputation, or contributions to the Regen Network ecosystem—but it is also clear that these metrics will not be mature enough for these two rounds of delegations, and will rather be rolled into subsequent redelegations later on.

Thank you for your comments and contributions to make this upgrade possible! We look forward to building with you!

Three Month Update: Community Staking DAO Delegations

TL/DR: Regen Foundation will delay its August 5mm c-REGEN delegation from the Community Staking DAO allocation in order to allow adequate time for community governance to upgrade the delegation strategy in light of the expanded validator set.

The vibe I’m going for in our community governance discourse. Photo by Valiant Made on Unsplash

Project Update

To recap: Regen Ledger, a Cosmos-based blockchain for ecological contracts, launched mainnet on April 15th of this year. Regen Foundation is responsible for distributing approximately 30% of the token supply to community stakeholders supporting our mission of ecological regeneration—such as farmers, researchers, engineers, indigenous nations, and rights of nature projects. (As an aside, we’re actively hiring for a Program Officer for the enDAOment process, as well as a Governance Lead.) In the interim, as we get these DAOs up and going, the Foundation is responsible for managing this pool in the best interest of the network. After a community process, we determined that approximately 83% of this allocation should be staked, and staked in a fashion to optimize for stake decentralization (both for the sake of security, as well as validator economics), while also still allowing new validators to make it into the set.

Over the past three month, we’ve successfully delegated just shy of 15mm c-REGEN across forty-six of the fifty validators in the active set (excluding the top validators so as not to contribute to stake centralization). You can see an analysis of token distribution with and without these delegations here. Although the Foundation can’t directly reduce stake centralization amongst the top few validators when measured as a percent of the total token supply (aside from refraining from delegating, which we’ve done), we have successfully decentralized stake as calculated as a percentage of stake tokens. Our biggest impact has been in the fees that validators in the bottom three quarters of the set are receiving—on average, our delegations have doubled commission revenues for these validators. Additionally, these delegations have resulted in a reordering of the validator set by voting power in favor of validators with lower commission.

Solicitation of Public Comment

Voting is currently underway for an expansion of the validator set from 50 to 75 validators, with a strong likelihood that this resolution will pass tomorrow.

How should the Foundation upgrade its CSDAO Delegation policy to accommodate this expanded validator set? There has already been discussion on this topic on various forums (Discord, Twitter, and the Regen Forum primarily). There’s isn’t yet community consensus.

There are three most likely pathways:

  • Option 1—Regen Foundation keeps its delegation policy as is, and doesn’t delegate to the new validators. Those arguing in favor of this pathway have pointed out that all of our initial 50 validators have been with Regen Network since before $REGEN was worth anything, and have proven themselves as committed community members. We will know less about many of the incoming validators.
  • Option 2—Regen Foundation expands its delegation policy to include the new validators in the set. Advocates of this pathway have argued that it would be unfair for the Foundation not to include these new validators in its delegation strategy. A more extreme version of this pathway would be to do some relegation to compensate for the fact that new validators have been left out of the first three rounds of delegations.
  • Option 3—the sky is the limit! We could integrate new factors into our algorithm, or incentivize specific community or network contributions (IBC relayers, additional block explorer support, methodology development, etc.). One caveat here is that, if the proposal entails significant engineering work to accomplish, it would further delay the delegation schedule past September resumption.

Schedule and Avenues for Engagement

You can find a Regen Forum discussion for this topic here. If you have comments or suggestions, this would be the first place I suggest you add them!

We will be hosting an AMA on Regen’s Discord (tentatively scheduled for 11:00am Eastern on Thursday the 19th).

Public comment will close on August 31st, Regen Foundation will integrate public input, and we’ll announce our new delegation strategy during the first weeks of September.

When to Vote?

Regen Ledger has begun the process of its first two network governance proposals. The first proposal concerns REGEN transfers (transfers within Regen Ledger). The second proposal concerns IBC transfers (transfers between Cosmos-based chains). At this inflection point in network maturity, it is worth reflecting on the culture and process whereby the Foundation should and might engage. In our Treasury Management Policy, we’ve established different approaches for voting for the two pools we steward. For our 5mm REGEN endowment, we’ve stated in section 1(d)(i):

“Regen Foundation will vote in alignment with its charitable cause, at its discretion.”

For the 30mm REGEN Community Staking pool we steward, we’ve stated in section 2(d)(i):

“Regen Foundation will not actively vote with these tokens.”

Now to turn to the issue at hand. The Foundation won’t vote with its 30mm REGEN pool, as this would exert undue influence. For our 5mm endowment, we’ve decided to refrain from voting. We are doing this for two reasons:

Firstly, through our delegation policy, and by the nature of the delegated Proof-of-Stake architecture, we’re relying on validators to meaningfully engage in these issues.

Secondly, these votes are about the fundamentals of the system architecture, and are not particularly controversial. They also don’t have a lot to do with the Foundation’s domains. The Foundation will serve as a voice for underrepresented stakeholders when needed. Staying aligned with this, the Foundation does intend to weigh in on some governance issues, but we feel it is more appropriate to abstain when the Foundation’s mission and competencies don’t directly relate to the issue at hand.

In conclusion, as a founding member of the Regen Network community attending to a specific facet of the broader ecosystem, the Foundation would like to be discerning in when we do and don’t vote our tokens.

Attending to Stake Distribution and Validator Economics

Regen Foundation’s Delegation Strategy for the 30mm Community Staking DAO Allocation

Context

Leading up to the April 15th Mainnet Launch of Regen Ledger, we at Regen Foundation published our delegation strategy for the Foundation’s 5mm REGEN.

Regen Foundation also stewards 30mm REGEN in an allocation focused on our Community Stake architecture. We’re working as quickly as we can to distribute this “cREGEN” (community REGEN—permanently locked) through the enDAOment process. In the meantime though, we need to develop a strategy for how we steward these tokens.

Process

On April 28th, I posted a proposal regarding delegation strategy of this allocation for public comment on the Regen Forum. On April 29th, I presented the basics during the Regen Network Community Developer Call. And then on May 4th, our Board Directors Gregory Landua and Kei Kreutler along with myself hosted office hours on the topic on the Regen Network Discord server. Public comment closed on the May 11th.

Policy

The Foundation plans to delegate 5mm cREGEN per month until 5mm cREGEN remain in this pool. The remainder will be used for Community Staking DAOs that we’re launching this year. If the pace of enDAOment (Community Staking DAO initialization) is moving along more quickly than that, the Foundation may not stake the full 25mm, as more would be going directly to DAOs.

Stake will be delegated across the most of the active validator set.

There are two metrics that we will be using at first to determine delegation:

  • Rankings (by stake)
  • Commission rate

We use rankings to create a bell curve for stake distribution across the set. Chris Remus, a founder of Chainflow, has commented on the general trend in PoS networks for stake to centralize amongst just a handful of validators at the top of the rankings. Chainflow is also backing this approach in the Regen ecosystem with a Delegation Program. Stake centralization is inversely correlated with network security. To compensate for this, the Foundation will reduce its allocations to top validators.

On the other end of the spectrum, network security is also affected by the dynamism of the validator set. For this reason, we also taper delegation weight as we approach the end of the active validator set, so that new validators have a better chance of being able to break into the set.

We equalize for commission rate (down to 3%)—a validator with a higher rate gets less stake than a validator with a lower rate, to equalize for their revenues from this stake.

The weighting by ranking utilized during this first round of delegations will be as follows:

  • Rank 1-5: no delegation
  • Rank 6-10: 0.25 weight
  • Rank. 11-15: 0.5 weight
  • Rank 16-35: weight of 1
  • Rank 36-40: 0.5 weight
  • Rank 41-45: 0.25 weight
  • Rank 46-50: 0.125 weight

Findings

Community members had a number of great questions and contributions to the policy:

  • Regen Ledger is focused on ecological regeneration. What are the ways that validators might contribute to this aim at the application level, and is there some way of systematically tracking these contributions? One corollary is the praise and CSTK score in the Commons Stack community.
  • In the future, the Foundation might consider a validator security audit, similar to what Celo performed?
  • There was discussion around a minimum commission correction. Originally I had proposed 1% (as some validators charge 0%). After community dialogue, this has been moved up to 3%. One factor to hold in mind here is that even if we’re compensating for validator take, larger delegations still result in higher governance weight.
  • Foundation policy on delegating to exchanges, once exchanges start running nodes (this may be solved simply through the commission adjustment)
  • If and when the validator set is expanded, this policy will be adjusted accordingly

Rollout

Sometime during the month of May, Regen Foundation will stake 5mm cREGEN according to this policy. We will continue to upgrade and iterate as we delegate and re-delegate in future months.

Other Foundation Delegations

At mainnet launch, the Foundation delegated its 5mm endowment across 25 validators. Due to some moniker alterations between testnets and mainnet, some validators didn’t make it onto this list. Some founders in Regen Network decided to address this issue by redelegating a portion of their own REGEN to these nodes. The Foundation is not going to relegate any of this pool at the moment, but will at some point in the future.

The Challenge of Inclusive Community Governance

Regen Foundation’s Delegation Strategy for Mainnet

With Regen Ledger going live in a few days, we at Regen Foundation understand the gravity of the responsibility resting with our organization. We have been weighing a number of complex factors as part of preparing our delegations for mainnet. 

The Community-First Principle

As an entity with a charitable mission explicitly in service to the Regen Network community as a whole, Regen Foundation requires a delegation strategy that optimizes for network health and commons governance.

Factors for Consideration
  • Network security (enough of the token supply should be staked to performant validators to keep the network robust)
  • Validator economics (what does it cost to run a validator, and what kind of revenues do validators need to be bringing in)
  • Ease of getting into the validator set (too equal a distribution of stake actually creates a barrier for new validators making it into the set, as it raises the stake threshold required to bump someone else out of the set)
  • KYC/AML (although the Foundation doesn’t want to enforce imperialism any more than it has to, there are certain minimum thresholds we need to meet so as not to violate anti-money laws that could endanger our operations)

Community Staking DAOs Allocation

Based on the factors above, we have decided to refrain from staking the 30mm REGEN held in the Community Staking DAOs pool at launch. If we were to stake these tokens, it would substantially depress yields for the remainder of staked token holders. Additionally, whatever algorithm we utilize would have substantial influence on the ecosystem, and we’d like to have more data to work with once the network is operational before exerting undue influence. That said, in the coming months, we’ll be engaging in empirical research to determine what factors we might consider for when and how this pool might be staked. 

Regen Foundation Allocation

After contemplating a number of factors, we have decided on a relatively simple algorithm for allocating Regen Foundation’s tokens at mainnet. We will stake this 5mm REGEN equally across twenty-five validators in the GenTX seventy-seven: lead validators on Regen Ledger, and then the highest-ranking validators from the testnet that got into the GenTX.

Hurdles

As of this window by which delegations are required for mainnet, there is relatively little public information on validators. Luckily, that will be expanding extremely quickly over the next few days. Testnet results are public—although not everyone that performed well in the testnet is participating under the same moniker in mainnet, or participating at all. Regen Network Development, Inc. has solicited validators to complete a survey which will help to populate the validator registry. The Anika Block Explorer will soon be tracking a wide range of metrics once the chain goes live.

Next Steps

In coming weeks, the Foundation will be pouring over this information and updating our delegation strategy accordingly. Stay tuned! In the meantime, our formal delegation policies are also tracked and upgraded on our GitHub in our Treasury Management document.