Thank you for having me. I'm good. Thanks. Holding on in the middle of this quarantine, but all good.

Same here.

Sure. So the story of the foundation traces its roots back to a political party. So the two co founders, Santiago and Pia, were they are from Argentina. And with their friends over there, they decided to create a political party called Cartido de la Red or the Net party, which basically had this, commitment where every candidate was going to vote in Congress, according to how citizens voted online in this platform that they also created, which was called democracy OS. So basically as a citizen, you could go there, see the laws that were being voted in Congress, and then you could vote in favor or against. And the, the candidate, if a candidate was elected, he was going to vote according to how citizens voted online. So it was this initiative to try to address this crisis of representation, which was at the time very much felt because this was, when we had the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which were all, social media organized movements. And this was an attempt to, to provide a, a, not a social media way, but just to leverage technology in favor of making democracy more robust. So they were not elected. But they they did make, you know, a great number of votes. It was they they made a lot of noise in in Buenos Aires. The Congress agreed, to use their platform in order to vote on a few pieces of legislation. And they continued developing the the software as an open source project. It was used by many different groups around the world. If I'm not mistaken, it was used to discuss the new constitution of Tunisia. It was used a lot in France, in Brazil, where I'm from, it was used a lot. That's how I found out as well, it was used in Sao Paulo. So it was a great open source project. And, it caught the eye of Y Combinator, which is, an accelerator from Silicon Valley that invited them to go over there and start thinking and get, you know, a startup training and start thinking about it, in a way, with a with a very technological perspective and not so much, thinking about the software as an interface for between citizen and government, but just pure governance software that uses the best, technology available to produce the strongest possible democracy. So there was this pivot. And in that pivot, I'm trying to summarize here, there were many stories also with corruption. They were asked for a bribe, which was, an experience with a direct experience with corruption that also marked a bit this this, turn. With all of that, there was this decision to to look into blockchain technology and see how this could be leveraged to create a censorship resistant democracy and just think about, the technology in a more pure way and not strictly, confined by what is possible in the institutional realm. So this was five years ago. And since then, we've been doing a lot of research, a lot of writing, a lot of imagining, what a what a democracy that, leverages blockchain technology would look like. And also working on identity, which is a key part that we can discuss, further. But this this would be, I guess, a a summary.

Yeah. We are we are a nonprofit, and our goal is, you know, it's a very, radical and and revolutionary one in the sense that we're trying to create a movement or enable, alternative forms of government, enough governance, alternative to the institutions that we have. There are many different opinions within, you know, among the people that have worked on this project regarding, you know, should we still have institutions or should we not have them? I am personally someone who sees this as a way to strengthen the institutions that we do have, you know, by creating alternatives. We we maybe can force them to be better at their game. But our goal is also a very, very high one. And I think with time, we discovered that the challenge was is an enormous one. It it always was. But the more we dig we digged into the problem, the more we've we discovered how complex it was. And I I think nowadays we see ourselves as, just trying to coordinate different efforts in the space, trying to foster conversations in a direction that we we think is productive for the blockchain ecosystem. And specifically the organizations that are concerned with governance. And and software wise, we're also trying to create software that helps bring different projects together and just accelerate the pace of innovation in the space, of blockchain based governance and identity.

Sure. So just to, clarify a bit what is this identity problem. Basically, in order to have online governance, you need to be able to ensure, first, that any, any kind any participant of this vote is a legitimate member of whatever the domain is. And second, that it's not a a replicant. So that, that there that it's, actually a real human being behind it and not just a fake Internet identity. And this is a pretty big problem because if you don't have a way to signal a robust, unique identity, then the only alternative that you have in order to do a a blockchain based vote is to do a coin vote. And this is what, most of the projects have been opting for when they have governance needs. You know, some of them I think that this also, on the other hand, has diminished the the use of blockchain as a infrastructure for governance. But when there's no way around it, when you need to decide the change in the protocol of, you know, whatever, project you, you have, or you need when there's an uncircumventable need, you need you then you you the only alternative that you have today is to do a coin vote. And then whoever has more coins, can alter the results in their favor. So most of blockchain governance today is plutocratic. And until we have a way to signal identities without also while preserving privacy. Because, of course, you can and there are some some blockchain identity projects. If you Google blockchain and identity, you will find many options today. But they are piggybacking the legitimacy of their identity on traditional solutions. Like, you know, nation state identity or any organization that you have participated in which can vouch for you. But the real challenge that we are concerned with as an organization, and more and more people in the blockchain ecosystem are as well, is to find a way to come up with a decentralized consensus for identity, where you don't have a single point of failure or a single institution, a single authority that can leak all of the data and control of the data and use it for bad purposes. And there are many, different minor challenges, also involved in this. How do you store this data? How do you keep it? How do you keep it through time? And there are many projects that are looking into how how to enable that. Because once you do, then there's this world of possibilities that you can enact with governance, with, UBI, etcetera, etcetera.

This is a great question. So I think one of the narratives that is very dominant in the blockchain ecosystem, and I think Balaji Srinivasan was one of the people who has put this a lot out there, is the idea of voice and exit. And basically it means that in a in a in order for citizens to to have a valid participation in a democracy, they must be able to have a voice, meaning to collectively organize around the cause and, you know, make their voice heard, and the ability to exit the system. And originally, this idea, there's this book called, I think it's Voice and Exit, where the author, when he posed this idea, he states that both in order to have effective voice, you need to have effective exit. So the the possibility of leaving enhances, how heard you are. And in order to to have effective exit, you also need effective voice. So those two things are dependent on each other. And what we have right now is exit. And a lot of people in the blockchain ecosystem were extremely excited. For example, when in Venezuela, you had hyperinflation, inflation and then many Venezuelans were able to flee the country by buying Bitcoin. And then they just turned their assets into this thing that they could carry in their head. No one could confiscate it at the airport, and they they were just able to leave and kind of escape this authoritarian regime. This was exit. And it's a very libertarian concept at the end of the day because it's concerned with the individual. But, and, and I can say this from experience, because I've been in touch with many people from Venezuela who were involved in the blockchain ecosystem and who wanted to turn this as, something that could empower their nation. But the issue is that we don't have a mechanism for voice, meaning for collective bargaining. There's no way for Venezuelans today to just go and organize on the blockchain and signal their, their needs. And this is and and it's an incomplete solution. If you can't organize with your peers, then, okay, you can leave your country, but your nation is behind you all all your life. So it's not it's not just desirable to have only voice, only Isaac. You need voice as voice as well. And I think when it comes to, to voice, this is an inherently, left, Maybe, you know, maybe I'm overstretching here. But I think it's something that the left is concerned with, participation, political participation and representation and the ability to have a democracy where everyone is heard and not just the few ones who have more, capital. And this is something that is not possible today. But if it is, it's something that I think the left should be interested in enabling. Because once we do have that, then there's several things, that pertain to left concerns such as, you know, just having a voice participation, which would be possible to do using blockchain networks.

It Exactly.

because we're you know, this is a pre French revolution time for the blockchain ecosystem because only people who have assets are able to have a voice. And then that's inherently an anti democratic, system. And we need to recognize that, that, first, it's, you know, we're at the very early days. So, there's also, I think it's important to recognize that not all is set in stone. There's much, in the state of affairs today, is not indicative of what is it going to be, forever into the future. There's a lot of work to be done. But also that the way that things are right now is pretty, what's the word for it? It's pretty archaic. You know, we we just don't have the franchise in within the blockchain world.

That's a great question. There are several properties that you that you want in a in a decentralized identity system. First, it should be decentralized. And, you know, that's what what we're aiming for. This is I'm I'm talking about an ideal that, you know, lots of people have been, it's almost this, you know, search for, something you know, it's almost this alchemy search because it's an ideal that a lot of people have been pursuing for many years. Some many people have simply given up and said that this is not possible, meaning to do a truly decentralized, identity system, because you will always have a way to hack it and to create fake identities. But the promises are so great. If you are able to do this, then what you can do the, the increase for human potential is so extraordinary that it's a lot of people are pursuing this, considering it more for us, even though it's a challenge. So some of the properties that such an identity system should have, it should be decentralized. That's the first thing. Nobody should have, the ability to find all of the data in one single honeypot. You need to, be able to ensure that all of the members of it are able to keep their privacy and keep their data and disclose it at their own will. Now different identity protocols that are being tested today, will are more relaxed or more, strict on on how private they are. The most private, I'd say, is this one called the Idina network, where you do not need to share any kind of information. All that you need to do is prove that you are a human being by doing a kind of CAPTCHA test where you you that only only a human can can do. It's a task designed solely for humans. No machine learning system can solve this task. And, all of the members of the network have to do it at the same time so that you know that there are no duplicates. And then on the other hand, this would be more the CAPTCHA style, identity protocol. And then on the other hand, there are, social network based identity protocols where you have this kind of social validation and then obviously you are exposing yourself a little more to a certain degree. But ideally, what you want is something that is privacy preserving. And then you want something where your data is locally stored on your device where there's no centralized server, holding it. And then, you also want to have the ability to know how your data is being used, if it is used, and to selectively disclose, this this, these pieces of data about yourself. And, you want you want to have the ability to also have multiple to have pseudonymities. So to have multiple identities if you want. You don't want to use the same key for every single platform that you access. So that's you know, these are many I I didn't exhaust the list. These are many difficult things to achieve in one single system. Still, there are, it's very encouraging to see right now. A year over a a little over a year ago, this space was pretty much empty. And right now, we have several organizations around the world, who are working on this project. Some of them are have software that is already, working like the IDINA network, which I mentioned. Provide ID is also super interesting. We are working on something with DemocraServe, which is the intersubjective consensus that you mentioned before. There's the UPALA also, which is a cool project trying to do, trying to estimate a price for for an identity, which is another interesting, super crazy, and great approach. But anyways, I'm digressing here. The point is that there's there have been significant advances in this direction. And the reason for that is, that the ecosystem as a whole is realizing that you really can't move forward in terms of governance without solving this first.

Yes. We are. I mean, this is this is the connected to the story of our organization. We started as a political party. And then nowadays, we are, extremely interested in helping governments, become more innovative. One of one of the things that we did last year was a pilot with, the Colorado Democratic Caucus. And we and in partnership with the Radical Exchange Foundation, we did a we helped them. We helped implement a quadratic vote for them. And this was super interesting. I'll just try to explain quadratic voting very briefly. I was gonna ask you that after this, actually. Yeah. So quadratic voting is a system of credits where basically, so just to to first, talk about the goals. The idea is that you want a system where people are able to very precisely express their preferences where whereas with, a simple one person, one vote system, it's very difficult for you to, express the nuance of your of your choices. So quadratic vote is something that is designed to allow each voter to express their their choices in a very nuanced way. And the way that it does that is by giving each voter a set of credits. So let's say each each of them has a 100 credits, and then you can express the intensity of your you have a set of choices. It could be candidates. It could be different policies. In in the case of Colorado, it was, different bills. And then you're able to express the intensity of your preference for each of the choices by putting more tokens, more of those credits onto them. But the trick is that for each, additional vote that you cast, there's an exponential cost. So one vote is going to cost one credit. Two votes is going to cost four credits. Three is going to cost nine, etcetera, etcetera. And therefore, if you want to really cast a lot of votes on the same on one single option, then you pay a very high price. Whereas if you, divide your votes among more options, then you're able to just choose more things and and have more votes in your in your wallet. So the idea is to make, zealotry expensive. And we we have implemented that for the for the Colorado Democratic caucus. We are we are also pursuing it with other governments. And the idea is to help, of course, if if we can. Our main focus is on identity. But we have a software that is ready for that. And we are also very much interested in helping, institutions adopt more innovative approaches in in their own governance. So at the end of the day, what this voting method does is that it, shows whether the strong preferences of the minorities are, stronger than the the weak preferences of the of the majority. So it it paints a very accurate picture. And what, research has shown is that this leads constituencies to become less polarized, which is a great thing. While it also helps minorities to to organize around their own causes. So it helps it helps groups find find consensus and determine what is really priority for them. And I think in in a scenario where we often have, special interests who are who have a disproportional impact on a few issues, The ability for constituencies to organize and voice their preference and fully voice, what they're doing, what they want through democratic means is very interesting.

Yes. Exactly. And one of the ways that I think about it is just in terms of the amount of information that you're putting out there. And, Santi, who I work with, is he he makes this joke that we are only in terms of the amount of information, what we can do today with our politics is to send to send an emoji every two years. And just it's a yes or no. And you're usually selecting from, a very small pool of candidates that are also is filtered through all of these processes that are not, democratic per se. So, what quadratic voting allows you to do, because you have to say, oh, I am in favor of this, but I really care about this issue. And this other one, I'm also signaling support, but not as much. Like, it it allows you to paint this picture of your preference. Then it's as if you're constructing a sentence or a paragraph as opposed to an emoji. So it's a a very rich, informationally rich way to to vote.

Yeah. It's a very binary option. Right? Yeah.

Well, it's certainly not a good one. I think that there are some some places where that could make sense. For example, for a a private organization, for a company, to have a a shareholder vote where whoever has more shares, has a bigger say on the outcome, that might make sense. That might even lead to better decisions. But when it comes to, deciding over public goods, making public decisions, then you definitely want to have a a democratic system where each person has the an equivalent, weight on on the decision in question. So what and this is it's true. It's a lot of people when we first started writing about this in 2017, we wrote this white paper of the social smart contract. And the idea was to imagine what would a new social contract look like, in the age of cryptography, in the age of smart contracts, in the age of blockchains. And when we first started discussing, blockchain based votes, this was the first question that we would get. How can you have a vote, that has a value to it? And I think that, first, it's important to say that every vote has a cost. We're just not, paying it upfront, but we are paying for the infrastructure with our taxes. In the same way also that every not not, there's no perfect identity system out there. You know, every we have civil attacks, let's say. Civil attacks is the term for for an attack in a distributed system. But we also have, duplicates or replicates or fake identities in traditional identity systems. So this these are two important things to keep in mind. And then by putting and then so why would we put a price on the vote? Why we would have a blockchain based token with a with a with a value to be used as a vote? I think the first, point that you want to address is that if you're doing such a thing, you want to ensure that you have a distribution among all the participants that is equivalent or equal. So that everyone has the ability to have a similar weight, on this question. When we were, writing the social smart contract, our idea was to have a universal basic income of votes. So everyone just is receiving this through time, in an equal way. And then or with with, quadratic voting also. It only works if all of the of the participants have the same amount of credit. So that's a prerequisite. And then on the other hand, what you want is to is for these votes to have an impact. And right now what we have in the Internet is that we're always signaling our preferences. We are uploading things on Reddit, or we are retweeting something. We are liking things on Twitter. We are giving hearts on Instagram. And all these things are, expressions of preferences, but they don't have any institutional value. And especially earlier, when I first started working with this, you know, in the civic tech world, where we were thinking about software for people to vote online, not using blockchain technology, I pretty quickly was able to realize that there were a lot of fallacies in the space. And, this was kind of an early promise that, oh, if you just create a website where people can vote, then they're going to be able to exert pressure in government and change, and, and achieve, you know, change in legislation. And this was disproved. A lot of these experiments were tried and tested, and it's very, very difficult to actually achieve the, you know, critical mass in order to of of people, you know, putting pressure in order to actually achieve change. And there are a few anecdotal stories of, like, oh, this change.org thing that everybody signed and it worked. But it but these are actually harmful because they create this false theory of change that if people just organize online, they're going to change government. And it it it does not happen like that. There there were millions of dollars invested by many different foundations on, legislative monitoring projects where citizens, you know, could go online and see the laws and vote. But these had no institutional impact. And right now this is pretty recognized, in the, in the civic tech space. So the value of having and I, I can even say, you know, share my own experience working with my, my government here from my city in Brazil, Curitiba, when we were trying to do a participatory budgeting project. And it was extremely difficult. We had the buy in of the mayor, but then tons of people were, you know, creating problems and were against it. And then at the end of the day, and we were an open source we were working with open source projects. We just wanted to enable it to give it for free to to the municipality. And it's very, very hard for them to even even in a case where we had the support of the mayor and he was really excited about it, it was very hard to actually turn it into reality. Governments are not designed to to you know, power is not something that people will just give away. So by this is, you know, a long answer, but what I'm trying to say is that by using blockchain technology, what we have is the ability to actually enforce the decisions. So we create a group. We we vote with things. Maybe the vote can pass, financial threshold and it can work in a vote. Can it can be a hybrid between a vote and a crowdfunding, project. Right? Like you're voting for it. You're staking, some value onto or you can just show that there's an x amount of economic value behind, a certain idea. You can even, you know, we used to joke that you can huddle, which is this expression that I don't know if many people are familiar with, but just hold your, your Bitcoins. You can huddle on, on a political cause. Like you can just stake your, your Bitcoins or your cryptocurrency behind a certain idea that you think is important. And I think that kind of signal is much more powerful than a simple like. And it enables you to do, a lot more things. By doing by so by attributing value to it, we're by no means saying that, whoever has more money should be making decisions. We're we're actually what we want is for all of us to be able to accurately and signal things and enforce them, through the power of economic value.

Yeah. It's a it's an interesting kind of conundrum. Because when you think about democracy, you think about, you know, the the rule of the majority. Whereas at the same time, we also find that there's something authoritarian about it because you don't want, if you, when you, when you have the tyranny of the majority, what you're doing is you're eliminating diversity. You're eliminating, you know, a plurality of ideas, to be able to emerge and to have an impact in in a group, in a society. So I think what what we have nowadays is that because minorities cannot express themselves through democratic means, because majority always wins, this is how democracy works. So you can have, you know, it's very difficult for you to get representation for minority causes. And usually the solution that you have for this in our democracy, in our democracies is to achieve those, rights and laws for minorities through the, through the judicial power. So judges are going to rule in favor of, of these minorities and then create those rights. But this is also far from being an ideal way of creating those regulations because you don't, you don't, there's no public oversight, over this in the same way that a democratic process would create. So what, what the patriotic vote does is that it allows minorities to also express their voice. And I think that it's not necessary it's not an anti democratic thing. What you allow with this is that you don't converge to the middle in every single one of your, decisions. And that might be a desirable property to have in a governance system because quadratic voting is allowing people to accurately express their preferences. So right now we often converge to the middle or even to more radical positions because people are not able to fully express the nuance of what they desire. But with just by allowing this, detail of of capture, then as a result, you have more more plurality of ideas and more variety. So we at the end of the day, it's a stronger democracy. It's one where you have more voices participating and not just one where you have this authoritarian convergence to the middle. I I I wouldn't say that it's an anti democratic thing, the very opposite.

Sure. Thank you for asking. It's a really cool project. So just to give a little bit of background, a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. That's what the acronym stands for. And it's basically a type of smart contract. So a group of people, let's say a group of people pulls funds, and they have this common interest. In the case of the MolokDAO, the interest is, the goal is to, promote the development of ETH two point o, the next, protocol of the Ethereum blockchain. And there's this group of of organizations or individuals who are interested in that, or let's say could have any any other kind of goals. So they pull funds, and then they vote on how those funds can be allocated. And anyone can create proposals, to get to to be funded by the pool. But the the cool thing about the DAO is that the voting and the governance rules and the allocation of the funds is all the ensuing, ensuing allocation of the funds based on how the members vote is so coordinated by a smart contract. So there's no authority. There's no entity. There's no, centralized organization that is that is behind this. It's all done by a contract that is incorruptible. You can trust it. And one of the main experiments, one of the main DAO experiments happened in 2016. It was called bDAO, and it was, hacked. And that kind of traumatized the ecosystem, I think, for a few years. So we didn't see many, governance innovations, especially on the Ethereum blockchain. But, you know, there there are a few interesting organizations out there, but there wasn't a lot of organic growth. And then that started to happen with the MolokDAO, which was a project created by Amin Saleh Mani in, early two thousand nineteen. I think it was in a hackathon. And so very spontaneous. And the main innovation that it brought to the DAO ecosystem and the reason why it caught on was that it had this rule called the rage quit, which enabled, very funny. So it it enabled all members to rage quit. If if you voted no on a proposal, it it's it's, on it's an ongoing down. So if you if you are a member of Molotow and if you vote no on a proposal and this proposal is approved by the other members, so if it passes, there's a grace period. And then during this grace period, you can quit the DAO. So you you are free to leave it and you take all the remaining shares. You you convert your share shares into, the money that you initially put in minus whatever has been allocated to the projects, while you were a part of it. And then, and then you you leave the DAO. So you're not locked into it, which was an issue with the original DAO, the DAO. So that gives that gives an extra assurance for for the members and it incentivized people to create more DAO. So it became a bit of a standard in the Ethereum ecosystem. And, we are we have created an interface for the Molot DAO, with Democracy Earth. And there are many other projects that have also used the same code. It's also 400 lines of code only. So it enables people to easily work with it. It also reduces the space for, hacks or bugs or zero day vulnerabilities. So it's it's an interesting model that has been emerging, and it has it's been gaining traction. There are there are several DAOs out there that they use the same model, and WageQuit has also become a standard in the place in in the space. I think Aragon has adopted it as well, which is another big, DOW organization. So that's that's Molotow. And what they are doing specifically is funding, ETH two point o development. But what I think that just the model itself became very became a new standard in in the space. And, I'm a I'm a big fan of, of Amin and what what their team did because they enabled the ecosystem to mature. For a few years, we didn't have much happening. In 2019, a few people called it the year of the doubt, because a lot of different projects started to to leverage this standard and also to create other standards.

no. The the the the meltdown has its own original user interface, which is, not super, but it works. And what we try to do is to just create a nicer user interface. And the next step is to enable anyone to just, go go on our website and fill out a form with the different properties of the DAO that they want to create and immediately create a Moloch DAO with the same interface for themselves. I see. I see. So, like, a a modular

Yes. And and the idea for that is that DAOs are they are a kind of contract that requires human input. If you're they are governance contracts. So people are voting. They have funds. So it's not you're not likely to see, bots, a DAO, filled with bots deciding things. It implies some kind of cognitive process there. So there's it's likely that there's a human behind, each address. So that's so that's why we we have been doing this because what we think is that it will be very good for the ecosystem of DAOs to grow. We want to support it. And by doing so, we'll have more human metrics that we can use for a probabilistic identity ecosystem.

So everyone is more than welcome to collaborate with us. Everything that we do is open source, coding wise, but also in thinking wise, all of our papers are written on GitHub. So you can just go to github, .com/democracyearth, and you'll find our different, projects there. We're also on twitter.com/democracyearth. And, you can always reach out to us, especially if you are willing to organize, and create a DAO, which is something that we are very much interested in fostering. We'll be putting out a very simple software where you without, much calling knowledge, you'll just be able to create a a DAO, for yourself with a great interface. You can check that out on Moloch, moloch,.democracy.earth. And you can see that, how how would a DAO look like. And what we're going to be doing over the next few weeks is to enable this software to just replicate, that model, but under with whatever, configurations you want for your own doubt. So this is also another key way, and you should be looking out for social media to stay tuned for for news on that front. And our blog, finally onwards. Democracy.earth and we're always publishing what we're up to over there.