MetisDAO Imagines Decentralized, Trustless Companies For The DeFi Revolution

MetisDAO is a DeFi startup aiming to provide internet communities with blockchain-based tools to organize and govern their projects in a decentralized way.

"They can build up their own decentralized community here and leverage the community power to govern the project development not by some giant warehouse or arbitrageurs," Co-founder and product lead Kevin Liu said. "We hope it could be fully decentralized to give back the power to the community members."

Metis protocol provides structure and management tools extending beyond a voting mechanism to allow internet communities to complete open-source projects. MetisDAO calls communities using their protocol decentralized autonomous companies (DACs), which the developers see as a more practical subclass of DAOs.

The protocol utilizes optimistic rollups to handle Ethereum congestion. The MetisDAO team touts optimistic rollups for allowing for faster transactions, low gas costs and higher privacy than other scaling solutions. Liu also noted that other solutions like the popular ZK rollups will take another year before they are mature enough for use.

When conductors of an open-source project want to use the Metis protocol, they first register the DAC and an Ethereum address is assigned to the decentralized company. Community members can then join and connect with the address. Unlike a DAO, when members join a DAC they must stake bonds through the Metis Meta Staking Contract. When community members fail to complete tasks, their stake is taken away. The staking structure is designed to hold all participants accountable.

"If you join the DAC you need to contribute and you get incentives if you contribute," Liu said. "it's more decentralized and the power comes back to the community members."

The Metis Protocol offers a suite of tools to DACs including task management which allows members to publish new tasks or grants. The team plans to expand access to tools like these as time moves on.

"We're building something that other people can use the whole protocol so others can build their own front end and hook it up to the protocol easily and manage their communities in their way," Sinelnikova said. "So it's not something that's set in stone but at the same time it's allowing others to be creative and then to manage a community in a decentralized way."

Incentives provided to strong contributors are called reputation points which users gain through successful collaborations or staking. Liu and co-founder and CEO Elena Sinelnikova believe that reputation points could soon be used across the wider DeFi community. The points could be used similarly to credit scores to determine who is most likely to pay back loans. Reputation points could also lend credibility to new DeFi projects if developers have accumulated more points.

"The whole mentality of people changes because they know it's not somebody to force it," Sinelnikova said. "Their own work and their own contribution is actually based off the points so it's very empowering."

By Emily Mason

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