Decentralized Platform Metis Aims To Bring Web Communities To Blockchain

MetisDAO, a new protocol aiming to drive the mass adoption of web communities onto the blockchain, has announced that Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of CasperLabs Medha Parlikar is joining the team as an advisor. The partnership comes ahead of the launch of the Casper network mainnet scheduled for the first quarter of 2021.

The Casper Protocol is a layer one public blockchain designed to support the governance of protocols through a range of features. Through partnership with Parlikar, Metis will help bring web communities into the Casper ecosystem by providing blockchain-based tools to organize and manage their projects in a decentralized way. In her advisory role, Parlikar plans to support Metis in pursuing their shared goals.

“[I see my role as] definitely getting [Metis] to work with the Casper protocol we have great alignment because they want to support the scaling out of adoption of decentralized organizations and enabling those organizations to use blockchain technology and we have the exact same goal we want to scale out the adoption of blockchain technology by making it intuitive,” Parlikar said.

By making it easy to utilize blockchain, Metis and CasperLabs plan to spur mass adoption of the technology. When organizers of an open-source project want to use the Metis protocol, they register their decentralized autonomous company (DAC) and an Ethereum address is assigned to the decentralized company. Community members can then join and connect with the address with little to no knowledge of the blockchain technology underpinning the product.

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

CasperLabs’ pure, proof-of-stake blockchain promises to support an array of protocols, including Metis, with web assembly for smart contract execution, high scalability, low cost and high security. While proof-of-stake comes with greater security risks, Parlikar and the CasperLabs team has been working for two years to research and develop a secure proof-of-stake system.

“It's really about efficiency and block times, so [with proof-of-stake] you can propose a lot more block times and get a lot more transactions throughput because you're not rate limiting the rates at which blocks are proposed because of the efforts in mining,” Parlikar said.

The two companies each have independent reputation tracking systems which create decentralized business credentials within each community.

“A lot of these governance protocols today they have this notion of a whale effect where you can just buy a bunch of governance token and sit on it,” Parlikar said. “We have a very different way where you can earn reputation through actions and that’s stored in your keys separate from your tokens, so it's a great way to reward contributions but you separate the monetary aspect, the token aspect, of it from reputation.”

The Metis protocol has its own reputation system where users earn points for their collaboration efforts or through staking. CEO of Metis, Elena Sinelnikova and Liu see lots of potential applications for the points, for example to use similarly to credit scores to determine who is most likely to pay back loans.

“The alignment in goals because we’re all working towards mass adoption, Sinelnikova said. “We know what blockchain technology and we love it and would like to bring it to web communities.”

By Emily Mason

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