StakingDAO: Supporting Small Pools

[IMPACT]

StakingDAO is a platform designed to give people the option to stake with Groups of Stake Pools instead (or as well as) their normal delegation choices.

A lot of community members already stake to multiple pools and managing multiple wallets can be awkward and unnecessary.

Delegators often want to support lots of stake pools or different altruistic or beneficial groups in Cardano but it quickly becomes a time consuming process.

Our platform lets a user pick a group of stake pools to support, and the DAO will automatically balance stake to all Pools in the given group.

The DAO will have 3 purposes

1. Support Small & Sustainable Stake Pools

2. Encourage Decentralisation Of The Network

3. Make Staking Simple For New Users

The DAO will enable SPOs to sign up and receive delegation distributed by the DAO to enable a 'rising tide' for single and sustainable pools.

ADA Holders can delegate to the DAO as a 'set and forget' delegation method, and the DAO will do the work of distributing all of the wallets of users to balance delegation across all of the stake pools.

This will enable the average user to support decentralisation without having to research pools or understand much about the decentralisation issues we currently face as an ecosystem.

It will also enable Stake pools to gain support without having to rely solely on marketing their pools or building a following - which, from my experience, a lot of particularly competent SPOs struggle with.

How Will The DAO Work?

The DAO will have its own governance token, which will be distributed on top on regular ADA awards, to users and SPOs as a means of governing/voting for changes to the DAO,

The DAO will accept applications from SPOs to join the Pools and will select which of the brackets they operate under (eco / bare metal etc.)

The DAO will collect all wallet addresses and balance the total portfolio of users to be evenly distributed between stake pools - smaller wallets will go to more saturated pools and bigger wallets will help make a bigger impact on smaller pools.

Users will have the option to specify the kinds of pools they wish to support, or take part in a general delegation strategy that encompasses all single pools in the DAO

The DAO will be able to seed new pools by either taking a % of portfolio or having a seeding option in the DAO so users can choose to help seed new pools to get their first block.

This will provide up to 5 Epochs of delegation to give them the chance to prove their competence as an SPO, before adding them to the normal distribution and moving seed wallets to another new pool.

Membership & Managing Pool Behaviour:

The DAO will have rules on membership, it will require pools maintain a certain variable fee level to ensure that pools are not gaming this system, and it will also track pool activity to make sure SPOs are acting responsibly - maintaining and updating their pools.

If a pool is flagged by the DAO it will be contacted with 1 Epochs notice to change, if it does not get updated or adjusted it will be spend an Epoch in limbo and finally there has still been no action then it will be removed from the DAO and any wallets delegated will be removed and redelegated to another pool.

Some extreme behaviour will not be tolerated if it shows signs of a bad actor, the DAO reserves the right to remove pools without warning.

You can find more info about the StakingDAO project on the website or check out our whitepaper here:

https://stakingdao.ai/whitepaper/

Our solution addresses the challenge by directly building a dapp / dao on the cardano blockchain for the benefit of a stronger and more robust network and ecosystem.

StakingDAO will help support the network and decentralise stake with its platform and make the delegation process for the user simpler and provide new and innovative options for users to stake

We already have the scripts and contracts developed to build this solution, the challenge will be to create a simple onboarding and educational process to help prospective users and SPOs understand how the DAO works and why it is good for the community.

[FEASIBILITY]

Q2 '22

• Building Web app & UI for Testnet
• Deploy scalable solution to Testnet
• Begin contract audits

Q3 '22

• Open testnet platform for Alpha testers
• End of term final product audit to ensure security

Q4 '22

• Public Launch on Mainnet
• Onboarding Users

Q1 '23

• Initial IP Governance rollout
• Open Community IP Submittal
• Dev Team application

Q2 '23

• Community IP Voting
• Rapid Response Voting Mechanism
• Initial Committee application

Q3 '23

• Committee Onboarding
• Deployment of Standard Operating Procedures

Q4 '23

• Community Handover of DAO

15K - Smart Contract Development for 3 months

30K - Front end Development for 3 months (2 People)

10K - Educational Onboarding Ux and documentation & language translation

5K - Marketing platform to community

Once the initial development period of 3 months has passed the DAO will look to the community and token launch to build a treasury for the DAO.

This treasury will be how the DAO will pay for further dev work as needed, and to implement IPs submitted by the community.

Rhys - SPO, Plutus Pioneer, Ux Ui

https://twitter.com/StoicPool

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhys-morgan-pt/

Edi - SPO, Software Developer, Plutus Pioneer

https://twitter.com/smoll_catto

Anthony - Web Developer, App Developer, Ux Ui

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-riera-96aba3133/

[AUDITABILITY]

We will measure progress according to our KPI's and our roadmap, and over time open sourcing our project once we have it deployed on mainnet.

Success for the StakingDAO is managing a portfolio or 5Bn+ ADA for the community, delegating to over 1000 Stake Pools

This is a resubmittal of the Fund 7 StakingDAO Proposal, which just missed out on funding