On March 03 2021, our community had a chance to welcome Mr. Eric and Mr. Steve Ngok to join in an AMA to give fruitful information about the key features and roadmap of of Dora Factory - the platform aims to build an open DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure for on-chain governance and open source ventures.
This AMA was held by Maru Nguyen from CryptoFamily Group – the top crypto community in Vietnam, where investors and traders can obtain the lastest news and signals from bot/ admins, as well as discuss and share investment experiences in the crypto space.
At this AMA, Architect and Oracle of Dora Factory warmly greeted the community and provided detailed information about the project and its key featuresd, as well as some exciting news and hot events will be taking place in the future.
Time: 8:00 PM (UTC + 7) on Wednesday, March 03, 2021
Venue: https://t.me/CryptoFamilyGroup
Airdrop 200 USDT for the best questions in the AMA.
Below are some main points of this AMA session:
PART I: OVERVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Please introduce your team and Dora Factory briefly. What are some highlights of Dora Factory compared to other projects?
Mr. Steve Ngok: Hi guys. This is Steve Ngok. Me and Eric are the founding team of Dora Factory and DoraHacks. We’re very excited to be here with Crypto Family!
So Dora Factory stems from DoraHacks, the global hacker community and Hackathon organizer. We started building DoraHacks community back in 2014, and step by step grew it to become the largest developer and hacker community in 2017. In 2018 we went global to 8 countries, 15 cities, and organized 31 blockchain hackathons.
You can check out the cool videos of our Hackathons here:
India Blockchain Rising Hackathon | DoraHacks GHS 2018 @Bangalore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xbuN5hUgps
Blockchain & Finance Hackathon | DoraHacks GHS 2018 @Oxford
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt-6VaQAi8o
Blockchain & AI Hackathon | DoraHacks GHS 2018 @Seoul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W8ROIL-XPg&pbjreload=101
In 2019 we organized the largest Hackathon in China history in Beijing, called the 4th Industrial Revolution Hackathon, more than 500 hackers participated in this event.
Also from then on, we started to build hackerlink.io/en, the online blockchain developer infrastructure. It has many cool features that serves blockchain developers, like quadratic funding grants, bounties, online hackathons and BUIDL sector where hackers demo their cool projects to the crowd.
We’re working with Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, ETC, Filecoin, Avalanche, Solana on Hackathons, Grants and Quadratic Voting & Funding recently.
During this process we built many interesting features for developer governance. Developer community is a crucial building block for the whole blockchain ecosystem. By working with DoraHacks and Hackerlink, many open Blockchain ecosystems can govern their developer community in a decentralized, democratic manner. This is where the idea of Dora Factory came into mind.
Dora Factory is a Programmable DAO-as-a-Service Open Infrastructure on Substrate. Schemes like Quadratic voting, bonding curve fund raising, all cool features regrading on-chain governance can be built on this infrastructure as pallets by the developers, and they can be rewarded in a SaaS model when DAOs launched on Dora Factory deploy them.
For us, a DAO is not just a coin-voting machine. A DAO is a set of on-chain governance schemes. To achieve this, there needs to be an open infrastructure where DAOs can plug-and-play governance features freely, and that’s what we call a DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure. Substrate offers a unique tool to build an open platform for on-chain governance protocols.
DAOs are the future of organizations. There are many examples of DAOs we can think of — open-source developer teams, DeFi protocol governance bodies, public chain developer communities, DAO-organized venture capitals, and many more. They all can be or already are DAOs. In the future, many more institutions can be organized as DAOs. For example, nonprofit organizations, crypto artist groups, event organizers, hobbyist groups, decentralized media, etc.
Ethereum DAO platforms are mostly voting machines, therefore they cannot serve many needs from DAOs. With Substrate, we can build a DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure where we can use $DORA native token to empower the system and incentivize developers, and we can achieve plug & play for DAOs that use different pallets and features.
Dora Factory provides a playground where DAOs can be easily created and equipped with cool pallets that serve their crucial needs for governance, fundraise, collaboration, administration and more.
We hope that DoraHacks and HackerLink’s vibrant global community will help Dora Factory grow a robust developer community to build amazing pallets and provide services and schemes in many fields that DAOs can use.
2. Can you tell me some of your strategic investors/ partners and what value they bring to Dora Factory?
Mr. Steve Ngok: We closed our private rounds and are very humbled to have many prestigious institutional investors backing us. Many of them can offer key resources upon global talent outreach, developer community building, strategic investment and advisory on DAOs, Defi, token economics design and operation, etc.
Our institutional investors are HashKey, Hypersphere Ventures, NGC Ventures, DFG, SNZ Holdings, AU21 Capital, Axia8 Ventures, Digital Renaissance Foundation, Candaq Fintech Group, Dealean Capital, Cabin VC, LD Capital, DoraHacks Ventures, Fundamental Labs, Signum Capital, CMS Holdings, Block Dream Fund, ID Theory, LongHash Ventures, PAKA, NEO EcoFund, Incuba Alpha, Zonff Partners, SevenX Ventures, Lancer Capital, Privcode Capital, Gate.io, Horizon Capital, Spark Digital Capital, Kernel Ventures, JRR, Infinity Labs, Lotus Capital, BlockRock Capital, BlockArk, Clover Ventures, The LAO and DuckDAO.
We also have many community backers and our partnership will be announced soon.
8 out of 10 Huobi Polkadot Sponsors invested in us, just to add up on this.
3. Next, please share with us some latest updates of the project in the near future.
Mr. Steve Ngok: Dora Factory’s first batch of key pallets has been developed by HackerLink, DoraHacks’ blockchain developer platform, offering blockchain-based tools, such as quadratic funding, bounty, BUIDL and online hackathons to foster blockchain open-source innovation.
Currently, HackerLink is hosting Binance Smart Chain’s first quadratic funding grant of $50,000. More than 80 new projects have already submitted applications for the program in less than 10 days since the grant was announced.
We‘re supporting BSC and the Graph for BSC Grant 2 on Hackerlink.io, you can check out the details at https://twitter.com/DoraHacks/status/1366970558613647361
DoraHacks is running another Hackathon in Beijing March 6th-7th where 20+ new hacker teams are going us. More details can be found at https://dorafactory.medium.com/eth-hackathon-nft-dao-layer-2-beijing-9dac13d979f4
We’re also running a Singapore Hackathon from April 10th to 11th.
Our community hacker Goda Takeshi will use the bonding curve scheme developed by himself to do a Penta Launch of leading projects for token sale on March 20th. You can participate by following his most recent updates at https://twitter.com/GodaTakeshi7/status/1367006863154237443
On Polkadot side, we are mostly building the infrastructure from the very bottom. A lot of exciting developments. Our first Web3 Foundation Grant was submitted. checkout the grant on GitHub --
https://github.com/w3f/Open-Grants-Program/pull/227
https://github.com/w3f/Grant-Milestone-Delivery/pull/104
PART 2: PRE-COLLECTED QUESTIONS FROM TWITTER
1. What does the Dora factory infrastructure comprise?
How did you come up with the idea of building open infrastructure for DAOs on Substrate framework and what are the solutions Dora Factory provide to Polkadot-native and Ethereum-native projects ? @AnisMelassa0211
Mr. Eric: On Ethereum if you want to build a platform normally you build a Layer-2. However if you want to provide extensible features you need to provide a factory contract for each of the features.
For example, if you deploy MolochDAO, it has fixed functionalities. Therefore if you look at Aragon, DAOHaus, and Moloch V2, they are mostly voting machines of different kind. If you want quadratic voting, you probably need to go to another platform, .e.g. GitCoin or HackerLink.
On Substrate, we can build a more general infrastructure where DAOs are separated from features. Then we can allow developers to build features and add these features to the parachain (permissioned).
If you have a DAO, you create it on Dora Factory, and you choose which feature you want to use, e.g. voting, quadratic funding, fundraise on a bonding curve, or auction, etc. Developers can build all kinds of governance schemes and DAOs can use these schemes. It’s a different kind of infrastructure comparing to Ethereum based ones. It’s open, it’s like a SaaS (but controlled by community and token economy instead of fiat and a company), and it’s fast, it’s cross-chain.
2. Currently I see Dora Factory has an official Telegram community in Vietnam. What is your upcoming strategies to expand in Vietnam, is this one of the target Asian markets that Dora is targeting to attract more strategic investors? @MyPhuongtran2k
Mr. Eric: We will have a bunch of AMAs in Vietnam. We love Vietnam. Before the pandemic, we visited Vietnam quite a few times. So now we are partnering with many Vietnam communities, and we have great people like Paulus, so we will continue expanding in VN. After pandemic, DoraHacks will host hackathons in Vietnam.
3. What can we expect to see from this project in the short-term (at some point in 2021) and 2022 and beyond (long-term goals)? @TrungHi34791477
Mr. Eric: You will see a bunch of products from us and our community! Not necessarily on Polkadot in the first place, might be on ETH and BSC, HECO etc. because they have users. Examples include quadratic voting, funding grants, bonding curve token auction, DAICO, etc. These will be usable products.
Already working product BSC grant hackerlink.io/en/grant
On Substrate / Polkadot, we focus on the infrastructure buildup, you will see the infrastructure and pallets gradually being built via Web3 Grants and our Dora Factory Open Grants.
The Global Hackathon community is amazing.
Now that about 40 top funds globally have committed to back Dora Factory, and you will see many updates from many fronts — product, tech, partnership, community, AMAs, global hackathon events, and exchange partnerships. Definitely stay tuned!
We’ll leverage DoraHacks resources and Dora Factory’s Open Grant and Treasury to incentivize more developers to build cool DAO features as pallets on Dora Factory’s open infrastructure.
We vision Dora Factory to become the best DAO infrastructure not only in the Polkadot ecosystem, but also in the great blockchain space.
4. What is your upcoming plan for $DORA token sale? Can you explain about the token economics, and what is the role of it in the Dora Factory ecosystem? @Hoaithuong00301
Mr. Eric: We’re planning on IDOs on multiple leading IDO platforms and more details will be disclosed shortly.
Maybe more exciting news will come soon! Let's see.
So first of all as a Polkadot parachain, the $DORA token is going to be incentives to maintain the network, i.e. validators and nominators. More importantly, $DORA will empower the DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure.
Notably DEV should be $DROA, but this graph explains a lot.
So we will incentivize developers, developers can price their pallet in $DORA, and DAOs using pallets will consume $DORA and reward developers. A portion of the consumption will be taxed by the protocol and reward the network validators and stakers.
When DAO’s are deployed on Dora Factory, they would need to stake a portion of DORA token, let’s say 100, to the network. When they deploy a pallet as core feature for their DAOs, they will need to pay the pallet developer a fee in a SaaS model with DORA token. A developer will gain reward when the pallet developed by him are used by the DAOs on Dora Factory. So this is very Polkadot-centric token economics design.
Imagine when there are many DAOs created, the tokens will be largely consumed and staked.
Other than these, the token is also governance token for the infrastructure.
There are two governance bodies: the governance DAO and the CouncilThe governance DAO is in charge of parachain major upgrade voting, consensus, governance rules, and community funding. The Council is firstly foundation appointed, responsible for implementing the roadmap
When mainnet is stable, we will remove SUDO, then launch a pallet called Election, then council will be elected by the Governance DAO
This will happen approx. 2 years. So $DORA is used to govern. Very important.
Lastly, we will empower many ecosystem products using $DORA.
5. Defi has become the fastest growing and most accessible aspect of the blockchain industry. How does DoraFactory feel about this? In your opinion, are we in danger of saturation? @Prettyboy071
Mr. Steve Ngok: We think Defi is definitely a very exciting sector, whereas many would say Defi projects and schemes are the first dapps with real users. Many interesting schemes are being developed, and competition are become fiercer. Only the best team and project can survive after this market cycle.
We're working closely with many Defi teams, like dForce, DoDo, Debank, DerivaDex and so on to help team grow their developer community.
One interesting fact: all defi projects all DAOs. Yet you can see that most of projects uses Snapshot, which is an off-chain toolkit. Almost no one uses Aragon or other infrastructures.
The current DAO sector is still a blue market and we're very confident that we can bring something different to the current blockchain space.
We vision Dora Factory to become the best infrastructure for every defi and non-defi project for the governance of their communities.
PART 3: LIVE QUESTIONS
Q1. It is unfortunate that some projects remain half way because their developers abandon the concept because they cannot achieve the desired capitalization in the long term; how do you plan to make this project sustainable for its development?
Mr. Eric: Backed by DoraHacks is very important, community devs are important, roadmap is clear, so we will implement what we say, maybe more, no less.
Q2. Where do I get information about your team? Why do you prefer to be anonymous? Do you have a plan to identify your team later?
Mr. Eric: Not anonymous, you can see DoraHacks team and follow our twitters @dorahacks @dorafactory for updates!
Q3. The Hackathon is the most striking events of Dora. What revolutionary ideas have been obtained by trying to merge different minds and make them partners in a common work? What other events do you plan to organize to strengthen and invest in technological innovation and DeFi?
Mr. Eric: We’ll introduce Quadratic voting schemes to more ecosystems. After Binance Smart chain, we’ll work with Huobi Eco Chain, OKExchain, Polkadot, Kusama, Filecoin, Solana, ETC, Avalanche to help them organize their own Developer DAO’s on Dora Factory’s platform. The hacker economy of their ecosystem are very valuable and we’ll provide the best infrastructure and pallets to host them in the long term.
Q4. Can you draw a strategy around growing your business? Who is your technology partner?
Mr. Eric: DoraHacks is one of the most active dev communities in the space, we only build tech with our own team and involve devs from community. No outsourcing!
Q5. Could you briefly describe the top achievements and goals that value of defi wants to achieve in 2021 and what we want to do for the future?
Mr. Eric:
- Implement Quadratic Funding and MolochDAO on Substrate
- Build DAO-as-a-Service and make it usable for decentralized organizations
- Allow any open source project to raise fund using our infrastructure
- On board all major ecosystem to HackerLink Grants
- Host Global Hackathon series in US, India, Europe, and hopefully VN!
- Make $DORA outperform the market!
CF: Thank you so much for taking your time to join our AMA today, as well as thanks for hundreds of good questions from our community!
Seems like there're many things to exchange, but I'm afraid the time is up now.
For all of the questions that have not been answered yet, guys feel free to search for more information on the links I provided below:
Telegram Vietnamese group: https://t.me/dorafactoryvietnam
Medium: https://dorafactory.medium.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DoraFactory
