GIP-59 : Should GnosisDAO fund Circles UBI R&D work?
- Let’s do this!! Go Circles!
- Make no changes
0 voters
Simple Summary
This proposal would fund the Circles Coop eG and the Bitsposessed developer collective to support the CirclesUBI team’s R&D costs for one and a half years and expand operations. The following Circles UBI proposal would foster the mass adoption of key Gnosis technologies like the Gnosis Safe via the establishment of UBI Open Pilots as well as fostering internal collaboration between GnosisChain dapps through the development of a Circles Web of Trust (WoT) GnosisSafe native app and other tools at a total of USD - $3.571 Million, paid 45% in GNO and 55% in DAI, administered by the Circles Coop eG.
Abstract
With over 120,000 accounts deployed so far via the circles.garden interface, CirclesUBI has established itself as a power dapp within GnosisChain, developing, maintaining and promoting basic income public good infrastructures built within programmable accounts via Gnosis Safe technology. The present proposal seeks funding for the team’s operations plus a UBI Open pilot funding program for 1.5 years, and includes a detailed budget on how the team plans to allocate the requested funds of USD - $ 3.571 Million equivalent. Through funding the present proposal, GnosisDAO would establish clear alignment with its core values of funding public goods and support the development and improvement of infrastructure critical to ensuring the sustainable scalability of the GnosisDAO and GnosisChain ecosystem.
See Phase 1 here.
Motivation
CirclesUBI is a basic income system for communities built on the GnosisChain. CirclesUBI was coined first by Martin Koeppelmann during the early days of Ethereum, merging ancient traditions of mutual credit with the idea of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) into a system of personal currencies. Since CirclesUBI launched in Berlin in October 2020 it has gained significant attention from individuals and communities world-wide, with over 120,000 successfully deployed GnosisSafes to date. Beyond the ongoing Berlin Open Pilot and the communities who use Circles around the world, there are new instances of the application being developed around the world, including a campaign by Expedition Grundeinkommen in Berlin that started from May 2022 (circles.pink). This proposal will support the development of a world-wide Circles Movement DAO to serve these as well as other emerging communities.
To ensure our mission to make Circles a planetary movement towards bringing UBI into the world, the Circles Coop and the Bitspossessed collective have successfully relaunched Circles in order to have an issuance rate based on time so that communities world-wide can more easily anchor Circles to their own Units of Account and start exchanging using CRC. You can read more about the recent transition and its benefits here.
With the goal to further increase uptake, Circles Coop and Bitspossessed are now focused on creating a resilient payments infrastructure without single points of failure (SPOFs). Based on the online Circles Market, the team is currently designing the specification to develop an OpenAPI so that people across the planet can use their existing preferred payment methods to co-pay with their CRC currency.
After the successful merge of XDAI/Gnosis, we believe it’s time to deliver on the promises of “developing the Gnosis Chain ecosystem and incentivize usage”. In order to have a more resilient and interdependent ecosystem, the CirclesUBI team wants to bring mutual benefit to the different dapps within GnosisChain via the development of a Circles Web of Trust (WoT) dapp within GnosisSafe. A native WoT GnosisSafe app would provide pathways for interoperability and integration between dapps, DAOs, GnosisChain POS validators, other WoT networks like Proof of Humanity, BrightID and more, embedding trusted relationships and token systems within a modular and integrative WoT for GnosisChain.
Circles UBI Coop approaches its mid-term development through establishing revenue-generating income sources to cover cost of production and re-invest the overflow into R&D. The CirclesUBI team will develop a Community Currency Exchange, a social DEX that promotes community finance (Co-Fi) via CRC group currencies and other alt-coins like our sister project Trustlines (recently decided to move to GnosisChain), where SMEs and COOPs and municipalities can issue their own community currencies and sell it for digital assets and DAI stablecoin in return for future promises to their own production, creating healthier relationships between investors within the Gnosis ecosystem and community/business members in the Circles network, new DAO structures and more. The Gnosis ecosystem can further benefit from the uptake of GnosisSafe infrastructure via CirclesUBI to non-crypto natives, with over 120,000 safes deployed as of mid-2022 on Gnosis Chain (source: Dune Analytics).
In short, the Circles Coop & the Bitspossessed have assembled an extremely well positioned team to stress-test, develop, maintain and expand underlying Gnosis core infrastructure and drive Gnosis technologies to mass adoption via the implementation of UBI on a planetary scale, which we believe to be a paradigm shift in how society is organised. Gnosis currently provides the backbone infrastructure for this transition to take place and our mission is to improve it through everyday usage with a wide range of people.
Specification
The Circles Coop and the Bitspossessed collective seek to increase the size of the teams to a total of 24 full-time positions, which will be employed over the course of 12 - 18 months, in order to develop, maintain and expand the described tools. Furthermore, the proposal includes funding for a Circles international ambassador position leading the community work within the Circles Movement DAO and transferring the Circles Coop’s Berlin pilot learnings, best-practices and research tools to better implement other Circles hubs around the world.
The total budget requested for the CirclesUBI team (USD - $ 1.948 Million in DAI, 55 %) and to equip the Circles Movement DAO via the development of Open UBI Pilots (USD - $ 1.5 Million in GNO, 45 %) is USD - $ 3.571 Million. The full budget details of the present CirclesUBI proposal can be found here.
Rationale
The CirclesUBI technical roadmap is public and was created by the Bitspossessed, the team that maintains and develops the CirclesUBI core codebase. Its chief priorities for 2022 include improvements to the pathfinder algorithm, including hardening transfer through transactions to improve the overall functionality and usability of the Circles network, as well as developing a Circles Payment API & co-payment functionality. For Q4 2022 and 2023, priorities lay on developing a general purpose GnosisSafe Web of Trust (WoT) native app and tooling based on the Circles WoT to encourage more on-chain collaboration and a Community Currency DEX. All of this is to ensure that the already existing living communities using Circles can have a better user-experience. In terms of promises to the GnosisDAO, we divide these into two:
1. Development of Gnosis Infrastructure & Public Goods:
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Development of a GnosisSafe Web of Trust (WoT) native dapp & modular tooling for the GnosisChain ecosystem: The Circles WoT provides a network of trusted peers which can be used by different projects building on GnosisChain so that other dapps can build on top of it using their own token network or connecting it with other WoT networks (e.g. BrightID, Proof of Humanity, etc) and established more aligned strategic pathways for collaboration. R&D will take place in the following areas:
- Robust network reputation system for staking on GnosisChain via the future Gnosis WoT & R&D on scaling GnosisChain through the Circles WoT and projects like Dappnode.
- Trust relations between and within DAOs using GnosisSafes.
- Modular collaboration and integration between dapps in the GnosisChain ecosystem. Think Proof of Humanity, Trustlines, BrightID, Circles and many more!
- Embed real time economic trade data onto the blockchain to support the development of more transparent, sustainable and trusted supply chains via the UBI pilots research.
- Pathfinder algorithm R&D - useful for other projects with native tokens to do their own transactions using an integrated WoT dapp.
- Modular extensibility of the transfer through methods.
- More non-market driven transactions, such as recent Proof of Active Participation (POAP) efforts. * R&D into a future $WOT token for the Web of Trust dapp for GNO token holders, similar to the $SAFE token proposal.
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CirclesUBI Open Pilots: Leveraging Gnosis technology, the CirclesUBI Open Pilots provide a strategic framework to go from basic income pilots to basic income policy and basic income systems around the planet. The Circles Coop is currently expanding the Berlin Open Pilot and plan to spread CirclesUBI more formally into other regions as part of a Circles Movement, planning to expand the support for open pilots by the end of 2023, where the joincircles.net will become a neutral platform for all projects using Circles and other wallet instances, such as circles.pink (Expedition Grundeinkommen). The Circles Movement DAO will work as a governance mechanism to allocate funds accordingly for the implementation of these pilots to the communities that want to implement Circles locally in a transparent way. Our go-to-market strategy is working with the B2B sectors to increase productive capacity, develop infrastructure and go to key stakeholders, such as established communities already using CRC, local municipalities and regional governments interested in implementing basic income, in order to create more ecological and transparent value chains. UBI is one of the main pillars for the 21st century economy and a social ecologically just transition, especially given the current context of supply chain disruptions and rising inflation. We strongly believe GnosisChain and Gnosis technologies more generally provide a strategic backbone for this transition to take place.
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Circles Payment API: In order to have a scalable system and reach millions of people, we are focusing on creating an open source payment API so that Circles can be used in a plug and play basis, allowing people to co-pay with their UBI using existing payment infrastructures and habits, such as debit cards, marketplaces and other payment applications.
2, Fulfilling the Promise of Investment Opportunities to GNO holders
- Community Currency DEX: Based on Circles group currencies (currently being developed by third party teams), a social DEX will create incentives for GNO holders via investment opportunities in strategic future tokens emerging from the development and deployment of the platform, as well as ROI from overflow investments in SMEs and COOPs who sell their tokens to the communities that support them, liquidity-pool provider incentives and more. To achieve this, we are exploring collaboration with MakerDAO for integrations and researching deployment of e.g. the Juicebox protocol on the GnosisChain. We are open for suggestions and potential synergies to collaborate with existing DEX infrastructures (e.g. Honeyswap, 1hive, Uniswap, Cowswap) within GnosisChain to design a specific-purpose social DEX that is directed at the real economy.
- Indirect benefits for GNO holders: Due to further increasing uptake of GnosisSafes and transactions being incentivized by Circles communities, the revenue model of GnosisChain (e.g. transaction fees, staking rewards, etc.) will in turn benefit all GNO token holders and those participating in the maintenance and improvement of Gnosis Chain. We also expect benefits coming from Web of Trust R&D.
All funds not spent will be at Circles Coop e.G. discretion.
Unconditionally,
Julio Linares,
on behalf of the Circles UBI Coop & Bitspossessed Collective
