Juicebox is one of the true pioneers in the DAO space. There are many things it can teach other projects. This article provides some pointers to people planning to start a DAO as well as gives some insight into how a decentralized autonomous organization can be managed efficiently.
About Juicebox
The TL;DR is that independent musicians, game developers, or creators of other digital goods need a sustainable way to get paid so that they can focus on their work without having to worry about money.
Artists, developers, DAOs, and public goods, are all entities with immense potential to bring a real revolutionary change to the world if they are successful. The benefit they could bring to humanity is very real indeed. But in order to make their dreams a reality, they need money. And the best way to do this requires them to take advantage of those money-making opportunities that lie all around us - so that they can generate revenue while working on something they are passionate about at the same time!
The Juicebox protocol allows projects to commit in advance about how their funds will be managed, so that backers know how their money will be spent even before receiving any payments. This means there is no more need for a payment terminal because the community can directly fund its preferred project through Juicebox. It works well for doing things like paying bills and managing donations automatically, but what makes it really special is that the project can promote certain initiatives and make sure its loyal backers are rewarded systematically as they become successful!
Values and Focus Areas
The JuiceboxDAO Foundation is on the mission to help people in running programmable and community funded treasuries openly on Ethereum.
Juicebox Values
The Juicebox team is great! We were especially impressed by how they carefully and methodically expressed their values to the public. You can always rely on them for the truth, which is something we hold very dear in the company. Here is the list of their values
- We're builders. The decisions we make prioritize those building, and we trust those who we've delegated responsibilities to.
- We're focused. We encourage one another to focus on the commitments we've made to the DAO, and keep each other accountable to them.
- We're supportive. We're here to help, and we communicate in a way that empowers one another.
- We're listeners. We are humble with our knowledge, and seek balance between urgency and patience.
- We're honest. We are each unique selves, and we communicate our individual ideas openly and with clarity. We express ourselves and exchange feedback with this in mind.
- We’re stewards. We respect the opportunity to help set a tone for what it means to build on the open internet together.
Focus Areas
This section describes the primary focus areas for the DAO wherein the resources, efforts and time is devoted.
- Protocol - The protocol is one of the primary focus areas in the case of JuiceboxDAO and holds the utmost importance. This includes defining, optimizing, testing, monitoring, and documenting the Juicebox protocol.
- Community alignment - Another objective of Juicebox is to help members of the JB community access the resources and allow them to get recognition when they need to get started and work together in a harmonious and inclusive manner.
- Web3 ecosystem - The aim is to possibly broaden and add value to the opportunities already existing in the web3 space by working with and helping other public DAOs, tools, and services in doing the same.
- Onboarding - This step involves helping people launch their projects on JB and building extensions to the protocol by the medium of active Q&A availability, provision of valuable and precise documentation, and helping shape the information architecture of web clients.
- Governance - Governance involves planning out the decision making process in an inclusive manner as the DAO scales, and keeping it accountable to its agreed upon decision-making schedule.
- Legal - The legal perspective involves working towards the legal clarity necessary to make JB a welcoming DAO wherein each individual could contribute with confidence to any focus area and get compensated for their work.
- Data viz - This part focuses on giving the projects valuable insights into their community, and providing overview information about the Juicebox protocol.
- Frontend - Frontend involves the development of web clients for the protocol that make the user interface more empowering, reliable, and delightful with time.
Membership
The DAO members are responsible for presenting the proposals and voting on the crucial subjects relating to the DAO such as the following-
- Method and Avenue of allocating DAO's treasury funds.
- Changes, amendments and enhancements to the protocol the DAO has agreed to steward.
- Changes to formal processes the DAO has agreed to follow.
- Criteria for membership and boundaries for rage quitting.
DAO membership is required by the people and projects who raise funds on the Juicebox protocol. Membership is granted to the individuals who are currently stewarding its focus areas, contributing effectively for DAO's betterment and is open to people who choose to help fund its treasury.
Membership is represented via the JBX token issued using the Juicebox protocol itself. The members can rage quit by burning any portion of their tokens at any time and take with them a portion of the treasury's funds.
The Juicebox membership has been given to those who have contributed and assisted in building the protocol and the DAO, and to those who have supported the efforts by sending ETH to the treasury. The preference is given to those who have helped in earlier funding cycles in any capacity. Membership has always been open to everyone since the deployment of the protocol.
Governance
The juicebox governance has been streamlined into a 14-day cycle that includes steps for Temperature check, Snapshot vote, Multisig Execution, Reconfiguration Delay and funding cycle update.
Each of these steps is performed under a stipulated time frame in order to complete the 14 day governance cycle in a systematic manner. Each step has a preassigned date for the respective execution. Let us explore each step of this governance process.
Step 1- Temperature Check
Each governance cycle involves proposals being discussed on the Discord server that are open to suggestions made by each community member present in the channel.
As their name suggests, proposals in the funding cycle are now put through a “Temperature Check” where for 3 days only the proposal is posted asking for a response via Discord. The purpose of these proposals being to see how much support each has and whether there is anything in particular that the innovators want to change about their proposal before it goes through an official review.
The community members are free to upvote the proposal or reflect their disagreement on the Discord thread.
After a consensus to post the proposals on Snapshot is reached, the sponsors who are usually those with enough tokens to propose at Snapshot, would push the proposal for voting. The execution occurs once proposals are voted for.
The community votes and when 10% of all votes are cast in favor of affirmation equivalent to 30% or more of the total votes cast and the content is executable in nature, the proposal becomes eligible to move to the next step of the process.
Step 2 - Off Chain Voting
Begins on Day 4 of Funding Cycle
Under this step formal voting is conducted on Snapshot.org/#/jbdao.eth. Voting is usually open for at least 48 hours. Typically, voting opens on the 4th day of the governance cycle and closes on the 8th day. All Snapshot proposals are decided based on single-choice vote.
Another condition of the Snapshot proposals is that they must include the full proposal text and a link to an immutable (IPFS or Arweave) version of the proposal text.
Herein, the proposals receiving at least 66% approval and 15 or more total votes pass and are queued for execution.
Step 3- Execution
This phase begins on the 7th day of the governance cycle.
Execution refers to the process of voting by the JBX token holders, on the decision proposed in the proposal for voting. The multisig has complete authority over all the treasury decisions and certain on-chain parameters.
Step 4- Reconfiguration Delay
Begins on Day 12 of Funding Cycle
Reconfiguration here refers to the rearrangement of the funding cycle. The reconfigurations to JuiceboxDAO must be submitted 3 days before the beginning of a Funding Cycle by the Juicebox multisig.
During this phase, JBX holders get time to verify queued reconfigurations and proposals and burn their JBX tokens if they desire to.
The emergency governance process
It's pretty evident that the conventional systematic procedure cannot be followed incase of emergencies.
Therefore, the emergency governance processes enable the DAO to take immediate actions when extreme circumstances arise.
Incase of a crisis scenario, a 24 hour Discord poll must be created in a public thread. To succeed, this poll must receive a minimum of 15 affirmative votes comprising 80% of the total votes. For extremely sensitive decisions that need to be undertaken within 24 hours, 4 or the 5 multisig members must agree.
Details of all the recent funding cycles can be found here https://juicebox.notion.site/7d56bf901f344d109b19037b55d84b50?v=2fd2b06f737f4561af274191377f4ce5
Voting for all critical decisions
The decision making for all the critical and significant decisions pertaining to the protocol is made by the voting process on Snapshot. Juicebox portrays that the opinion and viewpoint of the community members for the betterment of the DAO holds utmost importance.
Treasury Decisions
For all the treasury decisions, Juicebox undertakes the voting procedure via Snapshot. Examples:
Incentivize Frontend Decentralization
The treasury decision of allocating 10% of new JBX reserved for dao.jbx.eth at each funding cycle, to Juicebox frontends, was undertaken via the Snapshot votes.
The proposal on Snapshot clearly specified that the encouragement of new front ends would not only expand the Juicebox ecosystem but it shall also mitigate major risks to contributors, the community, and protocol as a whole.
Distribute JBX to Extended Community
For another example we can consider the decision of distributing 10,000,000 JBX from dao.jbx.eth (ETH: 0xaf28bcb48c40dbc86f52d459a6562f658fc94b1e) evenly to the 66 wallets that have received JBX as part of the JBX Distribution Program established by JBP-54.
The primary motivation behind this proposal was the fact that further distribution of JBX mitigates risks to the Juicebox ecosystem. Redistribution would result in the extension of decentralization further augmenting the resilience of the ecosystem to the takeovers. Also, with JBX distribution the views of the Juicebox community can be reflected at large by the governance.
Along with the advantages the proposal also mentioned the risks associated with the implementation of this decision such as this proposal will dilute the voting power of JBX holders not on the list, it is likely that many of the wallets that will receive JBX as a result of this proposal will not distribute that JBX any further without an enforcement mechanism. This further facilitates fair decision making by the community members.
Product Decisions
Most of the product decisions are undertaken via the voting procedure on Snapshot. Here, the proposals regarding updations to the discount rate can be mentioned.
This proposal was presented to update the discount rate to 20%. If approved, this modification would have implied that 20% of all donated ETH will enter the vault, and less JBX tokens will be issued to the donors.
The risks associated with the proposal such as the discouragement of more donations to the DAO reserve due to the fact that inflow of payments in ETH won’t be rewarded with JBX, the risk of platform closing donations and new members purchasing JBX tokens only through the market or receiving tokens via airdrops was also mentioned in the proposal for ensuring fair and justified decisions.
Another product proposal was made for the reduction of the discount rate from 10% to 4% in order to reduce the membership discrepancy of contributors over time.
The background of this proposal was that the ETH contributions to JuiceboxDAO have been made mostly entirely by projects paying their required membership fees. At a 10% discount rate, projects receive 10% fewer JBX tokens per ETH contributed every funding cycle, and the same was the case with reserved token recipients.
Process Decisions
A significant example for the process decisions would be to rename JuiceboxDAO Foundation to Juicebox DAO Foundation.This perfectly exemplifies how Juicebox ensures that even the minutest of the changes are brought forward by Voting incase of JuiceboxDAO.
JuiceboxDAO Foundation - Amendment
This proposal mentioned adding a "Mechanism" focus area, a "Project Management" focus area to the Juicebox DAO Foundation.
The primary purpose of this proposal was to update the DAO foundation to reflect work that is already being done within the DAO.
The implementation of this proposal would result in more JBX being distributed per ETH contributed to the JuiceboxDAO treasury. The proposal also mentioned that, this scenario would imply the possibility of projects or contributors feeling less inclined to join if they know that despite the difference in time, the subsequent joiners in future cycles would be getting membership rates more commensurate to theirs.
Another example of the process based voting decision would be the change proposed in the governance process.
Governance Process - Amendment
The goal of this proposal was to alter the Governance Process in order to allow a more efficient process that rules out confusion and promotes transparency.
The consequences of the proposed amendments would include the provision of more time to submit proposals for upcoming Funding Cycles, encouragement of more community feedback on proposals, enhancement of the quality of proposals and simplification of the process resulting in less confusion to newcomers looking to become involved with the DAO.
The purpose of this proposal was to fix the inefficiency in the current process. Earlier, the proposals required a proposal period followed by two days of discussion. After discussion, Temperature Checks were administered for proposals. Finally, if the Temperature Checks received the correct number of votes, the proposals were sent to a two day vote on Snapshot.
Implementation of this proposal has resulted in the elimination of the discussion period after the proposal period. This has given the community members more time to submit proposals for a Funding Cycle. A new procedure for Urgent and Emergency Processes has been added. These processes require validation from contributors of the DAO.
How can members contribute and get paid
For the members who wish to contribute to the DAO and receive rewards in return in the form of payments, they can do so by contributing to the protocol and indulging in active participation.
You can see all the issues on Juicebox with their status and any issues that may be available for you to pick up and work on
The Prospective contributors willing to contribute and achieve payments in return can add their ideas in the database or send a message on the discord channel.
Once an individual has made some contributions, the next step would be to submit a proposal for a Payout trial Period in the Database. The purpose of these proposals typically involving payments of $300-600 for 1-3 cycles is to ascertain whether a contributor is fit for the DAO.
After successfully completing the Payout Trial Period, the new contributors can advance to the recurring payout modes. For this they need to fill out a recurring payment template in the database wherein the details about the contributions made so far along with the future plans to contribute to the community need to be mentioned.
List of all the Juicebox contributors can be found here
Conclusion
What seems to be an overnight success is actually a long and exhausting process that can't be hurried along, even if you're passionate about your idea. It takes time, passion, and more than a little luck to make it big in this business. Same is the case with Juicebox.
Juicebox is one of the true pioneers in the DAO space. There are many things it can teach other projects.
We hope this article provides some pointers to people planning to start a DAO as well as gives some insight into how a decentralized autonomous organization can be managed efficiently.
References
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-juicecast/id1599885493
https://www.notion.so/JuiceboxDAO-Foundation-7bd59d35f08443b18e83e710df49ee3b
https://juicebox.notion.site/Governance-Process-ebfb9b0d7e8b41c1aa0cd26f8aab48fe
https://juicebox.notion.site/5344b8a0e77a45e18acc99a2806e81cd?v=8a27d37611164d559c4bee894db74509
Proposals
https://snapshot.org/#/jbdao.eth
https://juicebox.notion.site/How-to-Get-Paid-d141875c6f244818b16ec612042466b3
