There seems to be some disagreement on definitions and xDai is apparently more of a separate chain altogether with eth compatible addresses. You can apparently “bridge” tokens from ethereum main net to such sidechains/bridged chains in some mysterious way.
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There’s a whole mess of tokens here that I don’t understand.
DAI is the original ethereum token of the Maker DAO, a stablecoin.
xDai afaict is a 1:1 bridgeable thing that trades on its own cheap chain.
You buy Dai with ether and then bridge it over to xDai or something.
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Anyhoo, I’ll figure it out at some point, but for limited kyc need, the colony people sent me 0.01 xDai simply by asking, about 1c worth, and that was enough to complete various signings and representations needed to get set up. So punting on learning all this bridge stuff.
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This is a bit of a side quest I won’t get into since L2s, sidechains, bridges, and stablecoin s are general infrastructure used for more than DAOs. Goal is to learn just enough to play with DAOs cheaply. Sub-penny play sounds good. But here’s a diagram to help confuse you.
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Ok, pausing here for now. Request: If you are part of a DAO, post a reply to this with a link and short description of what it’s about so both people reading this thread and I have some working examples to look at and think about.
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Continuing DAO adventures. Managed to buy some DAI and bridge it over to xDai on the Gnosis/xDai through something called a "bridge."
This was *extremely* janky. The bridge had trouble recognizing the DAI in my account properly, but eventually I managed to get it across.
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xDai is the native currency of the ethereum compatible xDai/Gnosis chain (the name is because the two merged recently). Many complex dApps live on such compatible chains because they offer much lower fees (pennies instead of 10s of dollars).
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Dai is a stablecoin of the MakerDAO on Ethereum, which is used to create the derivative xDai coin on the Gnosis chain. This is done through a bridge contract that locks up Dai and releases xDai and vice versa. The screenshots are from the bridge application.
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I bought $100 worth of DAI on Coinbase and sent it over to my Metamask. Since it's an ERC-20 token it can live on Ethereum so you just send DAI to your ethereum address. That cost 7DAI so now I had ~93 DAI (=$93, since it is stable at 1:1) in my metamask. So far so good...
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The bridging process made me first "approve" a spending limit (50 DAI to xDai) and then pay separately to actually send the Dai to th the bridge contract thereby releasing the xDai on the Gnosis side. This may have been a mistake on my part.
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The instructions didn't say anything about a 2-step approve/transfer process, each with its own fees. So I paid about $14 and $9 in 2 transactions to do the bridge transaction. If you're keeping track, I've so far spent about $32... and I have $50 worth of xDai now on Gnosis.
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The Gnosis chain uses the same address space as the Ethereum main chain, just on a different blockchain. So your tokens simply live at the same address in a different city sort of. See in the screenshots below the network name is different but the address (0x25...) is the same.
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But now, having spent $32 to move $50, I am hopefully in the Land of Cheap Transactions and the 50 xDai will hopefully last me a long time.
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The reason for me exploring Gnosis/xDai in particular is because operates on xDai, and they recently did their token sale, in which I got a bunch of their CLNY token for having done some consulting for them in 2017-18.
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I got my wallet to recognize the xDai/Gnosis chain easily enough. You go to this page and follow the instructions to add the chain to your Metamask if it's not already there.
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But you need xDai to do anything on Gnosis, including in my case claiming my CLNY and my profile on the "metacolony" that governs the Colony DAO software project. Fortunately the good folks at Colony sent me a few pennies worth of xDai, enough to cover my bootstrap needs.
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Well, I signed up for Colony, got my CLNY, and made noble plans to set up a DAO there soon, but of course, first I wanted to do the base, degen thing and see what my CLNY was worth. Also my first plan to acquire some more xDai was to sell a bit of my newfound CLNY riches. BUT....
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Turns out I didn't actually have enough xDai left after my bootstrapping to even pay for the trade... the Colony people had sent me 0.01 xDai (1c), and I'd spent about 0.0065 already, and I had 0.0035 xDai (~0.3c) left. Not enough xDai to sell CLNY to get more xDai 🤣
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Anyhow that was a good excuse to learn all this fancy "bridge" technology. So now given that the average tx on xDai seems to be about 0.2c, and I have $50 worth, I am good for about 25,000 tx if I don't spend xDai on anything else.
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For comparison, $50 will maybe get me 1-5 basic tx on Ethereum.
There's other ways to get small amounts of xDai btw, like the faucet
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Anyhow, now I'm all set up to try some adventures on Colony and other attractions in Gnosis land (recommendations welcome).
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But an interesting realization here: microtransactions are real now! For a couple of decades now people have been fantasizing about being able to cheaply move pennies around, now you can! I'm gonna try and do a bunch of penny-scale transactions next just because I can.
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Another really fun thing going on here is having the same address on multiple networks which feels very sci-fi. Like China Mieville's City and the City which I started reading but didn't finish (it is about 2 cities that somehow occupy the same space)
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Well, my actual DAO adventures have actually begun, with the Yak Collective pilot on Colony. We're also evaluating Aragon, DaoStack and Daohaus, as well as just winging it with our own home-rolled solution.
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Colony is basically a intra-DAO payments clearing house and voting-on-motions engine. Very different from the early beta I experimented with in 2017 which was a sort of distributed kanban board. That kind of project management functionality is now external to Colony.
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The recommended tool for kanban type functionality to actually manage and coordinate DAO projects is app.clarity.so which I'm *really* liking so far. Kanban + a kind of roadmapping tool based on seasons, and Web3 native wallet signin and token-based gating and payments.
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So I guess the idea is, you define and track projects and tasks in Clarity, with payment promises attached, but the actual payments are done on the DAO app on Colony. You then reconcile by checking a box on Clarity. This should obviously be an integration...
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Right now, our basic problem is that the YAKG token we minted to run our DAO lives on Gnosis chain but Clarity only allows Ethereum mainnet tokens to be added to the payments methods. The solution I suppose is to unlock YAKG and bridge it over to mainnet so it exists there too.
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Our initial experiments are stalled by the fact that under Colony's scheme you need "reputation" to stake to back motions for voting, but you need completed work to get reputation, so chicken-egg. Right now, none of us seems to have earned enough reputation to back motions.
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Root admins can force some actions, but right now, the DAO is running in authoritah mode. But things are slowly moving along. I *think* we're all gaining reputation, but the UI annotations are not very clear, so I don't know.
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Okay, Clarity is awesome. You can add a token gate so people who have your token or NFTs can join. And there's wikis, notes etc. I'm totally using this now for my own projects. I'll mint a token on Mirror and use it to gate access to a Clarity base where we will make evil plans.
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Hmm. I can't figure out how to add my Mirror NFT as a gate token for a Clarity base. I can't actually figure out where the contract address is. Hey how do I use my entry token to gatekeep a Clarity base?
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Okay, I suspect this can't be done. Mirror editions aren't proper NFTs I think, they all seem to live in one giant contract. The OpenSea link to the contract for a collected edition points to this thing
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Okay, founder of Clarity says it can be done this way. Search for your Mirror Edition on OpenSea, and then put in the general contract id with the token id of your edition.
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Replying to @vgr and @viamirror
yep, it can still work in Clarity, but you'll need to specify the specific Token IDs within the overall contract.
we support both "all Token IDs within this contract" and "only [these] Token IDs within this contract".
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I'm trying it out. If you've bought one of my NFTs, reply if you want access to my experimental ribbonfarm Clarity base.
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If you've bought one of my NFTs (these), and would like to help me try an experiment on token-based access to stuff, reply to this.
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I'll have to reach out to a couple of people I know bought it, since it's mostly a list of addresses I don't know.
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Okay back to DAOing... finally figured out the staking/motion workflow in Colony. You activate some of the colony's native tokens you hold (YAKG in this case), then trigger an action, and stake some of the activated tokens.
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This is D'oh intuitive once you get it. The idea is that every action costs a certain stake, and the people backing that motion must collectively stake it with activated tokens. Then during the waiting period if there's an objection, there's a vote.
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And if the motion fails, you lose your stake. Presumably it burns or goes to the winning objectors or something. This thing now has 2 days to get through.
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A good example of DAO governance in action. A kind of "peaceful cancelation" via withdrawal of ENS delegation? No need to argue when you disagree. Just withdraw delegated authority. And if you hold enough direct authority, you're uncancellable? twitter.com/ericturnr/stat
This Tweet is unavailable.
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