CityDAO Newspaper - March 31st, 2023

Hello again, citizens. The first quarter of the year is already ending. Those of you who haven’t been fulfilling your new year resolutions, don’t give up! The year is still young, it’s not too late to get back on it.

In this second newspaper of the year, we’d like to focus on the governance aspect of our DAO. But before that, a couple of project updates.

CIP-129 NFT Marketplace Update

From now on, the CIP-129 team will be providing monthly updates in the project’s channel. Here is the summary of the March’s update:

The team has completed the market research within the DAO ecosystem, and has been focusing on building the foundations for communities that are looking to launch their NFT collection on the platform. A working MVP for the project is currently half-way through completion. An initial prototype for pre-launch testing purposes was also launched. This prototype was what the team used to participate in ETHDenver hackathon and won.

The current top 4 priorities before the next update are:

• Receiving the funding for milestone 1, 2, 3 as per CIP-129 to continue the development.
• Completing and launching the MVP.
• Discussing with the market for feedback on the MVP after it goes live.
• Discussing with the signers regarding milestone 4.

Blancanvas Update

Previously, the plan was for Blancanvas to become a Harberger tax-inspired land NFT art space. However, the project is moving away from that direction and is now going to focus on IRL community building instead, which is certainly more fitting for CityDAO.

The current idea is to install shelters, water tanks, renewable energy generators, and internet equipment, then create a fitting environment for potential inhabitants. If you would like to discuss more on this project, you can do so in the Baby Parcel channel.

CityDAO Governance Update

Governance has always been the most important aspect of DAOs, and at times, the most problematic one. That is no different here at CityDAO. Whether our project will fail or succeed, it first and foremost comes down to the governance, which is unsurprisingly no different than irl states. We’ve certainly come far given that CityDAO was started from complete scratch, but our governance is far without flaws. There’re many areas that we have to fix and improve, which is what the core people of CityDAO have been trying to do.

The many flaws that exist within our current governance system are easy to identify, but difficult to fix. More specifically, coming up with solutions for them is often simple, but implementing such solutions is difficult. For example, one of the issues is that the Snapshot quorum is inconsistent, making it tough for projects to get passed. The solution to this would be to implement a rising quorum scale. What makes this difficult is that we need a scale that allows good CIPs to reach the quorum without a big hassle, but we also don’t want it to be easy enough for any CIPs to reach the quorum easily. Not to mention the fact that we have to get a proposal to change the quorum pass Snapshot with the current quorum. You can take a look at all of the problems and potential solutions in this document. Citizens may freely comment on it.

Improving the governance system is going to be a very lengthy process, and a lot of our contributors’ time will be sunk into it. If things seem to be going slow at CityDAO, chances are we’re spending time with governance improvements. Citizens are free to participate in the discussions about our governance systems. You can do so in the governance channel.

The next meeting on the governance discussion will be held shortly after this newspaper is published. The discussion on a new CIP to fix many of our governance issues will also take place during the meeting. We will update you with the outcome of the meeting in the next newspaper.

Community Photo

A cool screenshot of our citizen rumraisin hanging out at a party in Decentraland in a fancy CityDAO tee. Despite the world returning to normal after the pandemic and people travelling IRL again, the metaverse trend is not dying down. We might even host a CityDAO virtual hangout event if citizens are up for it.

Our citizen Simplepixellife made a visit to the city of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, and took a photo of at nice little place by the river Tigris. The Tigris–Euphrates river system is one of mankind’s most important rivers, and it is full of human history dating back as far as civilizations goes. Really makes you think how many communities have been here before you when you stand besides it.

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How to get involved in the newspaper: leave a message for us in the CityDAO Discord’s community channel.