Berlin Blockchain Week hosted a lot of cool events: Web3Summit, DappCon, ETHBerlin, numerous meetups and #dHack. #dHack is decentralized hackathon where winners are selected by DAO voting. It's really cool idea, let's check the implementation.

#dHack onboarding

All Web3Summit, DAOfest, DappCon and ETHBerlin attendees received ether cards:

It was totally unclear why do we need this ether cards. I’ve seen a lot of people trashed them or just left them on public tables. On these cards you have ETH account public and private key and link to ether.cards. When you go to the link - there is NO info what to do with the cards. At this moment I just put the cards in the backpacked and forgotten about them for some time.
Idea #1. I would suggest to create a landing page with the detailed description of what can be done with the ether card and put a link to it on the card. Everyone who gets the card and visit the link on it can be easily onboarded to #dHack, POAP collectibles etc.

Let’s try to win #dHack

During ETHBerlin I had no time for anything except for buidling application. YAW team did a great job and it we won open track! YAAAAAAAAW!

A couple of days after ETHBerlin finished, I’ve seen post about #dHack and entered its telegram group. What I understood that I can submit proposal and if it’s successful our team gets additional bounty. That’s awesome! I went to Alchemy ETHBerlin and submitted a proposal. It was easy:

Okay, now I need to vote for it. In order to vote in #dHack DAO you need to get reputation (REP token) and you can claim it on Alchemy using ether cards (finally, I found where to use them!). I claimed the reputation … and I can’t vote with it! Why? Because you need to claim reputation before submitting proposal and you can only vote for submissions that were published only after you claimed reputation. It makes no sense and I can’t vote for my proposal with my REP =(

Idea #2. Obviously, the time when you claimed you rep shouldn’t affect your voting power and if affect write this in guide

Activity

After I made a proposal I couldn’t vote for it, however other users could. My proposal was published for 3-4 days and I had no votes. Hmm, I checked who has the REP to vote:

What does it mean - most of the people who potentially could vote haven’t used the cards at all. Let’s do some math. Currently, 100 REP (1 card) is 0.63% of all REP => about 160 cards (1 person could have up to 4 cards). I am almost sure that there was less than 100 participants and if you understand mechanics you can easily pass your proposal (ask for the ether cards that you friends don’t need). Moreover, big part of them just went to Alchemy once, placed all votes and will come back only to get the payout. After this I was not expecting to get any bounty, I wanted to understand the mechanics.
I think the problem is that DAO users don’t really care about DAO funds - they don’t upvote and downvote any other projects; if only organizers, sponsors and Alchemy users were able to vote, I guess the quality of passed proposals would be much better.

To boost or not to boost

#dHack inherits all the mechanics from the Alchemy. There is boost mechanics for the proposals which reduces the vote time. It’s done via prediction market and you need to predict that proposal will pass to boost it. By default, your proposal has 200 GEN bet that it will fail. Ok, I went to Uniswap and bought 300 GEN, predicted that proposal will pass and it was not boosted, however, I had green indicator that more votes are for passing.

After, 3 days I checked the chat and VIOLA for each proposal boosted, the staking difficulty increases by 1.15x. IT WAS NOT EXPLAINED ANYWHERE! I went to Uniswap, got 400 more GEN and boosted. I still couldn’t vote after boost(
Idea #3. You need to educate your users how to use the platform, show tips, explain the functionality etc. If #dHack was web app I’m not sure whether I would use it again.

Idea #4. I would like to see a separate boost button, it would let me save some GEN because I predicted and haven't boosted.

Greed is good

#dHack DAO has limited payout pool - 60 ETH. When you submit a proposal you decide what amount you want to receive. As for me, #dHack is kind of additional bounty that should be distributed for 2 types of projects - that need funds to develop and as small extra bounty for hackathon participants. I didn’t like to see the projects requesting 20-50 ether that all pool will be distributed for 2-3 teams. It’s okay for projects that want to continue development and need some funds, but not all of proposals are them.

Moreover, you need a lot of time to understand how to play #dHack and all the funds can be drained by that time.
Idea #5. I would actually limit the bounty to 5-6 Ether so 10-12 team could get some additional bounty and everyone will be happy.

Final thoughts

I’m the person who is in crypto for a long time, I know what DAOs are, I even played with DAOStack and won their sponsors bounty at ETHBerlin last year, BUT it’s very difficult to play #dHack even for me. I described only the main problems I faced and there were some more.

I’m sure that we are still not mature community to have DAOs.

Educate you users, technology is good but you won't have any users without good UX.

I like the concept, I hope I’ll enjoy the next #dHack.

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