Democratizing DAOs: An Influence Governance Platform Case Study

About Influence:

A robust governance system for decentralised decision making optimised for NFT governance in MetaDAO / SubDAO structures and social coordination. With Metaverse identity gating, quadratic voting and integrated proposal building.

Neti had the opportunity to collaborate with Finance.Vote (now FactoryDAO) and helped develop Influence, a platform that empowers DAOs with transparency and democratization. FactoryDAO created Influence to overcome the technical limitations of anonymous voting and provide a cost-effective platform for DAOs to make decisions in a fair and transparent manner. Thus, helping to build trust with their members and stakeholders and drive the development of a more equitable and just business landscape. Influence has been used by the organizers of conferences and hackathons, including ETH Brno, ETH Berlin, and Ethereum Zurich, for decision-making and voting on winners.

Influence is a platform that was created with the purpose of making decision-making within DAOs even more democratic and transparent. The platform is designed to allow DAO members to propose, discuss, and vote on proposals in a decentralized and transparent manner. This way, all members can have a say in the decision-making process and can hold each other accountable for their decisions.

By using Influence, DAOs can ensure that their decision-making processes are fair, transparent, and democratic. This, in turn, can help them build trust with their members and stakeholders, as well as increase their overall effectiveness and efficiency. Ultimately, the use of DAOs and platforms like Influence can help drive the development of a more equitable and just business landscape

Business Needs & Market Situation:

In today's business landscape, decentralization, democratization, and transparency have become crucial values for companies. Companies that prioritize these values have a better chance of earning the trust of their customers, partners, and employees. One way to achieve full transparency is through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Within DAOs, one of the fundamental principles is making decisions in a democratic and transparent manner. This is precisely the purpose for which Influence was created.

One effective way to achieve full transparency is through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). DAOs are self-governed organizations that operate using blockchain technology. Within DAOs, decision-making is done in a democratic and transparent manner, with members having equal voting power. This allows for a more equitable distribution of power, as decisions are made collectively and not by a select few.

Goals

• The challenge at hand was to create a voting platform that guarantees transparency while overcoming the technical limitations of anonymous voting. Our client desired a system that could work seamlessly with various blockchains and tokens, while being easy to use and cost-effective.To achieve this goal, our team leveraged the power of blockchain technology, which enabled us to maintain anonymity while ensuring transparency. Our approach allowed us to help build a platform that could accommodate multiple token standards and blockchain types, making it easy to port between platforms.
• Another goal was to prevent the possibility of any individual dominating the voting process, our client proposed implementing various strategies that we incorporated into our design. We recognized that in blockchain-based systems, the power of votes can be increased with a larger number of tokens, and we ensured that the platform could handle this without jeopardizing security or transparency.
• On the other hand having a cost effective platform that minimizes expenses was one of the major goals to be achieved. Neti development team built a system that reduced gas costs and eliminated voting expenses to the greatest extent possible. The result was a cost-free platform that was accessible to everyone and could be scaled as needed.

Technology

node.js, react, ether.js, solidity, Ethereum, MainNet, MongoDB, Kubernetes, 

Results

• The result of our work in a nutshell is an application that can be used as a single product and integrated with third-party projects such as StonerCats (voting on decisions of the main actors of the cartoon promoted by Vitalik Buterin, Ashton Kutcher, and Mila Kunis) or TotemFI (initially created/deployed on OpenSea).
• We came up with a chain-agnostic system that can operate on all  EVM-compatible chains which supports the multichain infrastructure that our client initially imagined.
• Our development team has prepared a set of varying application operating patterns known as strategies to support different token standards. Thanks to this, the application can support the most commonly used token standards like ERC20, ERC 721, and  ERC1155. 
• When a vote takes place within Influence, it won't cost the user a thing because the platform doesn't need to store the data on the blockchain. Instead, it is stored on IPFS, where data under a hash is persistent, which proves to be immutable. To verify an identity, the platform uses virtual wallets like Metamask. The voting process is safe because crypto wallets and digital signatures are being used in the process, which are unforgeable, to ensure the authenticity of the votes.

All in all,  the final product is capable of working on multichain structures that support multitoken standards and can offer seamless integrations to 3rd party applications. We managed to build the first version of the application in just a few months. It is built with a “Mobile first” approach in mind and fully functional from all other devices.