Walter

Dalifornia is becoming a utopia for Web3 hippies, attracting a group of post-95s and post-00s DAOers and Web3 practitioners. Before this, there has always been a group of digital nomads living here, who do not need to work offline and complete their work through digital networks. This group is mainly composed of programmers/coders, including Web3 practitioners. In addition, the impact of the Shanghai epidemic control measures has led to a mentality among Web3 practitioners that they do not need to stay in Shanghai unless necessary. Many young Web3 practitioners, with a cynical attitude and a longing for freedom, have gathered here. They think that even if they are under control, they hope to be locked in a place with beautiful scenery and poetry, rather than in the steel forest of Shanghai. At the same time, the Web3 industry is under significant policy control pressure, and many entrepreneurs are planning to start businesses abroad. This place has become the last stop for Web3 practitioners in China before going abroad.

The Wacat Summer Web3 event is an important milestone in the rise of Chinese DAO organizations. The event was proposed by 706 Space and jointly organized by multiple DAOs. A month ago, the event was just an idea, and no one knew if it could be realized. The organizers were worried that they wouldn't be able to sell a single ticket. During the preparation period, nearly 600 members from various DAO organizations participated in the co-construction process of the event. They sought resource support, shared event ideas, and facilitated the participation of projects and investors through the community, leading to the realization of this conference. Interestingly, due to policy pressure, the conference was eventually canceled, but the small gatherings/events and the itineraries of the participants were not affected. This may be a unique consensus culture of Web3. Once the community reaches a consensus on something, it is difficult to change, even if the conference is canceled or there is a possibility of being under control here. This consensus has also led to this large-scale gathering of netizens.

After arriving in Dalifornia, I visited the headquarters of several DAO organizations and communicated with DAOers. The most obvious feeling is that a large number of DAO co-builders have gathered here for some pure, and possibly impractical, ideas. They enjoy a community-based way of life, where they eat, live, play, and work together. The most classic scene comes from SeeShore, where a group of people lie on lazy sofas, eating fried chicken, drinking beer, playing casual games like Mario, and discussing how to build DAOs and create the necessary production tools and products for DAO organizations. There is a free and relaxed atmosphere here, with an ideal of governing by doing nothing, but also mixed with some hippie madness and chaos.

In the following days, I gradually entered the schedule of attending small gatherings/events. The activities mainly revolved around application layer products and protocol layer standards related to DAO organizations, tools, DID, data services, and NFTs. In addition, there were also discussions on the Move language and emerging public chains. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. DAO organizations and tools.

• The registration and establishment of DAOs should be permissionless. DAO charters should be codified and automated, and the rules and charters should be gradually improved and enriched.
• In the process of improving and enriching the rules and charters, it is difficult to satisfy all DAO members' suggestions, and it is inevitable that some members will exit. DAO organizations need to constantly expand and attract new members who are in line with the long-term interests of the DAO. DAO members need to maintain an open mindset and provide convenient tools and public products for entering DAO organizations. The NFTs of DAO organizations should be a label of identity rather than a governance tool.
• DAO organizations need internal applications similar to SBT/point-based systems to assist in management and help define members' participation and contribution levels. The governance voting of creative DAOs should be based on contribution/participation levels, rather than the amount of NFTs/tokens held.
• DAO organizations may have higher work efficiency than traditional companies: 1) Compensation is based on workload and contribution, making slacking off difficult and Free Riders likely to be quickly eliminated; 2) Bottom-up approach, DAO product developers are basically DAO product users, and work is generated from primary needs (such as projects incubated by SeeDAO); 3) Participation is mostly in members' spare time, similar to open-source culture, DAOers do not start from traditional work relationships. Of course, the formation of consensus is often difficult and slow, and collaboration and management are also weaknesses that affect the development of DAO organizations.
• DAO organizations need collaborative tools to provide organizational collaboration management and work efficiency. The main products include forums, SBT/point management and issuance tools, empowering DAO entry points (gamification and educational public products), scheduling and collaborative management tools, etc.

2. DID

• The EVM does not have an address-based database structure, only smart contract data structures. Users' assets are stored in the ledger of smart contracts, not under their addresses. Without actively adding smart contracts for assets, users cannot read their asset balances. DApps cannot directly discover users' smart contract assets through addresses and need to obtain data from the corresponding smart contracts to discover the smart contract assets held by users.
• DID projects are essentially helping users establish an address-based database. Due to the incompatibility of the EVM with this structure and the difficulty of adding this structure to the underlying EVM (it would increase the complexity of the underlying protocol, which is not worth it), most solutions are off-chain solutions, some centralized and some decentralized. DID projects can be divided into those working on unified database standards (NextID), those working on readable domain names and cross-chain address aggregation (ENS, DAS), and those working on decentralized address and identity management protocols and applications (Unipass).

3. Data services

• With the rise of application layer products, there is an increasing demand for data cleaning, data retrieval, and customized data services based on public chains. Data services mainly provide data APIs to B-side clients, helping them capture on-chain information, understand user behavior, and ultimately provide better products and services.
• The EVM architecture is contract-oriented, and asset information is stored in contracts. The retrieval, cleaning, and analysis of contracts involve different aspects such as nodes, algorithms, databases, and APIs, which are professional and cumbersome. It is difficult for application layer products to build their own data services and requires professional data service providers.

4. NFTs

• There is a growing number of projects focused on game and entertainment-related NFTs, but the failure rate of this category of products is too high to judge.

5. Move language and emerging public chains

• The Move language was designed with a focus on code as an asset and has convenient and composable collaborative design. This language is conducive to writing more complex automatically executable code and smart contracts.
• New public chains based on the Move language have built address-based database structures that EVM lacks. The calling and retrieval methods of DApps in these new public chains are different from those in the EVM.
• New public chains based on the Move language may face challenges in code and architecture security and require time for verification.

In summary, this event mainly focused on topics related to the application layer and emerging ecosystems. The main participants are those who entered the market in the past year with the popularity of the Web3 concept, which may indicate a phase of stability in the blockchain industry's infrastructure (still lacking, but there are usable solutions) and the gradual entry into a new stage of large-scale application layer innovation.

Finally, let's record the gossip that most people are concerned about: the conference was largely canceled, Arthur entered the venue, and participants had to write self-criticisms. During the event, several venues attracted Arthur's attention and were dispersed and closed under the pretext of crowd gathering. People had to register their ID cards and phone numbers one by one when leaving (the scene of writing self-criticisms at the entrance). We were indeed playing a game of cat and mouse, changing venues multiple times. Actually, if it is indeed due to the pressure of epidemic control, everything can be understood, but we cannot judge Arthur's true intentions and management intensity. To avoid unnecessary trouble, we can only take the best course of action. It is also because of this that new forms of conferences, such as gatherings in the wild, roadshows in wetland pavilions, and roadside begging-style forums, have emerged, leaving unforgettable memories.

I finished writing this travelogue on the plane back, and when I looked up, I found that the plane was playing a video of a conference held on a ship in Jiaxing in a certain year. Here are three pictures to match the scene. Is the in-flight entertainment system so advanced now, using user profiling analysis and algorithmic recommendations for movie selection?