DAObi White Paper
Questions, comments, restraining orders etc. to be addressed to @DaobiTreasury or @XianyangCB on Twitter.
Goals
DAObi is a blockchain-based simulation of an ancient Chinese state. Players compete for political and economic power, and the player who builds the biggest faction becomes Chancellor, winning the right to set the token minting rate for as long as their support lasts. Whoever wishes to take power must use analogue means - charisma, bribery and intimidation – to persuade other players to back their faction.
The primary aim of the DAObi project is not simply to create a store of value – though any tokens eventually issued must accumulate sufficient value to incentivise serious participation – rather it is to function as a game and a social experiment. The project was inspired by descriptions of factional struggles over the right to set monetary policy during the early part of the Han dynasty (“daobi” being the name of the currency in use at the time). We intend to recreate these conditions as closely as possible in an online environment. In other words, the DAObi ecosystem will become a palace intrigue game in the style of Royal Chaos or Call Me Emperor, but with genuine money and power at stake.
In the past, experiments such as this were impossible for all but state governments. The development of blockchain-based currencies means that anyone can now create and run a semi-autonomous political-economic system from their PC. While the primary use of this facility has thus far been in financial speculation, the same technology also provides a means to test socio-economic models in vivo. The data can then be used to verify existing models and create new ones. This is the major goal of the DAObi project.
Method
In the DAObi ecosystem, minting stands in for the levers of conventional monetary policy. Whichever participant has the most declared partisans is granted the right to set the token generation rate. To acquire partisans, a participant must use analogue techniques to convince them to declare themselves in his favour: persuasion, corruption, deception etc.
Anyone owning any amount of $DB can declare their allegiance to a faction at daobi.org and the player with the most followers is automatically appointed Chancellor. He receives a salary of $DB 1000 per day, super-admin powers on the Discord server, and the right to mint new tokens into a public liquidity pool, thus controlling inflation. The Chancellor can use his ability to manipulate the currency to enrich himself, but has to use his gains to reward his followers. If he is not generous enough they will leave and back a rival. Similarly, as in the Han dynasty, anyone who spends too long away from the imperial court is liable to be the victim of backstabbing by his fellow courtiers. Players can team up to stake $DB for the right to accuse rivals of “excessive idleness” and request that they be bannished - to refute the action the targeted player has merely to take any on-chain action within the three days following the accusation, thereby providing “proof of presence”. If this happens, the stakers lose their $DB to the accused player. If no proof of presence is provided, their $DB are returned and they also receive an NFT proving that they sucessfully eliminated an inactive player, bot or sockpuppet (as these are the accounts most likely to be targeted). This NFT may then be sold to a leader of a rival faction in exchange for a monetary reward, in gratitude for their efforts and risks taken to reduce the numbers of his opponents - effectively creating decentralised feudal police forces.
The system is this composed of four principal components (if you aren’t interested in the tech, you can skip this part:
The DAObi cryptocurrency itself ($DB): a generic online token designed to be as simple as possible to acquire and exchange in order to encourage participation. The token contract is currently live on the Polygon network (0x5988Bf243ADf1b42a2Ec2e9452D144A90b1FD9A9), with the tokens being tradable on Uniswap.
The faction table: player affiliations are declared and stored on-chain (contract address: 0xe8A858B29311652F7e2170118FbEaD34d097e88A). Owners of DAObi are not under any obligation to participate in this component, but registration will be necessary for all those who wish to have a chance to win the right to set the token generation rate themselves or decide who will. In order to register, they must have a wallet containing a non-zero quantity of DAObi linked to a valid Discord account. Once these conditions have been fulfilled they receive an NFT that gives them the right to become a partisan of another user or accumulate partisans of their own (or both) via the daobi.org front end. When a participant follows or abandons another participant, this information is recorded on the public ledger, which then plays the role of the emperor, making whichever participant has most partisans his “chancellor” and granting him the right to set monetary policy and also super-admin powers within the game Discord server (the ability to censor and eject members, change names, edit channels etc.). Faction counting is done on a rolling basis: once a player is a member of a faction, they remain in that faction until they choose to leave.
Similarly, if players notice that another player is inactive, they may band together to “banish” him and remove his vote. In return, they receive an NFT (contact: 0x397D5bA2F608A6FE51aD11DA0eA9c0eE09890D4e) as proof of their efforts, which they can then exchange for financial rewards from the leaders of opposing factions.
The Chancellor's seal: the holder of this NFT (contract: 0xE024B49eF502392E0eE64EC0323FF6aE7b463623) has the right to both claim a $DB 1000 daily salary, as well as to set the Daobi token minting rate.
Design
The project design was based on a series of agent-based models (previously published here) that simulated a similar set of socio-economic structures inspired by Warring States and Han Dynasty texts. The goal of Daobi was to run these models on chain using huamn participants in place of the computer agents. In the initial stages of the project, the voting and token-generation systems were simulated via a Discord server linked to an Airtable record of votes, Chancellors and tokens generated. (Note that for ease of use in a Discord context, votes are held on a daily rather than a rolling basis.) A token contract was then developed and deployed to the Rinkeby Ethereum testnet (0xD79dA24D607FF594233F02126771dD35938F922b), and a Uniswap DAObi-pool was created to enable holders to buy, trade and stake tokens. This enabled us to create working models of the automations and the blockchain components of the project without going straight to production, as well as to anticipate the economic phenomena we would likely encounter.
Finally, once the concept had been thoroughly tested, a production version was rolled out on the Polygon network. Network activity can be tracked on the block explorer using the contract addresses:
Token contract: 0x5988Bf243ADf1b42a2Ec2e9452D144A90b1FD9A9\
Faction contract: 0xe8A858B29311652F7e2170118FbEaD34d097e88A\
Chancellor's seal contract: 0xE024B49eF502392E0eE64EC0323FF6aE7b463623
The current contract uses a UUPS upgrade protocol, since the team would like to replace the current RPC provider (Infura) with an independent Polygon node at some point.
Users give proof-of-human using Discord:
They then sign in using Metamask, with the second requirement for signing in being that their wallet must contain at least some DAObi. This being done, they will receive a voting token that will allow them to interact with the site. (Only one voting token can be held by any given wallet.)
They can select the person they wish to follow and choose a user name.
Once in the system, they can choose to join another faction or interrogate the block explorer via the site, checking up on competing factions:
They can also choose to leave the system, whether temporarily by leaving their current faction or more definitively by burning their voting token. (If they wish to rejoin, they will have to reconnect their wallet and mint a new voting token.)
If a player succeeds in building the biggest faction, they gain the Chancellor's seal NFT.
This grants them the right to claim their $DB 1000 daily salary, as well as to mint new coins and full admin permissions in the Discord server (permission to delete the server itself excepted).
If a player has been inactive for a certain time, others can band together and stake some $DB to have him “banished for excessive idleness”.
If he provides on-chain proof of life within three days he takes their stake, if not they gain an NFT that can be exchanged for cash with one of the competing faction leaders.
Vigilantes are given free rein, but know they will suffer financially if they go too far; by offering rewards for banishing members of other factions, faction leaders become heads of their own freelance feudal police forces, responsible for local enforcement of systemic rules.
Results
$DB is now a fully exchangeable online currency, having been used to make real-world purchases as well as for speculation.
Interestingly, the Daobi system seems to have displayed faster centralisation than the agent-based models upon which it was based (“RulesOfChinese” has been Chancellor for over 80% of the game’s history). We hypothesise that this is because human agents are able to anticipate each other’s future moves, and thus will not make an attempt to take power unless the are very confident it will succeed.
We made no real effort to enforce Han Dynasty roleplay (unlike similar historical games active on Discord), but a distinct culture has emerged:
- Definition of factions by school of thought (Mohist, Confucian, legalist);
- Silent “mountain bandit” factions (players who do not vote, but use their potential strength to influence political decision-making);
- Decision-making via YijingBot divination;
- Ecosystem projects: a Secret Zhao Gao game on Steam, 3D Printable Seal NFTs, Joss App...
We feel that this is at least partly a product of the fact that Chinese history and philosophy provide the best tools for thinking about the political phenomena produced by these incentive structures and institutions, and so have been adopted unforced by the players, leading to a growing interest in more peripheral aspects of the culture.
In sum, DAObi provides a low-stakes (but not no-stakes) environment for experiments in governance:
The Chancellor system demonstrates that it is possible to create a strong centralised authority while keeping power decentralised;
The Banishments system shows that it is possible to decentralise policing without this leading to anarchy.
In the future, we are hoping to achieve two further goals:
Move to a fully staking-based system, with players staking $DB to enter the game, receiving it back if they leave voluntarily and losing it if they are banished.
Create an Anglo-European equivalent of the game, based more on combat mechanics and protection racket management.