API3 Portal — A sub DAO “for the community, by the community”
Portal is a promising idea, which could potentially grow to become a showcase on community engagement
API3 team, making the good even better
One of the things that impresses me about the API3 team is that they take what is working well and figure out how to make it better. The team built the successful Honeycomb marketplace using Chainlink and then decided to start afresh with API3, to design a better solution to the oracle problem.
In the same vein, I believe the project is geared towards improving how DAOs operate. For those who may not have caught it, API3 is already in the top 10 DAOs. While many projects open up their DAO only at a later stage, API3 has kept the DAO at the front at center right from the beginning. The team has also attempted to solve the scaling issues that DAOs typically face, through the fractal scaling model, elaborated in a post by API3 co-founder Burak Benligiray. This is an evolving effort, one that could help discover interesting ideas on DAOs structuring and scaling.
It is up to the community now
The API3 team has been encouraging the community to participate in discussion on the forum, vote on proposals and submit their own proposals.
However we also need to keep in mind that API3 is a multisided platform — with API providers, data consumers — and serving multiple blockchains. The team, rightfully so, needs to focus on these customer segments, to build and grow the project. What is perhaps required is a mechanism for the community to be more aligned with the project’s vision and be more engaged with it.
The vision of API3 Portal
API3 Portal will be a community-run initiative intended to function as a sub-DAO of the larger API3 authoritative DAO. It will be a sub-DAO “for the community, by the community”. The objective of the sub-DAO is to be a stakeholder on behalf of the community. The proposed activities are detailed in the litepaper on it’s website, and can broadly be classified as under:
● Engagement: Ambassador program, API3 Wiki Portal, content creation, AMAs, contests, community groups, etc. (the telegram and discord channels were unveiled recently)
● Feedback: Keep a pulse on the investor community and share it formally with the Authoritative DAO
● Enhance the value of the project: A community voting block, API3 test labs, etc.
In a nutshell, API3 Portal strengthens the D of the DAO and also enables the community to act as evangelists.
Why should the API3 community be interested?
Token holders have varying levels of engagement with any project. Portal can serve the requirements of the different segments of token holders, in the following manner:
● Highly engaged members: Discuss proposals, collaborate on proposals and projects, earn Portal rewards. For blockchain enthusiasts, it also provides a platform to build a reputation in the DAO space
● Medium engagement members: Information, updates, contests
● Low engagement members: Protecting the interest of token holders, through a community voting block
API3 Portal as a showcase for DAO scaling
At the start of this article, I proposed that Portal could become a showcase within the DAO space. I believe, if successful, Portal can serve as an example of how a token holder community can be engaged and aligned with a projects’ vision and act as a seed crystal for the fractal scaling model. It can also demonstrate, avenues for DAOs to generate economic value for the community, in addition to token price appreciation. And finally perhaps, API3 Portal and the larger sub-DAO effort by the API3 team can demonstrate ways in which DAOs can scale quickly and have more flexible sub-structures.
