OST a3 Finished: the DAOist Wallet Integration
DAO: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
We are developing a new way for groups to organize. This concept, called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, uses tokens to measure commitment and create an organization that is setup to empower action without having to know or trust anyone in the organization. This solves the problem of getting groups of people together that have a similar interest but don’t know one another well enough to trust and make decisions well — and to be able to do this remotely.
The way our system works is that “members” can register for the organization. They can receive tokens to register and can purchase additional tokens. These tokens can be used to confer trust onto other members by “liking” them (and thus transferring tokens to them).
The most critical aspect to our application is the use of ideas. Any member can create an idea. An idea is an actionable unit of work — it could be building a web site, launching a marketing plane, developing a feature — that has a cost and can be executed. A cost value in tokens (using USD equivalents, if desired). Members can vote on ideas by staking their tokens against it. Once the value is reached, then the tokens can be released to the person who posted the idea to execute.
The OST Alpha 3 Challenge
In the previous challenge, we minted tokens (we are using a VIN token for a Winery DAO example app, called Vinzy) and built an interface that allowed for members to register and receive their first VIN tokens on registration. They could also see the total number of members and log into a basic dashboard for the DAO:
Our original developer, Boris Verhaaff continued on with backend development, and we had additional help from Michael Tintiuc with front end work.
For this challenge, we wanted to take this project to the next level by integrating new features from the OST API, namely the wallet. Tokens are what make DAOs work. They are the fuel of trust, they are the voting power, and they are what provide the capital to execute on ideas for the group. So we want users to be able to see their balance and the $USD equivalent as well as any transactions they have made.
Additionally, we added the LIKE feature to like other members — essentially a vote of trust. This not only shows how many members have a vote of confidence, but transfers branded tokens (BT) to that user to quite literally put their money where their mouth is in terms of trust.
We also wanted to do a number of things to clean up code, add logging (due to use of Lambda serverless this is more complicated), add continuous integration and overall use best practices on everything in the project as we scale up more developers.
APIs
To do this, we used the Ledger, Balance, Transaction and Token APIs. Both developers had a great experience and couldn’t say enough good things about the OST API. The only complaint they have is that they can’t get new features fast enough. Boris liked it so much, he is the second highest contributor to the OST PHP SDK.
It’s nice that we can interact with the data not like it is blockchain data but like it’s just application data. It really succeeds in obfuscating the complexity of blockchain.
Our new developer (Michael) has never worked on anything in blockchain or crypto and had no problems getting up to speed virtually instantaneously.
The Wallet
We added a number of features to track coins, mainly enabling users to see their balance and all of the transactions to their account. In the dashboard, the user will see their OST balance and USD value.
If they click on it, it will open up a detailed wallet view that includes their transactions:
Plugging these items in, we can’t stress enough, was remarkably simple and didn’t present any surprises whatsoever.
Video
Conclusion
Overall, OST Alpha 3 was a great experience for us and we have evolved our application to a near usable state in a relatively short period of time. We are very excited for upcoming rollouts and and going to the next level with our application. If you are interested in reading more about our app and our experience with this alpha — as well as our product roadmap — please visit our other blog posts.
DAOist OST Alpha 3: Week 1 Update
