###### tags: `paladins` `history of Moloch`

- In 2019, Ameen Solemani, Arjun Bhuptani, Layne Haber, Rahul Sethuram, and James Young co-authored MolochDAO. (the contract)
- Moloch solved for a fundamental problem in TCRs (Token Curated Registries), specifically the problem of how people would be able to coorindate voting via a TCR.
- TCRs could not solve the issue of community building and incentives, you need a community to form around the token to do the work that would accrue to the token. Users were incentivized to *NOT* accumulate, making the utility of voting expensive.
- MolochDAO dropped the permissionless feature and introduced the concept of RageQuit to avoid capture.
- MolochDAO also solved the community curation issue by forcing membership to happen by reccomendation (i.e. membership happens through existing member voting in new memeber).
- However, in the DAO contract there was no way for value to accrue to contributors who put in time and effort to the project, so contributions had no incentive.
- In the meantime, platforms Aragon, DAOstack, Colony, gnosis, and others claimed to be the one stop shop for any community to launch a DAO through a modular interface (DAOstack) and deploy different types of communities to fit the given organizations needs (3-years later and I haven't seen a live product, except with gnosis.)

Why did these communities with well researched ideas around TCRs, governance structures, and incentive design struggle to `go far and go together`? (Coordination Failure)

- Metacartel was an entirely different animal that rose out of ETHSF 2018, the community could be described as a bunch of UX/UI enthusiasts with the goal to improve crypto-usability for all people.
- After the core community was established, the DAO was summoned and off to slaying Moloch
- Over the course of the Past three years or so, MetaCartel has been successfully providing grants to projects across the web3 ecocsystem. Here are just a few:
- Kickback
- Mintbase
- DAOhaus
- MetaCartel set precendence for any community to self-select (even non-technical) and organize through a DAO.
- Following the MetaCartelDAO launch, momementum kept gaining, and even through the thoroughs of crypto winter following the 2017 bull run, builders kept the BUDIL going.
- Soon after the launch of MetaCartelDAO, RaidGuild was summoned at ETHDenver 2020 with the goal to provide web3 software clients with unparalleled customer experience in getting applications built.
- In the meantime, there were many other things going on in the background, with stakeholders in the community hellbent on raising the bar for coordination in DAOs.
- These tools were developed across ecosystems, sometimes at hackathons, sometimes through a grant given by the community, or other times bear knuckles nose to the grindstone completely bootstrapped from the community members themselves.