Data DAO
Truflation is a data DAO officially registered in Panama.
DAO governance is notoriously riddled with challenges. Although the community's input is always important, letting it governs projects or adjust protocols has proven difficult and often detrimental to the project's viability. DAOs struggle to remain decentralized and require careful design of safeguards and incentives not to enable malicious players or hostile takeovers.
Autonomous, open-source protocols are superior, but not everything can be created and let run wild without adjustments and supervision. DAOs are a compromise to allow the project to remain decentralized but also allow its management, growth, and development.
Data DAOs could be the next step in decentralized data evolution. Multilayered projects can't always be put on blockchain in their entirety for many reasons like the cost of data storage on blockchain, data privacy and anonymity, or, in the case of Truflation, non-disclosure contracts with the data providers that make it impossible to share unprocessed information open source.
We take the massive data aggregates from multiple sources, calculate them internally, and provide them on-chain troughs the oracle network. In a decentralized world, Truflation is still a single-source provider with access to the underlying data as they flow through our servers.
The data DAO puts decentralized governance at the head of the project to limit data tampering and help maintain transparency.
Our goal is to make our data the most decentralized possible, which is quite a challenge in the centralized data world.
Optimally we would need to decentralize all our data providers and their providers, or better yet, source each data point from the initial data generator (like the Walmart's prices directly from Walmart), put separate price data on-chain by turning data for each item into a separate oracle, then feed the data from millions of oracles into our final calculation. It's the premise of how Chainlink's cryptographic truth hopes to work in the future but is currently unattainable for us and impractical when sourcing aggregated data from commercial companies.
That's why we settled for a second-best option, a data DAO where the community can govern the project and its admins.
Internally, we are working to minimize the steps between the data input and output and the potential points of interaction with the data or amount of people with that access.
Another step towards decentralization will be making all our algorithms public and open-source. We are not able to do the same with the source data until we become data generators.
Truflation data DAO is an officially registered entity that has a right to come into contractual agreements with data providers. One of the DAO caveats was that DAOs are not physical persons or corporations and cannot purchase commercial data necessary to develop and run Truflation's price indexes. We solved it by registering under the jurisdiction of Panama, which gives our DAO that legal ability.
Our data DAO is focused on its mission to systematize, standardize, decentralize, and democratize all financial and economic data reporting. We want to set a new paradigm for connecting global and centralized data to an increasingly decentralized world.
In the future, it could become possible to source the price data directly from the buyers through what we call swarm intelligence. In theory, by creating apps similar to fitness or food trackers that collect receipts or barcodes for products, we could become our own data powerhouse and not need permissions from the data aggregators to share the price data with the world. If you're working on such a project, let us know. We're always open to collaborations.
It would also be possible to source the data directly from users' wallets if cryptocurrencies were more commonly used for day-to-day payments.
Got 30min? Check this chat between Chainlink Labs David Post and Truflation's Founder Stefan Rust on Data DAOs.
Last modified 6mo ago