How district0x plans to create a modular framework for distributed, peer-to-peer marketplaces

Messari hosted a public AMA with Brady McKenna, Community Manager at district0x, in the Messari community group. Below is a transcript of the conversation.

You can find all of Messari's historical AMA's here

Messari: Alright, looks like we're good to go! I’d like to introduce Brady McKenna, Community Manager at district0x. Welcome Brady! Thank you for joining us right before the holidays.

Brady McKenna: Thanks for having me!

Messari: Of course! We’ve received a bunch of great questions from the community, but before we start would you mind giving us some background on yourself and how you got started at your current role?

Brady McKenna: It's a bit of a story. Here goes...

I got into crypto in 2011 and was interested because I was already into the first successful digital currency in Second Life.

I saw physical bitcoins from Casascius and being a coin collector had to have one. Long story short, I fell down the rabbit hole and didn't stop. Then a few years later I started doing consulting for individuals and businesses interested in the tech. Then I landed a role at Coinbase doing operational work with Joe and Alexander. Though it was my love for coin collecting, the virtual worlds, and digital currency that kicked things off.

Then I got a role on regulatory Compliance at Coinbase and was there for a couple more years. Then Joe, Alexander and myself left around the same time. So here we are helping build the district0x network.

That is the nutshell version 😉

I am now doing operational work here as well. Similar to while I started at Coinbase.

Messari: Wow that's great! All roads lead to crypto. How long were you at Coinbase? And what did you think of your time there? Also why did you choose to work on district0x after leaving Coinbase?

Brady McKenna: I was there about four years. I left mostly because my heart was not in regulatory work. I wanted to dig deeper into some of the more interesting things like curation markets, community marketplaces, DAOs, and monetizing creative content in new ways. I really miss my time at Coinbase but Compliance is a tough gig for a creative mind.

Messari: Yes, I can only imagine. And considering those interests, district0x is definitely a logical choice.

It would be great to get some background on district0x as well. Could you also talk about how district0x got started? What were some of its initial goals and the problems it's looking to solve?

Brady McKenna: The core vision of the project is to create a connected network of user governed marketplaces, with all the governance features in place to allow third party expansion of the network. We’re excited to finally get there!

To dig in more, we’re building a network of self-governing marketplaces. Using Ethereum, IPFS, and Aragon, we’ve created a platform that makes it easy for the average person to create a digital marketplace that can leverage the power of its own users to drive high-level governance decisions. This is important seeing all the issues that are rearing their heads with the whole Sharing economy and web2.0 marketplaces. High fees, deplatforming, a lack of censorship resistance and borderless access, currency agnostic options, etc.

As far as how things got started, Ethlance was the seed that grew into the larger vision of allowing cross functional marketplaces of any kind. This was initially built because our lead dev Matus needed an alternative other than Upwork and similar Web2.0 platforms.

Messari: That's a really interesting background on the origins of Ethlance. Turning to the community questions, we had one that asked about both Ethlance and Name Bazaar:

• Why did you choose to build Ethlance and Name Bazaar first?

Brady McKenna: Ethlance as I said was the seed that sparked the idea but it also offers all the basic functions you need from any community marketplace so it's. template of sorts for the other marketplaces. Searching, Filtering, Posting, Listing, Invoicing, Payments. These are the foundational functions that any marketplace needs. Then we launched Name Bazaar because it's a generalized framework of libraries and smart contracts that allow a standardized approach to all future districts. Meme Factory was then launched using this general framework and was also the framework for our general TCR design patterns. Ethlance is now being migrated to this new framework that is part of d0xInfra.

You can think of these first marketplaces like Wordpress templates of sorts and we will be launching modules that extend functionality soon. The first being the 0x payment module for "any token" payments.

Messari: This is a great analogy. This approach makes a lot of sense. Building these frameworks make future development easier and more standardized.

Brady McKenna: It also makes the modules easier to integrate in a standard way

Messari: This is great! A lot to unpack here. I'm going to start with the various components of the framework or platform in general:

• What are the pieces of d0x? Early on it seemed that aragon was the main infrastructure but are there others?
• the platform already integrates with aragon and 0x. how do you see district0x integrating with some of the other ETH protocols & apps, particularly within defi?

Brady McKenna: Yes, the initial marketplaces are those other components. General marketplace functions (Ethlance) Name Bazaar (Our generalized framework for all districts and d0xinfra) and Meme Factory (our TCR design pattern) Then Aragon, the district Registry to onboard new marketplaces, and all the Aragon apps that are being developed.

One big one I am personally excited about is the redesign of Ethlance. We will be integrating with Bounties Network so if you post a bounty using Gitcoin on a Github repo, it will show up in Ethlance and visa versa. So Ethlance will have robust bounty options, arbiter options, and general employment job board functions as well.

As far as Defi specifically that is a bit broad and this could expand quite a bit considering tokenized collateralized debt can be placed into a bounty. It's exciting to see this all come together in a cross platform manner.

Messari: I bet! There's plenty more to be explored. But the Bounties Network integration is very interesting. Is there a timeline for that at the moment?

Brady McKenna: No, our current goal is to launch the District Registry since it is a hair behind schedule. However it is done as of today but we are waiting to test and launch right after the holidays. No specific date set pending testing of this last (hopefully) deployment. However we have resources dedicated to Ethlance now and some of this is already being built as we speak. Most of the front end is done.

Messari: Awesome, thanks for the update. Diving back into the community questions, we have another one related to Aragon and district governance:

• there's a good amount of reliance on Aragon for governance. If Aragon left ETH to build on either Cosmos or Polkadot, how could this impact live districts?

Brady McKenna: I would refer you to the last interview we did with Luis from Aragon, we discuss this specifically and it dives into a lot more.

Though in a nutshell: It's not too large of an issue since Aragon will be maintaining apps on both Aragon Chain and Ethereum. And has a treasury app that could hold tokens and transact as a DAO to both chains.

Messari: Makes sense since all of the Aragon related efforts that still remain on Ethereum. It will be very interesting to see what happens if or when the multi-chain build out does occur.

Brady McKenna: I think multi chain support is inevitable, you can't do everything on a single chain.

Messari: Alright some more questions. This one is related to district proposals:

• How many District proposals are there? Has there been more or less interest over the past year?

Brady McKenna: We have more quality over quantity but it has slowed down. We have 100 closed ones and 172 open ones. The closed ones are proposals that don't qualify as a marketplace or were spam. Can't wait to migrate to the registry to eliminate spam.

Messari: Any indications as to why the proposal rate has slowed?

Brady McKenna: When you have a couple hundred proposals it gets hard for people to submit a genuinely unique idea. Many duplicates and overlap proposals get submitted. Some of the closed ones are in that category.

Though crypto in general has slowed down and the people who remain are the ones writing genuinely well thought out ideas and they have a deep understanding of the tech. Many have their proposal in and are already building out their marketplaces in anticipation of the registry launch.

Messari: Completely agree on that final part. Crypto has slowed, but the work being done all around has greatly improved, a lot of it behind the scenes.

Brady McKenna: Yes, it's great to see things chugging along. The Github commits are up and to the right 😉

Messari: We're starting to run low on time and I have a couple of burning questions. These will be less formal so I'll drop them all here:

• How does your team think about DNT token value accrual + value capture?

Brady McKenna: Took a peek at this question before, I have a lot to say:

DNT isn't designed to be an investment vehicle so value capture and accrual isn't a factor for the token beyond the fact that it is limited in supply. People shouldn't expect a return by simply holding the token.

It's a governance token with a set of specific use cases that are meant to empower platform and marketplace participants. On a side note, most traditional democratic systems have the highest rate of voter turn out when there is an extrinsic force or incentive, like being fined if you don't vote. This is similar to Australia's State general elections where they fine you for not voting and have one of the highest voter turn outs in the world. That said, passive holding of a token should be "punished" through governance functions/motivations to increase voter turn out. While this is tough in an open platform and very different than a general election, there are some ways this can be achieved within an immediate community.

One example of this type of "punishment/motivation" is the Meme Factory token. The vast majority of which was given to active governance participants only, while passive DNT holders received nothing. This ensures that the district specific token went to active governance participants who will be more likely to continue being active in the future.

Contrary to most arguments about tokenized governance platforms, it's not whale voting, and collusion we have to worry about as much as active users and voter turnout in an already nascent industry. Since it's largely controlled by developers and freelancers those are the target users right now.

Considering this, it's important to look at DNT as token controlled access for various labor markets, DAO tools, freelancing talent, platform access, not to mention future proposals and development within each individual district and Aragon itself.

Messari: How do you guys think about building on Ethereum during its transition to Ethereum 2.0? Why continue to build on Ethereum?

Brady McKenna: There are a lot of questions for the Ethereum community as a whole on how this will play out. The network could even roll back to proof of work if there is an issue. However it is a necessary transition if we are serious about onboarding the world and using the network as a "World Computer".

No other platform is close to achieving this while allowing a borderless censorship resistant foundation. You could do it in a centralized way and speed up adoption like some projects are doing but that would defeat the purpose of using Ethereum and DLT in general.

As far as why Ethereum? Every network is the same at it's core, they do the same thing, it's all open source, we could be using any other network. What is not the same are the people and it's really the people that matter.

If the people moved to another network I'm sure we would too but that simply isn't on the table right now. All the best tooling, all the best people, and a solid foundation for collaboration is taking place on Ethereum. Migrating is similar to starting a new job, in a new place, with new people.

There are costs and benefits and it should always be about the people. Right now that decision is clear. So here we are.

Messari: Are VR worlds a potential use case for District0x? Think about organizing governance of specific districts of Decentraland for example.

Brady McKenna: Absolutely, as I said before, I initially found an interest in crypto because of virtual worlds back in 2011, I earned my first bitcoin by performing in Second Life and exchanging Linden Dollars for Bitcoin. The work life and employment opportunity in virtual worlds is immense and still thrives in Second Life to this day. It's a model for what we should be aiming for with Defi. It's just an untapped resource and that economy is depressed, defi can and is helping already.

Also, I still perform music in VR to this day and I found an interest in community marketplaces like Ethlance because of the potential to create an employment community/network within VR to enhance the experience and content for viewers. I'm working on this now and Ethlance is part of that model I'm building for myself. More "dogfooding".

As far as governance, that will be important as we transition away from value added services, hosted content, and value extraction/rent seeking that Linden Labs has done in the past.

We now have open virtual worlds where will need new ways to make decisions and organize on a global scale. There really is no better option than a borderless globally accessible DAO for this. Exciting times!

Messari: Can't wait to see how everything plays out.

Brady McKenna: Same, there is still a lot of work to do but I love how much has actually been done in just a few years

Messari: And thank you for taking the time to break this all down. All of the other ETH based projects we've spoken with have echoed that sentiment regarding the transition to ETH 2.

Brady McKenna: No problem, thanks for having me!

Messari: This was incredibly insightful and I could keep going. But I don't want to keep you too long. Thanks so much for joining us Brady! To finish off could you just give us what excites you most regarding the future of the project and what the best ways are for people to keep up with you and district0x's latest developments?

Brady McKenna: The live stream is always a great place to come get updates. You can follow us on Twitter as well.

Here's [my Twitter]. You can reach us in Telegram as well here.

As far as what excites me? I want to see more cross functionality between networks and apps. That will be killer to see more of.

Though the one thing that excites me is the ability for a community to use a Dapp using something similar to how Aragon Agent works. It's still in development but if a whole community can use a Dapp, that has some huge implications that makes the mind race at night. It gives me the same feeling bitcoin did when I first read the white paper. Can't wait for that!!

Here's to more sleepless nights in crypto because it's truly amazing!! 🥂

I am going to go get some sleep for the holidays though, we need to get the Registry live. Need rest for that.