This is a guest post from Emerald City founder Jacob Tucker.
Emerald City is a DAO on Flow. More specifically, it was the first DAO on Flow as it was launched back in late October of 2021. I initially founded the DAO because I wanted to bring the excitement of DAOs to the Flow ecosystem and implement an example of what a DAO could look like to encourage others to do the same. Tons of people had great ideas about DAOs but they had no idea how to implement one from both a community and technical standpoint, so I wanted to solve that issue.
As for me, I'm Jacob, and I’ve been in the Flow space since the Summer of 2020 (Open World Builders bootcamp), but I stayed because of the community. I have been addicted to the energy and spirit of the people working around me. I believe Flow has an incredibly powerful community that is constantly contributing to the ecosystem from the goodness of their hearts. I also feel like I can make a difference here, given how early Flow still is and how many things I can work on at once. I believe the rest of Emerald City agrees with this as well.
I also believe Flow is in a unique position to onboard non-techy people into the blockchain world given its very easy onboarding tools and incredible developer experience with Cadence. Of course, the almost 0 gas fees are a plus. For me personally, Cadence is a very easy language to pick up and makes learning how to build on Web3 an easier experience. I’ve always preferred Cadence to other smart contract languages due to its resource oriented programming. Additionally, as an educator, I have found it far easier to introduce people to the tooling required to develop on Flow than to introduce people to Solidity. Blocto wallet, the ease of developing on Flow testnet, and Cadence make it very simple to get people deploying real-world apps. But by far the most appealing aspect of Flow to me is the community within it. They encourage me to develop and educate every day.
What Emerald City is now
Emerald City quickly evolved into something much greater than an idea about what a DAO could be. We are now composed of three Guilds: an Education Guild, a Building Guild, and a Governance Guild. Each of these guilds is focused on something different from the others, which I will describe below.
Education Guild
• Focused primarily on educating the Flow ecosystem by teaching people about the Flow blockchain and Cadence.
Building Guild
• Focused on building open-source tooling for DAOs/projects on Flow.
• Intended to not only get experienced developers involved, but to also provide a pathway for people learning in the Education Guild to tackle real-world projects as part of their learning path.
• Serves as a “community hub” for builders on Flow to come together, discuss tools/utilities that are needed in the space, and make them happen.
Governance Guild
• A group of people determined to figure out how DAOs can work on Flow and how to solve the “people problem.” That is, how to reward people for their contributions, represent voting power, delegate tasks, and more.
• We want to revamp how DAOs handle voting power, given the often misaligned“token-based” voting power system that has plagued DAOs on Ethereum.
It’s important to note that this is all happening within the same community, so people who are just learning Cadence through the Education Guild are simultaneously working on building real applications on Flow in the Building Guild and solving governance related tasks in the Governance Guild. Or, people can focus their interests on one category and contribute how they please.
What we've done
And now I'd like to share more about what Emerald City Guilds have accomplished already.
Education Guild
• Launched Emerald Academy, a series of educational resources/bootcamps throughout time to onboard people into the Flow ecosystem and teach people how to develop on Flow.
• Emerald Academy’s first bootcamp is starting on Monday, February 21st, to give an introduction to the Flow blockchain & Cadence.
• Started a YouTube series on how to become a Cadence developer, as well as other important topics on Flow (this is from me personally, but on behalf of the Education Guild).
Building Guild
• Launched FLOAT, the POAP equivalent for the Flow blockchain. FLOAT is a proof of participation system, intended to allow event creators to reward and recognize their community members for participating in their events. Whether this be for a Twitter space, proof of completion certificate for an educational course, or for whitelisting purposes, there’s no limit to the system. It is entirely up to the event host to decide how their FLOATs are distributed and why.
• Launched Emerald bot, a Discord bot that provides Flow project/DAO owners to set up gated access to their Discord channels based on token holdings. You can think of this as the Collab.Land equivalent for Flow.
• Launched EmeraldID, a service that ties an on-chain account to someone’s Discord handle so you can quickly detect and determine who someone is in Discord. Used by the Emerald bot to easily & securely give people gated roles.
Governance Guild
• Creating a Reputation System (that is a very rough draft for now) for DAOs on Flow through a “guild-based” architecture. We want to figure out how to reward community members for their contributions as well as tie those contributions into voting power within the DAO.
• A massive problem with DAOs right now (especially on Ethereum) is they all rely on “token-based voting,” which is very problematic and aligns incentives poorly. Emerald City will implement a reputation system on Flow (with Cadence, so it’s on-chain) to establish a new way of handling governance in a DAO.
• Coming up with a token structure to use as currency inside the DAO.
Emerald City is in a unique position to tackle new opportunities in the blockchain space because we have harnessed the power of the active Flow community and given them a space to contribute across so many different areas (namely Education, Building, and Governance). There are tons of Flow community members from across the world and from very different projects taking part in our DAO to contribute in some way.
From NFT projects (Matrix World, Goated Goats, Flovatar, GENIACE, etc), naming services (.find and Flowns), other DAOs (THiNG.FUND), event indexers (Graffle.io), community platforms (Flowverse), the Flow team itself, projects on Ethereum migrating to Flow, and people who have no idea what the blockchain is, our community has come together to build up the Flow ecosystem.
We are mostly unfunded and doing everything for free, and even so, the Flow community is so amped up that we are producing tools and resources at incredible speed (seriously… all of what I wrote above came together in less than 1.5 months). I believe the ability to tie in members from many different projects almost defines Emerald City as a developer/educational hub for Flow community members to come together and talk about important topics.
What's next
Here are some of the things on the way from Emerald City:
- FLOAT is launching on MainNet very soon.
- Emerald Academy’s first bootcamp is started on Monday, February 21st and lasting until March 14th.
- Emerald token is in the works and will be developed in the next few months to be used as currency within the DAO and reward DAO members (don’t know if this should be mentioned or not, maybe not important for now).
So if you want to be a part of a community of builders and Web3 pioneers, who believe in Flow being one of the building blocks that will bring this open world into reality, then I urge you to check out Emerald City and consider joining the DAO. If you have any questions or just want to chat, head over to our Discord and drop a line.
