Why FreelancoDAO
Last updated
Last updated
In a traditional freelancing model, clients and freelancers must trust the third-party platform for dispute resolution and payments. This puts a lot of power in the hands of the platform, leading to issues such as censorship, high fees, and limited access to specific markets.
FreelancoDAO solves these issues by providing a decentralized and automated dispute resolution mechanism. Using AI-assisted governance and oracles enables a more efficient, transparent, and censorship-resistant way of resolving disputes. At the same time, the non-custodial escrow contracts ensure that clients and freelancers have control over their funds.
Furthermore, FreelancoDAO is open-source and open to collaboration, allowing the community to contribute to its development and growth. This ensures that the protocol remains decentralized and free from the control of any single entity.
Web3’s primary promise is the decentralization of the Internet. This is a shift away from the highly centralized organization of Web2, where a small group of tech firms controls a large share of online activities and data, including their resulting IP and revenue potential. Although there is no consensus on the definition or direction of decentralization in Web3, the concept excites people. It is radically different from anything they’ve experienced in their online lives. While this shift introduces the potential for individuals to participate in more — and other — governance decisions in the future, it also presents an opportunity to rethink how current voting systems and governance structures could work with increased access and transparency.
Mirroring enthusiasm about decentralization in general, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are increasingly popular in creating governance systems within Web3. Since DAOs lack traditional hierarchy, many see them as direct democracy — as opposed to democratic republics with representatives — or as a revolutionary way to organize private enterprises. These organizations have been created to oversee everything from social groups to carbon credit market management to community development and have also given supporters of on-chain political voting a surge of hope. However, DAOs have proven challenging in both entrepreneurial and political applications.
Since DAOs make decisions by asking their members to vote, they must manage the administration of voting, identity management, counting of votes, and auditing. Any voting mechanisms that DAOs choose influence the value or weight of each franchise and possibly even the outcomes, further complicating this process. The DAO’s fundamental lack of hierarchy means each community member must thoroughly understand the voting mechanisms if they want to observe the transparency of governance in action.
Although many on-chain voting processes are overseen by DAOs, some projects, and organizations allow members to vote directly. Voting mechanisms such as token-based voting and quadratic funding have been used to gather input from community members and steer new initiatives. These systems have worked initially, though only on a small scale so far.
Some Web3 builders believe that systems built on the blockchain could address voter concerns over fairness and representation. Blockchain technology can register votes securely and allows for transparency in the voting process, which eases founded or unfounded fears of fraud. Given these factors, some thought leaders believe that on-chain voting could revolutionize how private and public organizations are run because of its transparency.
However, blockchain-based voting systems are imperfect in their ways. Their implementation currently faces challenges, including the following:
New possible failure points: Introducing technology to any process adds new possible points of failure. In this case, those include hacking, online vote tampering, and system malfunctions. Although blockchain technology is designed to be more secure than other forms of data codification, it is not immune to attacks or misuses. Hackers might not be able to change counted votes, but they could find (and have found) ways to vote multiple times as individuals through Sybil attacks. For example, on-chain voting for the NEAR Foundation/Forkast Shortlist of 20 Women in Web3 was skewed by a group of voters who used bots to multiply wallets to vote on a specific candidate. On the one hand, blockchain transparency made it possible to see this vote manipulation. On the other hand, the difficulty in pinpointing the source of the Sybil attack underlines an issue tied to all types of tampering: online identity. When hackers and bad actors cause friction in the Web3 space, it can be challenging to find them to hold them accountable. Requiring voters to meet a predetermined level of identifiability might help with ex-post accountability and Sybil attack prevention. Some options include decentralized identifiers (DiD); Voluntary mechanisms of personhood identification, such as Proof of Humanity; and non-transferrable reputation tokens, such as SoulBoundTokens.
Post-election risks of vote visibility: Although blockchain transparency can help combat fears of fraud, it also means that other individuals can see people’s individual voting decisions. Employers, neighbors, and even total strangers could see evidence of people’s political views and choices. This produces a cooling effect on voters who fear retaliation or reprisal. Aware of this concern, builders have proposed preserving voter privacy and anonymity by separating votes and voter ID in two blockchains.
Need for voters to be Web3-savvy: Just because the blockchain is transparent does not mean that every step is committed to the chain (and thus acceptable.) Nor does it mean that anyone can see and understand it, let alone audit it in the event of a recount. Currently, blockchain voting would require election administrators, electoral authorities, independent monitors, and even voters to understand how to use and navigate Web3 systems and interfaces. If blockchain voting is meant to follow democratic principles, it needs Web3 infrastructure that includes user-friendly audibility, aggregation, and transparency across systems. The people who oversee elections must be able to audit the infrastructure to certify and monitor the electoral process. They can do this now with paper ballots but lack the specialized Web3 knowledge to do it with blockchain voting.
We believe that a verifiable, automated, and decentralized impartial AI voting mechanism with the help of ChainLink Oracles and GPT-4 can solve these issues.
“If you want to know the tendencies of a panel of arbitrators, for example,” Mr. Katz says, “there are currently a handful of people who store this information in their minds . . . the question is how we might store some of that in a database so that it could be more generally available.”
AI cannot predict the future. Instead, AI can deliver probabilities, which may occur if the circumstances are similar to the actual situation. “In the case of disputes worth huge amounts of money, you need the skills of an experienced negotiator to persuade people to do things they don’t want to do,” says Ben Carroll, a dispute resolution partner at Linklaters.
“A skilled mediator can read the people in the room, understand what they’re worried about, and shape the settlement,” he adds. “So, it’s about more than just people paying out money. There are often things thrown in that help bridge the gap.”
However, AI is already bedded into the world of alternative dispute resolution in the form of tools to analyze mammoth bodies of data and documentation, often before mediation arrives as the best route.
Imagine a world where you can resolve disputes without relying on trust or censorship. A world where the process is transparent, verifiable, and censorship-resistant. That is the world that we aim to create with our dispute resolution mechanism. By leveraging the power of blockchain technology and implementing AI-based algorithms, we can create a fair, efficient, and accessible system from human biases. Our goal is to provide a solution that is accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or expertise, and that can be relied upon to resolve disputes in a transparent and verifiable manner. With our approach, we believe we can transform how disputes are resolved and usher in a new era of trustless and decentralized governance.
