Homebase Integrates Off-Chain 'Snapshot' Polls From Homebase Lite & Adds a Governance Token Creation Wizard

If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening in the many cool developments that have been around adopting DAOs on Tezos. A few weeks ago, we learned of 2 different institutions planning to use Homebase within the music and arts industry.

Fast forward to today, Homebase will now feature some exciting new updates to help cater towards an improved user experience and seamlessness. As the go-to platform for creating and managing DAOs on Tezos, let’s talk about these updates and what they will mean for creating DAOs on Tezos.

Homebase Lite has Merged #

For quite some time now there have been two apps for Homebase. There is Homebase Lite and the main Homebase application featuring Lambda DAOs. In recent discussions and polling from different communities, it’s become clear that both on-chain and off-chain voting are needed. Since Homebase Lite enables off-chain voting similar to Snapshot, it makes sense to bring the same functionality over to the main application.

With this merge, users can now create off-chain polls for their DAOs and enjoy the same features of on-chain voting all within the main Homebase application. Additionally, the added process of having to create a governance token via FA2 bakery has been replaced with a simple token wizard within the main Homebase application.

Previously, in order to create a DAO on Homebase users would have to create a governance token via FA2 bakery. This step wasn’t the most user-friendly process as knowledge of where to fetch the address of the deployed token on TzKT was needed.

Heading over to the application, you can see how it’s all now integrated. When one goes to create a new DAO, the above message populates allowing the user to use the new in-app token wizard to easily create a governance token. Additionally, users can go through the old process and use their already existing governance instead.

Following this, users will be asked to configure the token contract by entering some basic information. For the icon, you can use a free hosting platform like Imgur or IPFS to get an image for your DAO.

Next, you’ll need to set the parameters around the initial token distribution for your governance token. What’s neat here is that you now have the ability to pick your initial token holders. This is particularly useful if you want to create a DAO where the ownership is split among different users.

After reviewing the information and deploying the token, you’ll now see the DAO creator menu. Now, you have the option to pick between the two different versions whereas before this change, the only option was a registry and treasury DAO.

The full DAO now has all the functionality including a treasury, registry, and the Lambda endpoint. Further, if you do not plan on doing any on-chain governance for your DAO, you can create a Lite DAO. The cool thing here, however, is that when you create a full DAO it will also initiate a Lite version which gives you a lot of flexibility, such as on-chain proposals being executed based on the result of an off-chain poll or enabling delegated voting.

Key Insight from Andrei Taranu of dOrg #

Andrei was kind enough to speak to me about the latest features for Homebase and offer a sneak peek for those to come.

Tell us more about the work on improving UX at Homebase and if we can expect anything else in the near future.

Lambda is our functionality addition tool for contracts. The first one we’re developing is aimed at decentralizing the privileges of the token administrator, namely the power to mint, burn, pause, and un-pause. We feel these actions should also be subject to community consensus and we’ve partnered with Tezos Domains to create a solution for accessing these functions from the DAO via proposals. Right after that, we want to add another Lambda for interacting with a decentralized exchange, allowing DAOs to swap their assets without leaving the trustless environment. Right now it’s very easy for Tezos smart contract devs to integrate whatever functions they can code into the Homebase contracts. We see this evolving into an ecosystem of community-driven “plug and play” modules complete with custom user interfaces.

Another thing we’re moderately excited about has to do with delegation. From all the feedback we’ve gathered from DAOs, not just on Tezos but in the wider web3 space, it’s quite apparent that delegation is a key part of effective governance. It makes sense that not all members have the bandwidth to review all proposals. This is beautifully acknowledged in the core Tezos consensus mechanism and we want to do the same for Homebase. So the next big thing that we’re adding is liquid single-level delegation, meaning that you can allow someone else to use your voting power, and also revoke this action at any time. You can only pick addresses that have explicitly turned on a flag in the contract to accept delegations, and delegates cannot assign their voting power to another address.

Looking Forward #

As Tezos continues to evolve and grow, so do all the great developer tools around the ecosystem. Homebase has become a staple for DAO creation and management on Tezos and it’s exciting to see all these new features come to light to help make it easier for anyone to create and manage a DAO on Tezos. We look forward to seeing more institutions and community members create their own DAOs on Tezos with the application!