We are happy to present Nicholas Martin, Anthony Jeffrey, and Darius Wedergarten of the ClassicDAO team as one of the winners of the first round of the ETC Grants DAO program!
You can watch this interview here:
In our video interview, we spoke about the following topics:
- ClassicDAO team description
- What is the project?
- Grant amount
- Why did ClassicDAO choose Ethereum Classic?
Stay tuned for more interviews and presentations of our winners!
Following Is the Transcript of Our Interview:
Donald McIntyre (DM): Hi, I'm Donald McIntyre senior editor at the ETC Cooperative. Today we are going to talk about the ETC Grants DAO program and one of the winners, the team that is called ClassicDAO. I'm here today with Nicholas Martin, Anthony Jeffrey, and Darius Wedergarten. Hi guys, how are you?
Nicholas Martin, Anthony Jeffrey, and Darius Wedergarten: Good, good, how are you doing?
DM: Very well thank you! Thank you very much for your time, for being with us. I have a the first question for you. Well, you are a winner of one of the grants of the ETC Grants DAO program, so congratulations! And, the first question is to describe your team.
Nicholas Martin (NM): Sure! All right, I'll take that one. Hello everyone, my name is Nick. So, we have a kind of unique team. We range from an older, more seasoned group, I think is what I'll refer to myself, and Anthony, and then we have some younger individuals with us, the developing side. So, me personally I come from a software sales background where I work for a large company. Mainly in North America. Where we sell software as a service, and I've been doing that for a little while. Anthony also comes from the software side but he's also a little bit more technical, more of the engineering side. And, then we also have Darius and with him he's employed with us. Soteria Smart Contracts, one of our key Partners in the project. And, with that we have another couple of developers, one by the name of Diego who works very closely with us as well.
DM: Ok. You, Darius, you manage the developer team?
Darius Wedergarten (DW): Yeah. So, my firm, Soteria Smart Contracts, is hired by ClassicDAO to essentially build all the products and all the EVM side of things, including the front ends for smart contracts, and that also includes the development of a new DAO called the Winslow DAO Protocol that we'll be deploying for ClassicDAO.
DM: Good. Well, and what is the project? What is the ClassicDAO project?
DW: Ok. So, the ClassicDAO is a project which is very similar to the original DAO in Ethereum Classic. It has similar values and similar ideologies of, okay let's pull some money together, vote on what we think is going to be the right project, the right people, the right teams, and with that, hopefully, grow a very large ecosystem of very profitable dapps that cycle a lot of funds back into the DAO. To facilitate this, as I said before, we're building the Winslow DAO Protocol, which has some new innovations. We can, if you want to go and check that out, you can go to ClassicDAO.one, in the docs section, and you'll find information about the Winslow DAO Protocol. We'll be shortly updating that but essentially we are trying to work on scalability, security, and other factors, such as stability for the DAO. So, we're working on that at the moment. And, that's the project. Hopefully, we have...so, in terms of timeline, we can say the next month there is going to be a big push. We're going to try to finish pretty much everything, get the protocol audited, and from there we're going to try and get a launch early September or late August somewhere in that mix. So, yeah, next question?
DM: Before the next question, you mentioned the Winslow DAO Protocol. So, it's a new protocol you are creating for this particular DAO?
DW: Yes that's correct. So, it's a new protocol, completely from scratch, so we're not using any pre-used libraries. Everything is new code, so it's going to need a lot of testing and a very good auditing from two separate firms we're hoping. We had our grant initially valued at $46,000 when we made the request. We got devalued to $25,000. I'm not sure why. Bob did a great explanation, but to me it doesn't completely explain everything. But, it's okay, we're going to work with the $25,000 we have. So, we hope to get one or two audits on that, but, yeah, brand new from scratch protocol.
DM: That was the the next question. How much you got for the grant? So, can you explain what was the rationale for the first proposal and how much you got?
DW: Right. So, for the first proposal we thought that $47,000, or I think $46,000, or $47,000, would be a very comfortable number. We would have extra. We would have to cycle some of that back into the DAO once it launches. Part of the plan for the DAO once it launches is that the team...so, me Anthony, Nicholas, and Soteria Smart Contracts will all be working independently from the DAO as a DAO Foundation. And, we're going to do our best to have the least amount of influence over the DAO. And, we're gonna make it to make sure that all of our team members buy their tokens during DAO sales, so we're not going to keep any to ourselves. So, it's going to be a very open and very properly set up DAO that works on Ethereum Classic, hopefully to grow an ecosystem of really, really good products. And, I just want to mention one thing, if in the grant application we had written about... they asked us to compare our project to other projects, and so we figured we'd compare it to the ETC Grants DAO. And, I was pointing out vulnerabilities and problems with the fact that it's centralized as it is, and only now do we really see the full extent of how we have some projects that are fraudulent, and some that don't make any sense getting funded at the full fifty thousand. So, I'm not gonna...we really want to move past that. We're going to let them deal with the things. We're going to have $25,000 soon, and we're going to really try to build ClassicDAO to, you know, push competition, show that ClassicDAO can take the ETC Grant DAO and really have a public decided vote for people who have put their investment into the DAO.
DM: When you say "public" is people who donate to ClassicDAO are going to vote for what projects to Grant, to grant money?
DW: That's correct, but it's not a donation it's...they, when they buy DAO tokens, the smart contract implicitly says in the DAO that they can always redeem their tokens for ether or other assets that are within the DAO. So, if the DAO has ERC-20 tokens and ether it will pay that out to DAO token holders, so that they can redeem their part of the DAO treasury. So, it's all in the white paper. There's a lot more very interesting concepts that we're bringing together on that, so definitely worth the read.
DM: Ok. So, people should go to understand in more detail about ClassicDAO, they should go to classicdao.com, you said?
DW: ClassicDAO dot one. Like o-n-e, the number, o-n-e.
DM: Okay. Scratch! It's not ClassicDAO.com, it's ClassicDAO.one! And, the last question I have is, why did you choose ETC? Why do you think that ETC is a good environment, or a good system to build on?
Amthony Jeffrey: Yeah, I'll go ahead and take that and...yeah, I think the main thing is that ETC follows, you know, the Bitcoin philosophy. We like that a lot. It's proof of work, it's decentralized, it has this code of law, you know, it's censorship resistant, it's sound money, it has the cap Supply, it's a smart contracts, and it is the original Ethereum. We just kind of see ETC as kind of like a fertile ground, and, you know, that's a huge opportunity for us. And, you know, right now there's no central authority. We really, we really believe in the philosophy of ETC and the DAO is going to help enable that for people. So that's why we picked ETC.
DM: Excellent! I think it's a good interesting case to have a DAO. First, a new protocol on ETC, no? Instead of importing protocols that already existed in other chains. Second, to have a dapp, say, let's call ClassicDAO a dapp, that, in part works socially because at the social layer people have to make decisions and then vote on, or decide what to do in terms of where to direct the money, and things like that. But, where the treasury is inside the secure environment of ETC that offers immutability and is protected with true decentralization, with proof of work, etc. So, that's that's amazing. Excellent, thank you very much? And, congratulations guys for getting $25,000, and I'm looking forward to seeing ClassicDAO, how it works, and maybe become an investor as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, John. Bye-bye.
Thank you for reading this article!
To see the full list of winners go here: https://etcgrants.softr.app/projects-list-en
To learn more about the ETC Cooperative go to: https://etccooperative.org
To learn more about ETC go to: https://ethereumclassic.org