Level: Off-chain voting platform for DAOs on TRON

TRON has a big potential to expand; however, it lacks decentralization infrastructure for protocols and apps on the chain. Level is the prerequisite to any decentralized endeavor on TRON.

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Inspiration

Snapshot for Ethereum

What it does

TRON does not have a unified voting platform for decentralized autonomous organizations in its ecosystem. Voting platforms differ per DAO. TRON DAO utlizes the Tron wallet (where users must freeze their tokens to unlock voting power) in their Super Representative validator election, Just Lend DAO uses another platform, and Sunswap uses another. The infrastructure is fragmented and incoherent, increasing the barrier to entery for the entire ecosystem because nobody wants to hop between so many platforms.

We developed Level, an off-chain voting platform for DAOs on the TRON network. Level benefits the TRON ecosystem in two ways: 1) Uniform UI/UX among DAOs and 2) Off-chain voting.

Uniform UI/UX means that a user can track and participate in multiple DAOs all in one place. They only need to connect a wallet that supports ERC-20/TRC-10 tokens. Provided they hold the governance token for that DAO, the user can cast a vote. Off-chain voting enables the DAO to poll their community for soft-consensus on topics ranging from protocol upgrades to asset listings to grants.

Off-chain voting means that proposals need not have a smart contract ready for execution upon results. Voting on Level does not incur transactions on the blockchain therefore saving network bandwith and resources/no TRX fee. Instead, the Token Counter code us used to calculate each user’s respective governance power. All within Level. Results are displayed on Level and include every user’s wallet address, vote, and voting power.

Level plays a key part in the lifecycle of proposal. After thorough discussion and debate has taken place on the DAO’s forum, users migrate to Level to place their vote. Upon results the community will be better informed on the preferred direction of the DAO without incuring the bandwidth, fees, and permenance of on-chain voting.

How we built it

Browsing TRON DAO and other DAOs on the TRON Network, we noticed a lack of community in voting platforms. We found that TRON lacked a DAO ecosystem infrastructure, an off-chain voting platform with smooth UI/UX. Solution? Level.

  1. Built webflow site
  2. Built site UI with webflow
  3. TronLink Intregration through embedded code
  4. Create "Token Counter" in HTML with minted ERC-20 tokens (through Smart Contracts and ABI Calls) to generate voting power: https://github.com/c2-code/TronHack2022
  5. User casts vote through Level's site - currently a Google Form (try with Just Lend DAO)
  6. We manually count tokens with "Token Counter" and execute vote onto Level site in real-time.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenges we faced were: 1) a lack of front end development on Level to integrate the proposal listings per DAO and 2) automation for generating each user’s respective vote power. Ideally each proposal listing per DAO includes links to the forum discussion for users to read prior to their vote. With regards to calculating vote power, our current process is pretty centralized – our core team takes each wallet address and manually runs it through the token counter code. In the future we’d like to have as little manual effort as possible because it poses a threat to decentralized governance with the potential for vote tampering.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

WebFlow site with Smooth UI, Amount of caffeine consumed, "Token Counter", TronLink Wallet Integration, our PPT, our use case!

What we learned

So much about TRON dev, webflow, html coding, governance, html, and more.

What's next for Level: Off-chain voting platform for DAOs on TRON

Overall we envision Level as the prerequisite for any decentralized endeavor on TRON. 27 elected validators on the L1 is not enough to constitute a thriving decentralized ecosystem. Level provides a key part of infrastructure in off-chain voting for community-owned projects; whether that be a DEX, creator fund, or a tight nit P2E group that want to improve the game.

Next Steps:

  • Develop back-end capabilities and permanent webflow site
  • Pitch to TRON DAOs to join our platform to current voting forums/discord/community
  • Launch Level to all TRON DAO users and public
  • A lively DAO ecosystem on the TRON Network (hooray!)

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