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  Park DAO Logo

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  Park DAO Screenshot

Park DAO

Inspiration

• We are inspired by projects like CabinDAO, ConstitutionDAO, and CityDAO, that are leveraging the transparency of crypto to have real-world impact. However, Discord and Gnosis Safe are not powerful enough to truly drive a decentralized community.
• We have been frustrated by the inability of existing land use investments (REITs, Land Trusts) to actually fund conservation.
• The totally artificial aspect of existing collaboration platforms makes them feel trivial - we want to build a connection to the real world.
• Virtual land is the metaphor for virtual collaboration - this is the natural platform to build powerful communities online & IRL.

What it does

Part land collective, and part physical and digital coworking space - Park DAO is a community imagining new ways to bridge physical and digital spaces while protecting the earth.

Park NFTs and Tokens represent management interests in physical and virtual properties. Using our technology stack, creators can earn revenue by building in the real world (events, carbon credits, shared use) or by building in the virtual world (tools and features for user interactions in the collaboration metaverse). NFTs can be staked to the Park DAO contract in order to create and vote on proposals for core features of our platform. These proposals enable communities to come together and create transparent systems for land use, software development, project management, and collaboration in the metaverse.

How we built it

We used the near-contract-standards macros to create NFTs that represent real-world land onchain. Using nft_on_transfer, these tiles can be staked into the Park DAO contract to create proposals for land use and management. We are scanning real-world properties with drones, in order to create realistic on-chain digital twins. The first park is a 2-acre property just north of the Golden Gate bridge, which we are building into a collaboratively managed event and co-working space.

NFT tiles staked into the Park DAO create metaverse “worlds” that can represent real-world activities, software development tasks, or 3D asset creation. This spatial collaboration UX includes video conferencing and chat, to facilitate collaboration on Park DAO proposals. In this way, community members can determine the future of Park DAO parks, software, and web3 development.

We also built a marketplace contract using token approvals, so that NFTs stay in their owner’s wallets until the moment they are purchased by someone else. The contract also supports timed auctions that can be settled without the token owner being online. Park DAO tiles can always be listed and sold on our website, and of course are interoperable with other NFT marketplaces in the NEAR ecosystem.

Challenges we ran into

• It’s been a challenge to find ways to build something truly decentralized, but without the energy waste of ETH mining. We think NEAR’s “single-chain” sharding design has the potential to stay decentralized as the network grows.
• NEAR contract development in Rust is an entirely new programming paradigm to jump into. There is some good documentation out there, but it is not all in one place. However, after trying out a few other smart contract SDKs, we are so happy to have found NEAR!
• Digitizing land in a realistic way through drone scanning and photogrammetry (especially in the forest!) has its own unique challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Creating an ecosystem of composable contracts that work together to ensure that tile ownership and staking is self-sovereign. Using NEP 171, our NFTs are interoperable with other NEAR contracts.
• We also built a NEAR “plugin” using a macro to add multisig-like capability to any NEAR contract: multi-ownable.
• We used the latest NEAR tech (near-sdk v4, workspaces.rs, near-contract-standards).
• We are proud of the fact that we have built a platform that brings NFTs beyond the realm of “digital art”, and gives them real utility. Our tile NFTs are access keys into the Park DAO ecosystem, enabling holders to participate in our spatial collaboration platform, and to determine the future of decentral parks around the world.

What we learned

• We have learned that there is already a vibrant community of people interested in preserving real-world land using blockchain and web3. We plan to cooperate with other projects building the future, including Open Forest Protocol.
• Although smart contract development can be challenging, we’ve learned that this paradigm can actually simplify things by replacing the worst parts of web2 development (ops, db, etc).

What's next for Park DAO

Park DAO will become a collective of decentralized on-chain parks around the globe, built and managed by a community working to preserve and renaturalize the land indefinitely. Our platform will enable collective management of a network of protected land assets on the NEAR blockchain. Park DAO lands are allowed to flourish and be wild, or sustainably improved with guidance from naturalists and conservationists. The land is collectively managed based on a set of core principles, ensuring equitable and responsible stewardship.

Owners of real-world properties will tokenize their land by binding it to the Park covenant. In doing so, they can generate an on-chain digital twin. The real world land is brought on to our platform for sustainable, carbon negative revenue generation - leveraging the Open Forest Protocol. The digital twin becomes the base map for a collaboration metaverse. The goal of this system is to create economic incentives to preserve real land, while building the foundation of a compelling virtual economy with tangible connections to the physical world.

Check out parkdao.org for a roadmap of upcoming features.

Built With

• babylon.js
• jitsi
• near
• nft
• rust
• svelte
• typescript