TechnologyDAO

TechnologyDAO Landing page
TechnologyDAO writing page - uses GPT-3 currently , eventually will use open-source models ( GPT neo-X ,etc )
TechnologyDAO My accounts page (withdraw TDP tokens ERC20)
TechnologyDAO Reading page
TechnologyDAO Feed page , boosts feature
TechnologyDAO Wallet to be made on Supernets /
TechnologyDAO Landing page - features

Inspiration

I come from a mixed tech and business background and love to play around with AI based tools. I had been experimenting with GPT-2 , hugging face , GPT-3 and now even Dall-E and mid-journey. These AI models convinced me that there is a huge potential in making use of these next gen tools for making more efficient workflows.

Back last year I started paying for an AI co-writing service to better help me write articles and stories. I ended up paying an exorbitant amount while realizing that I could yet not use it to its full potential. The steep costs and rigid framework prevented me from being able to use it to its full potential. Moreover I realized that large corporations like Google , OpenAI , seldom release their AI models Openly and contrary to open use , they lock them in their own ecosystems.

This was also close to the time we were exploring web3 and participating in hackathons. Here I thought about how powerful it could be if we could fund AI based models like public goods. This set my initial goal towards building something that could benefit all the members of a DAO , while also being very inclusive to people with no knowledge of web3 , crypto or finance.

This served as my inspiration to build out technologyDAO.

What it does

Technology DAO aims to be the largest DAO that is open to all users and enables them to read and write AI augmented articles. We aim to be as inclusive to as many people as possible. We also aim to create a simple crypto-economic market where people can earn tokens for publishing the articles publicly and burn tokens for boosting their articles and minting nfts.

We hope that people with no experience in Crypto and web3 can easily join the platform , use it and then get involved in crypto thus onboarding them in a smooth and functional manner.

Users can join freely or with a referral code. They can then make use of our Ai-cowriter to help them write articles. These articles when published will give users our Technology DAO POints tokens (TDP tokens) an ERC20 token.

Users can then use these tokens to buy themselves a Pro membership which enables them to use the latest, experimental tools , publish more articles and customize their name tags. Another way users can spend the tokens involves using it to boost their published articles everyday so that it appears on the top of everyone’s reading list. As more users join our platform we plan to change the fixed model for boosting articles to a dynamic bidding model.

Many users who have no experience in web3 need not even have a web3 wallet to login and can just use their email IDs. The tokens earned will be currently stored in the main wallet. And they can cash this out to their web3 wallet when they want to do the same.

We also hope to make use of Polygon Supernets to create a simple crypto ecosystem where we can make wallets for our users and transfer the tokens earned to that instead of our main wallet in the future. In this way we want to completely decentralize the earning and ownership of the tokens.

In this way we aim to promote and develop a healthy crypto ecosystem that is free to join , easy to use and purposeful in existence.

The expanded series of rules of our crypto ecosystem can be found in our white paper link: ___.

How we built it

We started the project back in july 2022 and I decided to build this out with one of my best friends to bring the vision alive. We decided to revamp the website multiple times before achieving the final form.

The app runs on a Node Express server backend and ReactJS front end with smart contracts deployed to Polygon Mumbai testnet.

To make it easy for users who are completely unaware of web3 to use this app, we chose a mechanism to track token balances over a central database and allow users to withdraw the tokens they earn on the platform by specifying the Polygon account address to which the tokens need to be sent over. Our server captures this request and forwards it to a smart contract to mint the ERC20 equivalent tokens and deposit into the specified address. Since our server notifies smart contracts for minting and token transfers, there is no need for the end users to pay the gas fee.

To further scale this approach yet provide a fully decentralized solution, we plan to use Polygon Supernets or Polygon Edge to store user accounts and tokens.

Challenges we ran into

On the user's side we ran into many challenges. Our initial group of users were not even familiar with web3 let alone layer 2 , metamask and wallets. This led us to iterate over our initial prototype multiple times and build out a better approach to onboarding users to web3.

We also faced a lot of challenges to get our initial users to start recommending it to others. We had to make multiple compromises and changes to the landing page , etc to get the concept up and running.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of over 40 signups in the testing phase within the first 15 days of the launch. The average engagement time was 1 min 5 secs. Also a total of 80 articles were published . These metrics though currently really small are a small boost to the confidence in our vision.

We are also very happy to include and push new users to understand web3 and crypto further.

We have started to get some auxiliary sign ups via the users recommending it to their friends.

What we learned

We learnt from our Users that most people would only use the tool if it made a significant difference to their usage workflows. Just making it decentralized , Easy to use isn't enough . We also figured out that users would only respond to incentives when they are deeper into web3. Thus it is even more important for us to push learning about web3 through the platform.

Another thing that we realized is that face to face and word of mouth marketing are much much stronger than any ad campaign and for our initial growth stages we will optimize only word of mouth and invitation based signups.

What's next for TechnologyDAO

Though we are in the pre-alpha stage we plan to release a beta version by the end of September with at least 500 users sign ups and daily active user counts of at least 30-40 and unique monthly active users of 200 users.

We plan to continue building out the whole of technologyDAO with new features , a better more advanced tool and more intuitive UI.

As we continue on the path we hope to meet up with the vision of white paper to decentralize and make AI language models a public good.