Introducing the World’s 1st Hardware DAO!

SpiderDAO
3 min readNov 13, 2020

Even though today is Friday the 13th, we believe that introducing the world’s first hardware DAO is more important than an age-old superstition. By combining on and off-chain consensus mechanisms, SpiderDAO seeks to address the existing vulnerabilities in traditional governance systems.

Like many in the crypto community, we believe that Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) have enormous potential and we feel that the SpiderDAO hardware-based model presents a unique and innovative solution to some of the biggest challenges facing wider DAO adoption.

DAOs operate on a set of programmed rules that are established through decentralised consensus and governed by community participation without a central point of authority. With no bureaucracy, DAOs are an efficient and effective way of running an organisation. If correctly set up a DAO can, in principle, run with limited human intervention.

Problems with DAOs

Unfortunately, the last few years of experimenting with DAOs revealed vital vulnerabilities. We can even go as far as to say that the current permissionless model is fundamentally hostile to fair governance.

In most DAOs, holding a governance token is the only requirement for voting meaning that the utility of voting rights is tied solely to the governance token. This presents a weakness as most tokens can be easily acquired on an exchange, creating an opportunity for whales and bad actors alike to accumulate disproportionate voting power. Systems that are controlled by people of great wealth are antithetical to the ethos of the crypto community.

Other attack vectors can be deployed to manipulate voting and undermine DAO governance, including smart contract vote-buying, using trusted hardware for remote attestations, and dark DAOs.

SpiderDAO Solution

To unlock the full potential of decentralised governance, we made changes to improve the traditional DAO concept.

SpiderDAO is a next-generation DAO that bundles hardware and software tools to effectively create a whale-resistant governance solution. Our model shifts voting power away from token holders to hardware owners, where one validated router equals one vote. Additionally, blockchain-based router tracking ensures that hoarding of devices is instantaneously detected by the network and ‘fake’ routers are locked out of the network.

SpiderDAO will be underpinned by the Polkadot governance mechanism, allowing us to combine on-chain and off-chain governance tools. Polkadot is on track to deliver the most robust platform for security, scalability and innovation. SpiderDAO has identified the Polkadot network as the perfect platform to fit our needs. We aim to bring a new standard of fairness to existing DAO frameworks by bundling multi-layered hardware and software tools on top of Polkadot.

SpiderDAO Ecosystem

A fair, resilient, secure and robust DAO will be the foundation block of the SpiderDAO ecosystem. Stay tuned for our introductions of the Spider token (SPDR) and SpiderVPN, both crucial elements of the Spider ecosystem, coming with their own utility. These components will help us fulfil the SpiderDAO’s vision of bringing uncompromising privacy to the end-user, in a fair and transparent fashion.

We will be sharing more information about the project in due course, including details of our private sale. In the meantime, head over to our Website and join our community on Telegram.

Some additional materials for your perusal:

Welcome to the SpiderDAO community!

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SpiderDAO

SpiderDAO is the industry’s first hardware-enabled DAO that bundles multi-layered hardware and software tools on top of Polkadot. https://spiderdao.io