Swarm City Association

Membership is now open

Three years ago, we created Swarm City intending to build the infrastructure for decentralized marketplaces. Besides, we wanted to showcase how this works best by creating a decentralized Uber on top of the platform.

Today we accomplished 90% of the platform, but as much as we try, we cannot build a fully decentralized solution with today’s state of the blockchain and its tools.

In 2017 we lost our funding due to a hack of our state of the art Multisig Wallet. We continued working on the platform with a small amount of funding we had left and also using the Swarm City Tokens we had allocated to ourselves during the sale as well as some personal funds. In 2019 our funds finally ran out, and only Kingflurkel continued to build. But as mentioned, the tools we have at hand are either not working to the extent we need it or are not decentralized.

Also, in 2019 we finally created an entity in Switzerland. The Swarm City Association. An association is an organization that is run by its members. Every decision made is based on a vote by the members. We see this as a perfect step into creating a DAO while already protecting the brand and the people running the Organisation.

A system which is adopted by a few more organizations such as Commonsstack.org or DAppNode.io

In 2020 it is time to get members into the association and use the organization to make Swarm City a working product. As I am the only Board member left, I will set the first rules for membership, and once we have a few members, we can vote on these rules and any other topic altogether.

Here is my plan:

• Membership is open to any person.
• Applications can be made by using this Form: Swarm City Association Membership Application
• The membership fee is at least 500 USD to be paid in crypto per year (12 months from the time you join). You can choose to contribute more.
• The money collected will be used for fixed costs (Servers and URL) and mainly for finishing to build swarm city.
• Members will vote on the prioritization of what should be built and on the funding for building the topic.

Governance is one of the toughest topics to define. Starting, I would like to try the following voting/signaling mechanism.

For every USD contributed in crypto as membership, the member receives an equivalent amount of voting tokens.

For each vote, the member can stake/lock up his tokens in a voting contract. The longer the tokens are locked up, the more weight the vote gets. This concept is called conviction voting and is being built by the commons stack association. It is untested so far, but I like to try it.

Membership applications are now open. I look forward to receiving yours.

About the Author:
I am a former Advisory Board Member of the Ethereum Foundation, the CEO of Old School GmbH, Co-founder of AVADO and president of the Swarm City Association.

If you like my posts, please feel free to follow me here or on Twitter or LinkedIn.