ETHLocal | Manifesto

7 min readSep 1, 2020

Crypto ❤️ Grassroots

Origin

ETHLocal is the natural development of the premises under which the ETHTurin Hackathon was held by: directing some of the focus of the Ethereum Community towards those Grassroot Movements around the world that are helping re-shape our cities and lifestyles.

As the ETHTurin came to an end in April 2020, it became clear that the Ethereum Community could use a dedicated network to connect with the established associations and coops active in urban and social requalification and circular economy, art collectives, conscious tourism players, permaculture hubs, and integrate their know-how in bootstrapping bottom-up projects with a crypto use case.

Mission

Grassroot communities are restructuring production and society with the same intensity and the same spirit for decentralization the Ethereum and blockchain community are putting in re-organizing the Internet, its governance and funding mechanisms.

By re-discovering traditional paradigms of social organisation (e.g. urban gardens) and improving them with the use of innovative and open-source mechanism designs (e.g. chemical and weather control Arduino units), these players are helping establish new lifestyle paradigms. Unfortunately, sustainability projects around the world are too often limited to the societary and legislation frameworks of their region or country, making it difficult to reach wider pools of adopters and interact with twin initiatives. Thus, their focus ends up being placed entirely on impacting their local communities, while little or none is left to learn and harness the tools that, for example, Blockchain and Ethereum have to offer them in terms of funding, governance and business viability.

ETHLocal contributes to a “local adoption” pace to crypto, by breaking the “mass adoption” agenda into smaller use cases that can feed into pre-existing and self-sustainable social innovation environments.

By balancing on local hubs that have already impacted their territory, we believe Ethereum will be able to strengthen its presence among diverse political environments, each with their own legal frameworks and bureaucratic constraints, test and improve partnerships with local public administrations and institutions.

We find relevant examples of the importance of “going local” in France’s complementary local currencies and Sardinia’s SARDEX, a successful alt-coin project (established as early as 2009) meant to provide a compensation chamber for member-businesses who belonged to the same territory (and share the same offline trust network) in times of high mutual debting.

As a result to these considerations, ETHLocal’s mission articulates itself around five main goals:

A. Develop partnerships, assist OPS and fundraising around projects with a local and sustainability scope

B. Organize and assist Ethereum events with a local Call

C. Empower a healthier financial status for those grassroot initiatives willing to approach
decentralized governance and finance

D. Develop a network of proofs of concept to iterate upon

E. Weave a network of “residences” for the Ethereum Community to discover,
collaborate with and build upon

Holacracy

ETHLocal can be intended as part of a Ethereum wider holacracy, where every player acts upon a principle of self affirmation which is achievable only through the satisfaction of macro, collective purposes.

ETHLocal places itself ideally as a crew-holon bridge between the Ethereum ecosystem and the lifestyle-challenging projects dedicated to spread sustainability awareness and build new sets of know-hows among fiat society players.

ETHLocal Decentralized Flexible Organization (DFO)
and LOCAL Token

ETHLocal’s governance is based on a Decentralized Flexible Organization founded at https://dfohub.com.

The specific DFO structure setup allows ETHLocal to have all the basic features of a DAO without the constraints of a single ownership. It also allows modular micro-services to be applied to its governance system by direct implementation as well as importing from other DFOs.

10,000,000 LOCAL ERC20 Voting Tokens were created, 50% of which are held by ETHLocal DFO Wallet and 50% are kept as circulating supply for grants and genesis airdrops.

LOCAL ERC20 tokens represent the voting power in ETHLocal: new technical and community proposals as well as ETHLocal curated hackathons and events requiring consensus mechanisms will be voted by LOCAL token holders, in proportion to their owned amount.

ETHLocal DFO also allows the creation of sub-DFOs, each with their own voting tokens, that represent individual projects as well as one-time or recurring events like conferences, meetups and hackathons. Existing DFOs can become part of ETHLocal and ETHLocal itself could, theoretically, become a sub-DFO of other DFOs too. The voting power ratio between LOCAL and sub-DFO tokens will be established by a function yet to be agreed upon.

The Fair Inflation Mechanism

(credits: DFOHub and Austin “Khonsu”)

Fair Inflation is a more sustainable economic model for early stage, DFO-based startups to maintain value and fund operations.

A DFO can deploy its governance tokens (Programmable Equities) using a simple and code-free UI dapp frontend easily integrated with Uniswap v2. This framework creates a low barrier of entry in initial funding requirements for new startups and a fair distribution model for prospective token purchasers, investors and community. Combining the (1) Fixed-Inflation Mechanism [Fair Inflation v2] and the (2) Liquidity Staking Mechanism, the DFO business model aims to create a fair and long-term oriented funding and development strategy. These two mechanisms create a win-win financial synergy for developers and investors by providing a basis for all token holders to benefit in the project’s success. Specifically:

(1) Fair Inflation Mechanism relies on regularly-scheduled inflation events (selling to provide a sustainable source of income for the development of a DFO. Developers of a DFO are incentivized to build the project and create value for the DFO, thereby increasing their “paycheck” and supplying them with more resources to work with.

(2) Liquidity Staking Mechanism relies on regularly-scheduled rewards for liquidity-providers to encourage long-term investment in the DFO for prospective investors/community. Incentivizing holders to provide liquidity in long-term contracts establishes “network” security and price stability while offering a dividend-like payment [which can be seen as an offset to impermanent loss for LP]. Because the governance tokens can manage the assets of the DFO (like an on-chain bank) and the grants/proposals system offers a platform for all token holders to direct the project, the combined (1) and (2) mechanisms (DFO Business Model) offer a unique proposition for new types of companies on Ethereum. The flexible structure of the DFO (Double-Proxy System, Microservices) offers users a powerful playground of features for which to structure their organizations; this future-proof upgradability combined with a thriving ecosystem/community of DFOs developing new microservices offers a world of experimentation. [2/2]

Financial Roadmap

(DISCLAIMER: NO INVESTMENT, PURE R&D)

ETHLocal DFO was deployed on the Ethereum Mainnet in early July 2020.

Before September the 21st, 2020 the DFO will proceed to a series of micro steps to prepare the ground for FIT (Fair Inflation Traction) events, including LOCAL token airdrops to our genesis network and the crafting of Liquidity Pools on Uniswap v.2.

With a smart contract based proposal, ETHLocal DFO Wallet will proceed to FIT by progressively inflating the circulating supply of LOCALS for a total of 250.000 during a period of 14 months and splitted in 500 daily inflation events (6.300 Ethereum blocks). This smart contract will inflate the circulating supply of a total of 250.000 LOCAL in a year and a half.

The funds will be both inflated into the three different Uniswap Pools and locked to reward liquidity pool providers.

30% Uniswap V2 ETH/LOCAL (75.000 LOCAL)

30% Uniswap V2 DAI/LOCAL (75.000 LOCAL)

10% Uniswap V2 BUIDL/LOCAL (25.000 LOCAL)

30% Rewards for Liquidity Providers (75.000 LOCAL).

During every selling event, the circulating supply of LOCAL will increase by 500 LOCAL and will be split into

30% Uniswap V2 ETH/LOCAL (150 LOCAL)

30% Uniswap V2 DAI/LOCAL (150 LOCAL)

10% Uniswap V2 BUIDL/LOCAL (50 LOCAL)

30 Rewards for Liquidity Providers (150 LOCAL).

Grants and Citadels

By the end of 2020 / beginning of 2021 ETHLocal will launch a first round of quadratic funding-based grants to support Citadels who will have gained support by the Ethereum community. Citadels (grassroot community projects willing to explore and integrate crypto in their models) will be listed on a dedicated page at ethlocal.co and updated constantly. The network they will constitute will hopefully also provide residency opportunities for the Ethereum community to discover and iterate upon, as pointed out in goal E.

We are very excited to start this journey and we hope that our efforts will result in use cases and POC that can inspire and support a new wave of Ethereum projects. To keep in sync with future updates, join our Discord Server.