Part II

From one-trick pony to big bad wizard - how an offshoot of Ethereum repurposed DAO as the new blockchain economy engine

When we look at myths of indigenous people (all humans are indigenous for once in history), they often started with origin stories of their ancestral deity’s birth as deliverance from chaos. From there on order was created out of that primordial anarchy. Without order, there could be no civilization – such is the canonical history of the gathering of human beings²⁰. Order binds unruly individuals into people, tribes, cities and states – order makes us whole and happy, while chaos breaks us apart into destitute refuges cast adrift in the sea of misery and suffering – so we are told. Human history is full of anecdotes of such statements. Human societies seemed to have evolved from low-structure to high-structure, a phenomenon some attributed to growing orderliness. Order seems to be a good, sought-after attribute in the human society and order in the human society is manifested through its various organizations – governments, religious congregations, corporations, etc.

Economy, on the other hand, seems to be growing in the other direction – disorderliness is the norm, and the natural state of development. This seemingly perennial conflict between society and economy had been a central theme as we rummage through human history. Society

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²⁰ This traditional narrative of history’s linear development has been challenged, e.g., The Dawn of Everything.

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wants to rein in economy just like order tries to conquer disorder. Such view, of course, is one- sided. Over the course of its evolution, the sense of order has been gradually gravitating toward the notion of centralization. Our society, through its governing organizations, had long perpetuated an ever tighter control over economy through centralization. The main weapon in the arsenal of centralization is an ingenious human invention – a preordainment of value entity commonly known as money, also called token of value, and by derivative conceptualization, debt and credit. Exerting centralized control over economy with money is like tacking up a horse with reins and bits. The tack is not natural to a horse, as is money to economy. Horse sometimes kicks back.

Blockchain economy is like a free ranging horse, at least that’s what it aspires to be. Yet there is a price to pay for all that freedom. The weapon of blockchain revolution is, of course, decentralization. The problem with decentralization is that we don’t quite understand how it works or operates – it is full of surprises and obstacles in the eyes of a world accustomed to the reign of centralization. A one-trick pony is not going to survive the winter in the wild. She needs to become a big bad wizard.

Fortunately, we are getting there. Armed with Rollups and functionality parallelism, Metis DAO is setting out on a journey to a bigger, freer future of blockchain economy. Previous generation of blockchain applications are like one-trick ponies; now Metis DAO, the new big bad wizard in town, is building up the blockchain economy to a massively expanded version called DAC economy.

Metis DAO’s new bag of tricks are built on top of a construct called mechanism, which are functionalities in a decentralized environment (or setup). These mechanisms constitute the engine for DAC economy. Let’s dive in to have a closer look.