End to End Tutorial Debut | Incubator WEEKLY
Dash Incubator discusses their DAO proposal narrowly failing, explains how the voting and CrowdNode systems work, and previews a new end-to-end dev tutorial
Episode Description
Dash Incubator discusses their DAO proposal narrowly failing to pass, explains how the voting and CrowdNode systems work, and previews a new end-to-end developer tutorial.
Episode Summary
This episode of Incubator Weekly opens with the significant news that Rion Gull's Dash Incubator proposal narrowly failed to reach the required voting threshold, falling just 20 votes short at the time of the snapshot. Rion walks through the mechanics of Dash's DAO governance system, explaining how masternode owners vote on budget proposals and how the 10% net-yes threshold creates a high bar for funding. He gives particular attention to CrowdNode, a service that aggregates smaller Dash holders' votes and amplifies them through its approximately 111 masternodes, showing how a shift in CrowdNode sentiment contributed meaningfully to the proposal's failure. The discussion turns to what the missed funding means for the incubator's runway and operations, and Rion explains his broader strategy of building lightweight JavaScript tooling for Dash Platform to replace the oversized existing SDK, arguing this work is essential for attracting web developers even if it lacks the visibility voters want. Anthony Campolo then walks through his newly published end-to-end tutorial for Dash Platform, designed to lower the barrier for traditional web developers by covering every setup step, using modern JavaScript syntax, and culminating in a basic full-stack application. The episode closes with plans to bring guest developers through the tutorial live and a call for more community feedback on what the incubator should prioritize.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Proposal Failure and DAO Governance Explained
The episode opens with the news that Rion's Dash Incubator proposal did not pass the monthly funding vote, falling just short of the required threshold. Rion explains the fundamentals of Dash's decentralized autonomous organization, where masternode operators holding 1,000 Dash each get one vote on budget proposals. Anthony draws comparisons to government budget processes, and they discuss how the 10% net-yes requirement creates a supermajority standard that is deliberately hard to meet.
Rion walks through the specific numbers on DashCentral and MNO Watch, showing that the incubator received over 430 yes votes but was offset by 112 no votes, landing at a net of 320 against a required 340. He addresses the limited feedback received from voters, noting the perennial challenge in DAOs where participants vote without explaining their reasoning, leaving proposal owners to infer what the market values. The total monthly budget of 8,500 Dash is also discussed, with the majority going to Dash Core Group.
00:05:31 - CrowdNode's Amplification Effect on Voting
Rion introduces MNO Watch's CrowdNode tab to illustrate a less understood aspect of Dash governance. CrowdNode allows smaller holders to pool their Dash and participate in voting through a delegated system, currently controlling around 111 masternodes worth of votes. He shows that on the CrowdNode platform specifically, two-thirds of participating voters opposed the incubator proposal, a notable reversal from the historically positive CrowdNode sentiment toward the incubator.
The discussion highlights how CrowdNode creates an amplification effect where a relatively small number of individual voters can swing outcomes significantly because their preferences are projected across many masternodes. Rion emphasizes he is describing the mechanics objectively rather than complaining, and both hosts invite community members, especially those who voted no or abstained, to share feedback on what they would like the incubator to build. They acknowledge the inherent difficulty of gathering qualitative input in a system designed around binary voting.
00:12:56 - Impact on Operations and SDK Strategy
Turning to practical consequences, Rion reviews the incubator's reserve planning, explaining they have a financial buffer but will need to scale down operations for the quarter. He then lays out his broader strategic vision, centered on the Dash SDK problem. The current JavaScript SDK is an unwieldy download exceeding ten megabytes, which Rion argues is unsuitable for attracting web developers. The incubator has been building lightweight, modular libraries from scratch to provide a better developer experience for both Dash payments and Platform interactions.
Rion makes the case that this lower-level tooling work, while invisible to most voters, is critical for Dash Platform's success at mainnet launch. He and Anthony discuss how the current tooling gap would become painfully obvious once Platform goes live, and how competing platforms backed by venture capital offer far superior developer experiences. The quarter's priorities include completing AJ's JavaScript CoinJoin implementation and continuing to build out tools that make Dash accessible to mainstream web developers.
00:28:45 - Strategy Discussion and Developer Incentives
The conversation shifts to the broader question of how Dash should attract developers to build on its platform. Rion argues that simply launching Platform and expecting developers to arrive organically is unrealistic given the competition from well-funded Web2 and Web3 ecosystems. He advocates for active incentivization and wants to incorporate DAO proposal writing directly into incubator tools so new developers can learn the full governance process alongside technical skills.
Anthony emphasizes that both he and Rion take the funding responsibility seriously and are committed to delivering real value. They discuss the tension between building foundational infrastructure that voters cannot easily see and producing more visible, user-facing products. Both hosts repeatedly call for community feedback, acknowledging that the internet culture of lurking makes it difficult to get substantive input but stressing that even a single detailed response could help guide their priorities.
00:40:28 - End-to-End Tutorial Walkthrough
Anthony presents his newly published tutorial for Dash Platform, drawing on his experience writing beginner-friendly technical content. The tutorial is approximately 4,000 words and covers everything from initializing a Node project with proper ESM configuration through creating wallets, identities, and names, to working with contracts and documents. He highlights how it differs from the official documentation by including every intermediary setup step, using modern JavaScript syntax with imports and async/await, and organizing concepts into clear logical groups.
The tutorial culminates in a basic full-stack application using Express on the backend and a simple frontend, demonstrating how to implement a name-lookup endpoint. Anthony explains he intentionally kept it at a manageable length rather than building out every possible endpoint, with plans to publish a more comprehensive version soon. Rion outlines his vision to use this tutorial as a tool for onboarding guest developers in live-streamed pair programming sessions, testing whether newcomers with no Dash experience can follow along and identifying friction points in the developer journey.
00:53:00 - Closing Reflections and Next Steps
The hosts wrap up with final thoughts on what they learned from the episode's discussion. Anthony reflects that despite working within the Dash ecosystem, he had not previously engaged deeply with the DAO mechanics and finds the transparency of the process valuable. He frames the proposal setback as a healthy forcing function that compels the team to articulate the value of their work and seek genuine dialogue with stakeholders.
Rion echoes the sentiment, and both agree the path forward involves making a stronger public case for the incubator's contributions while actively seeking community input on priorities. They note the episode ran longer than planned due to the depth of the governance discussion and thank viewers for tuning in, signing off with a promise to continue the conversation in future episodes.
Transcript
[00:00:00.14] - Anthony Campolo We are live.
[00:00:02.17] - Rion Gull All right, welcome everyone.
[00:00:04.26] - Anthony Campolo Hello.
[00:00:05.11] - Rion Gull Anthony was in too good of a mood this morning for what happened yesterday.
[00:00:12.00] - Anthony Campolo I know. I woke up and I was like, I'm feeling good. I got more energy than last week and got my tutorial published. We're talking about the tutorial. And then Rion's like, "Guess what? We're all fired, guys."
[00:00:24.26] - Rion Gull Well, I don't mean to make light by laughing, but yes, that is what happened, but not to that degree. So I did want to discuss what happened at the beginning of the call today because it's a bit of a significant event in Incubator's history, and I think it bears going over and just giving my thoughts on why I think this happened.
[00:00:57.20] - Anthony Campolo It's very instructive. It's very instructive of the inner workings of what a DAO is. People talk about DAOs a lot. Not many people actually do DAOs. So this is a good example of what the reality of DAOs actually are.
[00:01:10.05] - Rion Gull Yeah, exactly. So it's firsthand experience, and I will go through how it works. Let me go ahead and share my screen. What I'm referring to is we have an incubator, we have a proposal, and I'll just go high level.
[00:01:36.13] - Anthony Campolo Just real quick, this is dashcentral.org/budget if someone else wanted to view this.
[00:01:42.25] - Rion Gull Yeah, I'll talk about this in broad general terms so that somebody even outside of our little bubble could maybe understand it a little bit in case we wanted to share it with other people. This is how it works in Dash: we have a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. I don't really like the term. We have an organization that is basically free to join, free as in freedom, not necessarily free as in free beer. Anybody can participate, and we would love to have more participation. Everybody who wants to participate can put forth proposals, and sometimes those proposals are voted on by our masternode owners, the node operators that have 1,000 Dash, and they each get one vote. So if you have 1,000 Dash, you're able to set up a masternode and vote on proposals. There are about 3,000-something, something between 3 and 4,000 depending on when you're talking about nodes on the network.
[00:02:55.05] - Anthony Campolo And can I draw a comparison here, and you can tell me whether you think this is a useful comparison or not? You can kind of think of this like a government that has been implemented in code, and these are quote-unquote laws that are being put forward and voted on by the legislative body. Is that one way to think about it?
[00:03:16.07] - Rion Gull Yeah, or more specifically budget proposals, to some degree.
[00:03:21.14] - Anthony Campolo So they always have all these battles about funding the government and things that get put in. People have to vote whether to fund these things, and now the government has these trillions and trillions of dollars of debt. So this is one way you can think about this, as budget proposals for the Dash organization.
[00:03:36.09] - Rion Gull Yeah, like bills and stuff. The only distinction I would make there is that I consider DAOs, and specifically Dash, completely different than a government in the sense that it is voluntary. It's a free-market government, a voluntary government. Nobody's forced to participate in this, both on the investor side and on the proposal side. So everything's voluntary. There's no taxation involved here.
[00:04:06.29] - Anthony Campolo And there's no threat that if you don't fund the bill, then we're not going to have money to defend ourselves from the invading Bitcoiners.
[00:04:14.29] - Rion Gull Yeah, something like that. But anyway, to get down into a little bit more of the details, these are the proposals that were on the network this month. The vote happens every month, and these are the proposals that were active this month. Some of them were submitted as multi-month proposals and some were submitted as single-month proposals. If they're multi-month proposals, then they're active and live for a while. We'll talk about this for probably about 25 minutes, just so everybody kind of knows, because I think it's an important thing to discuss. Right here is our Dash Incubator proposal. As you can see, we got very close to the finish line, and right now we're eight votes shy.
[00:05:04.24] - Anthony Campolo How many votes is that? You said we're eight shy. How many votes are for it?
[00:05:10.00] - Rion Gull I'll talk about that when I look at the next tab. But the way that it works is you have a passing criteria where 10% of the active enabled nodes are required to pass the proposal, and it's a net number. So it's yes votes minus no votes, and that has to be greater than 10% of the total nodes. So just for round numbers, let's say there were 3,000 nodes. That would mean you'd need 300 net yes votes, yes votes minus no votes, in order to pass. We were close to that. We only needed, I think, 20 at the time, and now 8. So some votes have come in after the snapshot.
[00:06:06.03] - Anthony Campolo But can any, can any more votes come in or is it cut off
[00:06:09.04] - Rion Gull at this point? So the votes carry through to the next month. This is a three-month proposal. You can see here three months remaining. That's not completely valid now. It should be two months remaining now, but because we didn't get funded, it shows three months remaining. There are only two of the three months that can now get funded for the incubator, for my portion of the incubator. We have another one of our strategists, Mikhail. His actually passed on the previous page. You saw that. This one did not pass, and I wanted to talk a little bit about it. I'll just scan through my proposal in case anybody hasn't read it yet and is looking at this. There was something unique that happened with this proposal that I don't think has really been seen in the past for the CrowdNode side, and I'll get into that in a little bit. I did want to give my debrief on why I think it didn't pass, though, and I want to address some of the feedback that I got.
[00:07:30.16] - Rion Gull I didn't get a lot, so there's not much to work with. This first question from Quizzy, "Why are Ash and Tim not requesting funds," doesn't have anything to do with this, that's just a question. The only concrete criticism I got on the proposal itself was right here from Lysergic: "Honestly, it's still too much for what we get out of your side of things. I will delve into what we got out of your side of things in the coming week or so and report back. But apart from the web wallet and a bunch of videos, not much comes to mind. Abstaining. Leaning to no for this for now." Then I gave my comment here, and I'll kind of expound on that a little bit by talking about my overall strategy.
[00:08:15.02] - Anthony Campolo Before you talk about your overall strategy, though, could I ask, just this person specifically, what do you think it is that they're wanting that is not being provided or planned? Maybe you don't know this person specifically, but do you have an idea of why they would say that was the type of thing they were looking for?
[00:08:36.29] - Rion Gull Yeah. And also as a preview of what we're going to talk about, we're not going to talk about this the whole time. We're going to talk about this for another maybe 15 minutes, and then afterwards we're going to go into your tutorial. That's the main meat of this thing. But I did want to talk about this, since it's never happened before. I want to be on record talking about what I think happened.
[00:08:58.18] - Anthony Campolo It's interesting to me, and I want to learn more about it. So that's also why I'm interjecting the questions here.
[00:09:04.25] - Rion Gull Well, as I've talked with AJ and with JoJo and maybe even other people, a lot of people in the incubator don't really even know these inner workings of how they're funded. So it's good for me to have a video for them. They can see, if nobody else, at least the people who have been and potentially will be in the future working with the incubator. This is kind of how things work. Just to answer your question before, again, 443 yes votes, 112 no votes, 0 abstain.
[00:09:38.05] - Anthony Campolo Okay, so that's interesting. Let me break this back to, usually if you think about the government, it's like 50-50 and someone gets 51% of the vote, then it goes over. We need over 80% of the vote for this to pass.
[00:09:51.02] - Rion Gull Yeah, you really need a pretty strong supermajority in order to pass these things. It will make even more sense in the next tab.
[00:09:59.26] - Anthony Campolo It kind of makes sense, though, because it's taking the idea of a democracy and making it much stronger. It's like we need a very strong majority, so you can't have the tyranny of the majority when just 51% is the majority. This actually makes sense, how we ended up with this kind of criteria.
[00:10:17.17] - Rion Gull Yeah, I don't disagree with the criteria. I think it's a little strong. It's really hard to get funded, but I think that's kind of on purpose.
[00:10:28.06] - Anthony Campolo Because you don't want to end up in a crapload of debt like the U.S. government.
[00:10:32.01] - Rion Gull Yeah. And although we don't fund through debt necessarily, we fund through equity, if you want to use those terms.
[00:10:37.24] - Anthony Campolo Well, you would dilute it. If you were putting out more and more Dash to people for doing no real work, then Dash is devalued. It's inflationary.
[00:10:45.16] - Rion Gull Yeah, and that's another longer discussion as well.
[00:10:48.17] - Anthony Campolo Like, there's that.
[00:10:49.05] - Rion Gull We could have a whole episode on that alone, actually.
[00:10:51.14] - Anthony Campolo Yeah.
[00:10:51.27] - Rion Gull Let me get into this next tab. It's a little more interesting. Let me back up here. This is mnowatch.org, a great site, and this shows it in a tabular form, what the proposals were at the time of the snapshot. You can see this final snapshot. This is a snapshot of when the month ended. It's actually a block number that it ends on, not calendar time, it's block time. There's a voting block that's three days. I don't remember exactly how many blocks, but it's something close to three days before the actual superblock payout is when the voting ends. So that's, again, high-level how that works here. You can see Lysergic is that same person who was commenting on Dash Central. He has a proposal himself for a measly 1 Dash to host this site, which is an incredibly useful site. So that's just kind of a nice little bit of trivia there.
[00:12:10.05] - Anthony Campolo But I'd like to get that person on Incubator Weekly if possible. If you're out there watching, we'd love to talk.
[00:12:17.08] - Rion Gull Yeah, they've been on our show. Not on Incubator Weekly, but they've been on. They spoke at the [unclear]. Anyway, it would be cool. But just to back up again about why I think it didn't pass, basically it always boils down to the juice isn't worth the squeeze, right? The juice, in our case, is the stuff that we're building in the incubator, at least my corner of the incubator that we're trying to accomplish, and not enough people thought it was valuable. So I wanted to talk about what it is that we're actually doing and why I think it's important.
[00:12:56.26] - Anthony Campolo That's also why I would be curious. What do they think is valuable? I don't think you can necessarily answer that because you're not them, you know.
[00:13:04.21] - Rion Gull Yeah, this is the problem in every DAO. You don't really get a lot of feedback. People just kind of vote, and their votes do the talking. So it's up to people like me and people like you and anybody that's working in the incubator to try to assess what people value. This is a challenge that every entrepreneur faces. Every entrepreneur has to judge what his market is and what people are willing to pay for or vote for. In this case, vote for, but it's also to pay for. It's kind of one and the same thing. We weren't the only proposal that didn't pass, by the way. You can see all these other proposals didn't pass as well.
[00:13:43.16] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, it looked like about half were passing versus failing, and there were like 20 or so when I was just looking at you scrolling. I don't know if that's exactly accurate, but that seemed like the general gist.
[00:13:53.20] - Rion Gull Yeah, and there was a lot of funds left over, so it wasn't like this was a competitive bid in the sense that you're actually against other proposals.
[00:14:02.28] - Anthony Campolo So the budget was for 8,500 Dash?
[00:14:07.27] - Rion Gull Yes, 8,500 Dash total in the total budget.
[00:14:12.04] - Anthony Campolo Okay, so that's about a quarter million if you go at 30 Dash.
[00:14:16.16] - Rion Gull Yeah. So a lot of money. Most of it goes to Dash Core Group.
[00:14:22.00] - Anthony Campolo How much went to Dash Core Group?
[00:14:23.17] - Rion Gull So here you got 5,112, and then here's another supplemental. It's actually closer to 70 or 80% that's going to them. So whether that's decentralized or not, make your own judgment there. We were asking for 800, and yeah, we just came up shy. That's kind of how it works. Here are the actual numbers. The required votes to pass is 340, and what that means is...
[00:14:59.09] - Anthony Campolo We had over 400.
[00:15:00.22] - Rion Gull There are 3,400 nodes approximately, depending on the rounding, 3,400 nodes total. You need 10% of that as a net yes, and the net yes is what he calls absolute yes. It's yes minus no. So we came in here at 320 right now, and the required was 340.
[00:15:26.03] - Anthony Campolo So we were the very highest that did not pass.
[00:15:29.14] - Rion Gull Yes.
[00:15:30.08] - Anthony Campolo Yeah.
[00:15:30.20] - Rion Gull Okay.
[00:15:31.14] - Anthony Campolo Yep. And another question real quick, before you keep going. In terms of Dash Platform versus not Dash Platform, in what sense is that being represented here? Is Dash Core also working on Dash Platform, or is that separate?
[00:15:50.01] - Rion Gull Yes, it's together, unfortunately. I would love to have seen them separate, but that's not how they chose to make their proposals. So this sum of 5,112 plus 1,156 goes to fund the core operations as well as platform. Those are our two main value propositions: core for payments and platform for data storage and potentially execution in the future, like cloud services. Those are our two things. They're essentially built by the same corporation. It is a traditional corporation.
[00:16:31.05] - Anthony Campolo Where is it registered?
[00:16:34.19] - Rion Gull I don't know. Probably Delaware, like most other companies are. I don't know for sure, but there's a pretty extensive ownership structure, and that's a whole other discussion. Another interesting thing about CrowdNode, about the MNO Watch site, is this other tab called mnowatch.org/crowdnodewatch. I wanted to talk about this because I don't think anybody has talked about it yet, and it would be good to show this part of the inner workings of this Dash DAO. Again, you need 1,000 Dash to have a vote in Dash, and that's true, period. However, there is a service called CrowdNode where you can send any amount of Dash, I think from 0.5 up, so just call it 1 Dash. If you have 1 Dash, you can send your Dash to CrowdNode, and then CrowdNode combines all of those small amounts of Dash. They also run masternodes that get votes, and by default, I think, and somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, the default is what's called a delegation.
[00:18:02.04] - Rion Gull So they vote based on who votes in their platform. They have basically a SQL server running that collects votes from all these small fish, and then they make their actual votes using the masternodes they're running. They're currently running, I would guess, at least 111 or possibly 110 or something like that nodes on their platform, because they have 111,927 Dash on their platform. It's quite a bit when you consider that 111 actual votes are coming from CrowdNode. If you look back on this page, 111 votes is a significant portion of the people who actually vote. If you sum up the votes on ours, 432 yes and 112 no, that's a total of 544 votes. Then there at the top here, you probably have something closer to 600, over 600. So between 400 and 600 votes in a typical month. If 112 of those are coming from CrowdNode, that's a significant portion, and that can actually be very influential in the final votes.
[00:19:42.02] - Rion Gull In the final votes, because they do vote with all of their nodes, and they vote in proportion to how the accounts on their system vote. Just to make it more concrete, for my Dash Incubator proposal, we had 33.76% of the votes saying yes on the CrowdNode platform and 66.24% saying no. This is actually quite different from the historical trend. Historically, my proposals have been positive on CrowdNode. This is all to say that if you look at the details of these votes, you can see who's voting. These are all the individual accounts on CrowdNode. There are a lot of them. I won't go through them all, but there are 2,859 total.
[00:21:02.13] - Anthony Campolo A lot of those are all zero.
[00:21:03.21] - Rion Gull A lot of these are zeros. If I scrolled up to where there's balance, here are very small balances. That's just garbage, basically. Maybe I'll scroll up until I get at least 1 Dash.
[00:21:28.01] - Anthony Campolo So it looks like the top, like, what, 800?
[00:21:32.13] - Rion Gull Maybe a thousand. Just give it a nice round number. There are probably a thousand accounts that have some meaningful amount. But the top, I would guess, let's see, 100 are the most important, going down to 309. It's a pretty good distribution. But not all of these people vote. You can see this column, there are a bunch of zeros. You could get a 158 here and there. Most of these accounts aren't voting, but some of them are. Just to give you an idea, let's look at this top one. This person made two votes this period, neither of them on ours. So that person made 43 votes, but none in this particular quarter. I'll just keep going down until I find one with the incubator. I don't think that has one. So here's the first one that we see votes for the incubator, and this one happens to be a yes for both Mikhail and mine. I don't remember which one that was. Let me see. Was it this one? No, that's the one it was.
[00:23:04.26] - Rion Gull I lost it again.
[00:23:07.05] - Anthony Campolo Anyway, it was the one with 217. Okay.
[00:23:12.27] - Rion Gull At any rate, if you scroll down here, you'll start to see some noes coming up for the incubator. Here's one, and there are several. So just to finish the discussion about how this works, because I think it's important to our DAO in general...
[00:23:34.27] - Anthony Campolo [unclear]
[00:23:35.05] - Rion Gull To make a nice easy number for the math, say that they had 120 votes instead of 112 or whatever it was. That means that, for this proportion, about two-thirds, about 80 no votes came in and 40 yes votes came in, for a net negative 40 votes or something like that. I think the actual number was 37. Outside of CrowdNode, this would have only had an effect of negative 4 votes. But because it was in CrowdNode, it has this amplification factor that shows you that basically, if you have an amplification factor of 10, that means like 10% of people are voting. The details might be a little bit more nuanced than that, but essentially you end up with far more voting weight in CrowdNode because of this amplification factor. That's a significant part of why our proposal failed this time, that a few people on CrowdNode were not satisfied. And I'm not complaining about that, I'm just describing it objectively because I think it's important that people know how this works.
[00:25:13.16] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, this is why I'll be curious, for these people who aren't voting, what would they see as a worthwhile thing worth funding? Not necessarily that we'll build exactly what they ask for, but we want to know. I'd be really curious, in general, for people who do put their money into this, because they have skin in the game. So for people who have skin in the game, I'd be really curious what their thoughts are. I welcome any feedback from people out there.
[00:25:43.24] - Rion Gull Yeah. This is a blunt tool to work with, our DAO. We want to keep it simple because we don't want to code a lot of edge cases into the core protocol. Those can be handled at different layers, and this CrowdNode layer is one of those layers above the actual DAO. It is what it is.
[00:26:06.11] - Anthony Campolo [unclear]
[00:26:06.25] - Rion Gull This has worked for us in the past, and it worked against us this time. So it's not good or bad, I just want to describe the process and how it works. But getting beyond that process, I know we could spend an hour talking about just that alone. I want to now talk about what the missed funding for this quarter means for us going forward. This is our reserve planning tab, and this is April. This current reserve is a little outdated. It will be lower than this. It already is lower than this, and it will be even lower than this once we make some payments. It'll probably be closer to 1,000 or a little bit less than that.
[00:27:01.01] - Anthony Campolo So if I'm understanding correctly, the reserve is because we already have money in the bank that is separate from the funding we're getting?
[00:27:09.06] - Rion Gull Yeah, yeah. We have a reserve of [unclear] according to this time snapshot, basically.
[00:27:15.18] - Anthony Campolo So people who are currently being paid aren't going to be totally SOL in this next month.
[00:27:22.09] - Rion Gull Yeah, I mean, we have a buffer, right? We have a buffer. We have a buffer to some degree.
[00:27:26.28] - Anthony Campolo That's great.
[00:27:28.21] - Rion Gull So our budget request was 800 Dash. We did not get that, so I'm gonna just type in zero here. We won't get that this quarter. Why is it? I must be...
[00:27:40.21] - Anthony Campolo But we won't get that this quarter, but we're going to have a chance to basically repropose in a month? Is that what I'm gathering here?
[00:27:49.26] - Rion Gull Yeah. Oh, it's because I'm not signed in. Ah, dang it. I wonder if this will... I'm gonna open this on... Yeah, never mind. I'll go back.
[00:28:10.20] - Anthony Campolo Just make a note for later.
[00:28:12.15] - Rion Gull I'll make a note for later. But yeah, maybe I'll go over that. Essentially, it means we have less runway to work with, and we're going to have to scale down our operations a little bit. That's, I guess, what people want. I'm not sure if people want us to scale down as much as they want us to build stuff that they want to see, but I don't really know what people want above what we're doing. So I actually do want to talk about that. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:28:45.13] - Anthony Campolo Okay, so you're good for going a couple more minutes? I was just going to use the bathroom real quick, if that's okay.
[00:28:50.13] - Rion Gull Oh yeah, go ahead. I'll keep talking. I'll talk about my strategy going forward, or actually the strategy that I'm working on. So right now, and I'll use this page again that I've used in the past, this is kind of the summary of why we're doing a lot of the low-level things that we're doing in the incubator. This is kind of one way to look at it. This is the Dash SDK. I've talked about this before, but I want to emphasize it again because it seems like people don't understand why we're doing what we're doing. This is the Dash SDK. If you back up and you talk about platform, Dash has two main products besides platform. We have the payments chain and we have the platform. The whole thing we've been building for eight years or so, the whole idea, it started because we wanted usernames on Dash to be able to map payment addresses to usernames. That's what got it started. But what it's morphed into, what we've been putting a lot of eggs into with this Dash Platform basket...
[00:30:12.07] - Rion Gull The whole reason is we decided that we wanted a general-purpose platform where people could store data of all kinds. One of the main entry points to using Dash Platform is web applications. So when somebody wants to set up a data contract on Dash Platform, they're going to have to use a library to interface with Dash Platform. What DCG is currently building is a Rust-based library that will eventually be wrapped by other environments. So you might have a JavaScript SDK that essentially wraps the Rust library.
[00:31:10.27] - Anthony Campolo And that is what we have, right? That's the one that I've been using this whole time, correct?
[00:31:15.12] - Rion Gull No, well, not exactly. What we have right now is a JavaScript SDK, and that's old tech.
[00:31:26.18] - Anthony Campolo There's a new Rust library that's separate.
[00:31:28.23] - Rion Gull There's a new thing, a new plan going forward. But I want to talk about what we currently have right now, because that new Rust wrapper thing is not going to happen for probably a year, I would guess. So what we're going to have at...
[00:31:41.14] - Anthony Campolo launch, and the idea is for mainnet to be launched before that is ready, and that's going to include all the stuff I've been building with, I believe.
[00:31:50.00] - Rion Gull I believe so. I'm not sure on the timeline from DCG's side. But what we've had in the past is this Dash SDK. It's a bundled JavaScript library, and it's ginormous. To me, this is not something that I can approach web developers with.
[00:32:11.14] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, the way I've gotten around this in the tutorial is that we use this server-side. Basically you're deploying a Node server that uses this library, and then you can interface with that through API calls, and you don't necessarily need to ship this whole freaking thing to the client. That's at least the way I've handled it.
[00:32:31.10] - Rion Gull Yeah, that's better. I think that's pretty much the best way to use it in its current state. But I would like to have tools that don't have to rely on...
[00:32:46.26] - Anthony Campolo a...
[00:32:47.10] - Rion Gull 10-plus megabyte download. This is one of the things that we're working on, trying to get a better interface to Platform than using this. How we've done that is we've taken the very low-level libraries and built them from scratch essentially to make them very small and performant and compatible in both browsers and Node. We're building these libraries. To bring it back to why we got defunded, I think a lot of people don't see the products because we're building lower-level stuff that they don't interface with. It's not like this sexy front-end thing that...
[00:33:45.03] - Anthony Campolo But Dash Core is not necessarily super visible either with what they're building.
[00:33:49.29] - Rion Gull Yeah, I get that. But people kind of understand that. So that is part of the issue, that we're building things people don't really see. But why we're doing it is I really want to give Dash Platform the best shot we can give it in terms of actual organic use. The only way that I see that is to make the SDK, which is the touchpoint that application developers will use for 99% of applications. We have some applications that won't necessarily be web applications, like our mobile app.
[00:34:40.05] - Anthony Campolo Do you think that maybe part of the issue is that this isn't on mainnet yet, and that once Dash Platform were on mainnet people would feel the pain of not being able to actually develop a real front-end JavaScript thing with it?
[00:34:56.02] - Rion Gull Yes, I actually fully believe that. I think that if we went to mainnet right now and people had the tooling that is available to them right...
[00:35:04.05] - Anthony Campolo now, they'd be like, "Holy crap."
[00:35:07.23] - Rion Gull Yeah, we would not find a lot of interest. This has been my concern for over a year. This is why we started doing what we're doing. Because I want our two core value propositions, I want excellent tooling for payments, including merchant tooling and payment tooling that we've spent...
[00:35:32.26] - Anthony Campolo I know your whole spiel now. I could give it.
[00:35:35.10] - Rion Gull Yeah, the payment side is just core blockchain, like core layer-one blockchain interactions and libraries and tools. That's one issue. Then the separate issue is platform. Because when we approach Web2 developers and we say, "Hey, Dash is ready to go. You can use this for storage, payments, authentication," I want that to have the best first impression that we can give. I don't think this is a good first impression. That is, I guess, the main pitch that I would make.
[00:36:20.06] - Anthony Campolo It went up since last version.
[00:36:22.25] - Rion Gull Yeah, it did. It went up, actually.
[00:36:26.06] - Anthony Campolo No bueno.
[00:36:27.17] - Rion Gull So in terms of the next quarter, what I plan to do this coming quarter, despite the fact that we have not gotten this funding and we won't have a lot to work with, I do want to keep moving forward and try to regain the trust of people. Try to do some more user-interfacing stuff so that people can see the value that we're bringing. One of the big things we've been doing through April is AJ has been working on a CoinJoin implementation in JavaScript. Again, that's part of one of those tooling things. We want it to be very easy for applications to use CoinJoin. This is one of our main features and what distinguishes Dash.
[00:37:17.25] - Anthony Campolo CoinJoin being a way to anonymize your transactions, is that correct?
[00:37:21.21] - Rion Gull Yes, that's one way to put it. But I would say it falls in the camp of security, because privacy is security. We wouldn't want websites to be operating with HTTP. So everything is HTTPS secure by default, and that's the same idea. You need your payments to be private. You need them to be secure.
[00:37:44.29] - Anthony Campolo Otherwise that means the same thing. Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:48.06] - Rion Gull Otherwise there's no real chance that this will have any kind of mainstream adoption. So we have to have private payments. We have to have privacy. We want the best privacy that we can have, but there are trade-offs. You make the trade-off at the point where you think this gives users viable privacy if they use it correctly, and that's what CoinJoin does.
[00:38:15.29] - Anthony Campolo Hopefully you don't find yourself in a tornado situation.
[00:38:19.05] - Rion Gull That's another discussion. But anyway, I want this available to JavaScript developers. Ninety-nine percent of applications, 99% plus, I don't know, I'm just throwing numbers out, but most applications are web applications.
[00:38:34.21] - Anthony Campolo 60% have jQuery. We need a jQuery library. Just being silly.
[00:38:48.07] - Rion Gull Anyway, I think I've talked enough about that. Now let's...
[00:38:55.08] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, that was great. I really appreciate all that context. I'm someone who's currently making a good chunk of my income through Dash, so this is relevant to me. I am one of the people who is being paid through this hunk of money that Rion is asking for. I want to definitely say that Rion and I take this seriously, and we don't just see this as a way to fool around and make easy money. We're building something legit here, and we want to make sure that we're providing real value. That's why I will reiterate that for people who did not vote or who voted no, I would like more feedback. I'd be really curious to know what it is that you think we should be building. If you think the stuff we built was fine but we need to do more of it, or if you think the stuff we built was entirely wrong and we should have built something else...
[00:39:51.03] - Anthony Campolo Any and all opinions, I would be really happy to hear.
[00:39:55.13] - Rion Gull Yeah, I'm the same. The problem is you just don't get that feedback.
[00:40:01.27] - Anthony Campolo That's why I'm just going to continue to try and reiterate it, because if we just got one person to give an opinion, then I can kind of start the avalanche, you know? The internet in general I feel is made up of mostly lurkers. Even if you're lurking and you're kind of voting on this thing, people are not always super vocal. They're not like me, where I'm just going to go out and blast my opinion about everything all the time. So I get it. I understand it.
[00:40:28.14] - Rion Gull Well, let's switch over to your screen now. I said we'd talk about that for 25 minutes. We talked about it for 40 minutes. But let's go into the meat of this discussion. I don't know, we might need to do a part two on this because we're already at 40 minutes. But let's get as far as we can on this, because this is excellent work. This actually just segues from what we were previously talking about to what we're now talking about. This is part of that discussion. We want it to be very easy for traditional web developers to approach Dash Platform. That's why you've written this tutorial, and you're like a master tutorial writer. So why don't you take it away with that context?
[00:41:16.28] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, this is my bread and butter. I have a series of tutorials I've written over the years called A First Look at Blank. This is how I first got started with Redwood, I wrote a blog series called A First Look at Redwood. The idea was that at the time I was a new developer, I was in a boot camp, I didn't know crap, I was a complete noob. I found that docs can, just by leaving out a couple of details for beginners, people who really don't know what the hell is going on, compound to make it almost impossible to get anywhere. The ethos I always went with when I was writing these is how do I make this almost impossible not to follow along with? How do we make this as simple as possible, include every single intermediary step, and create an end-to-end experience? That's why I've used the term end-to-end tutorial a lot. That's kind of the term I've been using for these last couple of videos. I always like to give a little bit of just, I'm going to walk through this niche part.
[00:42:24.11] - Anthony Campolo We're not going to actually run the code or anything, but I just want to give a quick example, and you can stop me and ask questions along the way. The first thing is I talk about what Dash is and what the Dash Platform is, and I define some terms. I wanted to be a little brief because, as you know, you can go very, very deep with all this. Then I talked a little bit about what the Dash Platform is and how it is different. I even went into the roadmap a little bit. Hopefully that stuff will stay fairly static throughout. Then I set us up with a basic Node project that is going to give you all of the scripts that you have in the main documentation, so dash.org. Just to give a little bit of info in terms of what is different here, what you get reading this versus the main docs, I've included the steps for setting up your Node project itself, making sure you're good with the latest in terms of ESM and installing the latest dependency, and even things like your .gitignore so you're not going to commit your wallet keys and all that stuff.
[00:43:37.13] - Anthony Campolo Then we have a whole bunch of scripts that we're going to run. The main thing I wanted to hit on is that I also wanted to group things in a bit of an easier way. If we look at the actual Dash Platform, it can be a little overwhelming when you see, okay, there's like eight of these, and then there's another eight of these. I wanted to group it in terms of, okay, you're going to get a wallet, you're going to create an identity, and then you're going to create a name. Then with that name you can work with contracts and you can work with documents, really separating those things and what an identity is, what a name is, what a contract is, and what a document is, and getting a sense of all those ideas. Another thing that's different if you read through this versus the docs is this is the most up-to-date JavaScript syntax. It uses imports instead of require, and it uses async/await instead of promises. That's something that I think is always good. For the actual docs themselves...
[00:44:53.16] - Anthony Campolo I was going to ask you about this. I can create a PR where I update the syntax, or I can create a PR where I have two tabs available so you can see the old syntax and the new syntax and have them both live there. Is that something you have thoughts on in terms of what would be a better approach?
[00:45:11.17] - Rion Gull Yeah, we'll think about that moving forward. But what I like so far about this is that it gives you, based on what I've seen before, if you don't want to go through the steps yourself, it still shows you what the code is, what command you would run to run that code, and then what the output is after running that code. You can go through the tutorial and see how it would work even if you don't actually go through the steps. That's a good tutorial, that it shows you what it would look like even if you're not doing it.
[00:45:50.11] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, exactly. Then it walks you through getting your first wallet set up and getting some testnet funds into it, and then creating the actual identities themselves. Once we've gone through all of that, then I set us up with kind of a full-stack example. This part of the tutorial, you won't get any of this out of the docs. This is the type of stuff that really gets you to the point of having something closer to an actual app instead of just one-off code examples that give you a sense of what's happening. I chose Express. This is something you can quibble with. Some people will say Express is a dead library, you should be using Fastify. What I will end up doing is, let me take a step back. This tutorial right now is 4,000 words. It's a pretty lengthy sucker already. I had a moment where I had to stop and say, do I want this to be 99% done or 50% done? Because every single Node script that we have, you can build out in a backend way and have endpoints available for all of them.
[00:47:09.02] - Anthony Campolo Then you can have a frontend that implements all of that with input fields and stuff like that. That is stuff that I'm going to build out. But if I were to include all of that, this would end up being like a 10,000-word tutorial. What I did instead is I implemented a single endpoint and a frontend that hits that endpoint. If someone were to read this right now, they would be able to set up their backend and their frontend and build from there. If someone actually wants the whole backend and the whole frontend built out with components and endpoints, that's coming very, very soon, within the next month. But in its current state, I just didn't think it made sense for the tutorial to be this ridiculously long 10,000-word tutorial. What it does is it basically implements an endpoint for your name. You give it /name and then ajcwebdev, and then it will display your frontend. This is something that I went over in my last stream with a Next.js frontend. One last thing I need to do is put a little screenshot here so people can see what's going on there.
[00:48:21.18] - Anthony Campolo That's where it's at right now.
[00:48:25.23] - Rion Gull Okay, great. That's awesome. What I want to do with this, and one of the reasons why I wanted you to put this together, is so that we can start bringing in guest developers. By the way, we'll want to update the logo, the image, with the latest logo. It's just a minor thing because there's a newer logo now. But I want to bring in some more developers in your network, in my network, and just go through the tutorial in this setting, live. We're teaching somebody that has no idea what Dash is, and seeing whether this is something they could work with, and what questions they have, what concerns they have, that kind of thing. So I want to start that this quarter. What do you think? Does that sound like a good idea?
[00:49:20.07] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, absolutely. I already know some people I would hit up to do that. For me, that's one of my favorite things, just live coding, pair programming, going over code together, talking it through. I think that's great, and that's something I think we should do as soon as possible.
[00:49:40.29] - Rion Gull Yeah, and bringing it back to what we talked about at the beginning of the show today as well, one of the issues that we have in Dash is that we don't have enough developers. We don't have enough people. I'd like to see more proposals from either individual developers or organizations that have multiple developers, however you want to structure it. More developers would be better. So we need to bring them in in a way that they can learn the whole process from start to finish. There's a lot that I could say about our plans for the Incubator Web Wallet along those lines. I want to incorporate proposal writing into the application, maybe a separate application or at least a separate route or subdomain. That's the kind of thing that, if we really want to bring in developers who are using Dash Platform, we should show them how this works, like how the DAO works in Dash. I guess some people would say, no, we don't want that, we just want to fund DCG or maybe the incubator, but beyond that... Well, it's a question of what you want Dash to be.
[00:51:03.19] - Anthony Campolo You know, you always said you want Dash to be currency that people use day to day. If you want to do that, you need apps. That's what you need.
[00:51:15.19] - Rion Gull No, I know, but some people would say that people should just build the apps on their own dime. They should have their own entrepreneurial venture, and we give them a platform to use. That may be the case, but I'm concerned that's too much to ask.
[00:51:33.22] - Anthony Campolo There's too many ways for people to build stuff these days. You got to incentivize people. The web should know about incentives.
[00:51:42.18] - Rion Gull Yeah. The web has come so far that the experiences venture-backed corporations give developers, in terms of both DX, developer experience, and in terms of financing to build on their platforms, is incredible. It's very hard to compete with. So we'll see. There's this whole idea of, "If you build it, they will come." We're very close to being done with building Platform, and we already have a lot of our payment infrastructure built. So the question is, if you build it, will they just come, or do you have to draw them in with incentives? I think it's the latter. I don't want to be in a scenario where, instead of "If you build it, they will come," it's "If you build it, they won't care."
[00:52:41.19] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, because Dash is competing with other cryptos. They're competing with finance, just fiat. They're going to be competing with central bank digital currencies sometime in the future. So yeah, there are a lot of things pulling people in a lot of different directions, right?
[00:53:00.26] - Rion Gull Yeah, a lot of incentives pulling people in their direction. So we are now at 54 minutes, I think. What are your final thoughts moving forward? I know we talked mostly about the DAO and the proposal stuff, but we got into the tutorial too.
[00:53:19.29] - Anthony Campolo This was great. Yeah, I learned a lot today about Dash. I knew Dash was a DAO, and I know what a DAO is, so I knew all this stuff was under the surface. I just never really thought about it, particularly because you brought me in and you've been my window into Dash. You're such a great manager that you were just kind of telling me, "Here, put your stuff here, give me your address here, and then you'll get paid." And I was like, all right, I do my work, I get paid. I didn't have to think about any of the other things. But it's good to know what is actually going on behind the scenes and what the different forces at play are in terms of how things get funded, who is in charge of what gets funded, and how those things get decided. I think this is really important, and I would say for anyone out there who does want to get involved in Dash, you should learn this stuff sooner rather than later, because it's good stuff to know.
[00:54:11.24] - Anthony Campolo But yeah, I kind of came out of this feeling confident that we need to both make a good case for what we're building and, if possible, dialogue with people to make sure we're actually building the things people want us to build, and make a case for what we're building. So yeah, I think that's all good stuff. I think this is all healthy. It forces you to think about the work you're doing and make sure it's actually the work that's important.
[00:54:37.19] - Rion Gull Yeah, those are good thoughts to close on. So I think we'll just close it out there. Thank you, everybody, for joining in. We have quite a few viewers right now. I haven't seen any comments, I don't think. But thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.