Fort Major DAO: Everything You Need To Know

Hey there and thank you so much for taking interest in Fort Major DAO!

We’ve just released our Public Beta and we’re eager for you to join in. It is absolutely free — you don’t have to buy tokens or lock a collateral to start contributing.

Come visit us at fort-major.org and join our Telegram group, where the main activity happens.

This article is intended for people who are just starting getting familiar with the DAO. It describes the basics — what is it, how it works and what are we trying to achieve with it — as well as provides you with instructions on how to start contributing and become a part of Fort Major.

What is it

TLDR; this is a dapp that allows you to join our team in a fair way; you can do what we say or you can come up with your own ideas — as long as it helps MSQ or the DAO in general, it fits.

Fort Major DAO is a horizontal organization, which works not because of legal agreements, but because of rules enforced by smart-contracts. The main goal of this organization is to bring MSQ — Safe ICP Wallet to it’s vision, while giving every contributor a share of ownership proportional to their contribution. The DAO is very flexible, meaning that you can do both: contribute as we ask you or discover your own ways of possible contribution. The DAO is truly horizontal, meaning that there is no radical difference between being a team member or being a contributor — anyone can drive new developments, anyone can participate in all activities, anyone can acquire influence over decisions made and there are literally no secrets, gatekeeping or middlemen. We just cooperate on work, complete it and enjoy the benefits together, with no special rules or exceptions.

The organization is remote-only — we don’t have an office and we only exist in cyberspace. We don’t require any identity verification — your skills is the only thing we care about, so it is possible to work at the DAO being completely anonymous. The code of the DAO is open-source and MIT-licensed — fork it, modify, redeploy — we don’t care. And by the way, it is 100% on-chain, thanks to the Internet Computer.

Who Are We

We are the team that developed the initial version of MSQ, which is a MetaMask Snaps based wallet for the Internet Computer. We’ve coded the Snap, found money to get it audited, pushed it to the official MetaMask Snaps store and told people about it.

We’re just regular guys looking for teammates. There are only three of us:

1. Sasha — Software Developer / Software Architect. Develops/designs blockchain-related projects since 2017. A lot of experience in identity- and voting-related projects. Builds IC projects since 2020.
2. Alina — UI/UX Designer. In graphic design since Covid. Specializes in e-commerce.
3. Nikita — Marketing / Social Media. Anti-fraud specialist, long-term fan of the Internet Computer. Participated in Tungsten Demo Day Hackathon.

To satisfy our ambition and achieve the MSQ vision, it would take a lot more effort, resources and people, than we currently have. So, our small team has to scale.

More on MSQ vision:

In our dreams MSQ is not just a way to authenticate to IC dapps, but the most easy-to-use wallet in the world.

We believe that global adoption of cryptocurrencies can’t happen, until banking apps are easier than crypto wallets. And we really want to be able to go outside, come into a local grocery store and buy a bun of bread using crypto. So with MSQ it is possible to do with crypto anything one could think of:

• gift it to your loved ones
• donate it to charities
• tip for services
• buy goods
• pay salaries
• etc.

Fort Major DAO is Our Way to Scale

Unlike many other DAOs, we don’t just want to decentralize the governance, we also want to decentralize the contribution process as well. And there are several reasons to that:

• Contributions create a much stronger relationships between the DAO and the contributor, comparing to ordinary token holding. A token holder’s connection is mostly (but not entirely) opportunistic — “I sympathize, because of a profit I might gain”, while a contributor’s connection is mostly emotional — “I sympathize, because I’m proud of the work I did”. Periods of depression are also better with contributors than with token holders. A token holder would probably sell and move on, while a contributor is emotionally tied with the result of his crafts.
• Decentralization of work decouples a project from its creators the same way as decentralization of computation decouples a webservice from its owners. In other words, the project will continue to live even when all of its original creators retire, because no one really owns it — new contributors will take their seats and continue evolving the project as long as someone finds the project useful.
• We believe that, If done right, a fully decentralized contribution process can be as efficient as the centralized one, adopted by traditional organizations. While decentralization makes it hard to keep track of activities and responsibilities, it also minimizes management overhead, allowing each part of the organization to make progress faster. Such an organization can bring a new perspective to the world — a self-management-centered perspective.

So, the Fort Major DAO is a digital organization with a decentralized contribution process, that is governed and owned entirely by its contributors. All decisions within the DAO are made by the contributors collectively via voting procedures. The contributors are funded directly from the profit they are able to produce via the projects they cooperate on together. Both: the voting power and the dividends amount depend on the share of a contributor in the DAO, which is, at any moment in time, proportional to their overall contribution.

You reap what you sow. And this rule applies to you whether you are a founder, team member or a newcomer.

How It Works in Practice

TLDR; the Team creates tasks, the Contributors solve tasks getting paid for that, the DAO slowly decentralizes.

In practice everything works very similarly to how it would work in a regular Agile environment, with several exceptions.

Every contribution is described via a Task — a piece of work or an issue that, when solved, grants its solver(s) with a piece of ownership, which we call Reputation. A set of all solved tasks is the ultimate source of the information about the DAO — it describes exactly what work was already done, who did it, when and what did they get in reward. By solving tasks we’re not only moving our projects forward, but we’re also writing the history of the organization, which can be viewed by anybody.

The DAO has two groups of members: the Team and the Contributors. The Team drives the process and slowly loses control over the DAO, the Contributors pick up the process, slowly getting control over the DAO.

The Team’s purpose is to decentralize the DAO — to evolve it to a point where the Team no longer posesses the majority of Reputation and thus does not make the rules anymore. So in future there is no difference between being a Team member and being a Contributor. Our goal is to provide tooling and motivation for the Contributors to get user feedback, gather around ideas, develop them to completion and tell the public about new features — all in a decentralized manner.

The Contributors pick up the process and slowly gain control over the DAO, by solving tasks, participating votings and proposing new ideas. It is absolutely possible to fire all current team members and elect new ones while being a contributor, if you have enough Reputation. Tasks can also be created by regular contributors starting from 20 Reputation.

Tasks not only grant Reputation, but also a reward: Storypoints and Hours. Storypoints are given based on usefulness and complexity of the task — the harder the task and the bigger its possible positive impact, the more Storypoints you get for solving it. Hours are given based on the amount of time one needs to solve the task — the longer it takes for you to solve the task, the more Hours you get. Unlike Storypoints, Hours are subjective and currently only given for Team members tasks.

More on advantages of two-factor reward system:

The system is designed in a way to encourage solving more tasks in less time. It is capital inefficient to spend too much time on a single task, because Storypoints are given with no respect to the time needed to solve the task. So instead of solving a single big task it is better to solve two smaller tasks.

This motivates to split big tasks in smaller ones, which, as a consequence, forces to clearly document each of them (so others understand what’s the difference, when they approve the task), which translates to better transparency to external observers.

Also, this system is simply more fair than regular hourly rate, adopted by most traditional organization, which only rewards for time spent, which leads to mediocre performance, since the employee is motivated to spend more time doing their work.

You can swap Hours and Storypoints into ICP or FMJ, depending on whether there is any accumulated profit in our fund and the swap exchange rate. Hours and Storypoints you’re swapping are burned from your balance. Currently, since we don’t generate any actual profit, one could only swap into FMJ.

You can swap rewards into FMJ as soon as your task solution is approved. That’s right, the DAO pays you immediately!

FMJ is a regular ICRC-1 token which you can take away with you wherever you want. It doesn’t give you any ownership rights and its utility is purely marketing-related (similar to other tokens, which omit their utility description at CoinGecko), but unlike Reputation, FMJ is transferable, which means that it can have a price. New FMJs are minted every time someone swaps rewards into them.

For investors FMJ provides a way to speculate on the value of the DAO’s brand without getting involved in the actual decision making. For contributors FMJ provides a way to get financially rewarded until the DAO is profitable. Once MSQ provides our contributors with a sustainable source of income, we’ll significantly shrink the inflation of FMJ, by adjusting the swap exchange rate. Similarly to how a regulator would adjust the base rate during a period of prosperity.

Before you can get the reward, your task solution is evaluated by all reputation holders. If the solution satisfies all the requirements listed in the task, it is approved; if not, it is rejected. There are also situations when a task offers bonus Storypoints for solutions that better comply with certain additional requirements. In that case, during the evaluation reputation holders give your solution a score, which, when combined, defines how much total Storypoints will you receive as the reward.

What’s Next?

The DAO has just been released and a lot of functionality is not yet in place. For example, there is no way to upgrade our canisters via votings yet, or to update the code of the MSQ Snap itself this way. But we’ll get there eventually. The most important thing — to be able to cooperate on ideas, make them real and split rewards fairly — is fully functioning.

Our current goal is to show this DAO to other people and attract contributors. The more contributors there are, the better we would see what’s missing and how to fix it. But our long-term vision for Fort Major is to make it an organization that is built on mutual respect and kindness, instead of careerism and greed.

We want the DAO to be a perfect workplace for people around the world — join and leave as you wish, contribute the way you’re passionate about, improve your skills and make the world a better place!

Tasks-wise we’re switching our focus to MSQ again. We have a huge milestone waiting for our attention — MSQ.Pay, which is a crypto-payment processor, similar to Stripe, integrated with MSQ and other wallets. We see potential fees from payments processed via MSQ.Pay as the main source of profit for the DAO at the moment.

How Can I Help?

Glad you asked!

1. If you don’t have time for diving deeper and actually work with us — consider buying FMJ at ICPSwap. This way you can support the DAO financially giving all of us a huge motivation boost.
2. But if you want to really be a part of the team and build something great together — join our Telegram group, so you could meet the others and find yourself a task. We have plenty of various tasks available already: from writing tutorials to developing backend code. And we are also thrilled for you to propose your own ideas and take control.

Since the software is already up and running, we’re very interested in people who would actually try it out and spread the word. So, if you have subscribers on any social media platform, please, consider joining our DAO. But we’re also interested in people who could fit any other possible role: testers, developers (Rust/Typescript), marketers, tech. writers, etc.

The DAO is very liberal in terms of possible contributions — anything that brings you joy and helps the DAO is considered a valuable contribution. In other words, we’re glad to fairly reward you for almost any idea of yours.

And we are also very excited for collaborations with other projects. If you’re building on the IC and you’d like to be a part of Fort Major — please, join in. For example, we have an ongoing task (if not present, ask via Telegram) that offers you to integrate MSQ authentication into your dapp and offers up to 60 Reputation and up to 590k FMJ for doing that.

That’s it!

Come visit fort-major.org and help us build the Fair, Open, Robust and Transparent digital organization with an uplifting vibe!