Marketplace DAOs
The two previous sections covered the generation and movement of information assuming the existence of some external system. To ensure legacy interoperability, these features will always be necessary, but they do not address blockchain based regulation.
Smart contracts enable a completely new kind of commercial system where relationships are deterministic, self-enforcing and free of ambiguity. They can in turn be used to create rules for marketplaces including arbitrarily complex structures such as arbitration, event driven refunds, and revelation of facts given special conditions.
We call these smart contract enforced structures Marketplace DAOs. They do not require special protocol support nor mutability to be embedded in the ledger. In fact, they can be totally constructed using a collection of interdependent smart contracts.
The architectural concept is to design a collection of commercial templates inspired from contract law and business best practices. These templates can be wired into a developer’s smart contract to enforce specific standards upon the marketplace.
For example, say a developer wants to issue an ERC20 token on CCL to conduct a crowdsale. A Marketplace DAO could be established specifically for crowdsales and its terms and conditions parameterized or even enforced by volunteer or legal standards. Things such as refunds, reallocation of funds or freezing of payment could be inherited in the developer’s ERC20 contract.
This effort allows us to have a macro discussion about how a marketplace should be controlled in order to ensure consumer protection. Second, we can discuss how to model transactions in a way to automatically ensure legal protection and rights within specific jurisdictions, such as New Hampshire.
Working with the Cardano Foundation, IOHK and other entities, the Cardano project will create a reference library of Marketplace DAOs for smart contract developers to use. Our hope is that insurance and regulatory markets can form around these DAOs and that they will be self-evolving based upon outcomes.