Ethical Purchasing Groups (GAS) as Decentralised Autonomous Organizations – An architecture
We can leverage many existing decentralized applications to create organizations implementing models that can better us as producers and consumers under capitalism. A possible way to do so is what I am proposing here: this model aims to help implementing a reproducible decentralized organization for purchasing groups, that is a group of people cooperating to buy a variety of products directly from producers, both for economical and environmental reasons.
I am assuming the reader as familiar with decentralized applications, cryptocurrencies and the like so I can cut to the chase.
The system leverages a variety of components that can work in a decentralized manner as a way to avoid the burden of a formal cooperative or other organization and let users totally self-manage and self-operate. Let's find out what these components are and how they work together.
Status is a modern chat application integrating an Ethereum wallet and a DApp-enabled browser. It comes in the form of an Android or iOS app, easy to configure and use. Those features themselves cover a big chunk of the capabilities needed for our kind of purchasing groups: group communication and a way for users to send and receive money. What else is great about Status? You can directly use DApps from it, like Aragon.
Aragon is a platform to host DAOs on. The nice thing is that it enables to effortlessly create DAOs from templates, with very useful pre-installed features, called apps. For instance, we can use the Membership template to mint our very own tokens, and use them to identify the group members making them non-transferable. The Finance app allows the organizatoin to have a cryptocurrency fund to be used as our purchasing group's cooperative fund. While the Voting app lets token holders cast votes, a functionality that in our case can be used to let members confirm buying orders. Conveniently, a successful vote can also (via a smart contract) directly trigger a cryptocurrency payment.
While the buying group can virtually buy anything, it is easier to deal in terms of digital goods, that can be directly accessed with the same devices we are using to intract with the purchasing group. To keep the whole system decentralized we can leverage IPFS (InterPlanetary FileSystem), that is a decentralized file storage protocol the group can use to collectively host files and even a static website.
The last, but not less important, component is a marketplace that lets producers create listings for the products they want to offer to buying groups. This marketplace should enable buying and selling of digital assets in ETH, searching and filtering offers and everything we are used to in ecommerce. The perfect fit for the need is District0x, a DApp which has under the hood the same solid technologies we are considering here (Aragon, Ethereum and IPFS).
This model is easily implementable, since the only costs are a few ether cents in gas fees for the DApps and, if we want to, a small server to host an always-on IPFS node, even at home. Configuration is also easy since we are making use of basic functionalities of each of our components. The hardest part, let's face it, is always adoption: we have to bring producers and consumers, buyers and sellers on the cryptocurrency side. However is my firm belief that the best way to raise adoption is experimenting until something moves in the right direction for good.
Everything we saw has been briefly tested and will probably be converted in a PoC soon. The only exception is District0x's marketplaces, which are not ready to be directly brought up yet. I plan to update this post with a PoC and meanwhile AMA on my fediverse profile @cirku17@mastodon.bida.im .