Hi everyone! 

A new year has begun and we have some exciting updates:

1. ENS <> Console integration is complete!

“Email lists are good. ENS lists will be better.” — Balaji.

At Console we are *very* excited about the future of Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and are happy to announce that ENS names can now be used on Console. For the first time ever, any one of the 2.5 million owners of .eth domain names can now chat directly with other .eth names. As we continue to build Console, ENS users will unlock all the wonderful benefits of decentralized, open source, private chat. Read more: ENS Names Launch on Console.xyz. 

2. Twitter Spaces Every Monday @ 5pm EST

Come join our Twitter Space! Each week we meet AMA-style with the Console team, and we plan to have more great guests in 2023. Follow our Twitter @consoledao, or come by any Monday @ 5pm EST.

3. Apps are coming soon! 

Our product focus this month:

• Desktop app (Mac/PC) — Expected release 3/1/23

• iPhone/Android App — In progress

• Light mode — In progress

Want to co-create with us?

We're excited to build with you! Have feature requests or questions? Reply back to this email or come join our next Twitter Space on Monday.

Thanks for reading! 
Chris Castig

We’re excited to announce that Ethereum Names Service (or ENS) domains are now available for use on Console. For the first time, every one of the 2.5 million owners of .eth domain names can now securely chat with other .eth names. 

The ENS community will benefit from Console’s mission of creating the world’s greatest community chat app. And as we build Console, ENS users will unlock all the wonderful benefits of decentralized, open source, and private chat.

ENS is a global passport for the Internet 

ENS domain names create excitement in the community because they are the first step in creating a truly global passport for the Internet. 

A global internet passport means you can have one persistent identity across all the apps you use. Why is that important? Today you may have one username on Instagram, one name on TikTok, and another for your Gmail. Multiple usernames can lead to confusion, distrust, phishing, scams, and spam.

Let’s look at a real-world Web2 vs. Web3 example: Jimmy Fallon’s Venmo may be @jfallon, while his email is jimmyfallon@gmail.com and he’s @jimmyfallon on Twitter. But now with his announcement that he owns fallon.eth he can use one name across ALL of his properties.

We believe 2023 will be the year of owning your online identity. And we support ENS names as they are more broadly adopted across both Web2 and Web3 apps.

Global identity is the future

The promise of a global passport for the Internet isn’t new. 

Microsoft Passport (2008), Facebook Connect (2008), OpenID (2007), and many more have all vied to become the one password to rule them all. The only problem is — who really wants Bill Gates, Zuck or any single company to own all the secret passwords for the Internet?

Luckily, a new technology inspired by the Bitcoin blockchain came along around 2016-ish, often referred to as decentralized identity. Decentralized identity is a way of securing your identity on the blockchain, rather than in a centralized database, and then using a web wallet to prove it's you. 

ENS is now the most popular decentralized identity in the world. Here’s how it works:

1. ENS issues .eth names and securely stores them on the Ethereum blockchain. 

2. As a user you can purchase a ETH name for about $5/year.

3. Once you own your .eth name you can use it to access websites and apps. Think of ENS as the last username you’ll ever have to own.

Once your .eth identity is stored on the Ethereum blockchain, how do you access it? Crypto. No, not cryptocurrency, but cryptography!

Cryptography is the exchanging and decoding of secrets. By combining the blockchain (which stores your identity) with a cryptographic secret you own (i.e. a web wallet like MetaMask), you can prove that YOU own the identity stored on the blockchain. In other words, you can prove that you are who you say you are.Turns out your mom was right; you are a special snowflake. If you own an .eth name, you’re the only one among 8 billion people who can access it. It would take the world’s best hacker centuries, possibly millennia, before they could hack it. And that’s just one reason why decentralized identities are so powerful.  

While Facebook Connect and OpenlD still live on in some fashion, they never really hit massive mainstream adoption. ENS names are a major leap in innovation, and they are leading the path toward humans having secure global identities. 

How to buy an ENS name

If you’d like to buy your .eth (ENS) name, search for ENS names at app.ens.domains or visit the market of ENS names on OpenSea. Once you find an ENS name, you can purchase the ENS name in three steps:

1. Download and install the MetaMask browser extension.

2. Send some Ethereum (ETH) to your MetaMask wallet.

3. Search for your ENS name and use your MetaMask wallet to purchase your name with Ethereum (ETH). Most ENS names are about $5/per year.

If you get stuck with any of the above steps reach out to us @consoledao on twitter and I’d be happy to help.

Next Steps

With Console’s integration with ENS names, you can use your global internet passport to chat with other .eth names. 

We think this is a really exciting innovation that's going to unlock lots of potential for NFT communities, artists, musicians, and the broader web.

Visit Console.xyz to join us today.

Cabin is a network of co-living properties that began as a residency program for independent creatives. Its first location, known as Neighborhood Zero, situated just an hour outside Austin, Texas, has been a temporary home for songwriters, artists, and other online creatives invited to enjoy the space to collaborate and create together. 

In 2022, the network added two new locations: Montaia Basecamp (Sierra Nevadas) and Radish (Oakland, California). Residents, as they are known, are invited to move from location to location. 

Cabin’s founders, Jon Hillis and Phil Levin, have a vision for growing Cabin beyond just three locations. 

“Decentralized cities,” Hillis writes, “allow people to maintain close social ties and norms while moving around to different places. It also creates resilience against local changes in climate, regulation, and society.” 

Cabin’s work is novel in that it uses Web3 primitives like a $CABIN token, Snapshot voting, and other DAO tools to decentralize power and ownership across its residents, community members, and investors. 

Recently I chatted with Roxine Kee, the head of growth at Cabin, to share lessons learned from managing the Cabin DAO. 

How did you get started working with CabinDAO?

Roxine: My introduction to Cabin was almost a year ago. I was one of the residents [at Neighborhood Zero in Texas Hill Country]. Cabin started out as a creative residency program, and our three cohorts were crowdfunded. I was in the third cohort of those residencies. 

My background is in growth content and product marketing, for not Web3, but for Web2 startups. I got into the Cabin residency and then slowly started doing a little bit of writing for the DAO, more content writing. I was part time from around October, November, and December, and then in January, I kind of ramped it up. February was when I went full time with Cabin. 

I think how you define Cabin is actually very accurate. There’s been a lot of different ways people explain Cabin, because we haven’t figured it out ourselves. So the official north star that we have for Cabin right now is that it is a network of coliving neighborhoods at the intersection of tech and nature. How we talk about it is, it’s a network city of coliving neighborhoods, for tech workers. But it’s also steps from gorgeous nature, with the natural world at the front door. There’s a lot of different problems that the network city and the coliving experiment want to solve, and one of them is what you mentioned that John had tweeted: affordable housing. I am by no means an expert on that subject, but that’s one of the things that we’re hoping to solve by building this network of coliving neighborhoods.

How many people are on the Cabin Discord?

I think our Discord is at around four thousand right now, but we also consider our Twitter following of ten thousand as part of the community. Of course, there are folks who aren’t on Discord but are on Twitter, or vice versa. And then we also have folks who hold the token.  I'm not sure about the exact number, but it's probably around one hundred people who hold between one Cabin token and all the way up to our biggest token holders. So those people are part of the community, too. 

How many people are part of the overall Cabin DAO? 

Roxine: We’re starting to feel the growing pains and trying to distinguish between someone who is a member of the community, someone who is a contributor, and someone who is actually a customer of the community.

I’m kind of picturing it as a Venn diagram of community members, contributors, and customers. Someone can be one, two, or three of the categories. For contributors, most of the people who hold Cabin token right now do so because they contributed through a bounty to the DAO. There are folks who are bounty hunters who kind of do it almost on a freelance basis (that’s not super accurate). But when we’re talking about work, there’s the freelance bounty hunter side and then there’s the fellowship team, which is kind of a project team, like almost all service providers for the DAO. So I am a part of one of the fellowship teams, and Cabin is my job. There are six of us who are part of this fellowship, and everyone treats Cabin as our job. And there are those who email us and folks who come and do coliving in our Cabin properties. So it’s really hard to say how many people there are, because there’s a lot of overlap.

Can you maybe talk about why you’re dropping the DAO from your name? I’m wondering, does it mean that you’re becoming less of a DAO and more of something else?

Roxine: I was just talking to John [Hillis] about this, actually, and Vitalik [Buterin] just put out a post “DAOs are not corporations” which was almost like an addendum to his definition of a DAO, and if you read it, Cabin is actually becoming more and more like a DAO, or at least the ideal version of the DAO, according to Vitalik. So I don’t think we're dropping it because we’re being less of a DAO; I think it’s more like going from “The Facebook” to “Facebook.” In other words, it’s a lot cleaner to just say Cabin. 

But in terms of the direction we’ve been going, we did publish our road map for 2022, in which we talk about our wanting to be an embassy for DAOs. So for that one, we were really targeting people who are in Web3 who are in DAOs, for our residences and retreats, but then the bull market happened and  we realized that maybe the market for Web3 and DAOs in targeting them as our audience either might not be as big we thought or is a little bit too volatile at this time to be building a viable business there. 

So the pivot into the name “Cabin” is also reflective of our desire to serve people who want to co-live, who want to create this new future, and who want to do so in a way that is friendly to nature and lets you be able to touch grass. 

By dropping the DAO from your name, it possibly signals more inclusion into Web3, or that you don’t even need to know about Web3 in order to participate in Cabin?

Roxine: Yeah, totally. Some of the people whom we love hanging out with at Cabin are the people we call solarpunk builders. These people might not necessarily be in Web3, but they have this vision of the future where tech and nature are in that same future, and they love going out and building things with their hands. So for a solarpunk builder, it doesn’t matter if you’re in Web1 and Web2 or Web3, Cabin is the place for you.

Is it a solarpunk building? Where did that come from?

Roxine: I think it’s just the conversations around the lore of Cabin and the kinds of people who thrive in our community. Something that we love doing is our build weeks; we’ve done about three so far. The first one was Neighborhood Zero in Austin, Texas, where we built a pergola and a firepit. For the second one, we built a sauna on the same property, and it’s almost like these people go to the properties. They’re tech workers for their day jobs and they’re building code by typing on their laptops. But they also want to be spending their time out in nature, building and actually sweating in the Texas Hill Country. So I think there’s that combination of someone who is immersed in the tech world but also knows that we’re building all this tech just so we can be in nature more of the time.

What goes into running Cabin DAO?

Roxine: I’m no longer facilitating the groups of writers within the DAO. What is happening right now is, if folks want to talk about bugs, if folks want to talk about writing, then it’s like the community side. So now I’m more on the contributor side, less facilitating conversations and more writing articles, doing content, and doing growth. Whereas facilitative media is good, I would say my time was split fifty-fifty, between contributor and community. Got it?

What are the best DAO tools for anyone who wants to create their own DAO?

Roxine: One definition of a DAO is basically a group of friends with a group chat and a shared wallet. So that baseline could just be what a DAO is: you could be on Telegram, have a multisig, on Gnosis or even just a shared Metamask wallet, and that would already be a DAO.

When it comes to doing work in a DAO, though, I actually think back to my Web2 days of working together and collaborating with other people. So at Cabin, we use Google Drive. We have some docs on Notion and we use Clarity.so for token-gating documents. But I think for the most part, our key tools are nothing too crazy, they’re just what get the job done. So if a lot of our bounties are on Clarity, that actually helps us keep track of and pay out our contributors at the end of the day. As someone who’s writing product marketing and announcements and docs and things like that, I’ve worked from Google Docs and shared links from there. And then I’ve shared on Clarity as a project management tool.

How indispensable is Clarity.so for Cabin?

Roxine: Again, going back to the distinction between community contributors and customers, it’s mostly the contributors who work on Clarity, and then we have public-facing links for people to read through when they are onboarding. So I can’t really say how essential it is, but that’s kind of the information flow that goes into Clarity. When it comes to handling our boundaries, though, Clarity is totally the essential thing that we need. Because if you log into Clarity (I think this is what throws people off), you have to understand almost two or three different note-taking apps or project management apps to understand what’s going on. So if you’ve ever used Roam Research before, and Asana, and, let’s say, Trello, then Clarity will make sense to you. But if you’ve never used any of those, especially Roam, or maybe Obsidian, then Clarity will be very confusing. So for our bounties, we actually have almost kanban boards set up to track where boundaries are, where projects are going, and when they are done. Whoever is sponsoring the project and set it to “approve” creates a spreadsheet, and then we can pay them out at the end of the month. 

Clarity allows Cabin to run your crypto-bounty program?

Roxine: Yes, that’s the basics of it.

Do you feel like Cabin’s bounty program has been successful?

Roxine: Well, it depends on what you mean by successful, and the definition of that has changed over the months. At first, we measured success by how many people reached their first bounty as quickly as possible; later, it was the total number of bounties reached. Now we’re just thinking about if the bounties actually fulfill the outcome that we are going for, which is developing neighborhoods. So I think in that way, we have a smaller number of bounties available now, but they are more aligned with where Cabin is headed. So, yes, they’re successful, but it’s almost like I have to rejigger the criteria to make it successful, because it’s changed over the months.

Is Cabin’s bounty program public? Or is it only visible to members?

Roxine: I’m not sure about that. I do know that most of our Clarity is token-gated, but there are public pages. I've been holding Cabin for a while, so I can’t really say for sure. If someone does not have Cabin and wants to go into our Clarity, they should feel free to reach out and let me know what’s public and what’s private.

What makes a good Web3 bounty?

Roxine: I think to answer that would first involve going back and asking what your bounty program is for and what its specific bounties are for. For instance, let’s consider a design bounty for a header for the blog: For that, I’m very specific. When I work with designers, I try to give them at least five working days. And for doing creative work, and creating bounties for creative work, it’s important to give people context, not just on what a specific project is, but also on where it falls into the bigger narrative of the DAO or community or project of which it is a part. 

So, you almost want to answer, from small to big, Why are you doing this? What is the outcome of this specific design or specific project? The goal should be that people working on it can make their own decisions and judgment calls without having to wait for me as the one who created the bounty to tell them yes or no. 

So with bounties, if it’s creative work, give people as many guardrails as possible, and don’t just say, “Oh, I want an article, go and do it”. And also expect that, especially if someone is starting up the bounty process, you’ll have to do parallel processing of teaching someone what to do, giving feedback on that specific project, and thinking about how the bounty process can be improved. So I think that was a big brain moment for me: I’m not just asking someone to design a header image, I’m also thinking about how we can make this process of designing header images or this boundary process better for the future.

If somebody was creating a DAO, or running a DAO right now, would you recommend starting a bounty program? 

Castig: Also, is it enough to compensate people with the Cabin token? Do you ever get pushback like, “Hey, we want US dollars, what is this?” I mean, I'm just playing, just imagining that people might not want that. Or is it enough? 

Roxine: Yeah. So I wrote a post How to DAO Ownership a few months ago, and I think with the bounty process, owning tokens in general has always been the bedrock of it for bounty hunters in Web2; they look like freelancers and consultants. And the hard part about being a freelancer or a consultant, which I was in a previous life, is that you might get paid higher rates than someone who’s salaried, but you don’t own any part of the company. So it’s almost like freelancers, consultants, bounty hunters, without getting part of the community, are incentivized to do just as much of a good job as what we’re getting paid allows for. So I think with a bounty program that pays in token, it’s a long-term play both for the person who’s providing services to the DAO and for the DAO trying to decentralize its operations. So it’s really great in that sense. In the sense of putting food on the table, that’s actually a little bit trickier.

In terms of people saying, “Oh, yeah, what is the token?” Like, “What the heck is this?” The Cabin token is strictly for governance; we don’t really have a liquidity pool. We don’t engage in speculation for our token, it’s specifically for saying, “Okay, please, we have this proposal going on, let’s vote, let’s put that DAO in the direction that people want.” 

So I think that answers a little bit of the Cabin-token side, but we do also pay out in USDC as a result. I think a bigger-picture question actually concerns the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in a DAO. We have people who are working and doing things for the day job, and the DAO needs to pay them for professional services. 

But what about the people who would just love vibing in a DAO? In Cabin we have these sessions called Teach Me Anything, where people come in and they teach whatever skill they have to the community, and that is totally from intrinsic motivation. The tough part about that is if we start paying people, whether in token or in USDC, for something that they volunteer to do, or that they intrinsically love doing, then it almost doesn’t feel very good, because you’ve made a transaction out of something that was meant to be almost like an offering and a contribution of free will. So I think we’re trying to kind of straddle that line.

Castig: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And I’d say it also touches on one of my latent critiques of Web3 in general. Like, all the incentivization and tokenization stuff, I get it, and I’m also kind of really excited about it. But on the other side, there’s a lot about the gift economy, in experimentation and in theory, I think that’s really beautiful. Anyway, there’s a whole lot to unpack there. But that’s cool. It sounds like you guys are on the pulse of how to incentivize people using both ways. I think it makes a lot of sense.

Roxine: Yeah, we are definitely trying to figure out the sort of people who are thinking about this problem in their community. I would recommend a book: Drive. I can't remember who wrote it, but it’s about motivation in general. And I think that it gives a fuller picture of the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and how we can incentivize folks to do the best work that they want to do without making it transactional.

Castig: Yeah, that’s awesome; it’s Drive, by Daniel H. Pink. Another good one is Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. And similarly, he just kind of describes human motivation, and talks about how powerful social incentives and motivations are. He did this really cool experiment with picking up kids. He found that if you asked parents to pick up other people’s kids, they were genuinely happy to do a favor, but when money came into it, people were less willing to help. But there’s a lot that goes into people building social capital (if that's what you want to call it), of helping other people, that money and tokenization sometimes drains from that equation.

Roxine: Yeah. And I think that’s why, when I was talking about Cabin, in our fellowships, I used the term “service providers.” So, in a coliving community like Cabin, we don’t pay people to wash the dishes. It’s just something that you have to do when you’re living with other people.

Like, if you’re co-living with someone, or you’re living in a house and someone just has to wash the dishes, you don’t say, “Okay, we’ll pay you ten dollars for every hour you wash the dishes.” But then there are cleaning companies that go in and clean people’s houses. So I think it almost doesn’t matter what the actual task is, it’s the intention around that task. If you’re thinking about “Okay, is this project a bounty?” the question you should be asking is if it should be an intrinsic- or extrinsic-motivation thing. That’s a useful analogy that I think about, like, “Is this washing dishes, or is this like a cleaner coming in and cleaning the house for me?”

How does Cabin use Snapshot and Gnosis Safe?

Roxine: Yeah, Snapshot and Gnosis Safe form the bedrock of Cabin’s tooling. All our proposals go through Snapshot. We are always testing out the new features from Snapshot as well; same thing with Gnosis. That’s kind of where everything goes and happens. 

How many owners are in your Gnosis Safe?

Roxine: I think it is three signers. 

How can people learn more about you and Cabin?

Roxine: Yeah, so with Cabin, our website is cabin.city. It used to be greatercabins.com, but now it is cabin.city. And I think our big thing right now is our co-living passport. So right now folks can book months at the—I’m not gonna say it’s historic; it’s been around for only a month, like a year and a half—but a very Web3 illustrious location. Folks can start living there beginning October 1, all the way until September 2023. 

So if co-living is something you want to try out and do with Web3 folks, then that is the perfect place to go. So, cabin.city, and I think there’s a co-living pass tab at the top.

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a domain name system built on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS domains are similar to traditional domain names (e.g. google.com, console.xyz), although unlike these traditional domains, ENS names are decentralized. This means that if I own an ENS name, castig.eth, then it’s 100% owned by me.

Why buy an ENS name?

Most people are familiar with domains like .com, .net, .org, and .xyz—these are called top-level domains (TLDs). TLDs are sold on domain registries like GoDaddy.com. But behind GoDaddy (which is just a distributor), all domains are owned by one organization, the Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers, known as ICANN. 

For anyone passionate about privacy and decentralization, the centralized ownership of the Internet’s global address system is problematic. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has reported numerous times how centralized domain names represent a threat to uncensored content.

The solution: ENS.

ENS names (.eth) provide a censorship-resistant domain name for both people and websites. They do this through the use of the Ethereum blockchain, and through the decentralized organization (or DAO) that manages the project, rather than one centralized company.

In this piece I chat with Alisha.eth (@futurealisha), Governance Lead at ENS Domains. In our talk we discuss the future of ENS, public goods in Web3, and the ENS Constitution. 

Why is ENS important?

Alisha.eth: ENS was my gateway into the Ethereum community. That’s often true for a lot of people. I first got into Bitcoin around 2014 or 2015, when I accepted Bitcoin as a form of payment from a customer on my Shopify store. I became more interested in Bitcoin in 2017. After the bull run came back, in December 2020, that’s when I discovered the Ethereum community. 

I happened to be looking at ENS when one of my domain names had expired. I managed to register it. (I’m like one of those people who register a domain every time they have a random business or project idea.) 

What is exciting about ENS? 

Alisha.eth: I understood .eth names as ENS—an evolution of DNS. I get that ENS is domain names on the Ethereum blockchain. I started to create content with my Crypto Native podcast. I thought that it was really interesting that ENS was a public good being used in a tangible way.  

Now that I had an .eth, I could use it as my identity on Twitter. I thought that was really cool.

Public goods—things like military defense or clean water or clean air—can feel very removed from our day-to-day experience, so it can be hard to appreciate what it would mean if those public goods didn’t exist. 

However, Nick Johnson, the founder and leader of ENS, created ENS with the intention from the beginning that it would be a public good. So actually, all of the .eth registration fees have always gone into a multi-sig (a wallet with multiple keyholders for shared-ownership of funds). 

That money has never gone to True Names Limited (TLN), the company that I am contracted to, which is like the dev shop for ENS. It’s never gone straight into the pockets of the devs or anything like that, because as a public service that treasury felt owed to the community. 

There’s never been a better time than the present to build a for-profit company in Web3. And I have so much respect for Nick Johnson, for the fact that ENS didn’t take on VC investment and kept building through the bear market so that the team could always bake in the best interests of the protocol—and essentially, humanity—rather than prioritizing the motives or incentives that might benefit their investors. 

How did you get involved working with ENS?

Alisha.eth: I had a Web3 podcast that I invited Nick on, and we hit it off. He could tell I was excited about ENS. Then I joined ENS as the community manager. As soon as I joined one of the team members said, “We are launching a DAO.” And I said, “Cool, what’s a DAO?” 

How did ENS decide to become a DAO?

Alisha.eth: The reason that ENS decided to launch the DAO, in November 2021, was because ENS had matured over the nine months before that, and the treasury had also started to get to a point where the funds were sitting there, unutilized. It just seemed to be the right time to launch a DAO. To do that we launched a token, which is the Governance token, the ENS token, which can be used to govern the protocol. 

What are the responsibilities of the ENS DAO?

Alisha.eth: The two primary uses of the DAO are protocol upgrades, and development and maintenance.

The DAO handles voting on whether to move forward with the name record contract, which is currently being developed. This will be put to a vote by the DAO, and then the entire community—the token holders—will vote on that. Then the other major thing the DAO does is distribute the treasury funds. 

Castig: There’s this whole history of DNS that I don't think we really appreciate. We take it for granted sometimes. But essentially, the domains—for example, google.com, facebook.com, yourwebsite.org—are all part of DNS (the domain name system). Since the beginning of DNS in the 1980s, there’s always been this looming question of, Who owns the domain name servers?

Back then, DNS records were managed by one man in San Diego named Jon Postel. He was the sole person, and he had a lot of power. He could potentially take down the Internet in one day, if he just deleted all the records. This was a real concern. 

Since then there’s been this entire debate (for two decades) around who owns the names of the Internet. It went from John Postel to ICANN. And then it wasn’t until the Snowden revelations, in 2013, that ICANN was finally decentralized, so that it wasn’t owned just by the United States, but by a global alliance. 

What is a public good? And how does Web3 create public goods?

Alisha.eth: When I came across the Bitcoin community, lots of people were building open-source software, and yet they struggled to capture donations and grants from the community just to sustain their work. If it’s open-source then often developers don’t charge for it. 

The traditional standard—the standard economics definition of public good—is that it’s nonexcludable and nonrivalrous. That means that you can’t stop someone else from using the good, and if you use the good, then it doesn’t prevent someone else from using it. A public good doesn’t diminish someone else’s ability to also use that good. 

Ethers.js, within the Ethereum ecosystem, is a good example of a public good. Ethers.js is a library, and you can use that library freely, yet your using Ethers.js doesn’t diminish anyone else’s ability to build or use it. 

And so, open-source [projects] fall into the traditional definition of [public goods] very easily. 

My hope is that the ENS public goods working group will actually do a lot to help fund that particular category of public good.

But within Web3, due to Gitcoin, the definition of a public good has expanded. Gitcoin is a platform where people get paid to work on open-source software. There are grants from every corner of the Internet that are putting forth this idea that open source is a public good. These are projects that are serving the public and that are providing positive externalities to the world. 

Chris: When we talk about DAOs, there are a lot of communities or groups of people looking for ways to organize their members. We hear a lot about coordination, especially in the Gitcoin world. 

How did ENS come up with the idea for the ENS airdrop and voting delegation?

Alisha.eth: The ENS airdrop, the distribution, and things like that were heavily inspired by Uniswap, which I think was the first in terms of the airdrop mechanism.  

Regarding delegation, we took a lot of inspiration from Gitcoin, which had launched a couple of months earlier and used delegation. So, we observed bits and pieces that DAOs had already rolled out. The thing about a constitution, and about DAOs in general, is that you can have a token, but I would say that for DAOs to really thrive, all the token holders need to be rowing in the same direction. 

And so, if you imagine a longship, and every token holder as the holder of an oar, the way that I think about it is that something like a constitution is like a coxswain (the person who sits at the front of the boat). 

The ENS Constitution is like the North Star. And no matter what the conditions of the water that you’re in, as long as you know which direction you’re heading—say, you’re heading north—it is always there to align you. It doesn’t matter where these different rowers are holding the oars. 

What is the makeup of ENS token holders? 

Alisha.eth: The ENS token holders are distributed geographically—there are all sorts of people. I think, 137,000 different wallets were eligible for the token for the ENS airdrop. 

Why create a DAO Constitution? 

Alisha.eth: The DAO Constitution is a straightforward way to set out the intention of the ENS DAO. 

And I think it’s been effective. It’s actually incredible how effective it’s been in the sense that if you go to the ENS forum, you can see references to the Constitution and conversations, and the legitimacy of the Constitution is derived from the fact that to claim the airdrop, you had to either approve or reject the different articles—the five different articles of the Constitution. The Constitution was a way to get legitimacy. It means that every decision that is made by the DAO from here on, as long as the Constitution stands, can be done in alignment with that, and there will be no major dispute, because everyone, or a supermajority of people, agreed to the Constitution.

Can you give a summary of the ENS DAO Constitution? 

Alisha.eth: Sure.

I. Name ownership shall not be infringed

Alisha.eth: That means that the name ownership (a.k.a., owning an .eth name) shall not be infringed. That relates to the fact that if you are a member of the DAO, there is nothing anyone can do—not the core team, not the DAO—to take your ENS name away from you. 

II. Fees are primarily an incentive mechanism

This means that the reason the fees exist in the first place is to prevent squatting. And to ensure that someone can’t just write a script and register a gazillion names. 

The $5 a year for five characters or more was based on the fact that it’s enough friction for someone to have to think, “Do I want to renew this, extend the registration or not?” 

A big part of how we want ENS and .eth to be used is as an identity on the Internet. And so you know, it’s no good to anyone if these things are just sitting in wallets registered; we really want people to be using .eths. 

III. Income funds ENS and other public goods

This means that income from fees must be used to support ENS as a public good. If someone comes to the DAO for a grant, through the working groups or a proposal, you can essentially look at the Constitution and say, Okay, is this going to fund the maintenance or development of ENS Protocol? Is it going to benefit the ENS ecosystem? Or is it a public good? And if it’s none of those things, then it’s essentially unconstitutional. 

VI. ENS integrates with the global namespace

This is about integrating the global namespace. Just because, again, Nick Johnson has been really intentional about ENS being complimentary with DNS. 

Will ENS become a TLD like .com? 

Alisha.eth: I think it’s not in the best interest of .eth to be a TLD. I think that .eth as the native ENS domain makes sense. And then every other kind of DNS extension can be integrated into ENS. But at the moment .eth is reserved for Ethiopia, the country. We are working actively to see if the DAO can secure that. Just kind of peace of mind. 

ENS vs. DNS: Are you saying they will merge?

Alisha.eth: Everyone thinks of .eth names when they say ENS. So if I say alisha.eth, people are like, “Oh, cool, you've got your ENS name”. But if I went by alisha.xyz, and I had integrated it into ENS, which you can, that would also be an ENS name. It's just that at the moment, we’re kind of early in the adoption phase. And also just based on the features that are available with the platform, DNS integrations aren’t really a big deal. 

As an example, some integrations that I fantasize about are things like Shopify, or Adobe integrating its DNS into ENS, and then issuing all of its users subdomains, and those would all be ENS names. 

And so for example, if you have a Shopify store, or if I had like, alisha.shopify.com, I could use it to receive funds directly to my wallet on my Shopify store, because it’s integrated with ENS, which means it can be used to receive crypto. I know that’s a mind bend. 

Are you saying we can take console.xyz and merge it with our ETH name?

Alisha.eth: If you have a .eth, that doesn’t mean that you obviously have any of the TLDs. And if you have any other TLDs, it doesn’t mean that you have the .eth. 

We’re actually in the process of shaping out a name wrapper, something called CCIP read, which basically means it will become easy for organizations, companies, and institutions to issue subdomains, literally in their own servers, to their users or community. I don’t know if Coinbase has officially announced this, but it issued its users subdomains with ENS on cb.id. And so that’s like a DNS; you know.

Chris: Keep us in mind as we build Console. At Console we are integrating .eth names. To me, I believe identity is the building block of the internet, and I think we take it for granted. And I think it’s still early days for Web3 to run. I think we’re still building the infrastructure and I think you guys are leading that, and so I am just super excited to watch and support what you guys are doing.

Where can we learn more about you and ENS?

Alisha.eth: People should follow the main ENS account, @ENSdomains. And I’m @futurealisha on Twitter, and pretty much everywhere. 

Note: This post has been edited from the original audio for grammar and clarity. 

At Console, we’re innovating on how our Web3 chat app can protect communities from identity compromise. Here are five reasons why we believe Console is the best Web3 Discord alternative.

1. Web Wallets Protect You From Discord Bot Hacks  

On Console, there’s no need for third-party bots. Verification with Discord bots leads to a whole host of security issues. With Discord, your individual security relies on the security of the bots you install, the security of the bots’ employees, and the digital hygiene of your community’s admins. Using bots for identity creates a large surface area for attack!

By removing authentication with bots, and natively building web wallet chat directly into Console, we removed an entire class of bot-related vulnerabilities. 

2. Token-gated Communities Filter Spam  

Token gating allows you to decide who has access to your Web3 community.

Admins of each Console community can choose their gating rules. Admins will choose from the following Web3 gating tools: 

1. Wallet Address — Anyone who connects with a web wallet (MetaMask, Hiro Wallet, etc) can join your community

2. Tokens — Anyone with a number of tokens can join your community. At the moment we support ERC-20 (Ethereum) and SIP-010 (Stacks) standards.

3. NFT —Anyone with a particular NFT can join your community. If you have an NFT community we will read directly from your smart contract, or you can use our whitelist feature to secure your chat.

4. .eth — Anyone with a .eth (ENS) name can join your community.

5. .btc — Anyone with a .btc (BNS) name can join your community.  

Token gating uses the blockchain to verify true members of your community and keep spam out. If you have additional ideas for token gating, or additional chains you’d like to see supported, please let us know on Twitter @consoledao. 

3. Console Doesn’t Own Your Identity, You Do! 

When the Ledger Wallet was hacked in 2021, I feared for my parents’ safety. The headline read, “Hacker publishes stolen email and mailing addresses of 270,000 Ledger cryptocurrency wallet users.”

It turned out it wasn’t the Ledger Wallet that was hacked; it was the mailing list of everyone who had purchased a Ledger wallet. Why is that so scary? When I purchased my Ledger, I sent it to my parents’ house. Now, my parents’ address was published on the Internet in connection to the Ledger hack. Anyone could see their home address and make the reasonable assumption that there could be a Ledger Wallet, potentially with a lot of cryptocurrency, in the house. 

Data breaches leave us all feeling unsafe. Sometimes it’s a home address; other times it’s an email used for targeted phishing attacks or for identity fraud. Facebook, Github, Equifax, and Bank of America have been victims of data breaches, resulting in millions of users' private data being stolen – data that is used to target you with spear-phishing, bank fraud, identity theft, and other hacks. 

“Not your keys, not your money,” is a common refrain in the crypto community. The phrase means: If you are trusting your cryptocurrency to a third-party like Coinbase, Cash App, or Open Sea, then you don’t really own those assets because they’re not fully in your custody. You trust these apps, but they are the owners of your assets.  

At Console, we like to say, “Not your keys, not your identity.” 

We don’t store your private keys in our database. We store a record of your public web wallet keys, and it's up to you to sign them on your web wallet for access. If Console’s database were hacked, we don’t have access to your identity. We can’t masquerade as you. We can’t read or look at your messages.

Google used to use the slogan “Don’t Be Evil” to remind employees to practice good moral judgment. At Console, we take the approach of “Can’t Be Evil.” We don’t have your identity, you do. 

4. End-to-end Encryption In Private Rooms (Coming in January 2023)

Group chat is secured with end-to-end (E2EE) encryption, the same level of privacy used by Signal and WhatsApp. Your E2EE data is never stored on our servers; data is only ever stored on your device. 

Community rooms will not use E2EE and instead will use AES256 Encryption. Why? If your community uses E2EE new users won’t be able to see chat history. What we’ve heard from a majority of communities is that there is a need to preserve a community’s history, and to make that searchable for new members.

Therefore groups rooms have the option for E2EE (data stored only on your device), community rooms use AES256 encryption (stored on our server, but encrypted), and DMs are always (by default) secure and private. 

5. Smart Contracts For DAO Tooling Built Into Console 

After Console launches, we’ll begin to roll out additional modules, such as a treasury, voting, and bounties, to support the growth of bitcoin, crypto and NFT communities. When we do, we’re planning to integrate smart contracts, and blockchain API calls directly into Console.  

Secure Web3 Chat vs. Safe Chat

While ideally all technologies should be “secure” at a minimum, a secure technology is often not enough. Safe technologies are secure technologies that are difficult to use incorrectly or insecurely.

Console aims to be safe by design.

We’re taking a progressively decentralized approach over time, and recognize that safe Web3 chat starts with secure identity. As such, Console will never use “email/password” for authentication. Only decentralized identities.

In doing so, we believe we’ll be able to lead Web3 communities onto a new “Can’t be Evil” internet. We’d love to have you join us. Please follow us on Twitter @consoledao and let us know what security features you’d like to see.

Discord hacks are on the rise. In 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of NFTs and cryptocurrency have been stolen across dozens of communities.

Over a 30 day period in June, Bored Ape Yacht Club, OtherSide, Known Origin and more than 103 NFT Discord communities were compromised. According to TRM Labs, more than $22 million USD were hijacked. Discord hacks have resulted in financial loss to the victims and growing distrust within our communities.

This affects us all.

Discord hacks inhibit the growth of Web3. To date, less than 4% of the world’s population owns a crypto wallet. In comparison to the original World Wide Web, 4% of adoption means today is the 1999 of Web1. Web3 is still a baby.

If we are to grow the Web3 movement — to realize our mission to upgrade the Internet, improve coordination, and make real world change — we need to build our communities on an open, secure platform.  

At Console, we’re building a Web3 alternative to Discord. Imagine a chat platform: decentralized and open-source, with myriad design and security upgrades. Security is our top priority for Console. To this end, we partnered with IOmergent, a cybersecurity firm out of Washington D.C, to study the past year of Discord hacks..

In this post, I break down the four most common Discord hacks, and what we’ve learned so we can improve Console. By the end of this article,  you’ll understand what you can do to improve your community’s security. 

Identity Compromise is at the Root of Nearly All Discord Hacks

Phishing attacks are the leading hack on Discord. But before the phishing hacks can take place the hacker needs to complete another hack: identity compromise. 

Discord breaches share a common taxonomy:

1. Identity compromise — Hacker gains control of a privileged account via mechanisms such as phishing, password brute force, malware, etc.

2. Fake announcement — Hacker emulates the original account’s style, urgently encouraging the audience to click on a malicious URLs. 

3. Funds stolen — Victims, conditioned to move quickly and/or having FOMO, click the link, connecting their crypto wallets to the hacker with permission to take all actions on the wallet. The hacker leverages permissions granted by users to steal the assets.

In March 2022, a hacker used the credential compromise hack to steal funds from the Mutant Ape Kennel Club Discord. Once identity is hacked, it’s easy to drop a link and phish members. From the user’s perspective it appears that they are interacting with the group’s admin — undoubtedly a wolf in ape’s clothing. 

Discord relies on bots for Web3 identity verification. Bots are a weakness in securing identity on Discord. Hackers have shown that if they can compromise credentials of the bot, then they can override identity in the Discord server. 

One big reason bots are hacked is that they increase the attack surface by which hackers can compromise a community. With bot verification hackers have two additional points of failure through which to attack. Web3 communities have additional security weaknesses from which they must defend themselves. 

Four Most Common Web3 Discord Hacks

1. Permissions are Overly Broad 

Bots and webhooks result in more surface area for attack. In the case of the Grape Protocol, admin credentials were hacked, used to install a malicious webhook called Spidey Bot.  The Grape hack involved an administrator from a 3rd party, who had nothing to do with the project itself other than managing the bot installation. 

Takeaway: Discord bots and webhooks may provide value to the community, but it's their overly broad permissions that make them dangerous. The least privilege principle should be applied: only the minimum permissions required for an action should be allowed.

2. A Bot’s Code is Compromised 

The Ticket Tool bot is installed on over 1.7 million Discord servers and 310 million users. Ticket tool is used by Discord servers to augment channels into a Zendesk-like chat support system.  In April 2022, the Ticket Tool bot was exploited due to a flawed update in the bot’s codebase.

Takeaway: When a bot’s code is compromised, Discord communities are at risk. 

3. An Employee’s Password is Compromised

MEE6 is Discord’s most popular bot, reaching over 18 million Discord Servers, and hundreds of millions of users. MEE6 provides additional features to Discord like roles and improved moderation. In May 2022, a hacker stole credentials at MEE6. 

Takeaway: If an employee's password is compromised, your Discord community is left vulnerable to a Web3 hack. 

4. A Web Wallet is Compromised 

You can see two websites above: one is the official site, the other is a knock-off. When I go to connect my wallet, I can see MetaMask pop up. But one of them is legit, and the other is trying to steal my password. Can you spot the differences? 

Spotting a URL in your MetaMask means, “STOP! You’re about to be hacked!” The example on the right is using a JavaScript pop-up to fake a MetaMask login and you can tell because you can see the https address crypto-chicks.app. 

Admittedly, this type of hack got me in 2017. I don’t even remember it happening. Fast-forward to a year later, the next time I added fresh ETH to that account, MetaMask immediately sent it out to another wallet. 

Takeaway: If you’re a Discord admin and your web wallet gets hacked, your community is also in danger. 

How to protect yourself and your community from Discord hacks:

1. Use fewer bots: Community admins should consider using fewer bots. With each new bot,  your community opens up a larger surface area for attacks. 

2. Don’t click on minting links in Discord: Minting abstinence (it’s not for everyone). But if you do, hover over a link and look in the bottom left corner of your browser to verify the link is pointing to where it purports to go. 

3. Practice safe minting: Advertise the minting process to your community in advance. Provide a standard announcement process which requires a well protected admin account to make announcements on new NFTs and Minting. Advertise the minting process to your community in advance.

4. Perform link validation: Create a multi-party acceptance process for approving links. If an admin posts a mint, consider creating a culture whereby two other admins also have to type “verified” below the link (whether on Twitter or Discord) to provide an extra layer of validation.

5. Enforce the least privilege principle: Organizational security, is just as important as technical security. If you’re an admin, make sure every user in your community only has the minimum privileges necessary in order to fulfill their role.

6. Enable two-factor authentication (2FA/MFA): Ensure phishing resistant MFA (FIDO Hardware Key) is enabled for admin accounts (email, file storage, password managers, etc). If not possible, enable two-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) using an authenticator app (Google Authenticator or Authy) instead of SMS or push notifications.

7. Don’t keep large amounts of assets in your web wallet: The less you have exposed to Discord, the less you can lose. 

8. Never share your seed phrase: Don’t keep your seed phase on your desktop. Don’t keep it in Evernote. Don’t ever “copy/paste” your seed phrase, as it’s possible for other apps to read from your clipboard. Even though the 90s are back, refrain from tattooing it on your lower back. 

9. Be aware of what you are signing: Read your MetaMask carefully before you execute transactions. If you’re building apps on Bitcoin with Stacks, the good news is that Hiro Wallet provides native alerts signaling “this transaction is not secure.

Phishing causes damage to Web3 communities, and Discord is a major culprit in facilitating these schemes. When designing Console, we knew that if we could protect users from the credential compromise attack, we could protect them from the #1 hack plaguing Discord. 

Console’s design protects you from credential compromise hacks.

On Console, every member can sign in directly using their web wallet, and their identity will be queried on the blockchain directly from our app. There’s no need for third-party bots, which removes an entire class of bot-related vulnerabilities. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Console can protect your Web3 community, follow us on Twitter @consoledao.

We hope to see you on Console soon! 

Bitcoin sparked the digital property movement in 2009. That’s because for the first time every Bitcoin allows users to verifiably own digital money. “Own” in the sense that no one can forcibly take your bitcoin (aka. digital property) away from you — not without your consent. 

Today, while it’s common to say “I own my car” and “I own my house,” there was never a way to own your online identity. You may believe you own your Gmail email, your Twitter social graph, and your Instagram handle, but you don’t own your them, you merely rent them from these companies. They own it, they have control, and they are restricting digital identity innovation through their monopolies.

In the same way Bitcoin began the great unbundled of money from governments, self-sovereign identities (ENS, BNS, NFTs, etc) are the next best step forward in unbundling power from these social media goliaths.

The mission of Console is to use the power of digital identity to build the future of group chat communications.

Console is Web3 chat. It’s an open-source, decentralized app for communities. And it’s one of the first apps to bring immense utility from Web3 and to the entire world.

I believe Console can play a large role in attracting the next 100,000 users to Web3, and so today I’m excited to share what we’re building.

Console is Built on Web3 Principles: 

1. Console is decentralized — In our first release we’ve decentralize where it’s most important: Identity verification & chat text. Moving forward, we’re employing a progressively decentralized approach to further decentralize. Our ultimate goal is to create a censorship resistant app, one where users can always communicate and reach their audience, even if the entire network tries to stop it.

2. Console is open source — Read our code, contribute to the repo, and help us build a better future for Console. 

3. Users own their data — Users are verified with native smart contracts, not third-party bots. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, Discord and nearly every other social media app, Console doesn’t own access to your identity, we don’t own your data, only you do. 

We believe passionately that we — the Web3 community — are building the future of work, governance, and the creator economy; and therefore we must build on a foundation of tools that we can trust respect our vision and values.

A Community Powered by Trust

Security on Discord is a huge problem. When I’m chatting in Discord servers I’m often on high alert for phishing attempts, DM bots, and random mutant apes shilling their latest rug-pull NFT. These types of hacks not only bankrupt our wallets, they bankrupt our trust in our community. Trust is something you can’t buy with your sats. It can’t be minted. Without trust, organizations fail. 

Now, imagine your community super-powered by trust. Imagine being able to click on a community member to review their contribution to the community. 

When did a particular member join? How many proposals have they voted on? How many bounties did they complete? The answers to these questions give users a snapshot of who is active in your community. Imagine all that in one app and without the need of third-party bots like Collab.land or MEE6. 

This summer we will launch our beta for Console. And when we do, our first Console community—Crash Punks—will be closing its Discord server of 25,000 members and moving over. In the meantime, we are accepting applications for the next batch of ten Console communities. In the meantime, I’d like to share a sneak preview: 

Decentralized Identity Means: Zero Sock Puppets 

Sock puppets plague social media. A sock puppet is a phony name or identity used to argue, troll, or take advantage of other users. For example, if you’re on Discord, you may not know if the person you’re talking with is an active community member or a puppet. 

Console is different. We use verified identity to silence sock puppets. When you arrive at Console, you log in with your favorite web wallet: Hiro Wallet, or MetaMask. 

Console validates your membership into communities based on your ownership of NFTs, FTs, .eth or your .btc decentralized ID.

With Console’s built-in identity verification, you can trust that the people you are chatting with are in fact verified members of your community—not masquerading bots or scams. As your community grows, you can assign roles (admin, moderator, member). And when you’re ready, you can choose to gate access to your community with an NFT, .eth or .btc domain. More trust, zero sock puppets.

More Secure, Better Design

Console offers a 10x improvement to Web3 chat. We’ve built in design improvements to threaded conversations, reactions, end-to-end encrypted private channels, and more.

Follow @ConsoleDAO

Console is invite-only. Want to join? Apply for a chance to bring your community to Console. If you have feedback, thoughts, or questions please reach out, we’d love to hear from you. Follow us on Twitter for early access and upcoming announcements @ConsoleDAO.