Meet Baal 👺

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Baal sets the season, and gives forth His voice from the clouds.

There was a time when humanity assumed we were at battle against each other. However, we were actually in a battle against Moloch -- the demon God of coordination failure. A strategy to beat Moloch was hypothesised, and Moloch v1 was an experiment to validate it.

Moloch v2 expanded on its success, and gave us the confidence to be bolder with our approach. This birthed Baal, the third version of the MolochDAO contract aiming to strike fear in the eyes of Moloch itself.

Your skills at wielding battle axes have improved. It is now time to test your courage. Moloch is a worthy foe. Aim for the head.

Baal is a minimal yet composable DAO template. It continues work from the Moloch, Minion and Compound frameworks that made it easier for people to combine and command crypto assets with intuitive membership games.

Baal Animation

The initial development of v3 (and a majority of this section) borrows from the Moloch Mystics' Baal repository, and current active development happens in a fork located in DAOhaus' Baal repo.

In case the repository is updated or shifted, a message shall be posted here.

Networks

Ethereum Mainnet, Gnosis Chain and Goerli

deployed factories

Baal (Moloch V3)

Baal is the code name for MolochV3

Baal is a governance layer that sits on top of a multisig treasury. It uses the Gnosis Zodiac standards to interface with the treasury.

By abstracting governance into its own layer, Baal enables a more nuanced, Moloch-style control over consensus.

Governance Units

There are two main governance units in Moloch v3. These are the same as that of v2, namely, membership shares and loot shares. However, the key difference in v3 is their transferability.

In Moloch v3, both membership and loot shares are ERC20 tokens. This means that thier minting, burning and transferability can be controlled by the main DAO contract.

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A DAO may start off with non-transferable membership and loot shares, but can later "turn on" the transferability of both types of shares.

Membership and Loot Shares

Membership and loot shares continue to hold the same rights in v3 as they did in v2. So membership shares continue to hold execution, voting and exit rights; and loot shares continue to hold only exit rights.

DAO Configuration and Guild Management

In v3, there are many configuration options that can be updated in the contract. These updates are done through the standard proposal and governance flow. Examples of some updatable configuration options are:

  • The minting, burning or pausing of membership shares and loot shares.
  • Enabling or disabling shamans to set governance or admin configuration.
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Shamans are smart contracts that can exercise granular control over the DAO (outside of the standard governance process). Either they are given these extraordinary rights during the initial DAO setup or later on (through a proposal getting passed).

Shaman Roles

The DAO always has full control over its configuration. However, the DAO can decide to grant certain roles to Shamans that let these Shamans make changes to the DAO's configuration directly.

A Shaman can take on the following roles:

  • Governor: Cancel proposals, set/change governance configurations (like the length of proposals, quorum requirements, etc.)
  • Manager: Control the minting and burning of membership shares and loot shares.
  • Admin: Pause or unpause membership shares and loot shares, and set admin configurations.

For more details, click here.

Initial Setup

The DAO can be setup in two ways:

  1. The Standard Summon: Here you deploy and setup all contracts (the core DAO contract, ERC20s) and the treasury (Gnosis Safe).

When you summon a DAO in the standard manner, the summoner must provide a DAO name, a token symbol and a list of actions to be executed on setup. These could be setting governance or admin configs, minting membership shares or loot shares to other initial members, and adding any Shamans and granting them roles.

  1. The Custom Summon: Here you deploy and setup all contracts (the core DAO contract, ERC20s) but bring your own treasury (Gnosis Safe).

The Custom Summon is similar to the Standard Summon, the only difference is that a you will need to sign a transaction in your multisig safe which will initiate the same process as above and also enable the Baal module on your treasury.

See the Baal Summoner factory for more details.

Proposal Flow

The proposal flow is similar to Moloch v2 albeit with a few small differences. In summary, all proposals are multi-call (as in, a proposal could trigger multiple actions if passed like transferring funds, minting shares, etc.) and include a time-boxed window for voting, followed by a time-boxed window for the grace period. The proposal flow is as follows:

1. Submission

A proposal must be first submitted for voting. DAOs can choose to require an offering to submit proposals to prevent spam (relevant on side-chains).

2. Sponsoring

For a proposal to go into voting, it must be sponsored by a current member. DAOs can specify the minimum number of membership shares required to sponsor a proposal. They can also setup "autosponsoring" in case a member satisfies the criteria of sponsoring a proposal.

3. Voting

After getting sponsored, the proposal goes into a voting period where members holding membership shares vote for or against the proposal.

4. Grace Period

After the voting period has elapsed, the proposal enters a grace period. The point of a grace period is allow objecting members to ragequit or allow the proposal sponsor to cancel the proposal.

5. Proposal is ready

After the grace period is over, the proposal is "ready" to be executed.

6. Proposal is executed

A member must execute the proposal once it's ready. Usually, the sponsor does so after a proposal is ready. The member triggering the execution of a ready proposal gets a small reward (from the amount that a sponsor has put up). The sponsor is refunded the amount they posted to sponsor the proposal (minus the reward given to the executor).

7. Post execution

After execution, the proposal enters the processed state. This could either be Processed (i.e. the proposal was executed successfully) or Defeated (i.e. the proposal did not pass). Additionally, the proposal can also be Cancelled (in cases of failed executed or if the manager shaman or sponsor cancels it in the grace period).

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Proposals must be processed in the order they are voted on.

Member Actions

1. Vote

A member holding membership proposals can vote for or against any proposal. Members can also vote with signatures (where votes are collected through and submitted later). This is a gasless process done via EIP712.

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All voting is optimistic in nature. This means that proposals pass if they have more yes votes than no votes at the end of the voting period. However, DAOs can also set minimum quorum requirements for proposals to pass.

2. Delegate

Members can delegate their voting power to another address (this could be an address of another member).

Members can ragequit to burn some amount of membership shares or loot shares and receive a proportional amount of funds from the treasury.

3. Ragequit

Members can ragequit to burn some amount of membership shares or loot shares and receive a proportional amount of funds from the treasury.

Admin Config.

The admin config. controls the transferability of membership shares and loot shares.

Governance Config.

The governance config. settings control the various parameters relevant to governance (these are detailed below). These settings can be modified via a Governor Shaman or via the regular proposal process.

Governance Config. parameters are:

  1. Voting: The time period for which members can vote on a proposal.

  2. Grace: The time period after voting is finished and before the proposal can be executed.

  3. New Offering:: The amount of a native token that must be offered when making a proposal. This is transferred to the DAO and is non-refundable.

  4. Quorum: The minimum percentage of shares that must vote yes for the proposal to pass.

  5. Sponsor Threshold: The minimum number of membership shares that must be held by a member to sponsor a proposal.

  6. Minimum Retention: It is completely possible to have members ragequit during the grace period after a proposal has passed. In such a case, DAOs can specify the minimum number of membership shares that must be held for a proposal to pass. If a large number of people ragequit and the number of outstanding membership shares falls below a certain threshold, the proposal is auto-failed.

Other Baal-only Actions

In v3, the ability to "guildkick" members (i.e. converting their membership shares to loot shares) is not present. This is because this process can be created through multi-call Baal-only proposal. In this way, DAOs can execute the inverse of this process too (as a way to "promote" members).

  • Execute as Baal: In v3, proposals can be executed directly from the Baal contract (for example, proposals that affect the DAO configuration and member management.)
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"Executing as Baal" lets DAOs rescure funds that might have been sent to the Baal contract.

  • Admin Locks: Since DAOs can employ Shamans to have direct control over the DAO (without having to pass proposals), they can also lock these special rights given to Shamans (to disable them).

In the Wild

Dapps and dev toolkits using this contract:

  1. DAOhaus v3 dev toolkit (alpha)
  2. DAOhaus v3's DAO Hub, Summoner and Admin UI (alpha)
  3. Gnosis Safe App Moloch v3 Summoner (coming soon)

DAOs using this contract:

Coming soon!

Audits

Quantstamp

  • Date: October 18, 2022

Hacken

  • Score: 9.6
  • Date: September 1, 2022

Moloch v3x and v4

We've only just begun! Stop by and say hi to learn about features we're working on, and ways to get involved.

Contributions

The Moloch contracts are built and maintained by a larger group of developers and teams. All our code is open source and all contributions, review and sanity checks are welcome.

These docs refer to the Baal working branch in the DAOhaus repo. That branch in itself is a fork of the Moloch Mystics' Repo.

Conversations regarding development happen in the #los-moloches channel in the MetaCartel Discord server. Come through!