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Welcome to DAOstack Arc Docs!

Arc is the base layer of the DAO stack. It consists of a collection of smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain that define the basic building blocks and standard components that can be used to implement any DAO.

Arc is built from the ground up with these principles in mind:

  1. Scalable Decentralized Governance - Arc implements game theoretic & economic techniques (such as: monetization of attention, staking on proposal results, and more...) that ensure high:

    • resilience - resistance to a disproportionate decision power in the hands of minorities.
    • bandwidth - decision making rate of the organization.

    even as the number of the participants gets very large.

  2. Security - Arc is community audited and embodies the best security guidelines and is very well tested.

  3. Interoperability & Compositionality - Arc can integrate with any other ethereum based framework with ease. Organizations can interact with each other and form hierarchies and other complex structures.
  4. Modularity - Arc is built in a modular way allowing anyone to extend and expand the ecosystem to support new use-cases.
  5. General purpose - Arc provides a single unified simple model for building any DAO imaginable.

For more information read the official DAOstack Whitepaper.

Check out:

  • The Contract docs for explanation about each contract and the source tree.
  • The Generated docs for detailed technical reference on every contract.

An overview of the DAO stack

Arc is only a part of a larger tech stack built for decentralized governance at scale, which is collectively called the DAOstack. It is important to note the other projects in this stack and how Arc fits into this larger whole:

The DAO stack

  1. Ethereum - Base blockchain.
  2. Arc - This project.
  3. Arc.js - A JavaScript library that interfaces with Arc, built on top of web3.js.
  4. Collaborative DApps, built on top of DAOstack using Arc.js. eg. Vanille & Alchemy

For more information regarding the entire DAOstack project, check out the docs repository.

The Structure of a DAO

Each DAO is a living entity on the blockchain that can own and manage resources. As such, it consists of the following “organs”:

The DAO stack

  • Native token - A Standard ERC20 token that defines the value system of the DAO. Participants are rewarded for their contributions based on this token.
  • Reputation system - Similar to native token but is non-transferable. The reputation system is used to assign weight the votes of participants.
  • Avatar - This is the public-facing part of the DAO that handles the interaction of the DAO with the rest of the world(eg. interacing with other DAOs, paying third party participants, etc...).
  • Subscribed Elements - The set of Schemes and Global Constraints that comprise the DAO.

For each DAO, the above components are organized in a single smart contract called a Controller, which acts as the owner of those components.

Elements

The main configurable and extendable building blocks of DAOs are: Schemes and Global Constraints, which are collectively called elements.

  • Schemes define the "dos" of the DAO, the rules under which actions are taken, based on the participants' input. Examples of Schemes are:
    • Rewarding contributions when other participants recognize them as worthy.
    • Voting on proposals and automatically executing the chosen proposal.
  • Global constraints define the "don'ts" of the DAO, the conditions that must always hold and can prevent an action from being taken if it violates these conditions. Examples of Global Constraints are:
    • Limiting the amount of tokens or reputation that can be minted per day.
    • Blacklisting certain participants from performing certain actions.

Contributing to Arc Docs

Same as CONTIBUTING, with the following additions:

  1. Make sure your pages are registered in the mkdocs.yml file under pages.

  2. Commands:

    1. npm run docs:update - generate documentation to docs/generated_docs.
    2. (*) npm run docs:build - update & build website to site/.
    3. (*) npm run docs:preview - preview website locally.
    4. (*) npm run docs:deploy - deploy website to gh-pages branch so it becomes live.

  3. Check for broken links by using npm run docs:preview and checking for warnings.

  4. Please use a spell checker in your IDE to avoid spelling errors.
  5. In case of missing or incorrect documentation please open an issue with the label documentation, indicating the file, line number and any extra details.

(*) - The command requires mkdocs & mkdocs-material, run pip install --user mkdocs mkdocs-material.