A stablecoin backed by real-world collateral: stocks like $AAPL and $TSLA; real estate; invoices. Decentralized banking. Need I say more?

You may know from my past articles that I'm very excited for OpenDAO. Months of testing have allowed the team to refine UI elements, battle-test code, and iron out important technical details. Now, with Christmas approaching, final tests are being run to open up the minting platform.

In this article, we'll go over what OpenDAO is, and what the team has been doing the last few months. Then, we'll discuss its significance as a DeFi project. Finally, I will give you a sneak-peak at what's coming soon. Won't you come along with me?

Meet The Team

Lead Architect Moresh Kokane and Operations Lead Sean Qian together created konkrete.io, a blockchain-enabled real estate crowdfunding platform utilizing tokenized real estate shares. Moresh has a background in real estate, having founded Estate Baron in 2014 as a crowdfunding platform for Australian property.

Blockchain Developers Ashkay Srivastav and Viraj Kokane worked on high value DeFi and web projects.

Logan Fulcher is Community Lead for the project and has been facilitating conversations with influencers, doing outreach to new audiences. He has provided support in social channels like Telegram.

Gopal Jadhav, UI developer, has several years of software development experience.

Operations Manager Harshal Mundhe has also helped make some slick animations for OpenDAO informational videos.

Last but certainly not least, Isabelle Qian works as a designer for OpenDAO, and we know she's doing a great job just by looking at the website!

OpenDAO: Bridging real world assets to DeFi

OpenDAO began as a vision: to connect the massive real estate market to a burgeoning DeFi space with tremendous potential for growth. Empower common people with tools to borrow against valuable property, free of the politics and control of government, free from banking institutions which have so many people.

As the project took form, it expanded in scope. A loan market as described requires people on the other end to lend money - in this case, stablecoins - to be placed against the real estate collateral. The tokenization platform to make all this possible on the blockchain would be powerful. It could support other collateral besides real estate, and I believe the team decided to go this route for a more stable, incremental development to the end-goal of supporting fully off-chain, illiquid assets.

In simpler terms, OpenDAO aims to provide a decentralized bank. People and companies could approach the DAO and submit requests for new kinds of productive assets to be placed on the market as collateral, and $OPEN holders vote on whether to add this new asset. By holding collateral in counter-balance to liquid on-chain assets provided by lenders, they can replicate the function of MakerDAO in a simpler, and likely better, way.

"OpenDAO: A DeFi Bank" by Me here on Read.Cash

Cashboxes

From October through most of November, OpenDAO had incentives running for people to deploy DAI as liquidity against Australian Real Estate shares through the Cashbox system. By pooling assets and stablecoins in a two-party mutual manner through Cashboxes, the protocol can provide liquidity to tokenized real world assets in a trustless, decentralized fashion. All parties make an agreement for mutual benefit.

On November 26th, Uniswap listed the $OPEN governance token which will democratically empower the OpenDAO community in future as the project unfolds. Providing liquidity for $OPEN with USDT or ETH can already give you a respectable APY if you stake the LP tokens on Unicrypt.

"Post Public Token release Business and Tech strategy" on Medium

"Double sided CashBox" on Medium

New Developments

Whenever faced with decisions in the development process, the team strives to go with the most secure, decentralized options. They had originally planned to build a Synthetix fork to mint a stablecoin against real-world assets. After a lot of deliberation amongst the team as well as discussions with the community, they decided it would be not only safer, but simpler, to work in tandem with existing platforms.

Ren allows Ethereum-based blockchain solutions to interact with assets from other chains. OpenDAO will work with Ren primarily for BTC collateral on the upcoming market system.

UMA Protocol enables developers to write synthetic assets, a kind of token which tracks the price of another asset, allowing you to transact something in a wider market which may have traditionally only been available in a specific, less widely available format (i.e. invoices or real estate shares). OpenDAO plans to build a DAI-like stablecoin backed by tokenized assets on UMA.

UMA's slow dispute resolution mechanism and oracle-free design makes flash loan exploits nearly impossible and lowers risks of sudden fluctuations the likes of which have hurt MakerDAO's DAI price pegging in the past.

"OpenDAO's Stablecoin Will Use UMA for Collateral Like Real Estate and Stocks!" by Me here on Read.Cash

An Exciting Opportunity

OpenDAO's expansion into progressively larger off-chain markets can give so much power to common people. We can get away from the banks which will manipulate our money to make more for themselves while doing everything they can, like introducing arbitrary wait times, locking your funds behind a frustrating 1hr+ phone call or verification process, to limit your control. All this hassle we deal with to interact with markets in an almost meaningless fashion, because the bank will take most of the profits.

Average people are the bedrock of an economy. Farmers grow wheat to be driven by truck drivers to factories where workers will work with machines to turn that into bread, which will again need to be delivered, to store workers who will put them on shelves, so you can buy the loaf of Honey Wheat sitting on your counter. It seems absurd to me that, somewhere in that chain, is a man in a nice suit sitting in an office rubbing his hands as his dollar amounts go up on paper.

Meanwhile, the farmer works on the wheat for a fixed hourly rate, with almost no opportunity to grow. Our supposedly free market system is allowed to continue benefiting people at the top by power and control. I believe the road to emancipation for humanity is in direct action and ownership, and Decentralized Finance can be a road for you and I to begin to take some of that direct control back from the wealthy.

Conclusion

What do you think of OpenDAO? Does the project excite you as much as it does me? Tell me your thoughts in the comments, and please leave an upvote if you found this informative. If you really appreciate or enjoy the article, maybe consider a tip!

Official Links

Join the Telegram to keep up with latest OpenDAO news

Medium: https://medium.com/opendao

Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenDAOProtocol

Stablecoin lending: https://opm.opendao.io

Governance token LP farming securely via unicrypt: https://openlp.opendao.io