Dialogue with Metis co-founder: What is Metis?

This article is from the DeFi Seven O'clock Community.

Q1. Could Kevin first introduce his professional experience and what aspects of Metis he is mainly responsible for?

Thank you, host. Hello everyone, I am the co-founder and product lead of MetisDAO. I entered the blockchain field in 2018 and have been conducting research related to DAOs, governance, and token economics. I, along with other collaborators, have published several articles that have been included in Hackernoon. It was also in 2018 that I met my two partners at MetisDAO, Elena and Yuan. We have been thinking about how to utilize blockchain infrastructure and the organizational structure of DAOs to manage decentralized collaboration, allowing community members to truly participate in the value production activities of decentralized projects or applications. These thoughts gradually evolved into the Metis project, which we officially launched in early 2019.

Before entering the blockchain industry, I had over 5 years of product management experience in tech companies, where I led a team to create a mobile video application that has been downloaded over 160 million times. This experience made me particularly focused on user experience, especially since many current DApps have numerous inconveniences for users. This has led me to pay special attention to product design on the Metis platform, focusing on how to make it very simple for users and communities to establish DAOs and how to enable builders to easily create DApps. These are key considerations in our product design.

Q2. Before formally introducing the Metis project, we have seen two recent community engagement activities related to Metis. Could Kevin introduce these two activities and share some experiences and insights?

Yes, on April 7, Metis officially launched the Alpha testnet and released a beta DApp called Prologue, developed by community members based on Metis Rollup. This application allows everyone to experience how to create a decentralized company in just three steps on Layer 2, and through Metis's "staking withdrawal" mechanism, manage tasks and collaborate on knowledge without concerns with people who lack a trust foundation. Everyone can experience the flexibility, transaction speed, cost, and rich functionality of building DApps on Layer 2. As one of the main Rollup providers, Metis Rollup will support various applications built on its Layer 2, including NFTs, DeFi, collaboration, and more. Currently, testing work around the Alpha testnet is ongoing, and we welcome everyone to experience it and report bugs to earn rewards based on their contributions. The latest data shows that over 6,800 DACs have been created, with more than 12,000 registered users.

On April 21, Metis launched a community NFT airdrop, marking the first NFT artwork collaboratively created by the community—"Rebuilding the Tower of Babel." The first phase (reservation) was completed in just 97 minutes (originally planned for 5 days) with the generation of 2,000 global tribes (DAOs). Later, in response to community requests, an additional 560 tribes were added, which were fully reserved in just 3 minutes. In the minting phase that started yesterday, despite high gas fees, the required 256 fragments for "Rebuilding the Tower of Babel" were completed in just 1 hour. Currently, this first NFT artwork generated by the community is being publicly auctioned on OpenSea, with two bids already placed, and the price has reached 7 ETH. The latest data shows that 12,118 wallet addresses participated in this community activity, and among the 2,560 tribes, 1,204 tribes are fully occupied (15 people).

The entire event exceeded our expectations, including server attacks and downtime, and we also discovered some interesting phenomena.

First, Layer 2 will help blockchain be accepted by mainstream society. Previously, due to imperfect infrastructure, poor scalability, and high gas fees, it was difficult for Layer 1 to support commercial operations beyond DeFi, and achieving an internet product-level experience was challenging. With Layer 2, products can be designed to be very flexible and lightweight, and user experience can be well taken care of, allowing for quick on-chain confirmations, enabling users to truly engage. Our test applications on the Alpha testnet still have many bugs and incomplete features, but due to the excellent user experience, users hardly feel they are operating on the blockchain, resulting in more DACs being established than expected. Imagine if some DApp products have a good experience, are easy to use, and fun; blockchain acceptance by mainstream society will not be an issue.

Second, the Web 3.0 era has arrived and is happening. For the same reasons mentioned above, there was not much that could be done in the decentralized world, aside from DeFi and trading tokens. However, with the support of Layer 2, Web 3 should operate as an economic entity, supporting various types of decentralized businesses beyond just DeFi. The architecture that Metis is building will support the rapid construction of various decentralized applications or businesses, such as decentralized chat rooms, social applications, sharing economy, gig economy, crowdfunding, and more. Thus, the decentralized world of Web 3.0 should have a richer and more diverse range of businesses or applications in operation.

Third, DAOs without a common mission lack significance. Currently, most DAOs are primarily used for governance and voting, but this is a false proposition. Most token holders are not the main contributors to the project, and allowing them to vote on the project's direction is unwise, as participation in voting is generally low. In our community-generated NFT activity, individuals can quickly establish tribes (DAOs), invite friends to join and trust them, and driven by self-interest, the tribe collectively completes the mission of generating the Tower of Babel puzzle. This vision truly activates the power of the community, allowing participation in the mission completion process through collaboration, with everyone actively sharing, inviting, interacting, and participating in the auction. This kind of DAO represents true decentralized collaboration.

Q3. Can you introduce the Metis project? What problems does it mainly solve?

Metis has built a brand new Layer 2 protocol based on Metis Rollup as the technical infrastructure and DAC (Decentralized Autonomous Company) as the organizational infrastructure to support the operation of decentralized economies, which is what we refer to as supporting the Web 3.0 economy on the blockchain. This is our goal and vision. We can say that for the first time, we clearly see that the future of Web 3.0 can operate as a large-scale economic entity, rather than a few scattered and fragmented decentralized applications.

To achieve such a grand goal, we see that Ethereum currently has various problems at both the technical and organizational levels. I will explain later why we need to consider both technology and organization.

First, Ethereum's gas fees and throughput have been criticized for a long time. In addition, relying solely on smart contracts cannot support complex business logic, which greatly limits the development of various DApps. This is a technical issue that needs to be addressed. Second, DAOs are highly anticipated, but currently, the most commonly used function of DAOs is voting, making it difficult for community members to engage in more complex business collaboration through DAOs. How to upgrade DAOs from a shell structure to the main body of value production activities is the second core issue that Metis needs to solve.

Q4. What has the Metis protocol done on Layer 2? What advantages does it have compared to other Layer 2 projects?

Metis has built a brand new Layer 2 protocol—Metis Rollup. Since we define Web 3.0 as a complete economic entity in operation, this requires a robust infrastructure with certain characteristics, including low cost, decentralization, strong scalability, ease of construction, and meeting the practical demands of decentralized business operations regarding privacy and storage. These are precisely what the Metis protocol has achieved on Layer 2.

As you know, various Layer 2 solutions, including Optimistic Rollup, Arbitrum Rollup, and ZKRollup, are still continuously being built and updated. Vitalik Buterin's view is that Rollups will be the main solution for Ethereum's scalability for a considerable period.

We have been researching various solutions for Optimistic Rollup (OR), but we found that some of OR's current mechanism designs are still imperfect, with some being highly centralized, lacking adequate incentive mechanisms for validators, and insufficient support for business scenarios. To be honest, it is not very easy to build DApps on OR, which is unfriendly to developers. Therefore, to serve the operation of large-scale economies and the complex logic of decentralized operations, we have made many innovations.

1. Unlike many OR solutions that only support a limited single virtual machine (VM), Metis supports multiple virtual machines running in parallel to support different DACs (Decentralized Autonomous Companies) simultaneously, avoiding potential throughput bottlenecks. This also further increases the degree of decentralization, preventing single points of failure and control by centralized entities.

2. Metis's virtual machine is compatible with EVM, so developers do not need to learn a new language to develop. For non-blockchain users, their guidance and interface will also be very simple, allowing them to launch their decentralized companies or applications just like opening other web applications.

3. Metis supports a microservices architecture-based development framework, allowing for easy expansion of various toolsets, smart contract templates, and rule charters. Developers can easily plug and unplug microservice tools to build their applications, increasing developer friendliness and lowering entry barriers.

4. Metis integrates IPFS to protect the privacy needs of different decentralized businesses, allowing DACs to choose what content to put on IPFS to protect commercial privacy.

5. Metis has introduced a Layer 2 Ranger mechanism, which incentivizes validation nodes to quickly perform validations through a competitive mining mechanism, thereby improving the efficiency of validation from Layer 2 to Layer 1 and significantly shortening validation times.

6. We believe that Web 3 is a complete economic entity, so each DAC should have self-sustainability. Therefore, we support DApps/communities issuing their own tokens to incentivize internal economic activities.

7. Metis has also integrated the framework of DACs into Metis Rollup, serving as a basic unit to support the operation and management of decentralized applications, communities, and businesses.

Thus, compared to other OR projects, Metis Rollup features high scalability, low latency, high functionality, high availability, high privacy, and self-sustainability. Metis Rollup allows developers and projects to enjoy the ecological advantages of Ethereum while quickly building operational businesses or applications based on Layer 2 using a complete development framework.

Q5. Metis combines Layer 2 with DAOs. What changes and significance will this bring?

We believe that DAOs/DACs are the basic units that make up the Web 3 economy. They are the framework that supports the operation of decentralized applications or businesses. In traditional centralized economies, companies are the basic units for value creation and transfer through collaboration. For Web 3, the entities that undertake similar roles of value creation and transfer are actually DAOs composed of individuals.

However, many projects still understand DAOs from an organizational perspective. In reality, a DAO is not an organization that includes individuals; rather, individuals constitute a DAO. This is not just a rephrasing or a change of wording; it represents the perspective from which you view the DAO—whether it is organization-centered or individual-centered.

We believe that DAOs have many important characteristics.

• Companies have boundaries, while DAOs do not; the continuous joining and exiting of members make DAOs a constantly flowing collective.
• DAOs are composable, meaning that they can be merged when completing corresponding missions, and can be split again after the mission is completed.
• DAOs are individual-centric, representing the characteristics of all individuals, so everyone is equal, and multiple values coexist.
• DAOs have homogeneity; the way two individuals collaborate within a DAO is also the way two DAOs collaborate with each other.
• Inclusivity. DAOs can provide services for companies, and companies can also be part of a DAO.

Therefore, we believe that a DAO should be a collective of community members working together to accomplish certain missions. In this collective, the real challenge lies in how to build mutual trust in a decentralized environment lacking a trust foundation and manage distributed collaboration.

By defining DAOs/DACs in this way, you will find that 1) the voting function commonly used in DAOs is actually just a very small part of its use cases; 2) it is impossible to manage DAOs/DACs on Ethereum Layer 1 due to gas fees and throughput limitations. Therefore, it must be combined with Layer 2.

Once combined with Layer 2, the capabilities of DAOs can be unleashed, allowing community members to collaborate according to a unified set of rules to achieve a common goal, thereby promoting the progress of decentralized businesses. This is also why we say that DAOs/DACs are the basic units that make up the Web 3 economy and are the framework that supports the operation of decentralized applications or businesses.

Q6. Does Metis have plans for layout in the DeFi/NFT fields?

We have seen that DeFi has grown significantly over the past few years, and some real value transfers are indeed taking place. However, for long-term and sustainable development, DeFi needs to be integrated with real-world economic activities, and we need more decentralized applications focused on different businesses to go live on the blockchain, not just Bitcoin and DeFi. Supporting large-scale applications of DApps and the operation of the Web 3 economy is precisely the mission that Metis hopes to achieve.

Metis is building a brand new Layer 2 infrastructure where decentralized applications like DeFi and NFTs can be built on Metis Rollup, benefiting from a low-cost, high-throughput, and easy-to-build development framework. At the same time, they can establish a DAC structure community, not for voting, but to coordinate and manage community members to achieve business goals. Community members can receive incentives based on their contributions and accumulate reputation points that benefit them in the long run.

We view DeFi as an organic component of the Web 3 economy, which can be integrated into the entire ecosystem to provide services for other DApps. Currently, we are collaborating with many DeFi projects and have recently invested in decentralized derivatives projects like Asteria and Rozoj, which require high-performance, low-cost infrastructure support, as well as Layer 2-based NFT generation and exchange platforms. With the launch of our mainnet, we will support various innovations in NFT businesses, such as the innovation of NFT + DAO + Social.

Open Q&A Session:

1. Does Metis have plans for a launch?

Yes, there will be an official announcement next week, so please look forward to it.

Risk Warning: All articles from Seven O'clock cannot be considered as investment advice or recommendations. Investment carries risks, and individuals should consider their risk tolerance. It is advisable to conduct in-depth reviews of projects and make careful investment decisions.