Metis, a decentralized framework to support the creation and management of decentralized companies, has announced that Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of CasperLabs Medha Parlikar is joining the team as an advisor. The partnership comes ahead of the launch of the Casper network mainnet scheduled for the first quarter of 2021.
The Casper Protocol is a layer one public blockchain designed to support the governance of protocols through a range of features. Through the partnership with Parlikar, Metis will help bring various use cases into the Casper ecosystem by enabling them to create their decentralized companies and providing blockchain-based tools to organize and manage their projects in a decentralized way. In her advisory role, Parlikar plans to support Metis in pursuing their shared goals.
"[I see my role as] definitely getting [Metis] to work with the Casper protocol, we have great alignment because they want to support the scaling out of the adoption of decentralized organizations and enabling those organizations to use blockchain technology, and we have the exact same goal we want to scale out the adoption of blockchain technology by making it intuitive," Parlikar said.
By making it easy to utilize blockchain, Metis and CasperLabs plan to spur mass adoption of the technology. "Metis is to build a decentralized framework on top of the Layer1 network like Casper. We will do most of the technical and communication work with the blockchain layer and erase the difficulty for end-users or builders to use blockchain technology." Co-founder and product lead of Metis, Kevin Liu, said.
Metis is using the DAO mechanism to construct the structure of decentralized company. Like an ordinary company in the real-world, this decentralized company is not just for voting, but will also conduct and manage collaborations, in a decentralized way, which is via the mechanism and tools provided by Metis to incentivize community members' involvement and contribution.
Collaborative economy is the niche market that Metis focuses on, such as the open-source projects, Defi, freelancers, sharing economy, affiliate groups, or various interest groups on Facebook or WeChat, which is a huge market with over tens of billions of market size.
When organizers of an open-source project want to use Metis, they register their decentralized autonomous company (DAC), and an Ethereum address is assigned to the decentralized company. Community members can then join and connect with the address with little to no knowledge of the blockchain technology underpinning the product.
"They can use the blockchain-based tools, such as tasks management, knowledge base, event management, accounting, etc., to manage all the collaborations, just like using any internet applications," Liu said.
"Metis is the Enabler," Parlikar said.
"As you can see, we spend a lot of efforts to make the framework easy-to-use and cater to the user experience of internet applications, so you don't have to worry about MetaMask, private key, public key, and other complex on-chain operations. Metis will do it for you. Due to the layer2 construct, the framework is also highly scalable and low in cost to operate." CEO of Metis, Elena Sinelnikova, said.
The two companies each have independent reputation tracking systems, creating decentralized business credentials within each decentralized company.
"A lot of these governance protocols today they have this notion of a whale effect where you can just buy a bunch of governance token and sit on it," Parlikar said. "We have a very different way where you can earn reputation through actions, and that's stored in your keys separate from your tokens, so it's a great way to reward contributions, but you separate the monetary aspect, the token aspect, of it from reputation."
The Metis protocol has its own reputation system where users earn points for their collaboration efforts or through staking. Sinelnikova and Liu see lots of potential applications for the points, to act as the social contract to prevent destructive behaviours, or to use similarly to credit scores to connect with Defi and determine who is most likely to pay back loans.
"The alignment is in goals because we're all working towards mass adoption, Sinelnikova said. "We believe with more and more applications adopt blockchain, the decentralized company will become as important as the company in the real world. And Metis will become a decentralized platform for builders to easily create, run, and manage decentralized companies."
Contributed by Emily Mason and Kevin Liu