SQUADS DEEP DIVE
Squads is a web3 collaboration infrastructure for Solana-based teams.
There are several things to consider when starting out with building your crypto project or community for a specific goal. Among them, having a sustainable game plan and set of rules that should be followed, the choice of the products to build at the start, and most importantly, building and managing assets and communities are challenging. Among the several protocols or infrastructures available on different chains, Squads is one of the infrastructures built on Solana to simplify help curb these obstacles.
Squads help web3-native teams organize, make decisions on-chain and manage digital assets together using codified membership, multi-signature wallets (multi-sigs) called “Vaults,” and tokenless, on-chain voting for governance(DAO).
Web3: Web3 is the next generation of the internet.
On-chain voting: A fair process of voting which is decentralized. Values cannot be altered and records remain unchanged.
Vaults: Unlike a regular crypto wallet, vaults do not allow crypto assets to be withdrawn immediately due to the fact that there is additional security because it requires two or more persons to approve a transaction in their individual wallets depending on the number of persons who own that wallet.
DAO: Everyone in a Decentralized Autonomous Organization is self-governing or has the right or power to make decisions for oneself. It operates completely transparently and independently of any human intervention including its original creators. In summary, a DAO is a body with an absence of a central leader.
Nowadays, we have a few platforms on different chains that community members from different crypto projects could leverage to create their DAO without learning how to code. DAOs have been popular on Ethereum before Realms launched into Solana.
Realms is a full-stack DAO platform and governance standard.
Squads is a tool for the creation of multisig Vaults.
As of 28th October 2021, the Squads team announced that they have raised over $1.5 million in its seed phase to take the DAO framework mainstream. Again, as of 24th February, they announced that they have raised $5m in s strategic round and went live on Solana.
After the first announcement, I was captivated to follow up the project closely and study its features and recent improvement to date. I will walk you through the Squads platform in this article in which I will lay emphasis on their unique features and gradually arrive at a conclusion at the end of the article. Are you ready for the “deep dive”?
KEY FEATURES
Prior to my research, there are some key features Squads Protocol possesses. They are:
- Opensourced to allow Web3 native teams work effectively without any limitations.
- Easy to deploy multisignature wallets.
- Abilility to store Non-fungible tokens in a Vault.
- Built-in twitter linking to a wallet address powered by Cardinal.
Squads protocol possesses the only multisig on Solana audited by Neodyme
Below are the two types of Squads that can be created currently, represented in a tabular form.
GETTING STARTED
Asides from the launch and social media pages which are shown at the top right corner of the site, it is impressive that their incentive also puts web3 teams into consideration just as the bio on the site states. The screenshot of several sections in the dApp is found below.
Let’s get to see each of the outlined features in the dApp mentioned on the website. For the sake of this walkthrough, I will be using devnet to make this illustration. To access the protocol, a supported SPL wallet by the platform is needed. I am using the phantom wallet extension. Do well to get some Devnet SOL from the faucet to serve as fees.
Mainnet: This is the Main Network in which users send, receive, and perform transactions with real money.
Devnet: Devnet is called Developers Network. It is used to test applications. Therefore, all coins seen on devnet are not real money.
This is the page where all your organizations or project committees appear. The top right corner where you see ‘Faucet’ can be used to get SOL devnet tokens to interact with the protocol. Proceeding to Create Squad will yield:
In this segment, you can add the display photo of your squad, the name of the squad, the squad token name, the description of the squad, and the initial token amount for the initial members that would be in the squad.
Unlike some SPL governance protocols where you get the tokens in your wallet which you can deposit into the DAO to have voting power, Squads protocol holds the tokens for you virtually, and the token is not sent or stored in your wallet. Therefore, it has avoided the creation of unnecessary SPL tokens. Also, in the description, you are limited by the text inputs, therefore, a summary of what the crew represents is needed.
The total allocation model consists of two types. The first model is to be considered when all members agree that one will have more voting power than the other while the second model is to be considered when everyone has an equal amount of tokens which implies that they can all have equal voting powers. Since the second model is self-explanatory, I will go with the first model.
You will need to give details for the Support, Quorum, and Core member threshold in percentages. I will use practical examples to lay emphasis.
For support:
If the total supply of the tokens = 100,000 and the support percentage is set to 70%, it means a total of 70,000 tokens should be allocated to an option when voting to make a decision a winner.For Quorum:
If there are a total of 200 members on your squad and the quorum percentage is set to 51%, it means that a total of 102 members have to vote for a particular decision to make it a winner.For Core Member threshold:
If the Core Member threshold is set to 10% and the total supply is 100,000, it means that a member should hold a minimum of 10,000 tokens to be considered a core member.
N/B: Support is based on the percentage of people while Quorum is based on the percentage of tokens.
It is not compulsory to add all members to the squad in the initial creation stage. The maximum number of members allowed in a squad is a thousand members. Contact the squads protocol team if you want to add members beyond that limit. Adding members after creating the squad will require the voting process and permission of other members.
On adding a member, you are to assign a percentage of the total supply to a particular member of the squad. The total number of tokens that will/to be assigned to all members must not exceed the initial total supply otherwise there is an error. It also raises an error if the public key is invalid. See the screenshot below.
For a start, I will be deleting the other two entries and I will be the only person in the Squad. After that, you are expected to review the details of the squad as only the Support and Quorum can be changed after it has been deployed.
You want to be very careful, especially when choosing Support and Quorum because a member can misplace his private keys, therefore, 100% on both is not advised.
This is the squad page. On the top right corner, you get to see the vault address. You can also see that you can navigate between the sections: voting, members, vault, chat, and info. There are also filter options to help reach a certain proposal in a case where you have many proposals. Let’s create a proposal.
When creating a proposal, you write the heading of the proposal, describe it and input your options in the segment below it. You can also attach a link to a website. On the right segment, if there are more than two options and members in your Squad are permitted to select more than one option, you can change from the single choice vote to multi choice vote, duration of the proposal and finally, click on propose.
When a proposal is created, you can see the information about the proposal including the Author’s public key. In the votes section, every member’s public address alongside their vote power and the option voted on is being displayed. Active and closed proposals are differentiated by the indication shown on the proposal.
Asides from active and closed indications on a proposal, there are other two indications: start later which means the proposal is counting down to its start date, and ready for execution which means appropriate for Regulations and required to be executed after the end date if its criteria are met.
If the Support and Quorum of a proposal are reached on the proposal before the end date, the proposal will be closed.
This section displays the Public address of each member, the number of tokens they hold, and the voting power. Any member can decide to quit the squad at any time but adding and removing members have to be in form of a proposal.
In the Vault section, you get to see the assets available. Assets can be deposited with ease but sending the asset would require the votes of other members of the community. On the devnet, only SOL is available but there are a vast of assets acceptable including NFTs on the mainnet.
I am a seasoned member in the Grape protocol community who has a skilled role and also in their DAO. Grape protocol helps projects grow by making available gated communities of the project on their discord. Before having access to the gated community, users may be required to have a percentage of $GRAPE or available to top-tier members in their community.
Readers who have little to no idea on what Grape protocol offers may refer to my article which I wrote some time ago.
Info section displays the information about the squad.
NFTS ON SQUADS PROTOCOL
NFT Squads are only available on the mainnet. If a Solana NFT project has been onboarded and registered with Squads Protocol, all you just have to do is to connect your wallet. On the ‘Your Squads’ page, the project community or DAO will appear. automatically without having to search for it as the protocol automatically detects the token in your wallet.
COMMUNITY
KEEP IN TOUCH…
If you are a user or consider making use of the platform in the nearest future, you should join the discord community to stay in touch with their latest announcements or new features releases.
CONNECT WITH PEOPLE
The community is also a great way to connect with members or teams of a particular DAO which you might have interest in also joining, making decisions, and building with them.
LEARN
The team alongside other community members share educative content on web3, DAO, and recent news around these topics so anyone can get equipped with more knowledge and stay updated.
REQUEST FEATURES/SUPPORT
You can also make requests for the project developers to add new features you feel would be beneficial to the protocol and it would surely be put into consideration. You can report any bugs you might find in the infrastructure for a smoother experience.
PARTNERSHIPS
Partnerships serve as an advantage to any project that wants to thrive in the crypto space.
Squads Protocol has several partnerships with big crypto firms and influencers. I attached one of their tweets in which they listed most of their recent partnerships.
MILESTONE
14 days after the launch of Mainnet and 1000 squads were deployed in which about 80% are multi-sig.
This is the first Squads protocol major milestone.
CONCLUSION
Squads protocol is a great DAO infrastructure on Solana that has a very good UI/UX design and I haven’t experienced any bugs so far using both the mainnet and devnet versions of the web app. I like the fact that virtually all the options have a brief explanation or tip to help anyone navigate through effortlessly.
Above this, the number of features it provides to DAO and web3 teams stand out with the fact that the cost of using these tools is so minimal. Nevertheless, I am optimistic about the fact that their app updates or new features will be mind-blowing. For instance, the interchain integration with Solana and Terra because it seems the team might launch Squads protocol on Terra.
Another feature I would request would be a theme changer for those who enjoy white screen lights in the day or bright places. I also expect that in the long run when there are many VR games or communities built on Solana and the Metaverse is now normal, they integrate more tools to help scale web3 communities in the Metaverse. I will definitely remain very active in the Squads protocol discord community to contribute in every possible way I can.
