Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This is a technique that fighter pilots learn so they can parse available info, make an informed decision, and execute—all within moments. It is also known as the OODA loop.
If a pilot compresses their OODA Loop down to mere heartbeats, they can outmaneuver and outcompete other pilots, even if those opponents fly a superior aircraft. Swift decision-making leads to decisive victories.
CityCoins isn’t facing such high-stakes decisions, at least not today, but our community does need to be able to adapt quickly to ensure a great future and positive impact.
The OODA Loop approach gives us a framework to consider how:
- Slow feedback loops are impacting CityCoins' growth
- Together we can create a feedback loop that naturally grows itself
We need to tighten the CityCoins OODA Loop
Today, CityCoins has little competition. Someday soon, it will.
The absence of competition does not equate to a holiday, but it does offer valuable time and space to improve and future-proof our ecosystem. To do that, we must compete with ourselves.
The ongoing success of the project is dependent on:
- Quicker capital deployment that supports protocol growth
- Efficient ways of activating new CityCoins
We must accelerate how quickly and effectively capital is deployed from CityCoin treasuries into growing their CityCoin, while having a long-lasting positive impact on the city itself.
Alongside that we must reduce the friction around activating new CityCoins, in a way that doesn’t diffuse capital or momentum from other cities.
Below, I propose a new approach to CityCoins…
CityCoins 2.0
CityCoins 2.0 is a two-pronged solution to make faster decisions informed by the community. Here’s an idea of how this might work:
1) DAOs for Cities
A simple DAO for each CityCoin could allow our project to move more quickly and effectively.
While crypto governance is still a greenfield with many possible configurations, I think we want the following to be true:
- Speed up funding proposals and community involvement
- Give enough power to the mayor/city to have meaningful control, but not overly burdensome responsibility
- Ensure funds are deployed into initiatives that accelerate the protocol toward its goals of increasing health, wealth, and happiness of citizens and stakeholders
Finding the right balance for a DAO to deliver on those goals requires a lot of careful thought from the community and the process would have to be a highly collaborative one.
With that, here is how I think this could work:
- The DAO could be made up of CityCoin token holders who have “Stacked” their tokens over a period of time (provable commitment)
- DAO community members work together to craft thoughtful proposals for deploying funds that will support the city and the protocol
- The CityCoin DAO can approve and reject proposals with oversight from the city
An approach like this would add inherent, immediate utility to CityCoins tokens by giving holders some voting power (whether direct or representative) on how their city’s funds get allocated and ensuring treasury capital allocation is effective, transparent and supports reinvestment back not only into the City but also into the CityCoins ecosystem which in turn helps the city.
Finding a dynamic that supports having the city government closely involved and in control is important as it ensures alignment between the city, token holders and city residents. I will explore this more in a future post.
2) Decentralizing CityCoins activations
Step two is simplifying the way new CityCoins cities are qualified and activated.
Right now the community does not have a clear approach to deciding which city to activate next. It’s unclear who exactly is in control. Even if a city has strong support, when and how do we know it’s time to activate it? We need a clear, measurable indicator and to know the answer clearly as a collective.
Could we allow for virtually any city to be activated at any time, subject to meeting meaningful measurable thresholds?
One approach would be letting the community vote by forwarding STX into a wallet designated for each city.
Once the wallet receives a certain amount—say, two million STX—boom, that city is activated, mining begins automatically and those forwarded STX funds are spread across mining the coin for the first week. If that activation threshold is not met within roughly six months, the wallet refunds all forwarded STX back to their original owners.
There would be several major benefits to this approach:
- Each new city would have significant capital to start powering community proposals upon activating, assuring the city that there is capital ready to go in supporting them.
- It’s a faster activation and adoption process than the current one, and it doesn’t require the city to politick or ponder certain decisions.
- It’s a simple, clear, and automated model that can scale across many CityCoins concurrently, rather than waiting one by one.
- It’s less risky: should a proposed city not reach its threshold within a set timeframe, say six months (~25,000 blocks at 10 min per block), all forwarded STX for that city could get automatically refunded.
Now, rather than everyone voting for every city one by one as a group, people who have a stake in a city can lead the charge, those uninterested in that city can focus elsewhere.
Why do we need CityCoins 2.0?
We don't want to fast-forward three years from now and only have a few CityCoins with little reinvestment back into the dev ecosystem. In the next few years, we want to have hundreds of independent and thriving CityCoins. Without change now, we won’t get there.
This new approach would remove the barriers to growing many communities and ecosystems simultaneously, get more developers working on more projects, onboard more community members, and make the protocol more global.
All it requires is a little tightening of our OODA Loop.
Please join me and the community in the Discord channels where these ideas are being discussed: #city-daos and #city-activations.
