Imagine a system where people are rewarded based on their ability to provide value. The more effort, insight, talent and achievements you acquire, the more you should be rewarded — both financially and through social recognition. So, the higher you climb in any organisation shows the value you’ve provided and are able to provide. That is the core ideology of a meritocracy.
It’s such a “no duh” concept, we almost expect it to be happening everywhere and at every level, from small businesses to world governments. But is that really the case?
The term “meritocracy” is not one that is used very often, but you’ve almost definitely heard of its most famous example: The American Dream. That classic narrative that drives the industrious heart of the US is meritocracy manifest. Regardless of your wealth, race, privilege, gender, education, and all those other factors, the only thing that truly matters is your effort, determination and talent. By harnessing the power of those three factors, you will find success.
However, the reality is not quite as smooth sailing as the movies make it out to be.
Unfortunately, other forces are at play that create unsurmountable barriers for the average person; bribery, coercion, corruption, nepotism, opportunism, and the very things that the American Dream claims to ignore still block true meritocracy.
We see similar issues in the DeFi space. When it comes to influencing crypto projects, one obstacle is that protocols don’t often even attempt to recognise merit, or to put it another way, they don’t even begin to think about how to recognise the value of an individual’s opinion. Most code simply grants every individual’s vote with equal weight, in a fully democratic, one-person-one-vote style. Or they increase the size of your vote based on the number of tokens you stake. This has a tendency of recognising wealth above all else. And, in turn, ensuring that future decisions are biased in favour of those that provide the most rewards to the — already — wealthiest members, which of course reduces meritocracy and opportunities for progression.
This is where Meryt shines however. Current DeFi tooling available to DAOs and crypto treasuries is inadequate from a meritocratic perspective. Already we see that the decentralised freedom of DAOs is being reduced by the reliance on inadequate DeFi tooling for on chain investment decisions.
This in turn results in decision making driven by those that hold the most tokens. The Meryt Protocol can help fix these problems by focussing on building decision making and execution modules that allow DAOs to invest their treasury on-chain in a trustless manner.
Now, we are not saying that democracy, or favouring those who have the most invested are necessarily wrong systems, but that there is often a need to attempt to weigh opinions in another way. Such approaches enable more meritocratic decision-making. Let’s explore a few:
· One example could be participation — tracking how engaged a user is around a particular project or issue, and giving those users more weight.
· Another could be reputation — here, it’s possible to measure the respect users have for each other, and thus granting more weight to the users who have received more upvotes than others.
· Or, track record — here we can measure how ‘correct’ users have been on their historic voting or prediction patterns, and give more weight to those people, as opposed to giving equal power to those who have been consistently or recently on a losing streak.
(The last option is what we have built at Pynk and found success in harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to make investment decisions.)
There are plenty of other options of course, and it’s possible to pick and choose between them for a particular vote. In some cases, 1-person-1-vote is clearly the right choice. In others, it may be that reputation works better (perhaps when we are talking about complex matters where non-experts wish to proxy their vote to those they believe are experts).
In others, we might even want to mix and match — for example, voting for an initial pool of options through 1-person-1-vote to narrow them down, then making the final decision through a reputation-based poll. Or vice versa. The possible combinations could cover almost any voting scenario to deliver results most aligned with the projects best interests.
So Meryt isn’t focused purely on meritocratic decisions. But it is bringing them to the table, and that act in and of itself, can shift the balance towards further meritocracy. Overall, we believe it can help create a truer economy of value than what we currently see across the crypto and DeFi space.
As Aaron Wright (@awrigh01, co-founder of the OpenLaw project) says, “Web3 will be optimized for people who can add value to a community”. We believe this will be done largely through meritocratic DAOs, of which Meryt will be the first of many.
I’d welcome any comments below with thoughts and suggestions and if you haven’t already please follow our socials at the link below:
Thank you for getting involved early in the Meryt journey. Our lives have become dedicated to helping all to create better futures for each other through collaboration. It’s our firm belief that by working together we can do this. As we like to say, ‘because none of us are as smart as all of us’.
