Glossary of Key Terms
Cold Start Problem: The challenge of gaining momentum and scaling a new product or network, particularly in two-sided marketplaces, where organizations traditionally invest significant time and money upfront to onboard one side before achieving exponential user base growth.
Conviction Voting: A DAO governance model where voters continuously express their preferences on proposals, and the longer they maintain their preference for a proposal, the stronger their vote becomes.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO): An entity that exists autonomously on the internet through underlying code, governed by collective action and decision-making by its members using blockchain technology, without the need for a centralized governance structure.
Decentralized Science (DeSci): An emerging field leveraging blockchain and decentralized technologies to revolutionize how science is funded, conducted, and shared, aiming to democratize access to research, enhance transparency, and incentivize global collaboration.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT): A decentralized database managed by multiple participants, allowing for secure and transparent record-keeping. Blockchain is a type of DLT.
Governance Tokens: A specific type of crypto-asset (token) often used by DAOs to grant holders voting rights and influence over the organization's decisions and treasury management.
Holographic Consensus: A DAO governance model where voters act as a prediction market, betting if a proposal will pass or fail. If a proposal reaches a certain threshold of voters who predict it will pass, it can pass with a relative majority instead of an absolute one.
Impact Factor (IF): A bibliometric (publication-based) metric that measures the importance of a scientific journal by calculating the average number of citations received by its articles over a two-year period, used as a proxy for research impact and career success.
IP-NFT (Intellectual Property Non-Fungible Token): A framework that tokenizes intellectual property elements such as patents, research data, and legal agreements, enabling them to be monetized and transacted using blockchain technology.
Liquid Democracy: A DAO governance model where voters can delegate their votes to any representative, or revoke/switch representatives at any time, or choose to vote directly themselves.
Multi-signature (Multisig) Wallet: A digital wallet that requires approval from a majority of its multiple owners (e.g., three out of five) for any funds or assets to be transferred, frequently used by DAOs to manage shared treasuries.
Quadratic Funding: A mechanism, often used in grants programs like Gitcoin's, that allocates funds to projects by prioritizing the number of unique contributors rather than the total amount contributed, aiming for fairer distribution.
Quadratic Voting: A DAO governance model where voters are given credits to allocate towards options of their choice, with the cost scaling quadratically to indicate the strength of their preference, rather than just a simple yes/no vote.
Smart Contract: A self-executing computer program stored on a blockchain-based platform that automatically runs conditional actions when certain predefined conditions are met, eliminating the need for a centralized intermediary.
Stablecoin: A cryptocurrency designed to minimize price volatility, typically by being pegged to a stable asset like fiat currency (e.g., US Dollar). MakerDAO's Dai is an example.
Token-gating: A practice within DAOs where tokens are programmed to secure and grant access to shared resources, property, or tools of the DAO, creating an easy way to share access to private community boards or digital/physical properties.
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