What is DeXe (DEXE)?

TL;DR

• The DeXe Protocol is an infrastructure of 50+ smart contracts for building and governing effective DAOs.

• DeXe’s core innovation is its robust functionality which rewards expertise, fights centralization, and aligns incentives for all stakeholders.

• The protocol is governed by the DeXe Protocol DAO and uses the DEXE token.

Introduction

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have the potential to give real governance power to every member (i.e. every governance token holder), from proposing initiatives to voting them into reality. However, current DAOs are not achieving this potential, as evidenced by low voter and delegate activity, gaming of voting for airdrop purposes, lack of actual control of treasuries and/or key DAO decisions, centralization, plutocracy, and more. The DeXe Protocol of interoperable smart-contracts allows for easy creation and governance of DAOs optimized for useful activity and sustained growth (as well as the creation of a number of new products and integrations).

What is DeXe?

DeXe Protocol DAO governs the development and improvement of the DeXe Protocol, which in itself is a DAO constructor and governance toolkit consisting of 50+ smart contracts. These smart-contracts can work together in a number of ways to create flexible, effective, and rewarding DAOs, as well as many other products (these smart-contracts are open source, so the only limit to their implementation is the imagination of builders in the space). 

DeXe was built to work across EVM blockchains. As a DAO, DeXe is driven by core contributors and a wide community of people passionate about DAO creation, governance, and education.

DeXe’s Key Features

As an open source, evolving library of composable smart-contracts, DeXe is very flexible. The logic within and among those contracts allows for many use cases in and outside of DAOs. For example, DAO founders can very precisely define the settings of each vote type. Delegation can be made meritocratic by giving more voting power to experts, anti-plutocratic by reducing the voting power of anyone accumulating too many votes, and rewarding by increasing the rewards to token holders who delegate based on the above principles. 

Complete toolkit

The friction involved in governing a DAO democratically and effectively leads to many DAOs that are not well governed. A big part of that is having to use multiple tools from different sources: on-chain voting, off-chain voting, forum for discussions, delegation platforms, reputation management, multi-sig wallet/safe, etc. etc. The beauty of the DeXe Protocol is its ever-expanding library which has all the popular DAO tools and many more intriguing features.

Plus, products built on the DeXe Protocol are adding more functionalities. For example, the DeXe DAO Studio that was developed by some of our active community members added on/off-chain proposals, detailed stats and analytics, notifications, and a lot more.

Meritocracy

Lack of DAO governance activity is largely based on lack of competency, of expert-driven proposals and voting. The DeXe Protocol introduces a system of meritocracy where DAOs can delegate their treasuries’ voting power and members can delegate their own voting power to experts who have applied and been approved as such by either the specific DAO (local expert) or the DeXe Protocol DAO (global experts). 

To align incentives, tokens with votes delegated to such experts get a higher multiplier not only of the voting power but also of the voting rewards. Thus, a token holder is incentivized to delegate to an expert for both the personal benefit and the benefit of the DAO. That being said, DeXe’s nonlinear voting formula prevents any single expert from accumulating too much voting power, reducing the voting power multiplier in that case.

Governance Token/NFT

With DeXe Protocol's smart-contracts, a DAO can be governed by tokens, NFTs, or both. In fact, governance tokens can be created during the DAO formation process. By allowing any current token or NFT collection to be used for governance, DeXe makes it easy to give your community a voice and to set up different levels of voting power. For example, assigning more voting power to NFTs held by trusted members. 

Flexibility

Some proposals may require a bigger quorum, some early vote completion, some as secondary vote review by trusted validators, some on/off-chain voting, and so on. The DeXe Protocol eliminates all that compromising between various approaches that don’t fully work, replacing it with a highly-flexible approach that allows each DAO to fine-tune every aspect of their governance process. They can then change it via the proposal and voting circuit if they so desire.

The DEXE Token

The DeXe Protocol is governed by the DeXe Protocol DAO using the $DEXE token, with which the DAO’s members propose and vote in their governance of the Protocol. This keeps the DAO fully decentralized and autonomous.

Products Built on the Protocol

DeXe DAO Studio was the first product built on the DeXe Protocol by a team consisting of several DeXe Protocol DAO community members. The Studio allows people to fully enjoy the full arsenal of the Protocol’s capabilities without needing to know how to code.  

The Studio uses the smart-contracts of the DeXe Protocol. On the front end, it is a convenient, all-in-one workspace to guide users through the DAO creation and management process with simplicity and with answering common questions DAO creators may have. With the help of the Studio, users can create DAOs that fit their own specifications using the Protocol’s math and algorithms to make the DAO effective and decentralized. 

What’s Next for DeXe?

With the release of the protocol, the next steps are to continue improving the Protocol and to continue DAO education in general. This is in pursuit of the DeXe Protocol DAO’s mission of making DAOs more decentralized, transparent, and effective. To that end, DeXe plans to continue evolving the Protocol’s infrastructure, adding new functionalities, products, and general improvements.

The DAO will support the Protocol both technically and educationally via grants and other initiatives approved via the DAO proposal and voting process. 

Closing Thoughts

The DeXe Protocol is a powerful collection of smart-contracts that work together as a single powerful infrastructure for creating effective, equitable, and sustainable DAOs.

The goal is to flip the paradigm by getting all types of users interested in governance, whether via active governance or thoughtful delegation.

At the end of the day, the DeXe Protocol is for everyone who wants to be part of an active DAO community: builders, members, service providers, partners, and so on. The protocol is the foundation — it is up to each community to decide what they will build on top of it.