This dApp will be utilized by PoSciDon decentralized autonomous organization (PoSciDonDAO) to facilitate staking and on-chain governance, making PoSciDonDAO the first fully on-chain decentralized science (DeSci) DAO. In current DeSci DAOs, DAO members that are not scientific experts are required to evaluate scientific research projects. To ensure that mainly expert scientific DAO members will source and review scientific research projects, we created a governance system consisting of two smart contracts: Research Funding and DAO Operations. 

Research Funding governance will include on-chain execution of passed proposals in USDC, MATIC and PoSciDonDAO’s token, called SCI (launch in 2024), to limit human intervention in the distribution of funds towards scientific research projects. This system will only be governed by elected scientific DAO members so that other non-scientific members are not burdened with the evaluation of research projects outside their knowledge. These expert scientific members governing Research Funding will be elected through the DAO Operations governance where anyone can participate as long as the member has staked SCI through the dApp. 

Besides the election of the expert scientific members, other aspects of the organization’s operations can also be governed through the DAO Operations governance smart contract. This governance system consists of several features including delegation of votes and quadratic voting. The distribution of funds in the form of USDC, MATIC and SCI will also be performed on-chain. Altogether, these features make the DAO Operations governance smart contract a robust system.

Quadratic voting can, to some degree, be bypassed by sending tokens to other wallets to further increase the user's total voting power. To overcome that, we implemented Holonym in the dApp. This implementation checks if users have minted a soul-bound token to their account after verification of their phone number or government identification through Holonym's platform. This ensures that only unique accounts can vote on proposals with quadratic voting enabled. 

Another common issue among DAOs is the lack of participation by members in its governance system. To incentivize members to participate in our Operations governance, members receive a non-tradable, non-fungible token called PO that can be exchanged for rewards including SCI tokens and, in the future, other rewards such as merch and conference tickets.
