Before starting I want to state that, as per Marble’s official announcement on Humanity DAO, the project’s current smart contracts are in a “pre-alpha” state. This means that they “may contain bugs” which result in a “loss of funds”.

You should also be aware of the fact that this is not an investment opportunity. Please do not enter with the hope of making a profit.

Now that we have warnings covered, let’s continue. As mentioned, the Humanity DAO project is one which seeks to solve the issue of unique identity on the Ethereum blockchain. It was created by Ethereum based lending platform Marble.

The current situation with Ethereum addresses means that any one person can create an unlimited number of wallets. This is not an issue within itself. However, this mechanism provides quite the issue for applications which require each participant is unique, for example a voting app.

If people are not proven to be unique when voting on proposals, the application utilising the vote is susceptible to a sybil attack. A sybil attack is an attack in which one person games a voting system by using multiple votes. It is one of the most common types of attack in the crypto-space.

Marble’s Solution: Humanity DAO

The solution offered by the team behind Humanity DAO utilises a so called Web of Trust (WoT). A WoT is essentially a system by which a pool of people, confirmed to be unique, vote on the legitimacy of new applicants. When someone is deemed to be unique they are added to the pool of voters.

Generally speaking, WoT systems implement an approach which rewards people for honesty when voting, while penalising dishonesty. However, as far as I am aware, the Humanity DAO only penalises applicants, not voters.

The idea of a WoT is not unique to Humanity DAO, other blockchain solutions (such as Enumivo) are also attempting to implement it.

Incentivised Uptake

Humanity DAO’s introduction states that their system uses their own Ethereum based token. The token is called HUM and has a total supply of 100m tokens.

The token is distributed in a way which sees 75m issued as an incentive to join the platform. This reward is only applicable to the first 10k people who are successfully voted into the platform.

There is no information regarding whether tokens are issued equally or staged. As the tokens will have weight on the outcome of future votes I would expect them to be equally distributed. But this is just speculation.

The Rest of Their Tokens

The remainder of the HUM tokens are allocated in a way which gives 20m to the development wallet and 5m to be

Said development funds are also to be used in a way which will give the dev team a “small portion” in order to allow them to “participate in voting”, although exact amounts are not disclosed.

The method by which the 5m ‘mined’ tokens are to be distributed is somewhat unclear. While the official introduction states they will be “mined directly into Uniswap… at a rate of 1 per block (for ~2 years)” it does not clearly state how they will be mined.

Teething Issues or a Lack of Transparency?

With so much still to be cleared up it is expected Marble’s Humanity DAO project would have teething issues.

However, Reddit user fuckhumanitydao noticed an issue with the project’s admission rate and found something odd.

According to his research (backed up with blockchain data), the team behind the Humanity DAO project purposefully manipulated their own system in order to allow Vitalik Buterin (a co-founder of the Ethereum network) to slide into the first 100 members.

The relevance of being within the first 100? A large percentage of the tokens which are used for governance of the system.

How Did They Do It?

“The first 100 registered humans in HumanityDAO get a large percentage of the tokens that allow for governance. Unfortunately Vitalik was the 136th person to join …. They’ve kicked out 40 members who applied in front of Vitalik so he can squeeze right in the first 100”

Fuckhumanitydao’s post states that Vitalik was applicant number 136 and the Humanity DAO dev team used their voting power to veto applications ahead of him. As a result Vitalik Buterin made it into the first 100 applicants.

He then continues to prove his accusations with the address of a member from the team and matching transactions which ‘kick’ members ahead of Vitalik.

“This is the one devs ethereum account. https://etherscan.io/address/0xa0dc2f2f6fd98d9c7254f929db233f149741c432 Proof it’s his account … https://humanitydao.org/humans … his recent transactions are just kicking out users that are in front of Vitalik. Here is an example: (click on “Click to see more” and then “DecodeInput Data”. It will say he VotedNo on Proposal/User ID #89. https://etherscan.io/tx/0xfc01bc52bf8cfabadfd1a037c8c4b39761fcc9a88aa2c1d20af26e62bc982e31″

Vitalik Buterin commented on the situation and stated he would no longer support Humanity DAO if the accusations were true. He went on further to state that it appeared Humanity DAO have retroactively sought to prioritise “some subjective class of people”, continuing to state he believed that a “maximally simple and neutral project” was what the community needed.

Their Reply

A member of the Humanity DAO team, Rich Mcateer , attempted to calm the storm by commenting in the thread.

He promised that the firm had “good intentions” and that they tried their best. Rich continued to argue that the team saw their actions as the “best path forward”.

Judging by the response of their representative, and in consideration of the proof provided, it would appear that Fuckhumanitydao’s accusations are, in fact, true.

The reasoning behind the actions of the Humanity DAO team are understandable, however, they do go completely against the transparent nature for which blockchain was intended.

Since the incident Humanity DAO have released a statement on their blog which explains they will compensate those who were kicked with: 12 DAI, 500 HUM and their ETH gas fees.

You can read it here: https://medium.com/@mcateer/humanitydao-community-update-7390c58d7d47

Peace, love and happiness.