So there will be no third party or external escrowers?
So far we are not inclined to use any third party escrow service for the development of DAO.Casino.
People in marketing always recommend having an escrow, while legal experts we spoke to say that escrow in this context makes no sense apart from a marketing trick, since it provides no guarantees.
First of all, let’s say a token holder is not happy with the development process i.e. it takes longer, can she go to the escrow service and get money back in exchange for tokens?
We recognise the fact that escrow can be a good way to psychologically comfort some users, but it’s unclear how it can provide guarantees in a practical sense.
An escrow doesn’t have any agreement with token holders.
Another question, is escrow legally liable for the timely development of the milestones?
There are loads of other questions about this that led us to the decision not to use third parties to manage project development.
Secondly, in order to theoretically move a responsibility for quality and security assessment to a third party escrow, this third party need to have a very specific expertise to actually assess decisions of a dev team and either agree with them or not.
Let’s imagine there is a dev team that uses Ethereum, but 3 years from now decides to move some components to DFinity blockchain. Will some escrow service with experience of bitcoin based altcoins have enough expertise to assess this decision? Decentralised tech, blockchain tech in particular develops very fast, it’s unclear how an escrow service would provide this expertise.
That’s why we don’t consider third party escrow services. Saying that, we’re open to all recommendations from community, if someone can explain how it would work in practical terms, and represent something more than a marketing strategy, it would be very useful, not just for this project, but for the community.
There will be a multisig for managing the project budget, and the signatories will be published on the site before the crowdfunding starts.
Since we are rolling out a working MVP before the crowdfund, we think that will be enough. Projects that run fundraisers pre-MVP can probably benefit from escrows.