Unicorns(🦄)

This Congress contract was deployed at block 988909 on February 11, 2016, by Alex Van de Sande (ENS: alex.vandesande.eth), the UX Lead and designer at the Ethereum Foundation from 2014 to 2018 and co-founder of ENS (Ethereum Name Service). It implements the Democracy DAO pattern described in the Ethereum Foundation blog post series published in December 2015: "Ethereum in practice part 2: how to build a better democracy in under a 100 lines of code."

The contract manages membership, proposals, and voting. Key parameters include minimumQuorum (the minimum number of member votes required for a proposal to pass), debatingPeriodInMinutes (the minimum time a proposal must remain open for discussion), and majorityMargin (the margin by which yes-votes must exceed no-votes). Members can add proposals specifying a recipient address, an ETH amount, and a description. After the debating period, any member can tally the votes and execute the proposal if it passes.

This specific deployment includes custom extensions beyond the base Democracy tutorial: references to a unicornAddress and priceOfAUnicornInFinney, linking the governance contract to avsa's Unicorns project, which was deployed in the same session at block 988949. The deployment represents avsa testing governance infrastructure for his early NFT project on mainnet.

The broader Democracy DAO tutorial was influential in shaping early thinking about on-chain governance. The pattern introduced ideas that would later be refined in more sophisticated DAO frameworks, including The DAO (2016) and Compound Governance (2020). avsa's direct deployment of this pattern in February 2016, just two months after authoring the blog post, makes this a primary artifact of that early governance research.