DFINITY Foundation

ICDevs.org

CryptoIsGood

Anvil

ICPL.app

ysyms

The Accumulators’ Neuron

RawTech Venture

Paul Young

ICPMANUAL

8yeargangDAO

Isaac Valadez

Krzysztof Żelazko

Nicolas.ic

Smaug’s Neuron for Retail Investors

Internet Computer Association

Synapse.vote (formerly ICP Maximalist Network)

Arthur’s Neuron (used to be cycle_dao)

The Fools' Court

Always Rejects

John Wiegley

Proposal for a social recovery of the TAGGR DAO


Dear NNS DAO,

We’re TAGGR, a small experimental decentralized social network running on IC since December 2021. It was founded by me with the goal to test and explore the IC, to push its boundaries, to trailblaze the eco-system and to learn the sailing in the vast and endless sea of decentralization 🏴‍☠️

A couple of highlights:

* Taggr is a blend of forums and blogs,
* Taggr uses a pay-to-post model and distributes its revenue weekly among the token holders and the rest as rewards to content makers,
* Taggr is an autonomous dapp that can upgrade itself via DAO vote (I swear, it didn’t work only once), top up it’s canisters, create new storage canisters when more space is needed and so on,
* we have 1100+ members with many of them daily using Taggr as a primary social app on IC,
* Taggr tokens cannot be bought but only mined by contributing to Taggr,
* Taggr was the first fully decentralized social app on the IC.

On Friday, March 24 a disaster happened:
* I accidentally uploaded a wrong binary while creating an upgrade proposal,
* Not only was it a wrong binary, but the one that does not read the previous heap data (the upgrade would have failed otherwise),
* The DAO approved the proposal without anyone verifying the binary hash (it didn’t correspond to the build from the commit on the proposal). 

There is no excuse for what happened. I failed as a professional engineer and the rest of us as a responsible DAO. We were iterating fast and were too light-headed, not ready for the challenge of a real decentralization. And while it was a bitter setback and we even considered to end the experiment for good, after countless hours in war rooms, we identified the most important problems leading to this situation and came up with a concrete plan how to prevent it from ever happening again.

Now we are at your mercy and ask for one more chance.

## Proposal

We propose to add the NNS root canister id `r7inp-6aaaa-aaaaa-aaabq-cai` as an _additional_ controller of the Taggr canister `6qfxa-ryaaa-aaaai-qbhsq-cai`.
This will require building a special replica version with an one-off patch deployed to the `mpubz` subnet.

Once this is done, we will create a second NNS proposal to upgrade Taggr to a correct binary the same way it is done right now with the system canisters. We were not aware of this possibility before and most likely we’ll leave the root canister as a second controller of Taggr for the foreseeable future. **This is the new best practice for all DAOs and the main learning from this incident.**

## Alternatives Considered

What are our options if the recovery will not be supported by the DAO?

1. Starting from the backup on a new canister.
2. Starting from scratch, without the backup. 

A recovery via option 1 will break all existing II logins or it would require a _permanent_ Taggr specific fix inside the II canister which will be maintained by the DFINITY team forever.
This was the second learning, that at least as of now, **IC does not provide a full recovery path for dapps, even if backups exist**.

The option 2 is discouraging for obvious reasons as we’d lose our entire history and work invested into creating our content.

## Authenticity Proof

All domains you used to login to Taggr will get a TXT DNS record on the subdomain `recover` with the id of _this proposal_ within an hour after its creation. Use any of these commands to check this record:

* `nslookup -type=txt recover.taggr.top`
* `nslookup -type=txt recover.taggr.link`
* `nslookup -type=txt recover.taggr.network`
* `nslookup -type=txt recover.taggr.club`

We will also tweet about the proposal on [@TaggrNetwork](https://twitter.com/taggrnetwork).

## Outro

We greet all fellow DAOs out there on the IC and urge them to add the root canister as a controller while they can. Learn from our mistakes!

Sincerely,

![This is how we roll](https://i.imgur.com/2al1rAk.jpg)

X & the TAGGR DAO.

