Luke once described 1hive as cybernetic superorganism, I didn't realized it was an established term in science to describe such an amazing natural phenomenon.

Together we thrive​

1hive is a decentralized autonomous organization, but that doesn't really mean very much to very many people, and even for people that are familiar with DAOs, the term has been used in so many different context that it has lost much of its meaning.

Superorganism - Wikipedia​

A superorganism or supraorganism is a group of synergetically interacting organisms of the same species. A community of synergetically interacting organisms of different species is called a holobiont. The term superorganism is used most often to describe a social unit of eusocial animals, where division of labour is highly specialised and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods.

A bee hive can be considered a superorganism as well which has a very interesting way to gather information from each individual bee through quorum sensing:

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) also use quorum sensing to make decisions about new nest sites. Large colonies reproduce through a process called swarming, in which the queen leaves the hive with a portion of the workers to form a new nest elsewhere. After leaving the nest, the workers form a swarm that hangs from a branch or overhanging structure. This swarm persists during the decision-making phase until a new nest site is chosen.

The quorum sensing process in honey bees is similar to the method used by Temnothorax ants in several ways. A small portion of the workers leave the swarm to search out new nest sites, and each worker assesses the quality of the cavity it finds. The worker then returns to the swarm and recruits other workers to her cavity using the honey bee waggle dance. However, instead of using a time delay, the number of dance repetitions the worker performs is dependent on the quality of the site. Workers that found poor nests stop dancing sooner, and can, therefore, be recruited to the better sites. Once the visitors to a new site sense that a quorum number (usually 10–20 bees) has been reached, they return to the swarm and begin using a new recruitment method called piping. This vibration signal causes the swarm to take off and fly to the new nest location. In an experimental test, this decision-making process enabled honey bee swarms to choose the best nest site in four out of five trials.

Here are two "primary regulation mechanisms" for regulating bee colony behavior at the group level, and two of four or five observed mechanisms known to be used by honeybees to change the task allocation among worker bees:

Waggle dance​

By performing a waggle dance, successful foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations with other members of the colony.

Tremble dance​

A tremble dance is a dance performed by forager honey bees of the species Apis mellifera to recruit more receiver honey bees to collect nectar from the workers.

Read more about signaling in nature​

I have found it very interesting leaning about this and other biotic interactions, such as how trees communicate with each other using a symbiosis of their roots with the network of fungi that connect them to other trees in order to exchange sugar, water, and minerals or be aware of predatory insects. You can read more on this in:

The Social Life of Forests (Published 2020)​

The Social Life of Forests As a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada's old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Her grandfather and uncles, meanwhile, worked nearby as horse loggers, using low-impact methods to selectively harvest cedar, Douglas fir and white pine.

Osmotic Funding is a protocol built on top of Superfluid Finance and Conviction Voting to create and regulate project funding streams based on the amount of interest a community gives them. Community preference is revealed continuously, since tokenholders are able to update their preferences (change their stake) at any moment.

A community of tokenholders (DAO) can use Osmotic Funding to decide which parts of the DAO should receive funding and how much. Funding proposals need a minimum amount of support to start receiving funds. Once the flow is open, they can grow or shrink over time, depending on the stake with which the token holders are supporting the proposals.

Mechanism​

We have prepared a desmos for displaying the different parameters and calculations the algorithm uses to distribute funds. >> Please go ahead and play along with it <<.

Depending on the distribution of staked tokens and the available funds in the pool, we can calculate which will be the rate of each proposal with:

$r_\infty(i) = B · \left ( 1 - \sqrt{\frac{T}{max(T, s_i)}} \right ) \\ \textrm{where}\ T = \gamma · (s_0 + s_1 + ... + s_n) + T_0\\\textrm{ and }\ B = b · \beta$

1. The target rate ($r_\infty$) of a proposal ($i$) is the amount of funds a project should be receiving per second in the future.
2. The pool balance ($b$) is the amount of funding tokens that can be transmitted to grants. It will keep diminishing if there are no inflows that fund the contract at the same rate.
3. Max spending ratio ($\beta$) is the max percentage of the pool balance that one proposal can spend per second.
4. Threshold ($T$) is the minimum amout of staked tokens a proposal needs to start getting funded depending on amount staked on the rest of the proposals.
   • Threshold ratio ($\gamma$) determines the increse in the threshold for each new token staked on any proposal.
   • Min threshold ($T_0$) is the minimum amount of tokens required to fund a proposal when no other proposal is being funded.
   • Total staked tokens ($s_0 + s_1 + ... + s_n$) are the amount of tokens that are actively voting in the protocol. It plays against a proposal if new tokens are staked on other proposals.
5. Staked tokens ($s_i$) are how many tokens are staked on the proposal which we calculate the rate for.

When the staked amount on a proposal ($s_i$) changes, the rate changes over time following the following formula:

$r_{t}(i) = \alpha^t · r_{0}(i) + (1-\alpha^t) · r_{\infty} (i)$

1. The current rate ($r_t$) of a proposal ($i$) is the amount of funds per second a proposal receives in a particular instant of time ($t$).
2. The last rate ($r_0$).
3. The exponential decay base ($\alpha$) is a number from 0 to 1 that determines the speed in which the current rate is going to reach the target rate.

As you can see the formula has two parts. The first part starts with last rate and ends at zero over time. The second part starts at zero and grows up to target ratio over time.

Every time the target ratio changes (due to a change in token staking), we define the current ratio as the last ratio, so the rate over time can still be a continuous formula, and we reset the timer ($t$) to zero.

In order to know the amount of funds a proposal has accrued since the last time there was a stake change, we can calculate the definite integral of the current rate ($r_t$) formula over time:

$f_{t}(i) = \int_{0}^x r_t(i)\ dt= \int_{0}^x \left[\alpha^t · r_{0}(i) + (1-\alpha^t) · r_{\infty} (i) \right]dt$

$f_{t}(i) = \frac{\left(1-\alpha^{x}+x\ln\alpha\right) · r_\infty(i)-\left(1-\alpha^{x}\right) · r_0(i)}{\ln\alpha}$

Because the target rate formula ($r_\infty$) does not depend on the time, we can treat it as a constant in the integral, which makes it not-so-difficult to calculate.

It calculates is the area below the curve defined by the current rate formula over time, which correspond to the amout of funds, or what is the same, the average rate (of all variations of $r_t(i)$ over the period of time) multiplied by time ($t$).

Appendix

Some research on botany​

We have done some research in botany in order to understand how plants distribute their resources. We hope you can

• Vascular tissue - plants have different types of conducting tissues:
  • Xylem - transports water and minerals from the roots upwards. Types:
    • Tracheid - primitive tissue, produces softwood.
    • Xylem vessel - present in most flowering plants, produces hardwood.
  • Phloem - transports products of photosynthesis to various parts of the plant.
• Vascular bundle - Joins many tissues, including xylem and phloem.
• Stele - central part of the root or stem of a plant, which contains vascular tissue.
  • Most seed plant stems primary vascular tissue are vascular bundles.
  • Photo gallery.
• Osmosis - why water moves from the root to the leaves.

The presence of vessels in xylem has been considered to be one of the key innovations that led to the success of the flowering plants.

Screenshot​