AbjaDAO

AbjaDAO (Arabic for: the alphabet DAO) is an alliance of four MENA-based organizations, joining forces to develop, maintain and propagate a methodical and standardized Arabic blockchain glossary. The alliance consists of Taxir, Arabs in Blockchain, ZeFi and DocStream.

AbjaDAO was conceived to tackle the language barrier concerning blockchain adoption in the region. While many organizations have developed Arab blockchain glossaries, they all suffer from three common flows:

• Lack of Standardization: other glossaries seem to be developed in an arbitrary manner, without methodical foundation or standardization. To tackle this issue, we started working on AbjaDAO by organizing several methodology where we agreed upon standards and approaches to be used across the glossary, to maintain a high level of consistency through our translations.

• Lack of Updates: we noticed that other glossaries are one-time off efforts, and lack further updates and expansions. Given that blockchain technology is constantly evolving and spewing new terminology as it does so, we agreed to schedule periodic updates of AbjaDAO to allow the glossary to keep up with the industry.

• Lack of Propagation: many of the Arabic blockchain glossaries are only used in-house by their developing organizations, such as the case with Ethereum Foundation and Cointelegraph Arabia, who both developed glossaries that were not shared publicly. Other organizations, such as Binance Middle East, have published public glossaries, but did not put the effort to propagate them. This leads to more translation dispersion, where we noticed that the same blockchain term is translated in many different ways across different publishers, leading to weaker SEO and translation quality. To tackle this, we planned for 3 waves of propagation, where we reach out to blockchain publishers (foundations, media, developers) and make the case for adopting our glossary.

Between September 2022 to August 2023, we translated 600 terms for the first edition of our glossary, published a beta version where we have collected community feedback, before launching the official first edition of AbjaDAO. We followed the launch by a highly successful propagation wave, that ended up with the glossary being adopted by 20 different organizations, including the Ethereum, Solana and Algorand Foundations. The propagation wave has also seen the translation of 20 blockchain-related wikipedia pages to Arabic using AbjaDAO. We are currently working on the first update to add 120 new terms to the glossary. AbjaDAO has received media coverage from Cointelegraph Arabia, NFT bil Arabi, UpYo podcast and Arab Blockchain Week.

AbjaDAO was funded by the Solana Foundation, and received logistic support from the Ethereum Foundation. In September 2023, we have launched the AbjaDAO Translation Unit.

How does this project fit with our mission and approach? AbjaDAO targets the language barrier and works to reduce this barrier to pave the way for better, more rapid adoption. AbjaDAO is an essential tool for any blockchain organization operating in or expanding to the Arab world, as well as any publication speaking to the Arab reader. On a secondary level, AbjaDAO is a showcase of DAOism and the values of collaboration, system thinking and open-source.