Latest Discord web3 native alternatives tools for DAOs and Communities.
DAOs will revolutionize how people work together. Despite the current bear market, new DAOs are accelerating and are more than twice the number from 2021 (source DeepDao). A large web3 ecosystem tooling option has flourished, how you are suppose to choose from all these different DAO tooling suites? Which one will be the best approach for your project?.
The future of the internet and the future of decentralized organizations DAOs, is community.
Web 3 communication tools are already here and for stronger communities. Do not miss the train, the train leaves now. Discord and others communications web 2 platforms are going to be left behind, as web3 projects, DAOs and communities are jumping to Web3 Communication Platforms for them to beat stronger.
I will list for you the current All-in-one tools, and I will specifically talk about the one that I know, based under my own experience.
In this article:
- The objective, reason why and to whom is this article addressed?
- Communities in web 3 and the emergence of DAOs.
- Web 3 vs Web 2 tools for your DAO.
- Choosing the right DAO Builder Platform, and the one that I know under my own experience.
- Endnote. The Beating Heart of Community.
1. The objective, reason why and to whom is this article addressed?
The objective of this article for answering the question: Which DAO Tool Suite will be the best approach for your project?
There is a lot to consider, but in this article I will go through some of the key high level point of some common DAO tool builders solutions, as far as what they do and why to use them. This article has been based on my experience working in marketing and growth in a DAO, and also as a DAO researcher and writer. Hopefully this article might help you on your own research.
Why I am encouraged to write this article? is because I have found, after having participated in several web3 TS (Twitter Spaces) , that both speakers and listeners of these spaces always complain about Discord or Telegram due to its complexity, lack of security, having bots that are mixed with real people … the good news are that today there is a web 3 solution for it, there are already Web 3 alternatives, hence I write this article to help raise awareness of these platforms.
E.g. Mike Winkelmann, the very famous NFT Artist Beeple Warns of Discord URL Hijack That Could Drain Wallets. He explicitly wrote “Once again massive thanks again to discord for being garbage.”
This article is for anyone interested in setting a DAO from zero, or looking for a web2 communication tool alternative ( Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, others…).
For those interested in learning about DAOs in general, I will recommend to read this complete DAO guide, everything you need to know about DAOs is there.
2. Communities in web 3 and the emergence of DAOs.
Vitálik ( Ethereum co-funder) has just published :
and here’s what he said in this article about DAOs:
“DAO” is a powerful term that captures many of the hopes and dreams that people have put into the crypto space to build more democratic, resilient and efficient forms of governance.
Web3 is “better with friends” or I will say web3 “ Is only possible with good friends”. Web3 is all about communities, in web 3 growth is about letting know your projects not through Ads, but through your community. If you want your web3 project to grow in a natural, healthy and exponential way by being strongly engaged with your community you for sure will need infrastructure or tool to manage your community.
Many artists have developed their own NFT projects thanks to the diffusion that their communities have made of these projects. Fans have spread “for free” through their own networks of friends or followers the NFTs thus making known the works of their artists, reaching millions of people exponentially, which otherwise would not be possible.
Before web3, record labels or galleries, were necessary to move and spread the art works, with web3 and communities this has drastically changed. If you as an artist, have your community close to you, by giving them exclusive benefits; earlier access, tokens… your community will broadcast the art. I see here a clear parallelism with web2 companies loyalty programs, I myself have been working many years as a CRM and loyalty programs marketing professional, eventually here in web3 the artist is working peer to peer benefits/loyalty program within his/hers fans by rewarding them through benefits. Meanwhile companies need CRM tools to deploy this benefits within their clients, the equivalent in web 3 are Web3 communities/DAOs builder platforms.
As an example, canadian rapper, singer, and record producer Tory Lanez unveiled his first-ever NFT collection, they released their NFT digital album directly to fans by selling out 1 million digital units in less than one minute.
Artists started experimenting with hybrid events as a way to bridge the gap between physical events and online fans/community. They are shaping the Future of Concert Visuals through theirs fans/community support.
See also fNFTs, they are a type of NFT that enable people to own part of an NFT that would, otherwise be unaffordable. This process of fractionalization allows to share the ownership of an NFT, through a set of fungible tokens tied to the original NFT.
DAOs like PleasrDAO, JennyDAO, Partybid, are gaining traction, thanks to a community around a piece of artwork that few singular individuals could afford, and thanks to these DAOs is possible the accessibility to rare and expensive NFTs.
A few days ago DeepDao, a Data intelligence tool, published that despite the crytpo Market situation, in 2022 the number of DAOs starting their governance activity is more than twice the number from 2021.
3. Web 3 vs Web 2 tools for your DAO.
Currently there are already web 3 platforms that are solving communications needs , from communities that simply want a secure and encrypted chat service, to communities that require more sophisticated web3 functionalities such as unlocking exclusive access by owning community tokens. Why it is time for web3 solutions:
- Communities that they only need a platform to talk and communicate. Small communities or just a group of friends, they only need a chat platform for communicating. We all use WhatsApp or Telegram, but sometimes it is not enough for having discussions / channels for different topics, and it is difficult to follow all conversations in just one channel/Group. Web3 chat solutions are more efficient and secure, with verified humans and the possibility to have channels for different types of discussions to talk, moreover more secure as it is decentralized ( it is not owned by a centralized company), with encrypted messages and thread solutions to better follow conversations.
- DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that they need a whole infrastructure of governance, voting, polls and rewards with tokenomics. they are more “sophisticated” communities, these communities need more advanced communication and governance infrastructure for token gates, governance system, votes, polls and rewards. Most of the DAOs so far use Discord, Telegram, Reddit for communications with their community.
- Companies are using Slack or Teams as communications tools, but it is indeed a silo culture. Can anyone on the internet or a client reach out any employee to give feedback or comments? Can they have an AMA with people/ clients? the answer is No, they can not.
So that, Web2 solutions are just old web 2 bridges and are not ready for the future of internet.
Until now members and communities have used and “suffered” the chaos, bots and the lack of security of web2 platforms like Discord and others because there were no alternatives that could make up for these drawbacks. Moreover they are centralized companies, they c-level decide what are the next features to develop, so they do not take into account the opinion of those who use their platform.
While web2 platforms have served as a bridge to get here, where we are seeing the emergence and establishment of new web3 communication platforms, where we benefit from the technology on which they are built, Blockchain. So security is the key and the most important asset of these platforms, as well they have been working hard in an intuitive and usable design, based on learning what their web 2 predecessors have not been able to solve.
Web3 enhances the internet as we know it today with a few other added characteristics such as:
- Verifiable
- Trustless
- Self-governing
- Permissionless
- Distributed and robust
- Stateful
- Native built-in payments
- get rid of bots…
4. Choosing the right DAO Builder Platform. The one that I know and under my own experience.
DAOs offer a number of advantages over traditional companies, including increased transparency, improved security, and enhanced flexibility. However, DAOs also come with their own unique set of challenges, one of which is the lack of standardization in DAO governance. This lack of standardization makes it difficult to compare DAOs on a level playing field, leading to confusion and disagreement within DAOs themselves. In order to address this issue and to help communication between its members and its governance, today there is already a large ecosystem of web 3 tools that help it all flow.
Any DAO is susceptible to the same high-level challenges as they grow, and need to map these areas:
- Join the DAO. Membership Token.
- DAO organizational and governance Model.
- Communication and coordination.
- Membership tracking and platform gating.
- Voting and decision making, proposals for rule changes in the DAO.
- Contributor rewards.
- Treasury management.
- Broadcasting.
- Legal.
One of the biggest challenge for DAOs is its governance, DAOs are not monolithic and the decision space is by far, vast. Efficiency and decentralization sometimes have a fine line, to ensure this balance, DAOs have adopted patterns of distributed authority and constrained delegation, where token holders empower groups of active contributors with executive decision-making authority within a discrete domain.
But to help to deal with all these challenges and tools needed, thanks God ( my grandmother will say) we have EIP-4824: Common Interfaces for DAOs , let me go a little bit technical here, ( feel free to jump if you are not that interested) in short EIP-4824 is a proposed API standard focused on relating on-chain and off-chain representations of membership and proposals.
The emergence of DAOs and the wide variety of types that exist, led to a wide range of patterns but little standardization or interoperability between the frameworks and tools that have emerged. We need standardization and interoperability.
In this article you can fully learn the vast existing DAOs tooling ecosystem
Here I bring for you the most well known DAO tooling Landscape by Nichanan Kesonpat
Imagine you want to set a DAO, where you should start? Is web3 advance technical knowledge needed?
The other day I had a call with David Macías, a very technical web3 friend, about the full tech stack that his DAO is using, and I could not believe my ears!.
So if you feel overwhelmed, my recommendation is to go for an All- in-One web3 DAO tool builder option.
The reasons why to go for an All in One Dao web3 tool, instead of a full stack web3 ecosystem:
- not dealing with different tools that they do not talk to each other.
- you are run out of tech knowledge, you only need a secure and handling chat tool.
- you want to run your DAO without tech complexity and efficiency as everything can work smooth. Some All-in-one Dao builder tools thanks to “social composability design”, the best example to explain composability is Lego, where every piece can connect to every other piece and built together, and related to crypto, DAOs and Tokens, is the ability of effectively clone, integrate and to be interoperable, so that everything can work smoothly.
As the vast majority of DAOs are Ethereum based or EVM compatible chain, yes there are some Cardano or even Solana DAOs projects, see here the most common, All-in-One DAOs builder tools solutions are tools for Ethereum or EVM, by the time I am writing this article there are about 5 all-in.one tools; (1) Common Ground, (2) DAOstack, (3) Colony, (4) Aragon and (5) Upstream.
Sarah Benson’s reviewed them, although it is not an updated review due to the fast evolution of the tooling ecosystem ( e.g. Common Ground is not there, and she mentions a project that does no longer exists) , but I bring it here for you, because although is not updated, she does a very valuable content about the tools I am not going to talk about them here, as I do not know them but for you to have all info. Therefore, I will bring here Common Ground, the tool I personally know and I have experienced, and because I found it so easy to use without no tech knowledge, I ask them to be part of their DAO, and eventually I became part of them and here what I found after more than 100 communities onboarded, despite we are in a closed alpha.
Common Ground web3 communication tool will allow your community to have:
- Web3 native: Token-gating, Digital Identity gating and support.
- Conversation: Real-time group chats, end-to-end encrypted voice chats and DMs, Moderation tools.
- Productivity: Quests, Bounties, Notification management.
- Governance: Votes, Polls.
- Growth: Articles, Announcements, Airdrops and Events display.
In Common Ground you can handle your community, reach and increase your audience, discover and network, collaborate and chat with friends, all in an environment custom-made and co-owned by web3 builders. Without losses and harm due to lack of security, trust, and fragmentation.
Common Ground is a web3-native, e2e-encrypted, messaging and voice chat platform, built as a public good. On Common Ground, communities chat, discuss and organize themselves with tools that work and play better with web3 technologies.
Even though it’s designed as the Home of Web3, you will have inclusive and gentle onboarding experience. Here the last reviews published by Common Ground’s communities:
Moreover, as Common Ground is in ALPHA, you can benefit from that. Currently, anyone can make an unverified community, but unverified communities are hidden from the frontpage (unless you are a member). To become a verified community, you need an NFT that the CG team can provide, simply reach out and ask for verification, it’s free during alpha and once you’ve got it, it’s forever.
5. Endnote. The Beating Heart of Community.
In my own opinion, regardless what DAO builder tool you should use, the most challenging and critical part of setting a DAO is to build a community, and this is something that it is not attached to any technical tool.
Vitálik tweeted this:
The future of the internet, and the future of decentralized organisations, is community, indeed this community has to be an ACTIVE one, the beating heart of Community is ALL you need.
If you’re reading this, you’re earlier than you can imagine, the world is for the earliest. Stay tuned for new content and subscribe!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
🔹 Twitter Mar Fernández
🔹 Medium https://medium.com/@MarBlockchain
🔹 Mirror https://mirror.xyz/marfernandez.eth
🔹 Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/marfernandezparra/
✳️ Common Ground https://app.commonground.cg/profile
