Summary
An available sample of 57816 DAOs listed on Syndicate from Jan 2022 to July 2023 shows that DAOs there are growing rapidly in that period, and they have also shifted some of their patterns:
1）Polygon is becoming a more active habitat for DAOs in creation and daily transaction, compared with DAOs’ “hometown” ETH.
2）Matthew Effect. Top 1% to 2% DAOs occupy the majority of all investor’s fund. And a select few investors are channelling significant capital into DAOs.
This research article is brought to you by ThePASS team. ThePASS is a pioneering DAO aggregator and search engine that plays a pivotal role in providing insights and analysis for DAOs.
1. Intro
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent a paradigm shift in organizational governance, leveraging blockchain technology to enable trustless, transparent, and decentralized decision-making. DAOs operate through smart contracts, allowing participants to collectively manage funds, propose and vote on changes, and govern the organization’s activities.
Notably, the DAO landscape faces a key limitation related to the tools employed, and Syndicate emerges as a subject of investigation due to its widespread use and significance within the DAO ecosystem.
This study aims to uncover insights though Syndicate’s infrastructure, shedding light on challenges and opportunities inherent in the DAO, and contributing valuable knowledge to the broader understanding of DAO development. The following parts will give an overview of DAOs on Syndicate in terms of DAO historical data, treasury deep-dive, investor overview.
2. Overview of Syndicate
Syndicate addresses the challenges faced by developers in the current web3 landscape, characterized by inflexible, complicated, and fragmented solutions. Over the last years, Syndicate’s collaboration with major web3 startups and Fortune 100 companies has informed the development of a new kind of infrastructure, making it easier to create and manage DAOs, allowing builders to focus more on creating exceptional end-to-end experiences for community members.
3. Methodology and Overview
The analysis of Syndicate’s DAO is conducted from three perspectives: (1) the quantity and activity of DAOs, (2) the assets held by DAOs, and (3) details about DAO investors. Each perspective includes information from both the Ethereum and Polygon chains. Due to data availability, time-series data covers from January 2022 to July 2023, while horizontal data is those of July 2023.
Codes are available on thePass’ Dune Library.
The data reveals that there are 57,816 DAOs, with treasury assets exceeding $50 million in USD and a total of 40,870 investors contributing a total investment of $41.684 million.
It provides additional insights from a more detailed analysis of the data from both chains. While 83% of DAOs are on Polygon, Ethereum’s DAO treasury assets account for 65.6%, with an average asset value of $3360.85, significantly surpassing Polygon DAOs’ average asset value of $361.19.
4. Empirical Study
By simultaneously digging into the quantity and activity of DAOs, the assets held, and DAOs’ investors, it enables us to unveil a more holistic view.
4.1 The quantity and activity of DAOs
Before the second quarter of 2022, the daily creation of DAOs was below 10, all based on Ethereum. However, starting from the second quarter, there was an increase in the number of DAO creations. In the third quarter, there was a rapid surge in DAOs based on Polygon, with the highest number reaching 1225 in a single day. The next minor peak occurred in January to February 2023, with over 30% of Polygon DAOs created within the second quarter of 2023. Additionally, noteworthy is the decline in the daily creation of Ethereum DAOs after reaching 563 in July 2022, and by the second quarter of 2023, the daily creation number was below 5.
When calculating the active DAOs, a criterion based on whether there is any transaction on the given day was employed. It is observed that overall activity saw a rapid increase starting from July 2022, primarily due to a significant rise in the number of DAO creations during that period. Subsequently, the overall activity has remained within a fluctuating range, displaying distinct trends between different chains. Polygon’s activity has been steadily increasing, while Ethereum’s activity has been gradually decreasing. Following a growth in overall activity until August 2023, primarily driven by contributions from Polygon DAOs, a declining trend has persisted since then.
Therefore, though the DAOs are originated from ETH, Polygon has been an active habitat for an increasing number of new DAOs.
4.2 The assets held by DAOs
The acquisition of DAO treasury asset data involves the compilation of token balances on the ETH (with a potential discrepancy in WETH quantities), token balances on the Polygon, as well as ETH and MATIC balances. The total is then calculated and presented in the table, including information such as the DAO creation date, chain affiliation, DAO address, total treasury assets, and DAO wallet address.
Additionally, the assets in the upper table were grouped based on five ranges: over $500k, $100k~$500k, $10k~$100k, $1k~$10k, and under$1k. It can be observed that the percentage of DAOs with treasury assets less than $1k is 93%, accounting for a mere 7.1% of the total assets. Moreover, DAOs with treasury assets less than $10k constitute 98.8% in quantity, representing 27.4% of the total assets. In other words, 1.2% of DAOs in terms of quantity hold a significant 72.6% of the total assets. This indicates that the majority of DAOs have relatively small treasury assets, while assets are concentrated among the top 1% to 2% of the pyramid-like structure.
4.3 DAO Investors
The detailed investment information was illustrated in the table below. The table encompasses information on individual investments, including the investment time, investor, invested DAO, DAO’s affiliated chain, investment type, investment amount, and USD-equivalent investment amount, accompanied by hyperlinks.
Similar to the growth curve of DAO quantity, the growth of DAO investors also exhibits two distinct peak periods. The first peak occurred in the third quarter of 2022, driven by a rapid surge in investors in Polygon DAOs, escalating the investor count from 5k to over 15k. The second peak is observed in the second quarter of 2023, with a daily influx of investors ranging between 300 to 500, propelling the total count from 30k to 40k. Both instances were predominantly influenced by the increase in Polygon investors. Additionally, after consecutive minor peaks in May and July 2022, Ethereum’s investor showed a prolonged fluctuating and declining trend.
The following two graphs depict monthly additions of investors (left) and monthly additions of investment amounts (right). The monthly additions of investors closely resemble the daily additions, and hence will not be extensively discussed here. The right graph highlights substantial differences in investment amounts across different chains. Notably, Ethereum consistently dominates the investment amounts at all times, even during the rapid growth of Polygon DAO quantity and investors in the third quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2023. For instance, in August 2022, Polygon’s investment amount peaked at $162k, significantly lower than Ethereum’s $926k. The overall monthly investment amount curve peaked in the second quarter of 2022, demonstrating a strong correlation with the surge in Ethereum DAOs during that period, reinforcing the interconnected characteristics within the broader context.
Additionally, investment details were based on individual DAOs, as illustrated in the graph below. This includes the creation date of the DAO, DAO address, affiliated chain, total received investment amount, total received investment amount (USD equivalent), and the timestamp of the last investment.
Simultaneously, attention was given to investors, with statistics revealing the quantity of DAOs each investor invested in and the total investment amount (as shown in the left graph). Information on the distribution of investors is also presented (as depicted in the middle and right graphs). Notably, investors with amounts below $1k constitute 93.3% of the total, while those with amounts below $10k reach 99.1%. On the other hand, investors with amounts exceeding $100k represent a mere 0.069% in quantity but contribute to 30.8% of the total investment. The proportion of total investment amounts for investors exceeding $50k is 38.3%, and for those exceeding $10k, it is 64.2%. This evident pyramid-like structure signifies that a small number of investors are injecting substantial amounts of capital into DAOs.
5. Conclusion
The DAO landscape reveals Polygon is winning the priority for DAO creation and activity, despite the most DAO was ETH-based. The distribution of treasury assets and investors reflects a pyramid-like structure, with the majority of DAOs holding relatively modest assets and a concentrated elite few investors contributing substantial capital.
Reference
https://docs.syndicate.io/get-started/introduction
https://dune.com/thepass/syndicate-overview
Related Research Studies:
Exploring Aragon: Pioneering DAO Infrastructure Enabling Comprehensive Governance
Decoding Safe: Analyzing Multi-Signature Wallets and Exploring DAO Treasury Management
Exploring DAO Governance: An Empirical Study on Snapshot
A More Transparent Way to Discover, Track and Analyze DAO Treasuries
About ThePASS
ThePASS is a DAO aggregator and treasury tracking platform that aims to build a reputation system for DAOs. It provides an all-inclusive view of DAOs by aggregating both on-chain and off-chain social graph information, tracking, analyzing, and evaluating treasury assets, including both FT (Fungible Token) and NFT (Non-Fungible Token) assets. This enables communities to gain a better and more transparent understanding of their organizations.
ThePASS has established partnerships with well-respected DAOs, such as Maker DAO, Meebits DAO, Bankless DAO, City DAO, Moon DAO, Jenny Metaverse DAO, Arts DAO, Foreverlands, Metaguild, Snapfingers, WHALE, MAODAO, TigerVC DAO, PandaDAO, among others.
Useful Links👇
Website: https://thepass.to/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepass_to
