Membership DAOs with Aragon
We created a DAO with non-transferable tokens to manage our crypto-assets.
I wanted funding for BrightID’s open-source base layer to move away from a single person making financial decisions. I didn’t want to be a bottleneck.
To me, a DAO was in order.
I didn’t want to follow the standard pattern of stake-based voting because it felt right that current members should always be aware of how DAO membership evolves. Instead of governance tokens changing hands outside of the DAO, any change in membership (issuing or burning a governance token) would be done through a vote by existing members.
Also it makes perfect sense that a technology that enables one-vote-per-person would manage itself in the same way.
The journey began after returning from Aracon 🎉 to find this article by Luke Duncan describing how to make a “Custom Aragon Organization.” It included instructions on how to make a DAO with a “membership” (non-transferable) token. It sounded perfect.
There were hiccups along the way, but — long story short — since a couple of weeks ago, the nightly build of aragon-cli has supported working, non-transferable tokens.
The central DAO that holds most of BrightID’s funds has a long voting period (60 days) to ensure that any attempts to wrest control can be seen far in advance.
Then, faster DAOs are created as needed with shorter voting periods (e.g. 3 days) to allow for funds to move quickly to meet deadlines. These fast DAOs are actively managed. The management should be fluid: voting members should be removed whenever they can’t actively participate (if they go on vacation, for example). In exchange for fast turnarounds and self-management, fast DAOs hold less money in their vaults to cause less worry about a takeover attack.
Identity and DAO membership has been discussed at length here. The goal is that an instance of Aragon’s identity app can use BrightID as a stamp of uniqueness for members.
The original guide for creating a custom DAO with non-transferable tokens is here. Before beginning, you will need the nightly build of Aragon-cli ( ≥ 6.04).
Here is a more detailed description of BrightID’s Aragon DAOs.
Finally, here are the actual commands and responses used to create BrightID’s Main DAO.
