To DAO or not to DAO — Chapter 1
I have been invited to be a part of an early community that is coming together around a Social Protocol — that aims to bring together the community, help the protocol survive and thrive by collaborating and working together with the foundation as well as key thought leaders within the community. As this is the first major DAO that I am becoming a core part off, there are several learnings for me and I aim to share them here and in the next few posts.
What is a DAO?
Wikipedia defines a DAO as “A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC),[a] is an organization constructed by rules encoded as a computer program that is often transparent, controlled by the organization’s members and not influenced by a central government, in other words they are member-owned communities without centralized leadership.[1][2] A DAO’s financial transaction records and program rules are maintained on a blockchain.[3][4][5]”.
In short, a DAO is an organized community with a purpose and a managed treasury/wallet. It could be a community with an ambition goal, a corporation (maybe some day) or a non-profit venture setup with a community good in mind (planet health, decentralizing social media) or a group of people coming together for a common cause (buying out Twitter from Elon Musk or with Elon Musk). Yeah, why not?
Example DAOs and Whitepapers:
Below are a few examples of DAOs listed below. I posted this on Twitter as well here and since one of the core first tasks of ours was to define the whitepaper, I started reviewing the Whitepapers of each of these DAOs (linked below).
- Maker DAO: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) project with a crypto-collateralized, stablecoin DAI pegged to the US dollar.
- The DAO: A digital decentralized autonomous organization and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund formed in 2016 via a crowdfunding campaign.
- Enter Dao: A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) building products to enable new markets within the Web3 metaverse economy.
- Mantra DAO: A community-governed DeFi platform focusing on staking, lending, and multi-chain DeFi services.
- KlimaDAO gives Web3 builders and users the opportunity to participate in the carbon market through the KLIMA token.
- Bit DAO is one of the world’s largest DAOs and has a vision towards open finance and a decentralized tokenized economy.
- TheDaoMaker is a multi-investment platform that allows DAO token holders to participate in early-stage token sales for stringently vetted upcoming projects.
- Avocado DAO is a metaverse gaming company that aims to make a real difference through empowering and educating people around the world on blockchain gaming technology.
- Vita_DAO is a DAO collective for community-governed and decentralized drug development. Our core mission is the acceleration of research and development (R&D) in the longevity space and the extension of human life and health-span.
- Nemesis Dao is a decentralized finance reserve currency protocol built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
This is by no means an exhaustive list nor is a list of the best by any metric. These are the first few that I came across and I have started reviewing. I will probably try and join some if not all of them to understand their workings.
What goes into the Whitepaper?
Here are some topics that need to get covered in the Whitepaper to inspire members to join the DAO especially and contribute towards its vision and mission.
- Vision, Mission & Objectives
- Organization: Core Team, Admins, Sub-DAOs, Working Groups, Group-Heads, Roles, Member Types, External Actors/Partners,
- Ethics & Governance: Conflict of Interest, Insider Trading
- Proposals, Voting, Abstention, Delegation of Votes & Decision-Making
- Tokenomics: Max Tokens, Supply/Burn/Airdrops/Offboarding, Bonding Curve, Staking & More
- Fund-Raise, Grants & Treasury Management
- FAQs, Glossaries and Community Resources — Git, Notion, Discord, Blog, Reddit, Twitter, Forums, LinkedIn, Website, etc.
Summary
While we go through and put these together over the next few weeks, from my preliminary research, I believe DAOs are how a lot of things will get organized in the coming quarters and years and these are just some of the examples.
The success / failure of some of these DAOs though will depend on how they are structured and the governance that is set in running these DAOs and on that metric, I believe there are a lot of DAOs that are doing reasonably well because there is a core team that’s driving most of the activity. In my opinion, these are not DAOs OR not yet DAOs. So, the onus is on such teams to make the right decisions to move the needle in the right direction and reduce the dependency on them, of course once the community has reached the right scale and maturity.
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