How to DAO on Solana: Realms & Tribeca
It’s 2022 — everyone loves DAOs. OK, fine. Some like them more than others, and in reality some are more decentralized and autonomous than others, but what’s a degen community without a DAO?
As someone who works closely with DAOs on a daily basis, I find it difficult to ignore the passion and excitement stemming from these communities in the Solana ecosystem. If this sentiment is any indication of what’s to come, I think it’s entirely possible that over a billion people contribute to or at least passively join a DAO in the next 10 years.
I know that might sound crazy, but the pace of innovation and development around DAO infrastructure and tooling solutions is truly impressive. I’m particularly excited about this little corner of the crypto world because it’s clear that the devs are doing A LOT to make it easier and easier to not only join a DAO but also create one of your own.
Realms and Tribeca are two open source protocols which enable you to do just that. They make it really simple for anyone with an internet connection and a Solana wallet to form a DAO or contribute to an existing one. But if you’re looking to bootstrap your own DAO full of passionate community members, how do you choose between the two? That’s what this blog post is for!
Realms: SPL Governance
Let’s start with Realms, which is arguably the easiest way for any degen out there to form a DAO. They even have a big “Create DAO” button. It’s really that easy.
Realms lets users choose between creating a “multisig DAO” or a “bespoke DAO”. A simple multisig DAO can be used to jointly custody and manage shared assets like treasury accounts, NFTs, or even Solana programs. With this option, users don’t need to worry about governance tokens or voting programs because the platform will generate everything automatically. The more advanced bespoke DAO option, on the other hand, can be used to create a custom solution tailored to individual requirements, community structure and governance token setup.
If you’re just looking to get up and running quickly, you can do so by providing 3 things:
- the name of your DAO
- the desired approval quorum (minimum % of yes votes to pass a proposal)
- the wallet addresses of voting members
BOOM! That’s it. You now have a fully functioning DAO on the Solana network. Each wallet address added above receives a “council token” to vote with (this is where the term “SPL Governance” comes from — Solana Program Library, or SPL, is the token standard on Solana). Council members have the ability to create and vote on proposals of various types, set up a treasury account, add a program, and jointly manage all of those assets.
More advanced users — perhaps those representing a DeFi protocol like Mango Markets for example — can opt to set up a bespoke DAO by providing more detailed information on their protocol’s governance token and governance program. If the team has built their own custom governance program, it can be utilized with ease, but Realms also provides a default option here to facilitate easy setup. The team will also have to determine how many governance tokens are needed in order to initiate an on-chain vote. In order to vote on a proposal, community members must deposit governance tokens.
Did I mention that all of this voting can also be done using NFTs?? That’s right! Because NFTs on Solana also adhere to the SPL token standard, DAO members can also use their NFTs for membership and to represent “council tokens” in Realms. The MonkeDAO and Degenerate Trash Pandas are leading the way and establishing a home for their respective communities on Realms.
Integrations with Realms
Several up and coming “B2D” (business-to-DAO) products have integrated with Realms over the last couple of months, and the lengthy list of new features continues to grow. Friktion and Solend are just two examples of DeFi protocols making it easier for DAOs to earn yield on treasury assets, while Notifi and Dialect are pioneering new ways to deliver value on the operations front with email and SMS notifications for proposals.
With a few clicks, users can create a proposal to deposit treasury assets and generate yield through one of Friktion’s structured product volts. Once passed, the treasury assets are transferred, and the yield starts compounding!
Tribeca: Governance by DAOs, for DAOs
As with Realms, Tribeca offers the ability to set up a simple “multisig DAO,” but it has become quite popular with Solana DeFi protocols which tend to require a more bespoke solution for governance infrastructure.
Setting up a DAO on Tribeca on behalf of a DeFi protocol requires a decent bit of technical skill (as it should!), but it’s still super easy for the average user to participate — particularly when it comes to voting. The protocol is “heavily inspired by the designs of Compound and Curve governance” and is built and maintained by members from several of Solana’s leading projects such as Saber, Goki Protocol, Sunny Aggregator, and Quarry Protocol. Tribeca also offers a clean and intuitive front end which is free and open for any DAO to use.
The three core components of Tribeca are the Governor, the Goki Smart Wallet (multisig), and the Electorate. The Governor and Goki Smart Wallet perform vital functions — keeping track of votes, queuing proposals for execution, and then ultimately executing them. These two are standard programs for governance processes that do not change across DAOs. The Electorate, on the other hand, offers a ton of flexibility to implement customized solutions. This is also the only contract of the three that can access user-owned assets and the only one that most users will ever interact with while participating in DAO governance on Tribeca.
By default Tribeca uses a voting escrow locker as the Electorate. Its default parameters include a min/max lock duration and voting escrow multiplier, giving more voting power to users who lock tokens in governance for the max duration. The locker system is designed to give more power to users who are economically aligned with the given protocol over the long term.
Using Saber as an example, in order to participate in governance and vote on proposals, users need to lock SBR tokens to get “vote-escrowed” tokens — veSBR.
Users choose the amount of time they want to lock tokens for, and the protocol rewards long-term participants with more voting power. The maximum lock period is 5 years, and one SBR locked for 5 years provides an initial balance of 10 veSBR. The minimum lock period, on the other hand, is 7 days. One SBR locked for 7 days provides an initial balance of only 0.038 veSBR tokens. This system is designed to prevent “just-in-time voting,” where a wallet, or maybe even a group of wallets, borrows a substantial amount of governance tokens to vote with right before the voting period expires and then returns them immediately thereafter.
Integrations with Tribeca
Once you actually use your veTokens to vote on a proposal, Tribeca has a really cool social media integration with Twitter that enables users to tweet about their vote and explain their rationale with the click of a button.
Another key integration is Quarry Protocol, which leverages Tribeca’s gauge voting system. Quarry gauges allow veToken holders to vote on relative weights of liquidity mining rewards across pools. Voting power allocated to each gauge is converted 1:1 to Quarry rewards share.
If you’re familiar with the ETH DeFi landscape, this should look very familiar. In the so-called “Saber Wars,” LPs use the gauges and vote to decide how much of that juicy SBR yield goes to their favorite liquidity pool!
So, which one is right for you?
Yup, you guessed it! The answer is… it depends.
If you’re just trying to set something up quickly with a group of friends to jointly invest in tokens or NFTs, I would probably go with Realms. Le DAO and metaCOLLECTIVE DAO are two groups that come to mind which are doing just that. The ability to vote on potential investment decisions and keep track of treasury assets in real time makes all of this possible.
That’s not to say, however, that Realms is just for retail and Tribeca is for established protocols. Orca — one of Solana’s largest and fastest growing AMMs — recently decided to launch their protocol’s governance construct on Realms because of the ease of use and speed to market. Orca also prides itself on having a simple and powerful UI. This also pairs nicely with Realms.
On the other hand, if you’re an established DeFi protocol and you want to let your community decide how to distribute token emissions or if you want the ability to lock governance tokens for increased voting power, Tribeca is probably ideal. Temporarily removing a bunch of tokens from the circulating supply never really hurts either ;).
Even if you’re not ready to start your own DAO at the moment, I would strongly encourage you to experiment and play around with both of these protocols. We’re still early, and I’m confident that these two will be adding DAOs to their rosters for years to come, so why not get familiar with them?
