Why OrangeDAO?
Investment and venture capitals have been one of the key groups that benefit from having a DAO structure — on-chain treasury vault, decentralized decision-making, automated membership and token gates, etc. Meeting the DAO operations and services of this group of DAOs is hence a priority for the service pipeline of Metopia. In this report, we’ll delve into OrangeDAO, a venture capital collective of over 1,300 founders that has recently raised $80 million to back crypto startups, and see what kind of services would fit their DAO operations.
DAO Purpose & Services
OrangeDAO’s purpose is to support Web 3 startups with pre-seed and seed stage funding as well as founder expertise from its membership and network. Its portfolio support ranges from hiring to investor onboarding, and to accounting and operations services.
OrangeDAO has over 1000 members from Y-Combinator and alums and has a portfolio of projects that includes LiquiFi, Decrypt, etc., and often publishes their portfolio updates on their Twitter account.
Membership Structure
OrangeDAO has a YC-centric membership, in that all of the DAO’s members are YC alums. The DAO itself has a governance charter called The Orange Charter that serves as a whitepaper of the DAO, and a dedicated Discord server for members and requires an access token to join.
There are currently three committees of OrangeDAO — The Development Committee, the Treasury Committee, and the Governance Committee, each in charge of partnerships, asset finances and token distribution, and charter and governance-related activities.
YC GEM — an experimental on-chain credential and the DAO access token
There is a membership token in OrangeDAO — the YC Gem. It gatekeeps the DAO’s Discord access. For anyone that wants to mint a YC GEM, first they need an ID on HackerNews — a social news site run by YC.
It is not clear as to if there will be further plans around YC GEM credentials utility other than the community access. However, judging by the name, it would seem that OrangeDAO intends to implement credentials-related feature on the YC GEM token. A potential next step could be incorporating YC GEM as part of a larger Web 3 member profile that is weight differentiated in the DAO processes.
$ORANGE — the member incentive token
From a membership incentive perspective, contributing members are rewarded with the $ORANGE token.
In the total distribution of 100,000,000 $ORANGE tokens, 5% is allocated for early contributors and 54% is distributed to the Treasury Committee to incentivize and reward contributions.
In one of the recent governance proposals on starting a Hacker House space in SF, for example, 5,000 $ORANGE is allocated to a contributor and 15,000 to the team per season.
In terms of investment process, OrangeDAO has shown to conduct investments with an on-chain treasury and a token vote process. Most of the governance proposals thus far are operations and finance-related proposals. The vote is cast with $ORANGE token with a 1-token-1-vote model.
Given the size of the fund managed by OrangeDAO, while managing it all in a Gnosis or Moloch pool would be conventional, putting portions of the fund and managing investments with on-chain voting would make this part of the DAO process more transparent, as many other investment DAOs have been doing.
How Can Metopia Help?
Metopia is a Web 3 tooling infrastructure that aggregates Web 3 user data in a reputation system for governance, reward, and identity use cases. If OrangeDAO has further plans on expanding the utility of YC GEM or their ORANGE token for governance, reward, and identity use cases, we see such an implementation highly conducive to OrangeDAO’s membership operations efficiency. We could achieve this by adding POAP, SBT and other credentials to create a membership credentialing process. In addition, implementing an onchain treasury could help increase the investment transparency too.
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