The NEAR Ecosystem Treasury Vote Is Just Around The Corner: Here Is What You Need To Know

“A Proposal to establish an Ecosystem Treasury DAO. Proposal includes member selection, funding this treasury with up to 200M $NEAR from NEAR Foundation and potential types of allocations. The next step is for the NEAR community to give feedback on this proposal and, if no major concerns are surfaced within the next 2 weeks, to launch the vote for initial members of this DAO.”

The NEAR Ecosystem has long been a home for crypto-communities of all sorts. With a number of creators, a host of guilds, and new DAO infrastructure on the brink of launch, the NEAR Ecosystem is upgrading in a massive way: The Ecosystem Treasury DAO has been proposed by NEAR Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin, to create a truly decentralized governance mechanism for the future growth of the NEAR Ecosystem.

Here is what you need to know:

What is The NEAR Treasury DAO? A DAO To Govern DAOs on NEAR

In short, the NEAR Treasury DAO is the governance body of the NEAR Ecosystem, and the NEAR Ecosystem treasury to manage the effective allocation of $NEAR to the various aspects of the NEAR Ecosystem. As Illia himself explains in his forum launch post of the initiative:

“To scale the fund allocation, the Treasury DAO is not expected to allocate funds directly into projects / initiatives. Instead, the Treasury DAO will allocate funds into other DAOs. Members of the Treasury DAO will focus on defining the strategy for allocating the funds and due diligence/reviewing of DAOs to fund into.”

Specifically notable is the governance structure of the treasury DAO itself. A group of 21 members select a ‘Chair’ who effectively manages the distribution of $NEAR to sub-DAOs that fund projects or individuals within their vertical. These sub-DAOs also include their own council of specific members, qualified for the vertical that is being funded.

Members will need to select the ‘Chair’ who will be responsible for driving members to come up with the high level strategy, collecting information about proposals, and enforcing the timeliness of the DAO’s decisions.

As the only funded member of the network of councils (originally) the ‘Chair’ of the Treasury DAO will share their work and management plan routinely with the rest of the NEAR Ecosystem:

“The Chair is also responsible for providing transparency into allocations back to the community by participating in Town Halls and presenting progress of allocation and subsequent results.”

How the Treasury DAO Works:

With this basic conceptual framework, we can get into a little bit of the nitty-gritty surrounding actual operations of the Treasury DAO. In short:

• On a quarterly basis, council members of the Treasury DAO are decided upon by the amount of $NEAR that is staked for a specific proposed member.
• For the duration of the quarter, that member has an equal vote as all other members of the DAO in pushing through proposals put forward by other members, or the DAO Chair.
• At the end of the quarter, a new window opens to allow members to change their stake, or for new members to put their name forward.

In this manner, the DAO Treasury Board effectively goes through ‘elections’ by Stake as a means of vetting the most qualified and engaged actors.

“Each account that has staked or delegation then can call delegate(account_id, amount_pct) function on DELEGATION contract to allocate a percentage of their stake to one of the candidates. Every quarter when the stake is updated, the votes for a given account get rescaled to the amount they have staked in the snapshot (e.g. if a user had staked 100k $NEAR on June 1 but only has 50k $NEAR on July 1, their delegation weight will reduce by half).”

The Evolution of the Treasury DAO:

In the long term, the NEAR Treasury DAO will become one of the largest funders of the NEAR Ecosystem. In the short term, they will start with a modest amount of 30 Million $NEAR to prove their capacities in governing the development of the Ecosystem.

“The Treasury DAO grant can be renewed to cover the rest of the Ecosystem’s funding from token distribution 1 (up to 200M $NEAR total) if the Treasury DAO has not had any issues and has earned the support of the community.”

A Short Term Roadmap for Standardizing Ecosystem Development on NEAR:

Crypto-Ecosystems remain in their infancy. With a lack of understanding surrounding the value of community, the NEAR Ecosystem is running on the cutting edge of developing both the social and personal infrastructure of a robust and self-developing ecosystem. With one of the most developed and customizable DAO infrastructures in all existence, and a rising community of highly active members, a host of DAOs and Councils can be created to specifically address certain needs and opportunities within the Ecosystem.

In the original proposal outlined by Illia, a number of sub-DAOs were already being discussed:

• Liquidity DAO: a DAO focused on funding liquidity incentives and other DeFi needs in the ecosystem.
• Marketing DAO: a DAO to fund operations of Guilds focused on awareness and marketing for ecosystem projects. NEAR already has a number of guilds like this and they are important to grow awareness and spread information across the ecosystem in a more emergent, decentralized way. It’s already clear that the NEAR Foundation is not an efficient way to do this for the whole ecosystem.
• Grants DAO: DAO that allocates grants to builders in the ecosystem. This is to augment the existing NEAR Foundation Grants Program and provide a more scalable and transparent approach going forward.
• Guilds DAO: a DAO that would allocate funds to all the Guilds in the ecosystem.

Altogether, the NEAR Ecosystem Treasury DAO, and the many sub-DAOs operating beneath it, showcase one of the most unique and innovative approaches to community governance in all of crypto. Be sure to comment on the NEAR Forum and prepare to vote on this proposal, as it will be taking place in the coming weeks!