Why Peeps DAO ?
Because the most important part of any product is how it empowers users to solve problems in new ways…sign up at www.peepsdao.com
We started Peeps Democracy with a vision of a more decentralized approach to political and social issues. We wanted to make it easy for ordinary people to come together and effect meaningful change in ways that were only available to the ultra-wealthy, the well-connected, and professional operatives. We built We the Peeps with that in mind to let people form their own decentralized PACs. Now we’re building Peeps DAO with the same mission, but with a focus on letting people do a lot more than just give to politicians — we want people to vote on spending those pooled funds on whatever they can dream of (assuming it’s legal).
When building Peeps DAO we started with a few requirements in mind, so that a Peeps DAO could work for a 527 (PACs and Super PACs), a 501(c) entity (nonprofit, advocacy organization, trade association, etc), or just a loose collection of like-minded people. We knew we wanted something flexible enough to address these various use cases, such that it would have to:
- Be easily able to accept donations or membership dues;
- Be able to address contribution limits for certain types of organizations, as well as any limitations on who could donate;
- Differentiate between donations and grants / payments, as well as track those two categories of things to meet any compliance obligations;
- Make grants or vendor payments based on votes of the membership, while, at the same time, controlling for the fact that certain organizations have restrictions on the types expenditures they can make; and
- Maintain as much other flexibility as possible, because there are probably some use cases we didn’t think about and smart contracts (once launched) are pretty immutable.
As discussed in previous posts, based on these criteria, we decided to start with the Moloch Ventures v.2 code and then make some changes and add a more DAO-novice-friendly front end. Below are some quick use cases for how we hope to see our Peeps DAOs being deployed in 2020 and beyond.
PACs and SuperPACs
PACs and Super PACs have a huge impact on politics in the US. They serve as organizations to pool money from donors and then strategically deploy that money to fund activities to further the PAC’s goals. When it comes to traditional PACs this usually means giving to a candidate’s campaign and then getting facetime with them at a rubber-chicken dinner. For Super PACs this means paying for independent expenditures, which can range from attack ads to paying for canvassers to get out the vote. Super PACs are often funded by the 1% and run by “hired guns” who know how to leverage the PACs funds to the maximum extent, which means that ordinary people don’t often get a chance to participate meaningfully in these organizations. But we’re ready to use Peeps DAOs to decentralize politics and hand more power back to the peeps.
If you want an ordinary old PAC, we’d still suggest looking into We the Peeps, but, if you’re thinking of running a decentralized Super PAC, Peeps DAO is your best bet. We imagine a Peeps DAO SuperPAC working like this…
A group of crypto-wielding people who care about a political candidate or issue come together and start a Super PAC by registering it with the FEC. They could set up a bank account for the Super PAC or just operate using a Peeps DAO for the fully decentralized experience. They raise ETH and/or DAI into the Peeps DAO from people who support their chosen candidate or cause and then those donors get to vote on the ads, canvassing, meme teams, and other activities being funded by the Super PAC. The expenditure side may still rely on professional operatives who know how to produce and publicize effective ads, but the DAO gives the donors the potential for a much bigger say in what their money is funding. All of the contributions and spending still needs to get reported to the FEC, but we’re making it easy to collect and pull that information for reporting.
Advocacy Organizations
Advocacy Organizations (or social welfare organizations) sit in a weird place between Super PACs and charities (or what we traditionally think of as being a nonprofit). These entities are organized as 501(c)(4) under the US tax code to advocate for particular issues or causes. They can fund education initiatives to raise awareness about their cause, can lobby governments to pass legislation or regulations related to their issue, support the activities of grassroots movements, and can even participate in political campaigning to a limited extent. In recent history these types of organizations have been categorized as “dark money” because they aren’t required to disclose donors when it comes to lobbying and educational activities. With Peeps DAOs we’re bringing dark money into the light and letting anyone participate in them.
We hope a lot of advocacy organizations will be founded as Peeps DAOs because of the flexibility offered by the law when it comes to the range of activities these organization can fund and sponsor. Imagine a group of people who care about issue X, which affects their community. Now they can donate DAI to a Peeps DAO to pool their capital to fight for that issue. Grassroots activists, who also care about issue X, can apply to that Peeps DAO for funding, for example, to rollerblade door-to-door with meme-y flyers on the importance of issue X. The DAO can also fund lobbyists to rollerblade through the halls of Congress to lobby for pro-X legislation. Finally, the DAO can pay for Reddit ads supporting candidates in favor of issue X (subject to FEC filings and compliance). These donors now have power to democratically decide the activities and strategies they want to pursue and fund when it comes to an issue near and dear to them — power to the peeps.
Charities
Traditional charities come with a few different rules from Super PACs and advocacy organizations. The big differences are: 1) donations to charities are tax deductible (unlike donations to Super PACs and advocacy organization) and 2) charities are more restricted in terms of what they can spend money on (i.e. it can’t be politics and has to be “on-mission”). So long as a Peeps DAO has a couple good and dedicated admins, however, it should be easy to run a Peeps DAO as part of an existing charity or start a new decentralized charity using a Peeps DAO together with an easy legal wrapper to formalize its entity status with the IRS — otherwise you’ll miss out on those sweet tax deductions.
Charities can use Peeps DAOs to engage their donors in grant making and decision making in new and transparents way. Donors to a charity’s Peeps DAO can vote on what programs get funded via the DAO. A charity with a mission to support zombie apocalypse preparedness could raise money from members who then help decide whether those funds get spent on making and distributing zombie survival kits or programs on post-apocalypse life skills courses. In any case, the Peeps DAO creates the potential for meaningful participation by funders in deciding what will increase the impact of the organization in a fully transparent way.
The charity’s officers or employees will still maintain some discretion when it comes to what proposals are acceptable for funding via the sponsorship and processing functions built into the Peeps DAO platform. While leaving the power to sponsor and process grant proposals in the hands of a DOAs admins sacrifices some of the decentralization of a DAO, we think it’s necessary in order to give charities a high level of confidence that rogue (or well-meaning, but uniformed) members won’t accidentally submit and fund proposals that could risk a charity’s tax status. We also believe that charities that use Peeps DAOs, but ignore the will of donors, won’t be very successful at gaining new members anyhow.
Other ideas (for fun)
A couple other less traditional ideas for Peeps DAOs are…
Churches and religious organizations are technically charities, but they deserve their own paragraph, because we like this idea and hope someone runs with it. Many religions started with ideas about radically reforming society to make it look more like their version of utopia — call it heaven on earth (or hell on earth for any Satanist out there). But, in all seriousness, many religious sects and organizations place a lot of power in the hands of parishioners, and we’d love to see the crypto-religious set leverage one of our Peeps DAOs to fund their worship and social programs transparently and democratically through a Peeps DAO.
Regular social clubs are another great use case that we’d hope to see on our platform some day. Maybe after those rollerblading grassroots activists mentioned above finish their issue advocacy, they can use a different Peeps DAO to support their amateur roller derby league and pay for track time, badass uniforms, and bandaids using the crypto they pooled in a DAO.
In the end, we’re here to serve communities of people and organizations brought together around causes, issues, or shared interests. In the future, we might do some more dreaming and imagine these types of organizations in 2024 when DAOs are everywhere.
