Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, provide a new way of organizing humans by utilizing blockchain technology. A DAO usually consists of people who come together around a common goal and create a fund to act on that purpose.
That purpose can be investing in NFTs or startups, managing a stablecoin, supporting charities, or buying historical artifacts. People can come together with long-term goals in mind, or DAOs can form abruptly. PleasrDAO is one of the longest-running DAOs and invests in NFTs.
ConstitutionDAO happened rather quickly. Thousands of people came together in under a week and raised $45 million to buy one of the original copies of the U.S. Constitution.
Blockchain software company ConsenSys defines DAOs as “governing bodies that oversee the allocation of resources tied to the projects they are associated with and are also tasked with ensuring the long term success of the project they support.”
Blockchain enables greater human coordination. With greater human coordination comes great power and the capability to resolve humanity’s major existential threats. However, we need tools built to address needs within the DAO ecosystem. DAO tools allow us to organize, manage funds, align incentives, vote, and reward contributors.
Let’s take a look at some DAO tools.
Aragon
Aragon facilitates the creation of a DAO on an open-source infrastructure. You can choose from DAO templates and apps to launch your own DAO. It also comes with a voting plugin, satisfying governance needs. Their manifesto shows passion for using technology as a liberating tool to unleash goodwill and creativity. Their tools are designed to incentivize positive behavior.
Open Law
It is now possible to model all or parts of legal agreements using code. You can easily find and create legal agreements that work with Ethereum and facilitate the legality questions with Open Law. With their platform, you can wrap smart contracts in legal agreements, then execute and sign the contracts.
JuiceBox
JuiceBox mainly works as a fundraising tool, making it easy to fundraise cryptocurrency. You can build a community around a project, fund it, and program its spending with the platform. The user interface is made so that it looks inviting. If you want to raise money, you can go for JuiceBox.
Gnosis Safe
Gnosis Safe allows DAOs to create common multi-signature wallets so more than one person can be involved in confirming transactions. The company works with big names like ENS and SushiSwap. It supports most wallets but is focused on the Ethereum blockchain.
Snapshot
Snapshot is a great tool that allows community voting using token and NFT ownership. A to-go software for DAOs, Snapshot is a decentralized voting system that supports various voting types to cater needs of different organizations, such as single, approval, and quadratic voting. You can create proposals and vote on them for free.
Tally
DAOs use Tally to create and pass proposals, enable delegation, and power voting. It’s a powerful platform for analyzing and voting on crypto protocols. You can connect your wallet and see all the DAOs you are involved with in one place. It’s effortless to develop and submit proposals. Tally supports Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche. Use Tally if your DAO involves submission and voting of proposals.
Discord
Until a web3 version comes along (it seems like the Moonbirds team might be working on this????), Discord is the leading platform where DAOs communicate, especially for bigger communities. Twitter and Telegram are also crucial platforms where conversations happen. If you will be creating your DAO and setting up Discord, it’s necessary to know your way around Discord and understand bots.
Coordinape
DAOs are autonomous, meaning participation usually happens voluntarily. Creating a suitable compensation mechanism for members who write, moderate, and work for the DAO is paramount. Recognition and compensation of people who add value to the DAO will be essential for long-term success. Coordinate helps DAOs incentivize participation and creates rewarding mechanisms for active members. Most DAOs, if not at the start, then during their progress, will need a couple of people to spend most of their time on the initiative.
Utopia Labs
Trusted by names such as Friends with Benefits, PleasrDAO, and Yield Guild, Utopia Labs is a collaborative payroll and expense management tool. It helps to manage payments, accounting, and reporting for DAOs. You can automate payroll (using fiat or crypto), keep track of DAO expenses, and assign roles to contributors to ease organization. What is impressive is you can batch execute all invoices and recurring payroll into one single multi-sig transaction without paying any gas.
Collab.Land
Many NFT projects utilize Collab.Land to verify ownership of NFTs to create token-gated communities. Leveraging the power of identity and ownership, Collab.Land enables various groups to form token-gated tiered communities. You could issue different NFTs to create different sub-communities or create a tiered system where the more tokens one holds, the more exclusive access one gets. Their bot can be added to Discord, as well as Telegram.
