DAOssination Classroom Takeaways

GM,

Thanks to everyone tuning into my recent DAOssination Classroom. I don't know about you, but it definitely inspired me to dive deeper into the DAO rabbit hole 🐰

Anime-related questions have tradition at NEAR is nao, so here are the favorites of our speakers this time around:

DAOs are not great at everything. But in a few things they are

Not so good for:

There's a trend for DAOs to not be named just that, it might actually lower the barrier to entry when not mentioning the word DAO.

Going from "just" an internet community to being a DAO doesn't just require tech; it also requires a mind shift from the people participating. Instead of everyone just running with it, they are now owners that can propose changes and have others vote on them.

Establishing such a change can take months. These kinds of changes eventually might even impact our society to have more conversations on eye height. 👀

We shouldn’t have smart contracts deployed by just individuals — also something at NEAR protocol we should have realized earlier as now there are some hugely valuable smart contracts where all the value goes back to one person.

Pragmatically, there should be more than just one person to release any new contract.

SBT DAOs

That’s how the Factory DAO team currently facilitates votes distributing QR codes at physical events to give everyone in the space a vote. That way, everyone can be part of the governance process there, and the formation of what is decided during such an event. Basically, community first, then deployment.

When DAOs need to hire people, they need an entity. That’s not something that is easily solved. One recommendation is to set up DAO-adjacent entities to do such things, as mentioned in the framework proposed by Ben Shapiro and the Delphi Labs team

We’re still early, and Arbitrum was still a great example despite the mess.

When legal entities are involved, smart contracts can reference the legal entity and vice versa to create a connection that’s needed to make either enforceable.

Maybe start with building a community and your knowledge first. The challenge can be who holds the governance tokens before you’re ready to distribute them.

Interacting with other smart contracts, though, can sometimes be difficult when you have a smart contract; there might be a centralized point when for example DAOs want to interact with DeFi or invest in other projects.

One way or another, you will need a token so you can vote and capture your identity. When tokens are fungible, that's how votes are weighted; SBTs and quadratic voting provide a different way to give people a more nuanced voice.

Not all DAOs have to be based on tokens either; if you consider them a spectrum, then you even have DAOs as a state of mind, or organizations like HER DAO, which have enabled a lot of womxn to enter web3 and participate in hackathons without a token — yet managing to coordinate various chapters across the world.

Btw, I’m also part of HER DAO Germany :)

We’ve had decentralized organizations for centuries, but they haven’t really taken off, which is something blockchain could facilitate.

In a sense, pirate ships meet the autonomy criteria for DAOs perfectly.

Smart contracts don’t run on single chains yet, but for protocols, it can work.

With a broader view, with DAOs as Co-ops, they are already multichain; an example would be the Unchain fund, which raised funds at the beginning of the Ukraine war.

Get into DAOs, a lot of smart people are in them, and you’ll learn a lot. Especially with AI DAOs might be the best way to empower communities.

Stay tuned for the next NEAR is nao.

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