DAOs GMI
We are all witnessing firsthand an incredible shift in the way we work and organize. As activity and value shift into the digital realm, distributed community and stakeholder coordination become ever more important. Crafty communities have figured that governance frameworks provide flexible and enforceable rules that enable anyone to coordinate and work towards any common goal with aligned incentives, and we couldn’t be more excited to support them on the Boardroom platform.
Since launching the first version of the Boardroom dashboard last summer, we’ve had the incredible opportunity to connect and learn from over 100+ communities as they built and experimented with these novel governance structures.
How the DeFi Blueprint Aligns Market Incentives with Societal Values
By Sam McCarthy
*Part 2 of a 2 part essay series on the current state of decentralized governance in crypto. This essay follows “Make Decentralized Governance Great (Again?).”
Decentralized governance implemented through DAOs encourages open participation in the development of the DeFi industry. By either purchasing or earning governance tokens, actors not only have the opportunity to share in the risk and reward associated with the monetization of a new financial system, but also the incentive to define the economic and social impact that system will have. Ideally, you purchase a governance token because you like the project and begin sharing ideas to make its token price go up. These tokens represent not only a financial stake in the protocol, but also membership in a community, the ability to influence the protocol, and a track record of participation.
Boardroom is a management platform built for DAOs, helping their members frictionlessly participate in their governance. Our mission is to make coordination more efficient and effective for crypto communities.
As part of that mission, we want to help improve access to basic DAO information.
Members Suffer from Information Overload
Access to and curation of DAO information is crucial to ensure effective participation by all types of community members and stakeholders. The rapid proliferation of DAOs has unlocked myriad experiments with novel coordination and decision-making mechanisms, but fragmentation and the sheer volume of information and content have created immense friction for participants and potential voters trying to contextualize a decision made by a DAO:
Crypto runs on DAOs. Underlying every major trend in the crypto ecosystem - from DeFi to NFTs - are DAOs and decentralized governance.
As crypto continues to bleed into mainstream consciousness and accumulates talent and resources to disrupt existing industries, it is now more important than ever to build with the tools needed for DAOs and decentralized governance to function more efficiently and effectively.
That's why we're excited to announce the Decentralized Governance Hackathon, co-sponsored by Boardroom, UMA Protocol, Gnosis, Snapshot, DAOhaus, Compound, and OpenLaw.
Featuring a case study of Instadapp's governance portal on Boardroom
Boardroom's mission is to make governance more efficient and effective for cryptonetworks and DAOs, which we believe represent a revolution in organizational design that will uproot traditional management and ownership structures.
Over the past 12 months, the number of DAOs has increased dramatically, growing alongside and underpinning the DeFi and NFT booms that have made waves in mainstream culture. More important than simply the quantity of DAOs, the sophistication, and importance of DAOs has accelerated as well. The aggregate value of DAO treasuries reached a peak of $16.5 billion in May 2021, growing from just a few hundred million dollars at the beginning of 2020. Moreover, many DAOs have begun to develop and experiment with novel operational structures as they pay contributors, align incentives of various stakeholders, and pioneer the future of work.
Special focus: Time-lock weighted token voting
A longer version covering DeFi case studies (Curve & Sovryn) is available here on Arweave
One of the most difficult problems in any organization is how to balance short-term interests and long-term goals.
As part of our new Stateless initiative, we’re excited to present a guest deep dive on DAOs by Nick Naraghi, in which he explores the four key motivations for building Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
👉 Keep tabs on the fascinating world of DAOs by subscribing to our newsletter here 👈
Boardroom has integrated with MultiSafe to bring transparency, access, and readability to DAO treasuries on our governance portal
For the past few months, we have been working with the MultiSafe Finance team to integrate Gnosis Safe information for projects onboarded to the Boardroom Portal. We are thrilled to share that anyone can now review treasury balances, activity, and payment details for DAOs directly on a project's dashboard. Some initial example integrations include Compound Grants, Bankless DAO, Synthetix DAO, amongst others.
The new treasury tab, found under every project in the portal, will enable DAO communities to maximize transparency by displaying real-time balance, flows, and transaction information originating from the project's default multisig. The feature:
As part of our new Stateless initiative, we’re excited to present a guest deep dive on DAOs by James Duncan, in which he lays out a framework to analyze decentralization (technical and cultural) and autonomy (technical and political) in these novel entities.
👉 Keep tabs on the fascinating world of DAOs by subscribing to our newsletter here 👈
DISCLAIMER: This article offers an early framework for understanding autonomy as a function of technical and cultural decentralization. Please find a glossary and resources at the end. The definitions provided need continued unpacking to form a broader context for understanding the way DAOs function today and in the future.
Originally published on Boardroom's Substack on August 25th, 2020
This week we’re featuring a guest post from Felix Machart, a summary of his longer report on “The State of Blockchain Governance” drafted alongside Jascha Samadi. This is a timely article delving into the intricacies of stakeholder governance as many of the prominent DeFi and cryptocurrency teams experiment with novel ownership models.
DAO communities so far have been experimenting with various systems to govern the infrastructure, from informal to formal processes, from loosely coupled off-chain to tightly coupled on-chain systems. There is no doubt that voting plays an important role in gauging community sentiment and to condense individual preferences into a picture that reflects the aggregate. The main questions are, 1) which stakeholders are entitled to vote (to the largest extent token-holders in permissionless systems, as “1-person-1-vote” has so far been either reliant on centralized KYC or not sybil resistant) and 2) how tightly coupled is the result of the vote with a protocol change.
Originally published on Boardroom's Substack on July 7th, 2020
The last few years have brought an immense wave of talent into the crypto ecosystem, but given the distributed and somewhat anarchical nature of the industry, that talent hasn’t always been effectively allocated. An evolving trend in the Ethereum/DAO world, however, is giving us a glimpse into the potential future of freelance work:
Originally published on Boardroom's Substack on Oct 13th, 2020
The Boardroom team is excited to announce that it has raised $2.2 million in funding to build a comprehensive platform aimed at reducing the complexities of crypto governance interactions. The investment was led by Standard Crypto, with participation from Variant, CoinFund, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Framework Ventures, and Slow Ventures.
The team is also proud to partner with MetaCartel Ventures, Divergence, The LAO, Stani Kulechov (Aave), Kain Warwick and Jordan Momtazi (Synthetix), Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet), Spencer Noon (DTC), Bollinger Investment Group, and Free Company.
Originally published on Boardroom's Substack on July 30th, 2020
Over the past months, a number of projects have started experimenting with the incentivization of liquidity provision and governance participation. This has provided the Ethereum community and wider industry a unique opportunity to earn governance tokens via novel token distribution methods.
Liquidity Mining allows users to lock their assets inside different DeFi protocols and receive governance tokens as a reward.