Discord roles are of incredible importance to anyone that has tried to spend time in a server with either a constant influx of new members or one that has more than a few dozen members. 


The reasons for this are because distinction by category is required in any realm of life that involves a large quantity of any kind of entity. Whether it's employees at a corporation or even your personal food and music choices, we categorize everything, and that too before we even consider anything individually. 


In the same vein, any DAO or digital community ought to create categories for new members or contributors before they’ve joined the organization. Most new employees at companies apply to specific departments,  and you’d know the cuisine of food you’re getting for takeout. 


So, it’s pretty apparent that Discord roles are needed. The categorization ought to be of both kinds: on the quantum of a specific trait, and which trait/vertical each individual belongs to in the first place. For example, there ought to be different roles or tranches of roles for developers of different skill levels (for the same kind of developers) in the same way that a role might distinguish between someone holding $100 worth of a project’s tokens as compared to $100,000 worth of a project’s tokens. 


There are a few apparent inefficiencies resulting from the way role assignment is done most prevalently: 

1: **Manual role assignment is problematic**: 
Firstly, it involves the individuals responsible for assigning roles (usually community managers or moderators) to do so after learning about the individual contributors and accordingly funnelling them. Clearly, learning about each new entrant into the community to assign roles could easily consume an inordinate amount of time. 

One would also be remiss to not point out that any kind of screening that involves subjective judgement is prone to personal biases and errors in judgement-an issue that is only compounded in matters of assessing other people. 

2: Precisely because doing this is time taking, core team members (say a design or development lead) are **not that likely to screen contributors** to assign them roles-despite them being the best suited people to do so. This creates a vulnerability to inaccurate role assignment, as moderators and community managers are likely not the ideal candidates to gauge technical proficiency, and spending an inordinate amount of time on their project’s Discord server is a sub-optimal use of dev/designers’ time. 


3: 
3: Lack of pre-joining role assignment delays the **time to value**; both for what the community can get from the contributor, and also what each individual contributor can get from the broader community. 


This is because of the simple fact that individuals can contribute the most to any organization if they are in contact with the specific subset of the community that most closely aligns with their interests and skillset with regards to the organization’s broader goals. ‘General’ chats are not an ideal place for the realization of specific goals. 


Similarly, the time to value that individuals can get would increase as well. Spending time in discussions that are either outside your area of interests, or too far beyond or below your expertise are likely to not provide much value to you. This problem also decreases **contributor stickiness** for self-evident reasons.

#### Benefits Our Onboarding Tool Can Bring


1: **Time saving**: 

By automating role assignment and funneling after the creation of a customized onboarding flow, individuals automatically get assigned roles and funneled to the relevant channels. This removes the need for manual role assignment. This is with regards to both interests and skills. Self-reported answers from contributors enable interest based funneling, while gating through tasks, interviews, and wallet holdings (including proof of work SBTs) enables skill based funneling. 


![image2.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670415421/image2_5ce1a14aba.png)


2: **Removal of inaccuracy**: 

The removal of a large portion of the subjectivity in role assignment removes the danger of biases. Furthermore, whatever level of screening (and with whom) that is required will not first be ascertained by individuals (like moderators) that would not be best suited to make those judgement calls. Instead, team leads-say developers, designers and marketers could set their own objective standard for when potential new contributors need to be screened by them individually, whether through a task assessment or interview. 


3: **Quicker time to value:** 

Because people will instantly be directed to sub-communities that are more relevant to them, they will be able to have more individually relevant conversations from the get go. In turn, this will improve the odds of their providing value to other community members in conversation, in addition to increasing the odds that they will be able to find work at the intersection of their interests and skills that meaningfully moves the needle for the community. 


This would also increase contributor stickiness in the initial stage of their joining. 


Our onboarding tool will assign roles like the ones shown below before onboarding, greatly increasing the time to value and also painstaking and often inaccurate process of manual role assignment: 

![image1.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670415420/image1_79efe72f6a.png)






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Guide to Onboarding: Role Assignment

Roles are essential for dividing communities. This has value with regards to both responsibility distribution and for community members to be able to have context on who they are talking to. 

We dive deeper into the benefits of role assignment and how it can be well executed. 

#### What is Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF)?


Let’s step back for a minute and look at why start-ups exist. They exist to solve a particular problem in a better way than what exists. Bonus points if they’re solving something that’s never been solved earlier. Now, these start-ups are able to try developing their products only when someone bets on their idea, aka, funds the company. Investors are willing to invest money into these start-ups thanks to the concept of an ‘exit’. If the idea has merit, and it’s successful, investors stand to make massive profits via ‘exits’ in the form of IPOs, acquisitions or mergers. 


Imagine public projects being funded this way. Since public infrastructure projects like roads, highways and commuting setups are not exactly for-profit ventures, it’s tougher to get the money required to do them. But with a DAO dedicated to retroactive public goods funding, it’s possible. Public goods funding can be enhanced and accelerated with ‘exits’ too. 


The Optimism team is building a mechanism to achieve this; with protocol generated revenue, retroactive public goods funding and  a DAO called ‘the Results Oracle’. The basic premise on which the DAO works is quite similar to how start-ups work, it’s easier to agree on what worked than what will work. By introducing the concept of ‘exits’ to fund public goods, the Reward Oracle will fund projects retroactively, in tandem to the value they have already provided.  


For example, imagine a township with a ring road around their town. This border road ensures easy connectivity from the city center to all edges and makes it super easy to commute within the town. Now, the ring road was an extensive project which took years to complete. The project was led by a small team of 12 engineers and they completely oversaw its design and development, with some help from the local administration.


Thanks to retroactive public goods funding, these engineers and the town administration can get paid retroactively for the value they provide to their town. In lieu of  this ring road project’s success, the administration is also planning several other public infrastructure projects to improve commuting in town. 


The payments are all very seamless, with the DAO’s project tokens regularly being regularly credited to their crypto wallets as per the terms laid out in their smart contracts. The ‘Results Oracle’ can also send rewards to any address, including individuals and organizations, smart contracts with fixed allocation tables or to project tokens can be distributed to several organizations and individuals. Like all things Web3, there’s great flexibility here too. 


The other benefit here is that if anything went awry, the blockchain would make it obvious before any physical harm is caused. As such, even unpopular experiments can be tried out, as DAOs are generally opt-in and don’t force anything on anybody, like driving on a specific road.

#### How the Optimism model works 

Based on the core idea that healthy public goods create a thriving and valuable ecosystem, the economics of this ecosystem re designed to generate value for three different stakeholders:

1. **Sequencer Revenue**
Holders primarily accrue value through the productive re-deployment of sequencer revenue, the money that’s primarily directed towards funding public goods. This creates ecosystem value and drives demand for blockspace.

2. **Contributors and builders**
These parties directly accrue value from the retroactive funding the subsequent markets it enables. Builders also benefit mutually as it’s simply better to build in an ecosystem with well-funded tools, education, apps and infrastructure. 

3. **Users and community members**
Optimism airdrops, project incentives made possible by OP ecosystem funding and the overall benefits provided by public goods are how users and community members accrue value. As users, the biggest value takeaway is of course, being able to use something for its designed purpose. 


![virt_cycle.61308786.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670403736/virt_cycle_61308786_65f4f13860.png)

The focus with RPGF, like with any DAO based initiative, is to foster community and collaboration. The intent is to create a flywheel that catalyzes a network. With a digital or communal network, the cumulative value created can be leveraged to fund public goods, further increasing the revenue accrual mechanism, leading to even greater retroactive value rewards. The higher the rewards,  the higher the incentive to create public good. This essentially leads to a sustainable loop of constant value creation. Imagine the scope of rapidly moving organizations like these in big cities around the world.

#### Measuring Value

Regardless of the initiative, it’s important to establish mutually agreed upon KPIs to accurately measure value. For the ring road in a township example, the average monthly ridership during the first 3 years would make for a great KPI. If there’s a toll collection booth, keeping tabs on the average toll collection at different times of the year is another fantastic KPI. After analyzing these KPIs, similar KPIs can be set for similar projects; information which can be used for future RPGF projects. 


If we were to look at a more digital example, number of users is perhaps the most commonly used KPI, and it can be a good indicator of several performance variables. With a software project in Optimism, the KPI could be the number of APIs called, or the number of NFTs traded. Point being, well-thought out measurement is key, but you also have the flexibility to set up things however you want. 


A benefit here is that RPGF reduces the reliance on judging ahead by reprioritizing the focus on people to judge backwards. . The democratic and quick nature of the blockchain allows for rapid experimentation at a massive scale. Since there is no central authority controlling how things work, the permissionless nature empowers experimentation, which subsequently sparks development and innovation. 


Permissions are also why things that may be a day’s work and a start-up may take a month or more at a large corporation. A permissionless setup empowers bottom up building, providing a critical advantage to existing public goods development systems. Before Web3 and RPGF, this was a luxury enjoyed only by lean start-ups. Thanks to the transparent and rapid nature of the blockchain, any entity that runs on it can enjoy this benefit. 

#### Other Benefits and the Future

The Results Oracle can also help with rapid expansion of organizations, quickly testing out new ideas and judging their merit based on retroactive value. This information can be used to prioritize expansion or redevelopment objectives and cut down significant time and cost. RPGF is well poised to create an environment of rapid experimentation, previously only enjoyed by startups in the realm of public goods.


Bringing start-up like experimentation to the realm of public goods is further a concept that could completely change our world. Imagine cities being developed with RPGF, or your housing community using RPGF for new developments. The sheer scope for experimentation will completely transform how we do things for the better. Not to mention the world around us. 


Perhaps the biggest benefit is how it incentivizes the creation and development of public good projects. Everyone’s got bills to pay and while people may be interested in creating all sorts of things, circumstances and the lack of scope for a clear payoff majorly hold them back. While circumstances can be avoidable, RPGF solves the critical payoff problem that all public good project builders face. Now, there is scope for a real payoff, and maybe even consistent income. 


Of course, developing public goods is never the same as creating nice to have products that most start-ups out there are making. These projects often form the lifelines of a city and impact the daily lives of residents and visitors. But that doesn’t mean experimentation should take a back seat. Public goods is one area where innovation and progress is slow. DAOs have a massive opportunity to accelerate this, and they already are. 















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Retroactive Public Goods Funding: A Primer

Web3 and DeFi are rapidly seeing ideation and experimentation in economic frameworks. 

This piece expands upon the potential real world applications of one of the most promising but simple frameworks in the space today. 

**Q.1 Will mass adoption of DAOs really happen? I believe not every organisation needs to be a DAO. (progressive decentralisation talk)**

Ans: Yes, communities are turning into digital nations and people are looking for a new way to connect and build something together while learning about new structures, new aims and see the results we can achieve together. 

**Q.2 DAOs are inefficient for complexity. How can DAOs reduce their level of complexity?**

Ans: Dao Tooling can play a big role here. By using and building great DAO tools communities can create optimum system. Also, something to note is that the centralised orgs are not as efficient either.

**Q.3 Not all decisions need to be on-chain vs. a lot of off-chain governance ends in the chaos of countless and endless discussions. Even though many may have an opinion on everything, not everyone has the expertise on every topic that is required for constructive discussion and decision-making. How decentralised should DAOs really be?**

Ans: Yes there can be chaos with having everyone participate but it’s creative chaos. And that’s where progressive decentralisation comes into play. People will start projects in a centralised way and then, progressively decentralise. DAOs are the way we lower the barrier of entry, this is where we can scale, this is where we have transparency. 

**Q.4 Soul Bound Tokens. SBTs have been compared to China’s authoritarian social credit system, which seem straight out of a block mirror episode. They have a good side where SBTs may act like real-life achievement badges or a negative where even criminal history and negative credit score impactors could easily be applied to someone’s Soul Wallet. How do you see them?**

Ans: SBTs enable sovereign identities. Having the ability to build sovereign identities enables freedom. Freedom from state identities, you no longer have to share information which is not needed and therefore, we eliminate room for bias against age, gender, nationality. Reputation is the only thing that matters. 

**Q.5 Talk about a life defining moment that really shaped who you are as a person today.**

Ans: When someone randomly air dropped me the tokens to join the Bankless DAO. That was the start to my wonderful journey in the DAO world. Connecting with the community members there was like meeting a relative you wanna spend time with 😂

**Q.6 As the DAO Lead of Polygon, instead of asking you what’s your current biggest paint point? I’d like to ask you, what’s something that’s keeping you awake at night?**

Ans: Growth. Taking care of the collective growth of the community is something on my mind very often. 

**Q.7 What are your top 3 tools for DAOs?**   
Gitcoin                         
Gnosis                          
Guild.xyz               

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Hightlights from A Discussion With Marco Moshi

Highlights from a discussion our Community Lead Devika had with Marco Moshi, the head of DAOs at Polygon. 

#### How did you get introduced to crypto? 


**Devika**: How did you get introduced to crypto?


**Rushi:** I was in grad school, and was a decent enough programmer to do statistical models. So, I was in touch with people who were lot more tech savvy than me. This was back in 2013, when Mt Gox happened and Bitcoin fell around 95%. That was my first experience with crypto, then went down the rabbit hole. 


**Devika**: Were you investing at that time? Because I know a lot of people enter the space because of the exceptional profits. Or were you more interested in the tech? 


**Rushi**: I didn’t invest that much at that time-I didn’t have the money! It was really interesting as a technology. I wasn’t that well versed with finance at the time either; so I wasn’t really putting in much money or staying in the markets for long. So, I kind of saw it as a fad like Beanie Babies. It was just a really interesting asset! Still seemed like a toy to me at the time. The tech savvy people wer really raving and working on it though. Because I wasn’t that tech savvy, I was just viewing from the sidelines. 
When I gained more financial sense, it really started to click for me. 


**Devika**: Yeah, I feel like everyone had gotten into Bitcoin at that time. Some people got really interested in it and read the whitepaper etc, whereas some people  thought of it as a fad. 


#### How did you start your journey with BioDAO?


**Devika**: On that note, i’d like to ask you about BioDAO.  What would you say was the start and what was the story behind it? 


**Rushi**: Well, some context on me. I have a PhD in Molecular Biology. After my PhD I was a management consultant and was working in the pharma/biotech sector. So I had a front row seat to how these technologies mature, and that this maturation curve is quite long. I also got to see how they’re funded and how they are distributed. Also got to see the pitfalls in the whole journey. During this process I realised that at the very early stage of biotech, when the tech is immature and is more or less a discovery and not a therapeutic product, the journey is very arduous. It takes a lot of skill and money, but moreover it takes a perfect combination of skill, money and people to execute. 

So I realized that at that stage, if you get the right advice from people, it can have an exponential impact on the project. For example, if you were working on an RNA project and a senior scientist from Moderna commented on your project, taht’d be invaluable! It’s also very hard to come by. At the same time, the issue in the market is that that kind of talent isn’t really incentivized to do this. For example, more than 95% of discoveries don’t become a therapeutic. 


**Devika**: Could you expand o what therapeutic means? 


**Rushi:** It’s an intervention that would impact human health in some way, simply put. Nevertheless, you’re not gonna call exercise a therapeutic. So a therapeutic is a real intervention which could be a small molecule (which you ingest, an injection, or a gene therapy (such as mRNA vaccines). This could be extended to devices as well; like ultrasound devices, transcranial electro-induction, but i’d still call these more like devices than strict therapeutics. 


**Devika**: Thank you! I ddin’t mean to interrupt, please continue what you were saying! 

 
**Rushi**: Well, I feel like there are gaps in the system.  It requires a new incentive mechanism for people to participate, and a collaborative effort. So it felt like you needed to engage the ‘hivemind’ of available talent, which is currently quite siloed amongst companies like GSK and Pfizer. 
Now, at the early stage, there’s not much conflict. 
That was basically the genesis of BioDAO. 

Now, another aspect that pushed BioDAO to exist was that if you look at technologies across the world, you see Biotech hubs like San Diego, Boston and Cambridge. This is not the only place the research is happening though, obviously. The idea was how we can help people with the right technology but not the right network or resources to bring their visions to life. THis motivated us to create a platform where they can easily come and ask people for help to accomplish their visions. This was another motivation for BioDAO, which was to go after the Long Tier of discoveries as opposed to the concentrated places that exist. 

#### Why did you choose to work in DAOs? 

**Devika**: Thank you! Initially, I wasn’t too well versed in the DeSci ecosystem, but after your explanation, I see how the network effects DAOs like BioDAO can create can help scientists from all over bring important research to life. 

I’d also love to ask you why did you particularly choose to work in DAOs? Do you think that DAOs are one of the most impactful ways to accelerate the mission that BioDAO has? 


**Rushi**: The way I look at it now is that the way DAOs are structured is that they’re kind of structured like cooperatives. Why this is so applicable to Biotech is because we needed this expertise to come in at an early stage but simultaneously de-risk this for htem as well. Typically, if a senior scientist is consulting for a project, the startup cannot often attract such scientists.  At the same time, they’d do it for equity, or futures. Now, 90% of these startups go bust. So we tried to think about how we can create an incentive mechanism for such individuals to consult on early stage ventures whilst also de-risking the proposition for themselves. DAOs seemed a viable alternative mechanism for this. So DAOs have a very efficient incentive alignment tool. 


**Devika**: Today, DAOs are struggling to retain talent. 
Do you think it’s necessary for DAOs to have a certain threshold for its treasury? You mentioned incentivizing these people, but how would you incentivize them if you were starting up tomorrow? 


**Rushi**: Great question! In trems of talent incentivization, it depends on what incentives people need. IN the interviews we’ve taken of experts, they just want to participate in this alternative route towards looking at discoveries. The incentives don’t always need to be financial. Their incentive is actually to just see discoveries happening everywhere. So, each DAO has to figure it out for themselves. Of course, someone like a Community Manager would want financial incentives. Nevertheless, for us, our primary focus is on these scientists. For a lot of the founders that we spoke to, simply being in a community with like-minded founders was enough incentive. They were literally looking at Clubhouse as a resource! 

#### Biggest learning from the DAO ecosystem


**Devika**: Thank you. What would you say has been your biggest learning in the DAO ecosystem? It’s obviously still very ambiguous, with a lot of people uncertain about its future. So, how do you see the ecosystem today? 


**Rushi**: In my opinion, they do tend to be ephemeral in nature. I’m more a proponent of progressive decentralization rather than progressive centralization. The latter is more like patching up an organization, as opposed to a (relatively) centralized organization which is gradually decentralized, with some decentralized parts, and some centralized (which gain no benefit from being decentralized). 


Another problem I see is that DAOs have systems in which everybody votes, but should everybody be voting? In our DAO, should we let everybody vote on which biotech projects to support? It doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason why we have organizations like the FDA. Nevertheless, there are some governance aspects around which decentralization makes sense. So I think those things are better figured out gradually as the organization grows. In my opinion, this is favorable to the opposite, in which deliberation is loosely done in a decentralized system, and then gradually centralizing. 

#### Pain points in the DAO ecosystem


**Devika**: Just piggybacking off that answer, what would you say the biggest pain points are that you’re facing as a DAO. 


**Rushi**: Internally i’d say that a problem we’re facing is how to assign proper project leads.  Like, this is what you’re responsible for, and this is what you have to execute. 

Another (bigger) pain point is actually onboarding people into Web3. Which may or may not be the right thing to do! For example, What Dapper Labs has done is that you don’t even know if your’e interacting with crypto on their size. They have great rails on which people can be onboarded from Web2 to Web3. I’d say 99% of our talent pool is in Web2, not Web3. It’s hard to get 50-60 year old scientists get comfortable with Metamask! Some stil think Bitcoin is bad for the environment, etc. 

#### What product do you think can help BioDAO function faster and better? 

**Devika**: On that note, if you had to develop a product that’d help BioDAO operate faster and more efficiently, what would it be? 


**Rushi**: I’d work on the onboarding aspect; anything that can make self-custody go into the background. I often compare this to how email was a few decades ago, where it wasn’t exactly the most elegant user experience. Crypto is headed to the same place email is at now-easy and elegant. The trick is to make people to people interactions easier, not crypto to crypto interactions. 


**Devika**: Isn’t that similar to what ENS does? Do you have an ENS yourself? 


**Rushi**: The burden still remains! You still need to register or buy your ENS domain, and that’s not the most intuitive process either. 

#### What makes you passionate about Web3? 

**Devika**:  I’d love to know what makes you passionate about Web3? 


**Rushi**: I think one thing is definitely DeFi. It’s opened up a whole new way of doig things. The parts that really excite me are the parts that aren’t just on-chain versions of TradFi. Perpetuals would be one instance, exemplified by BitMEX and dydx. 

#### Advantages & Disadvantages of DAOs


**Devika**: What would you say are some of the disadvantages and advantages of the DAO space today? 


**Rushi**: I’d say its tapping into the ‘hivemind’ of groups of people. This is something centralized thinking could not achieve. Another one is incentive alignment. Unless you have a very weird token drop, you’re not gonna have misaligned incentives. Those are the attractive things about DAOs. 

In terms of disadvantages, DAOs often have problems with efficient deliberation. You also need a strong sense of ownership over some deliverables. In my experience, DeFi DAOs have solved the second problem more than others. The reason for this seems obvious, the financial incentivization is clear. For DAOs that have a longer tail like BioDAO, the issue of making people accountable for their work is a much bigger challenge. 

#### What is your perspective on people's negative perception of crypto? 


**Devika**: What’s your perspective on people’s negative views towards the space? 


**Rushi**: Well first of all, they’re not wrong either, right. You gotta take a neutral approach. I’m not in the camp that says crypto is going to replace **everything** in the world. I’d say there’s a traditional finance system, and the best thing that crypto does is offer you a parallel financial system. There’s really no need to compete with the traditional financial system, the same way DAOs don’t need to compete with traditional companies. We’ve had cooperatives for centuries now! 

With regards to people who say crypto is a fad, there are large parts of crypto which really are a fad-we gotta be honest about it. The ICO boom with useless ERC20s,  now you have tons of NFTs, which are essentially just useless ERC20s with pictures on them. The same way the market crash flushed out a lot of the sub-optimal coins, NFTs went through the same experience. Of course, there are projects that are actually utilizing NFTs well, **RTFKT** would be one example.  Nevertheless, this is the case with any new technology: most projects fail, but a few succeed, and succeed massively. 

#### NFTs

**Devika**: Do you believe in NFTs? Do you own any NFTs? 


**Rushi**: I absolutely do. I am not really into collecting them for art. I’m more interested in applications of NFTs in which it’s bringing communities together, or actually utilizing the technology itself in a more financial sense. Uniswap representing LP positions as NFTs would be one such example. That’s very interesting. 


**Devika**: Do you have any favourite projects? 


**Rushi**: Within DeFi, i’d say **Ribbon Finance**, which is working on options in a very intriguing manner. Within NFTs, i’m interested in** NFTperp**, which is using perpetuals using NFTs. 

#### Why are companies like Pfizer interested in the space? 


**Devika**: You know so I just hosted Laurence from VitaDAO, and he told me Pfizer was showing interest in working with them. What do you think motivated Pfizer to work with them? 


**Rushi**: Well, we’re working with Pfizer as well. It’s great to see them interested in these early stage technologies. 

#### Community questions

**Priya**: How do you deal with people who come only for the tokens? Who might not be interested in voting or may not know enough to vote. 


**Rushi**: Well, we don’t do a token sale.  We’re just going to have a drop based on Proof of work. You need to have done work for the DAO, and show credibility and credentials and only then will you have access to this token. 


**Arora Borealis:** Do you see more traditional companies like Pfizer going down on the research via DAO route? 
In your opinion is that a niche and can it be useful for research across industries? 


**Rushi:** I would view the notion that DAO would do research through a DAO with skepticism. This is because clinical research is not that trivial to do and involves a lot of compliance that’s already in place. The end goal here is for the research to result in a drug application being submitted. There’s a lot of FDA regulations on that already. It needs to be done in certain labs, in some ways. So that’s the first thing. 


Secondly, it could be for very early stage work, like job work, essentially. It’d be like ‘I have this experiment, can someone validate it for me?’. This is potentially tenable. But where would the DAO be doing this? Is this a clinical research organization or is it a contract research organization?  

I do see something like this as useful for something that involves statistical analysis, like genomics. Those things are probably going to get commoditized sooner or later anyway. So, there are certain applications that could be useful, but not for others. 

Then, do I think that this model could be useful for research across industries? I guess what you’re trying to ask me is if Deep Tech research with a high initial investment that can eventually become commercialized can be bolstered with DAOs. Do DAOs offer an economical route to do this and is there a reason that they’d be able to? I currently don’t see that. 
I don’t see the gap in the system that they’d be able to plug. 

#### Why is it worth being in Web3? 

**Devika**: I think one last question i’d like to ask you is why is it worth being in Web3? Why should people care about it? 


**Rushi:** I think Web3 is doing something interesting in that its not challenging the existing financial systems but is making its own, a new form of efficiency to these systems. Any kind of financial rails are getting simplified with Web3. 


Why should you care about it? It is very effectively **tokenizing various aspects of life**. When I look at DeSci as well, it’s essentially just tokenizing science. When you look at what VitaDAO is doing, what BioDAO is trying to do, we’re all trying to tokenize different aspects of science. Some are going after papers, some are going after longevity, some (like us) are going after the talent itself. 

From a zoomed out perspective, we’re basically going through this phase of the tokenization of assets, of all things. Initially, **Ethereum tokenized angel investing-that’s how I look at the ICO boom. **

Similarly, you’re now seeing with NFTs that even art can get tokenized. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. Now you’re even seeing lending on art get tokenized!  People are doing these really interesting experiments with real estate, all sorts of assets that they wanna tokenize! 

Why should someone be in Web3? Just the way people were saying your industry is going to get digitized 10-12 year ago, I think we’re basically a decade away from tokenization. This tokenization allows us to tokenize abstract concepts like art or communities. We don’t have the answer to how we ought to tokenize communities or art, but we have the tools for it. Someone’s going to figure it out. 

**Devika**: Thank you so much, this was invaluable! 


















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Network Effects In Science: A Conversation with Rushi from BioDAO

BioDAO hopes to use network effects to be able to plug the gaps in the existing biotech research ecosystem. 
We talk to Rushi, steward at BioDAO about DeSci, DAOs, and the broader Web3 ecosystem. 

#### Initial Onboarding


It is imperative that the initial onboarding experience new entrants go through is one that has the following elements: 


**I: First experience with the community**

Joining a community is all about the people. As such, new entrants should feel an instant sense of camaraderie and friendliness when they first enter whichever group chat that they do. This is perhaps the hardest but also most important thing for any community manager to ensure. This is because it does not have to do with any concrete ‘steps’ or tools that must be implemented-it is the result of actually having built out a cohesive community in which people of all backgrounds and skill levels feel welcome.

Indeed, building out the community is self-fulfilling as well; the more welcome your community already is, the more likely new people are likely to stay, contribute, and make others feel at home. 

Furthermore, people **knowing their place** within the community is important as well. This involves both funneling and also having some context on other members of the community with regards to their field of interest/expertise and the depth of their expertise within it. Because of this, **role assignment** is crucial for new entrants’ (read our guide for role assignment [here](https://www.daolens.com/blog/onboarding-gating-and-role-assignment-1).) If people join a large chat and **don’t know where to go** or know **what kind of people they are talking to**, they are likely to get bewildered, significantly decreasing the chances that they will stick around. These roles can be based on skill, place within the community (core team, different NFT holders, Discord activity levels) or earliness in the community (‘OGs’). 

Treasure DAO’s role management is illustrative of our point here: 


![image6.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670390958/image6_fb4eb319f0.png)

The above point is especially true for large communities; general chats with hundreds of members are not too useful for both making deep social connections or coordinating to get work done. [**Dunbar’s Number**](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158#:~:text='Dunbar's%20number'%20is%20the%20notion,other%20individuals%20in%20the%20group.) of 150 is useful here; the channel/chat in which new contributors are going to participate in **should never exceed 150 people.**

Having different channels on the basis of language shoots two birds here, letting people communicate in their preferred language and also allowing them to create a shared camaraderie with people with whom they share a significant characteristic (language/nationality): 


![image2.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670390957/image2_3dfa99dd80.png)


**II: Clarity**

As we expand upon in our guide for **properly introducing your community**[Link](https://www.daolens.com/blog/introducing-your-community), you must ensure (in addition to having context on other individual members) that new entrants have clarity on what the community’s overall mission, values, and vision are. 
This also pertains to how a **particular individual** may be able to contribute, and what this may look like on a **day to day operational basis**. 


**III: Education

A corollary of clarity in your community is having educational tools for new members. This is **always** true when it comes to explaining your own community, and is also true for general ecosystem (Ethereum, Solana, NFTs, DeFi) education when it pertains to communities that may attract individuals with relatively lower amounts of knowledge than is required for effectively participating in your community. 

For matters pertaining to your specific niche (say,the fundamentals of bonding for a DeFi DAO like Olympus or basics of how conventional science is executed for a DeSci DAO like VitaDAO), it would be ideal to have **specific educational content** created catering to people of **different domains and skill levels**. For example, different tranches of material for beginners, intermediate, and advanced marketers and the same for developers. A good example to follow would be **this **[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYip_Vuv8J0) **Wired Magazine** series of videos that you may have heard of. 

For matters pertaining to knowledge that would be needed in other domains as well (such as the basics of DeFi or different chains), it would be more efficient to simply point members in the right direction; to teach them how to fish, so to speak.
For initially onboarded members, **FAQs, recorded spaces, and Twitter threads** are useful: 


![image5.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670390960/image5_858313f08d.png)


![image1.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670390959/image1_bb906d77f7.png)

#### Maintaining Engagement

**I: Checking in**

First and foremost, you (or at least some of your team members) should act like **members of your own community**. This means being active in the chat frequently, keeping tabs with the overall sentiment/flow of conversation, and having an understanding of whatever social dynamics have emerged. 

This is essentially a requisite for community engagement: no one’s going to care about what your community unless it's very apparent that you do. 

**II: Feedback**

A primary reason for why core team participation is imperative within your community is because it creates a **de facto feedback mechanism.** People wouldn’t even feel the **need** to tell you about issues that are being spoken about-if they see you around, they will know that you know. 

Nevertheless, such informal mechanisms are not sufficient. There should be other means of community feedback as well, whether it has to do with the product, the team’s communications, or even the behaviour of other community members themselves. 

For example, this can be implemented through **informal polls** (such as the emoji ones on Discord), intermittently (for example, quarterly) distributed feedback forms, and points of contact through which community members can speak about their experiences (good or bad) with the community in private. 

People can also make suggestions to improve the community or venture overall, arguably the most important part of a DAO! 


![image4.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670390961/image4_9c600dacf8.png)

**III: Events**

Simply having an active group chat is necessary, but not sufficient for having a durable, productive and tight knit community.

Events like guest speakers on Twitter spaces, community contests, and even in real life events are great ways to do this (Yuga Labs’ work building and maintaining BAYC’s community is a masterclass).

Indeed, there is always something to be said about to face interactions. So, whenever possible, you should host events for community members to be able to meet up-this doesn’t need to be [**Apefest**](https://apefest.com/); a simple lunch meetup would suffice. 


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Guide to Onboarding: Best practices for New Communities

What community admins do in the initial stages of community building is crucial, as it can determine whether the community sees inertia or momentum, both of which build on themselves. 

We have a look at some ways this can be executed. 

To create a guide on maintaining member engagement in a community, we'll need to first understand what member engagement is and why it's important for community managers to focus on it.


Member engagement refers to the level of participation and involvement of members in a community. This can include activities such as contributing to discussions, responding to other members' posts, participating in events or activities, and generally being active in the community.


Maintaining high levels of member engagement is important for several reasons: 


1. **First**, engaged members are more likely to continue to participate in the community and contribute to its growth and success. This can help the community to thrive and become a valuable resource for its members.

2. **Second**, engaged members are more likely to provide valuable insights and feedback that can help the community manager to improve and evolve the community. This can help to ensure that the community remains relevant and useful to its members.

3. **Third**, engaged members are more likely to be advocates for the community and promote it to others. This can help to attract new members and grow the community even further.

A key reason why participation may not happen is a lack of clarity around the purpose and goals of participation. If members of your community are unsure of why they should participate, or what they will get out of it, they are less likely to engage. It is important to clearly communicate the benefits of participation, such as the opportunity to have a voice in decision-making, the chance to contribute to the growth and development of the community, and the potential to build connections with other members.

Another reason why participation may not happen is a lack of an elegant onboarding experience and support for new members: 

An effective onboarding experience is crucial for maintaining member engagement in a community. This is because the onboarding experience is the first impression that new members have of the community, and it can set the tone for their future participation. An effective onboarding experience should provide new members with the **information and resources** they need to get started, and should also help them to understand the goals and expectations of the community. By providing a positive and engaging onboarding experience, community managers can help to ensure that new members are more likely to become active and engaged members of the community.

Our onboarding tool is ideal to help with this: 

**Give a brief overview of your DAO:**

![image2.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670334033/image2_15822ee9eb.png)

![image3.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670334033/image3_c6e89c8e9e.png)

In addition to onboarding, it is important to create systems and structures that facilitate and encourage participation. **This can include setting up channels and forums for discussion, providing opportunities for members to contribute content and ideas, and establishing clear processes for decision-making and feedback.** By creating systems that are easy to use and understand, you can help members feel more connected and engaged with your community.

**Treasure DAO's server can help illustrate this:**

![image1.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670334030/image1_c9a8d0841a.png)

**Automated Updates:**

A very important way you can  maintain member interest and engagement in a community is to use a system of automated updates. This can include sending regular newsletters or emails to members with updates on the latest happenings in the community, as well as notifications about new discussions or events. By providing regular updates, community managers can help to keep members informed and engaged, and can also help to remind them of the value and relevance of the community. Automated updates can also help to save time for the community manager, as they can be scheduled in advance and sent automatically, without the need for manual intervention.


Overall, maintaining high levels of member engagement in a community requires dedication and effort from the community manager, but the rewards – a thriving, active community – are well worth it.

Here are some other general tips you can use to maintain community engagement:

1. Set **clear goals and expectations for the community**. This can help to provide direction and focus for the community and its members, and can also help to ensure that the community remains relevant and valuable.

2. Provide **regular, engaging content.** :This can include starting discussions on relevant topics, sharing interesting news or resources, and organizing events or activities.

3. **Encourage participation** from all members. This can include asking for input and feedback on decisions, recognizing and thanking members for their contributions, and responding to posts and comments in a timely manner.

4. Foster a **welcoming and inclusive environment**: This can include setting clear rules and guidelines for behavior, and taking steps to prevent inappropriate behaviour, such as bullying and harrassment or attempts at scams. Bankless DAO allows members to report scams on a dedicated channel: 


![image7.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670334032/image7_769a35260b.png)


5  **Continuously assess and improve he community- This can include tracking metrics such as member engagement, participation, and satisfaction, and using this information to identify areas for improvement and make changes as needed. The analytics engine on our onboarding tool can help you get such metrics, including:

-**top contributors**
-**new joiners**
-**active contributors**
-**most engaged channels**


![image4.gif](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670334030/image4_ff4610fd6a.gif)


![image6.gif](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670334029/image6_4490fe402b.gif)


![image5.gif](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670334030/image5_fde3993c06.gif)





















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Guide to Onboarding: Community Engagement

Maintaining an active and enthusiastic community is one of the most important things for any Web3 project. 
We discuss why it is important, and how it can be accomplished. 

#### How did you get involved in crypto? 

**Devika**:  So one of the first questions I wanted to ask you is what made you choose crypto? Why not AI/ML for example? 


**Elijah:** I did come from a data science background. My background is in molecular biology, which is also what I went to school for my PhD. So, I started a research lab studying cannabis and genomics, which focused on developing new technologies for the cannabis and diagnostic space. Essentially, genetic testing to understand more about the plant. So our focus for the last 5 years has been to democratize access to this technology. 

In this journey, we’ve been enabling customers to generate a lot of data for themselves. We act as consultants, and so our customers retain full ownership of their data. It’s kind of like hiring a designer; you get the logo at the end and it's yours. Similarly, in this situation, you get the data and it's yours. So this has created sort of data ‘silos’. In the effort to advance science and my own research, i’ve done a ton of experiments that I know have been done. 

However, no one published the data: there could have been a lack of financial incentive, publication bias, lack of access to a platform, etc. There’s a lot of reasons  information is isn’t shared or kept secret (for example, to patent something down the line). Web3 changes this model.  It enables people to **monetize their data however they see fit whilst simultaneously maintaining ownership and provenance of it.** Currently, the paradigm is ‘iNFTs’ (intellectual property NFTs).  So that’s where Cannabis Genome DAO came from! So that’s what we’re trying to do with the DAO, a **tokenized data marketplace** where a small fee goes back to the DAO and that funds the community through further development, grants, etc. 

#### Ownership and Decentralization

**Devika:** Thank you! I feel like a lot of people don’t understand the value in ownership and decentralization. Would you like to expand on that? 


**Elijah**: So to me the fundamental part of Web3 is the ability to flip the ownership and governance model for so many substantial things that people are interested in-whether a protocol, a community, or the idea of sharing data! So the ability to **participate and own **something. So it’s kind of like the gig economy except instead of getting paid a few bucks an hour (like for Uber or Lyft) you actually get governance tokens and ownership where you get the ability to direct where the community is going. 

#### Transition from Delta Leaf Labs to Cannabis Genome DAO 


**Devika:** You recently tweeted about your desire to quit as CEO of Leaf Labs and work full-time in Cannabis Genome DAO. I’d love to hear about that. 


**Elijah:** So it’s been a hard decision. My joruney at Delta Leaf has been extremely rewarding and challenging. Launching a startup bootstrapped (I literally converted my bedroom into a lab!). So after grad school I needed to make some money, so I switched to diagnostics. Of course, it was quite building a biotech company from scratch without investors! It’s been a while, so it’s hard for me to come up with new ideas and things like that after so long. It does feel like the natural progression as well-my goal is to decentralize the lab’s governance too. In fact, I recently wrote a piece on Mirror thorugh Cannabis Genome DAO which discussed the possibilities of the DAO acquiring the lab. 

#### Dealing with Ambiguity In The Space

**Devika**: Well, good luck! How are you dealing with the ambiguity and skepticism around the space at large? How does it feel to transition your entire career to such a nebulous space?


**Elijah**: It’s been super exciting. I’ve met nothing but awesome people in the space across the space in the past  year or so. I got my start with Bankless DAO, whose contributors are invariably consummate professionals. The connections and ideas I made and learned there informed a lot of Cannabis Genome DAO. 

#### Passion For Cannabis

**Devika:** Where does your passion for cannabis come from? 


**Elijah**: Personal experience; I’ve been a cannabis consumer and advocate for 20 years now. It helped me level out my angst and focus during my teenage years. It really did give me direction for my career. So when I was in my final year of my PhD, Proposition 64 was passed in California (to legalize recreational cannabis), so I thought it was an opportune moment to leverage what i’ve learned over the years in an industry i’m passionate about. 

#### Pain Points in Running Cannabis Genome DAO


**Devika**: What were some of the pain points you felt in operating Cannabis Genome DAO in terms of onboarding and contribution? How sporadic was it? 


**Elijah:** This was definitely one of the bigger ones. We have multiple levels of domain expertise that we’re trying to bridge to a wider audience. One is the cannabis space, which of course has a lot of specific knowledge. But then there’s also the scientific aspects, which includes data science and genomics. And finally, the Web3 space itself! 

So merging this educational path for participation has been quite challenging; onboarding is a huge challenge, it’s hard to get people to easily use a new technology. So that’s also why we initially chose NEAR Protocol, given their focus on an accessible front-end for onboarding. 


#### Getting Exposure


**Devika:** How are you going about spreading the word? Whether you’re looking for contributors, admins,  community managers. Are you doing it on Twitter, Discord, where are you guys living and existing?


**Elijah**: Mostly Twitter right now, given that we’re still in the early stages. The people we’re trying to reach out to from the cannabis industry requires having the tech in place and the onboarding rails. So it’s mostly been focused on Twitter and other DAO communities, trying to find builders who understand the concept of **build now token later **and **Retroactive Public Goods Funding**. So that’s where we’re focused, but the majority of the cannabis industry is focused on Instagram. So we’re focused on bridging that. 


**Devika:** How are you dealing with the prevalent negative connotation behind crypto (that it’s not going anywhere, etc.)? Especially since you have basically bet your life on the space, and it’s not a side hustle. 


**Elijah**: Well, luckily, in the cannabis space, people see the value of it. Given that cannabis is still federally illegal, banking regulations are still a nightmare-**the cannabis industry doesn’t have banking**. So the crypto industry is a solution to that, and people see the value right away. **The issue becomes more operational, then. "How do I use this safely?"** So a lot of it is just education and accountability; getting people to do those first few transactions, understanding what a liquidity pool is, what staking is, etc. 


**Devika:** A lot of the times people are speculatively minded, thinking they’ll buy DAO tokens and flip them for a profit later; not exactly focused on building. What are your thoughts on that, especially given your ‘build first token later’ approach? 


**Elijah**: I think switching to the paradigm of providing value first and getting paid later (for example, through bounties) has been extremely significant. The fact that we're in a bear market right now helps too; a bear market is a builder's market. 












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Cannabis & DAOs: A Conversation with Elijah from Cannabis Genome DAO

Dr. Elijah Spina (aka Flowscience) is the CEO of Delta Leaf Labs and has also started Cannabis Genome DAO, which incentivizes open source cannabis research. 

Hyper financialization is lamentably prevalent across Web3, and in some cases, even the de facto focus of the space. In large part, this has to do with the fact that any asset that people can hold is tradeable, including governance rights. This poses significant problems that undermine the very ethos the space is ostensibly built on. 
The need for a dedicated framework of non-transferrable social assets to map onto on-chain social identities is evident, and SBTs offer a solution.

Our discussion today revolves around SBTs and their applications across communities in Web3 and how they facilitate a more pluralistic nexus of communities. We start the discussion by defining SBTs and then lean into the problems they solve for communities in Web3. We also discuss some powerful tools and protocols that aid the proliferation of SBTs as a concept and how you can use them to integrate SBTs into your communities.

SBT as a concept was proposed by Vitalik Buterin, E. Glen Weyl, and Ohlhaver in their research titled “**Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul**”. The document defines the fundamental primitive for the implementation of SBTs called “Souls” and expands upon some use cases in detail. 


#### What are SBTs?

BTs, or Soulbound Tokens are non-transferrable NFTs linked to individual “Souls” that represent an** interaction, commitment, or affiliation** across a social mapping. They are capable of mapping social interactions on-chain and creating interoperable social identities that provide the groundwork for a more inclusive and pluralistic society. Specialized infrastructure for encoding social interactions on-chain and linking them back to individuals is not currently prevalent in Web3. Communities in in the space rely heavily on platforms like Discord for social interactions and the attempt to eschew token-based voting mechanisms for Sybil-resistance forces them to rely on Web2-based social media profiles to corroborate identities. SBTs can solve this by offering a wireframe for tracking, encoding, and representing social interactions, affiliations, and memberships on-chain.


The fundamental primitive of this discussion is “Souls” because without souls, there’s nothing SBTs can be bound to. Souls are like social media profiles in Web3 that bridge the social distance across platforms by acting as a unified identifier. In other words, they are digital wallets in Web3 that can issue/attest/store SBTs. These SBTs can be issued/attested by individuals or organizations based on the nature of social interactions. A one-on-one podcast will simply warrant an SBT being issued by the podcast host to the guest. However, a product launch organized by a brand will end in the organization issuing SBTs to everyone who attended the event. If the event of obtaining the SBT is linked to task ‘T’ in a social sphere, then the cost of an SBT is derived as an aggregate of the social costs related to completing task ‘T’. 


Moreover, similar to having multiple profiles across social media platforms to represent different personas (Instagram- Social, LinkedIn-Professional), an individual can have multiple souls to group similar social interactions. A gaming soul, a professional soul, a community soul, and a political soul, all represent different sub-sections of social identity for a richer social context. 


**POAPs** (especially non-transferrable ones) can be said to be ‘proto' SBTs by linking tokens to social interactions and using them to establish social relationships of trust. The Ethereum Community Conference held on 19 July 2022 in Paris issued POAPs for attending the event. 


![image2.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670317259/image2_b89505978f.png)

There have been instances in the past where POAP tokens have been transferable and thus been speculatively traded in secondary markets. Soulbound POAPs offer better and more reliable proof of social affiliations.


Souls and Soulbound tokens offer a gateway to a more pluralistic and inclusive society with a richer social fabric. Although that’s an immensely fascinating conversation, it goes beyond the scope of this piece. We have already explored the narrative of DeSoc using [SBTs, VCs, and DIDs](https://www.daolens.com/blog/defi-to-desoc) in detail and you can refer to it for more insights. 


#### Problems Solved by SBTs

On-chain social mapping and soulbound governance rights can facilitate the proliferation of more complex governance structures.


Transferable governance rights pose a threat to the very existence of decentralized structures in Web3. Here are two primary reasons for that:

1. Web3 is built on the premise of decentralized governance. Transferable governance rights trample upon the very premise by **enabling concentrated interests to accumulate voting rights.**

2. The movement and stagnation of voting rights from the competent and visionary to incompetent but determined and financially apt is inevitable with transferable and financialized governance rights.


SBTs can help ameliorate the plutocratic nature of Web3 communities through soulbound governance rights and an on-chain social identity based on past contributions. A community can either **discount votes** based on the intersection of interests by mapping SBTs for peripheral social interactions and community contributions, or they can issue soulbound governance tokens unlockable by compounded contributions in a community. A tier-based soulbound governance token that matches the level of contribution in a community is more likely to favor the actual interests of core contributors over the financial interests of whales.

The [Otterspace](otterspace.xyz) protocol uses a similar soulbound governance dynamic in which multiple levels of badges called otterbadges are issued to individual contributors(otters) based on their contributions. Every badge is simply an EIP-4973 (which was itself developed by Otterspace) NFT with a name, artwork, and an optional expiration date that is backward compatible with an ERC-721 token. 


![image1.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670317259/image1_b92fc3ee46.png)

Communities often rely on tokens to validate memberships and to offer a monetary incentive to their contributors/investors. However, financialization follows when the token price climbs in the secondary markets offering a cradle for centralized power struggles. Otterspace solves this through soul-bound membership badges to **untether the financialized component from membership/participation in communities.**


![image3.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1670317259/image3_880d6fc6d0.png)


Otterspace badges can be used for anything that solicits an on-chain record, including **governance, access permissions, salary payment, staking reputation, token-gated commerce, undercollateralized loans, retroactive airdrops**, and so on.

#### Solving Hyper-Financialization and Sybil Attacks

Token/coin-based voting is often defended in Web3 with the argument that whales with the largest token holdings favor the best interests of the community as they have a higher financial incentive to do so. However, this is a weak argument because an individual can be the majority token holder in a community but their holdings relative to their entire portfolio might be small and therefore less significant. 
Moreover, even if the argument is considered to be accurate, it **magnifies the financial interests of a smaller group over the social interests of the entire community**. The predominance of financialization within Web3 has been to the space’s detriment and the proliferation of plutocratic governance structures across DAOs, protocols, and other democratic communities.

**QV (Quadratic voting)** offers a superior alternative to coin-based voting by adding incremental costs to each successive vote, thereby significantly reducing the influence of the rich and powerful. However, QV has no apparent way to fight collusion or Sybil attacks. In a QV framework, the first vote towards or against a decision comes at no additional cost, so a whale can simply buy votes through others instead of directly buying multiple votes, or even simply use sockpuppet wallets to Sybil attack the governance. 

SBTs provide a more practical solution to this problem, offering the framework for a nexus of on-chain identities that are correlatable. A vote supported by a group of individuals with similar social interactions and multiple common SBTs points towards collusion and even if it’s otherwise the votes represent a group bias or a collective error in judgment.

**Correlation-based discounting** can be clubbed with QV to enhance the efficacy of the voting frameworks and push towards a more inclusive and pluralistic Web3 demographic. 


The use cases of SBTs for Sybil resistance are not confined to correlation-based discounting. The research paper on SBTs and their use cases titled “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul” published by Vitaik Buterin, Glen Weyl and Pooja Ohlhaver proposed multiple use cases of SBTs to enhance Sybil-resistance. Here are some of them:

1. Communities can differentiate between unique souls and probable souls by analyzing the SBT collections of individual souls and denying voting rights to probable Sybil attackers.

2. Delegating superior voting rights to core contributors based on previous social interactions and contributions.

3. Issuing specialized “**proof-of-personhood**” SBTs, which could help other DAOs bootstrap Sybil resistance. 

#### Measuring Decentralization Through SBTs

As Sybil attacks, collusion, and centralized power struggles become more uniquitous, the need for a specialized tool to measure decentralization across communities becomes more pertinent. A tool that can quantify decentralization and define the extent of collusion and centralization. 


The [**Nakamoto Coefficient**](https://learn.bybit.com/blockchain/nakamoto-coefficient-decentralization/) proposed by Balaji Srinivasan measures decentralization by adding the number of distinct entities in a community to garner 51% of a social resource. Another popular metric to measure decentralization called the [**Herfindahl-Hirschman Index**](https://www.justice.gov/atr/herfindahl-hirschman-index#:~:text=The%20term%20%E2%80%9CHHI%E2%80%9D%20means%20the,then%20summing%20the%20resulting%20numbers.) or the HHI score correlates decentralization to the square of the market share of the market participants. 


However, both metrics provide a subjective decentralization score, disregarding certain grey areas of the discussion, such as what categorizes as a separate entity in a community, and how one candifferentiate between genuine and colluded market participation. 

SBTs offer a solution to this through a multi-step approach for measuring decentralization.


1. The first step would be to **limit voting power to Sybil resistant souls** with a more credible SBT constellation.

2. As a second step,  if two Souls share multiple SBTs, the protocol might then look at correlations between the SBTs they each hold and the votes they cast, pooling them as only partially separate.

3. The third step would be to take a step back and get a sense of the network's decentralization. To do this, one could measure the correlations between SBTs held by Souls across the multi-layer network, including **voting, token ownership, governance deliberation, and even control over computational resources**.

#### Implementing SBTs 

SBTs are a fairly new proposition and the frameworks for implementing SBTs have not been thoroughly scrutinized and deliberated over. The most promising proposal for the implementation of SBTs has been put forth by Ethereum called [**EIP-4973** ](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4973 ) which proposes a standard for SBTs in and offers an interface for non-transferrable NFTs bound to accounts on the Ethereum network. 

A straight forward avenue for implementing SBTs in your community would be through the Otterspace protocol as discussed above, you can join the Otterspace waitlist for community SBT integration [here](https://airtable.com/shrEEvxeIXzx9bwTM). 

Another great way to implement SBTs would be through tools like [Proof of Humanity ](https://www.proofofhumanity.id/)and [BrightID](https://www.brightid.org/) that help communities identify unique individuals. A DAO could issue governance tokens to each individual soul authenticated using these tools, reducing the likelihood of Sybil attackers in a community. 

[Authdeck.xyz](https://authdeck.xyz/) is a great tool to identify bot and Sybil accounts trying to accumulate governance tokens by assigning on-chain reputation scores for every individual. It runs a multi-level authentication check that involves solving a captcha at the initial stage and answering personalized questions at the later stages. Moreover, Authdeck analyzes personal blockchain history to assign a credit score based on a pre-determined formula.

[DegenScore](https://degenscore.com/) runs a similar beacon that analyzes your digital wallet bundles(soul decks) to identify your skills, preferences, and social 
affiliations and assigns you an on-chain reputation score called the Dengenscore. It issues an SBT that highlights your skills, traits,
and preferences across the social distance. 


#### Key Takeaways


-Plutocratic governance structures and hyper-financialized transferable assets have weakened the decentralized ethos of Web3. 

-The need for a dedicated framework of non-transferrable social assets is evident in Web3 and SBTs offer a solution.

-SBTs or Soulbound Tokens are non-transferrable NFTs linked to individual “Souls” that represent an interaction, commitment, or affiliation across a social mapping.

-Souls are like social media profiles in Web3 that store all your interactions across the social distance in the forms of SBTs.

-On-chain social mapping and soulbound governance rights can facilitate the proliferation of more complex governance structures.

-The Otterspace protocol uses a soulbond governance dynamic where multi-level badges called otterbadges are issued to individual contributors.

-Correlation-based discounting can be clubbed with QV to enhance the efficacy of the voting frameworks and push towards a more inclusive and pluralistic Web3 demographic.

-The most promising proposal for the implementation of SBTs has been put forth by Ethereum called the EIP-4973 proposing the standard API for the SBTs in smart contracts.

-Communities can rely on protocols like **Otterspace **and tools like **Authdeck** and **DegenScore** to implement SBTs.





























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On Chain Reputation: Soul Bound Tokens

Soul Bound Tokens are one of the most significant verticals to rise within Web3 in recent memory, and have the potential to solve a lot of the prevalent problems within the space. 
This piece dives deeper into what they are, how they work, and what unlocks they can bring. 


 
 
#### The Start: How did you get introduced to crypto? 

**Devika:**
Extremely excited to have you here, and super curious to know how you got started in crypto!

**Aditi:** 
I don’t have a glamorous story, you know, of me discovering something about getting some information and you know alpha and some hidden treasures which was on the cloud or which was on the internet bitcoin. I got into the space pretty recently, and my reason was very tactical, being a community builder myself and what i started seeing you know, second half of last year was a lot of Web3 projects were approaching us  to look at community. 

You know, this space is actually so community driven that community was at the core of what these projects were trying to build even before product. You know the kind of innovation that you can do, the kind of autonomy that you get and you know the spectrum of strategy that you can look at,  the pay scale all of these things are tremendously different and on the positive side of things so that made me look at Web3 as a space from the community perspective. 

After that, there was just so much to learn many new things to discover you know so to satiate my curious mind which was anyway  in that zone, when i was looking to build things. In that process, I started discovering the elements which comprise the Web3 ecosystem: DAOs, DeFi, NFTs, gaming. As a natural progression as a natural arm I took an extended body part to what my body of work is, it all started making immediate sense. 

We’d always tried to give people more agency in the decision making and engagement of the community. DAOs just gave it a more a much more formal structure. So that was my start into Web3, and learning led to more learning as I continued to dive deeper into the ecosystem.  I'd still consider myself a noob; DAO structuring being something i’ve been stuck with for weeks now. 

#### Why is it important to involve women in Web3? 

**Devika:**
Why is it important to involve women in Web3? Why has there been such a focus in bringing women onboard? 

**Aditi:**
It seems like an opportune moment. Lots of things went wrong with Web2. Given that the space is true and close-knit and likely to grow greatly, it just makes sense. There’s no reason for any gender to be excluded within the space. In an ideal situation we wouldn’t need to deliberately handhold women, but that is the way it is right now given the cascade that has stemmed from the previous iterations of tech.
It’s a great time to remediate the gender disparity created in the previous iteration of technology and the internet. 

#### Inspiration behind starting Superwomen DAO

**Devika:**
An interesting statistic from last year is that **Opensea did more in volume than Visa did last year.** This was despite Opensea only having **400,000** wallets, however only **10% of those wallets were women**. So clearly, we are in very early days. As it is, Web3 accommodates a lot more. Women already take on so many different hats, and so what you are building really helps women leverage this space. 
I’d love for you to dive deeper inot what your passion was behind starting Superwomen DAO.

**Aditi:**
It’s been quite unexpected and unplanned, but goes to say that's what serendipity does for you! Superwoman DAO was started in **May 2022**. My idea was that I don’t have proper compartmentalization, so my personal life and work life tended to mingle. This is when I realized that while I do have friends, I don’t have any girlfriends in the space. Out of curiosity I thought I should organize something at my place. I was surprised to see over a hundred women that registered within the first week!


This led me to realize that women definitely wanted something like this. Till now, i’m trying to understand why women want and need that separate space for themselves. Once the community started growing (we have over 1700 women with us now). What I realized was the relatability of how women can empathize with each other and not have any judgement. Superwoman DAO can help provide role models and inspire women to show up to events, as ultimately, its on women to simply show up for events. Mentors and lived experiences go a long way in doing this for women. More women being at the events simply helps women be enthusiastic about attending.


For me personally, figuring out operational specificities has been a bit challenging, with regards to voting and governance structures in particular. Currently, we raise funds through contributors and sponsors that want to support our mission of helping create a larger female presence in the tech ecososystem in general, and are experimenting with the direction our venture can take whilst maintaining a coherent brand identity. 


#### What has been your biggest learning in building your community? 


**Devika:**
Community is a primary pillar of Web3. What is one of the things you’ve learnt after building the community at Superwoman DAO? 

**Aditi:**
When I was  getting onboarded myself (setting up my Metamask, buying my first NFT), I realized that not everyone is going to care how everything works on the back end; **ease within the user journey will create sticky users.**

#### Giving first community

**Devika:**
What is one piece of advice you’d give to someone trying to build a community within Web3? 

**Aditi:**
First of all, I don’t look myself as a mod, I just enjoy being a part of the community organically. 

Secondly, people conflate building an **audience with building a community.** If just the few members from the team talk on the general chat, people will become reticent to talk themselves. If everyone is excited about talking, then everyone else is more keen to communicate as well. **Superwomen** is a giver first community. A significant percentage of your community must engage frequently enough, otherwise  others themselves will also not contribute and likely remain lurkers.  

#### Challenges you faced in building out a DAO

**Devika:**
What are some of the challenges you faced in building a DAO early on? 

**Aditi:**
Firstly, 
Initially I thought that for a DAO, i’d need to have a token and figure out tokenomics etc, but I wasn’t too sold on the idea. However, I didn’t want to create an exclusive community, but rather an umbrella community that might have its own sub communities or subDAOs. So I made it a point to tell our members that we’re a community first, and will become a DAO down the road. 
So, explaining our mindset was problematic with individuals who are more ‘OG’ in the space and/or are already a part of DAOs.

Secondly, **how do we distinguish between members and contributors without a token?**  The differentiation is only important because while people do want to contribute in good faith, they should still be rewarded accordingly for their efforts. So, we had to first **scout** contributors. 
Also, how do we know their skills? Given the nature of the space, asking for Linkedin or Twitter profiles was not always tenable. 

The third challenge was the **governance** side of things. What specifics should we decide for voting and proposals? Given the lack of a conventional business model, how will we accrue funds to our treasury? This was especially problematic for us, as we did not have a token. 

Fourthly, **role management**: for example,  a new contributor might contribute more but have evangelized less than a more ‘OG’ member who helped grow the community more in its early stages. 
Lastly,  everyone has different motivations to join a community or DAO: for example, some want to learn about Web3, some want to find other collaborators, and some want to learn from other women. So maintaining directional coherence can be challenging. 

#### Our product team answers: On-chain Reputation Management

**Yashwardhan:**
There’s 3 interesting means of reputation management that we can discuss: 
1:**Capital-based reputation:** Whoever holds the most tokens wins. 
2: **Social reputation:** An example of this is Coordinape; your reputation is communally determined by your peers. 
3: **Activity-based reputation:** Reputation points or badges for your activities within the Web3 ecosystem building an on-chain resume or profile that you can use across DAOs. 

**Aditi:**
Most of my learning with regards to members and responsibilities is from other DAO members, exposing me to different kinds of models. Now, with my consulting firm, I am the centralized point of contact. In a decentralized firm on the other hand, we can vote using proposals if someone offers us work. In this case, contributions would decide contributors, and we’d be able to ascertain contributions because we have all worked with one another.  

So at Superwoman, we’re trying a couple of experiments. Firstly, we’re starting an investment program, in which women in the ecosystem can give grants to women led projects. Secondly, we’re identifying experts, who can contribute to whatever requests the DAO receives for work in their particular realm of expertise. 

Regarding reputation, we’re understanding how FWB (Friends With Benefits). Now, their model is based on tokens. If you have their token, you can enter the DAO. However, this only grants entrance and not the right to stay. For that, you have to keep contributing. You’d politely be asked to leave. 
This is an example of a well-functioning DAO I’ve seen that is not an investment DAO.

#### Importance of ownership

**Devika:**
A lot of people don’t entirely get why ownership is important, what are your thoughts on why it is? 

**Aditi:**
I’m still on the fence when it comes to ownership with regards to owning say, a Bored Ape for the IP rights. However, what does make sense to me is if ownership comes with tangible benefits or incentives. For example, for artists, owning their own work is literally their livelihood, not vanity bragging rights. If the only ‘utility’ of each NFT is for an exclusive community, then are they really exclusive anymore? 

With regards to art or content creation, however, there is significant utility. What people don’t realize with say, Instagram is that while Instagram is indeed giving theme the reach to grow their personal brand, they are providing Instagram with some valuable content for which they are receiving nothing in return. 

**Provenance is valuable**; Prada’s introduction for blockchain based verification testifies to this. Even here in India, Nykaa’s introduction of authenticity certificates has gained significant traction despite the customers not actually double checking the certificates themselves. Nevertheless, the primary benefits are ones that I think will play themselves out in the future, at the moment, my perspective is grey with regards to the benefits we currently see. 

#### How Superwomen manages tasks internally

**Devika:**
I’m very curious to know at Superwoman DAO, how are you managing your day to day operations with regards to onboarding, contribution to framing proposals to treasury. 

**Aditi:**
I have to tell you, it’s a concoction, a soup. Personally, as of now, it’s been me individually executing a lot of the relevant work because of how early it is. With regards to task management, we largely rely upon weekly calls and catchups. For proposals, we use communal sentiment using things like polls and sentiment checks but of course, those are more speculative than concrete. 

The result of what people think would not necessarily be the actual proposal itself. In my opinion once you have more clarity on the direction of the DAO (investing, building, etc), it is more tenable to go forward with a more formal proposal process. At the moment, I think synthesizing the community’s perspectives in a more informal manner is the way to go. 

#### What's your why for being in crypto?

**Devika:**
Another question I want to ask you is your why for being in crypto. Why not AI or something else? 

**Aditi:**
Firstly, because I don’t understand them! It’s like going to school all over again, which I definitely don’t want to do! In crypto, it felt like everyone is a noob when I joined.  So, the feeling that I could catch up to others in the space by simply learning was really attractive. 

Secondly, **crypto is not only about technology**. In fields like AI, **the technical facets will always be front and center**. On the other hand, within say an NFT project, design would be most important. Within community building, it’d be storytelling. Within DeFi, the economic concepts. So, it felt more inclusive for me, and I felt I could make more of an impact. 

#### Advice for people who want to get into Web3/crypto

**Devika:**
Do you have any advice for people wanting to understand DAOs better so they can leverage it? Or even just people who have a vision or community that they want to build? 

**Aditi:**
 Firstly, if you’re starting to learn about DAOs right now, you’re in a great place. While it might feel like there’s a lot of people in the space right now, from the outside looking in, there’s not. So there are advantages to having the requisite operational knowledge early. You’ll have a significant **early learner, not just mover, advantage**. 
 
Secondly, how do you learn about DAOs? Well, it’s a mix.  It’s not just joining DAOs and their servers. Simply joining dozens of servers isn’t going to give you a lot of value on its own merit. You need to be more deliberate in your approach: how and how much you’ll contribute to different DAOs.  

Thirdly: **use reports**. There’s some really great reports that help you keep your finger on the pulse, for example those by Techcrunch and a16z. This is also why being a **part of the right communities** is important. The people in these communities are an invaluable resource: any time I have a question, I ask on these communities and quickly have an answer. So keeping a tab on the space would be a good mix of having a decent social network in the space, keeping tabs on social media, and thirdly reading up on the more academic developments in the space: reports, whitepapers, and thought pieces by respected thinkers and leaders in the space. 
I think it’s just a great time to be in the space: if you have the time and inclination, contribute in any shape or form to any DAO. 

**Devika:**
I love that so much. To be a part of DAOs, set aside 5-10 minutes everyday to learn, and not just joining random Discord servers!!
Thank you so much and for all of the lessons you’ve given us! 





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Women in Web3: A Conversation With Aditi Chopra


 Superwomen DAO is a ‘women focused education and investment DAO for Web3 builders’ with upwards of 2500 members at the time of publication. 

We talk to the founder, Aditi Chopra about her experience and perspective about the Web3 ecosystem. 

#### Introduction:

**Devika:**
How did you get introduced to crypto? 


**Laurence:**I heard about Bitcoin in 2013 and was instantly intrigued-I loved the name and was already a Computer Science geek!  I was already dabbling in machine language, and I had the realization that we need money to be controlled by technology, not old people and governments!


#### What is Longevity? 


**Devika:**To evoke the voice of the audience, why would you want to work on longevity? Given that some people might say it’s ‘gods plan’ and all that. 


**Laurence:**People said this about everything-even antibiotics. It’s unnatural! It’s going to increase the population too much and put a strain on resources! Nobody wants cholera to come back? Even cancer was seen this way-as death by natural causes. But then we started seeing the link between DNA mutations and cancer. Cancer can be fought. We gotta look at aging the same way-a lot of bad things are natural, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do something about it.  


#### Story Behind VitaDAO


**Devika:** Thanks! I’d love for you to talk about VitaDAO. The start, the story, and the journey. 


**Laurence:** So i’d started to notice an intersection between the top Key Opinion Leaders in crypto and ideas in longevity and biotech. Vitalik and Balaji were two, for example. It does make sense, they’re individuals who are futuristic in their thinking and are generally dismissed by the incumbents. How I’d wanted to do it initially was to create a non-profit DAO, create a bonding curve, and give money away to labs that are lesser known. It just made sense to give a crypto-native way to support longevity research. 


VitaDAO, then, was born from Molecule’s IPNFT framework, which enables it to have a treasury backed by real assets: IP, real drugs that DAO owns through NFTs that represent the legal contract. I joined Vita a few months before launch. We had a fair auction for the token, with no presales or pre-allocation. After everyone received their tokens, we had a vote (on the budget and so on), and it’s been around a year now. 


**Devika:** So initially, you started VitaDAO to be able to fund these lesser known labs? 


**Laurence:** That was the way  we were trying to do it before VitaDAO. With VitaDAO, we were trying to simply buy assets or IP and funding research projects in that way. The idea is that at some point, these assets (like patents) will be spun into startups of their own. These would be conventional startups, of course, raising money from VCs and what not. However, unlike other areas (such as crypto itself), within science, you usually raise money through government grants, and you can only raise money after your idea has been fleshed out. Of course, this is not how stuff is done within tech. This is similar to how programmers used to operate in the 90s and 80s; so I think the biotech industry is ripe for disruption the way tech did at that time. 
 
 
 **Devika:** What was the date VitaDAO was born? 
 
 
 **Laurence:** June 18th (2021) was when we started the auction and june 23rd was when we ended ther auction. The smart contract was deployed sometime in August. 
 
 
 **Devika:** At that time did you expect your community to become so big? Given that the space is still a niche. But today you have 14,000 followers on Twitter with a robust community working towards such an important goal. Do you think about that? 
 
 
 **Laurence:** Well, by now I thought we’d have a billion dollars in the treasury…Of course I am not always realistic in my hopes! I’m definitely humbled by what's happened  so quickly though; the space has grown so much with DeSci. We definitely have a good position in this. The inflection point is in front of us! The world will realize soon. We’ve proven it too, having funded 14-15 projects, and deployed almost $3M and have a lot more to deploy. 
 
 
 **Devika:** What even is realistic! What’s realistic for you could be outrageous for me. Really, it’s about the audacity to have such a big dream in the first place. Is crypto even realistic in the literal sense? 
 
 
#### Pfizer Partnership

**Devika:** So you guys recently had a partnership with Pfizer; obviously huge news! Talk about that please, how did it happen? 


**Laurence:** Honestly, they came on our Discord and meetings and started talking to us. Someone from Pfizer Ventures wanted to get involved and started asking good questions and providing value on our governance forums. So we allowed  our first institutional fundraise. For institutions like Pfizer to contribute to VitaDAO, not only do they have to contribute capital, but also actually contribute as members of the DAO. It can’t be passive, since our token isn’t a security.


**Devika**: I’d love to ask you, what’s your mission personally? What drives you? 


**Laurence:** I really love life, I want to do everything that's needed and possible.  I’m really curious to see the future and quite optimistic, so I want to prolong our lives as much as possible. Nevertheless, i’m realistic, so i’m trying to use a scientific approach to do this-working on aging is the answer. 

**Devika:** What would you say made you passionate about Web3 and especially its intersection with science? 

**Laurence:** With science, you need to rely on government grants. Imagine if crypto needed government grants instead of just VCs and individuals providing the funds. This is the future of science. Even though its dismissed by the incumbents at the funding agencies. We should prevent, and not just treat. We want to create our own incentive mechanisms for 
i-**Funding**
 ii-**Execution** (removing red tape)
 iii-**Publishing**: Journals still requite review pre-publication. I’ve seen delays of until a year between papers being submitted and published, caused by lengthy peer review processes. To this end, we are trying to revamp how we do peer review, utilizing mechanisms similar to Hackernews and Reddit. This is called Longevity Decentralized Review. This will be a panel that actually pays people to review and be editors, as opposed to the usual way in which no one is paid, researchers review other people’s research for free, and receive government funding for their own research. 
 
 
**Devika:** I think what you’re doing is really great, and that that’s exactly what Web3 is about-ownership and self custody! 

#### Why work specifically around DAOs? 

 **Devika**: Why did you specifically choose DAOs to work in? 
 
 **Laurence:** Because of our vision of doing science in a decentralized way, questioning how things are done, and having a quick iteration adn experimentation cycle and not being constrained by any centralized regulator. So, I see a lot of hindrances to the longevity movement, so i’m hoping that in this space, we can thwart some of these hindrances because of its permissionless and open nature.
 
 
**Devika**: While it’s definitely exciting that DAOs are permissionless andopen, people still aren’t being able to go full time in DAOs, since most DAOs aren’t that well funded, and of course, people need money. Even if they are well funded (because people are motivated by the mission), it’s always harder for poeple to be committed to something full time as compared to part time. Did you face these issues?

**Laurence:**I’d say no. Before we launched, we already had a great team of people that were excited about the vision. We were also lucky enough to do it without having too many constraints. I’m quite happy to say that a lot of people are really intrinsically motivated, and the scalability and permissionless definitely helps a lot -especially with dealflow! The nature of the work is amenable to part time work too-the professors that scrutinize our work for example just need to be paid on a piecemeal basis. They get paid for each review that they do. 

#### Passions Apart From Crypto


**Devika:** Apart from crypto and DAOs, what are some of your side passions or projects? 

**Laurence:** None that I spend a lot of time on, I guess! I really love having a lot of geeky conversations on things like Effective Altruism and existential risks in general-especially after we cure aging, which is a 100% chance that we die! I’m also interested in personal health and biohacking, which isn’t exactly a part of longevity and lacks concrete approvals, but i’m still looking at it. I think another piece i’m really interested in is mind augmentation and brain machine interfaces, and transcending and preparing for the technological singularity that I think is coming. I’m also a burner and interested in Burning Man and exploring consciousness and psychedelics and all that! 

**Devika:** So have you ever been to Burning Man or something similar? 

**Laurence**: Yes, but I went for the wrong reasons. After going, I connected with people, which was actually the spark that made me realize what’s important in life and pushed me towards longevity! 

#### Current painpoints at VitaDAO

**Devika**: Given the rapidly changing and nebulous nature of the space, what would you say are the major pain points you’ve faced at VitaDAO? 

**Laurence**: I think scaling, especially around part-time contributors and how we can enable people to have agency and do a lot of things without needing approval or permission. We do try to maintain a flat organizational structure. Even though i’m the steward of the dealflow group, that doesn’t necessarily mean i’m anyone’s ‘boss’. 
We definitely need more people that are intrinsically motivated and are willing to grind, even full time. 

Furthermore, we need a lot of help in spinning out the projects we’ve funded, some are already ready to be spun into proper startups and operated like real companies in biotech. We need experienced people to do that! 

#### How can someone join VitaDAO? 

**Devika**: How can someone apply to VitaDAO? 

**Laurence:** On our Discord. We have some general channels; just don’t be a stranger. Get involved, show that you care. Come up with ideas. Make it easy for us to empower you to add value. 

#### Perspective on people's negative views on crypto

**Devika**: Given that you’ve been involved in the space for a while, i’d be interested to hear your take on the negative press and connotations that crypto itself brings out.


**Laurence**: Well, we’re heads down and building. We’re creating value that will flow back to the treasury. So, all these thins don’t really matter as much. Of course if people start seeing deeper, our token will increase in value and we’ll be able to fundraise in the billions.  So of course, it does helpa  lot if people open their eyes. Nonetheless, we’re doing good work, and people are gonna come. 

#### Message you'd give to people

**Devika**: What’s one message you’d give to people in the Web3 space? And even just any personal advice. 

**Laurence:** Think about what matters to you, and how you can minimize your bias and have the biggest impact on whatever the thing that matters to you the most it. Then look at if Web3 is the best tool for that.  Might just be an experiment you want to try! 







 
 

 
 

 
 







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Can Humans Live to 100? A Conversation With Laurence Ion Of VitaDAO

Longevity research is one of the most ambitious and important, yet woefully ignored fields of research. 
DeSci has the potential to change that. 


Other than whatever content you might have on your website (general documentation, team pages, etc), it is essential to also have a brief synopsis of your community or DAO during contributor/member onboarding. Doing so would increase the chances that individuals would learn about your community, as they would be able to learn without switching contexts. By increasing the odds that individuals would actually learn about your community, you decrease the chances for people who would otherwise be interested but did not read the documentation to fall through the cracks. 

**In other words, it substantially increases contributor stickiness after the initial onboarding; perhaps the part of a contributor’s journey with the highest dropout rate.** 


In addition to a brief descriptive element, however, your synopsis should also have a persuasive element in its tonality. This is because of the nature of DAOs: to get someone to join, you must essentially **pitch them as well.**

For members, this is true because ‘membership’ implies a 
financial investment of some sort on their behalf. Similarly, contributors will definitely at least give their time, and depending on your specific membership structure, may also have to invest some money. 


Therefore, since people would have to spend their time and/or resources to be either members or contributors, they would need to believe in the long term viability of your venture from a financial perspective. This would mean that in addition to your vision, you must also elaborate upon your mission-how you are going to get where you want to go. 


**So, your initial synopsis should be an amalgamation of a vision, mission, and an elevator pitch.**



You can provide new joiners with one using our onboarding tool: 
![image2.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1669796832/image2_8bb16007e8.png)


Now, ***how*** you accomplish this is obviously crucial. You need to maintain a balance between readability, enough detail, and a tonality that pushes the readers to want to learn more about your community. 

Let’s see how one could accomplish this:

1. **Readability**: Some simple writing tips would suffice: don’t use excess adjectives, use short sentences, and keep the whole section brief by itself. 

2. **Detail**: To manage to bring in enough detail whilst not being too wordy, utilize bullet points, and choose to hyperlink all but the most important definitions of concepts that you might expect readers to not know. 

3. **Tonality/persuasiveness**: Without utilising absolute terms or superlatives such as ‘best’ (they are not the best at lending believeability) , demonstrate the need for for your venture and the product that you solve. With regards to the venture itself, you should basically just craft an elevator pitch like any other. However, what comes before a description of the venture is not exactly like elevator pitches. This is the ethos that your community seeks to reflect and grow. 

In addition to a synopsis, your new contributor’s should also know about how their time in your community would be if they were to join.

Using our onboarding tool, you can tailor this to specific kinds of new contributors. For example, based on the answers to custom questions (which you can set on our self-serve tool), you can ascertain what category new joiners could be in. This could mean a distinction between contributors or simply members, or one between speculators, devs, designers, and content writers. For example, if someone answers that they wish to only be a member or speculator, that could be the last slide in their onboarding process. 

On the other hand, if they want to be contributors, you can have branching flows which vary for say devs, coders and writers. Based on this, you could provide details for what each type of contributor’s experience working with the community would look like. This could include the tools  used, organizational structure, and compensation structure. 

![image1.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1669796832/image1_9299521676.png)












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Guide To Onboarding: Introducing Your Community

The initial period after people join new communities is crucial to developing interest and thus contributor/member stickiness.

Let's dive into how to make the most of it. 

#### Why is it important? 

It is crucial for any organization to have a clear understanding of what to communicate, which channels to employ, and when to communicate it. Given the relative lack of precedent in DAO operations, carefully deliberating upon a communication strategy from the get go is crucial for any DAO manager. This is because of a few reasons: 


**Firstly**, clear communication is key to effective member and contributor participation. Because DAOs are less rigid than conventional organization structures, people are more likely to not know what to expect with regards to standard operating procedures. This means that communication, both upon onboarding and in day to day operations is more important than it is in conventional organizations. 

**Secondly**, because of the same reason as the last point, people do not know the likely standard operating procedures with regards to communication itself as well. This means that how you are going to communicate must be clearly communicated as well. This is particularly true if you seek to onboard new members and/or contributors regularly, especially if they are new to the space. This is because they are not likely to know the commonplace means of communication within the space (such as Discord pinned posts and Twitter spaces) as it is, in addition to whatever other idiosyncratic means your community might have as well. 


####  Ongoing Operations:

In the spirit of a transparently run organization, community members/contributors should be aware of the ongoing development of the project. This should include things like roadmap updates, personnel updates, and/or how the DAO plans to work around any macro events in the industry or if it has been affected by them (like the FTX collapse). 

![image3.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1669790951/image3_069ebd1714.png)

![image1.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1669790948/image1_1c868ffed4.png)



#### Project/Product & Community Material


Content that sheds light on what your community’s vision, ethos or product is is essential. The rationale for this is perhaps most simple to understand: **people need to know what your organization is doing for you to have an impact, whether you’re a Fortune 500, a startup, or an early stage DAO.**


These can take the form of basic explanatory videos or short form blogs that provide a brief overview of what your vision is. Of course, the tonality and direction would completely depend on the specific direction of your community. For example, a DeSci DAO may contextualize the shortcomings of a particular field of research, and how they intend to improve them.


For example, this content could be made into 3 parts (whether videos or blogs). One focusing on the problems prevalent in a particular realm of research, one outlining the overall vision of the community (fixing xyz issue with abc problems),  and one speaking about the particular operational means through which this would be accomplished. 


Here are some other ways in which relevant topics can be communicated:

1. **Frequent calls/meetings:**
Two primary ways to communicate with one’s community at large are **Twitter and Discord spaces.**
These calls should ideally **be recorded** and also function as townhalls/AMAs for the community members. 

2. **Well thought out explainers/announcements:**
 Community members should be able to easily keep up to date with updates about the community and venture. This can be written in pinned Tweets, new channels, FAQ sections, and well timed, concise and easily understandable Tweets. 
 
 3. **Engagement**: 
 Activities and content to maintain community engagement and enthusiasm are crucial. 
This can include Twitter spaces with interesting individuals in the space and community contests. 

4. **1v1s with significant contributors**:
Similar to engaging the community as a whole, engaging your most valuable contributors is crucial. Some examples include making sure they are up to date with their responsibilities, if they seek to increase or decrease them, and their thoughts on the ongoing operations of the community. 


#### Information Categorization

While it is necessary to provide static repositories of information for relevant information, it is not sufficient. All kinds of communication should also be categorized to uphold accessibility. This includes both pinned posts on Discord and forum posts: 

The ENS DAO forums page:

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Guide To Onboarding: Communication Essentials

Effective communication is imperative for any leader, and this is no different within digital communities. 
Let's see some of the means you can use for effective communciation in managing your community. 

Currently, the primary gating mechanisms for Web3 communities involve token-gating, both **ERC20 and NFT based.**

We provide a suite of options that greatly expand the gating avenues available, resulting in benefits for both admins and contributors: 

Gating can be based on:
**I- Tokens**: for example, gating to Bankless DAO needs 
**II- NFTs**: for exclusive communities and member tiering 
**III- SBTs**: enables achievement-based gating
**IV-Interviews**: As much as one's achievements can denote, in person communication is a requisite to establishing any robust working relationship. We help do that, allowing you to implement interview based acceptance before individuals an be onboarded.

![Screenshot 2022-11-14 at 12.02.43 PM.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1668407568/Screenshot_2022_11_14_at_12_02_43_PM_54a51397b2.png)


**V-Task**: Submit proof of work through apps like Figma or Github


![Screenshot 2022-11-14 at 12.01.13 PM.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1668407478/Screenshot_2022_11_14_at_12_01_13_PM_b01fc37330.png)

### ADMINS:


Autonomously assign Discord  roles on the basis of entrants’ achievements, experience, and interests: 

![Screenshot 2022-11-14 at 11.59.42 AM.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1668407390/Screenshot_2022_11_14_at_11_59_42_AM_723aea183c.png)

![Screenshot 2022-11-14 at 12.00.03 PM.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1668407408/Screenshot_2022_11_14_at_12_00_03_PM_5fea679d38.png)

Our gating tool also enables role assignment, extending its utility to **contributor funneling** in addition to gateekeping. 

This has some significant benefits: 

#### I: Organizational efficiency through **improved recruitment**:
-A primary problem within DAOs is a **lack of information about contributors**. 
- Admins instead rely on **trust-based**, or ‘doxxed’ relationships to manage work and distribute responsibilities
-This **weakens the agency of the DAO**; often forcing organizations to utilize their ‘real world’ company to manage the most crucial work (such as with ENS and Uniswap)

#### II: Admins must manually parse through each potential contributor without any funnel.



#### III: SBT-based gating enables autonomous funnelling for expertise and achievements



i: This can include badges awarded for previous work or achievements such as: 

- **Bounties** for other DAOs

- **POAPs** for events attended 

- On-chain **trading profits**

ii: **Task based** gating enables a funnel for admins to only have to scan those applicants who can accomplish a requisite task 

iii: **Interview based** gating allows for admins to ascertain culture fit before using other admins’ time on applicants 


### CONTRIBUTORS:


**Problems and solutions**


i-Using **emojis to ‘verify’** oneself on Discord (or any number of other ways to do so) is frequently a very inefficient and frustrating process. 

ii-Contributors need to meander through several channels on any server and ask around before finding the channel that is appropriate for them.

By assigning roles prior to contributors’ accessing Discord servers, our tool both verifies and directs contributors to relevant channels, **increasing efficiency in onboarding.**

![image1.gif](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1668408265/image1_dbdc8e3632.gif)













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Onboarding: Gating & Role Assignment

Funneling contributors to the right channels is usually a painstaking and highly inefficient process. 

We show how our onboarding tool can help ease that process for admins. 

Our onboarding tool allows community leaders to both give potential contributors exposition on the DAO itself, and also learn more details about the new entrant. 
An example of an onboarding process would be helpful to demonstrate how contextualising would work here: 


**1:Provide a generalized synopsis of the vision, history, and ethos of your DAO.**


![image8.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1668425415/image8_25dcde7c69.png)






**2: Inform potential contributors about the day to day operational functioning of your DAO, such as the tools and communication channels used:**




![Screenshot 2022-11-14 at 6.33.22 PM.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1668431009/Screenshot_2022_11_14_at_6_33_22_PM_cc2b1fc664.png)



##3: Contributor Details: Learn about about all potential contributors and see a repository on a spreadsheet.
These details can be of the admins’ choice; for example, admins could gather contributors’ wallet addresses or Twitter/Discord handles. 

![image4.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1668425413/image4_463124891a.png)



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Onboarding: Contextualisation 

It is crucial for communities' to have context on new contributors, and for these contributors to have context on new communities they may join. 

We show how our onboarding tool helps accomplish that. 

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How should you fund your DAO?

A checklist of different ways to fund your DAO


While we have spoken at length about the virtues and promises that DAOs provide over conventional organizational structures, by no means does this imply that the current nature of the DAO ecosystem is one that is tenable for widespread adoption. Nonetheless, the future is not something that magically comes about; someone has to build it. To this end, this piece shall discuss the problems within the space today. More importantly, however, it will also discuss how these problems can be and are being  solved. 


**1**
Firstly and most pressingly, the ostensibly  fundamental ethos of DAOs, decentralization, is antipathetic to the way they are governed right now-through financial power. Whether using ERC20 tokens or NFTs, the governance mechanisms in most (if not all) DAOs today conflate voting power with financial power. This problem is compounded by the fact that governance is frequently implemented through delegates, which means that even more voting power is awarded to those with more public visibility. Delegation is done because whilst people may hold tokens of a given protocol, they may lack the bandwidth or knowledge to actively participate in governance.  Therefore, individuals/entities that people already know about may become Schelling Points for delegation. For example, **Coinbase** is currently the most powerful actor in the **ENS DAO**, the governing body of one of Ethereum’s most important infrastructure protocols (Ethereum Naming Service). The fragility of such a mechanism was further exemplified by a vote pertaining to the DAO earlier this year. Brantly Millegan, an ex- member of the core team at ENS, received public backlash for supremely bigoted and homophobic views. His removal was put to a vote within the DAO, and it was decided that he would stay on. The question of whether he should or should not have been terminated is not relevant here. It is the reason that he was not. He was not removed because he was one of the DAOs most powerful voters (largely because of the votes delegated to him), and thus voted against the proposal for him to be removed. Whilst 1.6M tokens voted against removing Millegan, 1.4M voted for it. He himself had 363,000 tokens (including the tokens delegated to him). Therefore, if it was not for Millegan voting against his own termination, the vote would have gone the other way.

![Screenshot 2022-10-06 at 11.45.07 AM.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1665036916/Screenshot_2022_10_06_at_11_45_07_AM_138df89d06.png)


This example gravely underscores two significant points: 
i-**Token based voting** is inherently prone to undermining a DAOs very purpose, and 
ii-**Representational or delegated voting** within financialized governance** significantly exacerbates the problem.

Now, how would this problem be solved? The first answer that would come to one’s mind is simple: one person, one vote. The way it is done in any democracy. Of course, even within the ‘real’ world, this method of governance is fraught with issues. However, as has been demonstrated above, it leaves much to be desired as well. 

By analyzing the pitfalls of the democratic processes we use in our nation-states through a first principles basis, we will be able to think about how DAOs could be better governed without any prior biases in mind. 

Now,  a  primary issue within electoral democracies is the fact that voters often vote along lines that have nothing to do with the issues at hand due to inadequate knowledge or cognitive distortions. Lamentably, this often results in people literally voting against their own interests. Intuitively, the solution to this problem would be to decide who can or cannot vote on the basis of a simple political literacy test. However, this would still beg the question that knowledge on any given topic is not binary and that people have vastly differing knowledge across a range of matters. Furthermore, this gradational and domain-specific system of voting would only be tenable in a system in a system of direct democracy, in which every/most issues go to a vote through a de facto referendum (as is the case with DAOs). 




However, such a system is logistically and financially impossible in nation-states, leaving elected representatives as the only option. Of course, this system is far from perfect too, with elected representatives themselves often having gaps in knowledge on matters that are ostensibly crucial to governance. Furthermore, they are often not acting in good faith, with personal gain a frequent factor in their policy making. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that a purely representational model within DAOs is not the direction to strive towards either (as Brantly Millegan’s example corroborates). 




Therefore, we have established that representational democracy is a sub-optimal system, and that an ideal scenario would be one in which significant governance decisions are voted upon by everyone in the community, but votes are weighed on the basis of subject area specific expertise. SBTs, or ‘**Soul Bound Tokens’**, enable this. A ‘soul’ may be considered to be an account or wallet that is inextricably tethered to any entity. Therefore, SBTs may be considered as non-transferrable NFTs. 
SBTs enable a governance framework that involves vote weighing and gating on the basis of subject specific expertise or experience/actions performed. 

This is because SBTs allow for **qualitative data** (as opposed to mere financial transactions) to be immutably tethered to specific wallets/souls. Indeed, it is reasonable to argue that a salient cause for the focus on token ownership within DAOs is due to a lack of means to denote qualitative metrics on-chain. 

In addition to solving the governance problems a lack of qualitative on-chain metrics causes, SBTs also solve a few other problems stemming from the same issue. 

Firstly, they solve the problem of how currently, **membership within DAOs is binary**. This obfuscates the depth of one’s contribution and/or immersion within a DAO. For example, an individual may have joined a DAO early and contributed to its development, but despite receiving a fair compensation in house tokens, he/she could easily be dwarfed by a speculative ‘whale’ with regards to their executive agency in the community. In addition to matters of fairness, this also results in a gross misalignment of incentives. This is because an individual whose involvement in a DAO is limited to their investment would only have one goal in mind: price appreciation of the token. This is often in stark contrast to the long-term flourishing of the DAO’s vision.



To solve this issue, member contribution is usually ascertained manually. Indeed, this is a large reason why protocols that are apparently governed by DAOs (like Uniswap and the Ethereum Naming Service) still utilize real-world, trust based relationships when it comes to crucial decisions that usually overrule the DAO. Of course, this throws the baby out with the bathwater, as doing so undermines the very principles that DAOs are built on in the first place. Borrowing from the Brantly Millegan episode would be informative here as well: Whilst the DAO voted to not remove him (the dubiousness of that process aside), the entity at the back end (True Names Ltd.) did so anyway. It is in fact understandable why such an entity would be required for a DAO to function if executive agency was based upon token ownership/delegation. If it was not, Coinbase could essentially hijack ENS if it wanted to through its control of the DAO. Nonetheless, this is a solution that brings forth yet another problem. 

Therefore, the problems ensuing from the binary manner in which membership is ascertained are ‘solved’ through a reliance upon human trust and interaction; thereby creating another problem that severely undermines the purpose of the DAO itself.


In addition to the weakening of the agency of the DAO itself, this problem also results in the fact that responsibility is divided up on the basis of human or trust based interactions. Again, this undercuts a primary advantage that DAOs bring: trustlessness in organizational scaffolding that aids efficiency. As anyone that has worked in a large company or bureaucracy would attest, problems like nepotism, favoritism, and office politics are not a good recipe for optimal performance. Therefore, the goal ought to be that contributor specific responsibilities emanate in an emergent fashion, rather than by fiat of higher-ups. SBTs allow this by creating an unbiased, immutable and incontrovertible record of a person’s accomplishments and skills in general, and contributions to the DAO in particular. 

SBTs solve this by fixing the root cause of these issues: a lack of on-chain, qualitative data points. 

One such way in  which SBTs can be implemented is by utilizing badges. Badges could be determined by individual DAOs on parameters that the DAO deems necessary to identify. Protocols such as otterspace.xyz are already being created to enable such functionality. Otterspace employs the EIP4973 standard, or ‘Account-bound tokens’. They can only be earned, and cannot be bought. One primary use case is of allowing tiered membership of community members. Membership and membership levels could ostensibly be based on anything the community wants it to with regards to the degree of contribution, with earliness with having joined the community being one obvious example. Furthermore, badges can also be given on the basis of the type of contribution. For example, members could be given badges on the basis of successful code deployed, governance proposals voted on, and in the future,  even autonomously calculated marketing engagement through on-chain protocols like Lens. 
To summarize, badges have the potential to create trustless dynamics with regards to the scaffolding for large scale cooperative efforts. 

In addition to how they can ameliorate the financialization of governance and create gradational hierarchies within organizational charts, SBTs also tackle a significant issue within DAOs today, that of Sybil attacks. 
Sybil attacks are when actors create fake pseudonymous identities in order to gain disproportionate influence over a given system. Self evidently, this can prove to be a massive problem for DAOs. 

Indeed, compared to the problems discussed earlier in this piece, Sybil attacks are a relatively tough nut to crack. Solving them requires proving that an account is being used by a singular entity, and that entity only. Of course, simply utilizing KYC is wholly untenable, given that it flies in the face of the etho of the space altogether. Now, implementing SBTs would not completely solve the problem as they are based on wallets, which can of course be created endlessly by any particular individual. However, SBTs based upon things that require more substantial time and effort (such as work done), do in fact solve the issue of Sybil attacks to a reasonable degree. Nonetheless, Sybil attacks for SBTs rewarded for participation in governance and relatively less strenuous tasks can be gamed. Therefore, whilst SBTs do provide a reasonable makeshift means through which to counter Sybil attacks, they are not future-proof. 

The only tenable means through which this can be done is through something akin to a ‘proof of humanity’-the proof that someone is a singular individual and also that that individual is not represented within any other wallet for a particular community. There are multiple theoretical ways to provide such a ‘proof of humanity’, and indeed, the term itself is the name of a protocol already attempting to do the same (https://www.proofofhumanity.id/). While this protocol attempts to utilize social proof in order to verify one’s identity, it suffers from the following flaws: social proof is relatively less scalable and requires social proof, because of which it ‘doxxes’ (publicly reveals) the identities of individuals. 

The combined use of **DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers)** and **zk proofs (zero knowledge proofs)** would solve this problem. Before one understands the nature of how this combined use would work, one needs to understand each of these technologies/concepts individually. 

DIDs are defined as ‘a new type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity.’ What this means in practice is that centralized authorities such as states or private corporations would not have the power to unilaterally revoke one’s identity, for example, with passports and university IDs. A DID that already exists and has garnered prevalence are ENS domains. One can mint such domains by paying the registration (and gas) fee on ens.domains, pay the gas fee for a chosen number of years (each year comes with a registration fee), and then trade the name on the secondary marketplace as an NFT. For the purpose of this discussion, we can think of someone as linking their real-world identity to their ENS domain; not for the sake of their name being the important thing, but simply to prove that a human identity is tethered to the domain in the first place. Now, conventionally speaking, this is a KYC mechanism-which is of course sub-optimal (to say the least). However, the reason KYCs are undesirable is because they infringe on individual privacy. 



This is where zero knowledge proofs come in. Simply put, zero knowledge proofs are a computational tool that allow one party to verify to another party that a given fact is true, without revealing any information other than the fact that the given fact is true. Put more thoroughly, their goal is to ‘is for a verifier to be able to convince him/herself that a prover possesses knowledge of a secret parameter, called a witness, satisfying some relation, without revealing the witness to the verifier or anyone else.’ 


It is apparent how this solves the issue of proving one’s humanity without revealing any information about who someone is. As a result, it solves the second order problem of Sybil attackers as well. It does so by allowing people to validate their data without revealing the data itself. In practice, this means that people can  validate that they are in fact human to their ENS domain (or any other DID) by demonstrating that they have something which makes them human; this could be any government issued ID or perhaps even a fingerprint. To prevent the same ‘proof of humanity’ being used with another DID, there would be a record of the fact that that particular ID (for example a specific passport number) had been used; but only with the protocol: the counterparties that individuals would use this ‘proof of humanity’ with would only have proof that these ENS’ are linked to one (and only one) individual, but not the particular details of the person. In turn, this maintains pseudonymity whilst preventing Sybil attacks. 

To conclude, we would be remiss not to mention the fact that the primary weakness within DAOs today is the fact that they lack real-world applications. Of course, this is a result of the aforementioned issues. If the solutions spoken about in this piece are implemented, we are likely to see a virtuous cycle in which increased adoption spurs better regulation, which in turn spurs increased adoption.




**REFERENCES**

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html

https://www.otterspace.xyz/post/the-otters-go-soulbound-part-i
https://www.otterspace.xyz/post/introducing-the-otter-badges-part-ii
https://otterspace.mirror.xyz/v9qIngNeQcvyo1LSUWFxkizN_hFQnT-VshSA3xo20_c

https://otterspace.mirror.xyz/fhugaesrk4XPppXRB-QBDnxfuq9UDUbwos9wD7MDNgQ

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/02/07/ethereum-name-service-removes-brantly-millegan-as-steward-over-2016-tweet/

https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

https://consensys.net/blog/developers/introduction-to-zk-snarks/

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2507/381-385-paper-70.pdf







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Challenges with DAOs and How to Address Them

DAOs are a new way of organizing work, but they face several challenges. In this article, we will discuss the most significant challenges and how to address them.

A look into creating a frictionless journey for your valuable community members

If you have read the classic Alice in Wonderland, then you know that one of the most memorable scenes is when Alice first meets the Cheshire Cat. The Cat grins ear to ear, and its wide smile is so contagious that Alice can't help but smile back.

Well, just as a friendly and inviting smile can make someone's day, a delightful DAO onboarding experience can make someone want to join and participate in your organization. And without a great onboarding experience, you would feel like Alice in Wonderland, tumbling down the rabbit hole into a strange and wonderful world that you never knew existed.


The world of DAOs is bubbling with potential and opportunity, but it can be difficult to know where to start. Luckily, there are some tried and true methods for creating a delightful DAO onboarding experience that will make your members feel warm and fuzzy all over. This article aims to give you an outlook on some of the current challenges that DAOs face when it comes to onboarding, as well as some simple solutions for making your organization's onboarding process as delightful as the Cheshire Cat's smile.


The challenge - No one really knows what they are doing yet
There is no denying that the world of DAOs is still in its infancy. And while there are some incredible projects out there that are pushing the envelope and blazing new trails, the majority of DAOs are still working out the kinks and figuring out what works best for them.


This lack of clarity can make it difficult for new members to understand what they are supposed to do, or even what the organization is trying to achieve. And without a clear understanding of the organization's goals and objectives, it can be difficult for members to know how they can best contribute.

If we were to consider a traditional organization, we can clearly imagine three stages of onboarding - **Before, During and After**.


**Before onboarding:**


This would involve learning and discovering more about the organization, culture, reviews, payout, previous projects, clients, testimonials, case studies, etc.



**During onboarding:**


This is when new members are given tasks and projects to complete, as well as being introduced to the other members of the organization. The focus is on orienting and acclimating the new member to their surroundings, getting them set-up with the necessary tools and resources, and helping them understand how they can best contribute.


**After onboarding:**


This final stage is all about integration and assimilation, making sure that the new member feels like they are part of the team and fully understands the organization's mission and values.

However, because DAOs are still so new, there is no real standard for what an onboarding experience should look like. And while some organizations are starting to experiment with different methods and approaches, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

To combat this,  it is important to focus on creating a clear and concise onboarding process that will leave new members feeling confident and comfortable about their role within the organization.

#### What can you do for your contributors?

1. **Context building before onboarding**
When it comes to onboarding, context is key. And while it might seem like a no-brainer, one of the most important things you can do for your members is to provide them with a clear and concise overview of the organization before they even start.

A few questions to consider:

What is the organization's mission and purpose?
What are the main goals and objectives?
What are the values that guide the organization's decisions?
Answering these questions will give new members a much better understanding of what they can expect from the organization, and will help them hit the ground running when they start their onboarding experience.

Asking these questions can help you to develop a clear picture of what your organization is all about, and this will in turn help new members to understand what they are getting themselves into. It is also important to remember that not everyone will have the same level of knowledge or experience, so it is important to tailor your answers to meet the needs of your contributors.

This can be done in a number of ways, but some of the most effective methods include creating an introduction video, writing a comprehensive passage, and developing an interactive tour that walks new members through the different parts of the organization.

No matter what method you choose, the goal is to provide new members with a clear understanding of the organization's mission and values, as well as its goals and objectives. By doing this, you will help to ensure that everyone is on the same page from the very beginning, and this will make the onboarding process much smoother for everyone involved.

2. **A learning pathway**
DAOs stink at getting people involved. A vast majority of "members" of a DAO do little to no work, which is fine. But what if they want to contribute? DAOs should know why members join! Lurking? Community? Voting? Coding? Working on integrations?


If DAOs know why members join, they can get them involved quicker and on the right path to contribution. A learning pathway ia a path that a new member can take to get up-to-speed with the organization, and it should be tailored to their specific needs and interests.


For example, if you are looking for members who are interested in coding, your learning pathway might include a series of tutorials that walk them through the different ways they can contribute to the organization's codebase.
![Untitled.jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664359617/Untitled_5614865d87.jpg)

This also helps map relevant projects to newbies. No one wants to be stuck on a project that doesn't interest them, so having a learning pathway that leads to projects that match their interests will help keep them engaged and motivated to contribute.


![Untitled.jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664359705/Untitled_3adf89f457.jpg)


The possibilities are endless, but the goal is always the same: to help new members learn about the organization and find their niche so that they can start contributing in a way that is meaningful to them.

3. **A support system**

One of the most important things you can do for your new members is to provide them with a system of support that they can rely on when they need it. This could include anything from a comprehensive FAQ section to an active chat room where members can ask questions and get help from more experienced contributors.


It is also important to have someone who is specifically responsible for onboarding new members, as this will ensure that there is always someone available to answer questions and help.

![Untitled (2).jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664359768/Untitled_2_c4266cd242.jpg)


This is highly beneficial for two reasons:

First, it helps to ensure that new members feel supported and that their questions are being answered in a timely manner. 

Second, it takes some of the pressure off of the existing members who might already be feeling overwhelmed by the work that needs to be done.

By having a dedicated onboarding team or individual, you can be sure that new members are getting the attention they need and that they are being integrated into the organization in a way that is both smooth and efficient.

4. Community knowledge management**


Without question one of the most frustrating things for new members is knowledge management. Core contributors have worked hard to create DAO related materials only to find it siloed in Google Docs or lost in one of the many channels in Discord. DAO tooling seems to be a hot topic, but community knowledge management is still a neglected child. This must change.

![Untitled (3).jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664359828/Untitled_3_65ed99e398.jpg)

An ideal way to do this is to have a central repository quite like a wiki of all sorts. For example:


Information regarding the tooling a DAO uses, and how to install and use it.
A step-by-step guide on how to contribute to the organization.

A listing of all the available projects, and what skills are needed to work on each one.
The guidelines regarding submitting proposals and tutorials on how to use the different aspects of the organization's platform.

This is just a small sampling of what could be included, but you get the idea. The important thing is that it is easily accessible and that everyone knows where it is. This will help to ensure that new members can find the information they need quickly and without hassle, and it will also help to keep the existing members from having to search through multiple channels and websites every time they need to find something.


Not only will this save everyone a lot of time and frustration, but it will also help to ensure that new members are getting accurate information from the start.


In the same context is the idea of all the Information spread across other tools. Any DAO today uses a bunch of tools. Sometimes, these tools have information that is highly relevant and beneficial to a newcomer. For example, the expected pay for contributing in a pod may be sitting in an open role/opportunity management system, whereas the compensation information historically may be sitting in treasury management. Similarly, the information about the proof of work for the contributor might be sitting in their on-chain profile, whereas the org structure indicating how people are organized into pods may be in another tool. Ideal onboarding should integrate all these tools so that the information is relayed properly to a new contributor.

![pasted image 0.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664359904/pasted_image_0_c7a41a30b7.png)

5. **Defined organizational structure**


While a DAO might be a decentralized organization, that doesn't mean that it is leaderless. In fact, most DAOs have a very clear hierarchy that helps to keep things organized and running smoothly.


New members should know from the start who the team leaders are and what their roles are within the organization. This will help to ensure that they understand who they need to go to with questions or concerns, and it will also help to keep everyone on the same page regarding expectations and responsibilities.

![Untitled (4).jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664359954/Untitled_4_7e4fe82ade.jpg)

Knowing who the leaders are and what their responsibilities are is important for two reasons:

First, it helps to ensure that new members know who they can go to with questions or concerns. Second, it helps to prevent any misunderstandings or confusion about roles and responsibilities within the organization.

It is also important to have well-defined teams so that new members know where they fit in and what their specific roles are. This will help to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals and that there is a clear understanding of who is responsible for what.


6. **Easy access to conversations**
DAOs tend to lose on so much available information! Every 'Tea Time', 'Hangout' or community call should be recorded, organized, and made available for new members (or anyone who couldn't attend). of the best ways to do this is to create a central repository where all of the recordings can be stored and easily accessed.

It will also help to create a more cohesive community as everyone will be able to participate in the conversations, regardless of whether or not they were able to attend the live calls.

Making recordings and transcripts easily accessible will help to ensure that new members are getting accurate information from the start. It will also help to keep the existing members from having to search through multiple channels and websites every time they need to find something.

![Untitled5.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664360022/Untitled5_b9f45280dc.png)


7. **Dashboarding and contributor monitoring**
For an admin, it is fundamental to have an overview of what is going on.  This can be in the form of a dashboard that includes information such as:

- How many people have signed up?
- How many people have completed the onboarding process?
- How many people are actively contributing?
- What sort of contributions are being made?

![Untitled (9).jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664360182/Untitled_9_f7072a49f9.jpg)

This information is important as it helps to identify any areas that may need improvement. For example, if you find that the majority of new members are not completing the onboarding process, you may need to reevaluate your onboarding process to see what can be improved.

Similarly, if the majority of new members are not actively contributing, you may need to rethink your incentive structure or find ways to better engage your members.

In addition to a dashboard, it is also important to have a way to monitor the contributions of individual members. This can be in the form of a leaderboard or some other sort of ranking system.

But, onboarding isn't just for new members
While it is important to have a solid onboarding process for new members, it is also important to remember that onboarding is not just for new members. In fact, it is important to have a continuous onboarding process for all members, regardless of how long they have been with the organization.

This is because people's roles and responsibilities within the organization can change over time, and it is important to make sure that everyone is kept up-to-date on these changes.

It is also important to keep existing members engaged so that they don't become disengaged or disillusioned with the organization. The best way to do this is to make sure that they feel like they are part of a community and that their contributions are valued.

Finally, it is important to encourage members to share their own experiences and expertise with others in the organization. This can be done through mentorship programs, community calls, or other forums where members can share their knowledge.

So, what does it all mean for a DAO?
At the end of the day, DAOs are simply organizations. They are made up of people with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. There is a need for strategy and process for how people join a DAO, learn about it, and utilize resources to achieve certain goals.

Web3 as a whole is moving very quickly and DAOs are no exception. It is essential that new members have a way to easily get up to speed and become contributing members of the community.

Some points to ponder as you think about how to structure an effective onboarding experience for your DAO:

How can you help new members feel comfortable and confident in the community?
How can you make sure that new members have access to the resources they need?
How can you ensure that new members are able to contribute in a meaningful way?
What kind of processes and tools do you need in place to support a successful onboarding experience?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to these questions. The important thing is to start thinking about them early on and to be prepared to adapt as the needs of the community change over time.

At DAOLens we help DAOs with their onboarding experiences by providing an easy way for new members to join and participate in the community. We also offer a variety of resources to help DAOs with their onboarding processes. If you're a DAO admin or member, feel free to contact us at vikram@daolens.com

How to create a delightful DAO onboarding experience

A look into creating a frictionless journey for people to enter your community



Every organisation has at least three groups of participants; **owners, employees and external stakeholders**. While owners and employees don’t need any explanation, external stakeholders include customers, fans, dependent businesses and others. 


With traditional organisations, you have employees and fans. Think Nike. The brand primarily comprises the company, employees, its products, its customers and its passionate fan base. Most of this fan base comprises of staunch loyalists who regularly use the brand’s products in their daily lives. While a lot of these loyalists and fans contribute heavily to the brand, they’re not compensated in any real manner. 


A DAO contributor lies somewhere in between a traditional employee and a superfan. They work for the brand, but they aren’t primarily driven by financial rewards. Much like fans, contributors support and contribute to advance visions they’re passionate about. Let’s look at how exactly they’re different. 


#### Who are DAO contributors?

Web1 saw companies and brands create content for the larger public. Most consumers were simple consumers of media and they had little to no interaction with the presented content, nor a platform to put out their own content.


Web2 changed this, allowing users to easily upload their own content. This led to what we refer to today as the ‘creator economy’. Companies that previously created content for our consumption turned into platforms that house the content we create. 


Web2 also saw users become the product. User generated content runs most platforms today and brands are piggybacking off them to advertise their services and generate revenue in other means. While users have already become a part of the financial equation, they don’t see much in the form of returns. 


Web3 (namely DAOs) aims to mitigate this rapidly growing problem with a system that actively rewards users in tandem with whatever they contribute. Unlike traditional employees who worked for money and traditional fans who worked purely out of interest, DAO contributors treat their contributions more like profitable passion projects. There’s a mixture of financial incentive and passion for a shared vision involved. Understandably, the biggest selling point for a DAO is the culture they foster and the opportunity to collaborate with talented talent.  


Contributors can contribute to DAOs in several ways like being a moderator on the DAO’s discord server, helping with the DAO’s source code, taking up design and content projects, serving advisory roles and a lot more. The possibilities are endless and any type of arrangement can be set up. 


#### Determining valuable contributors


By default, a DAO’s most valuable contributors are its most active ones. They set the mood, are the loudest voices in the Discord servers and are evangelists of the DAO, representing it to the world. They’re the DAO’s vibe. If you’ve got a contributor who completes all chosen tasks on time, contributes actively to the DAO community and regularly initiates projects and discussions, they might just be a high-value contributor you should hold on to. 


The best talent has no dearth of work. It’s no different for DAOs. The best also have the luxury of choice. If you’ve succeeded in attracting, recruiting and engaging excellent contributors for your DAO, it’s time to work on your retention strategy. Retaining your best contributors is  imperative for sustained growth. 


#### Leveraging KPIs


A great way to narrow down on your most valuable talent is by incorporating KPIs into your process much like traditional organisations do. However, KPIs here cannot be implemented how traditional organisations do, as most contributors are working out of choice and not compulsion. 

The right direction here would be to come up with KPI based incentives that encourage contributors to up their performance and output. Understandably, you’d need to tailor these KPIs and incentives to each specific role. For example, timely submitted bug-free code would be an appropriate KPI for developers and coders. 

Once you’ve determined who your best contributors are, it’s time to get around to retaining them. 


####Fairly distributing remuneration


The number one way to retain your best contributors is the age-old tried and tested method of adequate remuneration. Thanks to the underlying technology behind DAOs, you can choose from several different ways (or a mixture) to remunerate your contributors. 


#### Token grants


Token grants are the most popular method used to reward high-value contributors. Tokens are essentially a piece of ownership in the DAO and token owners have special privileges that other contributors do not. They have voting rights and can initiate proposals, usually in proportion to the value they create for the DAO.

#### Profit sharing


The other age-old method of encouraging participation and proactiveness is sharing profits. Like the name suggests, you share your profits with your contributors. In DAOs, you have the ability to easily distribute your rewards in proportion to individual contributions. 


#### Milestone based compensation (akin to bounties)
Much like how a lot of gig-workers work, you can encourage contributors by rewarding them according to milestones. This usually works for level 2 contributors who aren’t actively involved in the DAO’s daily operations. They’re much like freelancers, moving from DAO to DAO in search of interesting work, either out of passion or for financial incentives. 


Regardless of how much you pay each contributor, it’s good practice to keep things transparent. This not only boosts the morale of your DAO’s community, but also gives prospective contributors an idea of how rewarding contributing can be. It also acts as motivation for existing contributors who aren’t high-value yet. 

#### Treasury management


Like with any other organisation, the financial health of your DAO heavily influences the quality of talent it attracts. The more stable your DAO, the better contributions it receives, and the more resources you have when executing your retention strategy. Imagine the satisfying circular loop that creates. 

Here are a few ways to ensure financial stability for your DAO:

1: Allocate a good chunk of the portfolio to **stable coins**
Much like how national banks tend to peg their currency against a resource like gold, you should peg a healthy chunk of your DAO’s crypto portfolio to stable coins. By spreading out investments, you distribute risk and also cushion your DAO against potential unfortunate circumstances. 

2: **Adequately distributed multi-sig treasuries**


Bad players are an inevitable problem in any organisation. While there aren’t many ways to circumvent this in traditional organisations, the multi-sig distribution system in DAOs allow for appropriate checks and balances to be implemented, distributing responsibilities and preventing the development of bad players. 


3: **Regularly audited code and quick response time to exploit reports**


Any DAO is only as healthy as its underlying code. The best contributors value their work and ensuring its safety goes a long way in helping retain them. Regularly comb through your code (especially after every update) and quickly patch reported exploits. Your contributors are taking the time to report them, it’s your responsibility to get it patched as soon as possible. 

Which brings us to our next section.

#### Other tips and tricks for retaining contributors

1: **Competent people like competent organisations**

The most desirable organisations are the best run ones. DAOs are no different. Having a robust administrative system and a proper structure for discussions and rooms are practices everyone appreciates. This is assuming that your DAO already fosters a great culture and has a seamless onboarding system in place. 

2: **Regular and clear communication**

Like with any community that primarily comprises humans, communication is key. Host regular discussions, Q&As and other engagement activities. Also keep everyone involved updated on any developments in the DAO. Everyone appreciates proactive communication and it’s one of the signs of confident leadership. 

3: **Distributing social capital**

Apart from financial incentives, distributing social capital is a fantastic way to reward your best contributors. If your DAO has built some reputation, let your best contributors borrow the limelight during large social events like Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse sessions. They could also be featured on your social media handles and even end up contributing as an evangelist.


#### Summary
Despite growing in popularity fairly recently, a lot of DAOs out there are attracting and retaining top tier talent. The more valuable contributors they retain for longer, the faster they grow. Think of it like in traditional organisations; a high rate of employee turnover always significantly hinders growth. 

By not retaining your best contributors, you’re missing out on the leverage of momentum. Long term collective focus on any single entity builds a lot of momentum, which can significantly boost a DAO’s growth. Every organisation loves members who’re reliable, dependable and trustworthy. DAOs are no different. 

Follow the practices discussed above and fast track the growth of your DAO. Remember, good talent is hard to come by. Good talent you can depend on? It’s a minor miracle. 




How to Retain Your DAO's Most Valuable Contributors

Retaining its most valuable contributors is no different for a DAO as it is with other organizations.

In this post, we elaborate on how to do just that.

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Should you make your org a DAO?

If you have ever considered building a DAO or are on the fence, this extensive framework will help you look at the pros and cons.


DAOs are quite the buzzword right now, but we are confident they will evolve from being a mere buzzword to a ubiquitous facet of coordination over the next decade. Nonetheless, it is useful to remember that they are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. Simply making something a DAO is not valuable in and of itself.  This value comes from the principles underpinning DAOs, and the increase in organizational efficiency that they bring.  


Therefore, it would be useful to understand the various kinds of DAOs in existence today to be able to forecast the kinds of unlocks they will eventually provide with regards to socio-economic coordination.
This means exploring the differences in scope, vision and governance structures. 




#### Introduction and The Genesis of DAOs

Firstly, DAOs will be elaborated upon with regards to their scope. 

The most significant kinds of DAO are those that might perhaps not be considered ‘DAOs’ in the strictly technical sense at all. The group of people governing Ethereum would come under this category. The reason it is still imperative to discuss this is because Ethereum’s relatively nebulous governance structure is emblematic of the philosophical undeprinnings of DAOs as we see them today-including the smart contracts that are required for them to exist and function. Therefore, this delineation would also function as an apt segue into how DAOs are now blossoming in the purely  technical and real-world senses of the word as well. 


While Ethereum is now as significant as a large corporation, it does not follow a traditional governance structure. This is because Ethereum’s ‘product’ is not a traditional one either; it is permissionless and not ‘owned’ by anyone-that is what the tenet of decentralization rests on. There is no CEO of Ethereum. Nonetheless, it is a protocol that is being constantly developed. A primary way in which such changes are made is through EIPs, or Ethereum Improvement Proposals. Borrowing from the Ethereum foundation itself, EIPs are ‘standards specifying potential new features or processes for Ethereum. Anyone within the Ethereum community can create an EIP.’The process through which EIPs are implemented is fundamental to Ethereum’s functioning. For example, ERC721 (the proposal that standardized NFTs) came through an EIP. The description below  is relevant because it shows the spirit of how DAOs work.  The formal process to do so is as follows: 


1- Propose the EIP


2-After informal community discussions and scrutiny, present your proposal to Ethereum core developers


3- After assimilating feedback from the community and devs, present the EIP again for a final proposal 


4- If agreed upon by the relevant stakeholders, the EIP is included in the network roadmap


5-EIP is implemented. 

This process, starting in 2014, demonstrates one of remote collaboration (which was almost unheard of 8 years ago) to accomplish incredibly complex tasks. It is also one of a relatively horizontal organizational structure, in accordance with the decentralized ethos Ethereum was established on. At this juncture, it would be wise to reiterate what ‘DAO’ even stands for: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Indeed, it may be said that Ethereum’s development over the years (especially the recent and long-awaited shift to Proof-Of-Stake) was the first complex human endeavour to be executed on a wholly decentralized scale. Of course, in the post pandemic era we take remote work and collaboration for granted, but this was far from the case in 2014; to even suggest to your boss that you could ‘work  remotely’ was a laughable statement. Nevertheless, given the off-chain and informal nature of its development, Ethereum’s development does not count as ‘autonomous’ in the slightest. Given that the rest of the world (especially Web 3) is remote nowadays anyways, (whether a DAO or not), it is the autonomous and trustless nature of DAOs that provides the most substantial relative value add. 

Therefore, the DAO governance that is being adopted by major protocols (albeit gradually and in a piecemeal fashion) is the harbinger of the whole impact DAOs are likely to have in the coming years. We shall expand  upon the types of governance by understanding the primary different categories in DAOs today. 


**1: PROTOCOL DAOs**

Firstly, we may look at Ethereum Layer 2 protocol Optimism. Whilst Optimism was launched by the Optimism Foundation, it followed the concept of progressive decentralization and only created its DAO after several months of network growth. The DAO still doesn’t have complete control over the network, with the nature of its Optimism’s governance being described as ‘a collaboration between the Optimism Foundation and the Optimism Collective’. The governance token, $OP, was airdropped to early adopters of the network. (This is now the usual mechanism through which large protocols initially distribute at least a portion of their tokens.) Similarly, we may look at Uniswap, the protocol that arguably kickstarted DeFi as we know it today. (Uniswap was the first  Automated Market Maker, the mechanism which made decentralized exchanges possible). Indeed, the only ‘utility’ its $UNI token has is as a means of determining voting power within its governance framework. This token, too, was ‘airdropped’ (freely granted) to early users in September 2020. The Uniswap DAO, too, functions in conjunction with Uniswap Labs, the legal entity behind it. The reason such a mechanism still exists for protocol level DAOs with higher requirements for organizational complexity is because of the fact that DAOs still need to function on socialized trust based relationships. Nonetheless, this is a stepping stone to more independent large-scale DAOs (as our post on *hyperlink problems with DAOs post* elucidates upon.) 


**2: INVESTMENT/ ‘DECENTRALIZED VENTURE CAPITAL’ DAOs**

On the other hand, we are already seeing DAOs (in every sense of the word) with ventures that require relatively lower amounts of organizational sophistication. One such type is investment clubs. These are DAOs that most fit the relatively reductive label for DAOs as ‘shared bank accounts’, or decentralized and on-chain venture capital funds. One foremost example is Nouns DAO. The DAO has a daily auction for generative NFTs, which grant the purchasers rights to participate in the DAO. The funds raised from the auction (usually in the 70-90ETH range each time)  are then aggregated into a treasury. As of the time of writing, the treasury has a total of $35M. Each Noun counts as one vote within the community, with the interesting caveat that since the supply of Nouns is increasing by one every day, each vote is also accordingly worth less with each passing day. 


**A Nouns Profile Picture NFT**

![dc37a43999c910422a8eb70e46dbb2c7.svg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1665038236/dc37a43999c910422a8eb70e46dbb2c7_87df3ef1c7.png)

Another similar DAO/investment collective is Flamingo DAO, whose membership and governance is also NFT based. 

Interestingly, the Nouns DAO utilizes what is called a ‘fork’ (essentially a copy of open source code) of DeFi borrowing protocol Compound’s DAO. This is of significance because most DAO’s today do not need to set up the smart contracts required for their organizational functioning. In this way, we may consider DAOs that have their own native DAO or self-built contracts to be in an entirely different category altogether. This is also another significant advantage of DAOs over conventional structures, as even if new companies can copy the legal and bureaucratic scaffolding of existing companies, they still need to deploy the contracts (in this case, literal ones) by themselves. DAOs can literally copy paste code and do it within minutes. Indeed, there are ‘tooling’ services aimed at providing precisely this kind of service. For example, Syndicate DAO allows anyone to create an investment club of upto 99 members without utilizing any code. A crucial unlock that this service also provides is that it helps set up the real legal entity as well. 


**3-OWNERSHIP COLLECTIVES**

A natural evolution of investment collective DAOs (with the ostensible goal of profit) would be the creation of DAOs that exist in the pursuit of common goals. ‘We should buy a bar’ has to be one of the most common phrases  uttered over a few too many beers. Of course, no one extended this goal to purchases in the tens of millions of dollars. DAOs make it possible. City DAO has the stated mission of building an ‘on-chain, community governed, crypto city of the future’. To this end, the DAO purchased 40 acres of land in Wyoming, raising funds through the sale of NFTs at 0.25ETH ($1000 at the time). These NFTs function as proofs of ‘citizenship’, which grants voting powers. Similar projects (which we have spoken about) include Links DAO (a collectively owned golf club) and Evinco Winery DAO also raised funds through NFTs, with similar governance mechanisms. Another similar (but more idiosyncratic and smaller  in scope) DAO that we have previously discussed called Constitution DAO sought to purchase a copy of the US Constitution, and raised $47M within a few days to this end. While City DAO utilized NFTs, Constitution DAO functioned on donations, and granted donatees $PEOPLE tokens in exchange for their contributions.


**4-DECENTRALIZED SCIENCE/RESEARCH COLLECTIVES**

An up and coming sub-sector of the DAO ecosystem has to do with Decentralized Science. The scientific research space has some particular inefficiencies (with different problems in the academic side and the private sector respectively) that DAOs can add significantly to. Firstly, research within academia is often mired within red tape, with fund-raising  needlessly taking up a large amount of researchers’ time. Since this fundraising is significantly predicated upon the amount researchers have bene published, this biases the kind of research that they may undertake for the sake of simply being able to continue to work. Secondly, information access is currently usually gated behind either journals or siloed within private databases; something quite undesirable for a bona fide public good such as scientific research. 

There are a plethora of DAOs within this space, with biotechnology currently being most prevalent. While Bio DAO focuses on the promotion of biotech research as a whole*, there are a few more ventures with more specific goals:  Molecule, Vita DAO, PsyDAO and Phage Directory are some examples.  Molecule has a marketplace that allows people to fund specific biopharma researchers’ work; something very significant because pharma companies often neglect crucial research because the market is not large enough (but is nevertheless crucial for some people).






![Screenshot 2022-10-06 at 12.09.37 PM.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1665038388/Screenshot_2022_10_06_at_12_09_37_PM_bebf8efb66.png)

 
 **Molecule's Marketplace to Fund Bio-pharma Research Projects**
 
 
 
 
 Similarly, relatively esoteric research such will not be of too much interest to the scientific community, thereby dissuading academic researchers incentivized by published volume. Vita DAO is focusing on aiding research pertaining to drug development for human longevity research. **PsyDAO** is dedicated to funding research for psychedelic drugs, a field that is obviously fraught because of the legal status of psychedelic across the globe. Finally, Phage Directory seeks to solve the issue of siloed scientific information by increasing access to cumulative knowledge on phages. Essentially, they are trying to open source scientific research similar to how software is open source in Web 3. 

The last type of DAOs to be discussed today is builders collectives/guilds. This includes projects such as **Raid Guild, Superteam DAO, and Lex DAO**. Raid Guild is essentially an on-chain design and development agency that project leaders can hire for consulting, marketing, development and design. 
Superteam DAO is described as a ‘co-operative of creatives, developers, and operators’ with the goal of incubating promising projects within the developing world. Finally, Lex DAO describes itself as ‘a non-profit association of legal engineering professionals that brings the traditional legal settlement to code, and coded agreements to the masses’. Essentially, it is a collective that helps recreate the intricate legal systems of the ‘real’ world on-chain, and actually help expand sphere of influence that automated agreements outside the crypto bubble. 


**CONCLUSION**



Therefore, there are multiple types of DAOs; the most salient ones that we have discussed today are ones that govern protocols, investment collectives (akin to venture capital funds), decentralized science/research oriented ones, and ones that are collectives of people offering particular services. What is crucial to reiterate is that the on-chain activity/agency of the DAO over the organization is inversely correlated with the organizational complexity of the venture. This is because of a few reasons that we discuss in our post about the problems (and potential solutions) within DAOs today.  Furthermore, we have seen how Ethereum’s informal governance itself was the memetic segue from ‘traditional’ corporate governance to the world of completely on-chain governance. 




**REFERENCES**

Superteam.fun
Raidguild.org
Vitadao.com
lexdao.coop













       







Different types of DAOs: Explained

 DAOs vary in scope, ambition, and complexity. This article will explore the various ways in which these differences demonstrate themselves.

That is what your work team in 2027 (or even before that) may look like:

Your teammates own super cool pseudonyms. Eh! "What's in the name," said Shakespeare, and it's more relevant today than ever.
Their profile pictures are funky avatars. Woh! You might never really know what they look like in real life.
You will use 'they and their' more than he/she.
Your geographical location will be irrelevant.
Your clicks and contributions will be immutable and decisions made accessible to all for scrutiny. Imagine a performance report with zero bias. You would like it, won't you?
You and your bae might just vote differently on the same decision and never even know about it because you did it anonymously.
Web3: **A Trustless Business Landscape**

Like it or not, you can't ignore the fact world is moving towards a trustless environment in a big, bold, bullish way.

Wait, what? Oxford dictionary suggests trustless means distrustful! That can't be 'the future.'

Interestingly as the world moves forward to adopt and adapt to the Web3 ecosystem in its full glory, trustless is what will be trusted the most. A trustless environment is where no third party or intermediary validates your transactions or decisions.

It is a bias-free world with no concentrated power zones. Instead, it is a distributed network of nodes that auto-execute the decisions/transactions when pre-determined conditions are met, with Blockchain as the underlying technology.

Indeed, decentralization is the aspect that primarily differentiates the evolving business landscape (Read: Web3) from what we had been using since the onset of the mass adoption of the internet some three decades ago.

The world, as we may see merely five years apart, would be the one that will have applications that are readily processed by machines and operate without any real human interventions. Most businesses would communicate and transact with their audiences via Decentralized Applications (dApps) and other such blockchain-enabled organizations like the Metaverse, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms.

#### DAOs, DAOs Everywhere but how do they work?

An optimum amalgamation of technological innovation and human collaboration, DAOs are, as the name suggests, organizations that are decentralized and autonomous. They are also what we eat, breathe and drink here at DaoLens.

The functioning of a DAO solely depends on the pre-determined rules, which, when encoded for it to turn machine readable for auto-execution on meeting the pre-determined conditions, becomes a smart contract. Think of smart contracts as the DNA that structures a DAO.

These are community-first organizations with a flat hierarchy where a group of people with diverse (but relevant) skillsets come together to work towards a common purpose.

#### What is Governance? How do DAOs facilitate effective decision-making in the community?

Welcome to the world of Decentralized Governance. Let's start with breaking the word 'Governance' into a digestible bite. In simple terms, it would be how a group of people arrive at a decision together.

As we have already understood, decentralization is an environment that exists and flourishes without the need for a central authority or human watchdog.

In a typical scenario, right from building that solution to implementing and upgrading it when the need comes, every stage requires multiple decision-making on any standard day. It could be simple things from hiring a resource to finalizing a vendor or sealing a proposal or a potential partnership aiming toward a growth hack.

So, how do DAOs do that?

The answer is simple - Via a **voting**.

Every DAO has a voting mechanism to seek approvals from the community members, who hold voting rights more often than not in proportion to the investment made. The investment is not necessarily monetary.

It could be in terms of active participation in the community or a worthy contribution that made a critical impact, too. These mechanisms are encoded in a smart contract and deployed on a blockchain.

Once again, it is a set of computer algorithms and logic that watch the monitoring and enforcement of these smart contracts.

As you see, DAOs that function in a trustless environment have withdrawn or, you may say, lessened their trust in humans and have vested it in algorithms and smart contacts to manage governance.

However, when you begin to dig deeper, there is much more to it.

Wait, isn’t Democracy often ineffective? Decentralized governance for organizations building more complex solutions

Let's face it when a certain number of people are working together to arrive at a decision or solution, it is only wise to assume there will be disagreements. Multiple solutions would pop up. You may never arrive at that ultimate 51%.

More compound and elaborate problems will bring in more complex solution proposals. Consequently, it gets more complicated to arrive at a cohesive decision. No more the solutions will come in a simple 'Yes' or 'No,' kind of package.

Here are a few scenarios to think of while solving more complex issues in a decentralized landscape:

Community members are voting on a proposal that they don't fully understand.

Or

The problem statement to that proposal was never presented in the first place.

Or

DAOs with large communities with members in thousands or hundreds of thousands lack cultural or behavioural norms.

Or

Only winners are rewarded; what about the losers who have put in equal effort to understand the problem and put up their opinion.

Or

What about identity management? Couldn't anonymous entities that build a solid reputation in the community become a threat eventually.

Or

Multiple alternatives pop up, and the community never reaches the threshold percentage to execute the decision. That causes undue delay. Besides, you must not even tweak the computer algorithm or the smart contract to meet the need. That would fail the purpose entirely. Isn't it?

Or

What if community discussion forums turn biased towards a particular decision. Some community member drives the brainwashing, anonymously, to their favour.

If we go granular, countless such use cases will come to the fore that may discourage someone from walking the Decentralization path. However, it would be such a lost opportunity if you don't.

#### Future of Decentralization:

Do people even vote? What do we do about the lack of participation? These are questions that often get floated around. In DAOs, the same problem exists. For 99% of DAOs, less than 0.5% of governance token holders actually participate in voting on proposals.

How does a project distinguish between healthy core governance versus unhealthy centralization into the hands of a few? Can these people with power in their hands become bad actors inside a DAO? How can a DAO function effectively when everything today is still not on-chain but there is bound to be an off-chain influence. All these questions are fair and true.

DAOs are nascent, and so are the technologies enabling this concept. However, things are pacing up at jet speed. These decentralized platforms are working to develop innovative governance models to ensure they can function without hiccups while not compromising on any of the critical perks of decentralization.

The focus is on creating socially-conscious community-enabled organizations empowered by the dynamic governance tools so that voting systems are more meaningful.

Indeed, it will be too early to declare at what scale and scope will decentralized governance evolve in the near future; however, we are listing below some competent and relevant voting techniques that will play their influence in shaping Decentralized Governance for the better:

1. **Quadratic Voting**

The fundamental premise of this voting system is that voting expresses the degree of an individual's preference in favour or against a specific decision. That's interesting! Let's understand how this is precisely done.

Here is the Quadratic voting formula:

Cost to the voter = (Number of votes) to the power of 2.

Let's understand this with an example.

You vote once for a decision, and you exhaust 1 token.
You vote twice for that decision and exhaust 2 to the power of 2 (2X2) = 4 tokens.
You vote a third time for that decision, and this time you exhaust 3 to the power of 2 (3X3) = 9 tokens.
So on and so forth!

Apparently, only those who care genuinely about the issue will cast additional votes for them, for they get more expensive each time. On the one hand, it shows the intensity of an individual's support; on the other hand, it disincentivizes the frivolous not so sincere voters.

Quadratic Voting is a brilliant technique to protect the interests of small groups of voters that care deeply about specific issues.

2. **Multi-Sig Wallets**

The Multi-sig stands for multiple signatures. This means more than one person is needed for approval before things move forward. As you can imagine, this ensures that one person can’t do as they wish. You need multiple signatures from different private keys, distributed across multiple parties and often on multiple continents. In order to validate any decision, a majority of the members will have to sign with their private key.

Before we move ahead, we should explain quickly what the key does. Every wallet holder gets a key. The person who holds the key holds the power to do anything with the wallet. Common wallets like Metamask have only one owner so as long as you have your key,  you control the funds. The day you lose your key, you have given away your power to the person who now holds your key.

Many projects and communities have opted to go the Multi-sig route (usually with Snapshot for off-chain signalling). In this voting mechanism, token holders signal on proposals, which are then executed by a more centralized committee that usually controls a Gnosis Safe.

3. **Conviction Voting**

The most exciting aspect of this voting system remains rather than casting your vote in a single time-boxed session, you can assert your preference towards a certain decision over a period of time.

Conviction Voting entails a decision-making process that approves or rejects a proposal based on the aggregated preference of community members,expressed through the duration.

In sum, while this voting allows you to change your stance, the longer you keep your vote in particular ballet, the stronger your conviction towards it is considered and counted.

However, this gets interesting further. In conviction voting, voters do not put their votes in a Yay or Nay situation; instead, they vote based on their priorities.

In this process, all proposals are duly listed, and a voter can choose to put 40% of voting rights to one proposal, another 10% to one, and keep 50% to another. Of course, the voter has the right to withdraw their voting rights from any proposal at any time.

This voting system is an excellent tool to effectively manage the impact of last-minute vote swings due to anonymous brainwashing or herd mentality.


5. **Knowledge Extractable Voting**

The Knowledge-Extractable Voting (KEV) system fundamentally enables the more knowledgeable community members by strengthening their voting power over time. That means an expert community member will have more weight in their vote than a lay community member.

The KEV mechanism introduces a new type of knowledge token aka KNW token. Unlike the usual ERC20 tokes, these cannot be traded or transferred, and there are set rules on how and when to issue or confiscate them.

Critically, members have different KNW token balances for various areas of knowledge, each knowledge label-wise.

Another concept that remains at the core of the KEV voting system is that of 'Furtachy,' the underlying notion of which is 'betting on belief.' Furtachy champions governance voting supported by prediction markets. Those who vote for the correct option receive rewards, and those who vote for the wrong choice are penalized.

Inspired by this concept, every time an expert community member's vote matches the winning result, they are issued more KNW tokens in the KEV voting system.

Knowledge-Extractable Voting (KEV) can be a very efficient mechanism in scenarios where a DAO must decide on a multi-layered complex proposal requiring industry-specific expertise and knowledge.

6. **Holographic Consensus**

This voting system has proven to be very efficient for large DAOs where thousands of people vote to implement a decision. The mechanism here capitalizes on the attention a certain proposal garners.

In the DAOstack Ecosystem that supports Holographic Consensus, members get GEN tokens, which are betting tokens and not voting tokens. Members bet on the listed proposal. If the proposal meets the threshold and passes, the members receive more GEN tokens; if not, they lose.

This voting mechanism entails four critical steps:

1) Initiation: Any of the eligible members can initiate a proposal.

2) Boosting: Gen token holders boost the proposals they think have a higher chance of getting approved. The proposals that win the bet go to the voting stage, and the remaining are withdrawn.

3) Voting: Members with the voting tokens vote either in favor or against a proposal. If the proposal is approved, the betting members earn more GEN tokens as rewards. Similarly, they lose their GEN tokens if the proposal is rejected.

4) Execution: Approved proposals are executed on-chain.

Holographic Consensus is considered one of the most efficient voting mechanisms for a DAO for multiple reasons, like:

It renders all members an equal and accessible opportunity to initiate a proposal.
It filters out the unworthy proposals at the initial stage.
People must possess the knowledge and vested care for a particular proposal to bet on it effectively.
The winners are rewarded, and losers are penalized, making members more sincere in using their voting right cautiously.
The voting mechanism is proven to be effective for large DAOs.
Wrapping Up

DAOs are becoming a more prominent organizational structure by the day, efficiently governing social groups, research groups, non-profit causes, grant DAOs, media houses, collector groups, and other similar domains that are primarily community-focused.

With tech gorillas and administrators worldwide accepting the burgeoning need for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, you will soon experience plenty of innovations, improvisations, and upgrades coming to the fore, making DAOs of today more competent to solve complex multi-layered issues.

DAOs will broaden their horizons and move deeper into domains like eco-startups, tech-startups, fintech, education, and health while governing them with competence at the operational and corporate levels.

With the advent of more quality, result-oriented voting systems, DAOs will be much more robust with their decision-making process. Hence, while organizations can exploit the perks of decentralization, they will be able to have seamless and secure operations too.

Nonetheless, we can never say that centralized governance will be replaced entirely. Not yet! More traditional businesses and organizations will continue to function in a centralized matter.

However, there is a strong possibility many traditional organizations will transition to a hybrid governance structure where centralized and decentralized governance will co-exist in different departments or branches of that company, depending on the suitability.

Decentralized governance allows organizations an ideal environment for collaboration, breeding creative solutions and bringing speedier growth. Undoubtedly, every future-oriented organization should want to explore these expansion possibilities.

#### Key Takeaways:

Decentralization enables a trustless environment where no third party or intermediary validates your transactions or decisions.

As the world moves fast towards Web3, there is a high likelihood that DAOs will enable the operations of various blockchain projects.
DAOs allow all its members an opportunity to vote on a specific decision. The idea is to give every vested individual a voice in organizational matters, from hiring to funding and making critical changes in the organization's structure. However, the voting mechanism in the current DAO ecosystems has its pronounced limitations.
With the evolving needs of DAOs, more and more tech guerilla’s are experimenting and innovating to introduce more mature and foolproof voting mechanisms. Some emerging and trusted voting mechanisms are Quadratic Voting, Conviction Voting, Knowledge-Extractable Voting, and Holographic Consensus.


DAOs are already making a prominent mark in set-ups like social groups, research groups, non-profit causes, grant DAOs, investment DAOs, media houses, and collector groups. However, we shall soon find DAOs rising in eco-startups, fashion, fintech, education, retail, and health.


It will be a long time before Decentralized organizations will be duly equipped and capable of replacing conventional organizations entirely. However, we can expect an increase in the transition of traditional organizations to a hybrid system where both decentralization and centralization co-exist depending on the organization's need.
One of the most susceptible challenges for most DAOs is how to encourage all their members to vote. Data says an average of only 0.5% of DAO members actively vote.


DAOLens helps DAOs establish a seamless voting mechanism to ensure each member is duly engaged and vested in DAO governance and operations. If you are a DAO looking to innovate and streamline your voting mechanism, connect to us at vikram@daolens.com


For all your other queries concerning how to run your DAO more effectively, you can write to us at hello@daolens.com

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The Future of Decentralized Governance

Building a collaborative and cohesive work environment where all get a voice and ownership of what they create remains at the core of web 3. Instead of just a few at the top of the pyramid making shots for everyone, a decentralized economy aims to empower each contributor proportionately.

**Decentralized Autonomous Organizations** (DAOs) are considered the apparent logical step in this trust-building process. These organizations fundamentally rely on a bundle of smart contracts for the execution of optimal decision-making from anything and everything like inventory control, cash management, pricing, and even hiring.

All involved in a DAO are contributors or participants. These organizations function without a C-Suite or board of directors.

Now, it might hit you with thoughts like,

'Oh, but who's accountable for those decisions?'

'Who will address the grievances?'

'Is this even a functional business model?'

Amidst all the hubbub around the bear phase overriding the sentiments of crypto enthusiasts worldwide, we bring you what the top 10 thought leaders from the Blockchain industry have to say about DAOs.

#### 1. Vitalik Buterin

"Spiritually, I really love DAOs," these famous words belong to none other than Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum. A strong proponent of DAOs, Vitalik believes that the most critical aspect of a DAO is its purpose.

At present, Ethereum dominates as the first choice of blockchain for most DAOs. The platform and its compatible chains house more than 4,200 DAOs. The platform is mostly favored due to its technological robustness and security features.

Vitalik, with all his faith in DAOs as an optimal organizational structure for many businesses, is deeply vested in ensuring that they create a seamless infrastructure to support and encourage DAOs for hassle-free and cost-effective functioning. He has investments in CityDAO and Ukraine DAO.

#### 2. Naval Ravikant

The Co-founder and Chairman of Angel List, Naval Ravikant, is at the forefront of the web3 row and has strong opinions on DAOs. In one of his interviews with Yourstory, when asked, 'What's the future of firms?' He replied, 'Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), someday.'


Considering DAOs to be the structure that will sustain most businesses in the coming days, in one of his very famous tweets, he quotes, 'Blockchain-based "smart" contracts will eventually reinvent the firm.'
![1.jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664448947/1_36a7413d1b.jpg)

Some of the blockchain projects he is associated with include CoinList, Umbrel, MetaStable Capital, and ZCash foundation.

#### 3. Mark Cuban

The famous Shark from the Shark Tank show, Mark Cuban, has stated that 80% of his investments are into crypto projects. He specifically has been very bullish about DAOs, calling them, ‘the ultimate combination of capitalism and progressivism.’ In one of his interviews with CNBC, he stated, ‘Smart contracts can change the world.’

The Billionaire entrepreneur believes DAOs could lead to disruptive organizations. Below is one of his tweets affirming his optimistic thoughts on DAOs.

![2.jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664449020/2_111f887c70.jpg)

#### 4. Balaji Srinivasan

Former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, angel investor, and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan is yet another global leader who champions a decentralized economy with all its shenanigans.

On DAOs, he exclaims this is a unique place that enables communication, governance, and the spirit of the community simultaneously. Apparently, with the onset of DAOs, people can be more purposeful and intentional with their business ideas while appealing for investments. Check his tweet on DAOs

![3.jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664449492/3_4f1ef29e5a.jpg)

As per his Crunchbase profile, he is an investor in 82 projects, and almost 48 of them are blockchain-based projects, including Messari, OpenSea, Mem Protocol, Gitcoin, Syndicate, and Roll, Samudai, and DAOLens.

#### 5. Gary Vaynerchuk

The serial entrepreneur and global thought leader, Gary Vaynerchuk, is one of the early investors in Coinbase, holds 59 Cryptopunks, and has floated his own NFT project veefriends.com.

In one of his interviews revolving around everything web 3, Gary stated that he thinks tons of innovation in DAOs is on its way, and that DAOs of 2025 will be much more thoughtful and sharper than the DAOs of 2021.

When asked, 'DAOs bullish or bearish,' he replied, 'Very bullish.'

#### 6. Chris Dixon

Chris is an internet entrepreneur, investor, and General Partner with Andreesen and Horowitz. He is one of the loudest advocates of Web3 and decentralization and finds immense potential in DAOs.

In one of his interviews, Chris has candidly expressed, "The DAO structure lets these communities build treasuries, develop governing rules, and act collectively. Members can be anywhere in the world. New DAOs can be spun up in minutes. If those communities instead tried to form traditional companies, it would take weeks and require lots of paperwork."

He has investments in Dapper Labs, Coinbase, DFINITY, and many prominent Web3 projects.

#### 7. Kathryn Haun

Kathryn is the founder of Haun Ventures, which has raised a debut fund of $1.5 Billion to support the growth of Web3. She is a Board Member of Coinbase and was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

A strong proponent of NFTs, Stablecoins, Defi, and DAOs, Katie thinks DAOs can play an instrumental role in coordinating humans & capital on the internet. Check her tweet announcing her investment in Syndicate DAO.

![4.jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664449562/4_27d77273b4.jpg)

Apart from Syndicate DAO, Katie has also invested in web3 projects like Highlight, Zora Labs, Taxbit, and Euler.**

#### 8. Brian Amstrong

The CEO of Coinbase has gone on to state he can't rule out the possibility of crypto exchanges functioning as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO).

In one of his interviews, he stated, "One of the brilliant things that's been created in crypto is this idea of a smart contract. Instead of using lawyers to write on a piece of paper a contract between people, you can essentially codify these principles in software in code and run it on a global, decentralized blockchain, which is something that Ethereum allowed us to do, this idea of a smart contract."

Check out one of his enthusiastic tweets on DAOs

![5.jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/daolens/image/upload/v1664449593/5_78888d620d.jpg)

#### 9. Peter Thiel

The legendary investor needs no introduction. If you did not know, 19-year-old Vitalik had received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship that he used to build Ethereum.

Peter described himself as a "pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist," enabling Web3 since the beginning. He stated that looking at the potential of Bitcoin; he thinks he is underinvested in it. Peter argued, "It's the most honest market we have in the country."

He currently has investments in some of the most purposeful DAOs and web3 projects today, like BitDAO and Bitpanda.

#### 10. Andressen and Horowitz

Last but not least, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the a16z have been the true champions of the entire Web3 landscape, and definitely DAOs. In their official announcement about their investment in Friends With Benefits DAO, they exclaimed, ‘What comes next is hard to predict, but DAOs are likely to have an enormous impact on the adoption of web3 products.’

The organization has duly invested in Maker DAO, Uniswap, and Compound, too.

Marc Andreesen believes, ‘Crypto is really like the rise of the early internet.’ In their recent 56-page State of the Crypto report on Web 3, on page 48 they state, ‘DAOs are providing a path toward community governance of any kind of organization.’

We couldn't agree more!

As the world moves fast toward a more decentralized economy, at DaoLens, we are building intuitive tools and highly customizable frameworks to support DAOs function with more confidence and control.

If you are a DAO or are looking to join or create a DAO, feel free to join us on Discord discord.gg/daolens and you will have Crypto OGs and established decentralization experts walking you through your queries.

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What do the Top 10 Web3 leaders think of DAOs?

Top 10 Global Web3 Thought Leaders Scream a ‘Yay’ For DAOs

Have you ever been in a sorority or fraternity? If you’ve watched the movie "The Social Network," you might remember the scene where Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash, a website that allows users to rate the attractiveness of their fellow Harvard students. In order to get access to Facemash, users had to be in a certain fraternity or sorority. In other words, they had to be "in the club."

This is called gating, where new members are required to go through a period of initiation before they are allowed to fully participate in the group.

In the context of a DAO, gatekeeping can take many different forms, from voting mechanisms that allow only certain members to have a say in decisions to financial incentives that encourage participants to behave in certain ways.

But why would a DAO want to gatekeep? Are there any downsides to gating? And should you do it in your DAO? Let's take a closer look.


#### 1. What is gating in a DAO?

A DAO can use gatekeeping to control who has access to its resources and make sure that only those who are committed to the success of the organization are involved in decision-making.

For example, let's say a DAO is developing a new product. The team developing the product may want to gatekeep the project in order to keep it on track and prevent scope creep. This means that only people who are directly working on the project will have access to the relevant information and resources and that all decisions about the project will be made by the team developing the product.

The primary gatekeeping mechanism for any DAO is through on-chain metrics like voting or staking. For example, a DAO may use a voting system in which only members who have been with the organization for a certain period of time or who have contributed a certain amount of value to the organization are eligible to vote. Furthermore, we are increasingly seeing NFTs that are akin to membership tokens within DAOs, with some even having tiered membership.

Gating can also be used to control access to financial resources. For example, a DAO may want to set up a gated funding process in which only projects that have been vetted by the community and approved by a certain number of members are eligible for funding.

In some cases, gatekeeping may be used to protect the DAO from legal liability. For example, if a DAO is working on a project that could be considered illegal in some jurisdictions, the DAO may want to gatekeep the project in order to limit access to only those members who are willing to take on the legal risk.

#### Benefits of gatekeeping a DAO
For contributors:
1. **Helps keep the community streamlined**
When a DAO is starting out, it's especially important to have focused discussions and avoid scope creep. By gatekeeping, you can help keep the conversations on track and make sure that everyone is on the same page. This way, you can avoid arguments and confusion down the road.


2. **Helps the DAO run more efficiently**
A well-functioning DAO is one that can make decisions quickly and efficiently. When there are too many people involved in decision-making, it can slow things down. By gatekeeping, you can help ensure that only the most relevant people are involved in each decision, which can help the DAO run more smoothly.


3. **Aligned incentives and rewards**
In a DAO, it's important that everyone is aligned with the same goal. When there are too many people involved, it can be difficult to keep everyone aligned. By gatekeeping, you can help ensure that only people who are truly committed to the success of the DAO are involved. This way, everyone is working towards the same goal, and there is less chance of disagreement or conflict.


4. **Helps ensure that the DAO is making good use of your money**
As an investor in a DAO, you want to know that your money is being used wisely. Gatekeepers can help vet projects and ensure that they are aligned with the goals of the DAO. This way, you can be confident that your money is being used in the best way possible.

For the DAO:
5. **Enhances trust**
When prospective members see that a DAO has a process for vetting and onboarding new members, it enhances trust. It shows that the DAO is serious about its work and that it has standards for who can join. This can help attract high-quality members to the DAO.

6. **Helps avoid bad actors**
By gatekeeping, a DAO can help avoid bad actors. By vetting new members and ensuring that they are aligned with the goals of the DAO, you can help protect the DAO from those who might try to harm it.


7. **Increases accountability**
When members know that they will be held accountable for their actions, they are more likely to act responsibly. Through gatekeeping, a DAO can help increase accountability among its members. This can lead to better decision-making and a higher level of trust within the DAO.

#### Drawbacks of gatekeeping a DAO
Let's say a DAO is using gatekeeping to control access to its resources. This may seem like a good idea at first, but it can lead to a number of problems.

1. **Gatekeeping can also be abused**
In some cases, gatekeepers may use their power to control access to resources in order to benefit themselves or their allies at the expense of the DAO. For example, a gatekeeper may approve projects that are not in the best interest of the DAO or deny access to information that would be helpful to the DAO as a whole.


2. **Gatekeeping can also make it difficult for new members to get involved**
In a gated DAO, new members may have difficulty getting access to the resources. This is because gatekeepers have the power to decide who has access to what resources and information, and they may be reluctant to give new members access to the resources and information they need in order to be effective.


3. **Gatekeeping can also lead to conflict**
When gatekeepers control who has access to resources and information, it can lead to conflict within a DAO. For example, if members feel that they are being unfairly excluded from decision-making or that their projects are not being given a fair chance, this can create tension and division within the DAO.


4. **Gatekeeping can also make it difficult to change direction**
If a DAO is using gatekeeping to control access to its resources, it can be difficult for the DAO to change direction. This is because gatekeepers may be resistant to change and may block attempts to modify the gating process.

#### Conclusion: Should you gatekeep your DAO?


There is no right or wrong answer to this question. It depends on the specific needs and goals of your DAO.

Not all DAOs use gatekeeping. Some DAOs believe that it is important to have an open and inclusive community and that gatekeeping can be used to exclude people unfairly. They may choose instead to use other methods of controlling access to resources and decision-making, such as role-based permissions or multi-signature requirements.

If you decide that you do want to gatekeep your DAO, it's important to be aware of the potential drawbacks and challenges associated with gatekeeping. You should also put in place systems and processes that will help to prevent abuse by gatekeepers.

#### How can DaoLens help?

DAOLens’ onboarding product can help DAOs increase their gating capabilities on two dimensions. Firstly, add layers of gating such as interview, task, and reputation based gating. This is in addition to token-based gating that is currently prevalent (and enabled by tools like Collabland)

This can be done through our **custom self-serve screen**. This tool also allows community admins to create branching onboarding processes that would culminate in different gatekeeping mechanisms. For example, if a DAO is looking to hire skilled traders/investors for its treasury, the final gatekeeping mechanism could be either a questionnaire querying the individual’s most successful trades and/or outlook on the market at that time-a tool that calculates that individual’s lifetime on-chain trading profits is also possible,. Alternatively, if a community wants to onboard someone to create relatively easy to execute code, they could have an automated gatekeeping mechanism on the basis of a ‘badge’ that demonstrates a requisite level of coding skill. 









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What is DAO gating? When is it applicable? 

Gatekeeping in DAOs is similar to that in any other exclusive or selective organization-the mechanisms and criteria through which members are allowed in. 

This piece shall explore what the concept means for DAOs, where and why it is needed, and what the potential drawbacks can be. 

Things to know about your new members.

Onboarding new employees in Web2 can be a daunting task. You would need to know everything about the on-border, from their work experience, favorite color, and how they take their coffee to their strengths and weaknesses. Knowing this information can help you form a better connection with the new hire and help them feel more comfortable in their new role. It is easy to acquire such information in Web2.

But gathering this kind of information about new on-boarders can be a challenging task for a DAO admin. If you have played the game 'Among Us,' you would know that one of the impostors' goals is to eliminate all the other players and prevent them from completing their tasks. The impostor's job is to make it seem like they are just like everyone else when in reality, they are not.

Let's say as a DAO admin or a pod owner; you have been waiting to find the designers who could help you make your presentation. Someone walks into the server with the name rollingman007, and they don't have a profile picture. Rollingman spends time across the server, doesn't feel like doing anything, and mutes the server mostly because they didn't find something interesting. Now imagine you find out after a month that Rolling man is the person you have been looking for all these days, but now he has muted and has become dormant.

For a DAO admin, it can be challenging to know who they are onboarding and their intentions. So how can a DAO admin be sure that the new on-border is not an impostor?

We have compiled a list of actionable items to help you get new on-borders and avoid a similar situation with the next rollingman007 in your DAO.

1. **How much do they know?**

The first question to ask anyone is whether they are even acquainted with the lexicon. Remember, 99% of the world is waiting for the processes to get simple and less daunting. So, if someone is joining your DAO and doesn't even understand the terms used in the space, it is a red flag.

It is, therefore, ideal to create a central repository in the form of a wiki that can help new on-boarders understand the terms used in your DAO. This will also help you keep track of the questions they are asking and what they are trying to understand.

Your repository can include information like:

Processes and ways to contribute to your DAO
A list of all available projects and skills required for each
Tutorials and guidelines on how to submit and vote proposals.

2. **A system of well-defined, hand-held journeys**
The onboarding process should allow the DAO admin to gather all the necessary information about the new on-border. The DAO admin can verify the skills and qualifications of the new on-border and identify what role the new on-boarder can play in the DAO.

Based on the on-boarder's skillset, they can be asked to jump on a call, while some DAOs would need proof that they have tokens, and some may ask the on-boarder to show proof of work, while others may ask them to submit a work for entry. It is, therefore, essential to have a well-defined process for onboarding new members.


3. **Setup context-building calls**
Joining a DAO can sometimes be overwhelming and a constant struggle to keep up with all the information. One way to help ease this transition is by having 1:1 connections between new members and more experienced members of the DAO.

This could take the form of:

**Mentor or buddy system**

We have all been new to something at some point in our lives. And most of us have had someone help us through that transition. That's what a mentor or buddy system seeks to do in a DAO context. New members are paired up with more experienced members who can help them navigate the DAO landscape. This could be done on an ad-hoc basis or as part of a more formalized program.


**Cohort-based onboarding**


Another way to facilitate 1:1 connections is through cohort-based onboarding. In this model, new members are grouped together and accomplish projects or tasks. This is a great way to build relationships and trust within the cohort, which can then be extended to the larger DAO community. This type of onboarding can also help new members feel like they are part of something larger and that their contributions are valuable.



**Checklists**


Each new member could be given a task checklist. This is a list of things that need to be done to become an active member of the DAO, like introducing themselves, joining a community call, completing a bounty, or messaging a contributor. The benefit of this approach is that it allows new members to move at their own pace and see their progress as they complete each task. This can help to build confidence and a sense of accomplishment. Checklists can also be an excellent way for more experienced members to see what new members are working on and where they might need help.


While these may not be the fastest ways to initially grow a community, they can help to ensure that the community is built on a foundation of trust and mutual respect, which is essential for any DAO to function. It is vital to ensure that new members feel supported and have someone they can rely on during their onboarding experience.


4. **Status of Onboarding**
When someone is onboarding, the admins don't have access to analyze which on boarders have gone through how much onboarding and context building. This proves to be a challenge as admins wouldn't know at what stage the onboarder is ready to be an active member.

Wouldn’t it be magical if we could come to know that an onboarded has done 80% of their onboarding already so that the admin can reach out to them at the right time, not too early, not too late?

Similar to how Docsend tells you who spends how much time on which slide in your deck, this information gives the admin the power to see what an onboarder is doing and how much progress they have made. It would help the admin understand where an onboarding process is lacking so they can address it.


5. **Role Assignment**
Most DAOs fail to send people where they belong. The methods of allocating people to the right servers are highly inefficient. For example, people joining must simply click on an emoji to unlock access.


It should be easier to allocate roles based on interests and skills so that everyone can join the right servers and get started without friction. And you can easily do this with DaoLens. For example, if an onboarder is interested in product marketing and fulfils the right requirement, they should be automatically added to the right server.


This is a key step to avoid people becoming frustrated by not having enough context or feeling lost in the process.

6. **Activation**
New Members are only useful if they contribute. If everyone shoots for the 10k bounty, most people will not succeed. So DAOs should have some low-hanging fruits for newcomers to claim.


Newcomers should have some quick wins - something they can do in the first few hours or days that gets them some results and, ideally, some feedback from the community. This could be as simple as fixing a typo or reporting a bug. The key is to make sure that the task is small enough to be completed quickly and doesn't require a deep knowledge of the project.

This will get them through the imposter syndrome hill and give them a sense of accomplishment. From there, it will be much easier to involve them in more complex tasks.


7. **Post-Activation Context Setup**
Even after activation, there's a lot that a newcomer needs to do.  For example, in Web2, mostly a walkthrough of the projects, an overview of the tech stack being used, what the roadmap looks like, and how they can get involved gives a newcomer an idea of the objectives and expectations. These can be in the form of KPIs (key performance indicators) and OKRs (objective key results).

Similarly, a DAO needs to provide newcomers with an overview of the project, what is being worked on, how they can get involved, and what the objectives and expectations are. This post-activation context setup is essential to help newcomers feel like they're part of the team and to avoid them feeling lost or left out.


8. **Keeping track of performers through dashboards**
In a DAO, it is important to keep track of the performance of the new on-boarder. This can be done by having a system wherein the new on-boarder is required to submit reports of their work regularly. The DAO admin can compile and track these reports through a dashboard.


For example, if all the new on-boarders who have been given access to the programming projects of the DAO are not performing well, it could indicate that there is something wrong with how the projects are being managed. Or that an on-boarder might need some additional sources to help them with the project.


This level of management enables a DAO admin to have a system of accountability in place to ensure that the new on-boarders are held accountable for their work. This system can be in the form of a review process wherein the new on-boarders are required to submit reports of their work on a regular basis. These reports can be reviewed by the DAO admin and other members of the DAO.


The review process can help the DAO admin identify which new on-boarders are not meeting the expectations of the DAO and take corrective action. It also allows the members of the DAO to provide feedback to the new on-boarders about their work.


9. **Pod by Pod View**
While it is crucial to track contributors, it is equally important to examine if certain pods have best practices that result in higher average participation or activation. For example, if a particular pod is struggling to get any involvement, it might be a good idea to take a closer look at what they are doing differently.

With a trackable system like DaoLens, you can effectively monitor the progress at the pod or role level and decide where you need to put more effort internally in the org. This pod-by-pod analysis can help the DAO admin identify the issues that need to be addressed to improve the DAO's overall performance. It can also help the DAO admin identify which pods are performing well and replicate their practices in other pods.


10 Bonus: **On-chain reputation**
While the onboarding and review processes can help the DAO admin identify which new on-boarders are not meeting the expectations of the DAO, they cannot always be relied upon. This is because the time taken by one on-boarder to complete a task might be different from the time taken by another on-boarder to complete the same task.


This is where on-chain reputation comes in. On-chain reputation is a system wherein the new on-boarders are required to accumulate points or tokens in order to build up their reputation. The points or tokens can be given to them by other members of the DAO based on the quality of their work.

This on-chain reputation system allows the DAO members to rate the new on-boarders based on their work. It also allows the new on-boarders to see how they are faring in comparison to other new on-boarders. The on-chain reputation system can be used by the DAO admin to identify which new on-boarders are not meeting the expectations of the DAO and take corrective action.

It also allows the new on-boarders to be aware of their standing in the DAO and motivates them to improve their work to earn more points or tokens.

So, how can DAO admins take advantage?
Like other organizations, DAO admins need to know their new on-boarders to manage them well. And to get to know them, they must ask the right questions at the right time.

The crux of it all lies in an effective onboarding process. By getting to know your new team members and understanding their preferences, you can set them up for success in your DAO.

At DaoLens we help DAOs with their onboarding experiences by providing an easy way for new members to join and participate in the community. We also offer a variety of resources to help DAOs with their onboarding processes. If you're a DAO admin or member, contact us!

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What should you know about your new on-boarders? 

Read to find out if you are making these mistakes that is putting your DAO at risk.

We'll talk about the reasons behind DAO failure and how to prevent/mitigate it, Whether you're thinking about starting a DAO or are already a member of the ecosystem. Despite being founded with the intention of creating a long-lasting, sustainable community and culture, some DAOs have lost their impetus and eventually fallen apart.


#### What causes the creation of a DAO?


The motivation for starting a DAO can differ from person to person, but the fundamental motive is to build a community, or a collection of people working together on a shared goal with decentralized control, transparency, autonomy, and flexibility.


#### How can the reason for the creation be the reason for failure too?

The cause for the creation can frequently be the reason for failure, i.e., if a DAO is veering slightly from its original mission and vision or the web3 ethos, its members can either voice their concerns or leave. In the context of DAOs, voice or exit might have the following forms: Voice- Make suggestions or reform the DAO internally. Exit- Leave to start a new DAO or join one that has the same values.

The DAO may develop or disintegrate depending on the decisions that community members make. Along with the expansion of the community, the DAO's common principles and goals need to grow stronger. The lack of communication in the community is a clear sign that the DAO is losing steam.


#### What are the different ways in which people will eventually stop participating?


Goal-directed processes and communal cognition go in hand with DAOs. A DAO participant currently typically contributes to two or more DAOs. People leave DAOs for a variety of reasons, but the fundamental ones include misalignment of values, lack of awareness, and poor infrastructure.

- **Misalignment of values:** Misaligned values between a DAO's administration and members can have a variety of effects on the DAO as a whole. First of all, it could cause disputes among the participants. It can also lead to a significant PR crisis, which could have second-order implications such as losing momentum and being unable to recover the PR. Last but not least, it might foster an atmosphere where people are uninspired to give the community their best efforts. In the end, this might result in more members leaving the DAO.


- **Lack of Awareness:** A lack of awareness is one of the many reasons why DAO members may depart. For instance, if Members are not notified of upcoming changes or projects, they may feel alienated from the DAO. If members don't feel free to voice their opinions or problems, they might think the DAO doesn't value them or that their work isn't appreciated and might just exit.


- **Poor Infrastructure:** When a DAO does not have a solid infrastructure or an effective onboarding procedure in place, it finds it challenging to connect with its members and contributors. A DAO often needs that its members operate remotely. Additionally, the DAO can struggle to give its contributors the tools and information they require to accomplish their duties well.


One of the above two might be the trigger of the inflection point for a potential downward spiral for the DAO if actions are not taken. People don’t lose trust until they are given a reason to, that’s why preserving the collective cognition of the DAO can significantly improve the odds of exit.

A deeper discussion what are the signs of a healthy community when it comes to engagement and participation? Are discussions on every topic good?

There is no one answer to this question, as every community is different and what works for one may not work for another. However, some signs that a community is healthy when it comes to engagement and participation include regular and lively discussions on a variety of topics, a diversity of voices taking part in the conversations, and a generally respectful atmosphere. Additionally, a healthy community will likely have a system in place for handling disagreements and conflict in a constructive way.


#### How can community members be involved in things from DAO management to governance?

Community members can be involved in DAO management and governance by participating in Online forum discussions, Alpha Testing, and voting on proposals. They can also join DAO’s working group and committees to help make decisions about how the DAO should be run.


At any stage in its existence, a DAO's main aim is to ensure that all community voices are heard. If this goal is not achieved, the DAO's members are most likely to leave.


One such story of the split up of the community is between Uniswap and 0x; In mid-2017, a group of developers launched a project called Uniswap. It was a decentralized exchange (DEX) that allowed users to trade Ethereum-based tokens directly with each other, without the need for a centralized exchange. The project quickly gained popularity, and by early 2018, it was processing around $1 million worth of trades per day.

However, in May 2018, a group of developers split off from the Uniswap project to launch a competing DEX called 0x. This caused a major rift in the community and led to a dramatic drop in trading volume on Uniswap. In the months that followed, the two projects competed against each other for users.


These kinds of occurrences frequently occur in the crypto-verse; if voices are not heard, members leave. Similar to this, Vitalik Buterin met with the mastercoin team in 2013 and suggested some features. Later, he sent the team a proposal to make their protocol more generalized and support more types of contracts. Despite the fact that Vitalik's suggestion to enhance master coins two-party smart contract isn't exactly what today's Ethereum is doing, the team wasn't willing to abandon everything they had been working on to take a new direction. When Vitalik presented his idea to the mastercoin team, he was certain it was the best option for the protocol. Later, in December of the same year, he refined it and turned it into an early version Ethereum.


#### What differentiates a DAO from other DAOs doing the same thing?


A DAO can set itself apart from competitors by streamlining, simplifying, and eliminating fiction from the process. The actions listed below can be taken to set one DAO apart from other DAOs doing the same thing:

**Amplifying signal over noise**: A weekly newsletter summarising the debates and the DAO's progress can encourage more participation from all of the DAO's participants than having each one go through the group's or server's whole backlog of messages. As a result of being informed, members feel a sense of ownership in the community, which enhances communication.


 **Incentivising participation & frictionless involvement**: Several strategies exist to encourage participation in a DAO and make it frictionless:
 
 
 **Offer social status or acknowledgment for involvement**: This can entail displaying people on a leaderboard or awarding them with unique badges or titles that demonstrate their level of participation.
- Provide incentives for participation. This could take the shape of swag, points, or tokens.
- Provide unique access to features or material. This can entail granting users early access to brand-new features or offering them access to premium materials or resources.


 **Make involvement simple and practical**: This could entail offering people support to get them started or supplying tools and resources that make it simple to get started.
 
**Virtual events**: A virtual event on Zoom may be hosted for almost nothing. Holding regular events on a quarterly or monthly basis to discuss key issues and recognize modest victories will ensure that the community is prospering and that everyone is on the same page.

** Everything to make sure voices are heard:** One way to ensure that voices are heard in a DAO is to have a voting system in place where all members of the DAO can participate. This is to ensure that voices are heard and to have a system in place where all members of the DAO can submit proposals and debate the merits of each proposal.

#### How can gatekeeping be included to ensure a higher quality of users enters the community?

What is considered to be a "high quality" user varies depending on the community? However, some possible ways to include gatekeeping in order to ensure higher quality users enter the community could include having a moderator or group of moderators who approve new users before they are allowed to join, setting up a system where new users must complete certain tasks or earn a certain amount of points before they are granted full access to the community, or requiring new users to submit a short application or questionnaire that can be reviewed by the community before they are allowed to join.

Since the aforementioned remark goes against the web3 ethos, it might be argued that it should not be taken literally. Therefore, if you are creating a DAO for DevRels, there is no need for legal or sales representatives to be present in the community. It doesn't improve the DAO in any way. This should be interpreted as an enhancing signal over the noise process.


#### The structure should identify things that could go wrong, and then prove actionable solutions.


The most important action to take when seeking to turn early momentum into hockey stick growth is probably making the DAO experience effortless. Maintaining DAO's collective consciousness, which encourages the development of a self-sustaining society bound by a Mission, might be able to correct most errors. Any DAO or all DAO, regardless of their vision and objective, might be said to be striving to unify the collective consciousness, which is the holy grail that we are pursuing.

Traditional businesses often have limited stakeholders and a hierarchical structure that complies with corporate law when people get together to work on a mission. This is not the case in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which are rapidly evolving. Here are some steps you may take to ensure your DAO reaches the uni-mind state in order to thrive in the environment: -

- Making the DAO experience smooth and easier.
- The Unimind's (DAO) mission and ideals are crystal clear for potential new members.
- A strong communication channel with little noise lets members knows how the community is doing.
- Encouraging DAO participants to participate in discussions.
- Ensuring that voices are heard and that communal consciousness is balanced.
- To lessen churn, implement gatekeeping in your DAO.

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 What would kill your DAO?

Read to find out if you are making these mistakes that is putting your DAO at risk

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The DAO ecosystem is a cornucopia of innovation that is still nascent but burgeoning exponentially: in scale, complexity, and scope. Before the advent of configurable and no-code DAO tools in 2018, there were a scant number of DAOs-around a few dozen. As of today, there are more than 2000 DAOs with a sizeable treasury.

A fundamental pillar of Web3, DAOs have the potential to upend the very first principles upon which we build the organizational frameworks that accomplish humanity’s most complex and ambitious endeavours. 

In this report, we shall elucidate upon fundamental principles about DAOs, including the basics on what a DAO is, what one’s salient characteristics are, and how and why the ecosystem has seen a Cambrian explosion over the last few years. In addition to discussing challenges for the broader ecosystem, we also glean novel and tangible economic value propositions that DAOs provide from their first principle characteristics, aspects often overlooked in the space. Finally, we end the section with a conversation with EarthFund DAO, a DAO working on utilizing Web3 to help environmental ventures across the world.

If you are acquainted with the fundamental factors in the space, we recommend that you skip to the section on governance. In this section, we discuss governance from a first principles perspective, anchoring our discussion of the steps required to grow the ecosystem within a macro historical and socio-economic context. We then discuss specific means through which governance is undertaken in the ecosystem, a facet of DAOs that enables a sandbox for socio-political experimentation. We also posit theoretical frameworks to solve some of the most foundational issues that need to be addressed for the ecosystem to reach its potential in the years to come. 

Finally, we delineate a case study on Proof Of Humanity, an organization that is imperative to solving Sybil attacks, a point of weakness which undermines the very purpose of DAOs as a whole.

**To view the full report, [click here](https://www.daolens.com/content?modal=open)**

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Governance - Magnified by DaoLens

This issue of Magnified offers insights, analysis and perspectives into the current DAO Governance landscape and provides tools and theoretical frameworks for solving the most pressing issues faced by DAOs today

Alpha on the DAO ecosystem is often hard to find. 
We provide it directly to your mailbox. 