This Week in DAOs - July 22, 2021
Boardroom's Ideation Tool, Sushi's Treasury Diversification, DAO-to-DAO Loans, OpenLaw's Tribute DAO, and Radicle Orgs
This week in DAOs features a new feature from Boardroom, a fascinating discussion in the SushiSwap forum, the first DAO-to-DAO loan, and a couple new tools for DAOs.
If you want to get involved in Stateless - a community-driven resource covering digital and distributed organizations and their governance - or are interested in learning more about Boardroom, reply here or join our Discord. We’d love to hear from you.
📊 This Week’s Stats
Source: Boardroom Screener
Ecosystem Overview - July 22, 2021:
💰 $6.17 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 140,934 ballots ever 🗳️
👥 40,008 unique voters ever 👥
✍️ 5,739 proposals ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 3200 ballots cast on 45 different proposals 🗳️
👥 1557 unique voters 👥
🌐 16 projects with active voters 🌐
✍️ 26 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
Boardroom’s Ideation Feature
Last week, we hinted that Shapeshift’s DAO is the first project to try out Boardroom’s new Ideation feature.
We wanted to tell you a bit more about this exciting new tool for DAO governance.
Built on Ceramic, Ideation allows DAO members to suggest, discuss, and pressure test ideas in a collaborative, censorship-resistant, and fully decentralized way.
While the actual process of voting is an important part of governance, the social interactions and collaborations that precede it are vital to adding context, gaining support, and more. With Boardroom’s Ideation tool, DAOs can participate in token-weighted and context-rich discussions tied to Ceramic’s robust IDX reputation protocol.
With IDX, a user's history of on-chain and off-chain transactions - across multiple wallets - aggregate into a unified, cross-platform reputation which can be used everywhere across the Web3 ecosystem. Participating in governance discussions on Boardroom as an individual means building a reputation that can be leveraged, for example, to gain delegation power (for projects that support it); while, on a organizational level, it means collaboration in a more crypto-native and productive manner.
We're excited to see how projects use this new tool to help prioritize and evaluate governance actions. If you're interested in using this tool for your DAO, join our Discord.
MakerDAO Completes its (Re-)Decentralization
On Tuesday this week, Rune Christensen - MakerDAO founder and current Maker Foundation CEO - announced that MakerDAO is now “completely decentralized.” Concluding the re-decentralization process that started in March 2020 when control of the MKR token contract was handed over to MakerDAO governance (i.e. $MKR holders), the Maker Foundation is now officially dissolving.
Christensen’s announcement marks a historical moment for both the Maker community and DAOs in general, given MakerDAO’s leadership in the ecosystem. The blog post linked below details Maker’s journey from a DAO to a foundation and back to a DAO:
Checking in on Sushi
Arguably the most splashy news story in decentralized governance this past week has been SushiSwap’s strategic treasury diversification and the debate it has spurred.
We mentioned this story last week as an example of how VCs will begin to interact more frequently with DAOs. Following the post we highlighted by Amy Wu from Lightspeed, several other VC’s hopped in the forum to go back and forth with the SushiSwap community. In the process, everything about the deal has been put on the table, including: abandoning the discount, paying a premium, resizing the raise, and more. If you’re interested (and have a few hours…), check out the entire 300+ post thread here.
A wide-ranging list of proposals have been put forward for a Temperature Check vote on SushiSimp. If you hold $SUSHI, go vote:
DAO-to-DAO Loans
We like to highlight examples of DAO-to-DAO “business development” in this newsletter.
This week, the first DAO-to-DAO loan was provided from Iron Bank to PleasrDAO.
PleasrDAO transferred four of its Foundation NFTs to a multisig controlled by the PleasrDAO multisig, C.R.E.A.M. Finance multisig and Yearn Deployer, which will act as collateral for a $3.5m loan.
Together, these NFT’s have a purchase price of $10.1m. Following the NFT boom, which spawned several DAOs focused on pooling funds to buy them, it’ll be interesting to see if other groups take advantage of this liquidity solution provided by C.R.E.A.M. Finance and the Iron Bank.
Tribute DAO by OpenLaw
OpenLaw - the blockchain legaltech startup behind the LAO, Flamingo DAO, and more - announced their new Tribute DAO framework, which “aims to make DAO development easier by balancing a more modular design and an optimistic rollup with the security guarantees of Moloch.”
Essentially, OpenLaw has made it easier to modify the Moloch V.1 and V.2 DAO frameworks for a variety of use cases that DAO creators may dream up. They’ve also optimized for integrations with Snapshot for off-chain voting and Collab.land for Discord and Telegram integrations.
Radicle Orgs
Radicle, a decentralized app for code collaboration, announced Radicle Orgs, a decentralized code management tool for DAOs.
Radicle Orgs solve the problem of having centralized control over a project’s Github repository, enabling DAOs to “truly own their code with decentralized admin control and collective governance of codebases.”
By framing DAOs and multi-sigs in the context of code collaboration, Radicle brings decentralized organizations to the mainstream developer, allowing anyone to decentralize control over their codebase in a trust-minimized way.
Stateless by Boardroom is a community-driven resource covering digital and distributed organizations and their governance. If you’re interested in contributing to Stateless, reply here or reach out to us on the Boardroom Discord.