This Week in DAOs - July 8, 2021
Index Coop's Fundraising, FWB Season 3, Compound Long Term Contributor, Llama's DAO Accounting Standards, and more!
Another week down, another week closer to a DAO-run future. Hard not to get excited as we see communities learn from each other, develop best practices, and make progress towards better distributed governance and DAO operations. Keep scrolling to get caught up with this week’s news.
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📊 This Week’s Stats
Source: Boardroom Screener
Ecosystem Overview - July 8, 2021:
💰 $7.38 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 132,864 ballots 🗳️
👥 38,978 voters 👥
✍️ 5,198 proposals ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 1,825 ballots cast on 43 different proposals 🗳️
👥 1,219 unique voters 👥
🌐 17 projects with active voters 🌐
✍️ 23 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
Index Coop Fundraising
Index Coop - which deservedly receives a lot of mentions in this newsletter for their DAO operations leadership and active governance - announced a strategic treasury diversification which will bring on board a handful of crypto-focused VC firms and wealth management experts.
The Index Cooperative is excited to announce that we have raised $7.75M in a strategic Treasury diversification round led by 1kx and Galaxy Digital. Joining 1kx and Galaxy are 1confirmation, Defiance Capital, Assembly Capital, LD Capital, Wintermute, Laconia Ventures, and former wealth management exec. Phil DiIorio.
Index Coop continues to be a project to watch. In particular, keep an eye on this proposal to form a Metagovernance Committee that will ensure Index leverages its metagovernance powers to their fullest extent.
FWB Season Three
Friends with Benefits is a tokenized social community in which holders of $FWB tokens get access to a variety of cool products, events, and more, all built around the premise of connecting the technology and creative communities.
FWB announced the launch of their Season Three, a period in which the DAO will be focused on improving its operations in order to “achieve real world value.”
Specifically, FWB is creating four teams to address different aspects of their vision:
Editorial - in charge of developing and steering FWB-related media and public facing content.
Product - in charge of building the “suite of digital and physical products that power” FWB.
Membership - in charge of new member onboarding, events, inter-member coordination, and “ensuring FWB remains a place we all continue to call home.”
Treasury - in charge of setting budgets, forecasting growth, managing revenues, and setting financial success metrics.
If you’re interested in learning more and/or joining, check out FWB.help to get the 75 $FWB tokens needed to take part in Season Three and access their thriving Discord channel.
Llama Accounting Standards
Speaking of FWB, Llama - the startup/community focused on treasury management for DAOs - recently released “first ever financial statements prepared for a social token DAO” for FWB.
Llama also put out a request for accountants or other folks interested in building out accounting standards for DAOs:
Compound’s First Long Term Contributor
Compound is currently holding a vote to establish Getty Hill as its first long-term paid contributor.
Over the last 6 months, Hill has led the efforts to improve Compound’s oracle system, motivated by last November’s DAI liquidation event. He is requesting a streaming grant of 500 $COMP a year on an ongoing basis to continue this work.
It is worth keeping an eye on this vote; if it passes, we could see Compound - a pioneer in community governance - compensate additional community members in a similar fashion to oversee other functions.
DAO Vesting by Opyn
Opyn, a DeFi options protocol, introduced the Opyn Developer Kit a couple weeks ago.
Yes, this newsletter is called This Week in DAOs, so we’re a little late to the party but a tweet from this week got our attention:
Opyn’s new tool enables DAOs “to create physically settled vesting options … to emulate options given to startup employees for equity.”
Considering DAOs are refining and maturing their operational and staffing-related practices (e.g. Compound and FWB, among many others), it’s only a matter of time before we see some experimentation with vesting.
API3 DAO
API3, a decentralized API service for Web 3.0, has officially launched its DAO, which will have “full control over the project.”
Below is an excerpt from a previous blog post of theirs explaining why decentralized governance is so important to the project:
[Decentralized governance] is especially critical for oracle solutions because it’s unavoidable for them to have off-chain components (as they integrate the off-chain to the on-chain). These off-chain components make them prone to complete budget intransparency, corruption and fraudulent business practices. Therefore, an oracle solution should be deliberately designed in a way that its off-chain (centrally governed) components submit to its on-chain (decentrally governed) components, and not the other way around. The on-chain, decentralized governance holding the keys to the treasury is the ultimate way of achieving this.
Yet another building block for the DAO-run future that we’re hurdling towards - onward!
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