This Week in DAOs - October 14, 2021
MakerDAO's Legal Structure, DAMNs, Coordinape Gift Circles, and Orca Pods
We missed last week but the DAO news didn’t slow down. You know what to do, keep scrolling to get caught up.
Reminder:
Are you a governance enthusiast? Aspiring Delegate? Want to find a way to work for a DAO? Learn more about Boardroom’s Governance Scribe program and apply.
📊 This Week’s Stats
Ecosystem Overview - October 14, 2021:
💰 $9.6 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 253,643 ballots ever 🗳️
👥 62,965 unique voters ever 👥
✍️ 5,854 proposals ever ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 3,888 ballots cast on 83 different proposals 🗳️
👥 2031 unique voters 👥
🌐 28 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 49 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
MakerDAO’s Legal Structure
MakerDAO delegate PaperImperium made waves this week with a post in Maker’s governance forum that called for an assessment of how the DAO should handle the perceived risk that MakerDAO is “likely to be classified as a general partnership” under United States law.
As we’ve discussed in this newsletter in the context of Wyoming’s DAO law, if a DAO is legally considered a general partnership then “any individual member of that organization can be held to account for any other member for (among other things): legal liability, tax burden, [and] business obligations.”
Though there are ways to limit such liability risks - such as individuals establishing an LLC or other incorporated entity through which they interact with a DAO and hold its tokens - PaperImperium is urging MakerDAO as a whole to come up with a strategy for protecting itself in the murky regulatory environment for DAOs in the United States. Doing so, he argues, would enable them to safely do business with highly regulated institutions while protecting individuals in the community.
This is certainly something that many DAOs that are operating in any way in the United States (e.g. have U.S. citizen tokenholders) will have to confront. MakerDAO is among the longest running DeFi projects in existence and it seems they may also be among the first to tackle these thorny legal issues as well. Notably, however, in the MakerDAO thread linked above, a representative from Bankless DAO - @Bauhaus - shared this related proposal circulating in their community.
DAMN: a decentralized autonomous media network
Two weeks ago in this newsletter we discussed Mirror opening up their Crowdfund tool and predicted that this would lead to the creation of new DAOs at a rapid pace. (Note: since then Mirror has opened up their full suite of tools as well.)
One notable crowdfund last week came from Kiran Cherukuri and Gaby Goldberg, raising 25 ETH in exchange for $DAMN tokens.
From their essay which explains what a DAMN is meant to be and pitches the community on the inaugural DAMN they’re raising money for:
The next step-function innovation in consumer crypto will be DAMNs: decentralized autonomous media networks. If DAOs represent the next evolution of the corporation, DAMNs represent the next evolution of networked media.
According to Kiran and Gaby, DAMNs are essentially governance-minimized tokenized networks focused on producing and distributing media with built-in incentives to encourage participation and curation of said media.
If you’re interested in creating a DAMN yourself, check out Kiran’s associated project: Verse.xyz.
Coordinape Makes Gift Circles Available to Public
Coordinape, a project that spun out of Yearn Finance, is focused on building tools for DAO coordination and compensation of DAO contributors.
Gift Circles are a fundamental building block in the Coordinape system, allowing “a group of DAO contributors to decentralize the payment process, identifying each other’s value to the organization to create a compensation map.”
This week, Coordinape announced that Gift Circles are ready for public use after being tested by nearly 50 DAOs and over 1,000 DAO contributors. Fittingly, Coordinape also announced that it is beginning the process of decentralizing itself.
Orca Pods
Similar to Coordinape, Orca Protocol is building solutions for coordination within DAOs.
Last week, Orca rolled out Pods, their answer to the question “How can DAOs scale, while keeping the cost of participation low, work around current issues with on-chain governance and stay organized without compromising on decentralization?”
From their announcement blog:
Pods are small working groups, usually centered around one expertise. In place of—or in addition to—one massive, centralized DAO treasury, each pod has its own multi-sig wallet that is controlled by the pod members. So pods can be thought of as mini-DAOs within a larger DAO. By creating a pod around an expertise, certain elements of a DAO can be hardened. This means that it is possible for a DAO to codify specific roles and responsibilities within its ecosystem; we like to call this process podifying. Podifying a DAO will turn slow and inefficient, centralized and rigid structures into fast and fluid organizations.