This Week in DAOs - September 2, 2021
NounsDAO, SharkDAO, Juicebox Protocol, and Polygon's DAO Announcement
NFTs 🤝 DAOs. Keep scrolling to get caught up on what you need to know from the past week in DAOs.
Reminders:
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📊 This Week’s Stats
Ecosystem Overview - September 2, 2021:
💰 $10.15 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 223,072 ballots ever 🗳️
👥 59,073 unique voters ever 👥
✍️ 5,898 proposals ever ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 2,171 ballots cast on 81 different proposals 🗳️
👥 1,176 unique voters 👥
🌐 25 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 50 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
NounDAO
To say NFTs are hot right now would be an understatement.
According to this Dune Analytics dashboard, popular NFT marketplace OpenSea experienced a record-shattering amount of volume in August: 1,657,229 NFTs were sold for nearly $3.5 billion, with 217,977 users doing at least one transaction.
And that’s just OpenSea!
What does this have to do with DAOs? Lots!
As we at Boardroom like to point out, DAOs are not a trend. They’re an operating system for everything that happens in crypto and the NFT craze is no exception.
One NFT project that has received a lot of attention in recent weeks is Nouns. Everyday, a single Noun NFT - a 32x32 pixel profile picture based on a noun, i.e. people, places, and things - is auctioned off.
That’s where the DAO comes in. The Nouns ecosystem is controlled by NounsDAO. Each Noun NFT constitutes one vote in NounDAO governance - currently based on Compound’s governance framework - and 100% of the ETH paid for Nouns is routed to the NounsDAO treasury. As of 2pm ET on September 2, 2021, the NounsDAO treasury holds 3,691.1022 ETH, worth just shy of $14 million in USD.
One might ask: what is the NounsDAO treasury used for? The answer is that we’re finding out in real time.
The first NounsDAO governance proposal, which passed with a vote of 12 Yes to 0 No, was to donate 5 ETH each to 6 different charities. The second, which also passed 12 Yes to 0 No, was to fund the development of a “a web app to let users create and download custom 3D Nouns.” The third, which has yet to be voted on, is about “making community-driven nouns bidding easier” with better group-buying capabilities.
The significance of NounsDAO is that it is an example of spontaneous, open-ended DAO conception. There is no road-map for Nouns, it is entirely up to Nouns holders via NounsDAO.
When one steps back to think about what a successful DAO needs, a few things come to mind: community buy-in, resources to accomplish its goals, legitimacy (with regards to governance and operations), etc. NounsDAO has it all.
The best part? The Nouns IP is completely open-source. Anybody can spin up a derivative that uses the Nouns project’s combination of NFTS, treasury, and governance features. Only time will tell what kind of cool projects this leads to.
Sharks and Juice Boxes
Already, another DAO has been spun up to take part in the Nouns ecosystem: SharkDAO, a DAO dedicated to buying Nouns.
They own Nouns #2, #5, and #15.
To raise the funds needed to take part in Nouns auctions, SharkDAO is using Juicebox Protocol, a new fundraising platform for community-owned projects. Anybody can contribute to Juicebox fundraising campaigns for projects like SharkDAO and received the project’s tokens in exchange. In addition, those projects receive $JBX tokens, the Juicebox native token that will eventually govern certain aspects of the Juicebox protocol.
In the case of SharkDAO, $SHARK tokens are used to govern SharkDAO and make decisions on how SharkDAO participates in NounsDAO governance. See their inaugural Snapshot vote to establish SharkDAO’s mission statement here.
So, to sum this all up: what appears, on the surface, to be an example of people simply buying NFTs for (extremely) high valuations is also a story about DAOs and governance. A DAO (SharkDAO) is raising money via a community-governed (albeit governance-minimalized) protocol (Juicebox) to gain access to another DAO (NounsDAO).
Polygon’s DAO Announcement
We missed it in last week’s newsletter so we wanted to cover this important news item this week: Polygon announced their intention to launch a DAO, of some kind, to promote the adoption of DeFi and Polygon.
The details are not yet decided but, as one can read more about in the announcement blog linked above, the general idea is to bring together the various DeFi protocols that use Polygon’s PoS chain to promote the DeFi ecosystem.
To join the conversation and contribute to the DAO’s design, visit this forum.
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