Solana DAOs and Beyond - GrapeSpaces

[MC] DeanTheMachine - Building on #Solana - @grapeprotocol is here! http://grapes.network & http://discord.gg/greatape

Li Jin - cofounder @VariantFund @AtelierVentures @sidehustlestack @meansofcreation

TheOnlyNom - Chief Intern @MonkeDao, Advisor @frequenCmedia

SimkinStepan - co-founder @squads_dapp, ex @clifford_chance

Sebastian Bor - Engineering at @solana. Building governance and DAO tooling for on-chain communities

Let’s start with Raj’s tweet - Which are the three to happen for DAOs to take off?

G (2:05) - Funding is crucial (No money, ngmi), community belief (has to start centralized and gradually decentralize), and always needs to be a core team to drive milestones and next steps taking feedback from the community (e.g. MonkeDAO is 1700 people impossible to achieve consensus among that many people - one needs a smaller team that reaches consensus and brings it back to the 1700 people).

TheOnlyNom (3:36) - The biggest thing we are dealing with is getting people to actually vote and participate in the governance. Hands-off and successful at the same time not how it works…

Sebastian?

Sebastian (5:21) - Better job on tooling but tooling not enough. DAOs are about people working towards a common goal. Tools without humans not gonna work. DAOs are very different. Hears need that everyone should be involved in the governance but not always necessarily agree that governance is essential in all members - e.g. One who wants to buy $MNGO as an investment same as they would buy APPLE: they believe that people running this will do a good job.

We need tooling but also to structure DAOs in a way that allows to divide and conquer - to have pockets of authority that can manage themselves and that would target the governance apart. Does think that if somebody does not want to vote and does not want to participate, s/he shouldn’t be forced. Trying to engage or get more participation is the wrong problem to solve - we have to think about how to manage DAOs with the people who are actively involved and wanna participate and organize them around leaders.

Stepan?

Stepan (8:05) - Tooling allows to open DAO organizational design to concepts and structures that can be beneficial for issues like participation and scaling. Pockets of authorities are one, but generally creating this environment in which is easy to interact with other DAO members through user-friendly tooling, is super important. Though leadership on governance, setup and management and essentially best practices… Ecosystem maturing will help.

(10:00) - Glad you made the point of Solana being a young ecosystem as opposed to Ethereum where a lot of this discovery has had more time to happen and systems and primitives are more mature. Li, your thoughts?

Li (10:35) - Agrees with Sebastian’s take - the limiting factor is not the tooling but the people. DAOs are communities with shared missions and they have a shared cap table and a shared bank account in order to accomplish that. Thinks the limiting factor for why there aren’t more DAOs it takes a lot of creativity and initiative to define what those missions are and to rally people around them. When there’s a very compelling mission, people will onboard with today’s tooling - ConstitutionDAO huge onboarding event.

Regarding factors preventing DAOs as future of work, thinks same factors that prevent people from freelancing are the same factors keeping people from choosing DAO jobs over corporate jobs.

(13:24) - yeah, it will take time for people to get used to the DAO mentality. ConstitutionDAO good example, and now is the time to come up with grand missions. Li, what do you think is missing for Solana DAOs to catch up with ETH DAOs?

Li (16:38) - DAOs are collections of individuals and are subject to network effects. Right now ETH is the bigger network. 10x more users in ETH than in Solana. As a new DAO founder, the addressable market is larger now in ETH than SOL. Also, these DAOs are buying NFTs and projects - more maturity in ETH as well. Thus DAOs propensity to start on ETH.

(19:18) - Stepan?

Stepan (20:17) - high speed, low fees were the USP that brought us in to build Squads. Joined in May and realised this was a great community to join. All pieces are here (great developers building tooling, users coming in, Chase onboarding, …) and it’s just time and experimentation. Keep building community and tooling!!

(22:43) - Sebastian, what’s missing?

Sebastian (23:30) - Lack of focus. We have built the building blocks, what is missing is a focus. Everyone has a different opinion on DAOs cuz there are many types of DAOs (Trading DAOs, Crowdfunding DAOs, NFT collector DAOs…). Thinks we need to use case-specific tooling for each type of DAO. Regarding the ETH-SOL number gap… Quality is more important than quantity - we need just a few successful DAOs to lead the pack not a lot of them doing nothing (e.g. MANGO has the gravity that pools others into the ecosystem and shows what can be done). Like in the real world there are just a few successful companies, this will be the same with DAOs…

(26:15) - feels that there is a lot of ecosystem knowledge gap (ETH players lot to learn about SOL and vice-versa). Crypt0xG, which are your thoughts as MonkeDAO member?

G (27:42) - agrees with all points made. Sebastian knows our struggles to even have a multi-sig wallet. MonkeDAO is not directly funded on royalties from the original SMB NFT project - SMB allocates part of the royalties to a community wallet and SMB sees MonkeDAO as part of the SMB community (not the SMB community). So if we need to fund ourselves, we need to request funds from the SMB team - e.g. current MonkeDAO incorporation needed a large amount of USDC. MonkeDAO’s treasury management was based on trust at the beginning, now we have multi-sig but this has only been available for 6 weeks, question of time for ecosystem to grow.

Also, ETH is better founded than SOL.

Impressive how long you operated just based on trust

Crypt0xG (29) - we still trust each other - Nom getting wasted in LA is funded by MonkeDAO (JK).

Sebastian (31:18) - thinks monkeDAO is a perfect example that a really strong community and leaders come before tools. Tools can hub them and support them but the tools are not the first thing. The community is first, tools second.

(32:40) - ConstitutionDAO demonstrated the power of contributing to a shared goal and network effects. Do you think is too big to overcome?

G (34:35) - Does not think it’s too big to overcome. ConstitutionDAO did really well is to have people formed around an idea. You see this with the validator idea, the community really rallied around the idea of MonkeDAO running a validator and use the community to help stake to the validator, help breakeven and then become a net positive revenue stream to the DAO.

(37:44) - Metrics that matter on DAOs. Grape focuses on how many of their circulating tokens enter their governance votes, how many members (grape holder = member) enter into a skill force role and decay in the engagement of different cohorts over time (would love to see newer cohorts retaining well). Li, your thoughts on metrics?

Li (39:27) - Thinks it ties back to the mission of the DAO and what the DAO is trying to do. DAO term is like LLC, needs context. If it is a social DAO like FWB or other tokenised communities would be traditional consumer app metrics (DAU, MAU, retention cohorts, user growth, virality coefficient, …), if it is an investment DAO (multiple on invested capital, IRR, …) so not generic answer.

(41:17) - Crypt0xG?

G (41:56) - fun to watch community vibe in relation to SMB’s floor price - when the price ↑ we see new influx on members when price ↓ people down. We need to think forward and see how we can increase the MonkeDAO member cap above 5K.

(44) - Sebastian?

Sebastian - behind you in terms of measurement. Agrees. # active members important cuz if not graveyards. Also income is important in case is a production/investment oriented DAO.

(48) - Stepan?

Stepan - In case of NFT based governance, measuring participation - meeting quorum? # members participating? Now that more complex governance structures can be implemented with Squads, it will be interesting to see how fast decisions are made.

(51:12) - Let’s finalise commenting on what excites us on 2022 around DAOs. He is personally interested in reputation ledger and NFTs that are not transferrable. Thinks is gonna be a space with a lot of experimentation. Li, what excites you around DAOs in 2022?

Li (51:43) - experimentation with governance models - reputation-based governance, more subDAOs or pods emerging successfully…

(53) - Nom, G?

Nom - improving incentivisation tooling (e.g. automatic rewards for putting out proposals, generating memes, …)

G - wants to see people getting paid. DAOs that are able to settle proper jobs (Insurance, 401Ks…)

(55) - Sebastian?

Sebastian - Excited between on-chain real world crossing - e.g. Friends and Family DAO experimenting with the legal framework in UK. Trying to get a lot of talent into this work, cuz thinks that would be brilliant for contractors and other free minds. But they are hesitant cuz legal uncertainty and such, thus Mixing DAOs with IRL very important. Of course really excited about Realms and its roadmap. Looking forward to working with Grape, Squads… Expects to see a few really successful DAOs to come in 2022 (#GonnaMakeIt!).

(58) - Stepan?

Stepan - Squad almost in mainnet, check it out!!! More governance consultants show space maturing fast. Innovation and experimentation are exciting.

Written on February 7, 2022