The crypto space keeps providing a ton of innovation year after year, with corresponding opportunities for huge financial gains for those with the ability to spot the emerging trends and the time and interest to get involved early on.
The first famous DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) was actually called “The DAO”, and it blew up spectacularly due to a hack, which almost spelled the end of Ethereum (in fact it resulted in a hard fork of that chain). The crypto space has matured quite a bit since 2016 though, and it is now the time for a resurgence of the DAO idea.
This post will keep getting updated as I learn more about DAOs and experience being part of them myself.
When people ask me how they should learn about DeFi, I tell them to load up an account with some money and starting playing.
The reasons:
1. IMO, there is no better teacher than getting ur hands dirty
2. It pays to be a testerA thread about the top airdrops of the past yr 👇
— Nick Chong (@n2ckchong) January 26, 2021
2021 Resurgence of DAOs
NFTs were probably the hottest topic of 2021, but DAOs probably come in a close second. They are actually quite connected, as several DAOs were formed for the main purpose of group funding the purchase and custody of top NFT pieces.
DAOs are closely connected to programmable blockchains, and as such are a direct result of the emergence of the first successful blockchain of this type – Ethereum. The aim of such organizations is to keep the power and rewards decentralized so that everyone has a say in the future of the organization (governance) as well as reaping the rewards of success (through tokens).
With that basic definition in place, there are several different types of DAOs that we should be aware of.
If you want to understand at a deeper level how DAOs operate and what tools they use, read this post about DAO tooling. Here’s another good DAO Tech Stack 101 article.
Social Tokens and Web3
DAOs are part of Web3, and social tokens are an essential part of Web3 as well. In fact we can define some DAOs as social DAOs. This is probably the type I’m most interested in at the moment, together with holding DAOs like NounsDAO, HeadDAO, Fingerprints DAO and Flamingo DAO which exist for the main purpose of collecting NFT art. of DAO I might branch this into a separate post, but for now, here’s what you need to know. Social tokens are a great tool to coordinate contributors’ work, more than to incentivize them.
With social tokens, you can easily:
- Set up governance power & allow only certain people to vote on proposals(Snapshot)
- Token-gate channels at scale without having to update it or do it manually
- Use software such as Collab.Land or Guild.xyz to send tips
- Pay your contributors easily with Coordinape
- Create liquidity mining programs & leverage the power of vesting schedule
Here’s the general idea comparing Web1 with Web2 and now Web3. DAOs and social tokens belong to Web3:
Cycle of Creator economy👇
Web1:
Companies create content.
Companies earn money.
Web2:
People create content.
Companies earn money.
Web3:
People create content.
People earn money.— Tarique Sha (@kissingsky) August 19, 2021
Here are a few social DAOs that I follow and that have been really successful so far:
