DAOs: Social networks that can rewire the world
Exploring the new world of decentralized autonomous organizations
Around the Block from Coinbase Ventures sheds light on key trends in crypto. Written by Justin Mart & Connor Dempsey.
What the internet did for communication, DAOs can do for capital.
The internet and social networks have made it easier for like minded individuals to communicate than ever before, regardless of geographic location. The advent of digitally native money and finance have now enabled a new kind of social network that allows for like minded individuals to not just communicate, but also coordinate around capital. As with their predecessors, these new networks are unconstrained by geographic borders, capable of forming at massive scale or across a small number of select participants.
The most optimistic thinkers believe that decentralized autonomous organizations can reinvent how humans organize and eventually eclipse the size and scope of the world’s largest corporations and even nation-states.
In this edition of Around The Block, we explore the current DAO landscape and big questions surrounding their future.
What is a DAO?
Simply put, DAOs are software enabled organizations. They allow people to pool resources toward a common goal and share in value creation when those goals are achieved.
Just as the LLC (limited liability corporation) was the preferred organizing primitive of the industrial revolution, DAOs can be the same for Web3. Where corporations are rooted in the legacy financial system and organized through legal contracts, DAOs run on top of open blockchain networks like Ethereum, organized by tokens with their rules encoded in smart contracts.
DAOs aren’t tied to a physical location, which allows them to mobilize quickly and attract talent from all over the world — a notion that was on full display when the ConstitutionDAO recently raised over $40M from 17,000 contributors in less than a week in a failed bid to buy one of the original copies of the US constitution.
But DAOs can do so much more than mobilize internet friends to collectively bid on historic documents — they can transform how we organize any manner of economic activity.
What do DAOs do?
There are already over 180 DAOs (tracked by deepdao.io) with $10B+ in assets under management and nearly 2 million members. These range from DAOs that help manage some of the largest protocols in crypto, to smaller DAOs organized around investment, social communities, media, and philanthropic pursuits.
Protocol DAOs
Ethereum led to an explosion of new crypto assets. From there, developers created protocols that let people trade and lend these new assets (like Uniswap, Compound, and Aave). However these protocols were intended to be decentralized, which created a need to figure out how to govern their growth and evolution.
Rather than put every key decision in the hands of a small team of developers, protocol DAOs emerged as a way to give a protocol’s users a collective say in its future direction. Typically, users are issued governance tokens, often directly based on past usage and contributions, that convey voting rights. Any user can propose ways to improve the project, and token holders can vote on whether or not the developers should move forward with the proposal. More tokens = more voting power.
For example, Uniswap token holders are currently voting on which layer 2 networks the decentralized exchange protocol should be deployed on. Token holders also propose and vote on anything from marketing initiatives to how Uniswap’s $2B+ treasury should be managed.
Governance tokens align the community around the future success of the protocol, as they should appreciate in value as the protocol grows — or fall should it fail.
As of December 7th, the largest protocol DAOs by AUM are Uniswap, Lido, Radicle*, Compound,* Olympus, and Aave.
Investment / Collector DAOs
The second largest category is investment and collector DAOs. These let people pool capital with the aim of investing in specific assets. They range from venture investments in things like DeFi protocols or NFTs, to increasingly ambitious efforts like buying rare historic documents or even professional sports franchises.
Similar to other forms of crypto crowdfunding, these DAOs offer a fast and simple means of capital formation when compared to costly and complex legal setups associated with a typical venture capital fund. These funds are also more transparent than traditional venture funds, since members can audit all transactions on chain.
PleasrDAO, MetaCartel Ventures, Flamingo, Komerabi, are all great examples of DAOs pooling resources, collectively making investment decisions, and sharing in the upside when those investments appreciate. In a similar vein, Syndicate* is a project building a suite of tools that let anyone easily spin up their own investment DAO.
Social DAOs
Social DAOs intend to bring like minded people together in online communities, coordinated around a token. The leading example is Friends With Benefits and its $FWB token. To join, members must submit an application and acquire 75 FWB tokens. Entry comes with access to a community full of prominent crypto builders, artists, and creatives as well as exclusive events.
By organizing around a token, members have the incentive to create a valuable community — share insights, host meetups and throw great parties etc. For example, as more people understood the benefits of joining the FWB community, the token appreciated in lockstep, sending the $FWB price from $10 to $75 and therefore membership cost from around $750 to around $6,000.
Other social DAOs use NFTs as the mechanism for unlocking access to a broader community. Owning a Bored Ape NFT for example, unlocks access to the Bored Ape Yacht Club discord, events, NFT airdrops, and merchandise. In this case, the perceived value of the community drives value to the collection of NFTs.
This category of DAOs are all still in their infancy and it will take time to learn which models work and which don’t, but the rapid rise of these communities suggest that they represent a powerful new powerful form of social organization.
Service DAOs
Service DAOs look like online talent agencies that bring strangers together from all over the world to build products and services. Perspective clients can issue bounties for specific tasks and once completed, pay the DAO treasury a portion of the fees before rewarding individual contributors. Contributors also typically receive governance tokens that convey ownership in the DAO.
Most of the early service DAOs, like DxDAO