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Introduction

Overview​

DAO* (or DAOstar) defines a common interface for DAOs, akin to tokenURI for NFTs, so that DAOs of all shapes and sizes are easier to discover, more legible to their members, and more compatible with future tooling.

Many DAOs already publish their data in various ways. We've standardized these existing best-practices, making it easy for people to create and maintain new DAOs and DAO tooling.

  • [TODO] The objective of building interoperable standards and public infrastructure for DAOs.

Mission​

The mission of DAOstar is to support the long-term success and sustainability of the DAO ecosystem including DAOs, DAO members, and DAO service providers. We aim to do this by

(1) building technical standards for the DAO ecosystem (2) building, organizing, and funding public goods for the DAO ecosystem (3) setting and securing the long-term vision and leadership for the DAO ecosystem, i.e. someone needs to be thinking what DAOs will be doing 10 years down the line

Vision​

The vision of DAOstar is a world where DAOs and other digitally-constituted organizations become the worldwide norm for commercial and community governance. In particular, we envision a world where DAOs organize more assets and production than traditional, legal organizations.

Strategy​

The strategy of DAOstar is focused on growing the DAO ecosystem. Generally, we emphasize long-term growth and impact through standards development and research.

With respect to standards, DAOstar's staff (led by Metagov) makes independent commitments to specific standards based on our strategic evaluation of what the industry needs to grow. In this case, we are making bets on regulatory interoperability (making it easier for DAOs to comply with regulations), on attestations infrastructure (making attestations about DAOs and DAO members more interoperable and discoverable), and on grants management (making it easier for DAOs to get and give grants). We are also working to extend DAO infrastructure and metadata to cover non-crypto use-cases such as open-source communities.

In the short term, we would like to do more to help companies and DAOs survive the downturn by promoting DAO use-cases and organizing reports to investors, though we do not currently have the operational capacity to do this on top of our standards work.

See our roadmap for more

Funding and Sustainablity​

Sustainability is a critical question for both DAOstar and the DAO ecosystem. DAOstar's current funding is largely supported by grants from large L2s (e.g. Optimism, Arbitrum) and by research grants (e.g. from the EU). We were previously funded by a small (~100k USD) co-funding round from Ethereum Foundation, Aragon, Gnosis, Radicle, Metacartel Ventures, NEAR, and Olympus DAO.

About 30% of our budget is spent on EIP-4824 adoption and infrastructure. About 30% of our budget is spent on writing and supporting other standards, typically built on top of EIP-4824. About 20% of our budget is spent on operations (including membership and grant raising). About 20% of our budget is spent on education and events, including the roundtable, newsletters, and workshops.

See Grants & Funding for more.