You're reading State of the DAOs, the high-signal low-noise newsletter for understanding DAOs.
State of the DAOs has been discussing DAO tooling since its inception in 2021, and nearly every issue has touched on it in some respect. Why? Because DAO tooling is one of the most challenging aspects of starting, running, and growing a DAO. If coordination is our goal, the tools we use are the means to get there.
Many DAOs have relied on the incumbents to get work done, these tried and tested tools like Snapshot, Sesh, Coordinape, Collab-Land, and Safe. DAOs that do their work on chain tend to use AragonOS or Compound’s Governor Bravo with Boardroom, and some are trying other tooling by Commonwealth and others. Of course these tools have many upstart competitors, but the piecemeal approach to tooling, combined with the immutable nature of the blockchain, has made it so the DAO tooling conversation continues, in nearly every corner of the cryptoverse.
Aragon is the OG DAO tooling platform, helping communities build together since late 2016. This year, they released what may be their most ambitious offering yet - AragonOSx. With this new release, Aragon is bringing flexibly to DAO governance and operations, but more importantly, a mindset that says DAOs work best when they are mutable - that is, when they can respond to changes within the DAO and the ecosystem.
In this issue, Samantha Marin, a BanklessDAO alumni and an emerging leader at Aragon, provides us with the details of this new DAO OS. As she writes "No one can predict what the organizations of the future will look like. So, Aragon has built a completely free and open-source tech stack that anyone in the world can leverage to build their organizations. With the powerful and modular OSx, you can build anything you can imagine! And the simple, no-code front end makes it easy to launch a DAO and start experimenting with governance at the speed of software.”
Whoa.
As always, we conclude this issue with a TL;DR on some of the most recent DAO ecosystem takes and thought pieces, making it easy for you to cut through the noise and learn everything you need to know about the current state of the DAOs.
Contributors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild (Samantha Marin, Warrior, KingIBK, Quilia, Vi-Fi, Tonytad, Kornekt, Trewkat, HiroKennelly, siddhearta)
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Game7 is excited to launch Summon, our novel DAO governance platform.
Summon is a community LiveOps tool that takes governance to the next level by making it easy for DAOs to measure the contributions of their members, and reward them in ways that go beyond money.
How it works: Each community member mints a Soulbound NFT that evolves as the member contributes to the community, making the NFT upgradeable and unique. As each contributor completes quests and tasks, they earn experience points (XP), which help them move up in rank and unlock features and rewards in real time.
By tracking, measuring, and rewarding contributions, Summon provides decision-making capabilities to those who invest time and effort into the community, as opposed to only those who contribute capital.