How to get involved in a DAO?
Become an early contributor and earn rewards
In today’s article, we are going to delve a little deeper into DAOs and talk about how to get involved in one of them.First, it was the ICO (Initial coin offering), then Defi (decentralized finance), then the Meme coins, and right now it is the NFTs (non-fungible tokens). I am clear that the next trend will be DAOs.
I think that before learning how they operate or if you are thinking of investing, it is important to be clear about what they are.
WHAT IS A DAO?
We are going to go to?Wikipedia?to find the definition of DAO.
A?decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organization represented by rules encoded as transparent computer programs, controlled by the organization members, and not influenced by a central government. A DAO’s financial transaction record and program rules are maintained on a blockchain. The precise legal status of this type of business organization is unclear.
Source:?Wikipedia
And now let’s define word by word to have a more general vision.
Decentralized: used to describe organizations or their activities that are not controlled from one central place.
Autonomous: independent and having the power to make your own decisions
Organization: a group of people who work together in an organized way for a shared purpose
This new way of organizing is a different way of operating than with traditional companies. In my previous?post, I talk more about these differences.
No more tyrannical CEOs, useless bureaucracy and the pyramid hierarchy that previously reigned in companies. DAOs come to democratize all processes. Also through Defi, you will not depend on banks to receive or send money. Web 3 and Defi make DAOs empower the user in a revolutionary way.
HOW DO DAOs WORK?
To more easily understand how a DAO works, let’s take a simple example. Imagine that you are a member of a DAO and you have an idea that can benefit the project and with which you want to contribute. For example the creation of a website or a blog.
To do this you would create a proposal and among all the members they would vote if it goes ahead. They could also decide how many tokens from the joint treasury they decide to contribute to that idea. This work can be divided into guilds, which I will talk about later.
That simple!?Web3 and smart contracts allow this entire process to be public and transparent, so everything is in the hands of the community.
Now, although there are many explanations of how a DAO works, they usually do it generically. In this case, I will show you some very useful dapps that are important to know, to understand the potential of DAOs.
The steps that most successful DAOs have followed are these 5:
1.Establish a mission
2. Build a community
3. Create a shared treasury
4. Construct a governance framework
5. Distribute ownership
I am going to present you with the most used tools to carry out these steps.
Discord is a free text, voice and video chat app used by tens of millions of people. Discord first launched in 2015 as a means for people to easily communicate while playing PC games together. Today it is the most used app for play2earn, metaverse NFTs, and DAOs communities.
Snapshot is a decentralized voting system. It provides flexibility on how voting power is calculated for a vote. Snapshot supports various voting types to cater to the needs of organizations. Creating proposals and voting on Snapshot is user-friendly and does not cost gas as the process is performed off-chain.
In short, Snapshot is an off-chain gasless multi-governance client with easy to verify and hard to contest results.
In this article I am not going to extend talking about all the projects that are shown in the screenshot. I share their Twitter accounts so that you can investigate more if they interest you. They are some of the best examples of what can be created with a DAO.
-Gitcoin
-Poapxyz
The Gnosis Safe is a smart contract wallet that allows users to store tokens securely and interact with the decentralized web. At its core, it is a multi-signature wallet.
Whether you are a company or a group of friends, it is a very useful tool because, through multisign, funds can only be moved if the community decides so.
If for example, you have 10 main stakeholders in your business, you can set up the wallet to require approval from all 10 people before the transaction is sent.
A platform for creators to mint and issue social tokens. Coinvise also offers developer-friendly easy-to-use APIs to integrate social tokens onto existing media platforms.
This platform allows you to create your Mint token, a personal or a community token on a fixed supply, distribute it through airdrops. Also, send tokens in bulk to your community. Tokens can be sent via a unique claimable link or directly to a list of addresses and you can create quests to reward contributors for completing tasks.
Collab Land is a community management app that uses Discord and Telegram bots to verify you do hold a certain NFT.
Collab.land?on discord
The /tip command is widely used in the discord communities of many DAOs. Since it serves to send tokens easily without leaving discord.
At first, it can seem a bit intimidating and it is advisable to have some background in cryptocurrencies before entering a DAO and using these tools.
Decentralized finance has a slow and progressive learning curve.
In the future, more tools and protocols will be developed to facilitate the operation of a DAO and make it more accessible to everyone.
Now that you know what a DAO is, how it works, and the tools most used for it, we are ready for the next step.
HOW DO I GET INVOLVED IN A DAO?
In this landscape you can see all the types of DAOs there are and many examples of each type. There are so many that I cannot summarize them all in this article.
DAO landscape by?Cooopahtroopa
As you can see there are different types of DAOs: collector DAOs, grants DAOs, media DAOs, service DAOs investment DAOs, social DAOs. Each of them has different protocols and ways of managing the community and its token.
I leave you this link to?DAOcentral, a great tool to find and learn about the most popular DAOs.
The best way to learn how a DAO works is by getting involved in one of them.?You can do this in two ways:
INVEST IN A DAO
DAOs usually have their tokens.?Many of the DAOs that are being formed today will grow in volume and therefore the price of their token as well, so I understand the speculative part. Investors are always looking for new opportunities and DAOs have proven to be a good asset.
In coinmarketcap, you can see that it is a market of approximately $ 25,000,000,000.
Top DAO tokens by?Coinmarketcap
Some DAOs tokens have had great returns and it is still an expanding market.?I also think it is necessary to say that one of the problems that DAOs currently have (as well as the entire crypto space) is regulation. So any news of the tightening of these laws will make decentralized finances tremble, so it is always advisable to be cautious.
Many of these tokens also offer Defi benefits such as staking. They allow you to obtain passive income and through automated protocols generate very high APYs. Some examples would be?Olympus DAO,?Compound?or?Curve Dao.
That said, now I will explain what seems to be the best way to get involved in a DAO.
CONTRIBUTE TO A DAO
As a contributor in a DAO, you will have to get involved in the project and not just buy the token on an exchange and hold it.
Once you understand the operation of the tools described above, you understand that?the token is power within a DAO. And with great power, comes great responsibility!
领英推荐
For me, it is exciting to be able to participate in communities that are in an initial phase and grow together. We can all be DAO workers and be rewarded in “company shares.” Which I find incredibly groundbreaking.
If you add value to the DAO you will be rewarded for that, win2win.
You can vote and help decide the future of the DAO. You can share your ideas on how to improve the project. You can add value by creating content such as artistic designs, blogs, videos, podcasts, as a web developer, as a mod in discord, or by contributing your time and desire.
Either way you can imagine! It all depends on the type of DAO and the missions that the community decides.
In the next year two words will be trend. Guilds and bounties. Two of the most common ways to contribute to a DAO.
Guilds
Guilds are how we refer to groups of communities that can be social in nature or business / project-oriented.
Think of the Guild as the social collective. The individuals bonded together by shared interests and common goals, and working on projects together.
The DAO and its mechanism are used for governing and funding to help facilitate those projects.
Before DAOs, Guilds used to send invoices, but now, they can send in a proposal to a DAO, which is like a multi-signature bank account. DAOs can also serve different purposes for Guilds and can be set up for specific projects for the governance and funding of a specific Guild.
What is the difference between a Guild and DAO?
Guilds are intersubjective realities and social constructs. I think we could say guilds are a hybrid of communities, collectives, and companies in the modern sense).
DAOs are like onchain companies that are defined by their software.?They almost never have any real agency or autonomy on their own without agents (human actors) who vote using the DAO.
To understand it better, imagine that a DAO is a company and the guilds are its departments. So that the members of that guild coordinate and then coordinate between the different guilds into the DAO.
The word coordination takes on vital importance in a DAO.
The DAO could disperse funding to the community through the Guilds.?And remember, everything will be decided democratically by voting and in a transparent way. We see one of the great advantages that DAOs have over conventional companies. Now you can decide between the employees in what, how much and how to spend the money.
Bad times are coming for the typical lazy employee of a company with a handpicked position, who is also a tyrant and get more salary than his colleagues when he contributes less. That, through the mechanisms that offer a DAO, is over!
If you want to join a DAO and help the Community you can be an early contributor.
Early Contributors are anyone who contributes to a DAO, regardless of which guild they belong to. To be an early contributor you will have to “dive” in the DAO, usually in its discord. They are usually separated into sections and each of them is worked independently.
Guild roles are guild-specific roles that relate to your skillsets. For example, if I’m a writer I would have the Editorial Guild role as well as the Writer role. Guild roles can be acquired at will through reacting to messages during the onboarding process.
Anti Secret Society?discord roles
Discord’s ability to choose roles is incredibly useful for managing DAO. The possibilities are many, I leave you a guide so you can see what can be done with this?tool.
Everything is possible.?A DAO can have multiple Guilds as its founders/members.
A great example of how a DAO works through guilds and roles is?Bankless Dao. Bankless DAO is a decentralized community to coordinate and propagate bankless media, culture, and education. Its goal is to drive adoption and awareness of truly bankless money systems like Ethereum, Defi, and Bitcoin.
On their website, you can check the guilds out there and how to contribute. As you can see, they are divided into multiple guilds since it is the most efficient way. You have guilds of writers, devs, design, treasury, legal, analytics, education, research, marketing, translator, and Ops.
In this link, you can see the latest proposals.
I recommend visiting their discord and, although at the beginning it seems like a lot of information, once you choose your role and focus on what you can contribute, you will understand everything much better.
Another advice that I can give you is to look for the “OGs contributors” of DAOs and ask them questions, they are the first interested in explaining everything to you and start contributing.
Leaders are important within guilds.?They should handle the governance and distribution of tokens, in addition to introducing new users to the program.
That is why it?is important to maintain a balance between what the members contribute and the rewards they will receive, therein lies the key to the success of a DAO.
Bounties
One of the easiest ways for guilds to distribute their token is through bounties.?A?Bounty is a deal offered by many cryptocurrency and blockchain projects to the public by which individuals can receive rewards, usually in the form of tokens, for doing specific tasks.
These tasks may include public articles about the project, creating multimedia resources, and promoting the project using different social media platforms. They can also be translations or bug reporting.
Some people call themselves bounty hunters and they look for projects that have bounties programs and carry out different missions. For this, I will leave you 2 dapps that are currently the best to find these programs:
DAOs are creating their own micro-economies, issuing bounties to members to complete tasks to achieve their mission. By earning bounties that are denominated in a DAO’s native token, members are rewarded with ownership, in a way that makes web2 startup equity options look antiquated.
Whether you are a writer, designer, or developer, there are bounties available for work that you can claim (or create).
GAMING AND METAVERSE GUILDS
In my opinion, this organizational model can be extrapolated to any business/area of life. In 10 years who knows where we will be...?Even governing a country will be possible through a DAO.
Can you imagine knowing what politicians do with our money? Be able to eliminate the absurd and inefficient bureaucracy of today? In the future, you may have a Dapp in your pocket through which you can vote vital decisions, such as electing a president or deciding what to do with the taxes. The possibilities are endless!
But for now, it is better to put your feet on the ground and assess where we are. We are at a time when metaverses and pla2earn games have exploded, but not half of what they will, due to the lack of regulation and the difficult learning curve that is necessary.
A guild?can be, as I said before, departments within a company, but it?can also function as a crew or an army within a metaverse.
Let me explain, imagine that you are a crew of 10 friends who are artists and want to create a gallery in the metaverse. The main barriers to entry today to games like Decentraland, The Sandbox, or Omnium Space are two:
Many artists ask me how to exhibit in Decentraland, because they have seen a video on youtube of “How to generate income in the metaverse”. Once you investigate, you find these problems and it makes many of them unable to enter.
The possibility that a DAO gives you is to create a working group for the metaverse.?Could be divided into these guilds:
With these 4 guilds, it would be a way to start delegating the work in different groups.?Collaborations and have a good community are the keys to success in the world of DAOs.?All of them would have the same mission so they would join forces and make everything easier.
I think collaborative art projects will become more and more common but, where I think guilds and DAOs have even more spectacular potential in the gaming world.
Virtual reality and the quality of graphics have improved dramatically in recent years and will presumably reach near perfection in a few more years. In that time, the wallets, the tokenomics of the games and the entire crypto space, in general, will have also improved.
Gaming guilds are not new, there were already groups of people who played together in Diablo or Warcraft. However, if you understand the paradigm shift that web3, NFTs,DAOs and the metaverse suposes, you realize that, this was only the beginning of something much bigger.
Imagine they release a metaverse from the Middle Ages. Every land, every sword, every element like steel or gold could be an NFT. All interchangeable. The owner of a land could build a castle and catapults to defend himself. That person would be “the whale”. or the one that invests the most amount of money. What’s happening? that if it doesn’t have soldiers to defend that castle it could be conquered. So he is interested in lending his land to novice players or those who do not want to invest. So he would have to provide them with food and weapons in exchange for their work. Okay, I know that there are games that already work similarly, although what I’m imagining is, with hyper-realistic graphics and virtual reality glasses. ??
Personally, I think that play2earn games should focus more on the “play” part than the “earn” part.?Since if it is not fun, a videogame is doomed to rundown.
Most games have wanted to copy Axie’s style and I don’t think that’s the way to go. What cannot be denied is that Axie Infinity went down in history.
Games like Axie Infinity have also launched another revolutionary concept,?scholarship programs. The fact that you can lend your NFTs to other players and share in the proceeds is amazing! It allows those who cannot pay to enter the game to have options as well.
For those who criticize play2earn games, the NFTs and the metaverse I recommend watching this short documentary on how the lives of people from poor countries like the Philippines have changed.
I do not want to go much longer about the Gaming guilds in this article, so I am sure, that I fall in short explaining what they suppose, and the force with which they are going to break into the crypto space.
Source:?Crypto Street
CONCLUSION
DAOs come to change everything. The Internet has evolved since it was launched in 1983.?The web3 represents empowerment of the user that was not known before.
At that time I was not born, but I understand that the internet has become more accessible, cheaper and more stable over the years. As all these platforms are presented in a more friendly way, users will gradually arrive. It is a matter of time before the adoption is massive.
Source:101 Blockchains
For the first time in history, there will really be equality between countries.?Places like Silicon Valley will not monopolize all the technological?developments.?Instead a?group of friends created in a forum, from different parts of the planet, will be able to create a DAO, collect funds, and contract/offer the services to other people.
A web developer from Africa will be able to get the same remuneration as another in Switzerland.?This supposes such a radical change in the economies of the countries that it gives for a book, at least.
DAOs are a market yet to be exploited, many experts point to them as the next trend in the crypto world and I agree. The fact that you can also be an investor, an employee and receive “shares” (tokens) will make many people decide to work as a freelancer based on their tastes and preferences through guilds and bounties, instead of for that bastard boss they have.
Writers, developers, designers, economists, lawyers, content creators, community managers, gamers, and?a lot of other professions will function completely differently than they do now in the next 10 years.
The future lies in NFTs, the metaverse, and decentralized finance. DAOs will be the most common way to organize and the sooner you understand this, the more benefit you can get out of it.
The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of all these tools. Many people have been forced to telecommute or have lost their jobs. We are currently in an early stage and you have a once in a lifetime opportunity to join these communities now that they are being formed.
Find your passion, improve your skills and become an early contributor to any DAO you believe in. In a few years you will thank me! ??
Author′s Bio
KAF?is a consultant and writer helping people get closer to NFTs, DAOs, Defi, and metaverse.
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