We had the opportunity to chat with our friends from BitDAO, DeepDAO, Aragon, Superfluid and Shipyard Software about the current problems and future of DAO tooling. In case you’ve missed it, you can catch the replay of the panel here: https://bit.ly/3dN1E4s.
👀 Alternatively, check out the summary of the main discussion points below:
- DAO tools needed for astounding & exponential growth in DAOs
- More can be done on the overall capital management side to be able to manage finances easily. Such as tools that can show you what your returns are in order to track overall financial performances.
- Work on the bridging to different chains to manage the transaction to lower costs.
2. Are DAO tools Ethereum dominated or are there any kind of L1 or L2 alternatives?
- There’s many on the ethereum chain but the DAO ecosystem is very much alive on other chains as well. Eg. Sputnik on the NEAR ecosystem, framework to run DAOs on BSC, new DAO launches and DAO frameworks coming up everyday.
- Main problem that established DAOs are facing is to move everything from Ethereum mainnet to an L2 as many still have the mindset that the Ethereum mainnet is the most secure place.
3. Where DAO is headed: Experimenting
- Intersection of setting a mandate and being able to progress on that, but also allowing as many people to participate as possible: organisations can be anywhere in between and there can be many more experiments on that.
- As many things are done off-chain (Eg. chatting, debates & discussions on chat channels & forums), we need tools to have have better engagement from a community. For instance, tools to provide some of the highlight priorities and context around it for effective asynchronous and synchronous communication.
4. Tooling Problem vs Human Problem
- Technical tooling is great but it’s still sort of a human issue — How do we balance this?
- One thing technology does enable us though is the ability to iterate more quickly on governance than we’ve ever been able to do historically.
- Biggest unsolved problem right now in the space: Onboarding people outside of the community to become a contributor.
- Plugging in these tools and seeing what we can make more efficient and better, and check those assumptions about how governance is played out given this kind of new innovations is good. Try it , experiment it, that’s very much the phase that we’re in right now and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out over the next couple of years.
5. Need for Web3 / Decentralised version of Web2 organisational tools
- Web3 tools that web2 can’t do Eg. Dispute resolution — transparency & quickness
- Some tools that are needed: tools for discussion, supporting tools for treasury management
- These decentralised tools are a good aspiration to have but it may not necessary be possible to ever get there as we don’t live on chain and ultimately DAOs are humans.
- Web2 tools can still be really important tools — things like limitation of liability, incorporating and having a legal structure matters because DAOs have to interoperate with the real world. There are things that DAOs should do which are not going to be web3.
- Ultimately, we build tools & tools build us.
