Partnered With:

BanklessDAO: How a Textbook DAO Achieves Decentralized Governance

Read this article in 21 Minutes

Bankless DAO is a typical decentralized autonomous organization that operates independently of Bankless media.

Original title: "BanklessDAO: How a Textbook-style DAO Achieves Decentralized Governance"

Original author: 237

This article comes from the WeChat public account: Old Yuppie

In 2013, Vitalik Buterin described the source of DAO for the first time in the Ethereum white paper.

In 2016, DAO began to take root, when Ethereum community members were immersed in decentralization The world of globalization cannot extricate itself, and began to be dissatisfied with the low conversion rate of the traditional centralized organizational structure, so it started to explore the form of decentralized organization. The world's first DAO——Creation DAO (The DAO) was also established by This was born.

But since then, the development of DAO has not been smooth sailing, and the immature DAO has mastered a large number of There is no doubt that there are huge risks in the funds. The hack of The DAO in June 2016 also relentlessly proved this point. The attack even led to a hard fork of Ethereum.

Since then, even though there are still a large number of developers, DAO has still experienced a period of time silence.

Until 2021, driven by the bullish encryption boom, the concept of DAO has returned to public view. Many DAOs have sprung up, and even DAOs have appeared in a large number of other applications, such as GameFi, DeFi, etc.

However, not everything behind the prosperity is true, and there are still many problems in DAO at this time , some DAOs have even lost their original intentions for security or other goals.

But there are still some DAOs who have always adhered to the original intention, with ingenious design and amazing execution Come to today. What we are going to introduce today is a textbook-style DAO—BanklessDAO.

BanklessDAO——Defender of De-banking Financial System

< /p>

Bankless was founded in 2019 and is a very influential media in the encryption community. It was originally A newsletter that tracks the dynamics of the encryption industry. In 2020, podcasts and other content were added. In 2021, it officially began to operate as a company. It has achieved profitability until now. Its registered company is Bankless LLC.

In May 2021, Bankless issued a proposal to the community to start Bankless DAO. Since then, BanklessDAO began to enter the public's field of vision.

On May 4, 2021, BanklessDAO was officially launched to promote de-banking (Bankless ) concept of movement. The goal of BanklessDAO is to promote the large-scale application and social consensus of a truly debanked financial system, the core of which is the application and dissemination of Bitcoin, Ethereum and decentralized finance.

Bankless DAO is a typical decentralized autonomous organization that operates independently of Bankless media. The Bankless DAO community aims to create a good environment (onramp) for everyone to explore decentralized finance and technology.

Although it was launched under the initiative of Bankless media, BanklessDAO is a product of community consensus. There is no legal entity in the traditional commercial society, and it operates completely independently of Bankless Media. There is absolutely no overlap between the two at the business and legal levels.

Token and Membership

< p>

The BanklessDAO community is very open. Anyone can join BanklessDAO's server through Discord and gain access to browse most of the information and historical work documents. However, if you want to participate in collaboration and meetings, you need to become a member of BanklessDAO. The condition for membership is to hold a certain number of BANK tokens.

BANK Token is the native community governance of BanklessDAO Token , with a total of 1 billion pieces. It is mainly used to coordinate all DAO activities and distribute to active community members.

BANK Token It has no value in itself, and it only represents the contribution and participation of members to the community. BANK is not sold, and there are no investors behind it. Only members who participate in community activities can get BANK, and participating in community activities is the only way to obtain BANK. And how to participate in community activities needs to be decided by members of BanklessDao through voting.

On May 4, 2021, members who have participated in the BanklessDAO community activities will be able to Retroactive BANK allocation, the allocation plan is:

30%——Participated in the community Active Members

30% - Community Treasury

40%——as a 3-year option linearly unblocked to the community treasury

Afterwards, BanklessDAO The first proposal proposed to modify the above BANK allocation, and take 25% of the allocation of the original community treasury to Bankless LLC as an option. The revised distribution is as follows:

BanklessDAO Governance Mechanism - Season Plan

BanklessDAO A large number of communication spaces with different themes are provided for members to communicate openly. But undirected chat is clearly not enough to drive a sustainable DAO and achieve its goals.

As we mentioned above, BanklessDAO has a very clear goal. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal, BanklessDAO created mechanisms such as Season Plan, trade unions, and project funding to coordinate the operation of the entire DAO and manage output.

Season Plan is a periodic plan for the development and financial planning of BankessDAO. Each Season lasts for 3 months, basically parallel to the natural season in reality, and advances at a fixed time rhythm.

The purpose of setting a Season is to clarify collective priorities, focus goals, and increase a sense of direction. Season is also very important in the community incentives and economic system. At the beginning of each quarter, a budget is allocated and funding is provided for four different types of activities.

BanklessDAO Governance Mechanism - Guild

The basic structure of BanklessDAO is built by each trade union (Guild). The union's standard in BanklessDAO is defined as a talent pool, which is dedicated to bringing together talents with specific talents to serve DAO. In nature, it is similar to different functional departments in a company.

A total of 13 guilds have been formed, namely writing, finance, translation, research, and operation , marketing, legal, education, design, business development, development, video, data analysis.

All the trade unions listed above are completely open, if you want to join a trade union member The only thing you need to do is to fill in your name and expertise on the union's notion page.

Whether it is a trade union or a project team, they all collaborate through Internet tools. Our main discussions also take place on Discord. Under normal circumstances, there will be a regular voice meeting of 1-1.5 hours once a week. The consensus and conclusions formed in the regular meeting and the work items decided will be recorded in Notion, which will be jointly maintained by everyone and the work status will be tracked.

Any member can participate in any union discussion or audio conference. At the same time, almost all working documents and meeting minutes are also open.

Among all trade unions, there are two trade unions with very special status, they are the treasury trade union and operating unions.

The treasury union is responsible for the financial planning of the entire DAO, including not only the treasury, but also potential income generation and other planning .

The operation union is actually equivalent to providing management and background support for the entire DAO. Joining this union also follows standard union rules and is open to everyone. The specific responsibilities of the operation union include:

1) Responsible for coordinating daily affairs and ensuring the stability of the entire DAO run.

2) Supervise the daily activities of DAO, so that everyone's actions are consistent with the direction of the vision.

3) Facilitate that DAO can function smoothly and quickly at the organizational level.

4) Ensure the progress of core operations, people, budget and goals, project delivery and strategy.

5) Support the collaborative work of DAO.

The operation union is the most active existence in the entire DAO, most of the members of the operation union are in The entire DAO has extremely high authority, but this authority is not a power structure defined by rules, but comes from their profession, understanding and familiarity with DAO, a lot of time investment, and continuous help to members .

BanklessDAO Governance Mechanism - Project Funding

< /p>

The project is another very important element in the operation of DAO, which constitutes the continuous development momentum of BanklessDAO. It is an organizational action that produces a specific outcome in favor of the DAO, generating revenue or branding for the DAO.

Projects are generally divided into two types, that is, those that do not need funding and those that need funding.

If it is a project that does not require DAO funding, it will generally be discussed in the community and discussed by members Make combinations to advance collaboratively. As long as a consensus can be formed within a certain group without causing damage to BanklessDAO, the project can be promoted without formal consensus voting and complicated bureaucratic processes.

But for projects that need DAO funding, there is a set of complicated mechanisms to guide them from idea Become action and get funded. The purpose of this is to be responsible for the assets of the community and establish a corresponding traceable responsible person for decision-making. The specific process is as follows:

1. Brainstorm

Projects usually originate from the whim or deliberation of one or more people, and are initially quite limited in scope. Therefore, when there is a project idea, it should first be discussed in a larger scope to ensure that the idea is not a closed door. If it is an immature idea, it will be eliminated so far.

The place of discussion is generally the trade union channel related to the characteristics of the project. If there is no relevant channel, you can Enter a discussion area called "Brainstorming".

If after discussion, community members think that the idea is feasible, they can post it on Discord Set up voting in the group to organize other members to participate. However, this vote is only used to initially test everyone's ideas, and it does not yet have a high consensus.

2. Informal consensus test

This step precedes brainstorming and formal consensus voting, and although it is called an informal consensus check, it has actually formed a strict template. Template content includes:

A. Summarize - Summarize the suggestion in a few bullet points or sentences.

B. Background - why are you making this suggestion? What problem or opportunity is this proposal addressing? What do you think is the driving factor behind this being a great idea?

C. Related Discussions - Links to any previous Discord discussions on this topic.

D. Mission and Value Alignment - How does this project help the DAO achieve its mission and align with its values?

E. Details - Provides a rough outline of the scope of work.

F. Required resources - what DAO resources are required? What guilds must be involved to make this work?

G. Brand Use - If the project will use the BanklessDAO brand outside of the DAO, please detail how the brand will be used.

H, Success Indicators or KPIs - How will the success of the project be measured?

I. Next Step - If this proposal is accepted, the next action plan.

J. Squad background - who you are and your background.

K, Voting – Unofficial voting results in the Discord channel.

If the project gets positive feedback at this stage, a separate project channel will be created for better communication. At the same time, start to define more specific scope of work, required budget, specific team members, etc. Most projects will be promoted in multiple stages, starting from MVP, to V1, V2, until the project matures and enters a self-sustaining stage.

3. Formal consensus check

Once the informal consensus checks have been completed, feedback received, work scoped and a team formed, it is time to proceed with the formal consensus checks. Taking this step represents a signal to the community that this proposal is significant and should be considered.

The formal consensus check will be in a separate forum category and follow a different template.

As long as the proposal has solid support in the forum, the funding committee will Willingness to approve and fund projects unless there are major red flags that go undetected by community members.

4. Project Collaboration

< p>

When entering the project execution stage, the collaboration unit at this time has been reduced from the DAO level to the group level, which is not much different from a small team in an ordinary distributed office .

The project team is composed of distributed teams, usually between 5-15 people, with Relatively fixed team members and task assignments. Everyone maintains collaboration through version control tools and documentation tools, and keeps updated and discusses key issues through online stand-up meetings, weekly meetings and other mechanisms, and project members also maintain close communication. However, almost all project teams have maintained a lot of openness, and almost all progress of related projects is open to all DAO members and even the whole world.