Thread by @jessewldn

Experimentation in DAOs is really starting to heat up 🔥

A spectrum of new governance + coordination ideas are now being put to the test, each with the goal of reinventing the firm.

Here's a dump of interesting crypto governance ideas (will update/plz help! :)👇

(but first...) please note that none of the following should be taken as investment advice. see a16z.com/disclosures for more info.

okay, here goes.

@NexusMutual offers insurance to cover smart contracts against loss, bugs, etc. A historically dominant way for communities to share risk, mutuals are member owned/operated.

Nexus is a registered legal entity in the UK, but it's membership is orchestrated through tokens!

@AragonProject is experimenting with a DAO/LLC hybrid that issues legal shares through tokens. The whole workflow is wild and worth a read: forum.aragon.org/t/funding-prop…

They created their operating agreement on @OpenLawOfficial, which is creating "smart" legal contracts w/ portions implemented on-chain. Notable here is a markup lang which is legal, human *&* machine readable.

@Mattereum is another hybrid system for ownership of physical goods

These hybrid organizations, grounded in the legal jurisdictions of a host country, effectively export local legal frameworks globally.

One aim is to bring benefits of their host legal system on-chain while adding transparency, efficiency, auditability and programmability.

For example, can fiduciary law protect protocol users/members from "51% attacks"? Maybe! Many open question to do with jurisdictional reach on-chain, but this continues to be an interesting direction.

https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1097676307012509696

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1077063136908197891

The next level are project choosing to leave the legal system behind and use purely internet native methods of coordination:

@daostack is a toolkit for managing decentralized orgs. It leverages binary prediction markets to identify and boost proposals worthy of group attention.

predictors bet on whether a proposal will be passed by voters, based on the org values/rules. proposals w the highest pass/fail ratio are boosted in the voting queue + only require a relative majority to pass.

the aim is to keep voting both representative & efficient, at scale

I also like this novel mechanism for ensuring vote isn't swung against the prediction market at the last min:

Rather than simply analyzing decisions a management team makes, maybe the financial titans of the future will be armies of analysts helping steer those decisions for the collective by betting on optimal outcomes!

There are many open questions in this experiment:

Who are the voters, and how do you ensure they're not colluding with predictors? How will the predictor marketplace bootstrap and scale?

@_dx_dao will attempt to answer some of these Qs when they launch w tmw🍿 !!

@MolochDAO and @meta_cartel are simpler permissioned "guilds" whose membership is curated by existing members, based on social reputation. The purpose of both is to pool funds and vote on allocation towards improving Ethereum's infrastructure/dapp ecosystem respectively.

In exchange for funds/work, ownership tokens are issued to members who can use them to vote. If a member disagrees with an outcome, they can choose to exit and reclaim their pro-rata portion of pooled assets—exit is an elegant way to ensure representation in funding allocation!

@HumanityDAO is community-curated list (TCR) designed to incentivize its members to maintain a registry of human identities. There are currently 480 ETH addresses mapped to humans in the registry, which might be used for authentication, credit scores, democratic voting...

...really fun start, but the economic model needs some more work if we expect this list to remain accurate.

and last but not least (for now)...

@Kleros_io enables smart contracts to integrate with a decentralized court system that randomly elects jurors to adjudicate disputes. Since "all but the simplest contracts are incomplete" a protocol for dispute resolution feels like an under-discussed topic in crypto governance!

Today, it's unclear which of these models are likely to succeed, but it's extremely exciting that we're about to start learning a lot about decentralized coordination very quickly as these experiments run.

I'll update here with the most interesting new governance experiments in crypto.

Please lmk if there's anything else I should check out and add!

And for more on governance in crypto, check out our series of pods @a16z:

https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1095331013281148929

https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1095009964932980741

This is cool:

build-a-guild templates from @r_ross_campbell complete with

“DIGITAL GUILD ARTICLES OF ORGANIZATION 📜”
+
“INTERNET NATIVE CONTRIBUTOR COVENANT (INCC)“

medium.com/@rosscampbell9…

@_dx_dao launches today and is perhaps the most sophisticated DAO experiment to launch to date (AFIK)

https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1133742491792887808

Another first today: a hard-fork via on-chain governance.

After 3 months of voting & testing @tezos upgraded the network (reduced the stake required to validate.)

Interesting mechanism: the final voting phase required a supermajority participation level of over 80% to pass.

here comes the DAO-rush 💸

https://twitter.com/aragonproject/status/1134123534844813314

Strong product, vision + shared financial upside is appealing

In addition to premium features & discounts, exchange tokens BNB & LEO offer financial participation w/o decentralizing control of decision making.

Wish more could experiment with this model; regulation is tricky.