DAO tooling for project teams

Governance
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How do project teams contract and transact among themselves, and with other teams, in the Polkadot ecosystem?

With Polkadot, parachains get a DAO in the box. What is missing is DAO-in-a-box tooling for arbitrary projects.

I am seeking feedback on my idea that there is a need, particularly among builders, for more accessible, composable DAO tooling in the Polkadot ecosystem.

@olanod and the https://virto.network/ team made solid progress in building a DAO factory but paused this to focus on lowering the web3 adoption barrier with Virto Connect :clap:. My hunch is that the most pressing need for versatile DAO tooling is not among people to new to web3, but in the Polkadot builder community.

So, to expand my questions to builders:

  • how do you manage ownership, governance and allocation of shared assets?

  • how do you use web3 and Polkadot tooling to do that?

  • how is that working out?

I am relatively new here, so I honestly don’t know the answers to these questions. Please share your thoughts, including about anything I might have missed :slightly_smiling_face:.

I’ll share a little context about my hypothesis and idea, to invite conversation.

Polkadot DAO tooling is powerful for parachains but sparse for other projects

Teams building a parachain on Polkadot get the same OpenGov tooling as Polkadot itself. In the Ethereum ecosystem, there is no way to build a chain where DAO tooling is default. This is a key strength of Polkadot.

The Ethereum world does, however have an established array of composable DAO tooling. This makes it easy for teams to launch projects with web3 governance.

One example is the DAO-in-a-box tool from https://www.decent.build/:

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In the Polkadot world, on the other hand, teams building smart contracts or Dapps on existing parachains have far less access to DAO tooling.

Built on Kreivo by Virto, the communities and other pallets extend OpenGov’s referenda pallet to support membership, payments and on-chain governance. The DAO factory idea is one chain that can support many DAOs. To my knowledge, the Kreivo pallets are not yet live, but will be available after the Kusama Asset Hub migration.

The Polkadot hub will facilitate running EVM DAO tools, but would that really leverage Polkadot’s strengths?

Right now, the default seems to be a mix of agreements, a multisig, and a Discord.

If there is demand for versatile Polkadot DAO tooling, where is it?

This gets me curious. Is modular Polkadot DAO tooling scarce because there is no need for it? Or is there a need that is unmet?

I considered some sectors where demand might exist:

  • Real world collectives are coming on-chain, one day, I believe. Humans need new ways to organise at scale, and web3 governance provides that. I don’t see that demand today, though.

  • Web2 businesses may take advantage of the shifting regulatory environment to adopt tokenisation as a funding model. Again, it’s too early to call that demand.

  • Ethereum and other web3 projects do adopt DAO tooling but are already well-served.

  • Project teams building on Polkadot tend to value decentralisation, and need ways to contract and transact in their own projects.

At least this is my hypothesis.

Versatile composable DAO tooling in Polkadot

Imagine a platform where with little effort, a team can start a DAO, configure their on-chain governance, mint a token, vote and transact among themselves and with other teams.

Imagine if they could integrate their DAO with their project, and services across the Polkadot landscape. Could Polkadot’s cross-chain interoperability enable access to identity, NFTs, prediction markets, multisig, treasury-management, staking, reputation, socials, gaming and storage?

How is your team handling ownership and governance today? And if you had access to even a simple DAO-in-a-box for Polkadot, what would you do with it?

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There can be very different target groups to go for.

For example, millions of people have downloaded https://www.splitwise.com/ to share costs between friends. This is a Web2 tool, but something like this might be the perfect fit for Web3.

If you think that the Polkadot Builder Community would be the best fit, I think it would make sense to explain why specifically you would go for them. It is a possibility, but the community is in the hundreds or low thousands and finding a userbase from those is very niche.

To your questions:

How do you manage ownership, governance and allocation of shared assets? Wow do you use web3 and Polkadot tooling to do that? How is that working out?

Pure Proxy Multisigs, mainly via Mimir. It is finally working out without too much trouble since 2025.

As you can see, so far tooling is very simple. I think the main point to take away here is that DAO tooling has been in the works for many many years, but the UX for even the simple management of a collective Treasury took many years to consolidate to something simple and attractive. And I think that is the main reason why more complex tooling didn’t take off. You don’t get too many users if the tooling is so bleeding edge that it costs you more time than using a simple Web2 solution for the same task.

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There is also the ChaosDAO Discord Voting Bot which is adopted by a small handful of communities: https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/243

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Note:

The multisig primitive is a powerful and flexible tool. Its suitability depends mainly on scale and use case. A proxy multisig is especially effective for smaller organizations where decision making power is not distributed to token holders. In a sociocratic structure each circle manages its own multisig and links it to the outer circle as a shared operational identity. This model is not designed for token based voting, but solutions such as OpenGov address that specific need. The effectiveness of this setup ultimately relies on the cohesion of each circle. In sociocracy a circle is a semi autonomous group with a defined domain and delegated authority. This setup already connects to token based fund allocation through delegation.

The tools are there but the social systems need to catch up a bit more :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:. Not a technical problem that’s why the “it didn’t take off” feeling.

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@alice_und_bob, thank you for your feedback and pointers. I am on a learning curve here (/me researches Pure Proxy Multisigs), and appreciate your help.

My vision is mass adoption of decentralised governance on Polkadot! Project teams are simply my straw person for the problem to solve first.

Maybe a Splitwise alternative supporting crypto as well as fiat expenses would be useful for web3 user house-mates, co-working, travel, pop-up cities, …. That might remove one barrier for people switching to web3. At the same time, it’s kind of an accounting tool, rather than something that could open up access to the capabilities of OpenGov.

My assumptions for considering project teams as the first group to address are:

  • reachable – your response is evidence of that :slight_smile:
  • motivated to decentralise governance
  • tolerant of imperfect UX, if functionality is good
  • needs not met with existing tooling

While project teams are a small sector, they are apparently not as scarce as sociocracies :slight_smile:. Likewise, voting pools may be a smaller sector as well (considered here).

I don’t mind if the first users are few-ish and don’t pay. If there is a clear need, there is potential to rapidly deliver actual value, and get fast feedback to inform improvement. Then address the next segment.

I am totally open to ideas about another segment to address first!

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Alternative angle… above I mentioned:

Web2 businesses may take advantage of the shifting regulatory environment to adopt tokenisation as a funding model. Again, it’s too early to call that demand.

That was before I saw Paul Atkins said, in this Keynote Address at the Inaugural OECD Roundtable on Global Financial Markets:

We must ensure that entrepreneurs can raise capital on-chain without endless legal uncertainty.

Maybe, anticipating that demand, a broad roadmap could address:

  • Polkadot builders,
  • web2 startups raising capital, then
  • consumers, real world collectives

Either way, it’s an equivalence play. Polkadot has DAO tooling that could compete with the Ethereum eco tools, if it were more accessible. Do we unlock that potential to fill the gap, simply because if Ethereum has it, then Polkadot should too?

My take: only with actual users with a real problem to solve.

any more builders have thoughts on this??

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Hey! As someone who has been working on the DAO app you mentioned with the Virto team, I can tell you we made lots of efforts to reach an audience interested in this kind of DAO tooling, but we kept running into the same dead end.

At least for us, the issue was that we weren’t solving a real problem. We were just adding complexity with our unfinished UI, which stayed that way because we couldn’t get real organizations to actually want to use it.

It could be an awesome tool to manage organizations, with all the actions you mentioned (I’d especially highlight identity, treasury management, socials, and storage, since those were exactly the features we were planning to add, along with decision-making). Yet we weren’t able to find the right audience.

As for project teams, Polkadot already provides vesting to schedule transactions.
If the flow is:

  1. Communication via Discord

  2. Getting funds from Kusama/Polkadot governance

  3. Using vesting to manage payments

Then there’s not really a problem to solve for those project teams.

But as I say this, I have another thought. This year, I went to an event at Crecimiento, a coworking space in Argentina mostly attended by blockchain-related people, and one key insight I got was how slow medium-to-large companies are when it comes to making decisions.

As I’m also a lawyer, this idea came to me:
A system where decisions made on-chain could have the force of law for the organization.
That way, to make a decision they’d only need to:

  1. Submit it on the forum where all members with voting rights have access

  2. Set a voting period

  3. Once voted, that decision becomes binding for the organization, meaning they must carry out what was approved in the proposal

  4. The proposal automatically executes (e.g. if they need to buy something, the funds are automatically sent; if they need to pay someone, that transaction is automatically made)

Of course, you’d still need to find people who actually have this problem, who want to test the product, and the funds for the team to build it.
I’m also not sure how beneficial this would be for the ecosystem, whether it would bring more or less traction, and that’s something to consider when asking for funding.

Virto didn’t continue down that path mainly due to a lack of funding and clear insights to justify it at the time. But personally, I still, it’s a direction with strong potential, especially if there’s a group of users genuinely interested in testing and shaping it before the project starts.