DAO tooling for project teams

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/:

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?