The Decentralised Autonomous Organization (DAO) is a governing body established by a collective group of individuals or entities with common interests in a blockchain ecosystem without any centralised leadership. DAOs initially came into existence as a governing body that primarily handled the on-chain governance process. But as the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries grew larger, more communities popped up and DAO began to evolve along with the growth creating its own identity and classifications.
In today’s industry, as explained in our Twitter thread recently, DAOs can be primarily classified into three categories -
- Governance DAOs that are linked primarily to huge dApps and blockchain ecosystems. This type of DAO is used to vote on various proposals that help determine the direction in which the project would move forward, debuting new features or making changes to existing features and services in the dApp/blockchain ecosystem.
- Grant DAOs created by angel investors and VC firms. These are DAO bodies whose sole purpose is to look at various existing and newly emerging blockchains and dApp projects. They identify projects with good potential and help them by providing various resources in form of capital investment, knowledge aid, community connections, KOIs and other media-related resources essentially helping them grow from little seedlings to industry-leading giants.
- Lastly, Social DAOs are created by a group of like-minded individuals whose interest aligns towards a common goal. And these DAOs while decentralised in nature may not necessarily have commonly found DAO items like blockchain or governance tokens etc.
Understanding Social DAO and its functionalities
While DAOs have always worked to monitor, govern and aid the growth of an ecosystem, Social DAOs have become decentralised bodies that have detached from the goal of solely pursuing governance to entities that pursue and truly embody the essence of adopting a decentralised approach to any and all walks of life. This has become the major factor driving social DAOs.
These social DAOs are created due to various reasons such as
- A DAO body made of web3 firms and student bodies aimed at bringing about more web3 awareness and helping people see a smooth migration from web2 to web3.
- A DAO that primarily seeks to experiment and document various blockchain and decentralisation-related theories and proposals.
- A fan-based DAO community aimed at collecting and preserving proofs and samples of iconic moments from sports, movies and other social activities.
Here at Kana Labs, our team has come across several of these social DAOs and does have our own contribution to helping these social DAO entities in their pursuit of common goals. Some examples include -
- Providing Sponsorship and Intern opportunities to members from Dope DAO — an entity created by Indian college students aimed at bringing about more awareness and increased adoption of web3 and DeFi use cases.
- Aiding developer community DAOs via sponsorships and helping organise events to facilitate like-minded individuals and peers to interact with each other as they trial blaze and help push the move development community forward. Eg — Move Developer DAO — an Indian developer community focused towards Move builders focused on education, bounties, real-time workshops and grants.
