Let's talk about governance in DAOs.
Members of a DAO vote on proposals. Voting is usually based on token ownership. We’re going to explore key challenges with DAO governance and how to overcome them.
Let’s dig in.
Curate or buy in
When you start a DAO, you have the choice to curate membership or let members buy in.
FWB requires an application and 75 $FWB tokens to join. They curate membership by accepting applicants that suit their community. Alternatively, you can allow anyone to buy in to your community like OdysseyDAO's crowdfund. If you're building a niche, you might want to go with the former. If you want wider reach, choose the latter.
Awarding tokens
Award tokens to members based on valuable contributions.
Contributions are easy to measure quantitatively: threads, posts, replies etc. Quality is harder. What constitutes a "good" post? Some DAOs like Mirror have used community voting to determine awards (see $WRITE race).
Agility and speed
It’s dangerous to decide everything by committee.
If your project is large, making every decision by committee is impractical. Platforms like OrcaProtocol allow DAOs to operate self-sufficient pods to achieve the best of decentralised governance and agility.
Collusion
Collusion issues in DAOs that Vitalik said he missed it in 2021.
It’s not impossible for a sub-group to form within your voter base, and collude to force an outcome. Solving this requires it's own post, but checkout quadratic voting and Minimum Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) here.
There's no right answer to governance
Choose based on the size and type of community you want to build.