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📝 Editor’s Note: Setting the Scene

In today’s issue we’re exploring DAOs and DAO tooling – the foundational infrastructure that allows globally distributed communities to coordinate around governance, funding, asset management and much more.

DAOs have become the de facto mechanism for onchain communities to organize, but this is still a category in its early stages. Per DeepDAO, Over 500 DAOs currently control $27.5B in treasury assets, while the leading 10 DAOs control $20.4B of this, 74%. While impressive for a nascent segment, when you compare this figure to a centralized analog, 1294 different companies have larger balance sheets alone than the sum of all DAO treasury assets combined. 

One data point I found interesting as we oversaw this week’s research: 35% of all treasury DAO assets sit in L2 treasuries, with 3 of the top 4 largest DAOs being L2 projects. L2s are clearly revenue generating machines, and over time I think this will include other new types of onchain infrastructure as well.

OurNetwork will be observing this space closely over the next few years as it matures and continues to grow. My prediction is that it’s going to get a lot bigger, and quickly. Happy Friday everyone and I hope you all enjoy today’s newsletter.

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Snapshot, Squads, Tally, Gitcoin, Coordinape & CoW DAO.

• Snapshot currently is the leading governance tool with 96% of DAOs onboarded. The count of proposals put up to vote as well as actual votes paint a similar picture. With 1,007 total Proposals on Ethereum put up for vote in May 912 were on Snapshot - In the same month Snapshot accounted for 98% of all votes - indicating that proposals on Snapshot also tended to draw more votes. Other frequented governance platforms were mostly DAO-specific governance platforms like Nouns and Compound. 

• The amount of listed proposals on Snapshot peaked in February 2024 with more than 38k. Both May and June have less than 10% of that with around 3.5k each. Active spaces paint a similar picture with 20k in February and 1.4k in both May and June.

• The peak for votes on Snapshot is in July 2023 with more than 1.2M votes. February 2024 only accounts for 500k votes and May 2024 450k. This is driven by high vote volume spaces like Linea in July 2023 and in the last months by Arbitrum - stg.dao consistently draws +50% of all Voting since Q1 2023.

• Squads Protocol is the smart account standard for Solana and the SVM that teams use to securely transact, manage and own digital assets. Total value secured saw rapid growth in 2024, growing from $1B in January to a peak of $20B in April. Squads Protocol currently secures $10B, making it the most trusted program on Solana (using TVL as a proxy) outside the core staking contracts.

• Solana’s leading teams, applications and institutions have deployed over 54k smart accounts using Squads Protocol. The deployment curve aligns with the return of Solana’s onchain activity, with 32k of those smart accounts deployed between December 2023 and April 2024. Smart account growth will soon reflect consumer adoption with the recent launch of Fuse - Solana's first consumer smart wallet built on Squads Protocol.

• Squads Protocol crossed 1M SOL, over $100M as of June 28 2024, staked last week. Expect smart accounts to secure a growing percentage of the staking and liquid staking market - an LST market that grew from $190M to $3.5B in the last 12 months.

• Tally is a governance frontend for onchain DAOs that utilize the Governor framework developed by Open Zeppelin. Tally supports all major chains & has a front seat to the the explosion in DAO activity as protocols have begun to prioritize decentralized operations. Governor DAOs are experiencing significant growth: they control over $30B in treasury value, have transferred over $600B through roughly 7k onchain executions, and participants have delegated voting power over 200 thousand times.

• As DAOs continue to grow, they must return value to token holders to remain viable. Some of the largest DAOs today are exposed to governance attacks due to lack of participation. Uniswap has 158% of its quorum for sale in DeFi and on centralized exchanges, while the market cap of delegated ENS tokens is lower than the value of the accumulated treasury revenue. Consequently, governance attacks are not a risk but an inevitability.

• With the emergence of restaking as a key theme, governance tokens represent additional untapped potential that token holders must forgo in order to operate protocols. Governance tokens directly control additional value in the form of smart contract TVL (e.g. all the TVL on Arbitrum) and the future value of cash flows (e.g. Arbitrum sequencer revenue and Uniswap fees). Restaking activates the economic opportunity of governance tokens, but requires that token holders forgo participation in governance and forgo rewards returned to token holders by the underlying DAO. This needs to be solved.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: One of the largest proposals in the Arbitrum DAO (~$188M) was passed & executed onhcain via Tally. DAO growth & economic activity is substantial and as DAOs continue to deploy treasury funds to catalyze growth & create revenue — securing the viability of the token as a voting mechanism AND value accrual vehicle is paramount. As mentioned above, as DAOs continue on an upward trajectory of profitability, there is a higher risk of malicious attacks & degradation of values through financialization of governance. As DAOs grow, a dedication to security & token innovation must follow.

• Gitcoin is a platform geared towards funding public goods. Recent protocol upgrades enhanced operational efficiency with greater modularity, with GG20 marked as the first round on this new iteration. This doubled the number of projects from GG19 to GG20. More significantly, 81% of grantees rated their experience 4/5 or 5/5 in GG20 and 73% found GG20 better than previous rounds.

• The median project funding amount experienced a 50% increase, rising from $993 to $1,511 (this includes matching pool + individual donations). In total, 210 projects (64% of all projects) raised over $1k. What is interesting about this is, although the amount of donors decreased, the amount crowdfunded increased. What's more, in each round, more than half were first time donors.

• GG20 was a landmark round for Gitcoin, showcasing significant advancements in OSS funding, sybil resistance, and community governance. Introducing community governance was a pivotal move that involved electing a council responsible for allocating matching funds for community-led Quadratic Funding (QF) rounds. The matching pool for OSS was raised from $400k to $1M, and we also observed a 34% increase in crowdfunding for these rounds. Together, nearly $1.5M was allocated to OSS projects through the GG20 Program rounds.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This is not a transaction. It is the GG20 Data Dashboard, which articulates the activities of Gitcoin grantees and citizens during GG20. It matters because metrics such as total donations, number of donors, and amount raised per project provide a granular view of funding round efficacy. These insights support strategic planning for the DAO, ensuring that governance decisions are data-driven and aligned with community needs and preferences. In turn, these strategies can help other DAOs achieve their goals while maintaining transparency, accountability, and community trust.

• Coordinape built The Social Oracle: an EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) schema on Base that is updated with a skill attestation each time someone sends a GIVE on Farcaster. With @givebot or GIVE.party (our skill party frames), anyone attest to their friends' skills — there have been 45,000+ attestations registered already and more coming. GIVE can be sent directly within Farcaster frames, and we've seen as many as 6,000 unique people send GIVE at a rate of ~1 GIVE per second on our busiest day (so far).

• Users can start a GIVE.party for any skill, and over 100 unique skills have had parties where 30 or more individuals have been recognized. You can easily query skills and wallet pairings on Base, and we've started experimenting with visualizations which OG Coordinape users will recognize. 

• There’s a free to use GraphQL API from EAS waiting for you to start your queries of the Social Oracle, and we looking to support builders via CoDAO. 45K+ attestations is a start, but over 41M GIVE have been sent on Coordinape since 2021. Come build open, onchain reputation with us.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Onchain attestations are powerful because anyone can view them and build with the information they provide, including the wallets which send and receive the attestation. In the case of GIVE, context makes it more powerful. This tx is for a GIVE from nintynick.eth from Hats Protocol, recognizing zemm.eth for his skills in DAOs. Nick's reputation in this skill is particularly strong.

• CoW DAO's healthy revenue is a result of a diverse product suite. CoW Protocol is testing different fee models for sustainability: 50% of surplus on out-of-market limit orders (capped at 1% of order volume) and 50% of positive quote improvement on market orders (also capped at 1%). The CoW Widget allows integrators to charge partner fees of which a percentage goes to CoW DAO. Finally, MEV Blocker charges connected builders a fixed ETH amount per block won based on the average per-block value of MEV Blocker txs.

• Advanced traders like DAOs, whales, and crypto projects trust CoW Protocol for large transactions thanks to its MEV protection & cutting-edge execution. The average CoW trade size is ~60x that of Uniswap. DAOs like ENS, Aave, Curve, Lido, and Nexus Mutual have already benefited from the Mooo experience.

• So far in 2024, 36% ($206M) of all DAO trading volume on Mainnet has been processed by CoW Protocol. The platform's delegated trading model makes it particularly suited for DAOs as they can submit orders ahead of time without compromising their execution price or falling prey to MEV Bots.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: CoW Swap is the only DEX that gives you more than you asked for. CurveDAO uses the CoW Programmatic Order Framework (POF) to collect fees from their LPs automatically and swap the funds into a common token efficiently and without manual intervention. In one harvest, they received 75% more CRVUSD tokens than expected — a result not achievable with hard-coded execution paths. The CoW Protocol POF allows order submission without having to specify a price in advance while ensuring fair pricing at the time of execution.

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