Technology shapes culture, and culture shapes technology. We see the same in decentralization and its impact on culture and work, where our focus lies. There is a word for where decentralized work takes place: DAO. The impact seeps beyond DAOs to internet native organizations, online communities, and all instances where people gather together, collaborate, co-create, coordinate, and work. We have observed a gradual and organic change in how we contribute to the DAOs and alike, enriched with new ways of relating and contributing.
The first type of interaction started in the service of finance, such as investment pooling and deploying the funds. As wider audiences get to know about it all and step in to be hosts instead of remaining guests, we have brought more human activities onchain—yes, finance but also now creativity, writing, building, curating, entertaining, sharing, belonging, rewarding, exhibiting, venturing, expressing, and quantifying - all underpinned by the atomic activity called a contribution.
When we contribute in various ways, the tooling of the stack has evolved, too, And we are still evolving. What are the components of the DAO stack? The answer is as broad as “What are the digital tools of human activity?” Hence, we must draw a line and focus heavily on onchain organizations and related activities. Second, we will have a lens of the future of work broadened by the evolving definition of work, too.
To understand the whole picture, we need a third lens: the ever-changing nature of this stack with time, with its ever-changing names: decentralized autonomous organizations, internet-native organizations, or digital cooperatives.
Let's get into it! The shift in how we engage can be observed in five main evolutionary stages.
We will look at each era in terms of culture and the related stack.
1) Before the Cambrian,
2) Cambrian & Composability arrives
3) Specialized & Scale
4) Social first
5) A more intuitive future
Before the Cambrian
Before the Cambrian*, there existed coded interactions with smart contracts. The stack of the DAO is the code that is explicitly written for the interaction at hand. Following were a few names like Aragon, DAOStack, DAOHAUS, and Colony, which built products focusing primarily on proposals and variations of governance models that are somewhat configurable. Sometimes, the tool branding was led on the governance model they think is the best, a luxury current tooling stack does not have. People thought this was another trend that would be containable, and you could become a Certified DAO expert reading in 7 hours*. It was not. We know now that we are experiencing a trend with stages to follow - the Cambrian arrives.
Cambrian & Composability arrives
When complexity increased, and consumers started using varied activities, the organic shift was towards pick-and-choose, where code became productized and tools became configurable. We will be tackling most of the Dao stack in this section. We are currently in this era with more specific tooling emerging, which is tackled in the following sections.
We will observe per function. Let's get into it.
DAO Functions | Description | Players |
Deployment | It becomes possible to deploy your DAO in a few steps! Comes with tokenized ownership on-chain, pre-curated voting rules, proposal templates, and treasury automation with set consensus parameters. (Read/ Write) | DAOHaus, Tally, Aragon, DAOStack, Syndicate, Gnosis Zodiac, Kali DAO, Colony, Kalli, Roll, Coinvise, Juicebox, NinDAO |
Voting/ Governance | Smart contract frameworks for tokenizing voting or governance around a shared treasury. | Moloch, Compound Governor, Governor Bravo, DAOStack, Aragon, LAO Snapshot, DAOHaus, Tally, Sybil, Boardroom, Jokerace |
Discourse/ Governance | Most coordination happens before we even vote, which requires discourse. We have created specific tooling that goes beyond common communication and collaboration tools. | Discourse, Snapshot, Harmonica, |
On-chain Community, Communication & Collaboration | Tools for communicating in chat or indexed forum posts to build community feedback, collaboration, and communication. Note that most of this activity happens tolls dedicated regardless of web3 like Slack. Discord, gsuite which we will not list. | Console, Common Ground, NftyChat, Charmverse, Lighthouse, Guild, Lobby, Clarity Common Wealth |
Identity, credentials, Reputation, and Access | We acknowledge that wallets can be a way to identify without further solutions on top. The solutions are required as we get more sophisticated with identity - venturing into DIDs, identity expression, and authorization off-chain IDs with onchain indexing and access | Hats, Disco, gitcoin passport, Brightid and proof of humanity, ENS, POAP.xyz, Ceramic (infra powering most), Lit protocol, Collab.land, Guild |
Contributor Tracking | Working group operations on-chain to track contributions, contributor output, open work to the community, and pay contributors through smart contracts. | Wonderverse, Govrn, DeWork, Coordinape, Collab.land |
Experience Aggregator | View the DAOs you’re a part of all in one dashboard. You can view analytics, vote on governance proposals, and view member profiles. (Read) | Boardroom, Tally, Zapper, Messari Governor, DeFi Llama, Layer2Beat, Lighthouse |
Experience Onboarding | Attracting contributors and members to DAOs can be challenging. Gamification and minimal onboarding are mandatory UX for future Web3 communities. | Guild, Crew3, |
Rewards and Recognition | Incentives to contribute and engage become super important when organizations verge on permissionless. Rewards and recognition have been one of the main pillars of incentives and have matured beyond what a traditional organization can fathom.* | Coordinape, Praise, collab.land, tip.cc, POAP.xyz, Rabbithole.gg,SourceCred , Layer3 |
Learning& Training | Although learning technology/content does not require anything beyond traditional tooling, this category hints at more certification and content stacks specific to web3. | Rabbithole.gg, POAP, DEveloper DAO |
Investment Vehicle Structures | These are vehicles and tooling for fund pooling and deployment. | Syndicate, KaliDAO, TheLAO, |
Treasury Management & Accounting, | Applications for treasury management, payments, and financial services. | Utopia Labs, Defiance, Parcel, Coinshift, Metamask Institutional, Tally, SAFE, Hashi (Gnosis), Llama, and Juicebox. |
Compensation & Payroll | Web3 organization and team compensation. Payroll payments are also covered under the treasury management above. | Opolis, Coordinape, Smart invoice. Superfluid, Sablier, DEwork and Parcel |
We have listed the core functions above, and as maturity increases, we must tackle the impact the scale and specialization introduce.
Specialized & Scale
Specialized and Scaled tooling is a relatively new overlay to our current era that requires its theme. The maturity of a market leads to specialization and scale, which is similar to what we are observing, where specialized and highly scaled DAOs create the need for functions and tools to manage the scale or niche they carve. We believe this trend will stay as we mature and onboard more specialized ways of doing activities onchain.
Governance Delegation | Most governance/voting tools have a delegation option, and some tackle advanced the functionality including delegation for tasks, incentives, and tracking. | Tally. xyz, Metropolis, Butter |
Scaled Treasury & Risk Management | Applications for advanced treasury management, risk, hedging and diversification. | Hedgey Finance, Avantgarde, Enzyme, Blockanalitica |
Legal | Kyler, are we clear to write this without legal advice? | Open Law, Legal Nodes, Doola |
Social Era Starts
It was all about graphs and always has been. As DAOs matured, they matured in the same way consumer digital networks matured. Think of how finance, content, and e-commerce become social, the movement the tools enabled. It is almost natural that decentralized collaboration tools evolved also with a social first lens. It has a name, of course, DeSoc or decentralized social. It is relevant to the DAO stack in this social first graph because DAOs and organizations emerge on top of them. Unlike a startup advancing from 0-1, this type of tooling all emerges in a more social setting like swarming. This is the new era, and we are witnessing how it evolves while advancing the web3 ecosystem.
The stack in social-first organizations consists of players like Lens, Cyberconnect, and Farcaster. Farcaster recently picked up adoption by giving the option to build applications on the graph. Although these still need to look like work beyond influencer economics specifically, they are expanding contributions and evolving into a more general work activity. One to watch.
A more intuitive future
What are the progressions of this future of work? When can we get mass adoption? There are possible pathways that will evolve from where we are. Here are a few trends we think are the progression of today and we are already seeing the signals.
DAO work maturing and spilling into the streets
Startups like Tokens of Appreciation Protocol(TOAP.gg), TYB, and Cocreate want to bring elements of DAOs and web3 back into traditional organizations. TYB and Cocreate in consumer space, and TOAP at the workplace, advancing what Platform Coops started like taxi now *or Fairmondo, and aiming to make equitable and participatory work accessible to scaled traditional businesses as well as individuals so that co-creation and ownership becomes pervasive in daily life.
AI and Decentralisation merge
The current wave of Gen AI and AI also spills onto DAOs. Besides being copilots of our work productivity and enhancing user experiences, AI brings novel ways into decentralized work. Here are a few instances where it is already being built onto the decentralized work stack.
Ownership and tracking of contributions/data in a world where we co-create with AI
Autonomous worlds with AI where autonomous AI agents with treasuries, identities, and governance
Self Infrastructuring
This is still an abstract and far-fetched idea; we have only touched instances of it with decentralized organizations. The idea is that the individual has organic ways to interact with the digital, and they do not need to onboard onto a tool. They interact digitally with work and data with the perspective of hyper-personalized windows they own and choose, sometimes called swarm intelligence. The modular blocks of this far fetch feature exist in decentralized organizations, autonomous agents, and digital ID, and we might be approaching the self-infrastructure future one bit at a time.
