Measuring DAOs, defending them, and the data standards that make them legible.
Council dissolution and governance unwindingThis page is about dissolving a body inside a living DAO. For the organization ending itself – the wind-down vote, the redemption, and what survives it…DAO governance operating costsAsk a DAO what its governance costs to run and you will get a number. Ask two DAOs and you will get two numbers that cannot be put side by side.DAO mergers and token consolidationsCompanies merge under a body of law that has spent a century deciding what happens to the shareholder who votes no: appraisal rights, a court that can price…DAO metrics and analyticsMeasuring participation, treasury health, and voter power.DAO procurement and requests for proposalsA DAO that needs an audit, a market maker, a treasury manager or an RPC endpoint has to buy it.DAO security and governance attacksGovernance exploits, flash-loan votes, and how to defend.DAO service providersA DAO service provider is an outside firm paid by a DAO to run a defined part of its operation – indexing, treasury management, protocol engineering, growth…DAO tooling discontinuityA DAO's constitution is its contracts, but its working life runs on software somebody else operates: a voting front end, a forum, a member workspace, a…Delegate incentive programsA delegate incentive program is a standing budget a DAO votes to itself for the purpose of getting its own delegates to show up.EIP-4824: Common Interfaces for DAOsThe daoURI standard that makes any DAO's data readable across tools.How DAOs failThe common ways DAOs stall, capture, or collapse.Proposal spam and the governance denominatorProposal spam is what happens when a DAO's proposal surface is cheap enough to post into that people who are not participating in governance start using it as…Scoring and review gates in DAO fundingA review gate is the step where a DAO hands a funding decision to a small group of named people, asks them to score applications against a written rubric, and…The machine-readable DAOA DAO that nobody can read is, for most practical purposes, a private company with a public ledger.Voter apathy and governance participationVoter apathy is the single most durable finding in the empirical study of on-chain governance: across almost every DAO measured, the overwhelming majority of…Who pays to execute a passed proposalA DAO vote that passes does not do anything. Somebody still has to send the transaction that carries the decision out, and that transaction costs money.Winding down a DAOA company that stops has a procedure waiting for it: a liquidator is appointed, creditors are ranked, assets are sold, the entity is struck off a register.