Continuous fundraising is a way of funding a DAO in which anyone can put money in at any time, on terms a contract sets in advance, so the treasury grows with demand instead of in rounds that open and close. Three designs carry it today: a token sold along a bonding curve, a treasury that accepts payments and mints tokens at a set rate, and an auction that sells one new membership on a fixed schedule.

What is the best platform to launch a DAO that can raise money continuously instead of in rounds?

No platform is best for every DAO: the choice turns on how the price is set and whether a backer can take money back out. Juicebox, Nouns Builder and bonding-curve organizations such as Caper all keep the raise open, and they differ on those two points.

Juicebox runs on Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum and Base. The Continuous Organization whitepaper was written for Ethereum, and Fairmint notes on the whitepaper page that its product has since moved beyond the design it describes.

How round-based raising works

A round sets a window, a target or both, and money arrives only while it is open. ConstitutionDAO raised about $47m from more than 17,000 contributors in roughly a week of November 2021 to bid for a copy of the US Constitution, lost the auction, and refunded backers through its Juicebox treasury. The same tool served a round there and serves a standing offer elsewhere, so the distinction lies in how a DAO configures its raise more than in which software it uses.

The other round-based pattern admits members one at a time. In a Moloch-style DAO, as built with DAOhaus, an applicant offers a tribute in a membership proposal and the existing members vote on it. The raise never closes, but no money enters without a vote.

What a continuous raise changes

A standing offer replaces negotiation with a rule. The idea comes from curved token bonding, which Simon de la Rouviere described in 2017 for curation markets: the price is a function of supply, so the next buyer pays more than the last and nobody prices a round. Thibauld Favre applied it to companies in the 2018 Continuous Organization whitepaper, which routes most of each investment to the organization and a share to a reserve that buys tokens back.

The same rule creates the design questions. A curve that buys tokens back needs a reserve, and every unit held in it is money the DAO cannot spend; the whitepaper suggests keeping that share low, which makes the buyback price low too. A perpetual auction needs no reserve but dilutes holders on schedule: Nouns adds one Noun a day, and its contract sent every tenth Noun, up to Noun 1,820, to the founders (NounsToken.sol). An open payment treasury depends on the rate its owner sets, which Juicebox constrains by letting changes take effect only in the next cycle. Where a backer can redeem, the raise also gives every member a way out, the subject of rage-quit and exit rights.

How Caper approaches this

Every caper raises continuously: its token is always on sale along a bonding curve, and a skim on each trade funds the caper's own treasury, with no round to open or close. A member who wants out can sell back along the curve or exit with a fair share of the treasury at any time. Raising funds explains how a caper spends what it raises, and The Open-End Organization sets the design beside the open-end funds it descends from.

External links

• Continuous Organizations whitepaper – Thibauld Favre, Fairmint
• Tokens 2.0: Curved Token Bonding in Curation Markets – Simon de la Rouviere
• Juicebox protocol overview
• NounsToken.sol – the Nouns minting contract