DAOstar

DAOstar is the standards body for decentralized autonomous organizations. It writes the technical standards and publishes the research that let DAOs, and the tools built around them, speak a common language. Where ERC-20 and ERC-721 made tokens interoperable – any wallet or exchange can read any compliant token without bespoke integration – DAOstar set out to do the same for the organizations themselves, so that a DAO's members, proposals, treasury, and rules are legible to any tool without a one-off adapter for every framework.

The problem it addresses is fragmentation. A DAO built on Aragon, one built on a Governor contract, and one running as a Safe multisig each store their membership, proposals, and votes in different shapes. An analytics dashboard, a grants platform, a voting front-end, or a court that wants to read one of them has to reverse-engineer each framework separately. DAOstar's answer is a thin, shared metadata layer that every framework can expose and every tool can consume – the connective tissue of the DAO ecosystem rather than another platform competing inside it.

What that means in practice has shifted. The organization spent 2022–2024 building the general DAO interface, EIP-4824; since 2025 its live engineering, its live infrastructure and its own homepage have been about one narrower thing – grant data. The sections below date that shift from the repositories, the deployed services and the standards catalogue rather than from any announcement, because there has not really been one.

From roundtable to standards body

DAOstar began in 2021 as the DAOstar roundtable, a working series convened by Metagov that brought the major players in the DAO ecosystem to the same table. The initial drafting of its flagship standard drew representatives from essentially every EVM DAO framework of the day – Aragon, Compound, DAOstack, Gnosis, Moloch, OpenZeppelin, and Tribute – alongside a wide selection of DAO tooling developers and several large DAOs. Getting competitors to agree on a shared interface, rather than each pushing its own, is the whole point of a standards body, and it is what gave the resulting specification its legitimacy.

The effort is stewarded by DAOstar One and remains fiscally sponsored by Metagov, the non-profit research collective for decentralized governance. The roundtable grew into a membership program of roughly ninety organizations, and DAOstar's work is backed by ecosystem funders including the Ethereum Foundation, the Optimism Foundation, and Arbitrum DAO. It is deliberately structured as a neutral public good: the standards are open, the process is public on GitHub, and DAOstar sells nothing that would put it in competition with the tools that adopt its work. (The roundtable member-logo section was removed from the homepage in August 2025, so the current membership is no longer published; see below.)

EIP-4824: a common interface for DAOs

DAOstar's flagship is EIP-4824 (also catalogued as DAOIP-2), Common Interfaces for DAOs, first drafted in February 2022 by Joshua Tan, Isaac Patka, Ido Gershtein, Eyal Eithcowich, Michael Zargham, and Sam Furter. Its central idea is a single function, daoURI(), that a DAO contract exposes – deliberately modelled on the tokenURI that NFTs already use. Calling it returns a link to a JSON-LD document describing the organization in a standard shape, so any indexer can discover and read a DAO the same way regardless of which framework built it.

Beyond a top-level name and description, that document points to a handful of subsidiary URIs, each covering one facet of the organization:

• membersURI – the DAO's members, identified by CAIP-10 account addresses or DIDs.
• proposalsURI – on- and off-chain proposals, with their status, links to content, and the execution calldata a passed proposal would run.
• activityLogURI – a log of how members interact with proposals: votes cast, submissions, disputes.
• governanceURI – a human-readable (Markdown) description of the DAO's membership rights and how proposals actually work.
• contractsURI – the set of contracts that make up the DAO, potentially spread across several chains.

The payoff is fourfold: discoverability (DAOs can be found and listed automatically), legibility (their governance is machine-readable), proposal simulation (tools can read the calldata a proposal would execute before it passes), and interoperability (a voting UI, a treasury dashboard, or an analytics service written once works across every compliant DAO). Registration contracts and reference implementations let existing DAOs adopt daoURI without redeploying their core governance – and a companion standard, DAOIP-6, lets a DAO publish the same metadata through an ENS text record instead of an on-chain registry.

The specification has been status Review since it was drafted, and its on-chain registries are the one part of the DAO metadata story that can be counted: thirty DAOURIRegistered events across four production chains, roughly eight distinct third-party organizations, and nothing new since February 2025. That census, with the caveats it needs – the index catches only one of three publication routes – lives on the dedicated EIP-4824 page.

The DAOIP series, and the status column nobody reads

New standards move through a DAO Improvement Proposal (DAOIP) process – a design-document pipeline, defined in DAOIP-1 and modelled on Ethereum's own EIP process, for proposing a feature, gathering technical input, and recording the decision in public. The catalogue has grown well beyond the original interface to cover the practical machinery a DAO needs to be legible to the outside world:

Read together, the series traces the arc of what DAOs have had to grapple with: from simply being readable (DAOIP-2), to proving who did what (DAOIP-3, DAOIP-7), to funding work (DAOIP-5), staying safe (DAOIP-8), and finally meeting the law and the tax office (DAOIP-9, DAOIP-10).

The status column is the part worth reading, and it is easy to miss because every DAOIP carries it in YAML front matter rather than on the rendered page. Read from the repository on 9 August 2026: DAOIP-1 is Living and is a meta document about the process; DAOIP-2 is Review; DAOIP-3 through DAOIP-10 are all Draft. DAOIP-1 defines no status ladder of its own – it says that "in the absence of additional direction, please follow the norms of the EIP system", where the ladder runs Draft → Review → Last Call → Final. On those borrowed norms, nothing in the catalogue has ever passed Review, and the two newest entries have sat at Draft since November 2024.

Two smaller signs point the same way. DAOIP-1 still carries the sentence "As of February 26, 2023, the DAOIP system is currently being specified" – three and a half years unedited. And DAOIP-1 defines exactly two document types, Meta and Standard, but the type: field is empty in the front matter of all ten standards-track documents; only the meta document fills it in. This is the same shape the EIP-4824 census found one level down, where the interface was adopted and the schema was not: the part of a standard that is mechanically checked gets followed, and the part that is merely written down drifts.

What DAOstar is building now: grants data

The clearest statement of DAOstar's current priorities is not a blog post, it is the push history of its repositories. Read from the GitHub API on 9 August 2026: metagov/daostar, the standards repository, was last pushed to on 31 October 2025 – and both of that day's commits were edits to DAOIP-5, the grants schema. Meanwhile metagov/Grants-Gateway-API and metagov/opengrants-platform were both pushed to on 5 August 2026, four days before that reading.

Re-read from the same API on 16 September 2026, all three dates are exactly where they were: the standards catalogue has now been still for over ten months, and the grants stack has been still for six weeks. Six weeks is not dormancy, and the August contrast between a frozen catalogue and a live grants stack is the right way to read the pivot – but it is a contrast that has to be re-measured rather than quoted, because the clause that carried it (“touched this week”) stops being true without anything changing.

The website says the same thing more quietly. Two commits on 12 August 2025 – 9c0d46e8, titled "archive daoip2", and a follow-up four minutes later – changed the old homepage headline from "The DAO standard" to "The DAO Metadata Specification", commented out the "The DAO Standard" explainer and the roundtable member logos, and renamed the top-nav "Standard" link to "Specification". The site has since been rebuilt again, and the daostar.org homepage now names exactly two things under Standards: DAO ID, a richer organizational identity model built on top of daoURI, and OpenGrants, described as "an intelligence layer for Web3 grants". daoURI itself is no longer a call to action anywhere on the front page.

The narrowing is toward the more accurate claim, which is worth saying plainly rather than scoring points off: EIP-4824 always standardized the data about DAOs rather than DAOs themselves, and a body that ships one working data standard is more useful than one that maintains eight drafts. But a wiki entry that still called DAOstar "the standards body of DAOs" and stopped there would leave a reader expecting a general interoperability layer that is not currently being built.

What the live grants stack actually serves

OpenGrants is DAOIP-5 in production, and unlike the catalogue it can be measured directly, because the gateway exposes a public read API at grants.daostar.org with no key. All figures below were read on 9 August 2026 at 17:11 UTC and re-read unchanged on 16 September 2026 at 05:12 UTC – same four adapters, same three systems, same pool counts.

• /api/health reports four adapters, all healthy – Octant, Giveth, Questbook and SCF (the Stellar Community Fund) – with a healthy database behind them.
• /api/v1/grantSystems, the DAOIP-5 index itself, returns three systems: Octant, Giveth and SCF. Questbook is a healthy adapter that the index does not list.
• Following each system's grantPoolsURI: SCF publishes 48 grant pools, Giveth 10, and Octant 0 – a healthy adapter returning an empty set.

Fifty-eight pools across two funders is a small corpus, but it is a real one, served in a documented shape from a warehouse that anyone can query – which is more than the daoURI registry can say four years after that standard shipped. The pools carry funding sizes in a structured totalGrantPoolSize array, so cross-programme comparison is a query rather than a research project; that is precisely the capability the retroactive public-goods funding literature keeps asking for and rarely gets.

Two details reward a closer look. First, every response carries "@context": "http://www.daostar.org/schemas" – the same non-resolving context URL the EIP-4824 registry documents use. There is no document at daostar.org/schemas; the path returns 404 over both HTTP and HTTPS. A JSON-LD processor that tries to dereference the context to interpret the terms gets nothing, so every consumer is in practice reading the fields by name against the specification text. Second, each system's record carries an extensions object keyed by reverse-DNS namespace – app.octant.systemMetadata, io.giveth.systemMetadata, org.stellar.communityfund.systemMetadata. That mechanism comes from x-daoip-5.md, a specification update sitting outside the numbered series with no DAOIP number, no status and no front matter – the one piece of the catalogue that is unambiguously deployed is also the one piece that was never given a place in it.

The layer that stopped being operated

EIP-4824's explicit trade was one on-chain function plus a URI, at the cost of trusting whatever service that URI points at to stay available. DAOstar ran several of those services itself, and their current state is the cost being paid. Checked on 9 August 2026 against 1.1.1.1:

• services.daostar.org – no A record and no CNAME. It is the membersURI, proposalsURI and activityLogURI host for every Ethereum-mainnet registrant in the EIP-4824 index.
• api.daostar.org – an A record still resolves, and connections to it time out on both ports.
• proposalsuri.daostar.org – returns 503.
• daostar.org, docs.daostar.org, opengrants.daostar.org and grants.daostar.org – all 200, the last two hosted on Render.

Nothing was hacked and no key was lost. The registry contracts still return exactly what they were written to return, and every on-chain conformance check still passes; the operated half of the design simply stopped being operated when attention moved to grants. A DAO metadata registry can report thirty conforming organizations and be unable to return a single current member list. That is the same decay pattern this wiki has documented in DeSci's reference layer and in DeepDAO's disappearance and the frozen snapshot it returned as, arriving from a third direction: the immutable part of a public good is cheap and the operated part is not, and it is the operated part that carries the data.

Why standards matter for DAOs

Standardization is easy to underrate because its benefits are diffuse. But the legibility DAOstar creates is what makes a whole category of ecosystem infrastructure possible. Analytics platforms can rank and compare thousands of DAOs precisely because there is a common shape to read. Grants tooling, delegate marketplaces, and governance aggregators can be written once instead of once-per-framework. Auditors and insurers can reference a shared security baseline. And regulators, courts, and tax authorities get a defined interface to a kind of organization that otherwise presents as an opaque set of contracts – which, as DAOs take on real treasuries and real legal exposure, matters more every year. A shared standard is a coordination public good: no single DAO profits enough to build it alone, everyone benefits once it exists, and a neutral body is the natural place for it to live.

The DAOstar record is the argument for that case and the caution against over-reading it in one place. The standard that got written for everybody sits at Review with a dark registry behind it; the standard written for one concrete job – describe a grant round so two funders can be compared – runs in production with real programmes feeding it. The lesson is not that DAO standards do not work. It is that a data standard survives on whoever is obliged to keep publishing to it, and general-purpose organizational metadata has never had that constituency the way grants reporting does.

DAOstar and Caper

A caper is a DAO in all but name – it has members, a shared treasury, proposals that carry real on-chain actions, and exit rights – so the objects DAOstar sets out to make legible are exactly the objects a caper is built from. DAOstar's standards are EVM-native and Caper runs on Radix, so a caper does not implement daoURI today.

What the record above suggests is worth carrying over regardless of chain. The metadata that stayed readable was the metadata that lived where the organization already lives, and the metadata that went dark was the metadata that lived on a service somebody had to keep paying for. A caper's membership, its proposals, its votes and its treasury balance are components' own state on the ledger, so the answer to "who is a member and what did they vote for" does not depend on a hosted endpoint remaining funded.

That is not a claim to have solved interoperability – there is no standard interface here to read that state through, and cross-chain legibility is exactly what DAOstar's work is for. It is the narrower point that legibility and availability are separate problems, and a registry entry can keep passing its checks long after the thing it points at has stopped answering.

References

• DAOstar, daostar.org, and its OpenGrants, DAO ID and research pages.
• Joshua Tan et al., ERC-4824: Common Interfaces for DAOs – Ethereum Improvement Proposals (2022, status Review).
• metagov/daostar – standards, schemas, reference implementations, and the full DAOIP catalogue with each document's status in its front matter.
• metagov/Grants-Gateway-API and metagov/opengrants-platform – the OpenGrants stack; live at grants.daostar.org and opengrants.daostar.org.
• DAOstar, documentation – adopting EIP-4824 and the DAOIP series.
• Metagov, DAOstar project page.
• DAOstar, DAOIP-5: Grants Management and DAOIP-8: Recommended Controls for DAOs.