--- title: "DAOstar" url: "https://caper.network/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/analytics/daostar" updated: 2026-08-26 license: CC-BY-4.0 license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # DAOstar | | | | --- | --- | | **Type** | Standards body & public-goods organization for DAOs | | **Founded** | 2021, as the DAOstar roundtable | | **Steward** | DAOstar One, fiscally sponsored by [Metagov](https://metagov.org) | | **Flagship standard** | [EIP-4824](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/eip-4824) / DAOIP-2 – Common Interfaces for DAOs (`daoURI`), status **Review** since 2022 | | **Standards** | DAOIP-1 … DAOIP-10 – interfaces, attestations, grants, security, legal, tax. One Living meta document, one in Review, **eight still Draft** | | **Current focus** | **OpenGrants** (DAOIP-5 grant data) and **DAO ID** – the two standards the homepage names as of August 2026 | | **Standards repo** | [metagov/daostar](https://github.com/metagov/daostar) – last commit **31 October 2025** | | **Backers** | Ethereum Foundation, Optimism, Arbitrum DAO, and others | | **Related** | [DeepDAO](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/analytics/deepdao), [Snapshot](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/voting/snapshot), [Giveth](/wiki/daos/public-goods/giveth), [DAO security](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-security-and-governance-attacks), [DAO tooling](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/dao-tooling-overview) | **DAOstar** is the standards body for [decentralized autonomous organizations](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/fundamentals/what-is-a-dao). 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](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20) and [ERC-721](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/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](https://metagov.org/projects/daostar) 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](https://github.com/metagov/daostar), 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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/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](https://json-ld.org) 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](https://github.com/ChainAgnostic/CAIPs/blob/main/CAIPs/caip-10.md) 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](https://github.com/metagov/daostar/blob/main/DAOIPs/daoip-6.md), 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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/eip-4824). ## 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](https://github.com/metagov/daostar/blob/main/DAOIPs/daoip-1.md) 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: | | | | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **DAOIP** | **Title** | **Status** | **Created** | **What it covers** | | **DAOIP-1** | Purpose and Guidelines | Living | 2023-01-02 | How the DAOIP process itself works. | | **DAOIP-2** | Common Interfaces for DAOs | Review | 2022-02-17 | The `daoURI` standard – identical to EIP-4824. | | **DAOIP-3** | Attestations for DAOs | Draft | 2023-02-03 | An indexing layer over verifiable credentials for permissionless claims about membership and contributions. | | **DAOIP-4** | Proposal Types | Draft | 2023-02-03 | Standard templates and an extensible taxonomy for classifying proposals. | | **DAOIP-5** | Grants Management | Draft | 2023-11-14 | A common data model for grant programs – pools, applications, and payouts. The basis of OpenGrants. | | **DAOIP-6** | daoURI via ENS | Draft | 2024-03-11 | Publishing DAO metadata through an ENS (or DNS) text record instead of a registry contract. | | **DAOIP-7** | Attestation Schema Registry for EAS | Draft | 2024-04-25 | A registry of DAOIP-3-compliant schemas on the Ethereum Attestation Service. | | **DAOIP-8** | Recommended Controls for DAOs | Draft | 2024-10-22 | A minimum-viable DAO [security](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-security-and-governance-attacks) standard – controls across governance, operations, and risk. | | **DAOIP-9** | Legal Communication | Draft | 2024-11-26 | A `legalURI` for passing legal information to and from communities that lack formal [legal recognition](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/dao-legal-structures). | | **DAOIP-10** | Tax Reporting | Draft | 2024-11-29 | A data standard for DAOs to publish tax information for authorities and participants. | 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](https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1.md)", 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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/eip-4824) 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](https://github.com/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](https://github.com/metagov/Grants-Gateway-API) and [metagov/opengrants-platform](https://github.com/metagov/opengrants-platform) were both pushed to on **5 August 2026**, four days before this reading. The standards catalogue has been still for nine months; the grants stack was touched this week. The website says the same thing more quietly. Two commits on 12 August 2025 – [9c0d46e8, titled "archive daoip2"](https://github.com/metagov/daostar/commit/9c0d46e88d772c26201803c3cd4b4080187a6438), 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](https://daostar.org) homepage now names exactly two things under _Standards_: [DAO ID](https://daostar.org/daoid), a richer organizational identity model built on top of `daoURI`, and [OpenGrants](https://daostar.org/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](https://grants.daostar.org) with no key. All figures below were read on **9 August 2026 at 17:11 UTC**. - [`/api/health`](https://grants.daostar.org/api/health) reports **four adapters, all healthy** – Octant, [Giveth](/wiki/daos/public-goods/giveth), Questbook and SCF (the Stellar Community Fund) – with a healthy database behind them. - [`/api/v1/grantSystems`](https://grants.daostar.org/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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/eip-4824) 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](https://github.com/metagov/daostar/blob/main/DAOIPs/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](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/analytics/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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-security-and-governance-attacks) 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](/wiki/governance/execution), and [exit rights](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/rage-quit-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](/wiki/desci/desci-and-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](/wiki/governance/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](https://daostar.org), and its [OpenGrants](https://daostar.org/opengrants), [DAO ID](https://daostar.org/daoid) and [research](https://daostar.org/research) pages. - Joshua Tan et al., [ERC-4824: Common Interfaces for DAOs](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4824) – Ethereum Improvement Proposals (2022, status Review). - [metagov/daostar](https://github.com/metagov/daostar) – standards, schemas, reference implementations, and the full [DAOIP catalogue](https://github.com/metagov/daostar/tree/main/DAOIPs) with each document's status in its front matter. - [metagov/Grants-Gateway-API](https://github.com/metagov/Grants-Gateway-API) and [metagov/opengrants-platform](https://github.com/metagov/opengrants-platform) – the OpenGrants stack; live at [grants.daostar.org](https://grants.daostar.org/api/v1/grantSystems) and [opengrants.daostar.org](https://opengrants.daostar.org). - DAOstar, [documentation](https://docs.daostar.org/) – adopting EIP-4824 and the DAOIP series. - Metagov, [DAOstar project page](https://metagov.org/projects/daostar). - DAOstar, [DAOIP-5: Grants Management](https://github.com/metagov/daostar/blob/main/DAOIPs/daoip-5.md) and [DAOIP-8: Recommended Controls for DAOs](https://github.com/metagov/daostar/blob/main/DAOIPs/daoip-8.md).