Commonwealth is the crypto-native governance forum: wallet-authenticated threads, token-gated topics, on-chain polls and a direct line into Snapshot, built for the stage of governance that happens before anybody votes. It now trades as Common, and its centre of gravity has moved to launching tokens and coordinating AI agents. The forum layer it was built to own is still, in 2026, mostly Discourse.

That stage matters more than the tooling map usually admits. A DAO's binding decisions are made by contract, but they are shaped in a thread: the version of the proposal that reaches a vote is the version the forum argued into shape, and the options that never make the ballot die there too. The forum is also the archive – the only durable record of why a treasury did what it did. Custody has a standard, voting has a standard, and deliberation has a text box.

The deliberation layer, and who actually runs it

The proposal lifecycle starts with discussion and a temperature check long before a Governor contract sees a transaction. That first stage needs somewhere to live, and the market settled on general-purpose forum software rather than anything DAO-specific. A check of the four largest governance forums today returns the same answer from each: gov.uniswap.org, governance.aave.com, forum.arbitrum.foundation and forum.sky.money all identify themselves as Discourse installations in their own page metadata.

Discourse is a decade-old open-source forum with no crypto features at all: no wallet login, no token gating, no vote weighting. It won this layer on the properties that matter for an archive rather than the ones that demo well – the DAO self-hosts it, owns the database, and can export the whole thing. Commonwealth's wager was that the deliberation layer should instead be native to the chain the DAO governs.

What Commonwealth built

The product is a forum with the governance machinery wired in rather than bolted on.

• Wallet-native identity. Members sign in with an EVM, Cosmos or Solana wallet (or social login backed by a managed wallet), so the account posting in the thread is the account that holds the tokens – the stated case for a crypto-native forum over Reddit or Discourse.
• Stages. A thread-tagging system that communities mostly use, in the docs' own words, “to document which governance stage the thread is in”. It is the lifecycle rendered as a filter: the forum knows the difference between an idea and a proposal in voting.
• Groups and gating. Topics and threads can be gated on ERC-20, ERC-1155 or other on-chain credentials, which turns who may speak into an on-chain question rather than a moderator's.
• Trust levels. A spam-resistance ladder mixing on-chain and social signals, with per-level daily caps on posts, upvotes and AI generations – an admission that an open, wallet-authenticated forum is cheap to flood.
• Snapshot, both directions. Admins connect one or more Snapshot spaces, and members create and vote on Snapshot proposals from inside the thread, so the temperature check does not require leaving the discussion. The integration is restricted to ERC-20 communities.
• Native governance surfaces. The platform reads Governor Alpha, Governor Bravo, Aave, Substrate, Cosmos and Sputnik v2 governance alongside Snapshot and its own polls, which is what let one forum serve DAOs that had nothing in common at the contract level.
• Discourse import. A full migration path that carries threads, comments and upvotes across from an existing Discourse backup. The documentation index covers that direction and no equivalent route back out.

Community Stake: pricing a seat in the room

The most consequential design decision was to make participation itself an asset. Community Stake gives a community an ERC-1155 namespace and a stake contract; members buy and sell stake directly from that contract, priced on a bonding curve that rises with supply, and holding stake places them in a stakeholder subgroup with elevated rights inside the forum. Trades pay a fee, part of which routes to a community treasury controlled by the admin who enabled stake. It launched on Base and Blast in March 2024.

This is a genuinely different theory of a forum. Discourse gives moderators discretion and members equality; Community Stake gives the community a market in its own attention, and standing in the discussion becomes something you can buy or sell at a price that moves. It also gives the platform a fee to earn from a conversation, which is the hinge the rest of the story turns on.

From forum to launchpad

In May 2022 Commonwealth raised $20M from Polychain, Dragonfly, Spark Capital, Wintermute, LongHash and BitDAO's Mirana, reporting 60,000 active users across 700+ communities including dYdX, Axie Infinity, NEAR, Solana, BitDAO and Polygon, and announced a governance token, $CMN, as its route to decentralising the platform.

What shipped four years later is a different product. Common now describes itself as “the coordination layer for communities, contributors, and AI agents” and reports 100,000+ communities, 4M users and 50k tokens launched. The Ideacoin Launchpad mints ERC-20s on Base in one click and names its audience plainly: creators, “degens & early adopters” looking for high-risk, high-reward opportunities, and anyone after a fun, fast, low-cost launch. The protocol documentation describes the whole system as “tokenized attention for actions, ideas, and more”, built from a namespace, contests, referrals and a bonding-curve launchpad. The quest ladder rewards launching a token, graduating it and trading it; Postcoins (March 2026) makes an individual thread a tradable asset. The token that arrived is $COMMON, distributed by retrodrop on Base through Magna, with contributor and investor allocations on a four-year vest and a one-year cliff.

The clearest statement of the turn is the house blog arguing that conditional markets will replace token voting (December 2025): one token one vote produces plutocracy, apathy and whale capture, so run prediction markets on proposal outcomes instead. The diagnosis matches what the wiki's own turnout data shows. But it is a striking thing to read from the company that spent seven years hosting the deliberation, and it tells you what the platform now thinks the forum is for.

Why the incumbent held

Commonwealth's features were real and the DAOs with the most at stake still did not move. The reasons are unglamorous and worth stating plainly, because they generalise to any hosted governance tool.

• The archive outlives the vendor. A governance forum is the institutional memory of every decision a treasury has made. Self-hosted Discourse means the DAO holds that record in its own database; a hosted forum means the record's availability is a function of somebody's runway and roadmap.
• Neutrality is a feature. Generic software has no opinion about tokens, no fee to earn from the conversation and no launchpad to cross-sell. When the venue for deliberation has its own token economics, the venue is a participant.
• Migration is one-way in practice. Importing a Discourse backup is a documented service; reconstructing years of threads out of a hosted platform is not a path anyone has published.
• Crypto-native login solves a problem forums do not have. Wallet identity is essential for voting and gating, and largely optional for arguing. The pain that moved DAOs off Discourse was never authentication.

What to weigh before adopting one

• Deliberation has no execution guarantee. Nothing said in a forum binds anyone. It is the softest layer of off-chain governance, which is exactly why it is where capture is cheapest – controlling which proposals get drafted, framed and stress-tested is more valuable than controlling any single vote.
• Gating the discussion narrows the argument. Token-gated topics keep out spam and also keep out the researcher, the journalist and the affected user who hold nothing. Every gate on speech is a decision about whose objections the DAO will hear before it votes.
• Pricing standing changes who speaks. A staked or token-weighted forum reproduces the plutocracy problem one layer earlier, where it is far less visible than a public vote tally.
• Keep the record portable. Whatever venue a DAO picks, the test is whether it can walk away with the full history intact. If it cannot, the vendor holds a veto over the DAO's memory.

How Caper approaches this

A caper has no forum. There is no discussion stage, no temperature check and no venue the protocol knows about – members argue wherever they already talk, and none of it is on the ledger.

What the protocol does hold is the proposal itself. A proposal carries its title and description on-ledger as part of the proposal record, so the case put to members is stored with the decision rather than on a forum that may not outlive it. Posting one costs a fee that is deposited into the DAO's own treasury and requires holding the DAO's token, which is the whole of the spam defence – there are no trust levels and no moderators. Every proposal must offer members more than one option, and each option carries its consequences as structured data: the recipient, the currency, the amount. There is no separate drafting window, either: voting opens the moment the proposal is created and runs to a fixed close, so the debate happens against a clock that is already running.

The trade-off is honest. A caper gains a decision record that cannot be edited, taken down or lost with a vendor, and gives up the deliberation stage where a proposal is usually improved before anyone commits to it.

References

• Common, Welcome to Common · Features · Governance · Community Stake · Ideacoin Launchpad · Protocol overview · Common Claims
• Common blog, Why Conditional Markets Will Replace Token Voting (Jay Peredo, 20 Dec 2025) · Introducing: Postcoins (18 Mar 2026)
• Decrypt, Common Raises $20M to Build DAO Management Platform, Launch Token (24 May 2022)
• GitHub, hicommonwealth/commonwealth (GPL-3.0)
• Discourse, project site · discourse/discourse
• Governance forums checked: Uniswap · Aave · Arbitrum · Sky