EduDAO funds and organises university blockchain clubs. BitDAO, the treasury DAO now called Mantle, set it up by vote in December 2021, with student blockchain clubs at eight universities in the US, the UK and China as members, to pay for grants, research and product development. BitDAO's forum announced it as "the world's first student-led multi-university DAO organization". It has no token of its own. Two of the three seats on its first steering committee went to firms affiliated with BitDAO, and BitDAO's token holders could replace any of them. Since 2023 its published work has been events for students – hackathons, hacker houses and meetups at Ethereum conferences – and since 2025 its website has carried the branding of Game7, the gaming DAO BitDAO voted to fund a month before it.

How did EduDAO start?

Jon Allen and Jocelyn Weber of the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (Berkeley RDI) proposed it to BitDAO as BIP-6, "Education DAO" on 23 November 2021. The proposal lists Allen at Magnus Ventures; the launch release introduces him as managing partner of Mirana Ventures, which it calls a BitDAO venture partner. Earlier that month BitDAO had voted on BIP-5, the $500m Game7 gaming DAO, which Allen co-wrote with Ronen Kirsh of Forte. BitDAO itself was a treasury DAO backed by the exchange Bybit, governed by holders of its $BIT token.

BIP-6 argued two things: universities hold talent that a small amount of funding and guidance can turn into founders, and BitDAO lacked critical engagement in its own governance, which student groups could supply. The launch release spelled out the exchange. Each club would control its own allocated budget, and in return would vote in BitDAO governance and contribute work back to it, such as governance or treasury tooling or products for the BitDAO ecosystem. Allen told the forum the money would be paid in tranches, with performance reviews and accounting between them, and adjusted for performance and need.

BIP-6 went to a Snapshot vote from 9 to 16 December 2021 and passed with 153m $BIT for and none against, cast from 12 addresses. The release went out the same day and named nine founding members: Berkeley RDI, Blockchain at Berkeley, Penn Blockchain, Harvard Blockchain Club, MIT Sloan Blockchain Club, Blockchain at Michigan, Blockchain@USC, Oxford Blockchain Society, and the Tsinghua University Students Blockchain Association (THUBA).

Objections on the forum

Several forum members argued against the design before the vote. One said the money favoured wealthy US universities, and asked who would own what the students built and what recourse BitDAO had if funds were misused. A PhD candidate questioned whether the proposal described a DAO at all, and asked for an open grant process with public applications and delegated review. Others asked how a university outside the founding set could join. Allen answered that the clubs had been chosen for their track records, that small tranches and social accountability were the safeguards, and that expansion, including outside the US, was a goal for a second phase if the first worked.

How was EduDAO governed?

The formal launch came nine months later. EduDAO posted BIP-6.1 on 29 August 2022, and BitDAO voted it through from 6 to 13 September with 199m $BIT for and none against, from 149 addresses. It released the first tranche of $5.5m and set up a bootstrapping steering committee with three seats:

• one chosen by Windranger Labs, a BitDAO-affiliated contributor team;
• one chosen by Mirana Ventures;
• one elected by a majority of the member clubs.

A BitDAO Snapshot vote could replace any seat or change how many there were. EduDAO never issued a token, so the electorate above its committee was BitDAO's, voting one $BIT one vote – the token-weighted model. In the vocabulary of this wiki it is a subDAO: a body with its own budget and mandate whose authority comes from a parent DAO's vote.

The member list in BIP-6.1 had changed since the launch. It names eight student clubs and no faculty centre: Berkeley RDI, a co-author of BIP-6, is gone, and Penn is represented by FranklinDAO, its student blockchain group.

What has EduDAO done?

EduDAO's own blog, which posted recaps from January 2023 to January 2024, describes its work as events. At ETHDenver in February 2023 it co-hosted brunches and workshops with protocols, a hacker house with Sozu Haus, and an evening for over 100 students with Mantle and Mirana. From 21 April to 2 May 2023 it ran its first hackathon, with BitDAO, for students building on Mantle Network, with an in-person hub at Oxford; the call said performance would count towards future EduDAO grants. The winners included MEGAxis, a marketplace for AI prompts built by Tsinghua and USC students, and CampusChain, an Oxford tool for running EduDAO's own clubs.

Later in 2023 it ran a lounge at the Oxford Blockchain Society's June conference, student socials at EthCC in Paris, a hacker house at ETHGlobal Singapore in September, and another, EduHaus, at Devconnect Istanbul in November. Member clubs credit it in their results: the Oxford Blockchain Society thanked EduDAO when its students won ETHDenver 2023 and again after ETHGlobal Waterloo, and EduDAO lists among its students the Penn founders of Ion Protocol, a lending protocol for staked assets that raised a $2m pre-seed round in 2023.

What happened to EduDAO when BitDAO became Mantle?

BitDAO's holders voted from 12 to 19 May 2023 to merge with Mantle Network and rebrand, under BIP-21, which passed with 235m $BIT for and almost none against; $BIT became $MNT. BIP-21 named EduDAO and Game7 as existing initiatives that would keep the right to set their own brand, governance, mission and strategy. The BitDAO forum went read-only, and EduDAO's two proposals now sit in a curated archive on Mantle's forum. Mantle still votes in BitDAO's Snapshot space, and no proposal there since BIP-6.1 has put further EduDAO funding to a vote.

EduDAO kept running. Its website read "in partnership with Mantle", under a 2022 Windranger copyright, until at least December 2024. By April 2025 it had been rebuilt as "Powered by Game7", with a mission of connecting student clubs, developer networks and study groups to protocols and venture funds. The new site counts 72 university networks, 11 hacker houses and over 100 events since August 2022, and lists its team by role rather than name: club presidents from Berkeley, Penn and Tsinghua, alongside staff from protocols including Polygon, Sui and Starknet.

It was among the hosts of an ETHGlobal community meetup at ETHDenver in February 2025, alongside Game7 DAO, and its X account promoted events through 2025, the Science of Blockchain Conference in August among them. In March 2026 it pinned a post celebrating Penn Blockchain's event at the Penn Museum.

EduDAO has published no list of grants and no accounts for the first tranche. Those figures would come from Mantle governance, which approved the money, and can be requested on its forum.

How Caper approaches this

EduDAO's money came from outside it: a parent DAO's token holders voted to release it in tranches, and a committee seated partly by that parent's affiliates decided how to spend it. A caper has no parent. Its treasury fills from its own activity: a share of every trade on its bonding curve, and the fees its members pay to propose and to vote. Proposals reach that treasury only through a short list of typed actions, decided by a ranked ballot and then a market window. No sponsor's token vote sits above that decision, though a platform-wide upgrade path is voted in the $CAPER caper.

EduDAO's clubs answered to its committee, and the committee to BitDAO's vote. A caper member who has voted can leave with a share of the treasury at any time, without a proposal, in the tradition of rage-quit. What EduDAO had and a caper does not is a sponsor: a caper's treasury starts empty.

See also

• Mantle (formerly BitDAO) – the treasury that voted EduDAO into being
• Game7 – BitDAO's gaming DAO, from the same proposer, whose branding EduDAO now carries
• SubDAOs, working groups & pods – the structure EduDAO is an instance of
• Gitcoin DAO – grants decided in open rounds, the process EduDAO's forum critics asked for
• Protocol Guild – a funding mechanism whose beneficiaries curate themselves
• DAO treasury management – how large treasuries decide what to fund

References

• BIP-6: Education DAO (BitDAO forum, 23 November 2021) – the proposal, and the debate over it
• BIP-6 Snapshot vote (9–16 December 2021)
• Groups from Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and Others Join EduDAO (PR Newswire, 16 December 2021) – members, budget and obligations
• BIP-6.1: EduDAO (Mantle forum archive, 29 August 2022) – formal launch and steering committee
• BIP-6.1 Snapshot vote (6–13 September 2022)
• BIP-21 Snapshot vote (12–19 May 2023) and The Block's report – BitDAO's merger into Mantle, and the clause on existing initiatives
• EduDAO on Medium – recaps, January 2023 to January 2024
• edudao.io and the July 2024 archive – the site before and after the Game7 rebuild
• ETHGlobal Asia Blockchain Community Meetup (Luma, 27 February 2025) – co-hosted with Game7 DAO