DAOstar is the de-facto 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 sets 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.

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 has since grown 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.

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 DAOIP series

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:

DAOIP-1	Purpose and Guidelines	How the DAOIP process itself works.
DAOIP-2	Common Interfaces for DAOs	The daoURI standard – identical to EIP-4824.
DAOIP-3	Attestations for DAOs	An indexing layer over verifiable credentials for permissionless claims about membership and contributions.
DAOIP-4	Proposal Types	Standard templates and an extensible taxonomy for classifying proposals.
DAOIP-5	Grants Management	A common data model for grant programs – pools, applications, and payouts. The basis of OpenGrants.
DAOIP-6	daoURI via ENS	Publishing DAO metadata through an ENS (or DNS) text record instead of a registry contract.
DAOIP-7	Attestation Schema Registry for EAS	A registry of DAOIP-3-compliant schemas on the Ethereum Attestation Service.
DAOIP-8	Recommended Controls for DAOs	A minimum-viable DAO security standard – controls across governance, operations, and risk.
DAOIP-9	Legal Communication	A legalURI for passing legal information to and from communities that lack formal legal recognition.
DAOIP-10	Tax Reporting	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).

Research and public goods

Alongside the standards, DAOstar runs a research arm – its research programme publishes reports and hosts a fellowship, and the two feed each other: field research surfaces a problem, and a standard is the durable fix. The State of DAO Security report (December 2024) fed directly into DAOIP-8; regional State of DAOs in Asia studies covering Japan, Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan mapped how different jurisdictions treat on-chain organizations; and work like the DAO Policy Trilemma, State of DAO M&A, a delegate-incentives study, and reports on the social dynamics of DAOs and legally enforceable smart contracts round out the catalogue. A research fellowship, run in seasonal cohorts, brings independent researchers in to work on DAO governance and social dynamics.

Two initiatives extend the standards into products. OpenGrants, built on DAOIP-5, standardizes how grant programs publish their pools, applications, and payouts, so grants across many DAOs can be indexed and compared rather than each living in its own silo. DAO ID (from the 2025 Towards a DAO ID work) builds a richer identity model on top of daoURI, moving from a bare metadata pointer toward a fuller, portable profile of an organization.

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 like DeepDAO 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.

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 current standards are EVM-native and Caper runs on Radix, so a caper does not literally implement daoURI today. But the underlying goal – machine-readable, interoperable DAO metadata and a shared vocabulary for grants, security, and legal status – is the direction on-chain organizations are heading across every chain, and it is the same instinct behind Caper's own push to keep governance transparent and its market always-on. DAOstar is worth watching as the reference point for where DAO interoperability standards settle.

References

• DAOstar, daostar.org and its research programme.
• Joshua Tan et al., ERC-4824: Common Interfaces for DAOs – Ethereum Improvement Proposals (2022).
• metagov/daostar – standards, schemas, reference implementations, and the full DAOIP catalogue on GitHub.
• 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.