This post aims to summarise the Roadmap Session on 10-6-21, where we discussed the other DAOhaus alternatives (such as Gnosis' Zodiac), how DAOhaus intends to set itself apart and our direction moving forward.
More DAOs, more alternatives
Over the past year, more communities have come online and are looking for better ways to organise, given the Covid-19 social isolation, as well as the boom of crypto, NFT, DeFi and DAOs. With a new persona of communities looking to DAO-ify, new products such as Juicebox, Mirrora and Orca have risen to solve this need.
Each DAOhaus alternative bring out different solutions to cater for the needs, wants, savviness of their community persona. For instance, Juicebox is a token-based solution focused on financial transparency, returns and tokens. Mirror is publication-first tool that makes things simple enough for any creator to form & build their community via features like "Crowdfund" (aka CCOs
), "Auction" (aka NFT Sales
), "Token Races" (aka Governance
).
The increasingly crowded space & clear positioning of these alternatives makes us consider why would a community choose DAOhaus when wanting to DAO-ify?
Gnosis' launch of Zodiac
Next, Gnosis' Zodiac is as a strong alternative to DAOhaus because of its feature parity with Moloch DAOs, and DAO composibility. First, new Zodiac modules have started to achieve feature parity with Moloch's offering (such as RageQuit via Exit, Grace Period via Delay). Building on top of that, Zodiac's composability should kickstart a wave of use cases/ DAO legos built by the community, especially with Gnosis' standing. For instance, the Seele module built by Tokenwalk team can introduce powerful capabilities such as different modes of voting.
Given the prominence of Gnosis Safes, feature-parity with Moloch and the composability of Zodiac modules, anyone starting out with a Gnosis Safe will likely have a Zodiac-based DAO solution on the top of mind.
With the above context, we kicked off the discussion around topics, such as:
How does Zodiac work?
Zodiac is Gnosis' way to DAO, showcasing their belief that every DAO should start with a Gnosis safe (i.e. the bank account). As a feature, Zodiac is an App where users can click to view an iFrame UI of the Zodiac modules.
Here, DAO 'summoners' can pick and choose DAO legos built by different developers to empower their DAO in membership, governance, and other applications (e.g. DeFi, etc.). Currently all legos are built by Gnosis Guild, with the exception of Seele (by TokenWalk, but is not live yet)
How do Zodiac legos work?
Users can add any Zodiac Modules via the Contract Address and no signing is required when adding Modules. It seems like based on the Contract Address, some fields and basic UI should be generated for users to configure and use the Module
Who is it for?
Existing projects with a safe. Not necessarily communities, but signers to a bank account
What about our Safe Minion?
There are 2 ways DAOhaus has 'integrated' with Gnosis:
The Safe Minion allows us to focus on what we do best (governance), while keeping our vaults to a high standard. The DAOhaus app on Gnosis Safe enables interoperability and easy onboarding for Gnosis signers who want to evolve their set up to a transparently governed DAO.
Analysis & Discussion
When the Zodiac ecosystem Modules grows, it is likely that Zodiac functionalities will exceed the DAOhaus (& Boosts) offering. That said, given our experience connecting these composable parts, it is going to be hard to create an interoperable and yet user-friendly UI for users.
While Tokenwalk is still an early product, it's the first attempt on creating a user-friendly UI connecting the interoperable Zodiac components (i.e. mirroring a DAOhaus explorer on Zodiac). They are currently only on Rinkeby, but we should observe what they are doing for further learnings.
As we started comparison between DAOhaus & Zodiac, the discussion shifted to look inwards at DAOhaus: who is our user? what do we want to be?
What are we solving for?
We want to empower communities to coordinate better together.
Who are we solving for?
First, we want to build for communities with a strong purpose and are actively involved - commonly categorised as project, product or service DAOs. These DAOs are internet tribes that share a common goal, identity and vision. These members embody community
as opposed to audience
that can be seen in projects with many token-holders that do not really participate, collaborate or identify with the DAO.
Coincidentally, our permissioned shares-based voting is better for running purpose-driven communities as these DAOs have clear objectives to organise processes around or Web2 organisational structures that they can model. Our shares & voting processes are effective in modelling these social processes. A juxtaposition would be sporadic communities that are 'fun' without a clear purpose - these organisations have a formless or non-existent governance, so an ERC-20-token governance system might be a better start.
We are not saying that we don't want to serve current ERC-20 token-based communities. In fact, they represent a big part of existing DAOs today. We will need to figure out ways to onboard them into DAOhaus such as getting sub-teams with a clear purpose (e.g. Product teams) to use DAOhaus for more focused collaboration. We should also explore increasing transferability and fluidity of voting power within our permissioned governance system.
What is the DAOhaus product?
DAOhaus' 'product' is not just the DAOhaus user interface and features, but also the community around DAOhaus.
On a product front, DAOhaus' main focus is in providing a human, fun and simple user interface to navigate technical concepts such as shares, governance, treasury. To provide upgrades to the core DAO experience, DAOhaus also has Boosts and Minions.
Beyond the UI and features, the community around DAOhaus is not just some people on Discord or Snapshot hanging out, but contributors and collaborators who constantly create new initiatives that add value to DAOs. These initiatives typically help onboard new DAOs, faciliate DAO-to-DAO interactions and create new DAO use cases (such as LP DAO and Meta-X-lerator) which can be productised in the future.
What makes us unique?
After discussion on our approach, the main value propositions of DAOhaus are:
Our UVP | Why are we uniquely positioned to do it? | |
---|---|---|
1 | Heavy focus on governance & active collaboration for a purpose | Our product starts governance first (proposals, membership, voting, etc.) as compared to bank/treasury first |
2 | A** user-friendly, human and fun way** to navigating technical concepts | We design for cool & fun communities, rather than for IBMs |
3 | A wider community that creates new initiatives & services for DAOs (e.g. UberHaus / LPDAOs / Meta-X-lerator) | DAOhaus is owned, built and governed by DAOs - the entire community is DAOing together in a meta way |
4 | A social way to discover, manage and follow all DAOs in the ecosystem | We already have social aggregation features such as the Hub, Explore |
5 | An ecosystem of Boosts to expand DAOhaus functionality | We have an existing Boost marketplace |
Strategic Direction
Given the above UVPs, DAOhaus' strategic direction remains being focused on community governance in a fun & human way. However, in order to adapt to the evolving DAO landscape, we should add the following focuses :
This way, community initiatives push the boundaries by testing emerging DAO-DAO interactions and meta-DAO use cases, while magesmiths can productise those that work well. Social features will also help DAOhaus users better navigate, explore and be active in different DAOs. These 2 features are possible only because of the community unique to DAOhaus, giving us a superpower that is not easy to replicate.
Finally, Boosts will help to continually upgrade the functionalities of a DAOhaus DAO.
Refer to Appendix for a diagram on how these strategic focuses can practically lead to the benefit of DAOhaus
Positioning in relation to Zodiac
When thinking about how we navigate the eventual overlaps with Zodiac (especially in DAO functionality & Boosts), the analogies of Android
and Apple
are useful to consider.
Zodiac Modules' strength in composability and customisability will be great for power-users to customise legos for advanced use cases. While this attracts power-users, this is not the best starting point for most communities first entering the DAO space. Hence, we thought the Android
analogy represents Zodiac's position in the space well.
With a user-friendly, simple and fun user interface, DAOhaus wants to follow the Apple
approach, where we provide the easiest way for anyone to summon and participate in a DAO. This should show in how we design our core interfaces, features, copywriting and even best practices for Boosts. We do not need to be at the bleeding edge or have the most use cases, but we make sure that all use cases in the DAOhaus ecosystem are intuitive, simple and work well. If more advanced DAOs need more functionality, we should have custom Boosts and Minions for them to DIY.
While Apple represents our ethos well, there are some things we don't need to learn from Apple. For instance,
Another analogy would be WooCommerce vs Shopify
The focus here is to discuss and align on the strategic directions and focuses before we can look at the executional steps and priorities.
Executionally, this is how the strategic direction may be executed
Our UVP | Magesmiths' initiatives | |
---|---|---|
1 | Heavy focus on governance & effective collaboration | Continue doing this & explore greater transferability of shares |
2 | A user-friendly, human and fun way to navigating technical concepts | Continue doing this |
3 | A wider community that creates new initiatives & services for DAOs (e.g. UberHaus / LPDAOs / Meta-X-lerator) | Continue incubating initiatives via community, while magesmiths productise those that work (e.g. LPDAO) |
4 | A social way to discover, manage and follow all DAOs in the ecosystem | Build more social features (e.g. profile pages, follow DAOs, favourites, messaging, etc.) |
5 | An ecosystem of Boosts to empower expansions to DAOhaus functionality | Reduce barriers to Boost creation & incentivise Boosts development via Grants |
Regroup around DAOhaus' strategic vision
Forces of Change | Implication | |
---|---|---|
1 | New types of communities want to be formed | New products are built to solve this need (e.g. Juicebox, Mirror) |
2 | Hype cycle of DAOs leading to more funds flowing into DAO-related products | More competitors to DAOhaus core product & community builders for Boosts |
3 | Zodiac & Gnosis | Strong challenger, given Gnosis composability & community |
Community can start with any need to coordinate.
Path today
discord
haz token/nft
what is their next step?
Next Steps: Summarise document & dicussion