Types of DAO tools

Thanks to the continuous innovation in DAO tooling, spinning up a DAO has never been easier. Tools like Gnosis Safe and Discord can be combined to allow almost anyone to build a community, share capital and collectively vote on how it should be allocated.

This step will give you a brief introduction to the different types of tools inside the DAO toolbox. These tools can help you to create and manage your community along with its treasury.

The tools that we will cover this week can be broken down into the following categories:

DAO creation tools

Aragon is a tool that simplifies the creation of DAOs as it gives users simple templates and tools to make starting a DAO extremely simple. Aragon’s modular approach allows users to choose how they want their DAO structured and provides the means to make adjustments to meet their specific needs. There are also a range of other DAO creation tools that offer similar services, such as Colony, Alchemy, and DAOstack.

DAO communication tools

Discord is one of the most popular DAO communication tools and is a great way for the community to facilitate discussion and stay in the loop with what is happening day to day. Telegram is a chat tool used by community members to efficiently communicate one-to-one or sometimes as a community. Whereas Twitter is used as a marketing tool to spread awareness of the DAO, share information and acquire new members.

DAO proposal and decision-making tools

In order to facilitate decision-making in the DAO, the members will often use an off-chain voting tool in order to gauge interest in a proposal before taking it on-chain. Snapshot is one of the most popular off-chain voting tools used by DAOs. The tool is able to remain immutable by storing all data on the the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Snapshot allows for easy token-based governance where users can use their tokens or NFTs to cast vote on proposals without having to pay gas fees. Discourse is another tool that acts as a forum for DAOs to discuss governance proposals submitted by the community. Tally is used to track on-chain voting history across different protocols.

DAO execution and wallet tools

Gnosis is a multi-signature wallet that allows DAOs to safely manage their treasury. This is similar to a joint bank account or a trust, however there are generally multiple-to-many participants in managing the account. To execute a transaction in a multi-signature wallet you require a majority of signatures (e.g., 2-of-3 signatures). Because of this it is important to have a range of people who believe in the vision of the organisation to ensure they will continue to contribute to the management of the funds. This is the industry standard for managing funds in a decentralised world.

Compensation tools

You will likely have contributors to your DAO that need to be compensated for their efforts. Coordinape is a DAO tool that allows teams to fairly compensate their contributors in a distributed manner, acting as a decentralised payroll tool for these new organisations. It does this by allowing members to vote on how they believe each person they interacted with in the project performed over a certain period of time (e.g., one month). This allows decentralised teams that lack a top-down HR department to reward contributors for their hard work.