Rapture #103: DAO Tooling

Tooling for DAOs will become as important as the SaaS businesses today that serve large companies. Payments, HR, operations, and other services will need to have a software gooey for DAOs to succeed in the long run, considering DAOs are completely digitally native.

Thus, I thought I would cover some of the most compelling DAO tools in the market today.

Aragon

The OG DAO project. Aragon offers a service that allows a group of people to effectively create a DAO, from organizational structuring to voting to dispute resolution. Despite being founded in 2016, Aragon is probably most well-known for not building the sort of DAO infrastructure projects are interested in, considering Decentraland is probably their most significant client.

Gnosis Safe

Gnosis Safe is by far the most utilized platform for enabling DAOs to self-custody assets, like treasury assets, in a multi-sig wallet. Their vaults have robust support for multi-sigfunctionality. DAOs that utilize Gnosis Safe include SushiSwap, Yearn, and 1inch, just to name a few. Undoubtedly, Gnosis Safe is the leader in providing multi-sig self-custody solutions for DAOs.

Utopia Labs

Utopia Labs is a relatively new service that looks to automate payments, payroll, and reporting for DAOs. Unlike many corporations, DAOs have contractors and grantees around the world who often don’t have standardized employment relationships with that DAO. As you can imagine, managing a payments system for dozens to hundreds of different contracts, who are paid via blockchain based transactions, can be quite cumbersome. Thus, there will need to be service providers like Utopia Labs hat arise which help automate that functionality.

Discord

The renowned chat service for gamers has also been widely embraced by the crypto native community. In fact, nearly all DAOs have Discord servers set up where the team that supports the DAO actively communicate with their stakeholders and community members. Marketing, customer support, and informal proposal discussions all happen on these Discord servers.

Discourse

Along with Discord, DAOs use Discourse as platform for more formal, asynchronous conversations that relate to the project. Governance proposals, exploits, and general debates often are posted on this forum service.

Snapshot

As we have discussed in previous newsletters, Snapshot is an offchain voting software that enables the communities of DAOs to signal their votes on various proposals. Snapshot currently supports more tha 4,480 DAOs, and continues to be a critical piece of infrastructure for the DAO space.

Collab.Land

Collab.land is an integration with Telegram and Discord which allows DAOs to gate off their chat channels unless users hold a certain amount of DAO related tokens. Effectively, collab.land enables gate chat communities based around DAOs.