DAO Lego Index Proposal

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Title: DAO Lego Index (working title, there’s a DAO Jones joke here somewhere)

Author: 0xModene

Created: 5th May 2021

Summary

DAOs are the future of human organization. We see how well this works for the Coop, Moloch, MetaCartel, the list goes on. This is just the beginning, and soon I suspect we’ll see more and more new DAOs, and new styles of DAOs (think the recent announcements of Bankless DAO and BairesDAO).

Motivation

Watching conversations in the Coop forum and Discord, other DAOs, crypto twitter, and other places online tells me that sometimes DAOs are difficult to build and manage. It’s a new problem looking for new solutions.

We are also early birds. You’re smart, here and willing to get your hands a little dirty. As human organization starts to structure itself more into DAOs, there will be less of us to help build it. Most people aren’t going to be as willing as many of us to get stuck in deep. Fortunately, there are many teams building a lot of things that make life easier for DAOs, from creation, setting up the structure, managing the treasury, governance, and so forth.

I want to invest in the machines that make the machines that make the new face of human organization, and think being able to build such a product would make things easier to invest in the sector.

Specification

This could be achieved by a similar setup to DPI: market cap weighted, 6+ months old, above a certain height, etc. I have products in mind, but I’d prefer a full community take. I’m certain I’ve missed something, or some of these aren’t viable, but I’m mostly gauging community sentiment here, and details can come later.

Some I feel certainly need consideration:

  • GNO - Gnosis
  • ANT - Aragon
  • BUIDL - dfohub
  • NXM - Nexus Mutual
  • HAUS - DAOhaus
  • HBT - Habitat
  • EGT - Elasticdao
  • INDEX - stares at future SYI

Here’s a list of more ideas of projects: https://twitter.com/kevinknielsen/status/1384581254570516481

What I’m looking for in this forum post is to gauge sentiment to the idea of a DAO lego index, and if this looks like something people want, I’m all ears to anyone willing to help properly spec this out.

Gwei for your thoughts?

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My gut feel is that there is unlikely to be sufficient market size to justify the resources to develop and launch such a product at this time.

On a market cap basis NXM would dominate (~$880 M), many of the others are below $100 m (coingeco ranking > 1,000). We are still exploring the lower end of component sizes (MVI’s largest component at ENJ @ $1,750 m).

So while implementation looks pretty straightforward (assuming we get liquidity), market size / work involved looks unfavorable.

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I think you’re right that it’s probably a bit early for this, especially due to market size of some projects vs others. I think, from my light research, there’s also a lack of diversity of tokens atm, but that’s also why I’ve posted this here. I’ve no doubt forgotten something.

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I think this is a superb idea and strongly think we should investigate this further. We can start with the actual DAO tokens themselves and then as 0xModene mentioned – look at the protocols and infrastructure which will assist with the building and maintenance of DAOs across protocols and entities.

If we look at Coingecko for example, they currently have $2.3bn total market cap of listed Governance tokens:

In their list, there are something like 19 governance tokens each with over $100m in market cap (with many significantly larger than that) and, another 15+ between $10m and $100m of market cap so that is quite a market size to be covered by Index Coop.

Also, if you look at the DAO Landscape graphic:

There are DAOs in many different categories e.g. DAO Operating Systems, Protocol DAOs, Investment DAOs, Grants DAOs, Service DAOs, Social DAOs, Collector DAOs and Media DAOs, which is of course only going to grow further.

So, I think it is well worth investigating further.

I would be happy to be involved with any further investigation into this.

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