DAOs & Tooling on Celo

Ecosystem Dapps
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I recently did a presentation on DAOs and Tooling in the context of Celo. I am sharing the info here in case someone might find it useful. You can find the deck here.

What is a DAO?

The term “DAO” is pretty nebulous and definitions will vary depending on who you ask. I like to think of DAOs as internet communities that have a shared mission or objective. They are are group of people, organizing online, that are trying to do something. Oftentimes these groups have a shared, transparent pool of funds and processes to allocate funds to help do thing that brought the group together.

This is a very loose definition, but hopefully helps begin to paint a picture.

Crucial components of DAOs:

  • The community of people gathering around and working toward the mission

Features of DAOs

  • Fluid membership, often related to a token
  • Transparency
    • publicly visible treasuries
    • share learnings, successes and failures publicly
  • Inclusivity
    • Anon participants
    • barriers to participation are only technical competence and initiative
  • Flexible, dynamic orgs
    • low/fluid barriers to participation
  • Experimental
    • This is new, we are collectively figuring out how to DAO

(Some) Core components

  • Treasury
  • Gnosis Safe
  • Voting
    • Forums (informal)
    • Snapshot (formal voting)
  • Chat / comms
  • Blog

Communication

  • Discord, Telegram, chat apps
  • Token gated chat rooms
    • semi private chat rooms
    • Gate with ERC20 tokens or NFTs
    • https://guild.xyz/ ← works with Celo, check out an example here
  • governance
    • Discord → Forum → on-chain/formal vote
    • Explore DAOs and active governance proposals here

Track work and Compensate Contributors

  • Coordinape
    • resource allocation tool for compensation within ‘circles’ (working groups)
  • Govrn
    • Track everything DAO members are doing
    • Discord bot for data collection
  • SourceCred

Scaling DAOs

  • SubDAOs (working groups)
    • autonomous sub-structures that are mission aligned with the DAO
    • focus on specific needs (writing, legal, software developments, ops, governance, etc)
  • Proposal → funding → build a team

Frameworks

Additional Resources

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Just now coming across this thread and love it - I think it’s quite crucial for Celo to have proper DAO tooling in place. Would love to discuss and take this further!

How is this list supposed to be read, more like a roadmap or is it describing the status quo?
Without spending too much time on it, I could just see DAOhaus an XDAO working on Celo.
Do the other frameworks currently work on Celo, too?

  • The Gnosis Safe UI doesn’t yet support Celo, which presumably also means that SafeSnap and Zodiac don’t work. Do you know if that’s already in the works? If not, it would probably be a good idea to arrange that.
    Edit: Just now realised that Gnosis Safe on Celo is called Celo Safe and has its own URL. Do SafeSnap and Zodiac work too?
  • Snapshot: Do you mean their multichain strategy to check on ERC20 balances on Celo? That would probably work, though setting up the Snapshot space still requires an Ethereum mainnet ENS. Or can you in fact set up a Snapshot space directly on Celo?

On a related note, here are some more suggestions on DAO tooling that could be useful for Celo: https://twitter.com/followrene/status/1515145615994494978

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Hey @theobtl, welcome to the community!

DAOHaus and XDAO are currently live and anyone can deploy a DAO on Celo using those two frameworks.

Gnosis has Celo Safe, like you found. Zodiac is an amazing framework but I don’t believe they currently work with Celo.

We’re currently working on expanding our tools and support for folks interested in creating DAO’s on Celo. Do you have anything you’re currently working on or are interested in exploring?

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This is more of a description of the status quo. You’re right, the official Gnosis Safe UI doesn’t support Celo, but you can deploy the contracts and integrate with them yourself.

While SafeSnap and Zodiac don’t work with Celo Safe right now, it could be modified to work with them.

Since Zodiac is just a framework of smart contracts that is open source, you could also deploy and use them without Gnosis Safe (I’m pretty sure) on the Celo network.

Regarding Snapshot–yes, Celo is a supported network so the multichain strategy should work. And you are correct, you would still need to set up the snapshot space on Ethereum first.

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