# Technical metrics DAO

**Published by:** [dudkisan.eth](https://paragraph.com/@dudkisan/)
**Published on:** 2024-04-16
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@dudkisan/technical-metrics-dao

## Content

Accounting To quickly assess financial health of a DAO, transparent accounting is very helpful. While the open nature of public blockchains enables anybody to inspect the transactions going in and out of the treasury, additional dashboards and reports can be helpful to save time. A good example is the accounting dashboard by DAOhaus that shows on-chain metrics in a neat layout. Technical metrics Core architecture Most DAOs are based on templates such as Aragorn, Colony or DAOhaus (El Faqir et al., 2020). These parameterised platform DAOs allow anyone to launch a DAO without Solidity coding skills. Just some parameters need to be supplied. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as well-tested code is safer than custom written smart contracts. The other class of DAOs are self-coded — here it is much harder to assess the features and safety. If a self-coded DAO has no significant capabilities exceeding those of template-based ones, it should probably be treated with care. Review of proper testing and the presence of one or more security audits are always advisable, but for sake of brevity we won’t dive into detail here. Additional tools In addition to the smart contract-based core of the DAO, a wide range of extensions exists in the form of various tools. A blog post by 1kx provides a great overview. Voting and execution Voting can be facilitated ranging from simple polls in telegram or discord to direct interaction with smart contracts. While on-chain voting is clearly more secure and offers censorship resistance, off-chain voting is much cheaper. Researchers found, that members participate less in governance activities if they have to pay high gas fees (Faqir-Rhazoui et al., 2021). Thus, it can make sense to trade a bit of security to gain participation of voters. Snapshot is the leading off-chain governance tool that allows anyone to create a space for managing proposals and define strategies for creating proposals and voting. These proposals can be voted for by signing messages using a 256-bit ECC private key. The address corresponding to this private key needs to own certain assets (such as specific ERC-20 or ERC-721 tokens) to prove its membership to a DAO. The crucial link between these off-chain votes and trustless on-chain execution can be established if the DAO is using a tool like SafeSnap, which connects snapshot with Gnosis Safe, the most widely used multi-sig*.* Generally, beware of DAOs that manually execute transactions, even if they follow the outcome of a vote! While most proposals (such as standardised grants applications) can be handled automatically, some proposals can only be executed manually (such as complex technical upgrades).

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