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Share Dialog
Share Dialog
DAOs are the way to get the next 100 million crypto users. People want to pool money together to do cool stuff. The popularity of GoFundMe and other crowdfunding apps makes that abundantly clear.
This should be a clear use case for crypto. It’s a frictionless way for people to pool money and then vote on how those funds should be used. But it’s not happening…why?
Because the UX for DAOs is not good. If you want to join a DAO now you need to:
Know what a DAO is
Find a DAO you care about
Find the Discord for the DAO you care about
Buy the DAO token (know how to use a DEX and find a random low liquidity coin - incredibly challenging for a new user)
Ok so now you’ve joined a DAO? Let’s get stuff done! Except to do that you now need to hope the DAO has treasury funds to do something + jump through whatever unique setup the DAO has for proposing using funds. And convince people to vote in favor of your project.
And even if you get the funds…you have to now get the thing done which is a different beast in and of itself.
All of these steps are serious points of friction and, until we eliminate them, we’re never going to see mass DAO adoption.
This is why I want to work on micro DAOs (my working idea for an app is Hum DAO). Using the proposed Hum DAO UX, contributing to a DAO would look like this:
Find a project that you think is a worthwhile objective
Send money from an ETH wallet to a contract address
Set a notification to be updated when voting is open regarding whether or not the project was completed
And that’s it.
Shifting to micro DAOs would also help promote the creation of a more diverse set of DAO objectives. I’m a big fan of the UX that Juicebox fundraisers have for contributors. It’s very simple for someone to navigate to a fundraiser page and deposit ETH.
But what about the process of starting a fundraiser? Doing one with Juicebox (imo the best existing option in the industry) looks like this:
Complete a 7 step process with decisions on cycles, payouts, and NFTs.
Deploy the contract.
You are now on the hook for making sure that the objective actually gets done. You have created a community of depositors and they are looking at you to make good on their investment.
Step 2 is easy, steps 1 and 3 are terrifying for most people. This limits the number of contracts that will potentially be deployed on Juicebox, which then limits the number of different projects available for people to contribute to.
On the contrary, the flow for micro DAO projects could look like this:
Complete a 2 step process (project description, initial photo NFT).
Deploy the contract.
Monitor to see if someone else in the world decided to complete your task. If they did, trigger the voting period.
By outsourcing doing the task to someone out there anywhere in the world, the anxiety of creating a new project is greatly lowered.
There is the question of “who is going to be ready to execute all these random crypto bounties?” And the answer is “anyone that wants money”. Do we have a shortage of people that want money in the world? People flow to opportunities, and the low barrier to creating projects should create a wealth of opportunities for enterprising individuals that can tackle the low barrier to completing projects that is:
Do something
Take a picture to be your “invoice”
Upload it as an NFT to a contract
This idea sounds strange because the crypto industry thinks about DAOs and how they are useful in a very particular way. We’re thinking about DAOs in the same way early Internet theorists thought about websites. The thinking was people would all be webmasters with personal sites. Everyone would operate their own blog to publish content.
But as we’ve seen how the internet has evolved, what really happened was people wanted simple and fast ways to publish content, not their own robust content publishing platforms. The sites that exploded like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offered nothing new. There were plenty of ways to get stuff published on the internet before. But they beat the competition by having UX that allowed ease of use + ease of shareability.
Right now crypto is stuck in this mind frame that everyone is going to want to join a DAO. While that’s attractive to crypto natives that live in Discord, to a normal person, that’s as attractive as joining an HOA.
DAOs in their current form don’t have to go away (and won’t go away). Micro DAOs would simply add a new tool to the growing toolbox of how they operate.
A classic DAO is Shutterstock. A robust way for people around the world to interact with and purchase media from professional photographers. Micro DAOs are Instagram. A fast and easy way for anyone to share a picture quickly and for anyone else to see that picture and interact with it.
Want to talk more about micro DAOs? I’m on Twitter @kaspotz and Farcaster @kenny.
DAOs are the way to get the next 100 million crypto users. People want to pool money together to do cool stuff. The popularity of GoFundMe and other crowdfunding apps makes that abundantly clear.
This should be a clear use case for crypto. It’s a frictionless way for people to pool money and then vote on how those funds should be used. But it’s not happening…why?
Because the UX for DAOs is not good. If you want to join a DAO now you need to:
Know what a DAO is
Find a DAO you care about
Find the Discord for the DAO you care about
Buy the DAO token (know how to use a DEX and find a random low liquidity coin - incredibly challenging for a new user)
Ok so now you’ve joined a DAO? Let’s get stuff done! Except to do that you now need to hope the DAO has treasury funds to do something + jump through whatever unique setup the DAO has for proposing using funds. And convince people to vote in favor of your project.
And even if you get the funds…you have to now get the thing done which is a different beast in and of itself.
All of these steps are serious points of friction and, until we eliminate them, we’re never going to see mass DAO adoption.
This is why I want to work on micro DAOs (my working idea for an app is Hum DAO). Using the proposed Hum DAO UX, contributing to a DAO would look like this:
Find a project that you think is a worthwhile objective
Send money from an ETH wallet to a contract address
Set a notification to be updated when voting is open regarding whether or not the project was completed
And that’s it.
Shifting to micro DAOs would also help promote the creation of a more diverse set of DAO objectives. I’m a big fan of the UX that Juicebox fundraisers have for contributors. It’s very simple for someone to navigate to a fundraiser page and deposit ETH.
But what about the process of starting a fundraiser? Doing one with Juicebox (imo the best existing option in the industry) looks like this:
Complete a 7 step process with decisions on cycles, payouts, and NFTs.
Deploy the contract.
You are now on the hook for making sure that the objective actually gets done. You have created a community of depositors and they are looking at you to make good on their investment.
Step 2 is easy, steps 1 and 3 are terrifying for most people. This limits the number of contracts that will potentially be deployed on Juicebox, which then limits the number of different projects available for people to contribute to.
On the contrary, the flow for micro DAO projects could look like this:
Complete a 2 step process (project description, initial photo NFT).
Deploy the contract.
Monitor to see if someone else in the world decided to complete your task. If they did, trigger the voting period.
By outsourcing doing the task to someone out there anywhere in the world, the anxiety of creating a new project is greatly lowered.
There is the question of “who is going to be ready to execute all these random crypto bounties?” And the answer is “anyone that wants money”. Do we have a shortage of people that want money in the world? People flow to opportunities, and the low barrier to creating projects should create a wealth of opportunities for enterprising individuals that can tackle the low barrier to completing projects that is:
Do something
Take a picture to be your “invoice”
Upload it as an NFT to a contract
This idea sounds strange because the crypto industry thinks about DAOs and how they are useful in a very particular way. We’re thinking about DAOs in the same way early Internet theorists thought about websites. The thinking was people would all be webmasters with personal sites. Everyone would operate their own blog to publish content.
But as we’ve seen how the internet has evolved, what really happened was people wanted simple and fast ways to publish content, not their own robust content publishing platforms. The sites that exploded like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offered nothing new. There were plenty of ways to get stuff published on the internet before. But they beat the competition by having UX that allowed ease of use + ease of shareability.
Right now crypto is stuck in this mind frame that everyone is going to want to join a DAO. While that’s attractive to crypto natives that live in Discord, to a normal person, that’s as attractive as joining an HOA.
DAOs in their current form don’t have to go away (and won’t go away). Micro DAOs would simply add a new tool to the growing toolbox of how they operate.
A classic DAO is Shutterstock. A robust way for people around the world to interact with and purchase media from professional photographers. Micro DAOs are Instagram. A fast and easy way for anyone to share a picture quickly and for anyone else to see that picture and interact with it.
Want to talk more about micro DAOs? I’m on Twitter @kaspotz and Farcaster @kenny.
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