We’re making Uniswap governance safer and more transparent by adding support for the Seatbelt proposal testing suite. Seatbelt helps surface potential issues in proposals before they go to a vote, giving delegates and token holders more confidence as they participate in the decision-making process.

Learn more about Seatbelt and how you can use it in your proposal creation process on Tally ⬎

Why simulations sometimes fall short

Delegates and token holders are often asked to evaluate complex proposals that contain low-level contract interactions, multi-step execution paths, and time-sensitive logic. Basic simulations provide a first check, but they don’t always reflect how proposals will behave once executed on-chain. Edge cases, especially those tied to timelocks, can slip through simulation reports. In some cases, a proposal that seems valid in testing can still fail post-vote, leading to stalled processes, lost time, or even locked funds.

A more complete picture

Introducing Seatbelt: an open-source test suite developed by ScopeLift with support from the Uniswap Foundation. Seatbelt was created to proactively catch errors in on-chain proposal logic before they cause problems. Seatbelt runs pre-vote simulations and outputs a human-readable report that decodes what a proposal will actually do when executed.

By analyzing calldata, contract calls, and expected state changes in the context of a proposal’s specific timelock and execution environment, Seatbelt helps governance participants spot issues before it’s too late.

Today, Seatbelt is live on Tally for all active Uniswap proposals.

How it works on Tally

Uniswap delegates and token holders no longer need to rely on external analysis or sift through GitHub repos to understand proposal risks. With Tally’s integration, Seatbelt’s findings surface as actionable security insights directly on the proposal page. Users will now see the following on each active Uniswap proposal on Tally:

• A dedicated Seatbelt Report module embedded in the Tally UI

• Pass/Fail/Warning results for common security checks

• Readable summaries of core contract changes the proposal will enact

• Decoded calldata and parameters, for transparency into low-level actions

• A report status indicator that automatically refreshes every 3 hours to stay up-to-date

Note: Seatbelt reports are pre-generated and cached for performance. They automatically regenerate whenever a proposal is updated, resubmitted, or modified. (Reports refresh on a 3-hour cycle if no updates occur.)

Why it matters

Seatbelt significantly reduces the technical barrier to secure participation in Uniswap’s governance. By presenting critical information in an easy-to-understand format, it makes it easier for delegates and stakeholders (even those without a technical background) to cast informed votes. For Uniswap’s governance process, this integration leads to:

• Fewer execution surprises after proposals pass (no more unexpected failures when it’s time to implement)

• Improved transparency for non-technical users, who can now clearly see what a proposal will do

• Increased confidence for large token holders and committee reviewers when evaluating complex proposals

• A stronger foundation for more robust organizational security practices

Tally’s vision for safer governance

Tally’s Seatbelt integration for Uniswap reflects a larger goal: bringing meaningful, context-aware security data directly into the governance process. We believe proactive, integrated simulation tools like this should become a standard part of proposal workflows across all DAOs. By surfacing these insights across Tally’s interface, we’re one step closer to safer, more transparent on-chain governance for everyone.

Explore Seatbelt reports on Uniswap’s Tally page → tally.xyz/uniswap

Have questions or feedback? We’re listening – feel free to reach out

Access the Seatbelt Github

Access the Seatbelt docs

Tally worked closely with Hyperlane to create a smooth, multi-chain token launch with custom claim infrastructure, wallet eligibility flows, cross-chain compatibility, backend tooling, and data indexing. This included building a pre-launch registration flow that allowed users to sign up for the airdrop phase and verify eligibility ahead of the public claim window.

Tally’s infrastructure allowed users to claim tokens directly on their preferred networks without extra steps like bridging or network switching. On the backend, Tally handled cross-chain logic, real-time data indexing, and a customized frontend experience.

HYPER Launch by the Numbers

The HYPER token launch included 235,000 addresses claiming nearly 70 million HYPER. See the full breakdown ⬎

Tailored Infrastructure for the HYPER Launch

Registration and Claim UI + Cross-Chain Airdrop Logic

Tally built a custom registration and claim experience to allow eligible users to natively register and claim HYPER across five chains: Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and BNB Chain. The claim interface handled real-time eligibility checks, claim state display, and network-specific execution logic.

Pre-launch registration flow

• Registration frontend for users to sign up and verify eligibility before the claim window to create a smoother launch process.

Claim UI creation and closure logic

• Easy-to-navigate frontend for the claiming process, including a post-claim state.

Cross-chain eligibility handling

• Automatically validate wallet eligibility across Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and BNB Chain.

Homepage integrations

• Embedded claiming prompts and eligibility states to improve visibility and drive conversions.

Wallet Eligibility & UX

To simplify the user journey, Tally integrated WalletConnect metadata fixes, guided network switching, and surfaced eligibility states contextually throughout the app.

WalletConnect metadata fixes and improvements

• Added missing metadata and network details to improve wallet connection UX across multiple chains.

Handling network switching and validation logic

• Ensured users could see if they were on a supported chain and guided them through switching networks when needed.

Backend Reliability

To protect system integrity during launch, Tally implemented a NeonDB backup strategy and created a fallback plan to downgrade in case of issues, ensuring backend stability under high load.

Launch Coordination & Data Indexing

Tally developed internal tools to streamline launch execution, including scripts to import and verify large sets of eligible addresses via CSV. Tally' systems enabled efficient validation of eligibility data and reduced the risk of execution errors, while also establishing a foundation for future token upgrades incentive mechanisms.

Institutional-Grade Infrastructure for Multichain Token Launches

Token distribution can scale across ecosystems without sacrificing user experience or operational reliability. With Tally’s infrastructure, Hyperlane coordinated claims across multiple chains, onboarded hundreds of thousands of participants, and laid the groundwork for future upgrades. As Hyperlane continues to expand its interoperability framework, Tally’s tools will be able to support potential next steps like expansion rewards and deeper analytics to accrue value to the HYPER token.

Backed by Tally’s institutional-grade software stack, protocols like Hyperlane can launch, manage, and grow their tokens with the reliability and flexibility needed to operate at scale.

→ Ready to launch with Tally? Reach out at tally.xyz/contact

→ Explore Tally’s product suite

→ Follow Tally

→ Explore Hyperlane

→ Follow Hyperlane

What began as a DAO governance tool has evolved into the most widely adopted software stack for onchain organizations.

Tally powers infrastructure for leading organizations across Ethereum and Solana — including @arbitrum, @Uniswap DAO, @zksync, @wormhole, @eigenlayer, @Obol_Collective, and many more.

With over 1 million active users and $1 billion moved using our tools, winning teams use Tally to support every phase of their onchain journey:

• Launch: distribute tokens and onboard users

• Operate: manage treasuries and govern protocols

• Grow: accrue value and create token utility

Tally launched in 2020. We are grateful to have built through the ups and downs of the last 5 years, and we haven't been on this journey alone. We want to thank our users, partners, and investors including: @AppWorks , @1kxnetwork , @blockchaincap , @cyberFund_ , @placeholdervc , @BitGo , @Lemniscap , @CastleIslandVC , and @bloccelerate.

Tally is building the future of software onchain. To learn more about how we can help your organization, please reach out. We would love to chat.

Reach out on X or at tally.xyz/contact

“I can highly recommend @DennisonBertram and the team for TGE help, they’re great partners to work with!” - Toma, Obol Governance Lead

Obol is the team behind the largest Decentralized Operator Ecosystem. They're doing groundbreaking work in proof-of-stake infrastructure, making it easier and safer for people to participate in Ethereum staking.

To govern the Decentralized Operator Ecosystem, Obol partnered with Tally to launch The Obol Collective. The Obol Collective brings together token holders and technical stakeholders to guide the protocol's development and treasury management through its innovative two-house governance structure:

• The Token House manages financial decisions.

• The Citizen's House acts as a safeguard and has the ability to veto Token House proposals.

By splitting decision-making between these two houses, the Obol Collective creates a natural balance between financial and technical priorities in their governance approach. This thoughtful structure sets a new benchmark for how decentralized communities can effectively manage critical staking infrastructure while maintaining proper checks and balances.

The challenge: launching a token that powers real governance

When Obol approached Tally, they were tackling an ambitious challenge: making Ethereum staking more accessible and trustworthy through their Decentralized Operator Ecosystem. But they faced a critical hurdle – how to govern this protocol in a way that truly reflected their commitment to decentralization and community ownership.

Obol needed more than just a basic governance system. They required a solution that could:

• Balance power between different types of stakeholders

• Optimize delegate registration

• Make it easy for community members to participate in decision-making

• Keep their brand identity consistent across all governance interfaces

• Support their commitment to public goods funding

• Ensure their governance would actually work (unlike many DAOs where low participation leads to deadlock)

The solution: Tally delivers best-in-class token launch with robust governance infrastructure

Through our experience with hundreds of DAOs, we knew that successful governance needs three key ingredients: robust infrastructure, seamless user experience, and active community participation. Here's an overview of how we delivered on each front:

Claim-and-delegate experience: transforming token distribution into active governance

Our streamlined claim-and-delegate process bridges the gap between token distribution and governance activation, ensuring tokens don't just get claimed - they get used.

We knew that delegation during the initial token claim process was crucial for long-term governance success. Too often, we've seen DAOs struggle with participation when delegation isn't part of the initial setup. That's why we created a seamless experience where users could claim their tokens and immediately delegate their voting power. This approach dramatically increased governance participation from day one, avoiding the common pitfall of inactive tokens sitting in wallets. By combining a user-friendly claim process with immediate delegation options, we helped Obol achieve what many DAOs struggle with: active community participation.

Technical foundations: powering Obol's two-house governance

By implementing OpenZeppelin's Governor framework, we provided Obol with battle-tested smart contracts that are the industry standard for secure, decentralized governance. The framework's modularity supports Obol's evolving governance needs while ensuring both security and interoperability with the broader ecosystem.

We deployed the following smart contracts:

• ERC-20 governance token contract: enabling voting rights and delegation for Token House participants

• Token House Governor contract: managing proposal creation, voting, and execution for financial decisions

• Citizen's House Governor contract: overseeing protocol-level changes with veto power over the Token House

• Timelock contracts for each house: creating a mandatory delay between proposal approval and execution

Additionally, we implemented an integration with with Gitcoin's retroactive public goods funding framework, further supporting Obol's commitment to the ecosystem.

Delegate recruitment: cultivating a community of aligned decision makers

Tally's strategic approach to delegate recruitment combined targeted outreach with broad community engagement, meaning Obol was able to attract high-quality delegates who were truly invested in the protocol's success. Through our private registration portal, we helped identify and connect with key delegates who bring valuable expertise and alignment with Obol's vision. By beginning with a curated private registration process before transitioning to public recruitment, we helped establish a core group of committed delegates who set the standard for governance participation from the get-go and attract additional qualified community members.

The governance platform: a custom-built home for the Obol Collective

The Obol Collective launch featured a custom-branded governance platform that maintained Obol's distinct identity while leveraging Tally's robust infrastructure. We built a comprehensive governance hub that enables everything from proposal drafting and voting to treasury management and analytics.

Marketing strategy: amplifying Obol's governance launch

Tally leveraged its position as a leader in the onchain governance space to help launch and promote Obol's governance system through multiple channels. We featured Obol on our established media platforms, including an exclusive episode on the DAO Talk podcast, a spotlight in The Tally Newsletter reaching over 1,500 governance enthusiasts, and strategic coverage through our influential X presence.

Beyond traditional marketing channels, we provided strategic guidance on governance documentation, helping craft their governance based on best practices learned from hundreds of successful launches. This comprehensive communication strategy guaranteed that Obol's governance launch reached the right audiences while establishing them as innovators in decentralized protocol governance.

Toma from Obol Collective

Listen to this episode from The Tally Podcast on Spotify. We sat down with @_Cryptoma from @Obol_Collective to talk all things $OBOL, launching governance on Tally, & more!

https://spotify.com

Looking ahead

This is just the beginning. The infrastructure we've put in place opens up so many possibilities for the future. Whether it's expanding staking capabilities or adding new governance features, the Obol Collective is now equipped with a foundation that can grow with their needs.

We've laid the groundwork for:

• Expanding into more sophisticated governance models

• Implementing security council elections

• Adding new delegation mechanisms

• Supporting more complex proposal types

• Compensating participants via Governance Staking

The bigger picture

Our work with Obol demonstrates how onchain communities can make effective decisions while maintaining their core values. We've proven that with the right tools and infrastructure, decentralized governance isn't just a theoretical concept, but a practical and powerful reality. As the crypto ecosystem matures, we're proud to have developed a governance system that other projects can look to when decentralizing their decision-making. This success story highlights that thoughtful design, collaborative approaches, and technical excellence can create governance systems that thrive.

Decentralization creates principal agent problems that are unique to DAOs. These lead to several attack surfaces and common vulnerabilities in the ecosystem. DAOIP-8 is a baseline security specification for DAOs co-authored by DAOstar, Tally and eth.limo to combat these vulnerabilities.

<< We are co-hosting a discussion during ETH Denver on DAO security (DAO Security Discussion), and a full-day event on DAO-focused experimentation (DAO Day of Fun). RSVP if you are planning to attend! >>

Why Do DAOs Need a Security Standard?

One of the core tenets of web3 security is trust abstraction using cryptographic guarantees and

smart contracts. DAOs too are built on this foundation. Decentralizing decision making reduces the likelihood of a hostile takeover as governance power is distributed among a large number of participants. Many DAOs also set up additional safeguards, including:

• Permissioned sets of actors that can execute specific steps, for example, move a proposal to a vote or execute a proposal;

• Security councils that can veto malicious proposals;

• Active quorum thresholds and voting guardrails in order to specify a minimum participation baseline, ensuring that risks introduced by low voter turnout can be mitigated.

The long game of governance often acts as a practical filtering mechanism, which favors more active and committed actors to rise to prominence, for example, as the most influential delegates.

However, decentralization also diffuses responsibility, creating “no one’s job” scenarios, where critical tasks like compliance, incident response, or code reviews are neglected because no single party feels the mandate to act. Similarly, due to the bootstrapped nature of the DAO ecosystem, formalized definitions do not exist for most relationships between a DAO and external entities. Add to this the still-early nature of regulation and compliance of DAOs - the usual forcing functions that dictate how vendors, service provider policies, and other key entities are to be managed is largely non-existent.

All of this, when combined, has a direct effect on security as in the case of DAOs. They materialize as:

• Governance attacks that can lead to immediate treasury drain, sabotage protocol upgrades and cause unrest within the DAO. They can be orchestrated by accumulating governance tokens to vote down all proposals - bringing the DAO to a decision paralysis; slipping in a malicious proposal at the last minute; or attaching a malicious detail to an otherwise safe proposal. The attacks often leverage low voter turnout and the lack of technical expertise among governance participants.

• Low proposal safety through inadequate audits, rushed deployments, and insufficient peer review of on-chain code can introduce vulnerabilities. Even subtle bugs in upgrade logic, governance modules, or treasury contracts can become catastrophic if not caught early.

• Incident response gaps form when there isn’t a pre-coordinated emergency plan for the DAO, making it slow to respond to threats, magnifying the damage done by compromised signers, infrastructure hacks, or DNS hijacking.

• Poor management of external entities as many DAOs entrust critical tasks like multisig management or code upgrades to external groups without clear security policies in place.

• Physical security risks as the lack of proper guidelines and training for delegates, multisig signers, and core team members causes them to inadvertently expose private keys, laptops, or other sensitive resources. “Wrench attacks”, or physical coercion or intimidation of keyholders is a real threat, especially with the amount of conferences we do every year.

Several other attack surfaces and common vulnerabilities exist within DAOs. There are data transparency gaps (especially around privileged roles or incomplete listing of DAO assets, which can lead to confusion and difficulty in pinpointing accountability); regulatory uncertainty (which deters highly-aligned entities from governance participation due to the fear of regulatory backlash); community management risks (that can enable an attacker to spread misinformation or scam community members), and infrastructure vulnerabilities (off-chain infrastructure like forums, websites, or GitHub repositories can be compromised even if the on-chain code is secure).

Introducing DAOIP-8

DAOIP-8 aims to establish a minimum viable security standard among DAOs, such that all DAOs, irrespective of their scale or governance design, have an easily accessible set of controls to follow as standard practice when it comes to security. DAOIP-8 also intends to help DAOs establish the basic foundations of a Technical Governance Framework. External dependencies (for example, hosted code repositories, cloud services, and other third-party providers) introduce novel complexities without clear boundaries relating to technical asset ownership and management.

The specification in its current form considers:

• Data transparency

• Decentralized ownership

• Proposal safety

• Management of external entities

• Defense against governance attacks

• Physical security for key entities

• Community management best practices

• Compliance

• Code security

• Key management

• Subdomain versioning

These topics are addressed by outlining two levels of controls - [MANDATORY] (measures that are critical), and [RECOMMENDED] (measures that mitigate second-order risks). In total, DAOIP-8 defines 14 controls -  8 applicable to all DAOs irrespective of their governance structure or size and 6 controls for Protocol DAOs (DAOs that manage an onchain protocol through governance).

**To keep this blog post concise, we’ll refrain from defining all 14 controls here. The full specification, along with more context and research can be accessed here. 

While the absence of some of these controls, for example, a physical security policy for delegates, can lead to a critical security incident, others, say data transparency, may not have an immediate effect. Even so, every control defined in DAOIP-8 can have second-order effects. For example, low data transparency may lead to the loss of governance contributors, which reduces voter turnout and makes a governance takeover less costly. Hence, all DAOs are recommended to make their best effort to follow all controls outlined in DAOIP-8.

Conclusion & Next Steps

DAOIP-8 is a necessary step toward improving the overall security posture of the DAO ecosystem. As it is still an embryonic process, continuous, iterative improvements are necessary, alongside diverse collaboration with existing DAOs to better understand and address potential weaknesses.

DAOIP-8 aims to be informative and descriptive, not necessarily prescriptive. Given the diverse nature of the DAO landscape, the controls specified in DAOIP-8 serve as a starting point that can be adapted to the specific needs of individual DAOs. As this is open-source work, we invite contributions from everyone—whether you are a security professional, DAO voter, significant delegate, or governance enthusiast.

Next steps for you:

1. Read the full report for the complete list of recommended controls and references.

2. Stop by our event during ETH Denver to discuss and contribute to the evolution of DAOIP-8: DAO Security Discussion.

P.S: We are also co-hosting a day-long fun and experimental DAO-focused event during ETH Denver. RSVP for DAO Day of Fun!

See you in Denver!

To understand AGLD, you must first understand Loot. Loot is a first of its kind NFT project launched in 2021. Loot NFTs are text only and include 8 randomly generated ‘adventure gear items’. Loot is simply text, no instructions, and no limits to what can be created. The minimalist approach encourages developers to use Loot to build their own games & communities. The potential is unlimited and is dependent on what the community chooses to build with Loot’s building blocks. To learn more about Loot’s mechanics, visit. https://www.lootproject.com/

Enter Adventure Gold

Adventure Gold launched the first native currency ($AGLD) for the Loot ecosystem, marking a shift in how users interact & build fully onchain games with Loot. The protocol is the first to airdrop fair-launched governance tokens directly to NFT holders, meaning the only way to acquire $AGLD is to hold a Loot NFT.

Additionally, the Adventure Gold community launched Adeventure Layer (prev. Loot Chain) to provide a fast, affordable, sovereign, and EVM compatible chain for the Loot community to build and run fully onchain games.

AGLD DAO’s  governance launch on Tally marks an important step in the Adventure Gold ecosystem as more power is given to the hands of the community. The idea behind $AGLD is to unite the Loot ecosystem & drive long-term success of Loot based games through community governance. The introduction of the Adventure Gold DAO on Tally is the next evolution of the Loot ecosystem and would not be possible without the contributions of a few key community members taking an active role in ushering in a brighter future for the AGLD ecosystem. Let’s take a look at the timeline.

AGLD Timeline

1. AGLD Tokenomics Implementation Details

   In November 2021, Gareth, Hill, Eraser, JX and other AGLD community members proposed to position AGLD as the incentive token for the Loot & mLoot NFT, with a mild inflation plan for the UBI incentives for Loot & mLoot NFT. The proposal passed with more than 90% approval.

   Reference: [AGIP - 1] Adventure Gold Tokenomics Proposal v1

   Reference: Loot-Talk Forum Discussion

2. AGLD Tokenomics Upgrades

   In February 2023, Hill, a core contributor in the AGLD community, proposed to modify the last tokenomics proposal, adding more Lootverse NFTs to the UBI coverage. The proposal also added a treasury stewarded by the Adventure Gold DAO. The proposal passed with more than 90% approval.

   Reference: [AGIP-4] Adventure Gold Token Economics Proposal V3

   Reference: Loot-Talk Forum Discussion

3. Loot Chain Launch

   In April 2024, the AGLD DAO announced the launch of Loot Chain, a L3 as a dedicated chain for the Loot community. It aims to provide a fast, affordable, sovereign and EVM compatible chain for the Loot community to build and run Fully Onchain Games (FOCG). The proposal passed with more than 90% approval.

   Reference: Loot Chain announcement

4. AGLD DAO Introduction

   In Apr 2024, and Aug 2024, Hill, a core contributor in the AGLD community, proposed to enable onchain governance for AGLD DAO by Llama, later transitioned to Tally as Llama is discontinuing their service. Security concerns were raised during the attempt to implement the tokenomics directly on the current AGLD smart contract, highlighting that the current smart contract is under the control of a multi-sig built by the original token creator. The inflation in the tokenomics might introduce attacks from hackers on the smart contract, as well as the multisig holders. By transitioning to onchain governance, the AGLD DAO can ensure that the inflation and usage of the inflated tokens are managed by the AGLD token holders in a transparent, secure and verifiable platform. Both proposals passed with more than 90% approval.

   Reference: [AGIP-6] Enabling onchain governance for AGLD DAO with Llama

   Reference: Loot-Talk Forum Discussion

   Reference: [AGIP-7] Transitioning AGLD DAO’s onchain governance platform from Llama to Tally

   Reference: Loot-Talk Forum Discussion

5. Loot Chain Upgrades to Adventure Layer

   In September 2024, Hill, a core contributor in the AGLD community, proposed to upgrade the Loot Chain to the Adventure Layer, solving multiple technical bottlenecks as well as enabling better developer & user experience. The proposal passed with more than 90% approval.

   Reference: [AGIP-8] Upgrading the Loot Chain to the Adventure Layer

   Reference: Loot-Talk Forum Discussion

6. AGLD DAO Migrates to Tally for Onchain Governance

   In August 2024, Hill, a core contributor in the AGLD community, proposed to migrate AGLD DAO Governance from Llama to Tally to ensure and enhance onchain governance mechanisms in the DAO. The proposal passed with 100% approval.

   Reference: [AGIP-7] Transitioning AGLD DAO’s onchain governance platform from Llama to Tally

7. AGLD DAO launches on Tally

In January 2025, the Adventure Gold DAO officially launched onchain governance on Tally. AGLD community members can delegate, vote, and submit proposals via Tally’s platform.

Reference: AGLD DAO Homepage

The Future of AGLD DAO

Onchain governance is essential for the long term growth of the Adventure Gold ecosystem. Transparent, decentralized decision-making paired with $AGLD’s tokenomics structure allows the ecosystem to play an active and equitable role in the expansion of the Loot gaming community. As the community expands, aligning $AGLD token holders with the economic success of broader Adventure Gold initiatives is vital to sustainable growth. Tally enables the AGLD DAO to track decisions, reduce manipulation, & build trust with battle-tested governance solutions. Tally is honored to be the governance launch partner for AGLD DAO and looks forward to supporting future innovations.

Follow Adventure Gold on X

Get involved with AGLD DAO

Follow Tally on X

Interested in launching with Tally? Get started here

However, onchain governance isn't without its challenges. The public nature of blockchains means that voting decisions are fully transparent, exposing voters to potential risks like undue influence or intimidation. Knowing that voting choices are visible to all can compromise the integrity of the process, discouraging honest participation and enabling harmful dynamics.

With this in mind, Tally and Inco are collaborating to solve this problem by combining the best of both worlds: the decentralization of fully onchain governance with the confidentiality expected of Web2 systems. This innovative approach will enable DAOs and crypto communities to make decisions onchain in a trustless, secure, and private manner, fostering greater participation and confidence in the governance process.

At the heart of this solution is Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), an encryption technology that allows encrypted data to be processed without ever decrypting it. Inco has provided two solutions for Tally’s system: a fully onchain governance solution and a modular, plug-and-play smart contract compatible with DAOs who currently have Tally’s solution deployed. Both are powered by FHE.

With FHE, votes can be cast directly onchain while remaining completely private. Here's how it works:

• Confidential Voting: Each voter’s decision is encrypted, ensuring that their choices remain hidden—even on the public blockchain.

• Trustless Tallying: The encrypted votes can be aggregated and counted without ever being decrypted, ensuring accurate results while preserving privacy.

This approach ensures that onchain governance remains decentralized and trustless, while also maintaining the confidentiality of participants. Voters can now express their preferences freely, without fear of external pressures or exposure.

Tally, the industry standard for driving long-term protocol success, currently helps foundations, delegates, and token holders manage over $31 billion in onchain protocols. By teaming up with Inco, a pioneer in encryption and blockchain confidentiality solutions, Tally is advancing the future of governance for DAOs and beyond.

Privacy is a key building block for the future of governance. Inco’s flexible solutions lets people build privacy into governance on their terms.
- Rafael Solari, Tally CTO

This collaboration between Tally and Inco marks a significant milestone in the evolution of decentralized governance. We're excited to work with T ally to bring confidentiality—which should be a given in any onchain governance process—to its solution.
- Remi Gai, Inco CEO

To learn more about this initiative and how your organization can benefit, get in touch.

“The role of EigenGov is to maintain a coordination layer for the EigenLayer ecosystem of EIGEN holders, AVS developers, operators, and stakers who are key participants in the prosperity, security, and reliability of the EigenLayer protocol. EigenGov brings our ecosystem participants together to support our common vision of open innovation through a novel system designed to be both effective and decentralized.” (Introducing EigenGov: Part 1)

Yesterday, EigenLayer introduced an innovative approach to decentralized governance with EigenGov.

EigenGov is the governance platform for the EigenLayer ecosystem, marked by a few key governance innovations that build off existing decentralized governance mechanisms to enhance the efficiency of EigenLayer’s governance community. We are honored to play a role in the successful implementation of EigenGov.

EigenGov Councils

At the core of EigenGov V1 is its unique implementation of councils. EigenGov councils invert the traditional role of council governance by imbuing the bulk of decision making to high-agency groups of decision makers (councils) and reverting veto rights to non-council $EIGEN holders.

Councils consist of trusted domain experts empowered by tokenholders to make decisions on behalf of the community. These councils have specific authority over different aspects of the EigenLayer protocol, including protocol upgrades, rewards, community grants, and governance powers. Each council will operate under a charter that defines its scope and decision-making authority, with plans to expand in both number and responsibility over time.

Tally & EigenGov

Tally’s role in assisting the rollout of EigenGov is two-fold:

1. Building Council Infrastructure

   “We have a lot of work to do to ensure a resilient, transparent, and decentralized network of councils. To solve the challenge of effective and decentralized governance, the Eigen Foundation is implementing a philosophy of incubation for creating, appointing, and stewarding councils.” (Introducing EigenGov: Part 1)

   The success of EigenGov councils relies on the secure and expert implementation of its infrastructure. Tally is well versed in council based governance and is excited to develop Eigenayer’s vision for councils.

   Tally is working closely with the EigenGov team to carefully design and implement the necessary infrastructure to fully bring councils to life, including the council governance deployment, council endorsement flows, vetoing flow, & signal voting.

2. Developing the EigenGov Application Layer

   The successful rollout of EigenGov will create a high-signal, high-traffic governance community which requires an efficient and high fidelity application layer. Tally will build and maintain the EigenGov frontend in tandem with continuing support and consultation on the design and rollout of EigenGov councils and day-to-day governance operations.

Looking Forward

Tally delivers best-in-class governance experiences for the ecosystem’s most important protocols. We are thrilled to help bring EigenGov to life creating and maintaining a coordination layer for the EigenLayer community to usher in a new wave of decentralized governance.

We hope to attract the best minds in governance to build a better future through working openly on the most challenging problems, supporting researchers, and improving decentralized governance for the world — all while giving the EigenLayer community unparalleled ownership and control over the EigenLayer protocol.” (Introducing EigenGov: Part 1)

Follow Eigen Foundation on X @eigenfoundation and read Part 1 of the EigenGov Introduction.

Interested in building with Tally? Reach out to us at hello@tally.xyz or on X @tallyxyz.

We’re entering a new phase of protocol governance where token utility is not only possible, but necessary. As we begin seeing an uptick in forum proposals calling to share value with token holders, protocols should lean into this opportunity and take intentional steps towards returning value in exchange for the work of governance. Tally is building an open source standard that enables protocols to return value that we call Staker.

Staker

Staker is the web3-native answer to aligning protocols with token holders. Protocols generate value, whether through revenue sharing or controlled inflation, and share it with token holders who are actively contributing to long-term governance. Rewards are distributed to token holders based on governance participation parameters set by the protocol. Operators, foundations, investors, and the wider community become aligned with long-term success as the protocol becomes more secure through long-term aligned governance.

Staker Progress

Staker is starting to emerge across the ecosystem. Uniswap DAO deployed Unistaker: infrastructure developed to facilitate the collection and distribution of protocol fees to $UNI token holders who actively participate in governance. Unistaker is currently live, although rewards are not yet activated. Users can stake on Tally and follow the progress of reward activation in the Uniswap forum.

The Arbitrum DAO voted to fund the implementation of staking to unlock $ARB utility and align governance with the long-term success of Arbitrum. Tally is currently developing the infrastructure for the Arbitrum DAO to activate staking, read the full proposal to learn more.

The Ethena Protocol community is currently exploring activating a fee switch to begin value creation for token holders. Recently, Wintermute governance submitted a fee switch proposal to the Ethena Governance forum: “The Ethena Protocol has and continues to generate substantial amounts of real revenue, indicating a clear level of PMF for USDe. Unfortunately, sENA does not directly benefit from this revenue, resulting in an explicit disconnect between sENA holders and the growth of the protocol. It’s time to acknowledge this and look towards establishing clear alignment between ENA holders and the underlying fundamentals of the protocol.”

The Tally Protocol

The Tally Protocol enables DAOs to create revenue streams that not only reward token holders but bring the entire protocol into alignment. Fees are shared among active governance participants so token holders have a financial incentive to hold delegates accountable for high quality governance.

Additionally, governance tokens staked in the Protocol are issued a Liquid Staked Token (LST). LSTs unlock the economic utility of governance tokens, allowing token holders to participate in DeFi while ensuring the token’s voting power remains active in the DAO. Read more about LSTs in The Tally Protocol Whitepaper.

Looking Forward

As we enter this new phase of protocol governance, Tally is excited to help create lasting, secure, & aligned infrastructure for returning value to token holders.

Tally builds staking for protocols. Interested in setting up Staker? Reach out at biz@tally.xyz.

Governance participation is still too low.

Effective onchain governance is vital to the long-term success & viability of community governed protocols. The current era of onchain governance is defined by, for better or worse, the rate of participation in protocol governance. Today we’re diving into a few key trends affecting governance tokens & how protocols can take advantage of innovations from Hedgey Finance, Tally, & Wormhole to remedy downtrends in community participation.

The Obstacles

Apathy

Governance apathy is not unique to the onchain ecosystem. Governance in all its forms is ultimately defined by the rate of participation of its constituents. The problem is often chalked up as unsolvable, an issue defined by the difficulty of harnessing human attention in an era of fragmented mindshare. Onchain infrastructure is uniquely positioned to address apathy & protocols must align governance efforts to prioritize community engagement.

Chain fragmentation

The future is multichain & the future is now. Gone are the days where protocol governance resides exclusively on Ethereum. As users begin to adopt, grow, and participate across multiple chains, governance must adapt. Expecting users to participate on chains that are financially or technically prohibitive is a recipe for governance failure.

Investor Lockups

A large portion of token supply remains idle & unable to participate in governance during investor lockup periods (vesting). Enabling dormant tokens to participate in governance is the key to unlocking large swaths of potential governance participants.

Hedgey <> Wormhole <> Tally

Wormhole is the leading interoperability platform powering multichain applications and bridges at scale. The Wormhole DAO is set to launch onchain governance in the coming weeks & is building in tandem with Hedgey & Tally to create a lasting, involved community of Wormhole DAO governance participants. Wormhole is employing innovations like MultiGov™ & Hedgey’s investor lockup product to ensure the long-term success of its protocol governance.

MultiGov™

Wormhole & Tally are developing MultiGov™: an industry-first multichain governance solution directly addressing the key issues plaguing apathy & chain fragmentation.

“MultiGov™ lets DAOs meet token holders where they are. DAO members can govern an onchain DAO from any chain, regardless of the chain the protocol is deployed on. MultiGov™ *supports DAOs on Solana, Ethereum and EVM-compatible L2s. Multichain DAOs will lower barriers to participation and reach users everywhere.”*Read the full whitepaper here.

Hedgey

Hedgey’s investor lockup product enables Wormhole to distribute programmatically locked tokens to investors while maintaining the ability for the locked tokens to still participate in delegation and onchain governance. Lockup recipients delegate voting power to active Wormhole contributors, increasing the pool of voting power participating in governance while still ensuring tokens are programmatically released to investors on a predefined schedule.

Read more here.

Tally

The Tally team remains committed to supporting protocol governance & is actively building solutions to the key problems facing DAOs. Supporting innovations like Hedgey’s investor lockup product & MultiGov™ provides protocol’s with best in class products to support & grow a community of active governance participants. Tally is where protocols govern & is excited to continue to support the most important protocols in the ecosystem.

This article is written in collaboration with Hedgey Finance, Tally, & Wormhole.

To learn more & stay updated follow the contributors on X.

@hedgeyfinance

@tallyxyz

@wormhole

“Cryptography and blockchains are redefining our collective future once more. ZKsync is poised to power this new wave of progress through zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs that enable an ever expanding verifiable blockchain network, bringing digital sovereignty to billions with a protocol built on a foundation of integrity and security.

*To bring Ethereum to the masses and shape the future of the internet, ZKsync must maintain strong social and technical decentralization guarantees. To remain resilient in the journey ahead, ZKsync depends on a vibrant community empowered to drive meaningful change through protocol governance.” *(Introducing ZK Nation)

ZKsync Governance Structure

The ZKsync protocol token, through ZK Nation's onchain governance framework, is designed to empower token holders to delegate, propose protocol upgrades, deliberate, and vote.

• Three Body Governance¹

  • “ZKsync will implement a governance system that empowers ZK Nation to drive the continuous development of the ZKsync protocol. Protocol token holders will be able to introduce proposals and vote on protocol upgrades and network parameter changes.

    The ZKsync governance system is made up of three onchain bodies: the Token Assembly, Security Council, and Guardians, which will sit within different legal structures ensuring maximum protection for the Token Assembly. Together they will interact with ZKsync’s smart contracts and coordination channels such as ZKsync’s initial delegation and voting portal on Tally.”

• Token Assembly¹

  • “The Token Assembly proposes, deliberates and ratifies initiatives that govern the ZKsync protocol, token and governance systems, fostering a collaborative decision-making process.”

• ZKSync Guardians¹

  • “The Guardians act as protectors of the ZK Credo’s values by exercising their veto and/or approving emergency actions related to the ZKsync network.”

• Security Council¹

  • “The Security Council is a group of highly technical and skilled engineers, auditors, and cybersecurity professionals that safeguard the ZKsync protocol and network technical security. They provide technical reviews for protocol upgrades approved by the Token Assembly.”

To dive deeper into the ZKsync Governance philosophy & how to get involved in the DAO check out Introducing ZK Nation & Announcing the ZKsync Call for Delegates.

Tally’s Role

“To bring Ethereum to the masses and shape the future of the internet, ZKsync must maintain strong social and technical decentralization guarantees. To remain resilient in the journey ahead, ZKsync depends on a vibrant community empowered to drive meaningful change through protocol governance.”¹

Tally’s role as the service provider for ZKsync Governance of the ZKsync protocol creates a virtuous cycle of innovation for the ZKsync DAO & the broader onchain governance ecosystem. Tally works closely with onchain organizations, such as DAOs, to provide product innovation & services to provide the most impactful solutions for complex governance problems.

Tally is excited to support the launch & continued growth of the ZKsync protocol as ZK Nation begins governing onchain.

¹Introducing ZK Nation

Stay updated on all things ZK Nation @theZKNation

Reach out to us at hello@tally.xyz or on Twitter @tallyxyz

Unlocking Active Governance

Governance participation remains a major challenge facing DAOs. One reason for this is a broken incentive structure which fails to effectively maximize value for token holders, delegates and the DAO. Delegating tokens represents a poor tradeoff for token holders because it limits token holders' ability to fully exploit the utility of their tokens. For example, token holders who wish to delegate their voting power may be required to forfeit DeFi participation due to the underlying smart contracts being unable to fully support the voting functionality of governance tokens, breaking their 1:1 voting peg. On the other hand, for delegates, the hard work of active voting often translates into inadequate or inexistent benefits.

Consequently, DAOs continue to seek ways to unlock active governance participation by proposing and designing mechanisms aimed at incentivizing delegation by token holders, and increased participation by delegates. Notable examples include:

• Uniswap DAO: The fee-switch proposal by Uniswap DAO proposed a protocol upgrade to introduce a fee mechanism that rewards active delegation by UNI token holders. Under this setup, token holders would be required to stake and delegate their tokens to receive a share of protocol fees. The DAO would also have control of core parameters including fee generation, collection and distribution. This proposal has passed a temp-check vote, and the staking functionality has been implemented, although the DAO has yet to turn on the fee switch.

• Arbitrum DAO: Tally has proposed to introduce ARB staking in Arbitrum DAO in an effort to incentivize active delegation by ARB token holders. To earn rewards, token holders would be required to delegate to “active delegates” as defined by the DAO, ensuring thoughtful participation and alignment of token holders with the DAO’s interests. The proposal further incentivizes token holders by offering a solution to the issue of delegation affecting token utility. Essentially, token holders would be able to use their ARB in DeFi while maintaining voting power. This functionality would be powered by The Tally Protocol via Governance LSTs, described below in further detail.

The Tally Protocol & Governance LSTs

With the launch of The Tally Protocol, DAOs are presented with a novel approach to unlocking active governance. Through Governance Staking on The Tally Protocol, DAOs can create Governance Liquid Staked Tokens (LSTs) for their native tokens, e.g., stARB for The Arbitrum DAO's ARB token. Under the hood, The Tally Protocol abstracts away the governance utility of the DAO's tokens from its economic utility. The key effect of this is that token holders can delegate the voting power (i.e., governance utility) in their native tokens, while still being able to fully partake in DeFi (i.e., economic utility) using the liquid tokens. This fixes the incentive mismatch between delegation and exploitation of token utility by token holders. The Tally Protocol builds on this primitive to provide other mechanisms for improving governance participation:

• A protocol fee-sharing mechanism for distributing rewards per Governance LST that is actively used in governance/voting, incentivizing participation from delegates;

• A mechanism for distributing un-delegated voting power to active delegates, improving participation in DAO governance.

Metagovernance of Governance LSTs in DAOs

The What

One of the core features of The Tally Protocol's Governance Staking is the metagovernance of Governance LSTs. This entails how the voting power in the LSTs are distributed to delegates when a token holder fails to delegate them from the onset. By default, un-delegated tokens are delegated according to a delegation strategy defined by the Tally DAO. Alternatively, the underlying DAO can define its own custom strategy.

The goal of any delegation strategy would be to define criteria for determining which delegates are qualified to receive un-delegated voting power. Essentially, this would be solving for active and impactful delegates. DAOs may rely on one or a combination of the following two approaches to defining a delegation strategy:

• Provider Definitions: DAOs typically rely on reputation system providers (e.g., Karma, SourceCred) to define who an active delegate is. Provider definitions are primarily informed by metrics such as on/off-chain voting participation and forum engagement, which serve as proxies for governance participation. Based on these metrics, providers use formulas to arrive at scores assigned to each delegate, and those who reach the cut-off defined by the DAO are considered active delegates.

• Custom Definitions: Provider definitions are driven by quantitative metrics that aid automation and objectivity. However, its strict reliance on these limited metrics also constitutes a flaw. Truly assessing impactful governance participation requires tracking other qualitative metrics such as authoring proposals, contributing quality feedback, community engagement, development of key initiatives, and other forms of value-adds that are obvious but difficult to mathematically quantify. DAOs looking to more accurately define their delegation strategy can design mechanisms for measuring these kinds of contributions and whitelisting delegates. Doing this would naturally introduce human subjectivity to the mix, however, this can be mitigated by combining it with the objectivity of Provider definitions.

  • Framework for Recognized DelegatesA practical approach for DAOs seeking to develop custom definitions would be to establish a Framework for Recognized Delegates that provides guidelines for whitelisting active delegates. DAOs like Aave, Maker and Uniswap have tried to implement similar frameworks, although for different purposes. This framework should make key specifications such as:

    • The criteria for becoming a recognized delegate, which could include qualitative metrics such as proposal authorship and feedback, attendance of community calls/events, quality and speed of voting rationales communicated, holding roles, and exceptional contributions.

    • A DAO-elected committee to implement the framework and key responsibilities such as structuring an application process and an appeal process for rejected applications, maintaining a list recognized delegates, and proposing changes to qualification criteria for DAO approval.

    • Establishing a cadence for re-evaluating already recognized delegates. This should ideally be in close sync with the cycle for re-distribution of idle voting power.

• Other Considerations

  • Parameter changes: The chosen strategy should be flexible and allow delegation parameters to be adjusted when needed.

  • Delegation caps: In distributing un-delegated voting power, it could be helpful to implement delegation caps. This will help to prevent over-concentration of voting power or plutocracies by a few delegates. The drawback is that it limits incentives for large delegates which can potentially lead to an overall decrease in participation. Also, delegation caps may also be hard to implement in practice since it can be easily circumvented, for instance, using multiple wallets.

  • Re-delegation: The DAO can also implement a mechanism for re-delegation when delegates lose qualifying criteria.

The How

DAO-Tally Advocates

• DAOs seeking to integrate with The Tally Protocol will need to define a metagovernance strategy from the onset, including persons to manage the communication and strategy development with The Tally Protocol. DAOs can achieve this by appointing advocates or working groups to carry out this function. The Arbitrum DAO adopted this approach when it established staking rewards and delegation working groups for this exact purpose. Specifically, the DAO-Tally Advocates would be responsible for:

  • Proposing metagovernance/delegation strategies for Governance LSTs, for the DAO’s approval:

    • Developing and proposing custom definitions for “active delegates,” including whitelisting delegates if required by the DAO

    • Proposing, on/off-boarding of new, additional or unwanted reputation system providers

    • Reviewing and proposing parameter adjustments for Provider definitions in use by the DAO, including recommending formulas for calculating delegate participation scores, and proposing cut-off marks

  • Implementing DAO-approved delegation strategies

  • Reviewing and proposing delegate incentives, including fee-switch and fee-distribution proposals

  • Interfacing with The Tally Protocol on behalf of the DAO

  • Reporting and providing feedback to the DAO

Pilot Phase

A good first step for DAOs would be to kick off with a pilot phase where integration with The Tally Protocol is done at a smaller and more controlled scale to bound the risks of an experiment and monitor results. Both the DAO and The Tally Protocol can leverage learnings from the pilot program to implement a successful and larger-scale integration. An effective pilot design may entail following Uniswap and The Arbitrum DAO’s approach of simply activating governance staking on The Tally Protocol without turning on rewards for token holders. This allows DAOs to test the functionality of The Tally Protocol, including metagovernance strategies, without exposure to financial risks.

Governance Steps

Depending on the DAO, there may be additional steps in the governance process that would need to be completed before the proposed integration with The Tally Protocol and the accompanying metagovernance strategies can be deployed. Existing committees in the DAO may be required to go over proposals to conduct further research and impact analysis. For The Arbitrum DAO, the ARB Staking proposal first went through a research and security analysis conducted by the Arbitrum Research & Development Committee (ARDC) before progressing to a final DAO vote.

Way Forward for DAOs

The Tally Protocol represents a unique approach to unlocking active governance within DAOs, by offering a protocol-layer incentive mechanism that programmatically rewards governance participation by both token holders and delegates. DAOs can leverage The Tally Protocol’s functionality to ensure that idle voting power is automatically redistributed to active and aligned delegates. However, doing this would require DAOs to be involved in the metagovernance of their Governance LSTs, defining effective delegation strategies for redistributing voting power. This may start out as a “manual” process where selected strategies are iteratively implemented and adjusted before encoding the logic to create an objective, custom and fully automated system. Professional advisers play a key role in helping DAOs achieve this. Areta, as a strategic partner, will help address some of the larger strategic questions at the intersection of DAOs and Governance Staking and will play a key role in supporting DAOs as they establish and manage committees that interface with The Tally Protocol.

Read the full Tally Protocol Whitepaper

Interested in building on Tally? Reach out to us at hello@tally.xyz or on Twitter @tallyxyz

NEW YORK, August 29, 2024 — Tally, the leading decentralized governance platform, and Toku, the crypto-native employment and token compensation solution provider, today announced a strategic partnership. This collaboration directly addresses a fundamental challenge in the crypto ecosystem: enabling compliant governance participation for stakeholders with vesting tokens or those subject to transfer restrictions.

For the majority of decentralized or decentralizing organizations, a significant portion of tokens – often held by early employees, founders, and investors – are subject to vesting and lockup periods. This situation has led many organizations to delay the rollout of governance altogether, recognizing that a substantial group of key stakeholders would be excluded from participation. This limitation has created a governance gap, potentially hindering the true decentralization these organizations strive for and delaying critical decision-making processes.

The Tally-Toku partnership bridges this gap by allowing crypto companies to:

• Implement governance systems that include tokens subject to transfer restrictions without compromising regulatory compliance

• Enable comprehensive stakeholder participation in crucial organizational decisions, ensuring a more representative governance model from the outset

• Seamlessly integrate employment, compensation, and governance rights management

"We're not just improving a process; we're transforming how decentralized organizations function at their core," said Rafael Solari, Tally’s CTO & co-founder. "This partnership ensures that every stakeholder's voice can be heard, regardless of their token's status. By expanding the voting pool, we're fostering more inclusive and democratic decision-making in crypto organizations."

Ken O'Friel, Toku's co-founder, added, "By integrating Tally's robust governance infrastructure with our comprehensive token compensation and token management expertise, we're setting a new standard for effective, compliant, and transparent organizational governance. Our solution not only simplifies token-based compensation but also ensures that these tokens can be meaningfully used in governance, all while maintaining strict regulatory compliance."

About Tally

Tally is a decentralized governance platform dedicated to empowering communities with transparent and efficient decision-making tools. By providing seamless onchain proposal creation, voting, and execution functionalities, Tally enables DAOs and decentralized communities to operate effectively and democratically. For more information, visit www.tally.xyz.

About Toku

Toku is an all-in-one platform for employment, compensation, and token management, purpose-built for the crypto industry. With Toku, you can easily hire and pay talent globally in fiat, stablecoins, or native tokens — while ensuring full compliance with local tax and labor laws. Toku's system-of-record also simplifies token cap table management, making it easy to handle team, investor, and community allocations, as well as token distributions — all through a single, integrated platform. Learn more at www.toku.com

Media Contacts:

Tommy Lower - Head of Marketing - tommy@tally.xyz

Ken O’Friel - CEO - ken@toku.com

Written by Event Horizon for publication on The Tally Mirror

Tally x Event Horizon

Tally is building a much-needed solution for the governance space, the segregation of yield and governance capacity maintained by all DAO tokens. By bifurcating the two, the dilemma of choosing to use one's DAO assets for either yield or governance is eliminated. You may benefit from both concurrently.

However, the question of where Tally should delegate this accrued governance authority remains. Delegating to a public good such as Event Horizon provides one such option. Event Horizon and Tally’s models work synergistically ⬎

Event Horizon receives added delegations and the Tally ecosystem benefits from:

(1) The decentralization and positive productive use of the governance capacity within its protocol and for its DAO partners.

Once the asset is split into yield and governance capacity, the key to this model is the redelegation of the governance capacity of these tokens to allow them to be meaningful and productive in DAO communities. It is imperative that this governance potential does not homogenize amongst a small subset of ecosystem actors to replicate the inequities rampant today. By redelegating to Event Horizon, Tally users and partners can be assured that the underlying governance capacity of their assets is equitably distributed across actual users and communities which they serve.

(2) Added TVL from deposits which come from Event Horizon’s community.

As Event Horizon continues to gain delegations and deposits both through DAO proposals, partnerships, and the direct support of the retail DAO token holder it is beneficial for Event Horizon to deploy those assets in Tally’s product.

Key Problems Solved

(1) Not enough people care to vote.

(2) Those who do care to vote, don’t have enough influence.

Today typical DAO voter and token participation is assumed to be around 1%, meaning 99% of a DAO’s governance engagement potential is not being activated to improve the DAO’s collective cognition. It's all too easy, and incorrect, to blame the citizenry as simply apathetic when we have created structures which actively discourage community members from voting.

When a user has .001% of voting power, participation simply does not make sense, it’s a drop in the bucket. Naturally, sitting out of governance proposals is the rational decision; however, collectively this makes everything worse. Given the strength of the DAO is directly proportional to the number of active & engaged participants, this problem needs to be addressed.

What is Event Horizon?

Event Horizon is a public good, public-access metagovernance pool which enfranchises the long tail distribution of tens of thousands of smaller voters found within the citizenry of every DAO. This is made possible by Event Horizon’s novel metagovernance model, Implicit Delegation which provides non-monetary incentives to show up and vote (more on this below).

Event Horizon is live and currently supports onboarding new voters in 8 DAOs and has mobilized >$50,000,000 of voting power across ~400 proposals on behalf of retail voters at no cost to the user. This is $50,000,000 of voice amplification for the low-capital, high-conviction citizens which would never have been possible prior to Event Horizon. Most recently, Event Horizon officially partnered with the Gitcoin DAO to leverage Gitcoin Passport and received a 150,000 GTC community delegation.

Event Horizon is in the process of conducting a similar proposal that would see Arbitrum DAO delegate 7,000,000 ARB (~$5.3m) to help further empower and onboard low capital but high conviction DAO voters. This proposal is overwhelmingly supported by the community with >$150,000,000 of voter support during the temperature check and involves implementing Gitcoin’s sybil resistance Passport solution as a partner product.

DAO Benefits

From a DAO perspective, Event Horizon is a unique delegation option. It differs from the standard set of options (individual delegates and institutional delegates such as market makers and university organizations) in that it focuses entirely on building and strengthening the size of a DAO’s community while fostering equitable decentralization of governance. Event Horizon’s community voter pools are effective in:

1. Engaging, retaining, and expanding a DAO’s retail citizenry.

2. Promoting governance decentralization which offers benefits from both a community and legal perspective.

3. Surfacing dormant thought capital from the 99% of limited voice users found in nearly every DAO today, distributing cognition, and preventing non-participatory delegations for the benefit of DAO decision-making.

Engaging, Retaining, and Expanding a DAO’s Retail Citizenry and Surfacing Valuable Thought Capital

Event Horizon allows DAO citizens to vote with meaningful authority through its novel governance mechanism: Implicit Delegation. Event Horizon slots into the broader DAO ecosystem in a similar fashion to a standard delegate. However, rather than the pool voting based on the decision of one individual or group, it votes with the collective cognition of hundreds of individual Event Horizon Voter Pass holders. This serves two functions:

1. Enfranchise Community Citizens: It provides a clear and designated voice for smaller, retail voters.

2. Retail Participation: It drives participation through a game theoretic process called Implicit Delegation. Whether 10 people show up to vote, or 10,000 people do, the full retail voter allotment is mobilized in support of the community’s desired outcome:

   1. When participation is low: each voter receives a larger slice of the public access pie. This means the fewer people there are voting, the more incentive there is for someone new to come and participate.

   2. When participation is high: there are more voters splitting the same pie, however, retail participation is high, which is a great win for the ecosystem. This is all done without the need to pay delegates with inflationary token rewards. Event Horizon’s model attracts people who are strictly interested in governance, not payment.

Through the Implicit Delegation model Event Horizon pools bring the many great ideas and voices from the long-tail distribution of low-capital community members to the surface. The best ideas in an ecosystem are often held in the minds of individuals with little tangible governance power. Event Horizon is the first step in getting these people to start participating in DAO governance.

It is often a lazy shortcut that we as a space blame low voter turnout and limited community loyalty on voter apathy and flighty retail allegiances when in reality we should first build infrastructures that, contrary to standard DAO governance today, encourage the community to take ownership and maintain consistent loyalty to our ecosystems. Only then can we truly assess where the baseline desire to participate and loyalty lies.

Promoting Governance Decentralization

The notion that a DAO is truly decentralized becomes much harder to justify when the vast majority of decision-making authority is consolidated amongst a relatively small group of individuals and organizations.

Legal Decentralization:

If a protocol cannot show through its token its decision apparatus it is reasonably distributed the ecosystem begins to look more like a centralized corporation simply wrapped in a tech-forward decision tree.

However, when a meaningful portion of voting power is allocated to a pool provably guided by a large and dynamically changing mass of real community members and users, the case for decentralization grows exponentially stronger

Preventing Governance Vulnerabilities:

Without a broad diversity of actors and thoughts, DAO governance becomes vulnerable. It becomes both more easily captured and exposed to homogeneity of thought.

Surfacing Dormant Thought Capital, Distributing Cognition, and Preventing Non-Participatory Delegations

Surfacing dormant thought capital:

By allowing smaller DAO citizens to dictate how the Event Horizon public good voter pools vote, Event Horizon gives non-monetary incentives for sidelined DAO citizens to finally start participating in DAO governance: the first step in a DAO contributor pipeline.

Distribution of Cognition:

Governance is hard. It is nearly impossible to review, react to, and care about every individual proposal. Event Horizon functions as a hive mind to solve this problem. If there are 3 proposals (ex: Gaming, Lending, and Partnership) 100 citizens may show up to vote for each, but the exact voting body may differ each time: Those who care about gaming vote on the gaming proposal, those interested in lending vote on lending, etc. Event Horizon is working on a solution to leverage self-selection as a mode of driving the identification and magnification of subject matter experts through a process coined sacrificial specialization.

Preventing non-participatory delegations:

One of the most pervasive issues in governance today is the ‘Satoshi Delegate’. Because of the set-and-forget nature of delegating, it is incredibly common that massive sums of voting power were delegated to wallets which are no longer active. It is not uncommon to see as little as 5% of the top 100 most highly delegated wallets participate in governance in the past twelve months. The voting power entrusted to these wallets is now fully non-productive and effectively permanently locked from future productivity. Through Event Horizon voter pools all allocated voting power is and will always be fully productive. While the exact voters who turnout to each proposal are dynamic and always changing from proposal to proposal, the pool will always vote in every proposal. In this regard voters may come and go and the voter body can change and evolve. Experts in one subject may show up to a relevant proposal to their interest and not to others and the pool continues to function while the ecosystem continues to benefit from highly-productive governance power.

How it Works:

| Step 0 — Mint: Any citizen of the DAO ecosystem may mint a free voter pass.

| Step 1 — Duplication: Once a delegation is established, Event Horizon begins automatically duplicating all base DAO proposals within its own metagovernance dashboard.

| Step 2 — Metagovernance: Retail voters may mint a free voter pass and begin voting to decide how the retail enfranchisement pool is mobilized in the base DAO proposal.

| Step 3 — Base DAO Voting: 24 hours prior to the closure of the base DAO proposal, the Event Horizon metagovernance proposal closes. Event Horizon then automatically pushes the consensus decision established by the retail community during the metagovernance proposal into the base DAO proposal.

The end result is that citizens who vote through Event Horizon vote with a significant vote multiple. We’ve often seen multiples upwards of 10,000x and roughly $40k voting power per voter. This provides new users with a strong incentive to show up and vote.

Interested? Reach out to us at hello@tally.xyz or on Twitter @tallyxyz and @eventhorizonDAO

The full Tally Protocol Whitepaper can be read here & the announcement thread from Tally CEO & Co-Founder Dennison Bertram can be read here.

Over the next few weeks we will dive deeper into different features of The Tally Protocol’s design & incentive mechanisms with educational content, demo videos, podcast discussions, and guest posts from the Tally partner ecosystem.

A quick refresher on how The Tally Protocol works:

“The Tally Protocol unlocks the economic potential of governance tokens by providing a liquidity layer for governance staking and restaking while reducing the incentive to attack DAO treasuries and optimizing the distribution of voting power.

The protocol is a smart contract layer that creates Liquid Staked Tokens (LSTs) for governance tokens. Tally LSTs (stLSTs) offer token holders a simple and accessible way to take advantage of opportunities to earn staking and restaking rewards, maintain their voting rights, and use the liquid token to participate in DeFi.” (Whitepaper)

Redelegation Strategies

Lack of delegation & delegate activity in DAOs is a problem yet to be solved in onchain governance. Finanicialization of tokens, lack of delegation education, & inadequate delegate reward incentive systems mean DAOs experience extremely low participation in necessary governance activities. The Tally Protocol solves the delegation problem at the incentive layer to reward delegates, accrue value back to the DAO (incentive virtuosity), and protect against apathy induced treasury raids.

The Meta

The underlying utility of governance tokens is voting on proposals. Similar to how Lido solves for the underlying utility of ETH by maintaining a network of validators that produce blocks for Ethereum, the Tally Protocol solves for the underlying utility of governance tokens by maintaining voting power for delegates who vote on governance proposals. Token holders stake their governance tokens with Tally and receive a liquid staked token in return that can be deposited in restaking systems. The Tally Protocol ensures the voting power associated with restaked governance tokens is delegated to active, DAO-aligned contributors.

How it Works

Voting Power Redistribution: For stLST token holders that choose not to delegate their voting power, the protocol returns undelegated voting power to the DAO for redistribution to active delegates. Tokens that are locked in DeFi or restaking services automatically return their voting power to the DAO.

Optimized Governance: Token holders have a financial incentive to hold their delegates accountable for high-quality governance.

Fee Distribution: Protocol fees are shared among Tally, DAO delegates, and rebalancers (who manage the interface between stLSTs and underlying staking contracts) in a fair and aligned manner.

How it Benefits DAOs

Activates undelegated voting power by redistributing it to active delegates according to strategies chosen by stLST holders. This increases governance participation and enhances DAO security. If underlying DAO token holders wish to change the redistribution strategy, they can move into the stLST and alter the redistribution strategies, ensuring that the underlying DAO is always in control.

Creates a revenue stream for delegates that can be used to build feedback mechanisms for effective governance. This aligns delegates with the success of the stLST and encourages the DAO to endorse the stLST as their canonical solution.

Empowers DAOs with control over the critical stLST parameters to align stakeholders with protocol and DAO success.

Delegation is a core component of The Tally Protocol. Understanding how The Protocol is addressing delegation concerns in its design & implementation is essential to adequately participating in the next iteration of onchain governance. Keep an eye out for partner posts diving deeper into delegation & how The Tally Protocol is making real progress with DAOs across the ecosystem.

We will dive deeper into how into governance restaking, rewards, voting passthrough, and other Protocol mechanics in future Educational Series posts.

Interested? Reach out to us at hello@tally.xyz or on Twitter @tallyxyz

Separating voting power from financial utility with the Tally Protocol and Symbiotic

Governance tokens are a key component of the blockchain ecosystem, allowing stakeholders to directly participate in the decision-making process and operations of the protocols they rely on every day. These tokens, however, often struggle to balance their governance utility with their potential as financial assets, as participating in governance requires locking up tokens. Token holders face a tough choice: use their assets as collateral in DeFi or actively participate in governance. As the protocol token ecosystem grows, there is an increasing need to maximize the utility of these tokens without compromising their primary function.

The Tally Protocol, combined with Symbiotic’s shared security framework, solves this problem. It separates the governance voting power of tokens from their financial utility as assets that can be put into DeFi. This allows token holders to:

• Maintain their governance rights

• Use their tokens as collateral to secure infrastructure networks

• Unlock new economic opportunities

This approach creates a win-win scenario for DAOs, token holders, and ecosystem builders. It enhances token value, preserves decentralized governance, and enables the development of more robust blockchain infrastructure.

Governance Restaking unlocks a new category of shared security use cases. In this post, we explore the Arbitrum protocol governance token (ARB) and Wormhole protocol governance token (W) as examples of real-world applications for (re)staked governance tokens.

The Tally Protocol: Separating the voting powers of governance tokens from their economic utility

The Tally Protocol enables governance restaking in Symbiotic by enabling:

• A split in token utility whereby voting rights remain with the original token holder but can optionally be redistributed back to the DAO

• An unlock in economic utility through a liquid staked version of the token

This separation allows token holders to use their assets to secure infrastructure networks as well as deposit in DeFi applications, without endangering the DAO by locking up their governance tokens in third party protocols.

Symbiotic: Enabling flexible restaking

Symbiotic complements the Tally Protocol by providing:

• A shared security framework for custom restaking implementations

• Support for various types of collateral, including DAO protocol tokens

Symbiotic offers key benefits for both protocols and token holders. Protocols can design tailored security systems, while token holders can contribute to network security and earn additional yield. The result is that new infrastructure possibilities emerge, backed by protocol token economics.

Real-World Applications

The Tally Protocol and Symbiotic combination enables new use cases for blockchain infrastructure. To better understand how the Tally Protocol and Symbiotic work in practice, let's look at two potential use cases.

1. Powering L2 infrastructure with (re)staking

Layer 2 solutions today have a variety of different types of infrastructure which both need to be decentralized and secured by strong crypto economic systems. (Re)staking via Symbiotic and the Tally Protocol allows L2s to use their own token and ecosystem to back their own various services like decentralized sequencing, transaction ordering, interoperability and more.

One example is trustless data availability. Current options like Arbitrum's Data Availability Committee are semi-decentralized and require trust assumptions. The Tally Protocol and Symbiotic offer a more decentralized alternative that is aligned with token holders interests and is backed by the security offered by (re)staking:

• ARB token holders stake their tokens in the Tally Protocol and get tARB (Tally Liquid Staked Arbitrum token)

• Token holders provide tARB as collateral in Symbiotic to be used to back network services that provide data availability for L3 chains

• ARB token holders gain additional value from their holdings in two ways. First, they earn rewards from underlying ARB staking. Second, they can (re)stake their tokens in Symbiotic and delegate to data availability operators. Token holders can then earn a portion of the fees paid by L3 Orbit chains for data availability.

This solution creates a symbiotic relationship between L3s and token holders. L3s benefit from a more trust-minimized system, while ARB token holders unlock new value from their assets. While you can currently use ETH backed data availability solutions, token holders want native ecosystem aligned solutions that give them more utility and reuse their own economic security. Native token backed data availability solutions are more aligned with underlying token holder utility.

And it doesn’t stop with just data availability, tARB tokens (re)staked through Symbiotic can additionally be leveraged by other infrastructure use cases seeking to be secured by Arbitrum tokens, including e.g. middleware such as oracles, creating a restaking ecosystem for the Arbitrum community.

2. Decentralized security for interoperability platforms

Interoperability protocols like Wormhole currently rely on a set of Validators and Relayers for facilitating asset transfers.  The Tally Protocol and Symbiotic can improve and further secure this setup specifically when it comes to Wormhole's Native Token Transfer (NTT) Framework.

• Create tW (liquid staked Wormhole token) using Tally Protocol

• tW holders back decentralized versions of Guardians and Relayers through Symbiotic that work in parallel with the Guardian Network to create an even more secure and decentralized bridge for tokens

• This attestation is combined with the one from the Guardian Network on the destination chain. Subsequently delivering the user their funds.

• Wormhole token holders participate in securing their own protocol

• Holders earn native W staking yield plus yield from backing services

This approach enhances protocol security and creates a more robust, participatory ecosystem.

Both examples maximize opportunities for token holders by allowing them new opportunities to secure and back their protocol infrastructure. Importantly, this is achieved without compromising the security of the underlying DAO. The DAO maintains control over its protocol security while token holders are free to participate in restaking to earn additional yield.

Conclusion

Governance Restaking with Tally and Symbiotic addresses a significant limitation in DAO token utility and unlocks a new category of shared security use cases. By separating governance from financial utility, Governance Restaking:

• Unlocks new value for token holders

• Preserves DAO governance structures

• Enables development of more secure blockchain infrastructure

The net result is protocols gain more sophisticated and engaged token holders that are incentivized to continue to provide value and services to the protocol.

As the crypto ecosystem evolves, this approach has the potential to influence the trajectory of decentralized finance and governance. It addresses current challenges and provides a foundation for new blockchain applications, likely shaping the future landscape of the blockchain space.

Email biz@tally.xyz or message @coolhorsegirl on Telegram to learn more.

The incentives for participating in DAOs are broken. Token holders are asked to actively manage and govern multi-billion dollar protocols at their own expense. Large delegates fund their critical research and operations via inconsistent grants or retroactive funding. Token holders hold illiquid unproductive assets with little or no incentive to participate.

The critical challenges facing DAOs today are directly tied to the inherent dichotomy of governance tokens: they are both assets and voting rights. You cannot fully enjoy the utility of your asset and vote, and you cannot vote and fully enjoy the utility of your asset. DAOs ask their token holders to make an unreasonable choice: forgo the value of their asset to govern or govern without any reward to their asset.

DAOs must return value to token holders to remain viable. Some of the largest DAOs today are exposed to governance attacks due to lack of participation. Uniswap has 158% of its quorum for sale in DeFi and on centralized exchanges, while the market cap of delegated ENS tokens is lower than the value of the accumulated treasury revenue. It is imperative that token holders are properly incentivized to maintain the security of the protocols they govern. (Source)

With the emergence of restaking as a key theme, governance tokens represent additional untapped potential that token holders must forgo in order to operate protocols. The governance tokens on Tally collectively have a market cap over $30 billion. These governance tokens directly control additional value in the form of smart contract TVL (e.g. all the TVL on Arbitrum) and the future value of cash flows (e.g. Arbitrum sequencer revenue and Uniswap fees). Because of their valuable economic properties, it’s likely that restaking systems will attract significant governance token deposits. Restaking activates the economic opportunity of governance tokens, but requires that token holders forgo participation in governance and forgo rewards returned to token holders by the underlying DAO.

The Tally Protocol is the liquidity layer for restaking. The protocol solves the restaking capture problem by separating economic utility of DAO tokens from governance. The system is more efficient as DAOs can return value to token holders proportional to their revenue instead of being forced to attempt to outbid restaking protocols for their own security.

Overview

The Tally Protocol unlocks the economic potential of governance tokens by providing a liquidity layer for governance staking and restaking while reducing the incentive to attack DAO treasuries and optimizing the distribution of voting power.

The protocol is a smart contract layer that creates Liquid Staked Tokens (LSTs) for governance tokens. Tally LSTs (stLSTs) offer token holders a simple and accessible way to take advantage of opportunities to earn staking and restaking rewards, maintain their voting rights, and use the liquid token to participate in DeFi.

Key Features

DAO Alignment: While the Tally Protocol governs the stLST protocol layer, each stLST is owned and controlled by its respective DAO. This allows DAOs to set and adjust key parameters, ensuring alignment between the protocol and the DAO.

Standardized Token Design: The protocol generates uniform, standardized stLSTs that simplify integration for third parties such as exchanges and custodians.

Modularity: The protocol supports various staking mechanisms and abstracts the underlying staking contracts via modules, allowing DAOs to experiment with different designs that suit their specific needs.

Voting Power Redistribution: For stLST token holders that choose not to delegate their voting power, the protocol returns undelegated voting power to the DAO for redistribution to active delegates. Tokens that are locked in DeFi or restaking services automatically return their voting power to the DAO.

Optimized Governance: Token holders have a financial incentive to hold their delegates accountable for high-quality governance.

Fee Distribution: Protocol fees are shared among Tally, DAO delegates, and rebalancers (who manage the interface between stLSTs and underlying staking contracts) in a fair and aligned manner.

Protocol Mechanics

Governance Restaking

The underlying utility of governance tokens is voting on proposals. Similar to how Lido solves for the underlying utility of ETH by maintaining a network of validators that produce blocks for Ethereum, the Tally Protocol solves for the underlying utility of governance tokens by maintaining voting power for delegates who vote on governance proposals. Token holders stake their governance tokens with Tally and receive a liquid staked token in return that can be deposited in restaking systems. The Tally Protocol ensures the voting power associated with restaked governance tokens is delegated to active, DAO-aligned contributors.

Tally-Powered Liquid Staked Governance Tokens (stLSTs)

When a user stakes their token in the Tally Protocol, they receive a stLST token in return that can be used in DeFi or restaking and can be exchanged at any time for the equivalent amount of underlying DAO token plus any accrued rewards. Holders can choose to delegate the voting power of their token to themselves, to someone else, or to allow the Tally DAO to choose a delegate on their behalf.

• stLSTs are liquid, auto-compounding ERC20 tokens.

• stLSTs accrue value in the underlying governance token, with their exchange value increasing over time as staking rewards compound.

• The protocol supports various delegation strategies for staked but undelegated tokens, including a default metagovernance strategy where the Tally DAO selects trusted delegates, and modular third-party strategies.

• The Tally DAO selects the default delegation strategy but the underlying DAO is free to choose their own strategy as well.

• stLST holders govern the LST contract in a dual governance model with the Tally DAO. The underlying DAO token holders are free to move in and out of the stLST contract at any time, and as such stLST token holders effectively represent the underlying DAO’s wishes.

Rewards and Staking Types

stLSTs automate the process of accessing rewards for token holders by automatically claiming staking rewards and redepositing them back into the staking contract. This enables growth of the underlying position without manual intervention. Holders benefit from convenience and maximized earning potential.

• The protocol includes initial staking contract support for Uniswap Unistaker and Tally Staker: an improved version of Unistaker that incorporates delegate compensation, thereby incentivizing active participation in governance.

• The Tally Protocol is designed to be compatible with future staking designs.

Voting Passthrough

stLSTs enable voting passthrough, allowing token holders to maintain their governance rights while holding the LST.

• Delegated stLST holders are able to vote in underlying DAO proposals as they normally would via the Tally interface.

• The protocol initially supports two designs for implementing voting passthrough:

  • OpenZeppelin Governor with Flexible Voting: Enables pooled tokens to cast partial votes with 1:1 precision.

  • Older versions of Governor: Pools tokens to achieve 0.39% voting precision using 8 pools, minimizing gas costs for rebalancing operations.

• The protocol will be modular and support adding new designs at a later date.

Protocol Fees & Rewards

The Tally Protocol implements a fee structure and reward system to ensure sustainability and align stakeholder interests. The fees are decided by the Tally DAO and are charged on the accrued rewards of the protocol. Delegate rewards are calculated by revenue from the Tally Protocol. The underlying DAO can add additional incentives to delegate rewards to incentivize high-quality governance.

• Rebalancing Fees

  • The Tally DAO sets rebalancing fees on a per-LST basis to cover operational costs and contribute to the protocol's long-term sustainability. Rebalancing is the operation whereby the Tally DAO claims underlying staked rewards and compounds the staked position. Tally amortizes the gas cost of the operation across the entire pool.

• Delegate Rewards

  • The Tally DAO controls a delegate fee switch, toggled per-LST, to determine rewards for delegates who actively contribute to governance.

• Maximum Fee Limit

  • The protocol sets a maximum fee limit to prevent excessive charges and ensure the majority of the yield is distributed to stLST holders.

Benefits for DAOs

DAOs struggle with setting security parameters, which affects their long-term safety and viability, especially when treasuries become honeypots for malicious actors. The increase in returned voting power allows the DAO to choose security parameters closer to outstanding token supply instead of outstanding delegated token supply.

Alignment with the underlying DAO is a critical component to Tally’s protocol design. In a world of competing LST standards, having a version explicitly aligned with the DAO significantly increases its adoption.

To ensure maximum alignment with the underlying DAO, the protocol:

• Activates undelegated voting power by redistributing it to active delegates according to strategies chosen by stLST holders. This increases governance participation and enhances DAO security. If underlying DAO token holders wish to change the redistribution strategy, they can move into the stLST and alter the redistribution strategies, ensuring that the underlying DAO is always in control.

• Creates a revenue stream for delegates that can be used to build feedback mechanisms for effective governance. This aligns delegates with the success of the stLST and encourages the DAO to endorse the stLST as their canonical solution.

• Empowers DAOs with control over the critical stLST parameters to align stakeholders with protocol and DAO success.

Unlocking Liquidity for Restaking

Restaking systems pose an existential threat to protocol DAOs. As the business model of restaking necessitates the pursuit and capture of economic security at all cost, once the available ETH supply for restaking is exhausted, restaking systems will be forced to turn to protocol tokens to continue growing their economic security.

Restaking protocols will compete to consume the economic security of DAO protocol tokens as protocol tokens represent the natural expansion to their TVL.

For DAOs, this poses an incredible challenge and existential danger because restaking services like Eigenlayer and Symbiotic can always outbid DAO protocols for their own security. DAO protocols can pay token holders either inflationary rewards or as a percentage of DAO revenue. Restaking systems, however, can pay token holders as a percentage of DAO revenue plus the total TVL (economic security) locked in the underlying DAO protocol and/or as a percentage of the DAO protocols token market cap.

This means that DAO protocols should expect to lose control over their security to restaking services. Eventually, every DAO protocol will be consumed by restaking services.

As the underlying DAO becomes inoperable, the economic security it provides to restaking decreases, but there is no incentive structure that allows DAOs to recapture their own security. This leads to the collapse of the underlying DAO, while restaking systems continue to pursue greater TVL opportunities elsewhere.

The Tally Protocol is the liquidity layer for restaking. The protocol solves the restaking capture problem by separating economic utility of DAO tokens from governance. The system is more efficient as DAOs can return value to token holders proportional to their revenue instead of being forced to attempt to outbid restaking protocols for their own security.

Ecosystem

The Tally Protocol is designed to be modular and open such that there are multiple opportunities for third parties to build profitable businesses on top of the protocol.

• Professional delegates can build large businesses by getting compensated with a predictable income stream that is linked to their performance.

• Solvers and market infrastructure firms can build rebalancing mechanisms for claiming and compounding staked returns. Note: this area is currently being researched.

Market Size

The market size for governance LSTs is very large. The protocol is designed to serve all DeFi protocols, L2 protocol tokens, interoperability protocols, liquid staking tokens (such as the Lido governance tokens), and tokens created by restaking AVSs (Actively Validated Services).

The market will choose LSTs for security, economic utility, and alignment between DAOs and token holders. The Tally Protocol’s design will drive DAOs to choose Tally LSTs as their de facto LST, ensuring a TVL and liquidity advantage over any competitors.

Go-to-market

Tally is the right team to build this protocol. Since 2020, Tally has been the leading champion and infrastructure provider for DAOs in the Ethereum ecosystem. Tally supports hundreds of DAOs across more than 60 EVM networks. Nearly half a billion dollars has been processed via proposals created using Tally. Hundreds of thousands of users depend on Tally and thousands use our platform each day. The most valuable DAO protocols on Ethereum run on Tally. Tally’s category leadership allows it to:

• Build the best in class experience for safe and easy staking.

• Distribute staking across the entire ecosystem all at once.

• Continue to build relationships with key DAO stakeholders and delegates across the ecosystem.

• Build on its trust and respect as a DAO-aligned partner committed to DAO success.

Tally is working with leading L2s and interoperability protocols to build their staking systems and has several hundred million in TVL commitments.

Roadmap

The Tally Protocol is currently under development with Testnet to be deployed in the summer of 2024. Our roadmap includes a number of potential improvements to increase alignment with DAOs, and maximize token holder rewards and system efficiency:

• The ability for individual LST token holders to override the vote of their delegate in cases where there is a disagreement on a proposal.

• Creation of the Tally DAO, which will become the custodian of the Tally Protocol and recipient of the protocol fees.

• Expansion to Solana via the Tally-Wormhole MultiGov partnership.

Looking Ahead

The Tally Protocol represents a significant step forward in the evolution of decentralized governance and the alignment of stakeholder interests within the DAO ecosystem. By providing a simple, accessible, and yield-generating staking mechanism through Tally Liquid Staked Tokens (stLSTs), the protocol offers a powerful solution for DAOs seeking to engage and incentivize their token holders while ensuring the long-term sustainability of their communities.

The protocol's modular design and open architecture creates a strong foundation for future growth and innovation. As the DAO landscape continues to mature and new staking designs emerge, the Tally Protocol is well-positioned to adapt and evolve, offering a flexible and robust infrastructure for a wide range of governance use cases.

Welcome to the future of decentralization.

Interested? Reach out to us at hello@tally.xyz or on Twitter @tallyxyz

The 3-Headed Problem

DAOs are a historic shift in how people organize and work together. The way work gets done is a key driver of the economy and society broadly. Even modest improvements in this space will have dramatic implications. Three main factors are restricting the growth of DAOs: identity, replicable organizational structures, and real world applications. This said, solutions are not just possible, but currently in development. The success of these solutions will directly correlate with DAOs becoming increasingly widespread and impactful.

The Identity Problem

The most apparent challenge with the current generation of DAOs is identity. The ideal DAO is fully democratic, with each user or stakeholder receiving equitable voting power. This is not yet possible because a single user can easily create multiple accounts, or addresses, to vote multiple times (aka a sybil attack). As a result, DAOs use token voting to shift decision making to the users who are most financially invested in the project. Token voting parallels Ethereum's Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. Though PoS and token voting have issues, they are currently the best existing options to prevent Sybil attacks and grant ownership to those with the strongest financial stake in the project. Nevertheless, identity remains the end goal for systems that are meaningfully democratic. The lowest standard must at least match that of existing cooperatives. Work is being done in this space; notably, Gitcoin Passport can provide a level of Sybil resistance by providing evidence of humanity through interactions with a number of platforms and protocols. However, this approach does not solve the problem completely. Web2 approaches have existed for years: to a name a few, SMS verification and Captcha. Text verification, used by apps like Venmo, have limitations in the form of the backend infrastructure needed to support this process, and international users without access to a domestic phone number. Even more, burner phones can be accessed fairly affordably using prepaid SIM cards. Captcha also faces issues and is becoming less reliable than it used to be with rapid advancements in computer vision on tasks like object identification. In short, no existing method can dependably prove an account is controlled by a unique human. A democratic DAO needs to answer this problem to prevent votes from being manipulated by duplicate or bot accounts. While a perfect system does not exist, systems already exist that are good enough. Governments depend on ways to identify unique humans using tools like birth certificates, Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, and passports. The remaining uncertainty rests on of it is possible to sufficiently decentralize these processes, if it is possible to integrate the existing structures, as stablecoins do with fiat, or if an entirely new approach is needed for DAOs.

The Replicability Problem

The second challenge faced by DAOs constricting potential growth is the availability of replicable organizational structures: meaning platforms need to exist that can easily be used off the shelf for teams with varied degrees of technical background. In my opinion, this is the largest obstacle to widespread blockchain adoption. There is too much friction compared to web2 and offline alternatives. Problems like managing and navigating wallets, networks, and high gas fees lead many to choose centralized alternatives. The problem becomes even more evident as more sophisticated technology is necessitated, even the technically savvy experience issues easily creating, connecting, and coordinating multisig wallets. Scaling a DAO currently requires a detailed understanding of the bleeding-edge legal world of DAO incorporation to be able to properly interface with existing governmental and corporate structures. Platforms like Tally make the technical side of this process more manageable and provide resources for navigating it. Tally is industry standard for DAO formation, launch, and operations. Protocols looking to decentralize have a vast, battle-tested tool chest to deploy across one or ALL governance compatible chains (see Tally’s announcement of MultiGov™, a multichain governance solution developed with Wormhole). Tally works with OpenZeppelin who created and is continuing to innovate on its Governor contract which enables new possibilities for governance and suit more teams. The contract is battle-tested, modular, upgradeable and trusted by the largest DAOs in crypto (Arbitrum, Uniswap, etc). Teams looking to form DAOs need well-charted paths, platforms, and legal structures that can be easily adopted and are more compelling than centralized alternatives. Progress is being made both on core infrastructure as well as governance-specific tooling.

The PMF Problem

DAOs need to be able to solve real world problems and DAOs have the potential to solve a number of practical problems across the industry. Corporations spend substantial sums on operating expenses like compliance, rights management, and capital distribution. All of these problems can be addressed programmatically using onchain data, allowing businesses to operate dramatically more efficiently and reliably. Tools like CoinTracker already help simplify the process of income tax reporting by scanning the network for your transactions. Traditional investment brokerages require custom tools to offer the same functionality. Onchain verifiability opens new possibilities for interacting and collaborating with others teams too. Workers and contractors will have the ability to check books transparently and know they are being fairly paid. To be fair, total transparency is likely not attractive for most teams, the tension highlights the importance of replicable organizational structures: optionality. Many will opt for some balance of onchain, offchain, and zk operations to enjoy a balance of transparency and privacy to maintain demonstrable fairness, competitive advantages, and user data. Real world applications for others refer to branching out to include more traditional sectors. Forcing to DAOs cater strictly to onchain problems and communities limits DAOs to a small fraction of society; the strategy makes sense for early adopters who are able to navigate the high friction of participation but DAOs will need to expand. Content Guild is a good example of this: initially focusing on developing web3 content, nothing prevents the DAO from using these initial clients as a launching pad to create content in a number of sectors for many different types of clients. The process of business, technical exploration, innovation will introduce the DAO structure to a broader population. DAOs enable more teams, workers, and business partners to benefit from the advantages offered by efficiency and transparency.

Outlook

Just as cryptocurrency brought digital money to a higher paradigm, DAOs can bring collaboration in tow. The significant importance of human capital and cooperation in the modern economy is a unique and potentially massive opportunity for the DAO structure. Best practices are emerging & solidifying, tooling is maturing, and the UX/UI of decentralized governance is beginning to improve. DAOs have many obstacles to overcome but the future is bright & the teams building that future are more than capable.

Onwards.

This article is written by @m0xandrew in collaboration with @contentguildxyz.

To learn more about Tally visit tally.xyz or DM us @tallyxyz.

Wormhole, Tally, and ScopeLift are teaming up to build MultiGov: an industry-first multichain governance system soon available to DAOs on Solana, Ethereum mainnet, and EVM L2s. The Wormhole DAO will be the first to adopt MultiGov, enabling W holders to create, vote on, and execute governance proposals on any supported chain. Integrating this innovative governance model marks a significant shift towards a truly decentralized and inclusive decision-making process that operates at a level above the multiple underlying chains.

What is Multichain Governance?

Your DAO operated by users on any chain. Multichain governance lets DAOs meet token holders where they are. DAO members can raise proposals, delegate, vote, and generally participate in governance for an onchain DAO from whichever chain they hold tokens on. MultiGov will support multichain DAOs across Solana, Ethereum mainnet, and EVM-compatible L2s. As more projects expand to multiple chains, MultiGov will lower barriers to DAO participation and increase user reach in nearly all major ecosystems. Tally, Wormhole, and Scopelift are combining their expertise in state-of-the-art governance, delegation, and multichain infrastructure to build MultiGov.

Single-chain vs Multichain

Until now, DAOs have operated their governance on a single chain. Many of the oldest and largest DAOs keep their token, governance, and treasury all on Ethereum mainnet. However, rising L1 gas costs make managing and participating in governance increasingly expensive. In addition, with the growth of robust multichain infrastructure, DAO token holders are increasingly distributed across many chains. To maintain active, accessible, and decentralized governance, many existing DAOs are exploring options to expand their governance systems. Newer protocol DAOs often plan out their multichain strategy from day 1, launching on one network and then strategically expanding to other chains to grow their users and liquidity.

MultiGov aims to keep DAO governance:

• Active, by meeting community members where they are.

• Accessible to all token holders, by lowering gas costs.

• Decentralized, by enabling token holders to vote on any chain

• Flexible, by allowing DAOs to easily expand to new networks along with their protocol

Implementation: MultiGov’s hub-and-spoke model

MultiGov implements a hub-and-spoke governance model. This model combines well-understood building blocks – governor, timelock, cross-chain token transfers, and cross-chain messaging.

On the "hub" chain, a DAO using MultiGov has a standard ERC20Votes token and OpenZeppelin Governor with the Flexible Voting extension. The hub can be any supported EVM chain. Token holders can choose to natively transfer their hub governance tokens to spoke chains.

On each "spoke," there is a native governance token and a spoke Governor contract. The native governance token keeps track of voting power on that chain. When there is a proposal, token holders on that spoke chain submit votes to the spoke Governor. Votes on each spoke Governor can be aggregated and sent back to the hub chain via a cross-chain message. Users who are on the hub chain can submit votes directly to the hub chain Governor.

When the voting period is over, the hub chain will tally the votes it has collected from all the spoke chains and from users who submitted directly on the hub. If the proposal passes, it is executed on the hub chain, and sent to each of the spokes for execution via a cross-chain message. Creating new proposals to vote on follows a similar design, where proposals are created on the hub chain and then broadcast to each spoke chain.

To learn more about how DAOs can go multichain, watch Tally CTO Raf Solari’s ETH Denver 2024 talk on Multichain DAOs here.

The Wormhole DAO

The Wormhole DAO, governed by W holders, will be the first to use MultiGov’s pioneering multichain governance system. Wormhole's DAO will enable W token holders on any supported chain to participate in governance for the Wormhole protocol. This approach will provide users with a familiar interface for participating in Wormhole governance, whether they are on Ethereum, an EVM L2, or Solana. The Wormhole contributors hope that this will help maintain a vibrant and active Wormhole community, while keeping governance completely decentralized and accessible to all.

DAOs interested in implementing MultiGov can reach out to contributors at Wormhole, Tally, and ScopeLift by submitting this form.

Learn more about Wormhole, Tally, and ScopeLift:

MultiGov | Tally docs

Governing protocols on multiple chains

https://docs.tally.xyz

ScopeLift - High Caliber Crypto

ScopeLift is a software engineering consultancy focused on crypto. We combine high quality engineering with deep knowledge of the blockchain ecosystem.

https://scopelift.co

Classifying DAOs is important

If you’re interested in contributing to a DAO as a voter, delegate, grants applicant, paid employee, or in another way, you’re probably thinking about whether the DAO is the one that’s best for your passions and career interests. The same is likely true if you’re an investor looking to invest in governance tokens, or if you’re a trader interested in speculating. The truth is, tons of people are interested in finding the right DAO for them.

But that search can be challenging. Every DAO is unique across a wide array of factors, and the workstreams and culture you find at one DAO might exist differently or may not exist at all at another. In fact, in this world of infinite composability and programmability, finding two similar DAOs can feel like finding the same needle in two haystacks.

But fear not—learning to analyze DAOs with categories and metrics can help you understand DAOs with greater sophistication, and find the one that’s right for you. And going through this process of classifying DAOs will make you a smarter and more successful DAO contributor, more prescient of the risks and upside of going down the DAO contribution journey.

Analyzing DAO metrics

One of the best metrics-based frameworks I’ve seen is Ferdinand Regner’s “How to assess a DAO?” from 2022. Regner analyzes DAOs across five types of categories: strategic, financial, governance, community, and technical. Each category comprises metrics that measure some fundamental publicly accessible onchain or online attributes that DAOs generally share.

Four out of five of these categories don’t focus on the technology, tools, or infrastructure a DAO uses and this, I think, captures a fundamental essence of DAOs: that the most essential part of a DAO is its members and their capacity for collaboration.

Let’s go one by one and review all the categories and what they measure, and try to go beyond the framework.

Strategic metrics

Strategic metrics focus on the DAO's mission and purpose. The key question every DAO must address is "why join?" The answer doesn't necessarily need to be complex or profit-driven. Many successful crypto communities have rallied around simple concepts like memes. For instance, Bitcoin and Dogecoin have gained significant traction through memes alone. Similarly, DAOs operating as democratic entities can capture attention through unique or engaging ideas, with values and goals following suit. Nouns DAO is a prime example, having built a million-dollar treasury and an active governance board around a meme, leaving a significant impact on the crypto industry.

Guild DAOs, such as Vector DAO, Content Guild, Twali, and Safary DAO, focus on talent and services. These DAOs comprise skilled professionals like designers, writers, and consultants, offering service packages to companies seeking talent. In return, they provide attractive rates for their members who work for these clients or bring in new business. These organizations may not prioritize token price or even have a tradable, publicly accessible token, emphasizing their unique strategic focus.

The legal framework of your DAO matters when considering many non-obvious interactions, such as fundraising, revenue generation, and taxes. I’m not a lawyer so I won’t dwell on it, but A16z has written comprehensively about selecting a legal framework and the considerations and consequences of each legal framework in their article, “DAO Entity Features & Entity Selection”. Definitely worth a look-see.

Financial Metrics

Financial metrics are crucial for understanding a DAO's current and future financial health.

• Treasury size: What are the total assets under management (AUM) of the DAO? It's important to know not just the total value, but also how much the treasury would be worth if all assets were liquidated immediately.

• Revenue streams: How much the DAO has earned over a specific period, such as a week, month, or year? This provides insight into the DAO's ability to generate income.

• Burn rate: How much the DAO has spent its funds during the last period. Understanding the burn rate helps gauge the sustainability of the DAO's financial practices.

• Diversification: This metric evaluates the composition of the treasury. It's important to know how much of the treasury is immediately liquid and how diversified the assets are to mitigate risks.

While treasury size and revenue streams are important, burn rate and diversification are equally, if not more, critical for assessing a DAO's financial health. DAO treasuries often follow a power law distribution, with a few large DAOs holding a significant portion of total AUM. However, the size of the treasury is not the only factor to consider. Many DAO treasuries are predominantly denominated in illiquid governance tokens, which can significantly impact the token price if sold. Therefore, larger DAOs often focus on diversifying their assets by acquiring stablecoins, blue-chip cryptocurrencies, or real-world assets (RWAs). They may also pursue revenue generation strategies, such as lending tokens, to build antifragile treasuries that can withstand market volatility and sustain operational expenses for an extended period.

Governance metrics

Governance metrics are essential for gaining a deeper understanding of a DAO's decision-making health, inclusivity, and power dynamics, which are crucial for assessing its overall effectiveness and sustainability.

Governance activity: How many proposals have occurred over time? How many votes occurred over time?

• Proposal frequency: This metric tracks the number of proposals made over time, providing insight into the DAO's level of activity and engagement. You could also look into the DAO’s Discourse forum page to see how many temperature checks have been made.

• Voting activity: This measures the number of votes cast over time, indicating the community's involvement in decision-making.

• Proposal types: Understanding the types of proposals created and what is being funded helps gauge the DAO's priorities and focus areas.

Governance participation: How are voters actively participating in proposals?

• Voter engagement: Analyzing the percentage of the voter base that participates in voting reveals the level of active involvement in governance.

• Key voters or delegates: Identifying the main voters or delegates can highlight power dynamics within the DAO.

• Voting limitations: Assessing any restrictions on voting, such as token limits or anti-Sybil mechanisms, helps understand the inclusivity of the governance process.

Governance distribution: How does power manifest in the DAO?

• Token distribution: Examining how the governance token is distributed provides insight into the decentralization of power.

• Voting systems: Evaluating whether the DAO uses one-token-one-vote, quadratic voting, or one-person-one-vote systems can reveal the fairness and inclusivity of the governance structure. Quadratic voting and one-person-one-vote systems may be more equitable than one-token-one-vote, but they could also deter people from purchasing the token.

These metrics can be observed on platforms like Tally to what and how decisions have been made over the course of their history.

Community metrics

Community metrics provide insights into the size, engagement, and composition of a DAO's community, which are crucial for understanding its reach and influence.

This can be a complex category to measure. For one, each DAO defines “community” for itself differently. “Community” in the Nouns DAO ecosystem extends beyond just tokenholders, and includes creators, artists, proposers, and might even include the members of DAOs that have forked the Nouns model like Purple DAO and Lil Nouns. Conversely, DAOs like Optimism or Uniswap may define their community as only tokenholders, because there are so many and the token is easily accessible to new prospective members.

But by analyzing these community metrics, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of a DAO's social fabric, which is essential for evaluating its ability to capture attention in the crypto industry.

Community definition: What are the bounds of the community?

• Membership criteria: How does one become a community member? Do they buy a token, or do they simply have to identify with the mission or vision of the DAO? Do they have to contribute a proposal first or participate onchain? Is there a ledger, onchain or otherwise, with all the community members of the DAO?

• Scope of obligations: Assessing members' obligations, such as participation in governance or community events, reveals the level of commitment expected within the community.

• Exit mechanism: Analyzing how members can exit the community provides insight into its inclusivity and flexibility. Can they leave by selling the token or are the boundaries more ambiguous, or perhaps harder to leave from?

Community size: How large is the community?

• Member count: The total number of community members indicates the DAO's scale and reach.

  • Size matters when it comes to communities. The scale of a community can dictate how power is distributed, how contributors are paid, and how slow the DAO moves. It can also impact the strategic Balaji Srinivasan’s great essay on startup cities has a 4x4 matrix that shows how communities that operate at different scales and time-horizons are fundamentally different types of organizations. Joining a DAO that’s 100 members large and meant for a month long project is very different from working at a 10,000 member DAO with year-long contracts.

• Engagement on social media: Monitoring engagement on platforms like Twitter, Discord, Lens, and Farcaster helps gauge the community's activity level and ability to attract new members.

  • A strong social media presence is underrated, but can be incredibly valuable to DAOs. Some well-known DAOs, like Constitution DAO and City DAO, leveraged viral Twitter traction into multi-million dollar rounds of crowdsourced investments.

  • With a berth of new activity on Farcaster, I expect there to be a new opportunity to do the same this cycle on that platform. Just my opinion, but I expect DAOs that experiment with and integrate new social technologies early will be rewarded with more attention, more members, and a successful flywheel.

Community makeup: Who is in the community?

• Contributor evaluation: How are contributors selected and compensated for their work? Assessing contributors based on time committed, level of talent, and prosocial participation in the DAO can help you estimate what the community's capability and potential for collaboration might be.

• Influential members: Identifying well-known or influential members can highlight the DAO's reputation and appeal.

• Builders: If your community members can build for the DAO, whether by developing software, creating products, or simply motivating others in the community, encourage them to do so and incentivize them with RetroPGF or other funding mechanisms if your DAO has that capability.

Community dynamics: How is the community changing over time?

• Evolving characteristics: Tracking changes in size, quality, and definition over time provides insight into the community's growth and adaptability.

• Cultural identity: Recognizing the influence of the blockchain ecosystem (e.g., Solana's focus on trading, Ethereum's emphasis on public goods) on the community's culture helps understand its values and priorities.

Technical metrics

Technical metrics are about the infrastructure the DAO uses to manage fundamental operations like sending transactions on the blockchain or voting.

Generally, this means following best practices for treasury management, smart contracts, and voting, and depends on the blockchain used. For EVM chains, basics include using Tally for governance and SAFE for multisig.

Blockchain details

• Gas fees: Assessing the cost of gas fees for transactions on the blockchain is important for understanding the financial accessibility of participating in the DAO. Lower gas fees can make it easier for members to buy in and exit the DAO.

• Virtual machine (VM): Knowing which VM the DAO uses (e.g., Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), etc.) can provide insights into the compatibility and availability of tools and infrastructure for the DAO's operations.

Smart contract security

• Audit history: Checking whether the DAO's smart contracts have been audited and by whom can provide insights into their security and reliability.

• Bug bounties: Assessing whether the DAO has a bug bounty program in place can indicate its commitment to maintaining secure and robust infrastructure.

Some other notable frameworks for analyzing DAOs

The fun of analyzing and classifying DAOs doesn’t end here—there are many other frameworks for assessing DAOs and you should take the liberty to create other metrics and categories as you see fit for the questions you want answered.

For example, Marlene Marz has created a fantastic graphic outlining the various DAOs by their aggregator, type, and number of DAOs found per category.

Additionally, Christian Zeigler and Isabell Welpe have created this taxonomy of DAOs:

How to find DAOs to analyze

• You can find DAOs on aggregators like DeepDAO, Messari, and DAOcentral.

An incomplete list of a kind of analysis that you may do to scan the landscape.

Investment DAOs – These are DAOs that want to invest in startups, collect NFTs, or other collectively invest asset classes. Examples include Hydra DAO, Chainforest, Metacartel, and Social Graph Ventures. They are usually anywhere from 1 to 200 members, track membership with a whitelist or non-transferable token, and use blockchain SPVs to invest into startups.

NFT DAOs – These DAOs are formed around an NFT collection and often use treasury funds to market their NFT by hosting events and projects that spread their brand. Examples include Pudgy Penguins, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Solana Monkey Business (SMB). These DAOs limit members to holders of the NFT, yet may also have an elected board of delegates that oversees their treasury and is compensated.

DeFi protocol DAOs — DAOs that govern over DeFi protocols and their treasuries.

• L1s – Ethereum, Solana

• L2s – Arbitrum, Optimism, TreasureDAO

• LSDs – Lido, Rocketpool

• AI – TAO

• DEXs – Uniswap, Jupiter

DeSci DAOs – Organizations that seek to improve scientific institutions by funding impactful research or solving structural problems. Examples include VitaDAO and ResearchHub Foundation.

Ecosystem grants DAOs — DAOs with the aim to distribute grants to projects, typically open source projects with minimal or no revenues that have a disproportionate impact on the blockchain ecosystem they belong to like Arbitrum, Celo, and Aave.

Quadratic funding grants DAOs — DAOs with the aim to distribute grants using more equitable methods that let the community decide who to give to and how much to give from a matching pool. Typically open source projects with minimal or no revenues that have a disproportionate impact on the blockchain ecosystem. Examples include Gitcoin and Octant.

Guilds – DAOs that organize workers and work as contractors to earn revenues. Examples include Content Guild, Vector DAO, and Bankless DAO. There are many different types of guilds that can focus on different niches, like growth, but they are characterized by their members working on behalf of the DAO for payment from external companies.

Network states – DAOs that organize using the philosophy of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State manifesto. From the website, “A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.” Examples include Epoch and Praxis.

Some final tips before you go

Still, even after performing a multifactor analysis of every DAO in existence it can be daunting to actually take a chance and start participating. This is normal. DAOs present a unique set of challenges and opportunities, but you can get through them with some simple tips. Here are some final points to consider:

1. Understand your expectations: Whether you're a trader, investor, founder, developer, hacker, or voter, it's important to recognize how you want to contribute, express your expectations regarding payment, voting rights, and participation in proposals, and act respectfully and collaboratively with other DAO members.

2. Embrace dynamism: DAOs can have varied cultures and operational models. Familiarize yourself with the norms of one DAO, and then gradually explore others with different cultures to broaden your perspective and network.

3. Navigating complexity: DAOs can be complex to maintain due to their ever-changing nature. However, this complexity is also what makes them fascinating and a testament to the potential of decentralized collaboration in the crypto space.

   1. Openness: DAOs may engage in a range of activities such as investments, grants, funding, and services, so they’re a great chance to get involved with all kinds of new and exciting fields of operations that may otherwise be hard to break into.

   2. Adaptability and entropy: Unlike immutable smart contracts, DAOs are dynamic and subject to change. This inherent entropy requires constant adaptation and management but also adds to the excitement and potential for innovation.

   3. Power of incentives: A well-structured incentive system can motivate members to work towards a common goal. By aligning interests around a mission and creating a sense of belonging, DAOs can harness the collective power of their members.

4. We’re all newbies: Don’t feel intimidated by another member’s experiences or resume. DAOs are such a new organizational construct and a constantly evolving space, so it’s very likely that they’re relying on your knowledge, insight, and expertise as you are with them. So don’t feel worried about asking for clarification about a term you don’t understand, and chances are they’ll be happy to help.

And with that you should have enough of a foundation to know what DAOs you want to engage with. Now you can navigate the world of DAOs more effectively and contribute to their success while also growing your own skills and network within the crypto community.

Good luck on your DAO contribution journey: bon voyage! If you want to chat, reach out to me at @gigarahul everywhere, anytime.

Sources

• https://medium.com/@marlene.marz/how-to-classify-daos-according-to-their-mission-part-1-existing-classifications-e0fde6d9f4d

• https://medium.com/smape-capital/how-to-assess-a-dao-11e79988b87e

• https://medium.com/@vectorDAO/introducing-vector-dao-6eed7ff13aa6

This article is written by @gigarahul in collaboration with @contentguildxyz.

To learn more about Tally visit tally.xyz or DM us @tallyxyz.