Thanks for putting this out Iced! I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s thoughts on this.
In my opinion, if the DAO funds revenue seeking projects and wanted to optimize for
- the DAO’s mission
- decentralized project governance
- value accrual to the BANK token and the DAO’s treasury
- DAO sustainability
The answer would be the SubDAO model.
Revenue seeking projects would create a governance token. The project would transfer some percentage of the token to the DAO multisig in exchange for funding in BANK. Core contributors could be paid in the project token and in BANK.
Hypothetically, the project token would accrue in value. The DAO would be free to do whatever it wanted with the token. The DAO would also be able to vote to disburse revenue back to the token holders (including the DAO) directly (a dividend).
Allocation percentages would have to be negotiated with the project teams in exchange for funding.
I think that paying in governance tokens is better than a set percentage of revenue (dividend). Many early stage projects will need that revenue to continue to fund development.
Companies only pay dividends when they don’t have a better way to invest the capital. It wouldn’t make much sense to put that on an early stage project.
Projects would be free to seek funding from outside sources or the greater market if they wanted too. This freedom would be best for the project and best for the bDAO. If bDAO held the governance token, what’s best for the project becomes best for bDAO.
This makes me think of frogMonkee’s post - Brain Dump #5 - Bankless DAO: An Ecosystem of Nodes
This is where the value proposition of the DAO and the Guilds comes in. What would incentivize a project to seek funding from the Bankless DAO? What services is the DAO providing for those contributors?
Would the marketing, legal, dev, or analytics guild be more incentivized to help a project if they knew the DAO’s multisig held the project’s token?
I like it because it is clear and would keep everyone’s incentives aligned. We would know exactly who had what governance claim.
As far as advancing the DAO’s mission, I think revenue seeking projects will have the best chance to accomplish the mission and provide for the sustainability of the DAO.
I think entrepreneurs and contributors are more likely to want to build in a place where they can be rewarded in governance tokens.
I think a centralized department model will turn a lot of people off too. A lot of us were drawn to bDAO to get away from that.
Maybe, a project would be required to hold a certain amount of BANK on their multisig as well. This would create an environment of alignment and coopetition between projects. Sort of like individual contributor levels within the DAO.
For instance, BB and DEGEN just got into a dispute. Would the projects have been more aligned if both projects held BANK AND the bDAO multisig held their governance tokens?
When the dispute happened, we didn’t know who owned what. It made it difficult to figure out that alignment. Yes, we both held BANK. But how would BB’s success help DEGEN? How would DEGEN’s success help BB? We didn’t know.
Theoretically, BB and DEGEN would give revenue back to the bDAO treasury at some point in the future. But that is still unclear.
Another pro for the tokenization model is that I believe that is just where the future is going. Let’s get in front of it. When a problem arises, let’s solve it.
I can already see a lot of issues and problems arising if we take this on.
BUT, as we have seen with many of the bDAO projects, these early problems are entrepreneurial opportunities that the bDAO can leverage to create new projects.