Discussion on Memberships

Bankless dao membership

Let’s talk about memberships in bankless dao and what membership means

Currently there are 4 levels of membership

Guest pass
Level 1 - member (you hold 35k bank)
Level 2 - major contributor (you have been recognized as providing significant value to the dao and voted to level 2)
Level 3 - whale (hold 200k bank? I don’t know the exact number but something like that and you get a couple extra whale discord channels)

The following are reasons I see why someone would want to join the dao

Financial
You can work and earn bank

Community
You can make friends

Networking
You can make business contacts

Information
You can learn from others expertise
You can hear about alpha

I see these as the major reasons for why someone would want to join banklessdao and to take advantage of all of these there is no need to be a level 1 member. As far as I know there is no real limit to getting guest passes renewed and they provide almost all the benefits of level 1 and actually I don’t know anything they don’t have access to and level 1 does. Guest passes were started because we acknowledged that the barrier for entry of 35k bank might be burdensome for some people. We wanted to allow people to be a part of the dao and earn their way to full membership. I am increasingly seeing that not happen. Guest pass members can take advantage of every thing mentioned above and this creates no incentive for them to actually earn a full membership.

Holding 35k bank means you have a financial stake in making the dao successful. Being a guest pass member and taking on roles and earning significant amounts of bank and selling right away is not what the guest pass is meant to be. I could see a counter argument that people have bills to pay which is true but that applies to everyone and why should the dao be paying your bills if you can’t commit to being a member by holding enough of our native token to be a member. I think this skews alignment and encourages a mindset of extracting value from the dao rather than providing value to the dao.

I would like to start a discussion about this.

Some of my initial thoughts are that guest pass members should be either not be allowed to hold roles or as part of those roles there should be a percentage that has to be held until they have achieved full membership.

Or limiting how many times a guest pass can be renewed. Being a guest pass member for more than a season to me comes across that you are not aligned with the dao and I think you should lose your guest pass or hold 35k bank.

Maybe as part of this conversation we can talk about lowering the threshold but as it stands membership means very very little and we need to fix it to ensure people operating inside the dao are aligned with the success of the dao.

I would love to get the perspective of guest pass members and your opinions on this. My intention is not to exclude people who can’t afford the membership but we have created a way for them to earn level 1 now we need to create a reason for guest pass members to earn and keep their level 1 membership otherwise why have membership at all. Let’s discuss!

I know this is a hot topic . The more I read about it the more I think there should be a single membership.

I’m not sure there is a solid moral or business case that supports multiple tiers.

If anything, we might consider the benefits of raising the minimum $Bank threshold by 5%-10% per season.

$100 of bank for 30 days. Then align or out.

I have changed my view on this after reflection about it and I wrote it out below 0xLucas’s post.

1 Like

Thank you for your post soundman!
Right now we are a >contributor< dao with a social token so to speak that is being used to fund and incentivize stuff. But really the contribution part is in the center of everything.
This only works because we have people that have high intrinsic interest in their work + being a community that is known and trusted enough so that people are willing to buy tokens off of the market without any specific promises around the buy.

Usually DAOs are token-focused with contributions being critical infrastructure AROUND that.

Right now, this DAO is highly inclusive and I think it makes sense for what it is: A young (but quickly maturing) DAO in a stealth-phase branche (decentralized media) with some side hustles around a popular branche (Dao infrastructure) in a pre-early mainstream space (web3).

At some point bDAO will live through at least two narrative shifts. The first one will restructure our membership model to something more inner-Dao utility focused (dao getting paid for being an enabler to its community members [think connections, funding opportunities, work opportunities, perks]) and the next step will be outwards focused with the dao getting paid by outsiders like third party DAOs, speculators etc etc for its power through network, products and prestige. Think attention-stacking auctions where multiple DAOs bid with bank and the highest winning dao has to lock their bank for a period of time to get a perks of all sorts (be that dao-infra-reorg or in the main ball park of media attention or help to organize the media presence etc etc).

An important topic as we become popular are sybil attacks. High guest pass inclusiveness and us having no infra to sufficiently prevent coordinated efforts by non-token holder interest groups leads to a case where these could take over some parts of our DAOs with non-snapshot consensus like projects and guilds.

Talking about projects, those (I think you mentioned it somewhere before) could easily just bail as soon as they got the funding and developed a product.
I like the idea of vested tokens KPI-given-by-dao-focussed model to have a quasi project membership without them having to put in bank beforehand (I mean they’re here for funding not for paying upfront).

Therefore love that you kicked this off here