If you need some context about what DAO protocols are, how they work, and some challenges they face, please visit our last week’s article.

Context - DAO narrative

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent the purest form of what the crypto community stands for because they embody the core values of decentralization, transparency, and community-driven decision-making that are central to the ethos of the crypto movement.

DAOs are decentralized, meaning there is no central authority; decisions are made by consensus among the community. They are autonomous, as the community self-governs and self-executes via smart contracts. And they are organizations, consisting of a group of people working together towards a common goal.

The DAO is a beautiful concept and has given rise to some of the most explosive innovations in crypto. For example:

• Uniswap - the world's largest DAO and decentralized exchange.

• Optimism and Arbitrum - the most effective Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions.

• Sandbox and Decentraland - the biggest Web3 metaverse platforms.

• Illuvium and Axie Infinity - two leaders in the Web3 gaming space.

The list goes on, as many major cryptocurrency projects will eventually introduce a DAO if possible. Why? Because the idea of keeping everyone connected within a project is at the very core of what the cryptocurrency community is about. Every community deserves some level of say, after all, they are the reason these products get built and why they remain relevant.

DAOs align with our inherent need to be social and cooperate. Our natural tendency is to form groups and work together. The DAO structure provides a platform for the Web3 community to collaborate in a trustless, transparent, and accessible way. They have the power to unleash collective intelligence and creativity, enabling communities to flourish together and achieve outcomes that would otherwise be difficult to attain.

Needless to say, DAOs excite us very much. People join a chat room and things get built overnight, useful things at that. Whichever way you spin it, it’s a pretty neat category in Web3 that everyone should know about.

Projects you should know about

Developer DAO ($CODE)

What is it?

Developer DAO is an organization that is focused on supporting developers in crypto. Their whole mission is to empower builders in the Web3 space that are isolated and lack access to the resources, support, and mentorship needed to grow in Web3.

What’s so good about it?

Community

The Developer DAO community is one of the best-developed aspects of the organization, which makes sense because this DAO protocol’s main focus is providing value for the community.

For example, Developer DAO has a content-sharing Discord channel. Community members use this channel to share content with the DAO. In almost all cases, the official Developer DAO Twitter account will share that content with its following of 84,000+ people. At the beginning of any content creators journey, It’s hard to get attention without paying or leveraging a network effect. With their help, people can consistently see over 2,000 impressions on a post compared to 100 when starting out. Developer DAO puts all content creators in the spotlight and gives everyone a voice through this simple Discord channel.

D_D Academy is another way the DAO is empowering its community and others in the Web3 space. They have created a learning platform to cover the fundamentals of Web3 development through their own modules hosted on their website. Accessible educational material for blockchain isn’t as readily available as other technologies, and so it is vital that a DAO created to empower developers, helps them learn how to develop.

The DAO also offers a job board. Making a living doing what you love is the best way to improve your skills. The DAO's core team partners with organizations to find quality candidates. Additionally, there is an active Discord channel dedicated to jobs and gigs. Here, community members can promote themselves, and Web3 companies can advertise their job openings. The best part is that companies actually use this board to find new employees, and it's not difficult to find people in the community who have been employed in Web3 as a result of this DAO protocol’s efforts.

Team effort 

A quick point to make but an important one. The team is consistently great at keeping up with the community and reminding them of what opportunities they have up for grabs. A quick look around their socials and you’ll see core team members interacting with the community every day in a meaningful way. If you’ve been a part of stagnant channels in other projects, you’ll see the difference.

Opportunities

Developer DAO offers a wide range of opportunities, including scholarships, mentorships, and collaborations.

Their mentoring program provides bi-weekly sessions with experienced developers in the Web3 space to help with things like developing blockchain, and job readiness like building CVs and doing mock interviews. All meetings are recorded and documented on the DAO Notion wiki page for complete transparency. They also have find-collaborators and join-hackathons channels on Discord to connect builders with other builders for collaborations and hackathons.

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Radiant Capital ($RDNT)

What is it? 

Radiant DAO is an organization that is focused on creating the first omnichannel money market. Simply put, they will facilitate lending and borrowing across all major chains on a single platform.

They are focused on the issue of fragmented capital across different blockchains. Radiant is aiming to be an omnichain money market where users deposit any major asset on any major chain and borrow various assets across multiple chains. The goal here is to eliminate the need for silos of liquidity that exists as each different money market. Think dYdX, Compound, and Aave, each of these are there own platform and Radiant is making it easier to interact with all of them in one spot.

What’s so good about them?

Progress 

Radiant has recently upgraded their protocol to their version 2. This converted the token into an ‘omnichain fungible token’ by LayerZero. A key result of this upgrade means that Radiant can scale to every EVM-compatible chain.

Radiant aims to solve the current liquidity dispersion present in the borrowing and lending experience across different chains. If successful, users would be able to deposit any major asset on any major chain and borrow a wide selection of supported assets across all major chains. This is demonstrated below with Arbitrum and BNB.

They already have v3 and v4 on the roadmap, so we’re eager to see where they might end up if they’re successful in achieving their goal of becoming the first omnichannel money market.

Governance 

Radiant has an active governance system. They have over 18,000 members on snapshot, and between 2,000-3,000 members actively participate on each proposal.

They have thought through a proper set of criteria and processes for their proposals. Most importantly, proposals are always about something important that affects everyone. A common issue seen among DAOs is that proposals come through about many things, and more often than not, community members are either too uneducated on the topic or it simply doesn’t affect them enough for them to care about participating. Radiant takes an extra step as part of their process and has put in the effort to vet proposals as a community before committing them as something that needs to be voted on.

First mover 

Radiant claims that they will be the first omnichain money market which can provide great benefits for the project if they are successful and Web3 community finds their platform useful.

Having the first mover advantage provides a distinct competitive advantage if they do things right. It will ultimately be difficult for later omnichain money markets to catch up to a product that is consistently iterating upon itself and taking in feedback from a very active community such as Radiant’.

The network effects and brand recognition also can’t be understated. Being the first establishes them as the leader in omnichannel money markets. The network effects create a self-reinforcing cycle of growth if people like the products Radiant produce because users will attract more users when it comes to saving money and having no other options available to them.

Popcorn ($POP)

What is it?

Popcorn is an effort to link yield-generating decentralized finance (”DeFi”) products with contributing to social impact initiatives for the public benefit. They recognized that so much money was moving in and out of DeFi and with it only bound to increase, that there was an opportunity to contribute to the world in a different way.

The protocol creates yield-generating products where a small fee is charged upon usage of their products which is later shared with public benefit organizations.

What’s so good about it?

Social impact

Popcorn's governance system for their DAO requires a thorough process of nominating and electing beneficiaries who will receive contributions from the yield-generating products. This process involves several steps, which are elaborately outlined in the Popcorn Foundation gitbook. The application process for a beneficiary requires submitting various documents like financial and impact reports, mission statements and more. The DAO then selects the beneficiaries based on the criteria set and finally grants them contributions derived from the Popcorn products. This process ensures that the community makes informed decisions and that the beneficiaries are worthy of receiving contributions. The detailed guidelines also help in creating transparency and accountability in the entire process, which is crucial for Popcorn's governance system.

Popcorn’s protocol structure benefits more than just the users, and it’s important to give back from time to time. If you’re using their products, at least you know that a part of your transaction is going to a good (Popcorn DAO-approved) cause.

Economic opportunity

All DeFi products offer users the opportunity to earn money. Popcorn makes it relatively easy, as they automate yield-generating strategies such as claiming, staking, resupplying, leveraging, and swapping cryptocurrencies. This saves users time, reduces fees, and generates an optimized yield over time on their holdings.

Opportunities to make money with Popcorn are found on their Sweet Caramel dApp. Sweet Caramel is simply their UI that presents all of the functionality in their core products.

Butter is a yield optimizer that automates yield farming associated with a basket of tokens that the DAO determines. Its current underlying asset composition is Frax, Reflexer, AlchemixUSD, and mUSD.

3X is their first yield optimizer, but it offers an alternative composition of stablecoins. Its current underlying asset composition is DAI, USDC, USDT, sUSD, agEUR, EURT, EURS.

Finally, Popcorn offers liquidity mining where users receive rewards in the form of Popcorn’s tokens and fees for providing their crypto assets into liquidity pools. Users can claim their rewards and pop it right back in to the same pools for a compounding effect.

Governance

It is always a good sign when a protocol puts effort into developing a voting system. We will highlight some of the key points, but for more details, we refer you to their whitepaper (pages 7-12) for an in-depth look into their governance system.

One major issue in governance systems is voting weight. It is easy for the founding team of a protocol, who together hold the largest amount of tokens, to control a proposal. Popcorn offers the DAO 3 options to decide from when it comes to voting weight:

1. Voting is capped

2. Voting has no cap

3. Trust score system (verified addresses receive voting power in proportion to their trust score within the DAO)

In addition, Popcorn takes proactive steps to prevent common governance issues such as Sybil-attacks, bribery, and collusion. Here is a brief outline of their approach:

1. Sybil-attacks - implementing privacy-preserving pseudonymous identity verification for on-chain voting with specialized Oracle solutions

2. Bribery/Collusion - integrating zero-knowledge schemes

When a protocol carefully considers its governance system, it shows a commitment to making the DAO work and gaining the trust of its members. By taking these precautions, Popcorn is making it possible for people to engage with their platform willingly and with confidence

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