Hello!

I’ve missed this - it’s been three whole weeks since I last sent out a newsletter - this was a combination of hecticness leading up to traveling, traveling itself & being in a remote cabin with limited WiFi (plus being surrounded by 10+ under 6-year-olds that made this week entertaining).

On to today’s newsletter - as we shift to a world that embraces the creator economy, we need the infrastructure to support individuals that embark on their own creator journey.

What’s the point of freelancing if I can’t get paid?!

So, we’re going to talk about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (or DAO’s, as they’re better known) and the importance of companies that are building the operational infrastructure behind DAO’s (like Tally!).

We’ll talk about what a DAO is and why companies like Tally are so important to building the DAO infrastructure that lets everyone participate.

Let’s get to it!

🎳 What is a DAO?

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is a community of people who’ve come together with a shared goal.

DAO’s have a range of purposes, such as: social groups, collect groups, investor groups, talent agencies, research groups and more.

DAO’s are:

• Decentralized - they are owned and run by the community. There’s no uptight hierarchy like a company (‘a centalized organization).

• Autonomous - there’s a shared set of rules and a shared bank account (‘treasury’) that’s encoded and enforced automatically by smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Once something has been decided, the rules automatically execute - if everyone votes in majority of setting fire to the DAO bank account, the code will automatically execute this and dump all the $.

• Organization - because they’re groups of people that associate and coordinate around specific purposes.

❓Where does Tally come into this?

Remember how we said above that in a DAO, members arrive at a majority decision? In order to do this, they need to vote.

Many DAOs live in Discord and use it for voting. The main issues with this are:

• Each member gets a single vote and that’s it - it makes it difficult to implement a more ‘complex’ governance model (e.g. transferring ownership of your vote to someone else).

• Discord isn’t designed for highlighting proposals, their outcomes and who voted.

• It’s super easy for bad actors to sway decision-making by creating multiple accounts while holding a single token. 

Tally was designed to counter these issues and make it easier for DAO members to stay on top of all their proposals.

Tally is a voting and governance analysis tool that allows members of a DAO to vote on:

• Active on-chain proposals

• Delegate votes to a third party

• View previous proposals

• Allow the public to see who (and how they) voted

This brings a huge amount of transparency to the voting process.

🔍 Explore DAO’s

Once you go into each DAO, you can see the proposals you’re involved with and if you want to delegate your vote to a specific voter.

You can also see the voting power of each wallet in the dashboard below.

Why I’m a fan:

• Transparency: While many voting and governance tools require you to own tokens in the protocol itself to see data, Tally’s data is open for everyone to see.

• Clarity: It’s very clear what people are voting for and how their votes are being allocated. The on-chain proposal and the outcomes are defined upfront.

• Credibility: The tech is already being used by protocols like Gitcoin, FEI and Ampleforth.

So can everyone use Tally?

Well, unfortunately no.

Tally only works with protocols that use Compound or OpenZeppelin, so the voting mechanism may not be available to all DAOs.

This makes it harder to be adopted. But I assume they’re working on expanding.

Also, most logins are via wallet addresses which encourages anonymity.

Tally is working to move more people to link social profiles to tie votes to identity.

So there’s gonna be a fine balance between building a brand + credibility vs staying anonymous.

Conclusion:

DAOs will play a huge role in the future of organising work.

We will need more tools like Tally to help professionalize and level up our decision making abilities, by making it super simple to vote & keep track of the decisions we’ve made on the DAO’s we’re a part of.

Photos Of The Week:

NASA shared its first images from the James Webb telescope - I could look at galaxies from this view all day.

I’ve also been in Canada all week at a family retreat - being around family (especially people I’m not particularly close to) is good for the soul and I’ve now got cousin’s I can keep in touch with on the other side of the world. Some snaps:

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition - I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two.

Got feedback? Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.

Fahim