Incentive Design & Tooling for DAOs

1) How to lower the barrier to meaningful contribution: Because contributions to DAOs can come from anywhere, tools that qualify and quantify different types of contributions (e.g. bounties, DAO-specific metrics) can be used to create a shared understanding of priorities of how one can expect to be rewarded for different levels of participation. In... See more

DAOs have systems of organizing tasks that need to get done along with incentives for said tasks. This can be monetary incentives like bounties or reputational incentives to get other benefits in the DAO like more voting power.

The leading tool for intersubjective evaluation is Coordinape. DAOs can experiment with various policies for the mechanism, including for how many points each contributor should have to give out to others (impacting how much weight each contributor has in determining the results), how large the bonus pot should be relative to the base compensation ... See more

Incentive mechanisms have always been critical to build a healthy, highly participatory community of any kind. But historically, these systems and incentive mechanisms have been fractured and separate across spheres. We’ve had political systems for organizing participation in mass movements. We’ve had corporations and other financial structures for... See more

-Aligned incentives have a big role in the success of DAOs along with giving people power over their work or having a piece of ownership. It can also serve as a personal expression about what you care about.

The rise of financial incentives In order to encourage participation in DeFi (decentralized finance), new DAOs offered financial incentives. Those who do not have financial incentives would not invest time, money, and energy in networks, vote on proposals to improve them, or care about their futures. Here are some examples that can help builders un... See more

For engagement flexibility, DAOs can create two tracks for contributors. One track would compensate contributors retroactively based on the value that they’ve created for the DAO. Commonly used mechanisms in this area include retroactive funding proposals — where contributors outline the value they’ve created in that period and make a commensurate ... See more

Create rewards and incentives. All games have rewards and incentives. In DAOs these are not only financial incentives, but also social, cultural, intellectual, and even spiritual incentives.