Incentive Design & Tooling for DAOs

Streams are likely to become the salaries of Web3 because they have many of the same unique properties but provide a more digitally native and logical solution. These programmable cash flows can deliver payments block-by-block to contributors or other parties. For this reason, they are a great way to reward long term contributors and break the “mon... See more

We think that there is an opportunity here to help DAO operators identify their most important objectives before trying to decide which incentives to use or tools to experiment with.

Identifying your two or three most important factors can help to answer these questions and increase the speed at which you can identify the tools and incentive mechanisms most likely to help your DAO.

Does the DAO need a mechanism that is decentralized, or is some centralization compatible with your incentives? There are excellent tools when you need incentives to be decentralized, and excellent tools when you can accept a more centralized approach. The answer for a well established DAO is likely to be different from a new one, as are the corres... See more

Is the work highly complex, either in the task itself or the skill required to get it done?

StreamsKey benefit or use cases: Reward ongoing commitment, real time - pay by the block.

Is the task easily definable, and how can you determine whether it has been done or not?Easily defined tasks can be packaged up and shared anywhere or with anyone, and often work well as bounties or grants. Other contributions are less well defined: someone may make many inputs over an epoch without them having been defined in advance, and the valu... See more

What are my DAO's specific needs? And which incentive mechanisms address them? 

What is the nature of the work or activity to be rewarded?

Does the DAO need a mechanism that is decentralized, or is some centralization compatible with your incentives?