Understanding DAO Incentives & Rewards Better

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

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

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.

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

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

Is the impact and visibility of this task wide or narrow? DAOs (hopefully) pay for impact. But, incentives often work based on the visibility of such impact. We all know salt-of-the-earth DAO contributors who are the community's spiritual glue, but will their over-sized achievements be fully recognized in social graphs or mechanisms like Coordinape... See more