A Different Approach to DAO Governance & Resilience - Seeking Feedback

🤖 DAO Governance and Vision
, ,
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve been a long-time lurker here, deeply inspired by the work Gitcoin does to fund public goods. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the core challenges that all DAOs, including ours, face—things like contributor burnout, legal uncertainty, and the difficulty of measuring what truly matters.

I’ve been exploring a different way to think about these problems, inspired by regenerative design principles. Instead of solving each problem in isolation, I’ve been wondering if we can design a system where the solutions reinforce each other.

As a research experiment, I tried to architect a protocol that does this. The process led to a blueprint that integrates three core ideas:

  1. A polycentric legal structure to address liability.

  2. A reputation system (using non-transferable tokens) to incentivize and reward the “care work” of the community.

  3. A tokenomic model with a “speculation tax” that creates a permanent, community-owned treasury.

The most interesting part was that even after designing this, a critical flaw remained: the system’s dependence on off-chain data (oracles). It seems the bridge to the real world is always the hardest part.

I’m not presenting this as a final answer, but as a thought experiment and a potential starting point for a conversation. I’ve documented the full architecture and the reasoning behind it in an open-source mdBook to share with the community.

Link: https://carlosarleo.github.io/dao3-blueprint/

My questions for you all are:

  • Does this integrated approach resonate with the challenges you see in Gitcoin’s own governance?

  • Is the idea of a “Verifiable Social Capital Oracle” something that could help with contributor engagement and retention here?

  • Where are the biggest blind spots in this architecture?

I’m here to learn from your experience. Any feedback or critique would be incredibly valuable.

Thank you,
Carlos

4 Likes
2

I applaud you for thinking about these important problems.

I’ve been on the bleeding edge of DAO experimentation since Aragon launched in 2018. The biggest problems I see are

  • Sequestration of funds in treasuries–essentially hoarding funds in desperate need of deployment.
  • Unnecessary boundaries for participation. This includes learning formalities, slow review processes.
  • Requiring too much attention. There are too many DAOs, too many proposals, and not enough time. People should be able to engage productively even if they can only spare a little time.

I created Updraft as a funding mechanism to address these limitations and have communities organically grow up around ideas with very little barrier to participation.

I recently wrote an article on the topic of DAO participation.