How to build a DAO quickly and well: a toolkit

ForkLog has long covered the ideological, legal and other theoretical aspects of building DAOs. Today Web3 entrepreneur Vladimir Menaskop turns to practice and shares tried-and-tested tools for creating a decentralised autonomous organisation.

From the author

Platforms for building DAOs can do a lot, but not everything. Most of the conclusions in this article are based on personal experience, including running DAO Synergis for eight years, as well as involvement in more than 50 decentralised autonomous organisations. The rest comes from parallel research on NFTs, bridges and more.

What follows is a digest of the basics of DAO creation, plus a set of useful links to resources and documents.

The article covers five fundamentals:

1. Technical (organisational).
2. Marketing (advertising).
3. Economic (financial).
4. Legal (juridical).
5. Ideological (philosophical).

If you are new to DAOs, start here or with this piece. Because the ideological aspect runs through every vector, it gets no separate section here; see the “DAO Book” instead.

Technical and organisational aspects

Aggregators

DAO aggregators are a good route to launching your own decentralised autonomous organisation. But as software “combines”, they can lag: new networks, intricate scenarios, customised analytics and the like often arrive late.

Even so, a few leaders stand out.

Aragon

One of the most successful and swift ICOs, Aragon recently survived a significant crisis, shook off a raider takeover like an irritating louse, and kept going. I have used Aragon’s products since near the project’s inception and, subjectively, give them a neutral-to-positive rating.

Objectively, the system’s modularity is its most notable feature. Other advantages include:

• more than 7,500 active DAOs;
• among the leaders: Lido, Polygon, Curve and others;
• DAO customisation.

Aragon supports the following networks:

• Ethereum;
• Polygon;
• Arbitrum;
• Base;
• ZKsync.

The metrics may not impress Web2 users:

• monthly traffic around 40,000;
• the token had fewer than 12,000 holders as of August 2024.

But the picture changes when you note that projects’ aggregate treasuries exceed $40bn. I therefore recommend Aragon as the most developed ecosystem.

Developers and users of xDAO, Colony and many others may disagree. In any case, once you master one, two or three ecosystems, you realise there is always more. Above all, benchmark your experience against existing DAOs.

Specialised resources

Access to a DAO

By access I mean authorisation in Telegram and Discord chats—and, more rarely, other messengers—on forums and similar venues.

Collab

One of the first niche tools to turn rough products into coherent, working services—and, crucially, stable ones. It supports only Telegram and Discord, but that suffices for many beginnings.

Alternatives

Special mention to MyShCh and the following:

• Gitcoin — a service that built its Web3-passport analogue, used by many for user authorisation;
• Nomis — a reputation system with one flaw: scores increase for selling, which sits awkwardly with the notion of reputation;
• 0xScore;
• Aspecta;
• Openid3;
• Orange Protocol;
• PADO Labs;
• Civic (another ICO), Idena, Bright ID — the “old school” of identification;
• Guild, which provides access via guilds.

Governance

Recommended reading:

• ideas for DAOs from Messari;
• a description of governance as a process;
• the function of token-based governance.

Among services: gasless voting via Snapshot, the Discourse forum engine, Commonwealth and Tally for delegation and more.

Marketing

As ever, not straightforward. Two resources nonetheless:

• Flare;
• Crowdcreate.

At the very least, you’ll have order-of-magnitude numbers and datasets to hand. I also recommend crowd marketing for DAOs — a genuinely mature P2P tool suited to giants and tiny collectives alike.

Economy (finance)

Token launch

Many platforms already include this function, but here are handy tools for quickly distributing tokens to many recipients:

• Disperse;
• Unvest;
• Pinksale;
• Envelop — if you want to send many NFTs and ERC-20s at once.

Accounting

If you use Safe Wallet and have few transactions, a simple scanner plus the Safe’s own internal ledger will do. For more complex needs:

Start with Consola — full-featured B2B portfolio analytics, which means inbound and outbound payments.

Of course, DeBank, Zapper, Zerion, CoinDix, Step.Finance and peers remain useful, but bookkeeping and portfolio management are different vectors. Also have a look at the archive.

Accepting payments

ForkLog has a full piece on this topic; I point you straight to it.

Law and regulation

DAO documents

To begin with, two templates:

1. DAO Charter.
2. Multisig agreement.

Also strongly recommended: the introductory article “The legal status of DAOs”, documents developed by OpenLaw, and templates from EthSign.

Taxes

The most contentious aspect; nonetheless, the Koinly service offers cases across many jurisdictions.

Bridging to offline business

Several models are possible; at minimum, consider three:

• DAOBox — steadily developing along multiple vectors;
• Legal Nodes — another “wrapper” for DAOs;
• Otoc — among the earliest services in this direction.

Study at least one act on DAO linkages. This vector is evolving fast; track jurisdictions such as the United States, Japan and the EU. Above all, keep analysing practice.

How to build a DAO with these services: a checklist

Here is a ten-step sketch for launching a decentralised autonomous organisation:

1. You need at least two people. A one-person DAO is possible, but there is nothing to decentralise. If you lack partners, set up AI agents—at least you will have someone to test with.
2. Describe mission, aims, tasks and a rough roadmap in a charter, manifesto or similar.
3. Formalise tokenomics and basic legal foundations, for example in a white paper.
4. Create a multisig and lay out rules for its use.
5. Set up a basic chat: Telegram, Discord or a forum.
6. Go to Snapshot and create a voting template.
7. Launch tokens to quantify contributors’ input: NFTs, ERC-20s or another format.
8. Buy an ENS or other domain and build a simple DAO website — on-chain and online.
9. Map out the first actions as a bounty campaign, airdrops or any other post-TGE step.
10. Begin recruiting contributors publicly or in private (by invite).

These are very general steps, but with them you will be ahead of any newcomer still searching for a way to build a DAO.

Conclusions

DAOs, like many other Web 3.0 and Web3 segments, remain hidden from hype-driven crowds, leading some to dismiss them. Three points argue otherwise.

First, money: DeepDAO reports treasuries in the billions—and that is easy to verify.

Second, people: hundreds of thousands already take part in DAOs. Is that much in a world of eight billion? No—so the growth potential is vast.

Third, resources: many of the best today sit in DAOs. Even white-hat hackers and freelancers are already, in effect, contractors to DAOs. BitDAO (Mantle) is a wealthy fund; Uniswap is the leading AMM.

If you are ready, launch your DAO and join the industry’s pioneers.