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.<\/p>\n
Platforms for building DAOs can do a lot, but not everything. Most of the conclusions in this article are based on personal experience<\/a>, including running DAO Synergis<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n What follows is a digest of the basics of DAO creation, plus a set of useful links to resources and documents.<\/p>\n The article covers five fundamentals:<\/p>\n If you are new to DAOs, start here<\/a> or with this<\/a> piece. Because the ideological aspect runs through every vector, it gets no separate section here; see the \u201cDAO Book<\/a>\u201d instead.<\/p>\n DAO aggregators are a good route to launching your own decentralised autonomous organisation. But as software \u201ccombines\u201d, they can lag: new networks, intricate scenarios, customised analytics and the like often arrive late.<\/p>\n Even so, a few leaders stand out.<\/p>\n One of the most successful and swift ICOs, Aragon recently survived a significant crisis, shook off a raider<\/a> takeover like an irritating louse, and kept going. I have used Aragon\u2019s products since near the project\u2019s inception and, subjectively, give them a neutral-to-positive rating.<\/p>\n Objectively, the system\u2019s modularity is its most notable feature. Other advantages include:<\/p>\n Aragon supports the following networks:<\/p>\n The metrics may not impress Web2 users:<\/p>\n But the picture changes when you note that projects\u2019 aggregate treasuries exceed $40bn. I therefore recommend Aragon as the most developed ecosystem.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> DAOs.<\/p>\n By access I mean authorisation in Telegram and Discord chats\u2014and, more rarely, other messengers\u2014on forums and similar venues.<\/p>\n One of the first niche tools to turn rough products into coherent, working services\u2014and, crucially, stable ones. It supports only Telegram and Discord, but that suffices for many beginnings.<\/p>\n Special mention to MyShCh<\/a> and the following:<\/p>\n Recommended reading:<\/p>\n Among services: gasless voting via Snapshot, the Discourse<\/a> forum engine, Commonwealth<\/a> and Tally<\/a> for delegation and more.<\/p>\n As ever, not straightforward. Two resources nonetheless:<\/p>\n At the very least, you\u2019ll have order-of-magnitude numbers and datasets to hand. I also recommend crowd marketing<\/a> for DAOs \u2014 a genuinely mature P2P tool suited to giants and tiny collectives alike.<\/p>\n Many platforms already include this function, but here are handy tools for quickly distributing tokens to many recipients:<\/p>\n If you use Safe Wallet<\/a> and have few transactions, a simple scanner plus the Safe\u2019s own internal ledger will do. For more complex needs:<\/p>\n Start with Consola<\/a> \u2014 full-featured B2B portfolio analytics, which means inbound and outbound payments.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n ForkLog has a full piece on this topic; I point you straight to it.<\/p>\n To begin with, two templates:<\/p>\n Also strongly recommended: the introductory article \u201cThe legal status of DAOs<\/a>\u201d, documents developed by OpenLaw<\/a>, and templates from EthSign<\/a>.<\/p>\n The most contentious aspect; nonetheless, the Koinly<\/a> service offers cases across many jurisdictions.<\/p>\n Several models are possible; at minimum, consider three:<\/p>\n Study at least one act on DAO linkages<\/a>. This vector is evolving fast; track jurisdictions such as the United States, Japan<\/a> and the EU. Above all, keep analysing<\/a> practice.<\/p>\n Here is a ten-step sketch for launching a decentralised autonomous organisation:<\/p>\n These are very general steps, but with them you will be ahead of any newcomer still searching for a way to build a DAO.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n\n
Technical and organisational aspects<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Aggregators<\/h2>\n
Aragon<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Specialised resources<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Access to a DAO<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Collab<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Alternatives<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Governance<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Marketing<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Economy (finance)<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Token launch<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Accounting<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Accepting payments<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Law and regulation<\/strong><\/h2>\n
DAO documents<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Taxes<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Bridging to offline business<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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How to build a DAO with these services: a checklist<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Conclusions<\/strong><\/h2>\n