DAOs Beyond Buzzwords with @theobtl 

Ethereum App Builders Roundtable #6 on DAOs - How they’re run, what’s broken, what’s next

Guests: @spengrah.eth, @yitong, & @cupojoseph 

Here’s what stood out  1/15 🧵

3691233323:audiospace

Ethereum App Builders X Space #6 – Tomorrow at 6:30PM UTC (2:30PM EST)

Featuring @spengrah from @HatsProtocol and @zhayitong from @AgoraGovernance

A conversation on why DAOs matter, how they’re run today, what’s broken, and what’s next

Set a reminder
https://t.co/FcyJoCQ3IZ

Ethereum Foundation

building /hatsprotocol | 
proudly mid-curving it since 1995

DAOs Beyond Buzzwords with @theobtl 

Ethereum App Builders Roundtable #6 on DAOs - How they’re run, what’s broken, what’s next

Guests: @spengrah.eth, @yitong, & @cupojoseph 

Here’s what stood out  1/15 🧵
https://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/1907480383710548441

/ethereum foundation | opinions are my own but more than likely they come from Vitalik's blog paragraph.xyz/@chaskin

2/15 🧵 What is a DAO, really?

DAO means a lot of things to different people

@spengrah.eth: DAOs are a superset of org structures with programmable logic + distributed ownership

@yitong: Most real DAOs today are protocol DAOs with tokens. That’s where the hardest problems live

3/15 🧵DAOs don’t need to outsource everything

They can have embedded teams with deep context.
People assume decentralization means doing everything by vote. But "more decentralized" isn’t always better. "Better" is better

4/15 🧵 Voter apathy isn’t the real issue

@yitong: More voting ≠ better governance

Focus should be on aligned contributors in the right roles, with the right control structures

Trying to game more votes just invites bots

5/15 🧵 What makes a “good DAO”?

- We don’t really know yet
- No standardized metrics
- Need an “L2Beat for DAOs” to track progress over time
- Not just activity, but effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and resistance to capture

7/15 🧵 Who should build DAOBeat?

@spengrah.eth: EF is in the best position - credible neutrality, no protocol to promote
@yitong: EF’s involvement could align culture + legitimacy like Vitalik’s post did for L2 stages

Avoiding tooling vendor capture is key

8/15 🧵 The deliberation layer is broken

Proposals often get decided in DMs before anything hits the forum
Real discussion is drowned out by noise

@spengrah.eth: Collective attention is a resource. We need better ways to filter and containerize discussions

9/15 🧵 Backroom deals aren’t always bad

@yitong: It’s not that some rooms are private. It’s that we pretend everything’s public

We need clarity on who gets to be in what rooms, and why

Gatekeeping isn’t evil, being dishonest about it is

10/15 🧵 Infra isn’t the bottleneck anymore

DAO ops don’t need 1000s TPS

What’s missing: shared norms, legal clarity, cross-chain composability

@spengrah.eth: It’s painful for tooling teams to rebuild infra on every L2 just to serve one DAO

11/15 🧵 Why app devs should care

Decentralized governance minimizes platform risk

Credible neutrality needs to go beyond L1s

If you’re building on someone else’s protocol, you want its governance to be fair, sustainable, and stable

12/15 🧵 What DAOs can learn from local gov

@cupojoseph: You should know who’s voting and what they want. People talk forever to avoid taking action

Also in a DAO, you can just show up and start building. Local politics still has gatekeepers

13/15 🧵 DAOs = digital cooperatives

DAOs let communities fundraise, govern, and distribute value without the friction of legacy corp structures

Publicly traded companies cost millions to maintain

DAOs can do that with a smart contract

14/15 🧵 The next 5 years

- More interoperable, composable tooling
- More ConstitutionDAO moments that hit the mainstream
- More experimentation with structure, permissions, and decay
- More sustainable business models to keep us building for a decade

15/15 🧵 DAOs are coordination infrastructure

We're still figuring this out, but the upside is massive

Big thanks to @theobtl, @spengrah.eth,  @yitong, @cupojoseph, and everyone working towards building better orgs

6/15 🧵 3 pillars of DAO quality  
1. Is it achieving its goals? 
2. Is it doing so efficiently? 
3. Can it resist capture, both internal and external?

Security is part of the org, not just the contract