Mission
Analyst Dao is a distributed digital asset research organization constructed with the purpose of coordinating a collective of experienced DeFi, Web3 and NFT analysts to produce high quality digital asset research.
Like many other DAO’s, Analyst DAO started as just a group chat. Many of us were living in our own individual silos, treading water to stay on top of the latest protocol launches, updates and general industry news. Recognizing the limits of our own individual skills and bandwidth, we decided the sum of our efforts would produce higher quality insights than what we would come up with in isolation.
Our thesis is fairly simple - what an “analyst” is in crypto has been democratized and disintermediated from relationships with centralized institutions. Thousands across crypto twitter from great writers to financial analysts, data analysts and engineers have produced threads and Medium articles deconstructing the greatest financial revolution of our time. However, that influx of information has created problems in its own right - duplicative research, incomplete deep dives, mercenary shills, and financial propagandists. What if that firehose of information was reduced to a steady dribble by maintaining an uncompromising mission to produce “quality”? What if all these analysts who collectively put out a high quantity of research combined their unique lenses through which they view the world to produce lower quantity higher quality deep dives? By finding the right process and incentives for collaboration, we can improve the signal to noise ratio and free ourselves from the information treadmill. Put another way, by coordinating rather than competing individually for attention, we can improve the quality of our attentional commons and provide a more healthy information diet.
Analyst DAO ultimately aims to be the premier destination for the best analysts to collaborate and produce high quality independent research.
Recruitment
The success of this collective hinges on our ability to attract the brightest minds in crypto and cultivate a community with numerous avenues for members to contribute and grow. We have tried to maintain an extremely high bar for membership to the DAO as each member will become a filter for evaluating new talent and research pieces submitted for publication.
We kicked off our first recruiting season in the fall and are pleased to say we now have about 40 members in the DAO with working groups initiated on 5-7 different deep dives, several of which are yielding reports.
While our recruitment season has led to a lot of organic community participation, we realize there is work to be done to make sure we provide clear paths to involvement in the DAO during onboarding and put in place the necessary process, incentives and tools to facilitate the creation of distributed research at scale. We are actively working to improve these areas as we juggle full time jobs. Additionally, our recruits have mostly fallen into the buckets of writers or financial analysts with fewer data analysts and engineers currently participating in the production of research. In order to provide the quality of research we hope to produce, we need to do a better job of attracting and integrating those more technical communities into the DAO.
In addition to focusing on internal recruiting, we are uniquely positioned to provide a high quality applicant pool to funds and research firms looking to hire analysts. We are afforded the unique opportunity as a DAO with no current cost structure to not treat our members as assets. We are thrilled when individuals are able to sharpen their skills within our community and be referred on to funds or protocols. While we hope their contracts allow for continued community contribution, it has been extremely satisfying to already see some community members find new work opportunities through the community.
Product
Now that we’ve recruited our initial cohort, we’re focused on executing our vision. Our initial steps will be to start posting sector deep dives and individual research pieces with two pieces slotted to launch within the week. After building a portfolio of work, we hope to get a grant to build a website to act as a portal for our research. While the details are still getting flushed out, you can expect that the website will provide features that give users an information edge above and beyond what they get from the reports alone. We plan to build the products that we wanted to use as analysts ourselves.
We have been able to produce all of the initial research with no paid incentives, but we realize more explicit incentives will be required for us to scale. We have evaluated a number of different business models and it seems there is no perfect option. While subscriptions are typical for a business of this kind, the time it would take to build a subscriber flywheel would come at the cost of reach in the near to medium term. The next option would be to create a token-gated site and use the value of our tokens to fund more research. This not only reduces our initial reach just as a subscription would, but also forces our hand on creating a token before we feel comfortable doing so. Finally, we are left with either crowdfunding research or doing sponsored posts. While we hoped to keep our research pure and unbiased, even without taking money it is impossible to stay completely impartial. While we may accept money from protocols or funds to write research, we are committed to remaining as transparent as possible. The goal is to remain minimally extractive and give 80%+ profit sharing to the writers with 10-20% allocated to our multisig to pay core contributors and fund additional research. Should better monetization models be suggested, we are open to exploring other ways to fund our growth including raising capital.
The most important element other than talent in the creation of our end product is process. We’ve learned about how to coordinate analysts asynchronously, but we’re still learning as we go as to what tools and processes are best to facilitate this. Currently, we are using Google Drive and Airtable as the main centers for research operations. The Google Drive allows members to collaborate on primary research as well as reports directly, whereas the Airtable allows us to visualize the process with a KanBan board, keep an up to date directory, curate resources etc. Discord and Telegram have been used for communication, Gnosis Safe for our treasury and several community members have been working on templates to standardize reports and structure the research process. As more DAO tooling comes about, especially those more targeted towards media organizations, we will be quick to adopt tools that make our organization run more efficiently.
The Analyst DAO Flywheel
Analyst DAO will become a blackhole for analyst talent because it is built for analysts by analysts. As our talent pool grows, we will attract projects, companies and funds looking to access the knowledge of the community by either funding research or directly hiring members. Our ability to offer growth opportunities for our analysts will help us continue to grow our talent pool and create a flywheel that compounds our efforts over time. We hope that our mission will strike a cord with those who feel they are drowning in noise and want to contribute to cleaning up the informational airwaves.
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Discord: https://discord.gg/NWxaRZh42q**