DAOs fail at onboarding, but why?
Why do DAOs fail at onboarding new contributors and retaining the talent? I believe there are two major factors involved, which Rite of Moloch (RoM) offers a solution to. Firstly, DAO work remains volatile and unstable, making it difficult for DAOs to offer motivated contributors the financial stability they are looking for. Individuals move on, engage in multiple communities at the same time, or under deliver. These unreliable contributor relations the reinforce the first problem. Lacking stability causes misalignment and a vicious race to the bottom has begun.
The corporate world has solved these issues through the creation of human resources (HR) departments, which have the power to penalise employees or let them go. DAOs, however, do not have a stable core or strong punitive measures at their discretion. Excluding a DAO contributor would equate to forcing a shareholder of a company to sell their shares. Doing so at scale is just not sustainable.
To HR or not to HR?
Meanwhile, the notion of corporate HR is not human-centric and an institution Web3 actively works on leaving behind. At Raid Guild we strive to show dedication to recent joiners, but expect the same amount of effort and alignment in return. For this reason we have built for ourselves and your DAO the application, why you will not need HR. RoM is a staking solution, which incentivises contributors to make achievable commitments and deliver on them.
Any DAO can use RoM to deploy a cohort, where participants lock an amount of tokens towards a defined goal. If a set of conditions is met and the staking period did not lapse, successful participants can reclaim their stake. Otherwise cohort administrators can slash participants’ funds to the benefit of the DAO. Hence, the DAO is incentivised to define goals that are measurable and achievable because otherwise no one would ever stake funds. Individuals now have financial alignment to a cause they choose, while completing tasks.
DAO bonding for securing delivery
RoM enables contributors and DAOs to limit their downside. Hence, contributor onboarding is probably the most obvious use case, but there are more. If you are a service DAO, your name depends on the reliability of your contributors of finishing client deliverables timely and in expected quality. With RoM, contributors working for your DAO’s clients can now be prompted to stake a bond that is only released after a permissible delivery took place. Through such bond, defrauding clients, teams, or your DAO are sufficiently mitigated.
The same logic can be applied to internal DAO infrastructure projects. In particular, we have explored possibilities to connect gamified decision making with RoM-staking. When a DAO needs to decide on how to organise or which tools to build, members can use JokeDAO to vote for a solution. We have discussed this flow with @seanmc_eth and @davidphelps at JokeDAO and consider connecting the dots in the next iteration of RoM - HR for DAOs. Our first version is live on Vercel and can be accessed here. If you have questions, or would like to receive assistance in setting up RoM for your DAO, please reach out to @b3nedictvs on Twitter or come visit us on our Discord.