Most DAOs have a rather relaxed requirement for memberships. Technically, you are member if you bought enough of their tokens and a contributor if you simply attended a DAO meeting. Such lax requirement, for some DAOs, may benefit them because their strength is in numbers, and they need the publicity. You may wonder, what are some more exclusive DAOs where membership is hard to obtain? Let’s take a peek at Orange DAO, A Y Combinator Alumni-only DAO that just raised 80 million dollars to invest in web3 startups.
The Orange DAO is only open to people accepted into Y combinator, Y combinator staff and others authorized by the DAO. This membership barrier significantly filters out those who “buy” their way in a DAO or “spectators” who attend meetings but never actually contribute anything. The Orange DAO discord cannot be viewed unless you become a member, while most discord channels have public channels even if you are not a member yet. Although the discord server is not open to public, visitors can still view all the proposals on Snapshot. Anyone who wish to learn what Orange DAO is can still visit their official website which provides all the information one needs and I will provide a summary below.
First off, Orange DAO has the most comprehensive “charter” I have ever seen in a DAO.
In The Orange Charter, a 2600-words document covering the mission/vision, membership requirement/expectation, tokenomics, funds management, voting/governance rules, etc. If you are a Y Combinator Alumni (YC Alum), you can claim your identity token called “Gem”. The Gem will grant you access to the discord, and act as a symbol of your DAO membership. The Gem can be viewed on Opensea. Different than ERC-721 token, Gem is an ERC-1238 token, also known as “Soulbound token”. They are non-transferable, most suitable for on-chain identity management. Once a YC Alum is verified, they will receive a Gem and currently there are 1.1k gems.
As an investment DAO, it has already made over 100 seed and pre-seed round web3 investments and disclosed some of the most prominent ones. Average investment size is 100k. While an investment DAO typically can only have up to 100 members, Orange DAO is registered as a Cayman Islands foundation company, which separates the investment fund and the DAO to provide flexibility with regulation. Since every member has experience in building start-up companies at Y Combinator, Orange DAO can offer start-up companies all kinds of expertise besides money. I mentioned earlier the Orange DAO boasts an 80-million-dollar war chest, and I will break down the investors. Most notably, NEAR, a layer 1 blockchain protocol, invested 15 million into Orange DAO to become their web3 startup partner. Orange DAO builders will consider Near as their preferred blockchain when building applications. Algorand, another blockchain, also invested in Orange DAO’s fund. In addition, DAO members collectively contributed 10 million.
If you are a YC Alum and looking to get your hands on some Web3 deal flow, I would highly recommend checking out Orange DAO!