The recent tremendous growth in DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and the discourse surrounding them have crystalized our understanding of what these digitally native collectives are, their use cases, and possibilities.
With their ascendency, it has become clear that public blockchains offer more than the ability to speculate on digital assets. DAOs have opened up the understanding that blockchain technology or broadly speaking, web3, is a design space for experimenting with organizational forms and collective ownership. Many in the DAO ecosystem have characterized these organizational forms as a new means of coordinating humans around shared goals. As Kei Kreutler defines them in her seminal piece, A Prehistory of DAOs,
“...a DAO could be described as a voluntary association with the operating principles of digital cooperativism. As voluntary associations, they are a cross-jurisdictional way for strangers, friends, or unlikely allies to pseudonymously come together toward common goals, supported by a token model, incentives, and governance. Members of a DAO can have representative ownership of its digital assets through a token, which often simultaneously acts as a governance right and network utility”(1).
With the most recent Cambrian Explosion of DAOs, many within the Ethereum community began to look for EVM compatible chains to deploy on. Mainnet gas prices, which soared, sent DAOs in search of sustainable solutions to a persistent problem.
The DAO Chain
Gnosis Chain, which uses the xDai token, is the associated execution-layer EVM chain for stable transactions and includes a wide-ranging group of projects and users. Many of these are DAOs and, according to DAOhaus, Gnosis Chain is their most popular side-chain with over 1,116 DAOs deployed on-chain from a total of 2,000 (2).
Low gas fees denominated in a stablecoin and the general stability of the network are, in concrete material terms, the main value propositions for DAOs to deploy on Gnosis Chain. DAOs can run governance mechanisms like proposals, on-chain voting, or treasury management at a fraction of the cost of ETH Mainnet fees.
It’s also where builders and hackers have come to experiment and play coordination games within the Ethereum community. From MOONS to POAPs, Burner Wallets, and paying for food with xDai at Ethereum conferences, Gnosis Chain is a house with many doors with a culture of abundance.
In addition to providing stable, low-cost, and optimized transactions, the Gnosis Beacon Chain (GBC) infrastructure will be available to support important Ethereum updates, including EIP implementations. Gnosis Chain will merge with the GBC exactly like Ethereum will merge with the Ethereum Beacon Chain. DAOs will continue to have the ability to experiment on Gnosis Chain before going live on Mainnet.
Gnosis Chain has established itself as 10x carbon neutral since 2021. It has teamed up with Offsetra for a climate-positive carbon-negative initiative. As a result, Gnosis Chain is now offsetting 10x more carbon than the chain produces. Monthly offsets go towards supporting sustainability projects throughout the world. ImpactDAOs building towards a regenerative web3 future can deploy on Gnosis Chain knowing that their operations are aligned with their values.
To reflect the identity and history of Gnosis Chain, we are extremely excited to announce an official rebrand. The overall aesthetic is a solarpunk vision of the near future that emphasizes a culture of abundance. It’s what our lives might look like if we manage to solve the coordination failures around major contemporary challenges such as climate change.
In the spirit of building and experimentation, we’re also launching a poster competition on the GnosisDAO and Gnosis Chain Discord. We’ll pass off the Gnosis Chain branding kit and let you create your own poster. 1st place wins a DappNode Xtreme Gnosis Chain validator, 2nd place wins a DappNode Max validator and 3rd place wins 1 GNO. The competition will last 1 month and winners will be announced shortly after the 24th of June!
We'd love to chat with you about all things Gnosis and web3 in the GnosisDAO Discord. The GnosisDAO community call is hosted on Twitter Spaces every second Monday of the month at 4PM CET. The next call is on the 13th of June, 2022. To keep track of all GnosisDAO public events, visit our Linktree and add our calendar.