Decent DAO is rebranding to reflect our exclusive focus on the role DAO governance plays in advancing crypto. For the past two years, we’ve been building Decent (previously Fractal), a DAO application that empowers onchain orgs to govern at startup speed.

We believe now is the ideal time for onchain orgs to accelerate their decentralization. In fact, it’s critical to protect innovation. In the process of decentralizing our own org, we’ve learned lessons that are embedded in what we’ve built– and how we advise onchain teams that use Decent to govern.

We’re ponying up $5,000 USDC for a DAO that can show how it’s decentralizing while building on Base for Onchain Summer.

DAOs on the Brink

Onchain orgs have come a long way since the original Ethereum DAO. $30B in treasury assets are managed by onchain orgs today across thousands of DAOs and millions of voters. The stakes have never been higher. Crypto is inevitable. DAOs remain the next logical evolution of how onchain teams organize. But there are challenges to solve so that teams are not faced with choosing to progressively decentralize…or continue to ship fast.

DAOs on the Brink may be DAOs with governance details in their docs, or earlier-stage founders working via a multisig. We’ve found teams in this stage have been more-focused on building. They have a product in-market. They may have early or strong signal on product-market fit. They could be an investment DAO, privacy team, core infrastructure, art or music cultural project, or the latest memecoin. They may be pre-token, or have just-launched and now seeking liquidity and deeper voter participation. These onchain teams all have one thing in common: they are at the point where they must begin to decentralize to scale goverance with their product and community. These DAOs are seeking to grow while preserving what they’ve built.

These DAOs need to ship fast, sure. Executing goverance correctly with the right tools and partners ensures they are economically viable for the long term as well. DAOs need to be thinking about all the factors that result in remaining a long-term going concern.

DAOs Must Think Different: Modular Governance is Our Why

Our purpose is to accelerate governance to move as quickly and iteratively as the fast-shipping velocity, high-performing engineering and design teams in the space. Our mission is to redefine how companies are built and run by making decentralization the obvious choice for maximizing stakeholder alignment. We envision a world where DAOs power the next generation of human institutions that are 10x better at managing resources, making decisions, and coordinating collective action than current models of organizing on the internet. The right time to decentralize is now.

The DAO tool ecosystem is diverse with hundreds (!!) of open-source primitives (we’ll be sharing an open-source database later this month as a public good for DAOs). However, piecemeal integrations eventually bog DAOs down. We believe a unified experience– designed, assembled, and curated while staying modular, is what the ecosystem needs to meet the demands of DAOs that will lead going forward.

Introducing Decent

The Decent application plugs in with best-in-class DAO tooling like Safe and Snapshot to provide fully-customizable, modular governance in one interface for teams looking to decentralize their operations without compromising on execution. Organizations can structure how they decentralize. DAOs can can equip each team with their own governance models with built-in veto powers for checks and balances.

• Voters can review and vote for onchain proposals, or delegate their votes directly on Decent via PC and mobile

• DAO Contributors can see the DAO’s treasury, history of transactions, offchain and onchain votes, and hierarchy all together along with Sub-Safes

• Admins can create and manage proposals, as well as utilize templates make it easy to execute recurring transactions

We believe there are more opportunities to improve the experience for all DAO participants, which is why Decent can be utilized on PC or mobile. We build according to our core values and design principles.

Core values:

• Sovereignty: communities should decide their own futures

• Agency: the power to act is foundational

• Courage: we must be brave when facing uncertainty

• Safety: we make the frontier as safe as possible

Design principles:

• Quality: DAOs should use software that is beautiful, functional, and usable

• Security: trust comes through in the design and experience

• Simplicity: only keep what is essential, reduce friction to streamline the experience

Learn more about the core values and design principles that drive us towards better, simpler, and faster governance below:

Decent Partners and Users

We’re built on the best governance infraustructure in crypto, including Safe, Snapshot, and Open Zepplin Governor. Decent is available on networks like Base, Optimism, and Polygon in addition to Ethereum mainnet.

We’re developing an exciting integration with Hats Protocol that we believe will help DAOs improve how they vote on roles. More to come soon. We also believe private voting is critical to reducing governance bias which is why we’re working with Nillion to understand DAO privacy needs. Finally, we know there is room to improve how DAOs transact from their treasuries, which is why we’re working with Sablier.

We’re proud to support teams like Shutter, working on anti-MEV, Sarcophagus for data privacy and preservation, and Myosin, a novel web3 marketing collective. We’re also excited to begin work with Vanta Club, part of Contango Digital.

Stay Based, DAOs

Finally, to help accelerate teams building on Base, we’re excited to launch the Based af DAOs Contest as part of Onchain Summer 2024’s Buildathon. We’re offering $5,000 USDC and free advisory services to one early-stage team that can show how they decentralize governance while building. Learn more and enter below:

Try the Decent app and refer to our docs. Questions? Message us at hello@decentdao.org and join our community on X, Farcaster, and Telegram.

Prepare to take a great leap forward in DAO governance with us.

Parker McCurley, CEO and Cofounder, and the Decent DAO team