Note: This is an old article & it was moved from Substack.

We’re super excited to unveil what we’ve been working on for the past 6 months, this read will be a deep dive into StationX answering some crucial questions - what, how & why. HODL your horses because we’re just getting started!

The Next Cycle is going to be about Stations

Within the next decade, people & communities will be deploying resources on the internet towards a common goal, or collectively just own assets and govern them together. Either way, DAO framework becomes very crucial for these on-chain stations, at the highest, overall DAO assets under management market cap was $13.2 Billion in this cycle, it is said to touch $1 Trillion in the future.

As the space gets more decentralised, democratised & community-driven, we’re going to see a lot more people-collectives forming their stations for every goal.

People will form stations to - invest together, give out grants, donate to charitable causes, run a business, own/lend/borrow assets, collect NFTs, run DeFi protocols, manage NFT treasuries, host events & so much more. We can already see a lot of such collectives today (as shown in the image below) and there are thousands more.

StationX is a single protocol for global multi-human coordination keeping capital at the centre.

The Problems

The problems with the current landscape of DAO tooling are:

1. Lack of modularity: We need DAOs to be understood, set up, and managed easily on a single tool

2. Governance mechanisms: Existing governance models are rigid. There needs to be flexibility in setting up any governance mechanism that works for their vision

3. Single token DAO structures: With current governance tools it is difficult to divide up economic & governance rights

4. NFT support: So many NFT communities have not been able to turn into efficient self-governing DAOs because of the lack of tools that can efficiently create & manage NFT gated DAOs

5. Too many tools: DAOs use different tools for different services like treasury, governance, etc. which in itself makes it tedious to efficiently run the DAO

We just need technical solutions surrounding governance systems, treasury & collaboration tied together to make DAOs simpler - with the help of Stations.

What is a Station?

Stations are on-chain clubs where groups as small as 3 to as big as 10000 members can come together from any part of the world with capital & take action on it - such as investing, grants, savings, charities, cult, events, crowdfunding, fundraise, NFT treasuries, collect NFTs and much more

Stations fundamentally:

1. will own & manage 100% of their assets on their own DAO contract that is deployed at the time of creation

2. will govern themselves in the way they want

3. will access-gate themselves in the way they want - transferable/non-transferrable membership, token/NFT gated, open/private etc.

What is StationX?

Despite the kind of DAO or its purpose, fundamentally all DAOs have two things in common: Collective ownership & collective decision-making.

StationX provides a single webapp for users to deploy their stations using no-code in seconds, set governance & hold 100% ownership of their treasury. Anyone (web3 native or web2 people) can deploy and start managing their station on the app.

The pre-configured templates are formed by permutations & combinations of some key building blocks of a DAO:

• Token Gating - the platform allows users to gate members by ERC20 (transferable/non-transferable) tokens, ERC721 tokens / NFTs or any custom token

• Governance and setting the quorum

• Treasury - can be managed on Gnosis safe multisig or the token contract

Starting a DAO is a simple 3 step process (like filling a form) and inviting members is by sharing invite link or raising proposals or auctions (like NounsDAO)

The dashboard primarily allows members to:

• track treasury realtime

• monitor transactions

• raise & vote on executable proposals

How easy is it to create a Station on StationX:

1. Visit test.stationx.network & connect your wallet

2. Enter create station flow if you want to create a new station, if you’re a part of any existing stations they show up too.

3. Creating a station is of 3 simple steps, should take less than a minute if you are hands on, otherwise about 5 mins with the help of our guide.

   1. Add basic info like station name & token symbol (picture optional)

   2. Select a template based on your station’s goal (currently only ‘Investments’ template is active)

   3. Choose governance, deposits & exit parameters then deploy your DAO seamlessly in just a click of a button

   You can now start sharing the unique invite link with members who can join the station by depositing funds. Each member gets membership tokens immediately after the deposit into the treasury, which represent their share in the station. Station’s treasury is collectively owned by its members which can now be used to invest together in deals & accumulate assets.

Started in Early’22, what’s been achieved so far?

• Became a part of some of the biggest forums, DAOs and communities to learn more about DAOs and how they work

  • Joined GCR & SeedClub.xyz for Product Feedback & Advisory

  • Applied for FWB DAO & Metacartel Venture DAO

  • Initiating conversations with some core members of Cult DAOs (like LilNouns, Crypto Culture, etc)

  • Initiated conversations with folks at Aave grants to build a template for Grants

• Worked on identifying the problems, solving them and built an interactive wireframe that helped us get early feedback from users & experts in the space - you can check it out here

• Deployed our token and governance contracts on test-net. 

• Partnered with new DAOs (tools, listing platforms and DAO incubators) to onboard them

• Our Beta on Rinkeby test-net is live! Check it out here

  • Investment club template is active

  • Users can create their own DAOs & join others as members through an invite link

  • Deposit funds & get club tokens that represent their membership

  • Raise survey proposals

• Got a Grant from PolygonDAO to build on Polygon!

Here’s what’s coming in the future

1. Marketing & partnerships 🤝

2. Build a kickass StationX community 💙

3. More templates for DAO use-cases 🆕 (NFT Treasury, Grants, Charity, etc.)

4. Integrate with more chains ⛓

5. More on-chain coordination features on the product 🚀

Alright, let’s talk about the team

4 of us with CS backgrounds, ran a marketing & tech services company in India right after university from 2019 to 2021

• Rishav used to invest in crypto since 2017 (started with investing in top-tier ICOs through small pools & communities that had allocation with private investors). Invested in over 30 ICOs (including polygon, arweave, ankr, republic network, etc). Found out small communities came together to act as micro VCs, funds, and syndicates. One of the first use-cases of communities managing capital towards a common goal.

• Subham has been building & shipping products since 2017. He has more than 1 year of experience in blockchain specifically. He built a SAAS company from ground-up in the past & managed a dev team size of more than 10 developers across different roles.

• Pranav has 3+ years of cumulative experience in product design, sales, community & marketing. He started working with Web3 projects in mid-2021 and worked with 10+ projects to build their community strategy.

• Toshit is a performance marketeer with more than 3 years of experience in marketing & operations, worked with web3 projects since mid-2021 to generate traction & helped them with getting investors & strategic partners on board.

We’re thankful for the love we’re getting from the community, more details will be shared soon!