By Eyal Eithcowich Founder and CEO of Deep DAO
We are at the beginning of a revolution in the way people find and understand organizational data. There are several buzzwords associated with this revolution, such as big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchains, but the one I prefer is transparency.
The kind of transparency we are talking about is, of course, related to blockchains, data, and algorithms. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) built on the blockchain, or holding assets in treasuries and governance systems built mostly on chain, operate transparently, with public data holding an amazing level of detail into their financial state, and organizational structure.
Having the data of large, multi-billion dollar Web3 organizations such as Uniswap, Gnosis DAO, and others publicly available to everyone, is a huge step forward in our understanding of the way people coordinate, and work together. This knowledge is now available for more people, and requires less effort and less money to obtain.
It is poised, in my mind, to enable investors, journalists, academics, and many others to develop insights, and teach us things we don’t know yet about people and large groups.
The tools to aggregate, model, and analyze all this data are being developed as we speak. One such tool is DeepDAO, the company I founded in early 2020. DeepDAO aggregates data from thousands of DAOs and millions of governance token holders.
These numbers are huge in comparison with where DAOs were just a few years ago, and they pale in comparison to what we believe is coming: millions of DAOs, and tens of millions of DAO participants, managing hundreds of billions of dollars.
DeepDAO makes much of the DAO ecosystem data visually available through graphs and tables on the company website. All this richness of information is currently available for free. But there is only so much information you can model, and visualize yourself. Therefore it is my belief that the future of understanding Web3 organizational information at the most detailed level is through APIs.
Here are some of the highlights of what can be known by observing newly transparent organizational information.
DAO Power Dynamics
In DAOs, and in any other kind of group, people don’t work, or vote by themselves. They do it with their friends, and people with whom they have a mutual interest. We call these (sub)groups of people, who cooperate with each other, voter coalitions.
If the group operates without structure, and without transparency, voting coalitions are sometimes called an “invisible elite”, because they have power that may remain hidden from others. With crypto DAOs coalition breakdown, the organization’s power dynamics is out in the open. Now you can analyze DAO governance, and DAO control structure, to a much deeper degree than just by looking at the top stakeholders.
Tools such as DeepDAO provide 2 and 3 people coalitions for thousands of DAOs. For some organizations the API goes even further and provides as many as 10 people coalitions.
Understanding the people in DAOs
Creating white lists of DAO voters packs enormous power: you can create any segment of the entire active DAO participant population, and get an answer whether a certain person (blockchain address) belongs to this group.
If your project is looking to airdrop a token to the most active voters in DeFi, you can find them by creating the relevant white list. The most active voters in NFT DAOs in late 2021, at the height of the bull market? Create a new white list and you got it.
Or maybe you want to reward governance participants in your DAO?
Or invite another DAO’s participants to take a look at your new, thematically related DAO? Create an API white list, and easily find the people who match your search.
Time series data
Academics and organizational researchers need to understand trends. Is the treasury of a DAO going up, or down in any time period? Is the organization’s participating level increasing, meaning a vibrant community, or are the token holders less involved during the summer months?
With time series data API you can track trends in the ecosystem, and look at correlations between active governance and strength of treasury, or vice versa.
Overview of what else is possible
The following list serves as an overview of what’s currently possible in our understanding of DAOs:
- Ecosystem stats: An overview of the DAO ecosystem. The total treasury size, total number of proposals in all the governance platforms on DeepDAO, total votes, number of governance token holders and number of active participants.
- Organizations: The Organizations data points return a full list of thousands of DAOs on DeepDAO, and a breakdown of the most significant ones by categories. The highlights of this section are Coalitions, Top People in each DAO, and a white list of whether a person (address) is a member of a certain DAO.
- People: the People API section spans the full DAO experience of each DAO participant. This includes all DAOs the person is part of, all their votes and proposals. The People data point also delivers each DAOist’s participation score, and DAO score ranking.
- Proposals: Full governance proposals for each DAO, and active proposals in the entire ecosystem.
- White Lists: the white lists section allows you to create custom segmentations for the entire population of DAOists. Use cases for white lists include targeted airclaims to top people in governance, data driven NFTs, DAOist rewards, and more.
- Time series: full daily number of votes, proposals, voters, and treasury size from as early as 2018 (although there were very few DAOs back then). This section includes ecosystem-wide stats, and individual DAO stats.
Now consider this: the data insights above are just the beginning. As DAOs become more complex, and continue to grow, much more will become transparent and knowable about large organizations. The revolution will not be televised, it will not be tiktoked. It will be analyzed bit by bit, transaction by transaction.
About the author: Eyal Eithcowich is the founder and CEO of DeepDAO. Eyal is an experienced product and software leader. He fell in love with DAOs in early 2018 and, realizing the potential to revolutionize the way people coordinate, jumped in and never looked back. In previous lives Eyal was a journalist, a filmmaker and an activist.
