DAO Research Hub

TL; DR

DAOs currently spend $10s of millions on fragmented governance research. What if we could substantially increase the quality of DAO governance research while reducing the cost by 10x?

We propose that DAOs pool capital in non-profits through which they can collectively procure and open source research that impacts all DAOs.

Contact at: connor@daocollective.xyz, josh@metagov.org, eugene@scrf.org

Introducing DAO Research Hub

We believe that, by 2032, DAOs and other net-native organizations can organize more assets and production than traditional corporations, and enable more equitable and innovative forms of organization. But today’s DAOs are generally less efficient than comparable corporations and cooperatives, largely because their governance and operational systems are still immature and ad hoc.

DAOs are starting to research and improve their governance systems, but that research is scaling slowly and much of it is siloed within individual DAO communities. Most teams running DAOs lack the funding, human resources, and specialized expertise to conduct rigorous, pathbreaking research on governance—research that can make DAOs, as a whole, more competitive with traditional organizations.

The clock is ticking for DAOs. As policymakers turn their attention to this novel form of organization, now is the time to demonstrate DAOs’ robustness, compliance, and compelling governance features. If DAOs don’t demonstrate that they deserve special status, regulators will box them in with legacy corporate rules and eviscerate their potential.

That’s why DAO Research Collective (DRC), the Metagovernance Project (Metagov), and the Smart Contract Research Forum (SCRF) have combined forces to establish and run the DAO Research Hub. The Hub will accelerate governance research through grants and fellowships; distribute the burden of funding research across many DAOs; bring together academia, industry, and governments; create more targeted research opportunities sponsored by industry organizations, and make long-term investments in a new science of DAOs that can translate fundamental research into practical technologies that DAOs can use today.

About

DRC

DRC is a non-profit organization committed to accelerating the functionality of DAOs by procuring and open sourcing information foundational to DAO operation, with a particular focus on governance and legal research. Our work is supported by the Ethereum Foundation and Uniswap, Aave, and Compound grants programs.

DRC was launched in June 2021 to host a DAO Summit (video, speakers) with Stanford Center for Blockchain Research, the Ethereum Foundation, and Bankless, and has since focused on hosting events and producing/funding research critical to effective DAO operation, including research contributed by Andrew Hall, David Kerr, 0xKydo, Kelsie Nabben, and Jacqueline Radebaugh and Yev Muchnik.

Metagov

Metagov is a non-profit research collective building standards and infrastructure for online governance. It is led by a number of well-known researchers, including Lawrence Lessig, Nathan Schneider, Primavera De Filippi, Ellie Rennie, Michael Zargham, Joshua Tan, and others.

Metagov was launched in August 2019 as a collaboration between researchers at Oxford, Harvard, and MIT, and was organized as an independent research institute in January 2020. Since launching, we have produced peer-reviewed research on modular governance, technical standards for DAOs, large industry surveys and other governance data sets, an API gateway for online governance tools, political research published in industry media, and several open-source software projects. Our work is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, One Project, the Grant for the Web, the University of Oxford, EPSRC, the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab, the Filecoin Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, GitHub, Aragon, Radicle, MetaCartel, NEAR, Gnosis, and Gitcoin.

SCRF

The Smart Contract Research Forum (SCRF) is a not-for-profit public benefits organization dedicated to advancing research focused on serving the web3 space. In support of the mission, SCRF distributes grants, facilitates resources, and provides operational support to organizations and independent researchers who create actionable research. The company was founded in early 2021 by Richard Brown, former Head of Community at MakerDAO, and Sergey Nazarov, the Co-founder of Chainlink.

Since its inception, SCRF has sponsored several research projects. Notables include Professor Seth Frey’s literature review on building culture across disciplines, Metagov’s Govbase open database project, Professor Nathan Schneider’s CommunityRule and Modpol projects, and TalentDAO for exploring leadership patterns in DAOs. SCRF has also provided support to the CMU Cryptography Seminar, helped organize a mini-conference on DeSci with Foresight Institute and OpSci at ETHDenver 2022, and is co-organizing the first DeSci Day in Amsterdam in April 2022 with DeSci Labs/Foundation, vitaDAO, Molecule, LabDAO, Foresight Institute, and Science Coins. The SCRF Interviews podcast grapples with web3 questions and has featured Ariel Gabizon, Professor Nathan Schneider and Abbey Titcomb, Professor Seth Frey and Livia Deschermayer, Zach Anderson and Professor Ellie Rennie, Professors Darcy Allen and Chris Berg, Scott Moore and Professor Jason Potts, and Kelsie Nabben and Daniel Ospina.

Benefits to DAOs

• Delegate governance R&D and scale key learnings for a fraction of the cost:

• DAOs share many of the same critical gaps in knowledge but lack the resources, time, and network necessary to coordinate subject-matter experts in helping them fill those gaps. DAO Research Hub enables DAOs to delegate that task to an organization built specifically to fulfill that role. By pooling resources, we can source expertise and technology development at a fraction of the cost.
• Receive access to research and best practices that can help inform organizational design and governance, without drawing from internal team capacity.
• We encourage organizations that support the Hub to work closely with us so that we prioritize research that addresses the issues most pressing and relevant to their respective DAOs.

• Find high-quality contributors for your DAO:

• DAOs have difficulty finding high-quality contributors given the novelty of the space. Our researchers, and the organizations that we partner with, will be useful access points for DAOs looking for contributors to assist with governance support and design, and can act as a top of funnel for your recruiting endeavors.

• Guide leading researchers to focus on issues that matter to your DAO and capitalize on robust DAO governance research infrastructure and networks:

• We will work closely with teams from organizations funding the DAO Research Hub to identify their most critical governance issues and focus a portion to help provide solutions.
• The DAO community continues to lack the comprehensive DAO governance research infrastructure necessary for effective operation because (i) the interdisciplinary nature of this work requires coordinating experts in a variety of fields (e.g., legal, organization design, political science, computer science, etc.) and (ii) most relevant subject-experts are not familiar with DAOs. We find these researchers, coordinate them, and connect them with other researchers and data necessary for their work
• We will build the research infrastructure necessary to accelerate and support effective DAO operation, including by organizing university networks, hosting conferences, sharing data sets and benchmarks, and establishing methodologies. In so doing, we will reduce the amount of duplicative research which is currently taking place

• Train, develop, and reward your top contributors & researchers through industry placements at top universities:

• Industry fellows sourced from sponsors will be co-located with academic fellows at our partner universities and given the opportunity to collaborate and build relationships with those academic fellows and with the broader university.

• Anticipate critical governance issues, don’t just react to them:

• Engaging a collective of DAOs to provide funding and support for DAO Research Hub enables each organization to benefit from the insight and experience of the others, and anticipate/mitigate the impact of governance issues before they arise.

• Capitalize on virtuous circles of open source:

• Currently, most subject-matter experts working on DAO research only open-source a very limited portion of their research, typically only for business development purposes. In contrast, DAO Research Hub will open-source all of its research, enabling all stakeholders in the community to use that output as foundational knowledge for further research. This will have a second-order benefit for DAOs, in that it will raise the baseline knowledge of relevant service providers. Accelerating the pace of learning and likely reduce the cost of developing governance systems.

Use of Funds

We intend to raise a total of $5.7M for DAO Research Hub in two tranches: a first tranche focused on building research networks and academic infrastructure, and a second tranche focused on seeding scientific projects to run on that infrastructure. The below is an explanation of how we intend to use the funds raised. The specifics of these initiatives are subject to change based upon our experience during rollout.

TRANCHE 1: up to $2 million in funding

Fellowships - $1.2M

We will fund ten academic fellowships for a number of high-performing researchers across computer science, economics, political science, business, and the law. Each fellow in the cohort will be co-hosted and physically-based at one of two initial Centers for DAO Leadership, to be located at two major research universities across the world. Further, each grant sponsor will be able to send fellows to be based at these Centers for DAO Leadership, fostering industry-university collaborations across the ecosystem.

DRC, Metagov, and SCRF already host several fellows and have a number of existing connections with universities such as Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, MIT, Berkeley, CNRS, RMIT, and others. We will evaluate and place these Centers for DAO Leadership in partnership with these select universities.

Research Support Roles - $800K

The grant will provide funding for 1-2 years of new research support roles that will help run DAO Research Hub via Metagov and the DRC, the length of time depending on the role and whether either organization has already received funding. These roles include:

• Metagov COO - $300K in funding for a two-year engagement
• DRC COO - $150K in funding for a one-year engagement
• Community Manager - $200K in funding for a two-year engagement
• Service Providers Support - $150K in funding for two years of design, legal, and accounting

TRANCHE 2: $2-5.7M in funding

Towards a Science of DAOs: Benchmarks and Other Projects - $2M

DAOs need to prove that they are operationally better than traditional companies. But without a rigorous validation mechanism, progress will only ever occur in fits and starts. In this initiative, researchers at Metagov, DRC, and those supported by SCRF will lay the groundwork for a rigorous science of DAOs by producing comprehensive benchmarks, curated data sets, standard metrics for measuring engagement and contribution level across multiple DAOs, and standard governance “scenarios” for evaluating, comparing, and testing DAO governance systems—imagine ImageNet for online governance.

Metagov has substantial experience collecting and curating such data sets, having produced several ethnographic data sets, a large database of projects and tools in online governance, industry surveys of blockchains and DAOs, a data set of DAO constitutions, and a forthcoming data set on the contract parameters of common DAO frameworks. Further, as the host of DAOstar One, a leading industry body in the DAO ecosystem, Metagov has the experience and leverage to implement and disseminate such measurement standards.

Additionally, SCRF has experience organizing operational and amplification infrastructure around research projects in both academia and industry.

Open Research Grants - $1.5M

We will encourage and enable more high-quality research on governance by providing academics and operators with grants when they complete and open-source relevant research, as well as supporting those researchers with our network and distribution capabilities. These targeted research grants, ranging all the way from $3,000 to $200,000, are not intended to resolve all questions related to DAOs but to jumpstart research agendas and encourage academic careers focused on DAOs and on related subjects. A portion of these funds will be reserved for small grants emitted for already-completed research papers, to support researchers continuing their work in the space.

Providing targeted research grants for DAO governance, legal, and treasury management research is one of the key focuses of the DRC, and you can view their research so far here. Metagov funds a number of qualitative DAO research through its MetagovDAO program, while SCRF has been funding a wide variety of long-term and industry-sponsored governance research projects. All three organizations have strong academic and operator networks, which will help us solicit work from leaders in the field.

Conferences - $200K

We will organize two large academic conferences focused on DAOs and to be hosted at two of our Centers for DAO Leadership. The conferences will initialize the field of DAO research, host a range of pure and applied research, and serve as a touchpoint for leaders from industry and academia to come together on the future of DAOs.

DRC, Metagov, and SCRF have collectively organized several conferences and workshops to date, including the DAO Summit, the Open Web Governance Challenge, DeSci Day, and the Building Blocks of Web 3.0 conference at Harvard Law School.

Funding Logistics

The fund will be handled by Metagov, a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit. Metagov, DRC, and SCRF will coordinate on research funding decisions.

Team

DAO Research Collective

The DRC is run by Connor Spelliscy (Executive Director) and Tony Douglas (COO):

• Connor Spelliscy is a crypto researcher focused on policy and DAOs. He founded the DRC, co-founded the Blockchain Association, the leading industry association for blockchain, and works with many crypto organizations including the Interchain Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, and Gitcoin on strategy and DAO research.
• Tony Douglas is the Co-Founder / Chief DAO Officer of Convex Labs, a crypto innovation network.  He’s a second year MBA at Stanford, and Head of Governance for the Stanford Blockchain Club.  Prior to Stanford, Tony worked at Goldman Sachs, where he co-created an Organizational Design team.  Tony now applies his organizational design and development experiences, plus his general passion and experience with ‘Future of Work’ tech, to DAO research.

The DRC network includes Fellows, who contribute to the DRC through writing, mentorship, or other support. They include:

• Andrew Hall - Professor of Poli Sci/Business at Stanford
• David Kerr - Leading DAO tax expert
• Derek Hsue - Co-Founder at Reverie; Former Investor at Blockchain Capital 
• Jonathan Dotan - Fellow at Stanford Center for Blockchain Research; Founder at Starling Lab
• Larry Sukernik - Co-Founder at Reverie; Former Head of Investments at DCG
• Maria Gomez - Governance at Interchain Foundation; Former Aragon and Coinbase
• Sam Hart - Interchain Foundation Lead and Other Internet Squad
• Scott Moore - Cofounder at Gitcoin
• Sina Habibian - Founder at Zeitgeist; Former Ethereum Foundation Lead
• Shreyas Hariharan - Founder at Llama

Metagov

Metagov is led by Joshua Tan (Executive Director).

• Joshua Tan is a mathematician and computer scientist at Stanford, Oxford, and Metagov whose research focuses on applications of higher mathematics to the design of intelligent systems. He is founder and executive director of Metagov. He is also an executive editor of Compositionality, a peer-reviewed journal, and editor of Applied Category Theory, a book series published by Cambridge University Press. He previously held fellowships at Wharton, Princeton, MIT, and NIST.

Metagov’s research is led by a set of principal investigators, including:

• Federica Carugati, Professor at King’s College London
• Primavera De Filippi, Permanent Researcher at Harvard/CNRS
• Seth Frey, Professor at University of California, Davis
• Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Engineer, Open-source Developer
• Lawrence Lessig, Professor at Harvard Law School
• Ellie Rennie, Professor at RMIT
• Nathan Schneider, Professor at University of Colorado Boulder
• Divya
• Joshua Tan, Fellow at Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab
• Amy Zhang, Professor at University of Washington
• Michael Zargham, Founder/CEO at Block Science, Faculty at WU Vienna

SCRF

SCRF is led by Richard Brown and Eugene Leventhal.

• Richard Brown is the Co-Founder of the Smart Contract Research Forum. Previously he was the Head of Community at MakerDAO.
• Eugene is currently the Head of Operations and Outreach at the Smart Contract Research Forum (SCRF), where he oversees primary research support, strategic partnerships, hiring, and overall operations. Before joining SCRF, Eugene worked as a Project Manager at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. He also has seven years of experience working in professional services in the finance industry between New York and Hong Kong. Eugene holds an M.S. in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Finance with a double major in Psychology from New York University’s Stern School of Business.