Bankless DAO has become the home for over 1,500 members on the bankless journey. We’re on a mission to help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized technologies through education, media, and culture.
At this point, it’s virtually impossible to keep up with all the activity within the DAO given that the community is pushing forward in a million directions—as intended.
Don’t believe us?
Here’s what we accomplished in Season 1 and what to look forward to in Season 2.
tl;dr: Bankless DAO builds.
Season 1 Recap
Community Growth 🤝
At Bankless DAO, we understand that we’re only as strong as our community. Our governance, operational process, culture, and values all reflect our desire to build a thriving community. We’ve optimized for engagement, and it’s worked.
Bankless DAO is now the fourth most active Snapshot space by member count, only behind the goaliaths of Uniswap, Sushiswap, and Gitcoin.
What’s more interesting is that we only had four official Snapshot proposals in Season One. The DAO has been highly intentional with how we use formal governance votes to push the community forward. It’s important to strike a balance between capitalizing on the fluidity of DAOs while not hindering growth with bureaucracy (i.e. formal governance votes for every little bit of direction).
This has limited the number of token-weighted votes, however, has been a crucial mechanism in retaining voter participation.
To put this into context, Bankless DAO’s Season 1 spec saw 31M BANK voted across 500 addresses.
Our recent Season 2 spec generated over 50M BANK voted across 750 addresses, representing +60% and +50% increases in voter participation, respectively. This is a testament to the energy of the community, as governance participation typically decreases over time for many DAOs, not increases.
At the social level, we’ve seen an explosion of activity in our Discord, which stands at over 10,000 strong. Liberally handing out Guest Passes, which allows new members to join the Discord before holding the required 35k BANK to vote, has done wonders for bootstrapping further activity. Paul breaks down the numbers in this forum post from midway through Season 1, which are undoubtedly outdated already.
We recommend reading this presentation to get the full picture on our community growth.
Revenue Generation 💰
Another metric we prioritized in Season 1 was generating on-chain revenue. Bankless DAO is a fair-launched DAO with no funding and no investors. This is intentional. However, it is imperative that we’re able to bootstrap the DAO with non-BANK assets and establish revenue streams to sustain our community and its members for the long run. This is culminating with the launch of a range of products and services that serve our mission to onboard the next billion people to crypto.
In total, Bankless DAO generated nearly $200,000 in total revenue and over $100K in net profit to the DAO treasury in Season 1—a strong start for our growing community.
Here are a couple of highlights.
Culture
MetaFactory Drops 👕
Bankless DAO’s MetaFactory partnership has been a cornerstone for the DAO.
In Season 1, we featured two merch drops: Ultra Sound Summer and Back to School. In total, these two drops generated over $72,000 in sales while earning over $43,000 in net profit for the DAO. As a result, Bankless DAO has quickly climbed to become one of the largest ROBOT holders (MetaFactory’s native token) via its earning program, and we’re excited to capitalize on this momentum with more frequent merch drops with even hotter gear. 🔥
Trust us when we say there’s A LOT cooking. Stay tuned.
NFT Showcases
All Stars: Kouros, Crypto Bushi
Bankless DAO’s NFT Showcases serve as a great opportunity for rising artists to display their work to the crypto community. We do these every week and continue to find amazing artists in the space. Season 1 featured a number of showcases, with the most prominent being the Ultra Sound Bat. In total, this propelled the DAO to generate over $100K in sales and become one of the top artists on Rarible in August.
Equally as important, this showcase raised 5.88 ETH for CoinCenter, a U.S. organization fighting for more thoughtful crypto regulations. We’re extremely proud of the work being done by the NFT showcase team as they continue to discover rising artists in the crypto community.
DAOpunks
All Stars: Sinjun, Crypto Bushi
What originally started as a single drop from our NFT Showcase has blossomed into a fully fledged NFT collection with an active community, inspired by Crypto Bushi’s decision to quit his job and go full-time DAO. From within Bankless DAO, a community of creatives and enthusiasts have rallied around the DAOpunk collection, representing the next wave of employment, from CORPORATEpunk to DAOpunk.
Even more unique is the collaboration between the DAOpunk collection and MetaFactory. When minted, each DAOpunk NFT holder can claim a free limited edition shirt. The physical tee will feature the owner’s DAOpunk JPEG along with metadata and a QR code for proof of ownership IRL.
These unique identifiers will actually be in the print design on the shirt itself!
Join the Discord and see what’s cooking!
Education
Bankless BED Index
Investing in crypto can be a hassle, especially if you’re new. This was the motivation behind the Bankless BED Index. It’s a simple, credibly neutral index giving investors exposure to the main Bankless themes: digital gold (BTC), programmable money (ETH), and decentralized finance (DPI).
In collaboration with the Index Coop, Season 1 featured the successful launch of the BED index on mainnet. After the initial hype, the BED index settled at 13,500 units with 450 addresses holding it. Since then, the index’s unit supply has grown by 117%, with the number of wallets holding the asset increasing by 57% in tandem. Most importantly, all of this growth has been entirely organic. There have been no tokenized incentives for the index in any sense, providing a strong, early sign of a product-market fit.
We’re now in the scaling phase. This has resulted in certain initiatives, including pushing the BED index as a treasury diversification tool for other DAOs, as a base reserve asset for investment funds, and most importantly, as the best index to onboard your friends and family to crypto.
All of this drives further on-chain revenue to Bankless DAO.
We’re continuously pushing for the adoption of this index, highlighted by the $1M purchase of the index by our friends at UMA. We’re seeing continued interest across the board, including some heavy hitters in the space. Details TBA!
And who knows, maybe we’ll collaborate with the Index Coop to create another index along the way. It might be time for a DAO index!
Bankless Academy
All Stars: Fin4thepeople, Redvan, Ap0ll0517, Droste, NFThinker, DidierKrux, Grendel
A core pillar within the Bankless DAO’s mission is to help educate the world on crypto. Bankless Academy encompasses that mission perfectly. It’s aim is to become the go-to application from going to 0 to DeFi Hero. It’s probably one of our most ambitious projects and we’re just getting underway.
The project has received a substantial amount of support from the crypto community, including a $10,000 grant from Polygon and $5,500 from Gitcoin Grants in addition to 1M BANK from the Season 1 Grants Committee. This has allowed the project to establish a core team to build out the product, resulting in the MVP for the initial learning modules, wireframes, design assets, the teaser landing page, and more.
The Bankless Academy team is heads-down building the best application for onboarding the world into crypto, and we’re excited to share our continued progress in the coming seasons.
The next generation of crypto users will be onboarded through Bankless Academy. Bankless media content 👉 Bankless Academy 👉 Bankless DAO.
Stay tuned.
Media
Newsletters
All Stars: Siddeartha
Bankless DAO started off with launching the DAO Rollup, a weekly newsletter to help members stay up to date with all activity in Bankless DAO. The Writer’s Guild has done a phenomenal job at this and has proven its consistency by not having missed an edition since the first week. This has resulted in UMA becoming a big supporter and consistent sponsor of the newsletter throughout Season 1 and continuing now in Season 2.
In Season 1, we expanded our newsletter capabilities to Decentralized Arts, an NFT-focused newsletter highlighting the trends in crypto art, which consistently sees over 4,000 views per edition.
In Season 2, we’re expanding yet again to more content, including a high signal newsletter on grokking the DAO ecosystem (first edition is live!). With the influx of attention of talent into the DAO ecosystem, this newsletter will have valuable insights for everyone.
Keep an eye out for more content. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring any of our newsletters, the opportunity is there, so hit up frogmonkee#6855 on Discord!
Podcast Accelerator Program
All Stars*: Droste, EurekaJohn, Liquidiot, Soundman*
Podcasts are a popular learning tool in today’s age. Given the breadth of talent in Bankless DAO, we’ve decided to kickstart a podcast accelerator program to support rising podcast series and their hosts.
This has largely been highlighted with the launch of Crypto Sapiens by Humpty, a podcast focused on educating the next generation of humans in web3 and crypto. The first episode recently dropped with Brantly Milligan from ENS, with several more in the pipeline for release over the next few months.
Better yet, Humpty hosts these podcasts LIVE in the Bankless DAO Discord (in the Members Only stage) where members can get a front-row seat to the action! As we continue to flesh out the accelerator program, Bankless DAO will launch even more high-quality podcasts in the coming season. The community is stoked to help nurture these new series to rival the likes of Bankless HQ.
Bonus: DAO Tooling
DAOs are still in their nascency. There’s still a ton of infrastructure that needs to be built and improved on. And as a fast-growing DAO, we’ve come across our own tooling needs. Luckily, we have a deep pool of talented builders, so we set out to build our own set of products and tools to help service Bankless DAO as well as the crypto community at large.
Dev Guild strong.
Bounty Board
***All Stars: ***Icedcool
There’s always something to do for the DAO, and we needed a mechanism to broadcast these inter-DAO needs and compensate individuals for those efforts. As a result, Bounty Board is becoming a backbone for new members to earn their way into the DAO by contributing to tasks both small and large.
In Season 1, the Dev Guild launched Bounty Board’s MVP, which saw over 21 bounties valued at over 40,000 BANK. Better yet, we saw a lot of inbound interest for the product from nearly a dozen other DAOs, including some industry sluggers like FWB, Index Coop, Harmony Protocol, DXdao, and more.
As we move forward, the bounty board team is looking forward to drastically improving the product over time and white-labeling it for other communities as they explore better ways to compensate their contributors.
DEGEN
***All Stars: ***Nonsensetwice
DEGEN is a Discord Bot built for DAOs, by DAOs. Its goal is to automate as many Discord-based tasks as possible. Originally created to help manage the growing pain points in the Bankless DAO discord, we’ve now expanded our scope to include other servers and communities.
The product is in active development, but a handful of features are already live and operational. In addition to administering bounties in combination with the Bounty Board team, DEGEN has also significantly mitigated the problem of POAP farmers (people and bots scalping POAPs without participating). The community loved receiving POAPs for attending events, but it was a hassle to keep track of attendance and battle bots that exploited the claim codes. So we decided to build a better solution.
DEGEN now tracks attendees to any voice/stage call and automatically distributes POAP badges to all users who attend for five minutes or more. No codes. No manual distribution. No farming. Just pure automation.
We expect to load DEGEN with more and more functionality over the next few months, including the ability to fetch details from Notion, Discourse, and Github, adding governance functionality like managing multi-sig transactions and Snapshot proposals, L2 tipping, and even token-gated access to the Discord.
Season 2: Settling New Territory
The Growth Flywheel
Season 1 was framed as a testing ground for various coordination hypotheses the DAO came up with during the early months. We really didn’t know what to expect. We had two months of operational experience under our belt, but all of our forward-looking theories were just that—theories.
Going into Season 2, there’s a general consensus that we’re still dealing with some existential coordination problems before we can be in a position to really grow and scale beyond the steady trickle of new members.
In Season 1, we stabilized around Governance and Coordination. Our original seasonal specification was sufficiently stress tested and we’ve seen guilds flourish as discrete coordination units undergirding the DAO as a whole.
In Season 2, we will take the next set of coordination problems: (1) Project lifecycle management, (2) Onboarding, and (3) Compensation. (Link to read more)
These will be our back-of-house goals, while our front-of-house goals will be to double down on revenue-generating activities. In Season 1, we saw which revenue streams worked for us. Now we’ll take them to the next level.
Funding and Distribution
There was a lot of momentum with the launch of Season 1.
The season featured an 11M BANK distribution program across different initiatives. In total, the DAO spent roughly 95% of all BANK within Season 1, only leaving less than ~500,000 BANK leftover from the Grants Committee.
The Season 2 spec passed the official Snapshot vote last week, with nearly 50M BANK voting in favor (and virtually none voting against), bringing our budget up to 20.5M BANK distributed across projects, guilds, the grants committee, and contributor rewards. Here’s the breakdown.
- Projects - 5M BANK: This allocation is distributed to a core set of projects that are well developed and thoroughly scoped, with clear goals in mind. Some examples of official projects that qualify for this distribution are DEGEN, Bounty Board, and Bankless Academy. These projects go directly to Snapshot and are voted on by the community to fund from the community treasury. In Season 2, we’ve decided to fund a number of projects that have already shipped consistently in Season 1.
- Guilds - 5M BANK: In Season 1, we distributed the allocations evenly across all talent guilds to be used for funding internal operations, contributors, bounties, and more. In Season 2, guilds have requested their own budgets which, similar to projects, are verified by the Season 1 Grants Committee and ratified via Snapshot vote.
- Grants Committee - 7M BANK: For funding between seasons, Bankless DAO’s Grants Committee is responsible for allocating BANK to new projects as well as additional BANK to existing projects. There’s a slight change in the members of the Season 2 Grants Committee, which can be found here.
- Contributor Rewards - 3.5M BANK: Season 2 contributor rewards will be split into the following three categories: 1.5M BANK for three monthly Level 1 Coordinape rounds, 1.5M BANK for three monthly Level 2 Contributor Coordinape rounds, and 500K BANK for an end-of-season Guest Pass Coordinape round.
Member Access
Following community discussions, Season 2 DAO access will continue to stay at 35,000 BANK.
Additionally, in partnership with Balancer, we’re also adding Level 1 support for the 80/20 Balancer BPT tokens—currently 4,200 BPT for those who provide liquidity to the Balancer pool.
In the next few weeks, the Balancer pool will feature a liquidity mining program where LPs can earn both BANK and BAL on a weekly basis for their participation.
Member Benefits
With over 1,500+ members, we can collectively provide plenty of benefits for members.
Here’s what you get when you join Bankless DAO with 35,000 BANK or more:
- Access to the Bankless DAO Community Hub: One of the core perks of DAO memberships is access to the Bankless DAO Discord channel, a community hub for web3 opportunities and like-minded individuals on the Bankless journey. Find work you believe in and get paid on-chain.
- Crypto Sapiens Front Row: Within the DAO Discord, community member Humpty hosts exclusive Tuesday Talks, featuring weekly live discussions from industry leaders and experts. All talks are then released on the Crypto Sapiens podcast.
- NFT Club: Tap into the knowledge of NFT experts like Crypto Bushi and WPeaster on a daily basis around the world of NFTs. Crypto Bushi hosts regular discussions around what’s hot and guides DAO members as they ape into the next big NFT wave. More than a few members have successfully flipped NFTs from all the alpha.
- Top Signal Audience Participation: Members get exclusive access to front row seats on Bankless’ new show, Top Signal, where members can chat and shitpost live with the hosts and guests during the show.
- Mental Health Support: Your mental health is equally as important as your physical health! DAO members can join a weekly mental health peer group where all are welcome to share and discuss all things mental health.
- Giveaways and Airdrops: Members will be able to participate in token and NFT giveaways. The giveaways may be limited in number and require timely actions to be taken to obtain them!
- Exclusive Yield Opportunities: Members are getting their first taste of exclusive yield opportunities, inaugurated by the GoodGhosting savings pool and upcoming PoolTogether pod.
Conclusion
Season 2 is here. In just five months, Bankless DAO has put together an impressive list of accomplishments. The community is growing every day, and everyone is truly starting to hit their stride.
It’s still early for DAOs. But the bankless community is helping pave the way for the future of work and collaboration on a global, digital scale. Season 2 is powering the next leg of growth for this vibrant, always-expanding community.
Strap in and get ready.
We’re headed west. We’re going Bankless.
We’ll see you on the frontier as we settle new ground in Season 2.