DAOmeter is an industry-first DAO maturity rating system.
TL;DR: We're launching a rating system designed to measure maturity in DAOs. We believe it is vital for users and operators of these systems to fully comprehend their decentralized nature in order to use and build them safely and sustainably. Our vision is to provide deep insights and transparency into the rapidly growing world of DAOs by setting new standards for decentralization.
The Launch of a New Rating System
We are excited to announce the launch of DAOmeter, a decentralization rating system designed to provide valuable insights and transparency into the rapidly growing world of DAOs, developed by the team at StableLab. With the increasing popularity of decentralized finance and the use of blockchain technology, DAOs have become a powerful tool for community-driven decision-making and management of protocols. Our rating system brings transparency to governance by providing objective, data-driven evaluations of DAOs based on key metrics such as voting, community engagement, treasury management, security, and more.
DAOmeter was created as a public good and is free for all to use.
The Problem:
Measuring Decentralization is Hard
More and more blockchain-based protocols are launching DAOs as a way to manage their operations in a decentralized manner, especially within DeFi. As with any new technology, there is a lack of established best practices and guidelines for creating and managing DAOs in a dynamic environment. At the same time, users often face difficulty in identifying which ones are truly committed to decentralization.
The Solution:
Maturity Rating System for DAOs
DAOmeter offers deep insights into the maturity of DAOs. Users can easily compare different DAOs and better understand their organizational structure.
This will:
Help protocol users make more informed decisions about which DAOs to use/support
Help organizations understand what areas they need to improve in order to become more mature and well-governed.
Try it out today and see how it improves your understanding of the DAO landscape!
How We Measure Decentralization
DAOmeter rates no less than 30 sub-categories that are foundational to decentralized organizational maturity. These sub-categories fit along the axis of the following six categories:
By analyzing these categories, we give users a comprehensive understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a DAO. At the same time, we provide a new set of best practices that can guide founders and their teams on the journey toward decentralization.
For example:
The 'Voting category looks at how distributed decisions are made within the organization and whether there are active delegates, such as StableLab, involved.
The Treasury category looks at factors such as how funds are managed and how diverse the treasury is in terms of assets held.
The Proposal category evaluates how new ideas and proposals are brought to the organization, and how they are evaluated and implemented.
With the creation of the first scoring system for DAO maturity, we aim to shape what could be the beginning of something that the web3 industry is highly demanding: standards for decentralization and governance.
How We Built DAOmeter
Over the course of a year, the StableLab team conducted extensive multi-stage research using quantitative and qualitative research methods to establish these organizational maturity standards. Over 60 governance experts and leaders across 40 different DAO communities were interviewed and surveyed to identify the most essential governance characteristics. Datasets from the 15 most prominent DAOs helped further refine the scoring which ultimately established the ‘DAOmeter Score’. For the full research breakdown, read the methodology report here.
Let’s Build Governance 2.0
We aim to further elaborate our vision for the future and show where we currently stand. We strongly believe in the importance and possibilities of governance and want to contribute to advancing it. Therefore, StableLab recently started taking its governance research journey to the next level, to help identify and develop a set of best practices together with partners and industry experts.
With the creation of the first scoring system for DAO maturity, StableLab aims to shape what could be the beginning of something that the web3 industry is highly demanding: standards for decentralization and governance.
What's Next?
We believe this breakthrough product will revolutionize the decentralized finance space. And it’s only the beginning. We will continue to improve DAOmeter as well as work on its automation. We aim to incentivize protocols to put more thought and resources into their decentralization to ensure sustainability. These newly introduced standards for decentralized governance will be a guideline for users, founders, and teams such as ours in our daily delegate work at protocols like MakerDAO, Aave, 1inch, Balancer, Optimism, Element, and Hop.
As the technology and ecosystem surrounding DAOs continue to develop, our team is honored to be at the bleeding edge. We believe that good governance is critical for the sustainable growth of web3, and we are excited to be part of the future of decentralized governance.
With the launch of DAOmeter, we welcome all feedback from the community as we look to refine, update, and expand our reviews. Check out DAOmeter and please reach out!
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to those who made this release possible: Gustav Arentoft, Victoria Berger, Ann Brody, Doo Wan Nam, Christian Ziegler, Pedro Parrachia, and Matthew Stein.
We'd like to thank all the governance experts who participated in our preliminary research discussions, interviews, and surveys, especially Bobby Bola, Rex Hygate, Nikita Buzov, Rob Sarrow, Daniel Hwang, Anthony Yoon, PaperImperium, James Moreau, Andy Chou, Rolf Hoerfer.
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