Spotlight Series: DeepDAO

This week we dive in with Eyal from DeepDAO, that offers DAO insights into the decentralized world. DeepDAO lists, ranks and analyzes top DAOs across multiple metrics and has Governance + People feeds in the current beta.

How did you get into crypto?

A friend told me he's about to sell his apartment for Bitcoin and I said no! Are you crazy? What is this Bitcoin anyway? A few weeks and hours of reading and watching youtube videos later I was so deep down the rabbit hole I didn't see my friends anymore. That was 2017 and it was clear to me that I was going to find a way to get involved.

Tell us about your project ...What was the inspiration behind DeepDAO?

Later in 2017 I ran into the DAOstack and Aragon white papers and fell in love. I believe, and I still do, that DAOs have a potential to solve fundamental problems in how people coordinate. I joined a DAO, Genesis DAO by DAOstack and started hanging out in the chat rooms, and voting on proposals. As I became more and more involved I wanted to see a DAO explorer, that will show trends and analytics in how people participate in proposing, getting rewards, voting, and creating voting coalitions with each other. When such an explorer wasn't being built by others I decided to build one myself. As you do in DAOs I created a proposal and asked for a little bit of money, the community approved and a few weeks later I created the first version of DeepDAO.

Why do DAO analytics matter so much to the ecosystem?

One of the most important aspects of governance is transparency. I think this is an area in which blockchain DAOs can solve a real problem. Our core mission in DeepDAO is to show the raw data, and analyze it so that people can understand what's going on inside the DAO. In other words, let's teach ourselves to figure things out based on data, not hype.

On DeepDAO you can see a list of many of the top DAOs in the ecosystem, and dig deeper into their proposals, members, and their trends; on our Governance Feed you see all the proposals and discussions in the ecosystem, and a list of the top active communities and organizations, and on our People dashboard you get a leaderboard of the top active people in governance. Overall I believe we provide the fullest picture of the current governance ecosystem, which is managing in access of 10 Billion USD.

What are the alternatives to DeepDAO?

If we're talking about the Ethereum ecosystem, there are a couple of DAO directories with lists of DAOs. Products like Tally or Boardroom provide lists of projects, and voting capabilities into some of the DAO platforms. The Substrate /  Polkadot ecosystem has fully developed governance products. There's also NEAR Sputnik DAOs directory and other networks that have their own.

However, at DeepDAO we take a broad view of the ecosystem and consider the multichain, multi implementation world. Our north star is to serve the growth of the DAO ecosystem so we're focused on expanding data coverage to as wide as we possibly can. This is sometimes difficult as the ecosystem is developing at such breakneck speed.

What excites you most about the DAO ecosystem and the future of DAOs?

DAOs are one of the most fundamental innovations in human coordination. Since the establishment of firms, humanity was able to lower the coordination cost and collaborate to produce impactful outcomes. With DAOs, the coordination cost will reduce multifold further and I believe it will in turn enable a borderless economy.

Within the next decade DAOs will transform the way society is run, assets are owned and capital is allocated. I believe this could lead to a vastly enhanced technological future and improve the lives of many people.

What triggered you to become a clr round recipient ?

We feel really grateful to have been a recipient of a Clr round as DeepDAO shares the ethos of supporting public goods. We love community collaborations and we certainly hope the DAO research that we contributed serves the community.

Why do you think clr.fund represents such an opportunity in the ETH ecosystem?

Clr fund has been supporting projects that have unique value from deep research perspective. While the Ethereum ecosystem is thriving, it's important to remember it's still a young ecosystem that needs effective tools to support public goods as we have a long way to go if we'd like to see the decentralized space serving societies at a massive scale. DeepDAO is committed to contribute to this ethos with reliable data.

How do you feel about the future of quadratic funding?

Algorithmic "wisdom of the crowd" applied to funding is very interesting. QF as it stands to day is a beautiful innovation and will likely be further developed, I'm looking forward to see QF innovation integrated more into DAO tooling.

What key use cases beyond the current ETH ecosystem fundraising do you see Quadratic funding being helpful for?

QF can be used in the broader public goods context by legacy governments, municipalities, the UN and charities.

If you could change one thing about the space right now, what would it be? aka what keeps you up at night about the Ethereum world?

We need to talk more about well-being. The historic bull market we're all experiencing is providing great access to capital, and while we're building the tools to take it to even greater heights we should emphasize and support people, and communities in ways that the centralized world may support us.

TYSM for joining us in conversation, Eyal!