Introduction

The year 2021 has seen explosive growth of DAOs with the popularity of Web 3.0 and the metaverse. Among a wide range of DAOs with different goals and organizational structures, Bankless DAO stands out.

Bankless DAO is launched by Bankless, a famous crypto media outlet founded in 2019. By providing the latest crypto news and updates, Bankless has attracted a large number of followers. On May 4, 2021, Bankless launched Bankless DAO, the community-driven autonomous organization, and $BANK, its governance token. Now, Bankless has grown from a centralized media organization to a paradigm of decentralized community cooperation.

What is a DAO?

In order to understand Bankless DAO, it is necessary to know what a DAO is.

DAOs, the new model of organizational governance, are created following the ethos of ​​blockchain - decentralization. Blockchain uses codes to create trust so that DAO can bring together a large number of members from all over the world on the blockchain. These members cooperate with each other through pre-created smart contracts, and DAO encourages members to actively contribute through incentives. This makes organizational management an “automated” process without a centralized regulator, which greatly reduces the organization’s management costs and boosts users’ enthusiastic participation in a democratic way.

DAOs can be regarded as an upgraded version of modern enterprises. However, compared with traditional organizations, DAOs have a somewhat democratic management hierarchy. All regulations and balance sheets are published on-chain and open to all, making DAOs more transparent. In addition, the barrier to joining a DAO is much lower than participating in traditional enterprises. And members of a DAO may come from every corner of the world.

The first well-known DAO was probably The DAO, which was created in April 2016 by the blockchain company Slock.it, which is essentially a decentralized venture capital fund. The DAO members contribute ETH in exchange for its official token $DAO and get voting rights according to the number of tokens they hold. They vote to decide what projects to fund.

The DAO raised 11.5 million ETH contributed by 11,000 members, equivalent to about 14% of the total ETH supply at the time. Unfortunately, it was hacked on June 17 of the same year, resulting in more than 1/3 of the Ethereum assets being stolen. Ethereum had to roll back the transaction through a hard fork to recover losses. Although The DAO ended in tragedy, its creative organizational structure is widely adopted by many other enterprises, among which is Bankless DAO. We will introduce it in detail.

The organizational structure of Bankless DAO

Unlike the hierarchical traditional companies, Bankless DAO adopts a rather democratic organizational structure. If a traditional company is a pyramid, a DAO is more like a starfish with multiple arms. Every arm has its own “miniature brains” and can somewhat operate on its own.

Specifically, in addition to the core development team, Bankless DAO operates through 14 parallel guilds, including the Writers Guild, the Treasury Guild, the Translator’s Guild, the Research Guild, the Ops Guild, the Legal Guild, etc. The guilds are the “talent pools” of the Bankless DAO and work together for the best interest of Bankless DAO. Every guild has its own home pages, missions, and values. Except for the Treasury Guild and the Ops Guild, all other guilds have their own budget systems. In addition to receiving funding from the Bankless DAO treasury (grants committee), they need to generate their own income.

Image: bankless.notion.site, Bankless organizational structure

Each guild will launch a Season Plan every three months that plan the organization’s progress. For a guild to complete a task, guild members will first propose a “project”. The project may cover a wide range of affairs, including seeking partnerships with eternal sources, building a Bankless island in the metaverse, translating a news article, etc. When a project is proposed, community members will vote to either approve it or deprecate it. If it is approved, talented members will be recruited from all the 14 guilds to implement it. Upon successfully completing the project, participants and guilds will receive token rewards based on their contributions.

Bankless DAO Token Allocation

As the name of Bankless DAO implies, the ultimate goal of the organization is to build a new “de-banking” financial system and establish a decentralized consensus in the whole society. Bankless is intended to onboard 1 billion members and has a total supply of 1 billion of $BANK, among which 30% was retroactively allocated to early supporters, 30% to the community treasury since its genesis, and 40% to the treasury linearly over 3 years. The Bankless team did not hold any $BANK tokens at the beginning but obtained 1/4 of the total amount allocated to the treasury as options through a proposal. The company entity Bankless LLC is now established.

Source: bankless.notion.site, BANK token distribution as of May 7th, 2021

The $BANK has no intrinsic value. It is more a representation of members’ participation in Bankless DAO and, to some extent, a measure of members’ contribution to the community. The $BANK token can only be obtained, besides buying it on the open trading market, by participating in the daily operation of Bankless DAO and completing tasks.

How does Bankless DAO work?

Cooper Turley, the co-founder of Friends With Benefits, called the DAO a shared ownership structure and group chats with bank accounts. Actually, a DAO works in a way similar to traditional internet communities like a forum. For example, the operation of Bankless DAO is mainly based on Discord and Notion.

Anyone can join the Discord server of Bankless and browse public information and documents. To actually participate in Bankless’s governance, users need to stake 35,000 $BANK to the network. $BANK can be purchased in the open market or earned by completing tasks. Bankless DAO also provides a 14-day temporary participation opportunity, which can be applied more than once.

Users who are granted temporary qualifications can participate in most of Bankless’s daily operations. But to participate in the governance of Bankless, you should be a Level 1 or above user with a holding of 35,000 $BANK or more. Members who have made special contributions to the community may upgrade to Level 2 through community nomination and voting. And the Level 3 membership requires a holding of at least 15,000 $BANK.

Image: Bankless’s Discord server

Members eligible to participate in community governance can choose to join any guild they like. Specifically, they will need to provide their personal information, including their nickname and skills, to the corresponding Notion database created by that guild. Each guild has practical functions and is responsible for specific affairs. They share the same vision, which is to help society “go bankless”.

All activities of Bankless are driven by a “consensus” reached by polls and discussions. Topics being discussed may become a proposal subject to voting by guild members. In this process, people get ideas and reach a consensus through extensive discussions. For major proposals pertaining to the operation of the entire organization, serious voting will take place within the entire DAO. Guilds will publish the task in the discussion board and reward members who complete the task with $BANK tokens.

Bankless arranges a slew of conferences every day to coordinate various matters. The minutes of the conferences will be written by a person in charge and made available to all other members. In terms of its organizational form, Bankless DAO is like a discussion board with a token incentive mechanism, where a group of enthusiasts sharing the same goal gather together to brainstorm, propose new ideas, and are incentivized to work towards the successful execution of each task.

For more information about Bankless DAO, you may want to visit:

Bankless website: Bankless.community

Bankless Notion: bankless.notion.site

What is suBankless DAO

Bankless DAO has made astonishing achievements since its establishment. However, as the organization grows larger, there are more members participating in governance and decision-making. The implementation of projects got lengthy, just like in many large companies. To overcome this problem, Bankless DAO launched multiple suBankless DAOs, which operate independently of each other, just like subsidiaries of traditional enterprises, but share the common goal of the parent DAO.

Conclusion

Although the organizational structure of Bankless DAO is still rudimentary, it is followed by many DAOs later. The open, transparent, and decentralized operation mode of Bankless DAO has inspired a lot of people.

In October 2022, ConsenSys, an Ethereum infrastructure provider, announced its partnership with Bankless DAO to launch the DAOlationship, aiming to provide Bankless DAO with talents and support ConsenSys employees to explore the broader DAO ecosystem. In the future, every one of us may work for DAO, which potentially changes the way we work and live.