5 Different Sources of Income for Developer DAO Treasury

In this post, I am going to propose 5 different ways we can get in some cashflow during the initial seasons.

Treasury is one of the most important aspect of a DAO, and when we get some initial liquidity we need cashflow to stabilize it. This will also ensure that contributors are rewarded for their time and expertise which in turn ensures a smooth working onflow of the DAO.

1. Liquidity Providers and Bonds

The token launch will open one of the biggest gateway to the DAO treasury management. We need to build a staking and bonding mechanism which will generate a good enough APR to incentivize people to hold the tokens. In the long run, this will be the primary source of wealth creation for the treasury and the members.

2. Services/ Products

The biggest advantage of Developer DAO is that it’s full of developers and people with different expertise. This opens opportunity to create teams and provide services to external organizations.

We can also build products/tooling for the Web3 infrastructure which will pull in several grants funding from other Blockchain protocols/ DAOs.

3. Events

To bring the community together, there are no better way than organizing events. It can be anything from Hackathons to Developer Conferences and Workshops. This will not only bring external sponsor fundings but also solidify our image as an organization to the external world.

4. Newsletter

Having a quality newsletter with a decent number of paid subscribers for the Web3 industry can provide a constant steady flow of income to the treasury. A newsletter is already being planned by some of our members. Apart from the subscribers, in future we can also partner with blockchain companies who want to publicise their important announcements.

5. Job Board

From my personal experience I have seen that the web3 industry is heavily struggling to find the right talent in their organizations. We can set up a job posting platform and partner up with different organizations and match them with the ideal candidates. A lot of people will benefit from the job and the DAO in turn can charge the companies to provide this service/ post their job ad.

There is no doubt that the Job board won;'t bring in that much revenue as compared to the others, it will be a great public service too.

Looking forward to hear everyone’s opinions and discuss many more sources of income for the DAO!

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Cool. I think another way (in the future) is that the DAO can become a public good and get funding from Gitcoin Grant or Ethereum Grant, or leveraging other DAOs like Nouns DAO that we can buy shared ownership of Nouns NFT and write a proposal to get some funding from their treasury.

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Thanks for writing this, agree that all of those could be good sources of income.
Curious to know more about number 1? Do you know a DAO that has done it successfully?

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Quick rundown of where these things are or might fit as far as I’m aware:

  1. Liquidity Providers and Bonds may or may not be covered in the discord tokenomics channel.
  2. Services/Products is likely blocked by Governance figuring out what, exactly, we are as an entity (as typically contracts involve legal entities agreeing to terms, and an unincorporated entity leaves members directly exposed to liability, at least in the US).
  3. Events have come up and seem to be a very high priority for the DAO… I think this is the purview of the new Marketing & BizDev guild but I may be wrong
  4. Newlsetter is under the writers guild and is being worked on (including the notion of sponsors)
  5. Job board has been driven by @angel so far and has traction in the Dev Guild now. Has its own channel job-board-project under the dev guild and continues to build forward. Others have experience with the business/operations side of a job board so we can likely get this fully formed at some point.
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Onboard with all of them!

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A few thoughts on each bullet @Sandipan:

  1. 100% in agreement. People buy securities because they increase in market value or pay dividends. Demand for the token will be dictated by the effective APR, so the treasury will grow as we… grow the treasury. Unless we think we can make the coin popular with some kind of fancy public relations/virality play, this will be our flywheel but we need an initially strong input from sources 2 - 5.

  2. I’d propose a barbell concept here, where half these services we provide are some kind of commodity (dev man hours) and half are moonshots (effectively building startups). Edit: Important to note that another angle could be skipping this entirely, focusing as a dao on free products/services, and then focusing entirely on 1, 3, 4, and 5.

  3. Maybe the easiest path of building the treasury here will be getting developer dao members to show up somewhere and letting companies advertise to us. We’ll probably get free beer out of it too!

  4. Paid subscribers is an interesting take. Are you thinking members can produce such thought-leading content that we can charge for it? Ad space makes sense to me, and I actually currently work at a paid publication that also sells ad space right now.

  5. Part of how much money this makes is how much value we make with it. There are job boards, and then there are recruiters, one gets a little money and the other gets a healthy % of the starting salary. Might be an opportunity to approach this more like a recruiter, but I haven’t thought it through.

I’m still new to the NFT world so I’m coming from a web2 business perspective here, so you may need to translate what I’m saying a bit.

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Another question: should “investing” be added as a long term source of income, and what should it look like if it was?

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It would be great to have a semi actively managed treasury, targeting low risk yield positions like farming pairs of majors (ETH/WBTC, for example)

Touching on the Job Board, I think this could be a very important and valuable resource for web3 employers, but it will hinge on how we design our Proof of Competence concept. If we can come up with a standardized rating that the web3 industry can rely on, I have no doubt that companies will pay a premium to have access to a pool of talent that is searchable by a standardized POC rating.

I’ve added my thoughts into the current Proof of Competence Draft Proposal

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Thanks for pulling this together! Agreed this DAO has the expertise to provide much needed web3 product design and development services to external organizations. Focusing my initial considerations on the services piece:

A) We’ll need to establish a way to fairly compensate contributors- the DevDAO folks providing the services. Especially if revenue from the engagements are going to the treasury.

B) I’d imagine there’ll be more demand for services than the DAO can confidently support and deliver w high quality. If so, we may want to a way to decide on and prioritize which projects/clients to take on.

Voting on every project might unnecessarily slow down the process; perhaps the solution includes a transparent evaluation framework including alignment with overall DAO goals to

  • Onboard, Educate, & Support Web3 Developers
  • Foster & Build Web3 Tools & Public Goods

C) Along with generating income for the DAO, these service projects are a great way for developers to gain experience (and be compensated!) working on actual products. This includes beginners, who may have completed tutorials, dabbled in a personal project or 2, but have not worked on a product deployed to real end users. As such, we should ensure to allow for a range of engagements to be inclusive for contributors of all skill levels.

This is a great list! It’s important to note that the ERC-20 token is a non-financial governance token. As such there will be limitations around what the DAO itself can do with it.

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  1. part of the treasury can be a incubation fund. longterm income source.
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感谢您的文章Preformatted text

I think #1 is particularly important, because this is what will allow the DAO to not have to suffer the consequences of continually incentivizing DEX liquidity via liquidity mining rewards.

DEX liquidity is crucial for being able to effectively leverage our treasury of native tokens.

We can also launch a series of NFTs with the resale commissions being split between the artists and the treasury. For eg. An onchain educational nft that teaches other artists how to use various already available tools to launch their own onchain NFTs without having to do a lot of coding. It would save them from being dependent on centralised marketplaces.

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Has anyone ever thought about consulting as well? Seems like we would have a lot of people who would be really good at consulting for web3 strategy

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^
This. Important to understand.
(The DAO itself will [most likely] not be an active liquidity provider / miner etc.)

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