Brief Summary: A decentralized, autonomous organization run directly by $RLY token holders to govern and distribute a periodically refreshed budget for the benefit of the network.
DAO is an acronym for a “decentralized autonomous organization”, a project with no central leadership. Decisions are made by the decentralized community that is organized around a specific set of rules enforced on a blockchain. DAOs are internet-native organizations collectively owned and managed by their members.
Key Leadership: No central leadership from the original Rally core team. $RLY token holders will directly govern and allocate the DAO funds to $RLY ecosystem participants that create value for the $RLY Network. The community should discuss the appropriate structure for optimal team operations and KPIs.
The $RLY Ecosystem DAO is entirely community-run and is set up to be a grants/funding DAO to help businesses build on $RLY. There’s no “staff” from the initial core team, although the DAO is perfectly able to create its own distributed organization if it’d like to overtime to pursue whatever goals it deems fit.
Objectives: Foster an organic, rich community-driven ecosystem of developers, creators, businesses, and service providers for the $RLY Network ecosystem.
The $RLY Ecosystem DAO will be directly run and governed by the $RLY community, therefore, putting more control in the hands of the community, can disburse grants or loans from the DAO treasury and oversee projects for the broader ecosystem. With this new set of decentralized infrastructure in place, the $RLY protocol should become even more attractive for third-party development, creators, or anyone to build a business on the $RLY Network without any singular centralized entity controlling the ecosystem.
In the $RLY Ecosystem DAO, every $RLY holder is a member and has the authority to vote to influence the direction of the $RLY Ecosystem DAO. Like typical DAOs, the $RLY Ecosystem DAO has a funded treasury that is only accessible with the approval of its members. Decisions are made via proposals that the $RLY community votes on during a specified period. The existing Snapshot platform will initially serve as the governance mechanism, and in the near future, although the $RLY community can vote to use a different platform for the future, via Snapshot.
As governance for the DAO project will be new, the primary control mechanism will be starting with a smaller annual budget than anticipated for future years but to turn over full control of this budget and project directly to the $RLY community.
Business Model: Annual grants from the Association, with the first grant totalling 20M $RLY and $2M USDC.
$RLY DAO is community-run with a specific budget to invest in the ecosystem as $RLY token holders see fit. The DAO can make grants, loans, partner with other DAOs and crypto projects, or put the funds into liquidity mining or whatever the community decides. I hope the community takes an exploratory and experimental mindset, versus a conservative one. It will operate as a direct democracy governance model.
@coopahtroopa made a good point that as $RLY DAO is a Grants DAO, which is an awesome first step, it fails to identify how a central Rally DAO captures value over a longer time horizon as creators are successful on the platform. The Ecosystem DAO would push us as a community to think of ways to bring in new assets with a high potential for success. It would be beneficial to find one central DAO address to easily measure the aggregate value of assets held by the DAO.
Further, Syndicate Protocol’s mission is to help other communities build “a legally compliant, decentralized automated organization (DAO) empowering communities to invest in themselves”, which I believe is exactly what we need at Rally. I believe their new product is the right product for us to use for a truly community-governed investment DAO. My hope is over time, this RallyDAO will get larger and larger funding, but I believe 10M is a great amount to start with to see how an on-chain treasury can better serve the community.
The next proposal successfully closed with 100% of the votes in favour and proposed ways to create an on-chain RallyDAO with 10M $RLY initial funding. This proposal is designed to reward the first full-time, outside venture-funded business building on top of Rally Network and accelerate their work. The PR and communication of this grant will be designed to bring other developers into the ecosystem by giving investors further confidence that their capital will be amplified by the community as we grow the early ecosystem.
This proposal vote does not approve a proper RallyDAO but instead will kick off work aligned with other progressive decentralization work the initial development team is working on. The RallyDAO would empower the community further to set these matters with more effective governance tools that have come to market since the Rally launch.
