Minimal DAOs

Anybody studying DAOs today will be astonished at their complexity.

Collecting money from people for a DAO makes the DAO a fiduciary. Fiduciaries are regulated. Hence the amount of legal incorporated in DAOs and some explanation as to DAO complexity.

If the scope of your purpose is limited and the amounts required are similarly small, an Aaragon or Moluch DAO is overkill.

Why not organize for some purpose and manage aka ‘vote’ on expenses all with NO treasury?

I call this a MinDAO and it is easily managed in the Bulla protocol.

We create a MinDAO Bulla to manage a group of wallet addresses. The act of creating or joining such a group implies that you agree to shoulder your share of the groups expenses.

Below are a few MinDAOs that you might join.

Let’s say we have joined the Farmers CO-OP Project 1

Here members may perform a task for the MinDAO and subsequently invoice the group. A member can detail out her expense to all members equally — or to a select number of members.

Members may pay their share to a billing member of the MinDAO or the MinDAO can eventually ‘true up’ and close.

The MinDAO may also manage bills from outside wallets. A fertilizer provider will want to invoice the farmers coop, but will most likely not want to be a member of this minDAO. A member(s) of the group must agree that any outside invoice is a legitimate expense to the group, pay it and detail proportional payments to other members.

A MinDAO can manage small projects without a treasury — and so avoid many of the fiduciary rules and regulations. Upon MinDAO creation there can be an attached hashed expense/arbitration sharing agreement or similar.

A member may reject or pay an expense. Payment would occur wallet to wallet and the expense entry in the MinDAO would be updated.

A member may pay another member’s expenses. A rejected expense could trigger arbitration mentioned above.

The intent is to allow willing and trusting parties to cooperate on-chain for some simple purpose.

In an odd way, MinDAOs function as an inverted multi-signature wallet. Instead of collecting an escrow and waiting for member wallet requests and approvals for payment from that escrow address, it is assumed in a MinDAO that all attached wallets have agreed to shoulder expenses made to the MinDAO. A payment from escrow could be denied by a wallet vote in a multi-signature wallet. In a MinDAO a partial payment could be denied by a wallet address. Both modes of collaboration introduce different ‘gaming’ problems.

Look for the Bulla MinDAO feature for people to create simple MinDAOs by early 2022.