All DAO organizations are either forking or on the way to forking

There's no DAO that won't fork; it's just sooner or later.

By Jaleel

Edited by Jack

Establishing a good forking mechanism does not mean encouraging forks, but forking may be an inevitable part of DAOs as they move towards decentralization.

The NounsDAO fork has been discussed many times, but it was actually implemented last month, after the official approval of Proposal 356 for NounsDAO V3. After the Forkv3 proposal was approved, NounsDAO's official website launched a fork page where holders can join the fork and split the DAO treasury. The time window for supporting the fork is one week. According to the rules, after the end of the window period, if 20% of Nouns NFTs support this fork, supporters will be separated from the main body of NounsDAO and directly split the corresponding proportion of ETH from the treasury.

On September 9, 214 Nouns NFTs chose to join the fork, more than 20%. At that time, the NounsDAO fork was bound to happen.

Does the forking mechanism necessarily cause forking? How did the crisis of trust happen? In addition to needing decentralization, do DAOs need to be “humanized”? Should “humanization” reach such a reasonable level? As the Nouns fork progressed, the debate over the DAO fork was brought back to the stage, forcing the entire crypto community to re-examine DAO governance and re-understand the fork. These issues may be an ongoing challenge for all DAO organizations.

DAO's exploration of governance mechanisms

That DAO, which is recognized by many OGs as one of the most elegant in the crypto industry, has forked.

Nouns was born on August 8, 2021, and today, as part of Nouns' main culture, the 24-hour auction is still ongoing. After each auction, 100% of the proceeds go to the treasury, which is managed by Nouns owners.

On September 16, NounsDAO completed the fork on this day called “Fork Day” by the Nouns community. 472 of the 846 Nouns NFTs joined the fork, and more than half of the holders chose to leave Nouns, and they withdrew nearly $27.3 million of ETH from their treasury.

Retreating doesn't just mean “quitting in anger”

The biggest difference between the forked NounsDAO fork0 and the original NounsDAO is that it has a “ragequit mechanism” (ragequit). Like forks, the raging mechanism has been discussed many times on NounsDAO, but it hasn't really been implemented.

“Unlike what many people understand, retreating isn't just used to describe DAO members' angry exit.” During an interview with BlockBeats, Wang Chao (@cwweb3), an OG participant in the DAO field, said this. “The foul back feature was first designed in the Moloch agreement, and members can vote against a project they decide to invest in if they are very unhappy with the project they decide to invest in. After voting against it, if the proposal still passes, members have seven days to choose to exit the DAO in anger, and the proposal will only be implemented after seven days. This waiting period leaves a window for dissatisfied members to execute an angry exit. However, the practice of rage functions in the DAO field is uncommon, and can even be said to be very limited.”

The retreat function allows members to quit by burning their own tokens in exchange for a certain percentage of the treasury share. MolochDAO, derived from the Moloch agreement, can be said to be a pioneer in investing in DAOs. It is a DAO that promoted ETH2.0 through donations, and the first DAO launched based on the MolochV1 version of the agreement. After receiving support from Vitalik and ConsenSys founder JoesphLubin of 1000 ETH each, Moloch became famous. It can be said that most of the investment DAOs currently running around the world are built on Moloch.

Since then, the “retreat mechanism” has been learned and adopted by some DAOs one after another. Under the consensus of the majority of people, it is also taken into account that a small group follows individual wishes. This is the value of the existence of a “retreat mechanism.” For example, a DAO member can exercise the ability to “retreat” if they disagree with the group consensus on the decision.

Since NounsDAO is open, anyone is free to join. As members' wishes continue to evolve, it is inevitable that DAOs will gather many different opinions. As DAOs gather more and more dissatisfied members, an angry exit may have been an option long overdue.

In March of this year, 4156, one of the founders of NounsDAO, wrote about his thoughts on the anger retreat mechanism in a blog post: “Angry Exit” was originally designed to protect minorities in the DAO and keep them from being oppressed by the majority. The basic logic is: if a proposal is supported by a majority but opposed by a few, then those opposing members have the right to withdraw their share of the DAO fund pool and withdraw before the proposal is implemented.

An extreme example is the “51% attack,” where a majority of voters proposed withdrawing the entire pool of funds. More likely, however, are concerns about legal risk or dissatisfaction with the allocation of funds. We are unable to clearly code in the agreement when the rights of minorities should be protected, so their rights are ultimately guaranteed by the “angry exit” mechanism. Properly implementing an “angry exit” can not only protect the DAO's minority, but also prevent an existing minority from becoming a majority through strategic action. Developing a highly compatible “angry exit” mechanism should be considered a priority, as this will ensure future minority protection and make the DAO more focused on its core goals.

Crypto KOL DCFGod participated in the investment and acted as a strategic advisorDeFiThe loan agreement Vesta Finance has also recently been mired in major divisions among the project team. Two of the project's three co-founders — James “Atum” Peterson and Midnight, posted an “angry exit” proposal on the governance forum to exit the project.

Some investors, including early supporters of the project, have called for an “angry exit.” Ogle, the main investor in Vesta, believes, “Currently, an 'angry exit' is the best outcome for investors. It's all very difficult to recover.” Several DAO members are also pressing for an “angry exit,” which is the “best solution” for all parties involved.

On the question of whether the retreat mechanism is important, BlockBeats interviewed Shawn (@ShawnMelUni), the head of the SeedAO incubator. Shawn believes that a DAO should have three basic mechanisms: one is to ensure multiple signatures from the treasury, the other is to have a perfect on-chain voting mechanism, and the next is a retreat mechanism.

In an interview with BlockBeats, Shawn repeatedly emphasized the importance of building a retreat mechanism to DAO organizations: “In a DAO organization, the rage mechanism should be the most basic and lowest level function. Currently, many teams, whether successful or unsuccessful, encounter various problems in the early stages, and it is not uncommon for team members to choose to leave because they disagree. However, if there is a “retreat” mechanism, most problems can be solved relatively smoothly. After all, it can also solve the partnership problems we often encounter in traditional companies. I personally believe that the backlash mechanism is a cornerstone of DAO.”

The Guardian Behind the Midnight DAO

“When NounsDAO forked, I felt like I saw 2016, the moment when Ethereum and Ethereum Classic split.” Compared to the backlash overlooked by many DAOs, forks are one of the most native cultures in the crypto industry.

Rabbithole CEO Brian Flynn (@Flynnjamm) expressed similar sentiments. He supported this fork and chose to join NounsDAO fork0. In his eyes, the original NounsDAO was more like ETC, while the forked one was more like ETH.

The fork allows groups of holders to migrate to a new protocol instance to maintain the original ecological momentum as much as possible. The most famous examples are the Ethereum Classic fork and the Bitcoin Cash fork.

As a well-known NFT collector, xaix2k is also the owner of Noun 1. He successfully won Nouns' first auction for 613.37 ETH on August 8, 2021. Although he did not comment much on Nouns' development in the future, it is clear that he has reservations about Nouns' current split and retreat, believing that this was unfair to the early owners.

The Nouns Protector governance team said they are very supportive of the fork, but previously voted against 356's fork proposal. The reasons focus on two main aspects: the first is a mixed topic, and Proposal 356 bundles two vastly different topics. The Fork proposal involves deep incentives and organizational changes, while the V3 feature focuses on improving the governance participation process. This bundling approach confuses discussions and compromises transparency in governance.

More importantly, the NounsDAO Fork proposal bypasses regular procedures and should not be proposed by just one team. From inception to implementation, the Fork feature was emotion-driven and evaded the expected process. Following the outraged exit of Proposal 248, a utopian voice emerged in the community, imagining an infinitely bifurcated future for NounsDAO. Two emotional currents rushed to launch the notorious DAO Fork feature, which circumvented the regular process.

“A rapidly introduced branching mechanism whose incentives distort the behavior of community participants.” Therefore, the Nouns Protector governance team proposed to reject Proposal 356, push for a V3 upgrade without the Fork function, return the Fork feature to the research stage, launch the DAOFork Research Sprint, solicit research from various parties, and push forward the proposal again.

When new proposals came up, the members of the governance team did extensive research behind them and discussed them every Tuesday at 8 p.m. “Sometimes when I see a good proposal, I'm very thankful that I have votes and can support it. This is worth spending time studying. On the other hand, for proposals that are so bad that they want to shoot down, I'm thankful that an organization like Nouns Protector oversees them.”

Nouns Protectors will not vote in favor; they chose to appear in the face of relatively aggressive proposals, believing that everyone will like and vote for excellent proposals, and that proposals that waste money require identification and supervision. As a result, Nouns Protector only voted against and abstained, presenting the risk to DAO members, pouring a pot of cold water in the heat of brainstorming, like a ruthless guardian of NounsDAO, the defender behind the DAO in the middle of the night.

Rediscovering bifurcation

For many people, whether it's a fork or a retreat, they all seem to be a sign that the DAO is experiencing pain and confusion, a bad omen. Because of this, there are many opinions that the first Nouns fork involved more than 28,000 ETH, which is an astonishing number and a very bad thing.

But Jacob, the co-founder of Zora, has a positive opinion about the Nouns fork, and in general, the fork is a good thing.

Jacob believes that unlike the forks carried out by Ethereum to counter large-scale hacking attacks, Nouns' forks are long and ongoing, and have become an inherent part of the protocol. Nouns' design is an advance because it allows Noun holders to easily choose whether to fork or not, while the entire community can transparently monitor the process.

Not only that, unlike the Ethereum fork, where people can own both ETH and ETC, holders of Nouns have to choose between the original Nouns and the new version. At the same time, this branching method provides a complete exit mechanism. With this design of Nouns, users can choose to exit peacefully and at the same time take back the value behind their Noun, which is roughly 36.6 ETH.

Establishing a good forking mechanism does not mean encouraging forking, nor does it mean that forking is a must. Forking is only an option, and the forking mechanism is just a function.

A healthy fork is a positive evolution

The forking mechanism is probably the most unique feature of DAOs. It allows copying and creating new versions of the system under new ownership. Just like variation in biological evolution, small DNA changes can cause new species to be created, while the old ones remain.

The NounsDAO fork incident appears to be a major event in the extranet crypto community. One big reason is that the community is rethinking and understanding the fork as a result. Although branching is a big challenge, it can lead to reduced mobility, reduced talent concentration, and increased management complexity. But communities have grown larger, wealth has accumulated, and branching may be a natural consequence. This may also be a litmus test for DAOs. A DAO that can solve these problems may be a successful experiment.

If we think of DAO governance as a way to find consensus on a myriad of decisions, not just to allow senior management to reach a small number of decisions, then we can think of it as a way to split large groups into small, efficient sub-groups when coordination is difficult, while also creating value for each other. Seen from this perspective, forking is actually the highest form of decentralization, transforming governance into social networking to help people find small groups of like-minded people to achieve their goals.

The core of this form of governance is to encourage communities to share and express their preferences: good governance is a good user experience. Through healthy divisions, we can encourage the formation of sub-DAOs, which in turn drive the development and growth of the ecosystem. Bifurcation, like cell division and biological reproduction, can generate diversity.

A healthy fork is not only an improvement in technology or governance models, but also a refinement of community culture and values. It allows a large community to be subdivided into smaller, more focused groups to meet their unique needs and goals. This segmentation is not a zero-sum game — one group gains, another loses. Instead, it is positive because every sub-group can innovate and prosper according to its specific needs and goals.

In most cases, forks occur because the community is divided on an issue. Large organizations will inevitably face differences, and if these differences are irreconcilable, they can lead to divergence. Any organization that survives will have a strong following, and as long as the overall consensus is not damaged, the community will not die out.

But from another perspective, forking can be seen as a way for a community to “evolve.” Just as species adapt to their environment through natural selection and variation, communities can also adapt to their unique challenges and opportunities by forking. This adaptability ensures the longevity and resilience of the community, allowing them to thrive in the ever-changing crypto landscape.

The era of memes and CC0 also included many invisible forks. A new take on a story based on core IP and a new use case was a fork. By incentivizing anyone to use their IP for free, more value will go back to the core IP. By abandoning short-term revenue requirements, the value of the brand may be even more valuable.

This is still a form of brand building and marketing communication for memes and the CC0 IP itself. So a fork isn't just a replacement for the original zero-sum game; it could also be a positive sum game that accumulates value back to the original IP and brand.

SubDAO is another form of fork

Many subDAOs already exist within the Nouns ecosystem; they are essentially DAOs funded or organized and working within the Nouns ecosystem. Nouns Builder is a tool specifically built to make this precise behavior as simple as possible. By pre-setting the parameters of the auction, such as the auction cycle, starting price, etc., anyone can launch a DAO with a Nouns structure. The team behind Nouns Builder is Zora. Zora used this tool to establish Nouns BuilderDAO. Nouns BuilderDAO applied for 1000 ETH from NounsDAO's treasury, and then used this start-up capital to incubate more creative NounishDAO and spread the Nouns model.

The typical subDAO is LilNouns. Apart from differences in parameters, LilNouns rules in all other aspects are basically the same as Nouns. The LILNouns auction cycle is 15 minutes, and the starting price is 0.15 ETH. The number of votes in the LilNouns treasury will participate in voting on each Nouns proposal, bringing more members into the Nouns ecosystem by lowering the participation threshold.

SubDAO is more flexible, reducing the limitations and impact of massive scale and complexity to a certain extent, just like another form of fork.

Maker is one of the oldest DAOs. MakerDAO has annual revenue of over $142 million and project expenses of over $44 million. At this scale, MakerDAO has also been battling governance coordination issues for years. To solve the governance problems in the MakerDAO ecosystem, the established DeFi project announced that it would pass the Endgame plan. During this period, many VCs, including a16z, were dissatisfied and sold all of their tokens.

In addition to upgrading the brand, SubDAO is undoubtedly Endgame's biggest feature. After all, one problem that no cryptocurrency project can escape is community governance. Rune, founder of MakerDAO, believes that in order to thoroughly govern the community, it is necessary to “reduce complexity to simplicity” and split the huge and complicated system into various subsystems, and the goal of Endgame's birth was clearly this.

There are four subDAOs under MakerDAO. Among them, Sakura DAO is rapidly rising in the Japanese community, and Spark DAO allows the Korean community to discover that it can build interactions here. Quant is a subDAO focused on real-world assets (RWA), using technology and scale to create value, combining Maker's multi-billion scale with tokenized assets. Quant is a subDAO focused on real-world assets (RWA), using technology and scale to create value, combining Maker's multi-billion scale with tokenized assets. Qual is also a subDAO focused on RWA and finance, but Qual is more aimed at the Chinese crypto community and the Southeast Asian community.

In an interview with BlockBeats, MakerDAO founder Rune expressed her views on SubDAO: “Even when SubDAO was in the hypothetical phase, I clearly saw that SubDAO was the trend of the future. I think any project that wants to succeed in this field and have the opportunity to expand will adopt some version of the SubDAO model. Without compartmentalized management from the beginning, as a DAO, it could only expand to a certain extent, or become a single company, thereby abandoning the entire decentralization and governance. Now that we've evolved further, we've shaped the DAO based on signals from the market and community.”

Behind Governance Wars and Arbitrage: How a Trust Crisis Occurs

Many people in the community believe that the main reason why NounsDAO split was the decline in trust among community members. Noun 40 (@noun40__) also expressed his opinion on this issue: Definitely, the reason the fork mechanism was added wasn't to pay back arbitrators or invite people we disagree with to leave. The reason for adding the branching mechanism was to allow the remaining factions to coordinate with more trust. I'm not saying that the forking mechanism necessarily causes forks. My hope and expectation is that the existence of a forking mechanism will allow both parties to obtain more sincere cooperation from each other.

And similar trust issues don't just happen on NounsDAO.

BuidlerDAO, Paraspace: Who controls the treasury?

At the beginning of this year, BuidlerDAO was embroiled in a dispute over the management of its treasury funds and the founding team. Chen Jian, a former BuidlerDAO team member, claimed in his circle of friends that “the founder did something that went against the bottom line.” In the period that followed, this statement attracted widespread attention from the community, and there were even rumors that the founder used the treasury to trade coins, causing BuidlerDAO to fall into a crisis of credibility for a while.

A few months later, BuidlerDAO founder Kui Xiaobu Niels made a public statement about the incident, arguing that the storm was due to a conflict between him and Chen Jian, another core member of the team. According to Kui Xiaobu Niels's clarification, he admitted that he had adjusted 150,000 U assets in the treasury to ETH and BTC in December 2022, but the operation was based on advice and suggestions from investors, and there was no sign that funds were flowing to personal wallets or exchanges. The on-chain data is as follows: https://etherscan.io/address/0x72Dcfc6F1Aa963d01b1D48C53a1b0630EF87db28.

The BuidlerDAO incident was not just a conflict between the two founding team members; it also reflected core topics such as transparency and automated governance in DAO governance. Although Kui Xiaobu Niels has provided a reasonable explanation for his behavior, since multiple treasury signers and rules have not been established before, and BuidlerDAO's treasury multi-signature wallet is controlled only by Kui Xiaobu Niels alone, this also left him behind, weakening BuidlerDAO's transparency and credibility to a certain extent, and BuidlerDAO also learned a valuable lesson from it.

Not only BuidlerDAO, but Paraspace, a team that received over 10 million dollars of investment from top VCs such as Sequoia, Coinbase, and Founders Fund, also performed a wonderful “power dispute” due to capital related issues. On the afternoon of May 10, several well-known KOLs issued articles warning of problems with the NFT lending protocol Paraspace and advising users to withdraw their capital as soon as possible. The news quickly spread across Twitter and the community, causing intense panic. Not only did Yubo, founder of Paraspace, face allegations of misappropriation of funds, but governance differences within Paraspace have erupted like a volcano.

The cause of the incident was that Paraspace had been hacked and funds were damaged. When the damaged funds intercepted by the security company BlockSec were returned to Paraspace, the funds were not fully returned in a timely manner.

In response to allegations of misappropriation of funds, Yubo stated on Twitter Space that this was because the protocol debt gap was a stablecoin, but BlockSec returned the funds in ETH, so it decided to gradually sell and fill the agreement debt gap in line with market changes. However, the address beginning with 0x909 is actually Paraspace's day-to-day operating wallet, and it is indeed controlled by the Paraspace itself for efficiency reasons. The reason for the “misappropriation of public funds” controversy arises precisely because Blocksec directed the stolen funds to a user address that cannot be controlled by a protocol smart contract. However, the Paraspace team as a whole should immediately decide what address to use to receive the funds after the stolen funds have been recovered, and what return process to follow after receiving the funds. However, the main point of contention in this “war of riots” is the specific return process of funds, which has led to a crisis of trust.

Arbitrage has existed for a longer time than DAOs

Arbitrage in the market has been around longer than the DAO organization itself.

Back to NounsDAO, the problem of waste of Nouns treasury funds has always made the dissatisfaction of community members more and more obvious. There is an endless stream of arbitrators, a high rate of approval of junk proposals, poor delivery of approved proposals, participants voted with their feet, and many holders were quite petty. Seneca, one of the founders of NounsDAO, admits that in the early days of NounsDAO's development, the attitude towards finance was indeed laid-back, which not only wasted the opportunity to try many experiments, but also harmed Nouns' network value. But now NounsDAO should improve this aspect.

Kol Hype (@hype_eth) also revealed on social media how Nounsbrand stole nearly 400e (about $640,000) from the treasury: first raised 355e from the treasury to build the brand nounsbrand, then raised 33e from the treasury to make a pirated LV suitcase with a shaking head, yet they never delivered anything. They've also now removed all nouns-related content from their images, websites, and social networking sites.

0xBobaTeas is the proponent of “Nounify New York Fashion Week” (Proposition No. 129), and he also revealed the matter in more detail in an article: After meeting the Advsiry team, Advsiry promised to provide the guests with an Advice X Nouns attendance badge and Nouns gifts, put the Nouns brand on the venue, host a Nounish afterparty, and display on the platform by Keith The Nouns object, designed by Herron, filmed a documentary for Nouns, and the price for all of these events was 33ETH.

After using the 0xBobateAS relationship to gain support, Proposal 129 passed the proposal by 59 votes to 1. Disappointing, however, was that Nouns had almost no presence during the New York Fashion Week event. The proposal was hardly implemented, and the 33ETH was not refunded, and that's how trust among Nouns community members was eroded. Since Nouns was born, community members have been thinking about how to use treasury funds to buy influence and become priority decision makers in public sector culture. The proposal was passed loosely, and for many holders, it seemed like a design flaw.

And during the entire Nouns fork process, it was also a large-scale arbitrage event.

Fork participants can choose to continue using the new NFTs in the new DAO fork, or use the “angry exit” mechanism to withdraw their ETH contributions in proportion. Considering that participation in the fork may bring a book value of about 35 ETH, and current market dynamics show that Noun's selling price has always been lower than its “book value,” and the auction price is mainly between 20-30ETH, and arbitrators clearly see room for the price difference in the middle.

In recent months, arbitrators have been actively buying Nouns during the downturn in the market, hoping to exchange higher returns for their ETH after the fork. These voters recently bought terms for less than book value and objected to most of the proposals, only positive about v3 audits, core development funds, and voting refunds — all of which directly or indirectly supported them to arbitrage or save costs.

Regarding this type of arbitrage, Shawn, head of the SeedAO incubator, told BlockBeats: “The phenomenon of arbitrage is actually to be expected. It provides a challenge and opportunity for DAO organizations, and is even a litmus test for DAO organizations. This is like a witch attack. We can't avoid witch attacks, but similar attacks can actually improve the shape of this organization. It is important that organizations recognize these phenomena and adapt and improve accordingly. Without such challenges, the organization might be complacent and stop improving.”

BlockBeats learned from the Nouns Protector governance team that pure arbitrage operations are only a small part of Fork's reason. Since May of this year until Fork launched, it can be seen that the number of Nouners has basically stopped growing, and the Nouns auction is still ongoing. Participating in auctions during this time to “hoard” Nouns, and going to the secondary market to get more Nouns before and after Fork was launched are normal market behavior. Among them are participants who actually have Long Nouns also contributed to Nouns. Promoting eventual large-scale participation in Fork should not be blamed on individuals, but on overall spontaneity.

Not only do they need to be decentralized, DAOs also need to be “governed by people”

In an interview with BlockBeats, Wang Chao, an OG participant in the DAO field, expressed his opinion: “If according to the standards and ideas of DAO stipulated in the previous Ethereum white paper, the world probably doesn't have a real DAO, because it still requires human participation and governance in actual operation.”

The DAO's philosophy is to automate certain governance processes so that they continue to run without human intervention. In Ethereum's white paper, a real DAO should be a decentralized autonomous organization that doesn't rely on human coordination at all. Even Bitcoin has only implemented this concept to a certain extent. It is closer to the definition of DAO, but it doesn't fully meet the definition of DAO. Strictly speaking, although many organizations call themselves DAOs, they have yet to achieve true autonomy and autonomy. DAOs not only need to be decentralized, they also need to be “humanized.”

Decrease human rule and move towards autonomy

In some DeFi DAOs or community DAOs, excessive “human governance” has led to unreasonable decisions or actions due to flaws in the design of governance mechanisms or other constraints. On March 28, the Arbitrum community launched an Arbitrum Improvement Proposal 1 (AIP-1) proposal vote on Snapshot. The proposal is to introduce ArbitrumDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization structure managed by ARB holders, and the Arbitrum Foundation will also serve and be managed by the ArbitrumDAO community.

However, voting is not over yet, and the AIP-1 proposal has yet to pass. However, as revealed in Patrick McCorry's blog post, the Arbitrum Foundation has created a multi-signature wallet with the address “Arbitrum DAO Treasury2” in advance, received nearly 700 million ARB tokens, and sold ARB tokens in advance in exchange for stablecoins. The community and some partners were extremely disappointed with the Arbitrum team and the so-called governance, believing that AIP-1 was not a real vote; it was throwing DAO principles straight out of the window. The content of the proposal has been implemented without the community's approval. What's the point of such a vote?

Although the DAO concept aims to completely control the organization by code, in reality, many DAOs still have too many human participation and decisions, and this excessive human participation is the essential cause of the DAO trust crisis.

In an interview, Wang Chao, an OG participant in the DAO field, told BlockBeats that, to some extent, he also shares this view, “If DAOs still require a lot of artificial governance, then it may actually have strayed from the definition of a real DAO. “When an organization relies too much on human decisions, it's closer to a simple decentralized organization than a fully autonomous DAO,” he said.

As smart contracts and infrastructure evolve, DAOs are gradually increasing their degree of decentralization. For example, NounsDAO has implemented fund management through multi-signature wallets, and smart contracts are used to automatically trigger funding after the proposal is approved.

However, complete on-chain governance remains a challenge for many projects. Although the underlying technology continues to improve, many complex decisions and business logic are still difficult to automate. This means that human participation is still necessary in many situations, such as the execution risks faced by DAOs in the real world, whether it is allotment funding, reviewing the degree of completion of tasks, and most importantly implementation proposals, that require human participation.

DAOs not only need to be decentralized, but to what extent do they need to be “humanized”? This is probably an ongoing challenge for all DAO organizations.

After the fork, where do we go?

Which is more orthodox, the new DAO or the original DAO?

On this issue, the Nouns Protector governance team told BlockBeats that the current debate over orthodoxy is unimportant and that the issue is too early. Much of the current discussion about orthodoxy is simply because people are pursuing actual interests; if we discuss Ethereum's legitimacy debate in 2016, it would be ridiculous. In the short term, the party with the most capital often has more say. But in the long run, what really matters is which organization can nurture meaningful and valuable innovation.

Of course, many people are worried about the possibility that Nouns will fork indefinitely. On this issue, BlockBeats learned from Wang Chao that from a tool perspective, Nouns seems easy to fork. But in reality, I don't think forks happen often; after all, successfully maintaining an active and socially agreed organization is extremely challenging. “Although the recent split has sparked lengthy debates and revealed some discontent, I feel like this is just a fleeting state of affairs. I'm not really sure what's going on right now, but this fork is probably a wake-up call, and I still believe Nouns can continue to grow healthily.” Wang Chao said.

After the fork, where will the holders go? When it comes to choosing between the new DAO and the original DAO, BlockBeats found that most of the community's choices were loyal to their own trust. “Where are our trusted friends, team, and community members, our choices are.”

Let's also take a look at MolochDAO, a precedent after many forks. Since its launch in March 2019, MolochDAO has been forked into a DAO with different goals, such as MetaCartel Ventures and Marketing DAO. Although MolochDAO hasn't launched many well-known projects other than Tornado.cash, the DAOs that have been forked based on MolochDAO today can be described as diverse.

NounsDAO's fork plan has also attracted a lot of attention in the governance of other DAO organizations, and has become a reference blueprint for other DAOs. For example, members of FloorDAO also put forward a proposal in the community to implement an angry exit mechanism for token holders by forking the DAO “FloorkDAO”.

Are full autonomy and decentralization just an illusion of utopia? In this new cryptographic world defined by “code is law,” will human subjective will still play an important role? The NounsDAO fork incident has also caused many governance practitioners and the crypto community to re-examine the significance and future of DAOs.

Perhaps it is difficult for DAOs to completely escape human influence right now, and the path to autonomy is tortuous and tortuous. But as AI tools and infrastructure for the confidential industry advance, for those idealists, the future of DAOs must be more than just a big experiment.

Special thanks to the Nouns Protector governance team, Wang Chao, an OG participant in the DAO field, and Shawn, head of the SeedAO incubator.

Reference content:

1. “S1E10 | VENTUREDAO Prequel: Arrogant Proposals from Unknown Generations Become the Cornerstone of the Industry｜DAO Special”

2. “Keeping Up with the Nouns”

3. “Rejected Nouns Fork: A Last-Resort Minority Protection Mechanism”

4. Thinking About Rage Quit

5. Fork is a good thing: it's a new feature, not a bug

6. “Sharing Across Communities - When Elegant NounsDAO Meets Governance Attacks”