Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are rising as an on-chain social coordination mechanism. However low governance participation and uninformed voting have hindered their effectiveness.
Mainstream is fixing these governance challenges with a token-gated discussion board for DAOs. The Mainstream platform combines token-gated entry and customized incentivization methods to encourage considerate dialogue, group engagement, knowledgeable voting, and extra governance participation.
Samsung Subsequent participated in a pre-seed SAFE spherical that additionally included angel traders Linda Xie, managing director of Scaler Capital, and Jason Kim, CEO of Huge Whale Labs, and others.
Merely, we invested in Mainstream due to the founders. The founders have an unimaginable trajectory regardless of being early of their careers and schooling. They’ve been core members of the DAO ecosystem and have private expertise with decentralized finance (DeFi). Byeongjun (BJ) Moon, CEO, is a current highschool graduate, pursuing a level at USC this fall. He has labored with Harvard Innovation Labs, and based PadawanDAO, a undertaking elevating funds to ship college students to blockchain conferences. Jae Wu Chun, CTO, helped launch certainly one of Western Canada’s largest hackathons, developed a high-school examination prep website for worldwide college students, and operated a boutique internet improvement company.
The pair have developed crypto-native governance aggregators that can allow DAOs to create primary and customized incentive methods and governance integrations. We clearly noticed Mainstream’s founder-market-fit. The corporate’s founders are well-connected to the DAO ecosystem, which bodes nicely for its capability to develop. As Mainstream beneficial properties traction, it guarantees to assist drive the event of latest governance incentive mechanisms, and to in the end assist improve DAO participation charges.
To ensure that DAOs to realize really decentralized governance, they’ll want to extend participation from their varied stakeholders. The platform is utilizing tokens to fine-tune management of boards and discussions. Participation in on- and off-chain governance is supported by auto-advancing stakes. DAOs can also customise entry by utilizing Mainstream’s Actions Builder to create and set off on-chain executable actions.
The Mainstream platform will facilitate DAO discussions and voting on a single, built-in platform. As an alternative of leaping, for instance, between Snapshot and Discourse, token holders will have the ability to talk about proposals with different customers, and vote, on the identical platform. Customers additionally will earn rewards for participation by way of Mainstream. Furthermore, DAOs can have the flexibility to supply native tokens and different awards to contributors. Mainstream additionally will allow DAOs to securely allow customers to delegate voting energy to anybody they select.
When the brand new platform rolls out later this yr, it will likely be free to make use of. As soon as it’s up and operating, Mainstream plans to introduce a tiered enterprise mannequin that caters to large-scale DAO clients. Assist for cross-chain governance contracts is deliberate for this yr. By early subsequent yr, the corporate plans to rollout an API, and the flexibility to combine treasury and different governance mechanisms on its platform.
Whereas DAOs are nonetheless within the early phases, they’ve the potential to change into a basic element of web3-native organizational constructions. That places Mainstream ready to change into the house for DAOs and token-based communities.
Sam Campbell is an Investor at Samsung Subsequent. Samsung Subsequent’s funding technique is proscribed to its personal views and doesn’t replicate the imaginative and prescient or technique of some other Samsung enterprise unit, together with, however not restricted to, Samsung Electronics.