bDAO Deal Sheet

Project Name	Bankless DAO (bDAO)
Project Summary	bDAO is a decentralized community dedicated to propagating awareness of web3 through media, culture, and education. Since its launch 10 months ago, bDAO has grown to 15,000 Discord members and 4,200 token holders, becoming one of the most active social token DAOs in the space. bDAO supports 13 guilds (organized around domain expertise such as developers, writers, treasury managers, etc.) and has launched newsletters, podcasts, educational webinars, international media nodes (in 15 countries), a consultancy, an apparel collaboration with MetaFactory, two DeFi index products with IndexCoop, and even spun out its own NFT community called DAOpunks.
Key Team Members	Bankless HQ (https://twitter.com/TrustlessState; https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams) Grants Committee members (https://twitter.com/0x_Lucas; https://twitter.com/davidcoleto; https://twitter.com/abv_avg_joe; https://twitter.com/eaglelex_eth?lang=en) Ex-Core contributor (https://twitter.com/frogmonkee)
Social Links	https://twitter.com/banklessDAO https://discord.gg/bankless https://www.notion.so/bankless/Bankless-DAO-82ba81e7da1c42adb7c4ab67a4f22e8f
Investment Thesis	1. bDAO is one of the most active, recognizable DAOs built on a social token and is a first-mover in the space. 2. bDAO has seen impressive growth and pace of execution despite its short history. The DAO funded or incubated 21 projects / guilds in Season 1 and 33 in Season 2. 3. DeFi is a high-growth category that will continue to see widespread user adoption and displacement of TradFi. TVL grew from $19B to $244B in 2021. 4. DAOs will continue to surge in popularity as an alternative means to coordinate talent. DAO members reached 1.3M in 2021, a 130x YoY increase and DAO tooling continues to improve in sophistication. 5. $BANK trading at an attractive valuation relative to the opportunity. $BANK has a market cap of <$10M - for reference, FWB raised $10M at a $100M valuation last November.
Key Risks / Concerns	1. Failure to engage and grow community will stall bDAO’s momentum - Mitigant: These challenges are not unique to bDAO and if anything bDAO has been a thought leader in the space of DAO organizational design. 2. Leadership turnover & governance - Mitigant: All early stage orgs suffer from “key person risk,” and bDAO is addressing this through a Governance Solutions Engineers program, which will fund dedicated & qualified individuals to spec out governance solutions and strategic priorities. 3. Exogenous macro and regulatory risk - Mitigant: Membership growth and DAO activity will be the key indicators of bDAO’s long-term success, not short-term market volatility. There are also temporary legal structures that DAOs can pursue (such as registering as an unincorporated nonprofit association) to address regulatory concerns.
Tech / Product Vision	bDAO’s roadmap is centered primarily around the growth of its guilds and projects. A more comprehensive view can be found below.
Market / Competition	Social tokens are backed by the reputation of the community they represent and derive value outside of financial speculation. Social tokens are often used as a means for admitting members into gated communities via a token ownership threshold, voting on governance proposals, compensating members for their contributions, and accessing other community perks. Therefore users are incentivized to retain their social token holdings for non-financial reasons as dumping them otherwise would preclude the user from accessing all the aforementioned benefits. While bDAO does not have a direct competitor today, it is worth noting DAOs that have overlap in the scope of their activities. bDAO’s focus was initially on furthering Bankless HQ’s DeFi-centric mission, although its guilds and projects have expanded into many areas outside of DeFi. From the point of view of sheer output, bDAO has been the most productive of its peers in terms of quantity and range. Not included are other crypto-native media companies that compete for mindshare against Bankless HQ, as bDAO’s activites are quite distinct from Bankless HQ. Social token comps would include: - FWB: known for their IRL events and parties, FWB members have also started a number of projects including an NFT auction platform and gallery, curated city guides, a member directory + dashboard, a newsletter, and proprietary governance proposal platform (called Upvote). - Global Coin Research (GCR): centered around access to exclusive content, learning resources, community hangouts, and Web3 investment opportunities through its $GCR token. - Decrypt: announced the were building out a DAO in Sept 2021 but unclear how much progress they have made since then
Tokenomics / Launch Strategy	In terms of supply, bDAO minted 1B total $BANK tokens with the Genesis Proposal. 30% of these tokens were airdropped to Bankless HQ premium subscribers who had obtained a Bankless 2020 or 2021 badge on Ethereum. These holders then passed a proposal that would give a one-time grant to Bankless LLC for their help in getting the DAO started and building community early on - this grant constituted 25% of total supply to be vested over 3 years. This left the treasury with 5% of tokens with the remaining 40% also allocated to treasury but vested linearly over 3 years. In 2024, there is an optional mechanism to trigger 2% inflation in each subsequent year. No private sales have occurred to-date to fund the treasury. Given $BANK’s function as a social token, there are incentives in place for community members to hold the token longer term vs selling for short-term financial gain. Users have to maintain a certain threshold of tokens to remain members of the community, and a status visible to all on the Discord is assigned to those with larger holdings. The membership levels are as follows: - Level 1 = 35,000 BANK - Level 2 = 35,000 BANK and be voted in as an “Active Contributor” by peers - Level 3 = Whale 150,000 BANK - Level 4 = Liquidity Provider 250 Uniswap V2 BANK/ETH LP tokens or 1500 BPT Guests passes are given to those who are completely new to the Discord - however, these expire after 2 weeks unless renewed by a Level 2 member. Prospective members are incentivized to earn their membership either by completing bounties posted on the Bounty Board, receiving allocations through Coordinape rounds, earning a “salary” as a role holder (paid seasonally), or buying $BANK tokens directly. While volatility associated with the crypto market at-large remains, the social / membership benefits associated with $BANK should mitigate speculation as the primary reason for owning the token.
Deal Dynamics	$10M private sale of treasury at $0.4 per token
Next Steps	- Speak with as many members of grants committee as possible. Topics to understand include community engagement, status of current initiatives, and future growth opportunities - Speak with leadership at treasury to understand treasury mgmt and revenue streams - Speak with heads of major projects/guilds
Decision Date	March 31, 2022

OVERVIEW OF GUILDS AND PROJECTS

Writers Guild

The Writer’s Guild is responsible for cultivating promising writers in bDAO and publishing three newsletters including Weekly Rollup (what happened the past week in bDAO), Decentralized Arts (weekly NFT and crypto-art content), and State of the DAOs (bi-weekly focusing on the DAO ecosystem and organization tools). Total newsletter subscribers are nearing 10K and continuing to grow.

Treasury Guild

The Treasury Guild is responsible for preserving, enhancing, and supporting the DAO’s financial resources. They provide general financial reporting, planning, and budgeting, and also work on treasury diversification initiatives and liquidity partnerships.

Translators Guild

The Translators Guild ensures that bDAO content is properly translated to reach the broadest possible audience. In past seasons, the guild has worked on a number of projects, the biggest of which was spun out independently as International Media Nodes, which are standalone non-English media channels. Today, there are 17 IMN channels in operation.

Research Guild

The Research Guild is responsible for conducting, guiding, and funding research that aligns with the goals of bDAO. Specifically the guild creates research bounties and requests for remuneration, funds specific-scope projects through a grants program, and writes / publishes research articles in its own newsletter.

Operations Guild

The Operations Guild watches over the daily activities of bDAO to ensure members are aligned with the general mission. Guild members facilitate core operations such as:

Coordinape Rounds - monthly and season-end rounds for member remuneration

Community Calls

DAO operational expenses

Notion/Discourse administration

Discord administration

Seasonal planning and transition management

DAO cartography and organization mapping

Marketing Guild

The Marketing Guild delivers a full suite of Web3-specific marketing solutions to both internal bDAO constituents and external clients. The guild leverages bDAO’s media assets as part of their marketing campaigns and has a Kanban board database that tracks all ongoing initiatives. The guild also helped create a media kit / sponsorship guide to easily onboard outside partners who may want to sponsor with bDAO. The process map to the right illustrates the workflow for how the guild vets and runs marketing campaigns.

Legal Guild

The Legal Guild’s purpose is to support the bDAO community with up-to-date summaries of legal developments in crypto and DAO governance. As part of this, they publish a newsletter called Decentralized Law. The guild also helps serve as liaison for communications with outside third parties to minimize legal compliance issues in the off-chain world.

Education Guild

The Education Guild provides tools and resources that empower members to share and obtain knowledge around Web3, DeFi, NFTs, and metaverse topics. They’ve done this through a number of projects including the following:

Bankless Academy - a “Duolingo” for crypto. The program guides users through a skill tree, content in various media formats, interactive quests, and quizzes, all the while rewarding the user with POAPs and other goodies.

First Quest - a series of Discord channels that a user navigates through when they first join the bDAO Discord. First Quest is meant to properly onboard members by helping them navigate bDAO resources and showing them how to get involved.

Mentorship Program - provides a means for high quality mentors to pair up with new members and also offer their expertise via outside consulting work.

Developers Guild

The Developers Guild seeks to onboard and organize technical talent specific to Web3. Guild members support technical initiatives across bDAO and also manage in-house departments for Solidity training modules and DAO-wide developer systems infrastructure.

Design Guild

The Design Guild brings together web-native designers as a resource for bDAO projects that require a visual component. The guild has compiled a comprehensive style guide and has been the driver behind bDAO’s branding across its various media assets.

DAOlationships Guild

The DAOlationships Guild facilitates and coordinates relationships between bDAO and external organizations. This guild plays a crucial role in helping bDAO establish partnerships with other DAOs and organizations, with the goal of turning bDAO into a “super connector DAO” that supports the overall Web3 ecosystem. Examples of collaborations include those with Metafactory, Balancer, citaDAO (upcoming), and Copper (Alchemist).

AudioVisual Guild

The AV Guild creates and curates media assets that directly support the broader mission of bDAO. Such assets include Podcast Hatchery, a podcast development program for content creators within bDAO, and Crypto Sapiens, a weekly podcast featuring discussions with innovative Web3 builders.

Analytics Guild

The Analytics Guild builds data products and uses data analytics to create insights for bDAO and other DAOs. Their goal is to build a high-performing analytics engine and sensing platform that will deliver insights about internal DAO performance metrics as well as external on-chain metrics. DAO Dash is the Analytics Guild’s internal data dashboard, complete with standardized data pipelines and a collaborative query / analysis environment.

DeFi Products

Through a collaboration with Index Coop, bDAO has launched 2 DeFi index products to-date. The first is $BED (Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi), which is made up of ⅓ wBTC, ⅓ wETH, and ⅓ DPI. DPI is itself an index of the top ERC-20 DeFi tokens. $BED was co-marketed by bDAO and Index Coop and provides users a passive, cost-efficient way to have balanced exposure to crypto’s top assets. $GMI was launched more recently and seeks to give exposure to “DeFi 2.0” projects, which are not captured in the DPI index. These projects tend to have more aggressive designs, leverage new primitives like protocol-owned liquidity, and be a bit higher up the risk curve - their weightings in the $GMI index can be seen below:

Bankless Consulting

Bankless Consulting was formed to create external revenue streams for bDAO members through the delivery of professional services and Web3 tooling to external parties. This subDAO will coordinate the talent of bDAO to focus primarily on DAO-to-DAO, DAO-to-Business, and product incubation. Bankless Consulting is incorporated as a Delaware LLC to ensure regulatory compliance.

Bounty Board

The Bounty Board provides an easy-to-use interface for members to claim bounties (ie. units of work) and be compensated for it. Creators post a bounty with an associated reward and contributors can sort through bounties by reward amount before laying claim. The Bounty Board is what facilitates intra-DAO coordination of talent and is typically one of the first ways that a member starts earning $BANK.

DAOpunks

DAOpunks may be one of the more intriguing projects to come out of bDAO. DAOpunks was conceived in an attempt to build a community around its NFT collection through claimable merch, DAO-to-DAO collaboration, and other perks. Since the public mint, DAOpunks has spun out of bDAO and amassed a public treasury through that sale to fund community-approved projects that support growing the DAO ecosystem. DAOpunks can be purchased on OpenSea and currently have a floor price of ~0.23 ETH.

DEGEN

DEGEN is bDAO’s Discord bot that automates a number of otherwise tedious user tasks. The goal is to provide executive functionality from within the bDAO Discord, increase productivity by minimizing the amount of time it takes to search out documents, and run processes external to the server. Examples include:

Fetching links and information from Notion, Discourse, and GitHub

Providing onboarding services to new members

Providing voernance functionality from within Discord including managing multisig transactions and Snapshot inquiries

Fight Club

Fight Club is a venture DAO initiative that will focus on investing in early-stage Web3 projects. Modeled after Metacartel Ventures, Fight Club plans to raise capital through an investment vehicle and spin out as a separate entity in the coming months. Fight Club also has an education program that seeks to teach members about venture capital and equip them with the skills to eventually assist with diligence and portfolio work within the fund.

REVENUE MODEL

Existing Revenue Streams

Treasury asset appreciation: bDAO generates income when the value of its Treasury assets appreciates. This is booked as a realized / unrealized gain on its accounting statements. The downside here is that the Treasury is beholden to market corrections.

DeFi product fees: bDAO’s DeFi products collect a streaming fee from traders. Today that fee is 0.35% and is split evenly between bDAO and Index Coop.

Merchandise sales: bDAO’s recent merchandise collaboration with MetaFactory has been a source of revenue, with many items selling out in short order on the site.

NFT sales: bDAO was a beneficiary of DAOpunks’ public sale, which was the biggest source of revenue for the DAO in Q3 (aside from token appreciation).

Future Revenue Streams

Additional education content: The Education Guild has found a nice cadence to its content production and could at some point in the future start charging for access to premium courses.

Sponsorships / ad revenue: As bDAO’s media assets continue to grow in viewership and engagement, there will be increasingly more lucrative opportunities for outside sponsorships. bDAO has already created an elegant media kit, so the marketing collateral exists to support a more aggressive sponsorship campaign.

Rev share with subDAOs: As guilds and projects begin generating revenue streams of their own, there will likely be a revenue-sharing agreement for a portion of those proceeds to flow back to bDAO’s Treasury. This would certainly be the case for Bankless Consulting and Fight Club for instance.

IRL events: There is a real opportunity to better capitalize on events in real-life, whether through social functions, hackathons, or conferences. Permissionless (co-organized by Blockworks + Bankless HQ) and Mainnet (hosted by Messari) are both examples of what a larger-scale bDAO event could look like.

bDAO Deal Sheet

Project Name	Bankless DAO (bDAO)
Project Summary	bDAO is a decentralized community dedicated to propagating awareness of web3 through media, culture, and education. Since its launch 10 months ago, bDAO has grown to 15,000 Discord members and 4,200 token holders, becoming one of the most active social token DAOs in the space. bDAO supports 13 guilds (organized around domain expertise such as developers, writers, treasury managers, etc.) and has launched newsletters, podcasts, educational webinars, international media nodes (in 15 countries), a consultancy, an apparel collaboration with MetaFactory, two DeFi index products with IndexCoop, and even spun out its own NFT community called DAOpunks.
Key Team Members	Bankless HQ (https://twitter.com/TrustlessState; https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams) Grants Committee members (https://twitter.com/0x_Lucas; https://twitter.com/davidcoleto; https://twitter.com/abv_avg_joe; https://twitter.com/eaglelex_eth?lang=en) Ex-Core contributor (https://twitter.com/frogmonkee)
Social Links	https://twitter.com/banklessDAO https://discord.gg/bankless https://www.notion.so/bankless/Bankless-DAO-82ba81e7da1c42adb7c4ab67a4f22e8f
Investment Thesis	1. bDAO is one of the most active, recognizable DAOs built on a social token and is a first-mover in the space. 2. bDAO has seen impressive growth and pace of execution despite its short history. The DAO funded or incubated 21 projects / guilds in Season 1 and 33 in Season 2. 3. DeFi is a high-growth category that will continue to see widespread user adoption and displacement of TradFi. TVL grew from $19B to $244B in 2021. 4. DAOs will continue to surge in popularity as an alternative means to coordinate talent. DAO members reached 1.3M in 2021, a 130x YoY increase and DAO tooling continues to improve in sophistication. 5. $BANK trading at an attractive valuation relative to the opportunity. $BANK has a market cap of <$10M - for reference, FWB raised $10M at a $100M valuation last November.
Key Risks / Concerns	1. Failure to engage and grow community will stall bDAO’s momentum - Mitigant: These challenges are not unique to bDAO and if anything bDAO has been a thought leader in the space of DAO organizational design. 2. Leadership turnover & governance - Mitigant: All early stage orgs suffer from “key person risk,” and bDAO is addressing this through a Governance Solutions Engineers program, which will fund dedicated & qualified individuals to spec out governance solutions and strategic priorities. 3. Exogenous macro and regulatory risk - Mitigant: Membership growth and DAO activity will be the key indicators of bDAO’s long-term success, not short-term market volatility. There are also temporary legal structures that DAOs can pursue (such as registering as an unincorporated nonprofit association) to address regulatory concerns.
Tech / Product Vision	bDAO’s roadmap is centered primarily around the growth of its guilds and projects. A more comprehensive view can be found below.
Market / Competition	Social tokens are backed by the reputation of the community they represent and derive value outside of financial speculation. Social tokens are often used as a means for admitting members into gated communities via a token ownership threshold, voting on governance proposals, compensating members for their contributions, and accessing other community perks. Therefore users are incentivized to retain their social token holdings for non-financial reasons as dumping them otherwise would preclude the user from accessing all the aforementioned benefits. While bDAO does not have a direct competitor today, it is worth noting DAOs that have overlap in the scope of their activities. bDAO’s focus was initially on furthering Bankless HQ’s DeFi-centric mission, although its guilds and projects have expanded into many areas outside of DeFi. From the point of view of sheer output, bDAO has been the most productive of its peers in terms of quantity and range. Not included are other crypto-native media companies that compete for mindshare against Bankless HQ, as bDAO’s activites are quite distinct from Bankless HQ. Social token comps would include: - FWB: known for their IRL events and parties, FWB members have also started a number of projects including an NFT auction platform and gallery, curated city guides, a member directory + dashboard, a newsletter, and proprietary governance proposal platform (called Upvote). - Global Coin Research (GCR): centered around access to exclusive content, learning resources, community hangouts, and Web3 investment opportunities through its $GCR token. - Decrypt: announced the were building out a DAO in Sept 2021 but unclear how much progress they have made since then
Tokenomics / Launch Strategy	In terms of supply, bDAO minted 1B total $BANK tokens with the Genesis Proposal. 30% of these tokens were airdropped to Bankless HQ premium subscribers who had obtained a Bankless 2020 or 2021 badge on Ethereum. These holders then passed a proposal that would give a one-time grant to Bankless LLC for their help in getting the DAO started and building community early on - this grant constituted 25% of total supply to be vested over 3 years. This left the treasury with 5% of tokens with the remaining 40% also allocated to treasury but vested linearly over 3 years. In 2024, there is an optional mechanism to trigger 2% inflation in each subsequent year. No private sales have occurred to-date to fund the treasury. Given $BANK’s function as a social token, there are incentives in place for community members to hold the token longer term vs selling for short-term financial gain. Users have to maintain a certain threshold of tokens to remain members of the community, and a status visible to all on the Discord is assigned to those with larger holdings. The membership levels are as follows: - Level 1 = 35,000 BANK - Level 2 = 35,000 BANK and be voted in as an “Active Contributor” by peers - Level 3 = Whale 150,000 BANK - Level 4 = Liquidity Provider 250 Uniswap V2 BANK/ETH LP tokens or 1500 BPT Guests passes are given to those who are completely new to the Discord - however, these expire after 2 weeks unless renewed by a Level 2 member. Prospective members are incentivized to earn their membership either by completing bounties posted on the Bounty Board, receiving allocations through Coordinape rounds, earning a “salary” as a role holder (paid seasonally), or buying $BANK tokens directly. While volatility associated with the crypto market at-large remains, the social / membership benefits associated with $BANK should mitigate speculation as the primary reason for owning the token.
Deal Dynamics	$10M private sale of treasury at $0.4 per token
Next Steps	- Speak with as many members of grants committee as possible. Topics to understand include community engagement, status of current initiatives, and future growth opportunities - Speak with leadership at treasury to understand treasury mgmt and revenue streams - Speak with heads of major projects/guilds
Decision Date	March 31, 2022

OVERVIEW OF GUILDS AND PROJECTS

Writers Guild

The Writer’s Guild is responsible for cultivating promising writers in bDAO and publishing three newsletters including Weekly Rollup (what happened the past week in bDAO), Decentralized Arts (weekly NFT and crypto-art content), and State of the DAOs (bi-weekly focusing on the DAO ecosystem and organization tools). Total newsletter subscribers are nearing 10K and continuing to grow.

Treasury Guild

The Treasury Guild is responsible for preserving, enhancing, and supporting the DAO’s financial resources. They provide general financial reporting, planning, and budgeting, and also work on treasury diversification initiatives and liquidity partnerships.

Translators Guild

The Translators Guild ensures that bDAO content is properly translated to reach the broadest possible audience. In past seasons, the guild has worked on a number of projects, the biggest of which was spun out independently as International Media Nodes, which are standalone non-English media channels. Today, there are 17 IMN channels in operation.

Research Guild

The Research Guild is responsible for conducting, guiding, and funding research that aligns with the goals of bDAO. Specifically the guild creates research bounties and requests for remuneration, funds specific-scope projects through a grants program, and writes / publishes research articles in its own newsletter.

Operations Guild

The Operations Guild watches over the daily activities of bDAO to ensure members are aligned with the general mission. Guild members facilitate core operations such as:

Coordinape Rounds - monthly and season-end rounds for member remuneration

Community Calls

DAO operational expenses

Notion/Discourse administration

Discord administration

Seasonal planning and transition management

DAO cartography and organization mapping

Marketing Guild

The Marketing Guild delivers a full suite of Web3-specific marketing solutions to both internal bDAO constituents and external clients. The guild leverages bDAO’s media assets as part of their marketing campaigns and has a Kanban board database that tracks all ongoing initiatives. The guild also helped create a media kit / sponsorship guide to easily onboard outside partners who may want to sponsor with bDAO. The process map to the right illustrates the workflow for how the guild vets and runs marketing campaigns.

Legal Guild

The Legal Guild’s purpose is to support the bDAO community with up-to-date summaries of legal developments in crypto and DAO governance. As part of this, they publish a newsletter called Decentralized Law. The guild also helps serve as liaison for communications with outside third parties to minimize legal compliance issues in the off-chain world.

Education Guild

The Education Guild provides tools and resources that empower members to share and obtain knowledge around Web3, DeFi, NFTs, and metaverse topics. They’ve done this through a number of projects including the following:

Bankless Academy - a “Duolingo” for crypto. The program guides users through a skill tree, content in various media formats, interactive quests, and quizzes, all the while rewarding the user with POAPs and other goodies.

First Quest - a series of Discord channels that a user navigates through when they first join the bDAO Discord. First Quest is meant to properly onboard members by helping them navigate bDAO resources and showing them how to get involved.

Mentorship Program - provides a means for high quality mentors to pair up with new members and also offer their expertise via outside consulting work.

Developers Guild

The Developers Guild seeks to onboard and organize technical talent specific to Web3. Guild members support technical initiatives across bDAO and also manage in-house departments for Solidity training modules and DAO-wide developer systems infrastructure.

Design Guild

The Design Guild brings together web-native designers as a resource for bDAO projects that require a visual component. The guild has compiled a comprehensive style guide and has been the driver behind bDAO’s branding across its various media assets.

DAOlationships Guild

The DAOlationships Guild facilitates and coordinates relationships between bDAO and external organizations. This guild plays a crucial role in helping bDAO establish partnerships with other DAOs and organizations, with the goal of turning bDAO into a “super connector DAO” that supports the overall Web3 ecosystem. Examples of collaborations include those with Metafactory, Balancer, citaDAO (upcoming), and Copper (Alchemist).

AudioVisual Guild

The AV Guild creates and curates media assets that directly support the broader mission of bDAO. Such assets include Podcast Hatchery, a podcast development program for content creators within bDAO, and Crypto Sapiens, a weekly podcast featuring discussions with innovative Web3 builders.

Analytics Guild

The Analytics Guild builds data products and uses data analytics to create insights for bDAO and other DAOs. Their goal is to build a high-performing analytics engine and sensing platform that will deliver insights about internal DAO performance metrics as well as external on-chain metrics. DAO Dash is the Analytics Guild’s internal data dashboard, complete with standardized data pipelines and a collaborative query / analysis environment.

DeFi Products

Through a collaboration with Index Coop, bDAO has launched 2 DeFi index products to-date. The first is $BED (Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi), which is made up of ⅓ wBTC, ⅓ wETH, and ⅓ DPI. DPI is itself an index of the top ERC-20 DeFi tokens. $BED was co-marketed by bDAO and Index Coop and provides users a passive, cost-efficient way to have balanced exposure to crypto’s top assets. $GMI was launched more recently and seeks to give exposure to “DeFi 2.0” projects, which are not captured in the DPI index. These projects tend to have more aggressive designs, leverage new primitives like protocol-owned liquidity, and be a bit higher up the risk curve - their weightings in the $GMI index can be seen below:

Bankless Consulting

Bankless Consulting was formed to create external revenue streams for bDAO members through the delivery of professional services and Web3 tooling to external parties. This subDAO will coordinate the talent of bDAO to focus primarily on DAO-to-DAO, DAO-to-Business, and product incubation. Bankless Consulting is incorporated as a Delaware LLC to ensure regulatory compliance.

Bounty Board

The Bounty Board provides an easy-to-use interface for members to claim bounties (ie. units of work) and be compensated for it. Creators post a bounty with an associated reward and contributors can sort through bounties by reward amount before laying claim. The Bounty Board is what facilitates intra-DAO coordination of talent and is typically one of the first ways that a member starts earning $BANK.

DAOpunks

DAOpunks may be one of the more intriguing projects to come out of bDAO. DAOpunks was conceived in an attempt to build a community around its NFT collection through claimable merch, DAO-to-DAO collaboration, and other perks. Since the public mint, DAOpunks has spun out of bDAO and amassed a public treasury through that sale to fund community-approved projects that support growing the DAO ecosystem. DAOpunks can be purchased on OpenSea and currently have a floor price of ~0.23 ETH.

DEGEN

DEGEN is bDAO’s Discord bot that automates a number of otherwise tedious user tasks. The goal is to provide executive functionality from within the bDAO Discord, increase productivity by minimizing the amount of time it takes to search out documents, and run processes external to the server. Examples include:

Fetching links and information from Notion, Discourse, and GitHub

Providing onboarding services to new members

Providing voernance functionality from within Discord including managing multisig transactions and Snapshot inquiries

Fight Club

Fight Club is a venture DAO initiative that will focus on investing in early-stage Web3 projects. Modeled after Metacartel Ventures, Fight Club plans to raise capital through an investment vehicle and spin out as a separate entity in the coming months. Fight Club also has an education program that seeks to teach members about venture capital and equip them with the skills to eventually assist with diligence and portfolio work within the fund.

REVENUE MODEL

Existing Revenue Streams

Treasury asset appreciation: bDAO generates income when the value of its Treasury assets appreciates. This is booked as a realized / unrealized gain on its accounting statements. The downside here is that the Treasury is beholden to market corrections.

DeFi product fees: bDAO’s DeFi products collect a streaming fee from traders. Today that fee is 0.35% and is split evenly between bDAO and Index Coop.

Merchandise sales: bDAO’s recent merchandise collaboration with MetaFactory has been a source of revenue, with many items selling out in short order on the site.

NFT sales: bDAO was a beneficiary of DAOpunks’ public sale, which was the biggest source of revenue for the DAO in Q3 (aside from token appreciation).

Future Revenue Streams

Additional education content: The Education Guild has found a nice cadence to its content production and could at some point in the future start charging for access to premium courses.

Sponsorships / ad revenue: As bDAO’s media assets continue to grow in viewership and engagement, there will be increasingly more lucrative opportunities for outside sponsorships. bDAO has already created an elegant media kit, so the marketing collateral exists to support a more aggressive sponsorship campaign.

Rev share with subDAOs: As guilds and projects begin generating revenue streams of their own, there will likely be a revenue-sharing agreement for a portion of those proceeds to flow back to bDAO’s Treasury. This would certainly be the case for Bankless Consulting and Fight Club for instance.

IRL events: There is a real opportunity to better capitalize on events in real-life, whether through social functions, hackathons, or conferences. Permissionless (co-organized by Blockworks + Bankless HQ) and Mainnet (hosted by Messari) are both examples of what a larger-scale bDAO event could look like.