Learn2DAO

History is riddled with examples of how individuals, when organized towards realizing a common goal, can achieve incredible feats, such as building the pyramids of Giza or putting a man on the moon. More often than not, larger communities with engaged, mission-aligned, and informed members - and by extension, those with more resources - are able to realize their objectives more effectively. We believe that the most efficient and productive DAOs are those that have an engaged, mission-aligned, and informed user base.

Just like how the modern internet ushered in a new era for human connectivity by enabling individuals to communicate instantly with one another, DAOs are being praised as the tool for the next generation of community collaboration. Not only have the number of DAOs on Snapshot grown by 757% from May 2021 to May 2022 (yes, really. Not including other DAO platforms like Tally, Syndicate, Boardroom, Aragon, etc), they are now also recognized as legal entities in the states of Tennessee and Wyoming*.

As the DAO ecosystem continues to grow, how do these organizations ensure they are operating efficiently and attracting the right members to accelerate their efforts to achieve their goals? And how do we lower the barrier to entry for newcomers (web2 users) into the space?

The answer is Learn2DAO: the first community driven DAO platform aimed primarily at education and web2 user onboarding.

Learn2DAO was built for two types of users:

(1) The group of users who are new to DAOs or web3 in general. These users are often times curious and eager to participate and contribute, but are easily overwhelmed by the ocean of information they must first find, interpret, and compare/validate before joining a DAO. We believe this user base is incredibly large and offer yet un-tapped potential to onboard to web3 (we count ourselves among them).

(2) DAOs want to attract and retain mission-aligned, engaged, and informed members to build a cohesive, more productive community to ultimately accelerate their journey towards their mission and to further their cause. We believe all DAOs should be proactively investing in this area as this aspect of their organization is incredibly vital to their long-term sustainability and effectiveness.

Learn2DAO aims to be the first place for new comers to visit to look up and research about prospective DAOs and offers a fiat on-ramp to join once they’ve decided! The platform allows a prospective user to browse DAOs and learn about their mission, goal, and watch a quick video introduction about the DAO. They’re also able to quickly see easy-to-interpret, simple metrics about the organization that are community-authored and custom-tailored by the DAO. Lastly, after a user has learned about a DAO and is ready to become a member (Hurray! 🎉 ), users can buy governance tokens using fiat currency (e.g. Credit Card, GPay, Apple Pay) through their Gmail/AppleID account using MagicLink, or connect their wallet to swap their cryptocurrency for governance tokens (e.g. using BTC, ETH, USDT).

For DAO organizations, Learn2DAO can be used as a blank canvas to educate and ultimately attract new mission-aligned and engaged members who may have not found out about them otherwise. The Dune queries can be custom-built and LivePeer video selected for the audience the organization is hoping to attract. DAO-specific ERC-20 governance tokens can be purchased using fiat currencies (for web2 users!) using MagicLink, or swapped for using 0x.

In the future, we’d love to continue to invest in the product and while working on adoption.

For the product side, we will begin investing in capabilities to further lower the barrier of entry for web3 and DAO newcomers, such as: support for obtaining (buy/swap) ERC-721, ERC-1155 governance tokens, and governance tokens from other chains, centralizing relevant information from Discord, news articles, Medium Blogs, and Twitter, as well as eventually computing a “DAO Score” on-chain so users have a way of objectively comparing DAOs and their effectiveness.

For the go-to-market strategy, our north-star metric will be the number of people who obtain DAO governance tokens through our platform. We aim to measure and maximize this number through strategic partnerships (with DAOs) and marketing the platform to web2 audiences.

• A Primer on DAOs, Harvard Law

Our react-native web-app allows users to browse and learn about DAOs, alongside external links to their websites, Twitter, Discord channels, Telegram chats, etc. We use Dune’s newly released API to execute community-authored queries that power visualizations in the frontend. LivePeer is used to stream videos to prospective DAO members (e.g. an introduction video or onboarding). All data is stored on-chain on FileCoin/IPFS. Lastly, after a user has learned about a DAO and is ready to become a member (Hurray! 🎉 ), users can buy governance tokens using fiat currency (e.g. Credit Card, Apple Pay) through their Gmail/AppleID account using MagicLink, or by connecting their wallet to swap their cryptocurrency for governance tokens (e.g. using BTC, ETH, USDT).

Longer term, we plan on extending our platform to enable DAOs themselves to customize the Dune queries that they want to display, videos on LivePeer they want to show prospective members, and overall vision/mission statements they want to showcase to net new users looking for DAOs to join!