How to DAO

Introduction

4 min readJul 25, 2022

DAO stands for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation.

An organisation is a structure that carries out functions. The decision making function of most organisations is centralised. Even if an organisation is owned by the collective, the members will nominate a few to make decisions on their behalf. For example, Pension fund members elect trustees, shareholders elect board members. This smaller group of centralised people meet to make decisions for the organisation. A DAO is an organisation with a structure that allows all members to participate in the decision making function.

DAOs use blockchain technology to issue tokens to members. The tokens can be used by members to vote on various decisions.

Step 1

Head to https://aragon.org/ and click create your DAO. You will then see the screen below. Note you will need to have Metamask installed as a Chrome extension and connected to the Polygon Network. If you haven’t done that yet, please see my earlier article on getting started with web3.

After you click “Create an Organisation” you will be given a choice on what type to create.

I’ve gone with a Company for this tutorial but feel free to explore one of the other templates.

Next we need a name for our DAO. I’ve called mine the NFT Airdrop Club.

Next we determine the rules for voting.

50% support means that half of the votes need to agree with a proposal.

15% minimum approval means that at least 15% of the members need to participate in the voting process for the proposal to succeed.

Vote Duration determines how long members have to cast their votes.

You can choose what set of rules are best for your DAO

Next we determine our tokens name and symbol. We also then determine who are going to be the original token holders and the amount each will get. You can manually add each address with its corresponding balance but this will take a long time. I suggest assigning all the tokens to one address at the start and then using an airdrop application to distribute the rest of the tokens to other addresses.

Next we review that all the information is correct. You want to make sure there are no mistakes as the next step will require a significant gas fee and so it will be a waste of money to restart. When you are happy, click Launch your organisation.

After you click launch your application, a Metamask pop up will appear. If you see the red text: “Unknown processing time” then you need to click edit and edit suggested gas fees and then select high. See screenshots below for each step:

Once you have edited gas fees to high you should see the green text in the Metamask popup that says: “Very Likely in < 15 seconds”

You can now click confirm but be prepared to wait, it will take longer than 15 seconds, for me it took more than 30 minutes and don’t be tempted to “Speed Up the Transaction” as that will cause the DAO creation to fail.