Select Notable DAOs

ConstitutionDAO

The idea that became ConstitutionDAO was conceived in November 2021. Based on the knowledge that a rare original copy of The Constitution would soon be auctioned by Sotheby’s. The vision of this single purpose DAO was to attempt to keep a key piece of US history in the hands of the US people themselves. Constitution DAO has 18,000+ members that came together to raise US $47 million. While the DAO did not win the auction, the demonstrated ability for such a DAO to form, raise significant funding, and ultimately gracefully unwind and return funds to contributors was considered a major success and win for the idea of decentralized capital formation.

BitDAO

Among the largest DAOs in the world is BitDAO. Managing a treasury of more than US $2.0 billion, BitDAO is designed as a general purpose DeFi and investment mega-DAO that is active across a number of different Web3 modalities. To date, BitDAO has established subsidiary DAOs focused around gaming, zero-knowledge research and entrepreneurial education.

Uniswap

A major backbone of Web3, Uniswap defines itself as “a public good owned and governed” by its token holders. The $UNI token represents voting rights to both control the direction and parameters of the Uniswap protocol as well as to manage and deploy funds from Uniswap’s US $2.3 billion treasury. Uniswap consistently ranks among the most widely used Web3 applications, often accounting for 10-20% of total usage on the Ethereum blockchain.

Ukraine DAO

Over the past year, DAOs have proven their ability to quickly organize and deploy funds for humanitarian efforts. Upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a DAO was formed to collect and distribute funds to alleviate the resulting humanitarian crisis. Supported officially by the Ukrainian government through the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Ukraine DAO has so far raised and donated more than US $7.0 million.