DAO Glossary of Terms

Each Moloch DAO uses several standard parameters or inputs to manage how the DAO operates and decides to accept and use funds. There are also some terms that are helpful to learn.

Each Moloch DAO uses several standard parameters or inputs to manage how the DAO operates and decides to accept and use funds. There are also some terms that are helpful to learn.

Select a currency, or “deposit token” to serve as the main currency for your DAO. This will likely be the currency members contribute when joining and people will receive when the DAO decides to spend money. Currently wETH and DAI are available through the DAO pre-sets. DAI makes sense for DAOs that need a stable store of value, while wETH makes more sense for DAOs that can benefit from the appreciation in ETH prices.

In Moloch v2 the DAO members can vote to accept additional types of ERC-20 tokens and the DAO can hold up to 100 different ERC-20 tokens at any one time.

Delegate Key

This allows you to assign your voting shares to another ethereum address. This doesn’t mean delegated voting (if you’re thinking liquid democracy), but just allows a user to use one wallet address for voting and another for economic rights.

Grace Period

The grace period is the period of time after the voting ends, but before the proposal can be processed (and the applicant can get their funds). This is important when it comes to rage quitting, which is described below. Again, Venture DAOs and Grant DAOs typically want longer grace periods, while a Club might be cool with a short grace period.

Loot

Loot is essentially a non-voting, economic share of the DAOs tokens. If you just have loot, you won’t be able to vote on proposals, but you can withdraw that loot into your own wallet.

Period Duration

This is the base period that the DAO uses to tell internal time. The default is to use a 1 hour period, but via Hard Mode you can choose anything between 1 second and 10^18 seconds (not recommended for mortals).

Pokemol

Pokemol is short for “pocket moloch.” This is basically the front-end for your specific DAO. While DAOhaus can connect you to tons of different DAOs, a pokemol represents the site where the real DAO action happens.

Proposals

Proposals are basically what they sound like. These are proposed decisions for the DAO to make. The standard types of proposals are:

  • Membership Proposals - a new applicant proposes submitting a certain amount of tribute in exchange for a certain number of shares and/or loot.
  • Spending Proposals - a proposal to send some of the DAO tokens to an applicant.
  • Whitelist Proposals - a proposal to add a new token to the DAO’s approved tokens list. Molochs do have a limit on the number of tokens you can have in the DAO, so don’t get token crazy.
  • GuildKick Proposals - a proposal to kick out a member of the DAO. Warning once a member is kicked out they can’t be added as a member ever again.

Process Proposals

After a DAO proposal is voted on by the members, a member will need to process the proposal. The DAO might give a reward to the processor to reimburse them for their trouble (this comes out of the deposit made by the sponsor). After a proposal has been processed the applicant will get their tribute back (if the proposal failed) or be able to access the shares or withdraw the tokens granted to them (if a proposal passed).

Rage Quit

This is part of the magic of Moloch. Rage Quit allows a member or loot holder of the DAO to leave the DAO with all or part of their share of the tokens. So image a DAO that has 100 DAI, 50 Shares, and 50 Loot (shares). That means if you own 10 shares of the DAO and rage quit all of your shares, you’d leave with 10 DAI.

Shares

Shares are granted to members in order to allow them to vote on proposals in the DAO. Shares also represent a claim on the tokens held in the DAO.

Sponsor

Before a proposal can go for a vote, it needs a current member of the DAO to sponsor it. The sponsor will need to deposit some tokens (a proposal deposit) in order to sponsor a proposal to make sure that they don’t sponsor spam-y proposals.

Trade

Another term that basically is exactly what you think it would be. This is a quasi-proposal type that allows you to swap one DAO token for another.

Tribute

This refers to the DAI, wETH, or other tokens you send to a DAO in order to join as a new member or get more shares.

Vote

Voting is one of the core activities of a DAO. In the Moloch framework, all voting happens after a proposal has been sponsored in the wait for it…”voting period.” Voting is a simple “yes” / “no” choice where you vote all of your shares for one of those options.

Voting Period

The voting period is how long members will have to vote on a proposal once it’s been sponsored. Venture DAOs and Grant DAOs that may give out large amounts of capital typically use 7 day voting periods. Other DAOs may choose to have shorter voting periods, so that funds can be accessed quicker.

wETH

You might have noticed this currency called wETH. If you’re not familiar with wETH, it’s just wrapped ETH (i.e. ETH that’s been magically turned into an ERC-20 token). Since Moloch’s can only accept ERC-20 tokens at the moment (and ETH doesn’t make the cut), wETH is the closest a DAO can get.

The best place to get some wETH is https://wrapeth.com/.

Boosts

Boost are how you can level-up your DAO. Boosts are like magical mana that you can buy and then give to a DAO. The DAO can then use those boosts to buy upgrades for itself, such as a custom front-end, telegram tie-ins, etc. A lot of these upgrades require a monthly payment of boosts to keep going, so don’t skimp.

To make it simple, we’ve bundled boosts / upgrades into some cool starter packs for people to buy.

1 Like