‍One platform to build, vote and fund; How Astro is shaping the future of DAOs

Why Astro?

Decentralised Auotonomous Organisations (DAOs) are the future of the ways organisations in general are run in that they are transparent, operate in a flat non-heireichycal structure, are managed by communities and usually governed by a token. However, despite having this knowledge, many people do not yet know how to setup, build or run a DAO properly using the right tools to ensure that the organisation stays organized because its basically still early days for DAOs and the complexities involved in communicating with a large number of people.

Astro DAO built on NEAR Protocol, has made this process very seamless by developing a platform where anyone can build a DAO on NEAR, vote on proposals to enhance decision making as well as fund the DAO on the platform. Astro as tool is totally onchain as communities are bound by smart contracts which live on the Blockchain therefore ensuring that there is transparency among members of the community, decisions can also be made onchain via voting by members of the community while funds are distributed based on voting decisions.

Starting off its building process, Astro buit on SputnikDAO V1 to provide the right functions any DAO would need and ensure the platform fits the needs of DAOs. Some major highlights on the functionalities of Astro include:

• Policies are flexible and role based
• Payouts are made via stablecoins to cut out the worries of crypto volatilies
• Governance polling system
• Representatives elections
• Cross DAOs Accountability
• Members of a given DAO can be members of other DAOs
• DAOs can own other DAOs’ tokens to enhance shared collaboration

Setting Up A DAO

DAOs across the world are attempting to make impact on how things are done in this time and agefrom DeFi to constitutions to raising more developers to NFTs and Metaverse and so on.Some of the incredible DAOs include ConsitutionDAO, MakerDAO, DeveloperDAO, Index Coop among many others.

Some of the challenges faced by these big DAOs which included not having the right tools, building on high gas networks, offchain and onchain voting have been solved by Astro. With Astro, you can easily build a DAO on NEAR Protocol which is a high speed, low fees network as well as manage the processes within the DAO from the platform.

In order to create a basic DAO on Astro, the following steps are needed:

1. A NEAR wallet with a minimum of 5 NEAR (you should have more than that due to fees)
2. Visit the DAOs page here and click on “create new DAO”
3. Fill the DAO name, purpose, link and socials field

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4. Set the rules for the DAO based on the type of DAO to be created. The types of DAOs and rules available are shown in the table below

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DAO Types

Foundation - For community projects, donations or general purpose open-source projects.

Clubs - For friends and acquintances yet are still very flexible like other DAO types on Astro

Corporation - For Businesses with shareholders and a more formal structure

Cooperatives - For Businesses wth members rather than shareholders

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5. Upload images

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6. Preview your DAO
7. Click on “Create DAO”

For a more comprehensive step by step process of creating DAOs on Astro, click here.

Creating Proposals

Generally, proposals in DAOs are suggestions made to the DAO in form of documentation or code that will serve as change processes to improve the product or the DAO. The way it works is that members of the community discuss on a change or improvement, write a proposal for it and then the team votes FOR or AGAINST it. If it is voted FOR, it is implemented by the team and becomes part of the DAO but if it is voted AGAINST, it is discarded by the team.

For Astro, creating proposals carry pretty much the same weight in terms of decision making. Once a change is to be made or an action is to be taken, a proposal needs to be created so that the community wil vote approving or rejecting the proposal. 

There are different types of proposals that can be created on Astro and the following gives a brief highlight into each of them:

• Add or transfer Bounty: This proposal is created when a goal is to be reached and a bounty is placed on it. To be able to get the bounty running, the community will have to vote for it to be accepted. In the same vein, when a bounty is to be transferred such that tokens are moved to a different NEAR wallet, a proposal is also created. This, overall is usually a simple suggestion.
• Change Config: This proposal is a high priority proposal and is created when very important information in the DAO is to be altered. Changes such as the following fall within this category:
  - Changes to the DAO name
  - Changes to the purpose of the DAO
  - Changes to the DAO links
  - Changes to DAO Flag and Logo
• Change Policy: This type of proposal has urgent priority as the actions or changes needed are policy based. Some of the changes here are changin voting policy, bonds and deadlines or creating a group.
• Role member addition or removal: In order to remove or add any member to a role, a proposal suggesting that is created and voted on. They are generally proposals of high priority.
• Voting: This is a simple suggestion for voting on proposals created. It is basically a poll.
• Function Call: These are special application for calling custom functions in JSON files. 

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To be able to create a proposal, follow the steps as shown below;

1. Go to the DAO page where you are a member and click on the “+” sign

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2. Select the type of proposal from the drop down list

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3. Describe the proposal and provide the necessary details and click on “propose”

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Every proposal has three (3) statuses upon creation. The status of the proposal gives an idea about what level the proposal is at towards implementation. The status can be IN PROGRESS (If the proposal has been created and voting is ongoing), APPROVE (if the proposal goes through the voting period and is voted FOR) and FAILED (If members do not vote FOR the proposal but AGAINST it).

Voting

One of the key processes on Astro is voting. It is about the major process driving the operations and sustenance of any DAO. With voting, people can contribute to the change within a DAO or a group.

On Astro, there are two types of voting;

1. Token Weighted Voting which is based on a number of stacked voting tokens
2. Role Weighted Voting which is based on specific groups of users holding specific voting weight.

Voting is either to APPROVE or REJECT a proposal. When you approve, it means that the proposal is supported and should go through. However, when you vote to reject a proposal, it simply means that the proposal should not fly.

There are some cases where proposals are removed because of invalidity. When a member votes for the proposal to be removed, if it gets the quorum number for it, it becomes invalid and is removed permanently from the feed.

To determine who gets to vote or not, there is a Voting Policy laid down by the DAO council that states the conditions to be met to be eligible to vote fon any proposal. A typical policy contains, who should vote, how they should vote and the quorum required for a proposal to be implemented or dropped.

Transaction

On Astro, a transaction is the smallest unit of computation, function or storage on the network. It can also be described as a collection of actions that tells what should be done at the receiver’s account. For a transaction to be successful, there are critical factors that make up the transaction. They include:

• Origin shows the sender of the transaction by a signer who signs the transaction cryptographically.
• Destination shows the receiver of the transaction
• Recency gives the block-hash which should be within acceptable limits (1 epoch)
• Uniqueness gives the signer accesskey which is unique

Every transaction is based on one or more unit of operations known as actions. Currently, there eight (8) action types that are supported on Astro as shown below:

1. CreateAccount to make a new account (for a person, contract, refrigerator, etc)
2. DeleteAccount to delete an account (and transfer balance to a beneficiary account)
3. AddKey to add a key to an account (either FullAccess or FunctionCall access)
4. DeleteKey to delete an existing key from an account
5. Transfer to move tokens from one account to another
6. Stake to express interest in becoming a validator at the next available opportunity
7. DeployContract to deploy a contract
8. FunctionCall to invoke a method on a contract (including budget for compute and storage)

Treasury

All DAOs need a treasury to manage the funds within the DAO. On Astro, there is provision for DAOs set up to have their own treasuries. There are three types of funds that contain treasuries supported on Astro. They are highlighted below:

1. NEAR token: Since all DAOs created on Astro are built on NEAR protocol, it is quite easy to say that the DAO can hold their funds in $NEAR which is the utility token that powers NEAR blockchain and is also one of the top 40 cryptocurrencies at the moment.
2. Fungible token: DAOs can as well create fungible tokens on NEAR Protocol which can be transferred from a NEAR wallet to the DAO’s wallet and vice versa.
3. Non Fungible Token (NFTs): DAOs can choose to hold their funds as NFTs where each  token has a unique ID.

Conclusion

As DAOs spring up everyday, it is important that there are easy and quick routes for setting up and this is what Astro is building for DAOs. Building on NEAR Protocol which is a fast network with lower fees, Astro is set to transform the way DAOs are built and to ensure the gaps in the technicalities surrounding building DAOs are bridged.

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