SubDAO’s Vision: How Will Organizations Evolve in the Next Decade?

8 min readMar 1, 2021

SubDAO’s Vision and Mission

As the global economy has recently suffered from another recession, Bitcoin is making its way to disrupt the perception of the crypto-conservatives, showing the world what it was created for and all the dirty deals behind the scene.

Whether you are enthusiastic or unwilling to accept it, blockchain has become an inescapable topic for all. Over the past decade, blockchain technology has been slowly growing in its gestation period, subtly influencing the development of human society in many ways. In addition to bringing new changes in the financial field, the application of blockchain technology has also revolutionized the forms of organizations. With the development and maturity of blockchain technology, the new form of organization, DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), has gone from obscurity to the preferred form of governance for most blockchain projects, distincting from its traditional centralized peers.

While centralized organizations are formed during human beings surviving nature, decentralized autonomous organizations are built based on replacing trust between humans with machine trust. Both forms have their advantages. How will the future of human social organization be constructed? Centralized organizations with improvements, or decentralized autonomous organization to coordinate everything? This is the question we are thinking about standing at the crossroads.

Figure 1 Centralized Organization -> Decentralized Organization

Any organization is a system that brings people together to do specific things to achieve certain goals. There are four elements, namely, people, system, motivation, and affairs.Decentralized autonomous organizations differ greatly from centralized organizations in these four aspects. In a centralized organization, people join as employees; the system adopts a hierarchical management mechanism; the affairs handled are fully in line with the demands and interests of the organization or the management; and the motivation is to maximize profit or organizational revenue. In a decentralized organization, anyone can join and quit the organization as they desire; people in the organization can vote democratically to achieve equality in decision-making; the matters handled are in line with the demands of the majority of people in the organization; and the motivation comes from individuals’ passion and willingness.

With the help of blockchain technology, a decentralized organization is able to stay clear from human interference, avoid power rent-seeking, and fully practice democratic governance. Hence, a decentralized organization will promote the diversity in the organization with open and transparent incentive mechanisms, enhance the motivation of participants, and adapt to different scenarios.

To avoid human interference and fully practice democracy in a group is not only necessary for blockchain projects, but also for open-source organizations, corporates, and social governance. Decentralized organizations will co-exist with centralized organizations in the next decade and gradually expand its role, until replacing centralized organizations as the ultimate form of all organizations in the far future. In the future, decentralized organizations will be intertwined with people’s life. However, at present, decentralized organizations are not yet known by the general public, and their tools for organizational governance are relatively less than enough and fragmented.

Currently, there are some DAOs on the blockchain, most of which have their own governance schemes and systems, such as MakerDAO, TheLAO, etc. They have developed their own systems for governance. TheLAO, on the other hand, has developed a voting contract on Ethereum to vote on investment projects. Other organizations have developed basic DAO governance toolchains, such as Aragon and DAOHaus, which abstract the common functions of the DAO governance process and provide functions such as voting and fund pool management. DAOHaus provides functional contracts for voting and fund management on Ethereum, as well as an attractive front-end and other tools to help DAOs with governance.

Not every DAO is able to develop their own governance tool, and only those organizations with sufficient R&D capabilities and fund can afford to do it. So it is not practical for smaller organizations or those without sufficient fund to develop their own governance tools. The current toolchains and systems for DAO governance can meet the most basic needs of governance, i.e., voting and fund management. However, other common needs, such as the combination of multiple decision-making, automated execution of governance behaviors, daily community governance communication, etc., are difficult to satisfy with the existing toolchains. Meanwhile, only a number of systems have open interfaces for customization, which requires highly-specialized technical skills and will be hard for small and medium sized organization to implement.

For a DAO of any size, a rich and complete DAO governance toolchain is the foundation for its sustainability, a simple and easy extension is the way to enhance the DAO’s diversification, and friendly peripheral tools are the accelerator for the DAO to facilitate every aspect of human life. The SubDAO Network was created for this ultimate purpose: providing all DAOs with governance toolchains.

Our vision is to integrate DAO governance into every aspect of life, by exposing everything in the sunlight and eliminating oppression. Ultimately, the hierarchical concept will be removed, and everyone is able to embrace freedom, in the way that they can express their opinions openly and make their own choice freely. That’s what we call the real democracy. Fuck pseudo-democracy!

SubDAO Network

SubDAO Network is a Polkadot-based DAO management platform developed with the Substrate framework, aiming to provide a chain of tools to facilitate DAO’s creation, funding pool management, voting, and customization, to assist DAO creators and participants in the governance of their organizations. With SubDAO Network, DAO creators can build and customize DAOs quickly and easily. Meanwhile, DAO’s participants will be able to take part in its governance.

The SubDAO Network consists of four parts: SubDAO Node, SubDAO Airfone SDK, SubDAO Smart Contract, and SubDAO App front-end.

The SubDAO Node is a blockchain node developed using Substrate. It has the blockchain node capabilities and also provides off-chain data access, serving as the foundation of the SubDAO Network
SubDAO Airfone SDK is a set of SDKs to provide developers with links to the DAOs in the SubDAO Network, providing a DAO governance interface wrapper that allows developers to easily and quickly integrate DAO governance capabilities into applications on the web, iOS/Android mobile devices, and PCs.
SubDAO App Frontend is the interface for users to interact with the DAO. Through SubDAO App Frontend, participants of the DAO can directly participate in the governance of the DAO.
SubDAO Smart Contract is the core of the DAO’s governance. With smart contracts, the governance behavior of the DAO can be guaranteed without human interference. There are several components in SubDAO smart contract, namely Template Library, Asset Vault, and SubDAO Guard.

* Template Library is the core component of SubDAO smart contract, which consists of the main smart contract and several smart contract modules. Its main function is to provide and manage a variety of DAO organization templates for various organization forms and provide modules that can be customized to allow DAOs with certain R&D capabilities to define new modules as needed.
* SubDAO Guard is the component that manages the functionality in the SubDAO Network. All governance actions for the SubDAO Network are performed through the SubDAO Guard component, such as adding new modules to the SubDAO Network, adjusting the functionality of the SubDAO Network, etc.
* Asset Vault component is the asset management component in a DAO. All assets from Polkadot and other chains are managed by Asset Vault.

Initially, SubDAO Network will provide some of the features commonly used in various DAO governance and standardize them into DAO templates so that people can easily and quickly create and participate in DAOs later. We will gradually provide DAO-based company templates, non-profit-organization templates, government templates, educational-organization templates, club templates, venture capital fund templates, voting templates, fund management templates, and basic templates, so that as many organizational models as possible can be supported by SubDAO. SubDAO will also provide DAO participants with the ability to customize their templates.

Our idea may sound simple and naive, but we have already made our first step. Starting from the shore, the SubDAO has set sail towards a historical milestone.

SubDAO’s Ambition

Pioneers are starting to embrace the Web 3.0 world whereas others are still living in the Web 2.0 era, an era will soon be abandoned by the history. SubDAO aims to provide the tools of DAO governance to those who embrace the trend that DAO will be the future form of organization, while also introducing a new world to those who know nothing about DAO!

In the future, we will also build on the existing DAO system and provide the Web 2.0 world an entrance to the new land of DAO.

SubDAO has the following adoption scenarios. Don’t hesitate to follow and join us if you are interested.

An open and free decentralized arbitration court

SubDAO aims to practice justice in an open way and help people when they are unfairly treated. SubDAO’s ultimate goal is to bring about a world that saves no place for questionable judgement and underground deals, a world where everyone is treated nicely and fairly.

A credit-based lending platform

SubDAO will build a credit-based lending platform with reference to individual and organizational behaviours throughout SubDAO’s onchain governance. You no longer need collateral borrowing. Your asset no longer has to be houses and cars as banks believe, as credit is also your asset.

Social media platforms with DAO governance

People need to experience DAO anytime in its most convenient form. Hence, as the most-commonly-used applications, social media platforms will be integrated with SubDAO, to make DAO easily accessible in everyone’s life.

Decentralized communication platform for DAO

Current DAOs are still in centralized supervision. A secure, decentralized, and unregulated communication platform is a necessary choice to eliminate oppression. Hence, SubDAO tasks itself with providing a truly decentralized community platform.

More ideas are in the work, and we look forward to hearing from you if you love DAO and want to contribute your effort to our cause!