# The DAO landscape is growing, fast

**Published by:** [Tally](https://blog.tally.xyz/)
**Published on:** 2026-01-06
**URL:** https://blog.tally.xyz/the-dao2dao-ecosystem

## Content

This article was originally published on Medium on January 31st, 2023. It has been republished here with minor updates for clarity.In 2023’s web3, DAOs are ubiquitous — but, as recently as a few years ago, the concept of digitally decentralized coordination was essentially unknown to most people. Over the last two years DAOs have empirically demonstrated significant growth. From May 2021 to June 2022, the number of DAOs with at least one live proposal increased from 700 to over 6000 DAOs (+757%), as shown by Electric Capital engineer Emre Caliskan’s analysis of Snapshot data. One note: DAOs that don’t use Snapshot weren’t included in these numbers, so these growth statistics present a partial analysis of the total DAO ecosystem. The rapid proliferation of DAOs — a nearly ninefold increase in just one year — coincided with web3’s latest run of immersion in mainstream pop culture and finance. For example, ConstitutionDAO made waves by crowdfunding over 40 million dollars in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bid on an original copy of the Constitution. The Sotheby’s auction and its aftermath were heavily covered in traditional news media, as a result, because the speed at which ConstitutionDAO raised their funds was unprecedented. In a statement after the auction, the DAO said they “broke records for the most money crowdfunded in less than 72 hours” and were the first DAO community that Sotheby’s had ever worked with.The number of DAOs (as defined by voting on at least one proposal on Snapshot) has grown from 700 in May 2021 to over 6000 in June 2022. Source: Emre CaliskanDespite the rapid growth, the DAO landscape as a whole is still in its infant stages of development, and the current topography is very much reflective of ‘a tale of two DAOs’. There’s the ‘mature and advanced DAO’, represented by the 10% of DAOs who are responsible for 65% of total proposals. PancakeSwap and Decentraland are examples of these kinds of DAOs, with 3,900 and 1,800 proposals, respectively. These DAOs have developed increasingly intricate and complex operational and governance systems to support their growing communities. They have implemented structures to facilitate onboarding, communication channels and incentives. On the other hand, we have the ‘young and immature DAO’; small, scrappy, and still figuring it out. These DAOs represent the 60% of projects that have voted on 3 proposals or less. These DAOs are in earlier stages of adjusting to on-chain governance and working out the basics of decentralization. Elsewhere, we have the seedlings: the soon-to-be DAOs that haven’t voted on their first proposal yet. Many communities start out completely centralized with the goal of attracting the right people to their cause before progressively decentralizing to become a DAO (Boys Club is an example of this). One common theme that has emerged from the development of DAOs is the question of information sharing and creating a set of best practices. How can DAOs more intuitively support and learn from each other? Is it possible to make the “figuring it out” stage that 60% of DAOs find themselves in right now easier? How can we identify and quantify the qualities of a successful DAO ecosystem, and how can we use that information to build a strong DAO2DAO ecosystem?The existing DAO2DAO landscape: how are DAOs supporting other DAOs?“DAO2DAO” interactions are self-descriptive, and refer to any interaction between two or more given DAOs as organizations. This can include, but is not limited to: monetary transactions, exchanges of service and instances of metagovernance between separate parties. Much of today’s knowledge proliferation happens on the individual level in analog fashion. While individual DAO contributors might write articles, host Twitter Spaces or even join other DAOs to share best practices, there is still an immense amount of knowledge “siloing,” which can considerably impede the collective progress of an industry. Despite the relatively slow (by web3 standards) process of dissemination, there’s a lot that can be learned from these kinds of interactions because they place people and their experiences at the forefront. The issue here is not the quality of the information shared, but the accessibility and scalability of said information. On the DAO2DAO level, building public goods to support other DAOs both benefits the original DAO through marketing and publicity, and open-sourcing information encourages greater innovation from other operators. The following sections summarize some of the types of DAO2DAO interactions that help increase the health of the ecosystem as a whole.DAO networksDAO networks facilitate interactions between DAOs, although many key players in this space are not DAOs themselves. Seed Club, which features a media arm as well as their Accelerator, gathers a cohort of DAO operators who learn and build together. The Accelerator has had five cohorts so far with dozens of DAOs in their alumni network. Other information sharing initiatives include nonprofit DAO Research Collective, which funds academic level research and events to advance DAO functionality. The DAO product space also serves as a network for builders. Tally is both shipping features to their DAO operations platform to bring DAOs to the masses and running events such as DAO NYC and the On-Chain Summit. Tally simultaneously lowers the the technical barrier to launching and operating DAOs while proliferating meaningful DAO networks through content and education. This article was funded and published through Content Guild, a DAO for creators started by Tally. DAO networks are crucial to the development of the DAO2DAO landscape because they provide opportunities for frictionless connection and collaboration among DAOs. Rather than needing to find other DAOs through social media platforms or word-of-mouth, DAO builders can refer to their networks.ConsultingAlthough DAOs sometimes get compared to corporate structures, decentralization remains a key differentiator and consideration for builders, as corporate structures do not prioritize decentralized approaches. Bankless Consulting, a legal arm and subsidiary of Bankless DAO, is a web3-native consulting firm that consults for both DAOs and traditional companies, forming a digital bridge between web3 and web2. Bankless Consulting’s value proposition is that their solutions are “field-tested,” which makes sense because the original Bankless DAO itself is proof of their model’s success.AnalyticsInformation and data on the collective DAO ecosystem is important for understanding how DAOs might interact and which DAOs are relevant in certain spaces. DeepDAO aggregates and analyzes financial and governance data to better inform people on the space and its growth. The dashboards feature thousands of DAOs and a variety of metrics related to proposals, treasuries and contributors.DAO2DAO token swapsToken swaps provide mutually beneficial upside for DAOs, as DAOs are able to diversify their treasuries, invest in the overall ecosystem and participate in each other’s governance efforts. Hedgey and PrimeDAO offer infrastructure for token swaps, and DAOs such as Gnosis DAO and Agave have been early adopters.Infrastructure, Tooling, and Operating System DAOsInfrastructure and operating system DAOs encompass DAOs that are building tooling that makes it easier for others to start a DAO, manage contributors and enable governance systems. These types of DAOs represent a significant opportunity in the DAO2DAO landscape because the operating systems that are released directly lead to an increase in DAOs. By abstracting away code and some of the complex backend for launching a DAO, these platforms make DAOs more accessible to non-technical and non-web3 native people. Already, there are a handful of DAOs working in the operating system space. Aragon Network DAO is the DAO behind Aragon, a modular DAO platform that includes an app to create and run a DAO as well as an SDK and Design Systems to enable extensions. Aragon Network DAO coordinates using the ANT token, and holders vote on proposals. The DAO is made up of a main DAO, Executive and Compliance sub-DAOs, a Tech Committee and Aragon Court. AN DAO’s charter outlines the core vision for the DAO: “Building tools to create and manage decentralized organizations will unleash a cambrian explosion of new governance forms, and the competition among them will raise the bar globally. It will finally allow us to experiment with governance at the speed of software and learn through the empathy of a collective design approach.” AN DAO’s vision encapsulates why the DAO2DAO interaction can be so powerful. Correctly aligned incentives in operating system DAOs can push rapid, iterative forms of decentralized organization forward because they are able to test and respond quickly to the space. DAO operators know firsthand what problems they face and can capitalize on “the speed of software” to solve these problems for others. Other examples of operating systems DAO include Moloch DAO, which invests in public infrastructure on Ethereum and is connected to the open-source DAO framework Moloch. HausDAO manages DAOHaus, a no-code platform for creating and managing DAOs. Operating systems can also take on cultural context. Nouns DAO, which started in June 2021, is behind the Nouns generative NFT project. Proceeds from each daily sale of a Noun are put into the treasury and managed by the DAO. The original project has inspired a large variety of spinoffs, with many contributors building in the spirit of Nouns all over web3. In particular, ZORA and Nouns released Nouns Builder, a tool that allows anyone to create an on-chain DAO that uses the format of Nouns DAO. Nouns have infiltrated web3 through the popularized Nouns glasses across social media platforms. Many DAOs have already been formed using Nouns Builder. For example, Purple is a DAO with the goal of expanding the Farcaster ecosystem. Proceeds for sales of Purple NFTs go to NounsDAO, Farcaster.eth, and PurpDAO.eth, with the funds contributing to grants to people proliferating Farcaster. Nouns represent an interesting prospect for the future of DAO2DAO interactions, because DAOs themselves can become models for others to emulate that are aiming to achieve certain goals. Crystallizing the cultural and technical properties of a certain DAO into a tool like Nouns Builder allows for more diverse best practices tailored to specific use cases.A DAO2DAO futureThe future of the DAO2DAO space is promising! As our collective understanding of DAOs continues to evolve, collaboration between DAOs will become even more essential to success. Tooling and networks built by DAOs for DAOs have already become popularized in web3 and will only continue to rise in importance and popularity as further use cases develop. Each localized DAO ecosystem-wide success will ultimately illuminate the value of the DAO ethos and thesis on a large, global stage. The future is DAO2DAO.

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