Participating in a DAO

A practical guide to finding, joining, and contributing meaningfully to DAOs, including the latest legal frameworks like Wyoming DUNA and the rise of AI-assisted governance.

28 min · advanced · part of DAOs & Governance

Getting Started with DAOs

Participating in a DAO might sound complicated, but getting started is simpler than you might think. You do not need to be a programmer, a cryptocurrency expert, or even a large token holder. Many DAOs actively welcome newcomers and have pathways for people with diverse skills and backgrounds, including writing, design, community management, research, legal expertise, and operational coordination. The first step is to **find a DAO that aligns with your interests**. Just as you would not join a club or organization at random, you should look for a DAO whose mission resonates with you. Are you interested in decentralized finance? Consider protocol DAOs like **Aave**, **Compound**, or **Sky**. Passionate about Ethereum scaling? Look at the **Optimism Collective** or **Arbitrum DAO**. Care about open-source software and public goods? **Gitcoin DAO** has been a leader in funding ecosystem development. Drawn to art and culture? Look at collector DAOs like **PleasrDAO** or social DAOs like **Friends With Benefits**. Several websites curate DAO directories to help you explore options. **DeepDAO (deepdao.io)** provides analytics on DAO treasuries, voters, and proposals across more than 13,000 organizations. **Tally (tally.xyz)** offers an interface for discovering and participating in DAOs that use on-chain governance. **Snapshot (snapshot.org)** provides a comprehensive directory of DAOs that use its off-chain voting platform. Simply browsing these platforms can give you a feel for the ecosystem and help you identify DAOs that match your interests. Once you find a DAO that interests you, the typical entry point is their **community forum** (usually Discourse, at "forum.[daoname].org") and **chat platform** (usually Discord). Join these channels, introduce yourself in the appropriate channel (often called "intros" or "welcome"), and start reading. Observing governance discussions and community interactions for a few weeks before jumping in gives you valuable context about the DAO's culture, priorities, key members, and ongoing initiatives. Many DAOs also hold regular **community calls** or "town halls," typically weekly or bi-weekly. These are voice or video calls where members discuss active proposals, share updates from working groups, and coordinate ongoing work. Attending these calls (even just listening) is one of the fastest ways to understand a DAO from the inside. Calendar links and meeting recordings are usually pinned in the Discord or posted in the forum.

Also in this lesson

Your First Steps as a DAO Member
Ways to Contribute
Legal Frameworks: The Wyoming DUNA Revolution
How DAO Contributors Get Compensated
Essential Tools for DAO Participation
The Future: AI-Assisted Governance and What is Coming
Risks and Considerations
For Deeper Reading

Key terms

Wyoming DUNA: The Decentralized Unincorporated Nonprofit Association Act (Senate File 50). Signed by Governor Mark Gordon on March 7, 2024 and effective July 1, 2024. Provides legal personhood, limited liability, and tax compliance pathways for DAOs.
RetroPGF (Retroactive Public Goods Funding): A compensation model that rewards contributors after they have created value, rather than promising payment upfront. Optimism's RetroPGF program distributed $100M+ through Round 5, with $1.3B+ reserved for future rounds.
Coordinape: A peer-to-peer compensation tool (coordinape.com) where DAO contributors distribute "GIVE" tokens to each other based on perceived contribution value. The aggregate allocations determine how budgets get distributed at the end of each epoch.
Dework: The leading task management and bounty platform in the DAO space (dework.xyz), processing more than $1.2 million in bounty payouts in 2025.
DeepDAO: The leading DAO analytics platform (deepdao.io), tracking 13,000+ DAOs and treasuries totaling more than $26 billion. Essential resource for DAO due diligence and research.
Working group: A team within a DAO focused on a specific function like marketing, treasury management, or technical development. Members coordinate regularly and typically share a dedicated budget.
Bounty: A one-time reward offered by a DAO for completing a specific task. Bounties are open to anyone and are paid upon satisfactory completion. Dework processed $1.2M+ in bounty payouts in 2025.
Delegate: A DAO member who accepts voting power from other token holders and actively participates in governance on their behalf, often publishing voting rationales. Karma scores help track delegate accountability.
Karma scores: A reputation system (karmahq.xyz) that rates DAO delegates based on activity, communication quality, and voting alignment with their stated principles.
Gitcoin Passport: A sybil resistance tool (passport.gitcoin.co) that aggregates verifiable credentials to demonstrate an account is operated by a unique human. Used by many DAOs to gate quadratic voting and grants.
Optimism Collective RetroPGF Round 7: The seventh round of Optimism's retroactive public goods funding program, launched January 16, 2025, transitioning the program to a more ongoing distribution model.
Arbitrum DAO: The DAO governing the Arbitrum Layer 2 network. The ARB token launched on March 23, 2023 with a total supply of 10 billion tokens, creating one of the largest treasuries in crypto.
AI stewards (AI angels): A concept proposed by Vitalik Buterin in February 2026 (extending earlier 2024-2025 musings) describing AI agents that read proposals, summarize them, and vote on routine matters according to delegated principles to reduce voter cognitive burden.

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