Report
69 Trends in 2025-Era DAO Design
A comprehensive survey of 69 trends shaping DAO design in 2025, spanning AI integration, financial mechanisms, governance models, info finance, infrastructure, organization models, and token economics.
Research & Trends
Analysis, reports, or trend pieces
All Research
Opinion
A Networked Epistemology: Individual & Collective Thriving in the 21st Century
Civilizational decision-making infrastructure is under strain. Traditional ways of knowing are failing due to increasing complexity - we need new networked epistemological frameworks leveraging blockchain, AI, and collective intelligence.
Report
AI Agents and Public Goods: The Emerging Agentic Economy
How AI agents are reshaping public goods funding, from Vitalik's Deep Funding vision to autonomous DAO governance, and what it means for capital allocation at scale.
Report
Allo Protocol: Building the Rails for Capital Allocation
Analysis of how Allo Protocol enables customizable funding mechanisms and its adoption across the ecosystem.
Report
Antifragile by Design: Lessons from Decentralized Resilience Building
How principles of antifragility apply to decentralized systems, from blockchain protocols to permaculture, and what it means to build systems that get stronger under stress.
Opinion
Assembly Theory x Onchain Capital Allocation
Assembly Theory explains how complexity emerges by combining simpler components — applied to Web3 funding infrastructure, it reveals a powerful approach to systematically exploring the capital allocation design space.
Report
BioFi: Bioregional Finance Powered by Web3
How bioregional finance channels web3 capital into regenerating ecosystems through local-first coordination, DAOs, eco-credits, and participatory funding.
Perspective
Bioregional Swarms
How bioregional financing facilities, AI swarms, and knowledge commons converge to enable place-based coordination beyond nation-state boundaries.
Report
Capturing Value Like a Slime Mold
How slime mold behavior offers a biomimetic model for DAOs to explore, discover, and capitalize on Web3 funding opportunities through decentralized search.
Perspective
Coalitional Funding: A 2026+ Era Funding Primitive
How coalitional funding evolves from ad-hoc practice to first-class coordination primitive, with historical precedents and design principles.
Report
Collective Intelligence Infrastructure: Protocols for Thinking Together
The tools and protocols emerging to help groups think better together — and why better collective intelligence leads to better capital allocation.
Report
d/acc Market Map
The d/acc Market Map maps the defensive acceleration ecosystem across digital and physical infrastructure.
Report
Deep Funding: A Visual Guide in 3 Easy Steps
A walkthrough of Deep Funding's three-step process—dependency mapping, a market of allocators, and expert verification—for funding open source software at scale.
Opinion
Dopamine-Driven Web3: Navigating Incentive Structures and the Search for Meaningful Value
Web3 apps fail at mass adoption because they assume rational users — instead, applications should leverage dopamine psychology to create rewarding experiences that feel intuitive.
Report
The Eight Forms of Capital: Beyond Financial Metrics in Public Goods
How the Eight Forms of Capital framework from regenerative enterprise reveals the blind spots in how we fund, evaluate, and value public goods.
Report
EIP 1890 & EIP 6969: Lessons from In-Protocol Funding
the story of two EIPs that tried to enshrine public goods funding into ethereum's protocol — one died with a bang, the other with a whimper. what they taught us about credible neutrality and the path forward.
Book
Ethereum Localism
How onchain tools can serve physical communities — reimagining Ethereum as infrastructure for local connection, trust, and coordination rather than placeless global scaling.
Perspective
Ethereum Public Goods Funding Sources - The Next Era
in this piece, i examine where the money comes from. money always has a source, and the source shapes behavior downstream. by studying the attributes of its sources, we may then reason about the shape, form, and longevity of how it flows .
Book
Exploring MycoFi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond
Reimagining capital allocation through fungal network metaphors — adaptive, context-aware, and symbiotic systems that treat capital as a living part of a thriving ecosystem.
Opinion
How Should We Be Exploring the Capital Allocation Design Space?
Gitcoin's challenge of balancing depth vs breadth in capital allocation design — and why network-first exploration beats hierarchical approaches for frontier innovation.
Report
Fair Fees: A Dynamic Formula for Balancing Value Creation and Value Capture
A proposed dynamic fee structure for onchain capital allocation mechanism builders that provides higher returns for smaller pools while decreasing to a minimal percentage for larger ones.
Opinion
From Chaos to Coordination: How Abundance Networks Can Transform Progressive Organizing
Progressive movements fragment across competing organizations — abundance networks offer coordination systems where individual success requires collective success.
Opinion
From Degen to Regen: The Cultural Shift in Crypto
How crypto culture evolved from speculative 'degen' gambling toward 'regen' public goods funding — and why the narrative matters as much as the mechanism.
Report
From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State and Back Again
How pre-New Deal America relied on fraternal organizations for social welfare, how the Great Depression overwhelmed those systems, and how blockchain and DAOs could enable a renaissance of localist capital allocation.
Opinion
From Tribes to LLCs to DAOs: The Evolution of Human Organization
Throughout history, humans have organized themselves in evolving structures - from egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes to feudal systems to corporations. DAOs represent the next chapter, reviving collective decision-making through blockchain technology.
Report
Gitcoin 3.3 (3,3): An Evolutionary Arena for Capital Allocation
A proposal to evolve Gitcoin into a modular ecosystem where builders compete to develop effective funding infrastructure, inspired by BitTensor's evolutionary model.
Book
Grassroots Economics
A guide to designing capital allocation systems that start at the edges — community-first, bottom-up, and locally grounded, emphasizing depth before breadth and trust before tokens.
Report
Guild Guild: A Locus of Coordination for Guilding
How guilds enable collective bargaining and resource pooling for Ethereum public goods, and a meta-guild to coordinate guild creation and governance.
Opinion
Hyperstitions: How Shared Beliefs Shape Onchain Realities
Fictions that make themselves real — how shared narratives function as coordination mechanisms, and how onchain systems encode and amplify collective belief into infrastructure.
Opinion
Liberating Attention: Humanity's Scarcest Resource
Human attention processes only 50 bits per second from millions of inputs — tech companies exploit this scarcity while programmable money offers paths to reclaim cognitive autonomy.
Opinion
Meaning Awareness: We Need New Ways to Find What Actually Matters
Modern systems excel at measuring clicks and engagement but fail at distinguishing what captures attention from what creates fulfillment — we need new approaches to meaning awareness.
Report
MEV for Public Goods Funding
How Maximal Extractable Value — the hidden tax on every Ethereum transaction — could be redirected to fund public goods infrastructure.
Report
Microsolidarity: Small-Group Patterns for Large-Scale Coordination
Richard Bartlett's microsolidarity framework offers a fractal organizational model — from dyads to congregations — that bridges the trust gap between individuals and large-scale coordination.
Report
Network Nations: Building Sovereignty Without Land
An exploration of how digitally-native communities are constructing functional sovereignty without territorial claims, from pop-up cities to blockchain governance.
Report
Networks vs. Hierarchies: Organizational Structures in the Digital Age
Hierarchies offer stability but resist change, while networks enable innovation through distributed authority — DAOs and blockchain create networks on steroids where code replaces managers.
Report
From Auction to Incubator: The Evolution of Nouns DAO Capital Deployment
How Nouns DAO evolved from direct proposals to Prop House to Flows.wtf, revealing broader patterns in onchain capital allocation.
Book
Onchain Capital Allocation Handbook: Volume 1 — Innovators Edition
A comprehensive guide for protocol developers, DAO architects, and mechanism designers — covering composability, modular design, and implementation pathways for onchain capital allocation.
Book
Onchain Capital Allocation Handbook: Volume 2 — Explorers Edition
A practical guide to experimenting with capital allocation onchain — introducing voting-based, market-driven, and reputation-weighted mechanisms for communities and DAOs.
Opinion
Onchain Capital Allocation Neural Networks (AlloNets)
Drawing lessons from neural networks to envision interconnected, adaptive onchain systems — AlloNets — that optimize capital distribution for public goods funding, collective action, and ecosystem growth.
Opinion
Our Choices, Our World: Thriving Together in an Uncertain Future
We have the agency to collectively shape our future - we should use it to choose a future where we maximize human thriving through new coordination mechanisms and blockchain technology.
Book
Pathways to Regeneration
An invitation to reimagine capital not as a tool of extraction but as a force for regeneration — weaving story, systems, and strategy into a new vision of how value flows through communities.
Perspective
The Case for Plural Funding Mechanisms
Why no single funding mechanism is optimal, and how ecosystems benefit from mechanism diversity.
Report
A Vision for Pluralistic Civilizational-Scale Infrastructure for Funding Public Goods
A framework for using blockchain-based ImpactDAOs and quadratic funding to create decentralized, global infrastructure for funding public goods at civilizational scale.
Perspective
Practical Pluralism
Why diversity of mechanisms, implementations, and approaches — like Ethereum's client diversity — is a primitive for antifragile, resilient, and regenerative systems.
Opinion
Review & Recap: Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression
A review of the book that presents a programmable economic grammar where value is defined, expressed, and allocated by networks — not capital.
Report
Sybil Resistance in Quadratic Funding: 2024 Approaches
An analysis of how Gitcoin Passport, MACI, and other approaches address sybil attacks in quadratic funding rounds.
Perspective
Reforming ETH Public Goods Funding in 2026+
How Ethereum public goods funding is shifting from vibes-based charity toward provable, mechanistic, and structurally sustainable systems.
Report
Impact Measurement in Retroactive Funding: Evolution Through RetroPGF 3-6
How Optimism has evolved its impact measurement approaches across four RetroPGF rounds, with lessons for the broader ecosystem.
Report
Revnets & Retailism: Can Autonomous Treasuries Fund Public Goods?
revnets propose a radical idea: deploy an immutable treasury once, and let it fund your project forever. no grants, no governance, no owners. here's how they work and what they mean for public goods funding.
Perspective
Shape Rotator's Guide to Funding What Matters
Mapping the multi-dimensional design space of capital allocation mechanisms for public goods funding.
Report
State of Public Goods Funding 2024
A comprehensive analysis of how public goods are funded across the Ethereum ecosystem, tracking capital flows, mechanism adoption, and emerging trends through 2024.
Report
Summer of Protocols: What Protocol Theory Teaches Us About Coordination
The Ethereum Foundation-funded Summer of Protocols initiative revealed protocols as civilization's dark matter — and its findings reshape how we think about public goods funding.
Opinion
The DAO of DAOs
A DAO of DAOs is an interconnected network where organizations collaborate through social, technical, and governance layers - moving beyond competition to create an ecosystem where DAOs collectively thrive through mutual support.
Opinion
The Evolution of Surplus Distribution: From Hunter-Gatherers to Onchain Systems
The history of human economic organization traced through how societies generate and distribute surplus — from communal sharing to hierarchical command to programmable onchain systems.
Report
The Gitcoin/GitcoinDAO Egregore Is Emerging
A philosophical manifesto and strategic roadmap for Gitcoin's transformation from centralized platform to DAO, framed around three core optimization problems and long-term vision scenarios.
Report
The Great Interregnum: Where Capital Flows After Institutional Breakdown
Old systems still make money but no longer work for most people, and new web3 tools that help people coordinate and share value fairly could become the next big place where power and investment move.
Opinion
The Metacrisis: Coordination Failure at Civilizational Scale
Humanity faces interconnected systemic crises — climate, AI, biodiversity, inequality — driven by the same generator functions: multipolar traps, perverse incentives, and coordination failure. The third attractor points toward distributed coordination as the way out.
Book
The Networked Firm: Capital Allocation in the Age of Blockchain and AI
Why AI and blockchain are turning rigid companies into adaptive networks — and how to operate and allocate capital in this new era where the cost of cognition and trust approach zero.
Perspective
The Wells Are All Dry: Regen Web3 at a Crossroads
A frank assessment of the regen web3 ecosystem's stagnation after the 2021-2025 era of onchain public goods funding, arguing for a pivot from vibes-driven grants to revenue-generating applications with real product-market fit.
Report
Values in Programmable Money: More Than Code
Programmable money like Ethereum enables embedding diverse human values — ethical, social, political, environmental — directly into monetary systems, reshaping economics and governance.
Report
Web3 Funding Fatigue: A Growing Problem
How fragmented funding processes create fatigue for both grantees and funders, and aggregation-based solutions to reduce coordination overhead.
Analysis
What If Gitcoin Grants Had Been Early-Stage Investments?
A counterfactual analysis of Gitcoin's $767K in early matching grants, estimating a hypothetical ~$20M portfolio if structured as seed-stage equity.
Opinion
What Nature Can Teach Us About Allocating Capital
How ecological principles from 3.8 billion years of evolution can inform better capital allocation, resilience, and regenerative economic design.
Report
Why I Am Holon Maximalist
How the concept of holons — wholes that are simultaneously parts — provides a framework for expanding quadratic funding across overlapping communities for compounding impact.
Contribute Research
Have insights to share? Submit original analysis, reports, or trend pieces. We maintain a high bar — only well-researched submissions are accepted.
Submit Research