How DAOs and NFTs work together?

DAOs are decentralized organizations formed to accomplish a common mission through community governance instead of a central authority. They range from investor and protocol DAOs to philanthropy, service, and DeFi DAOs. 

As strong pillars of web3, NFTs are at the center of developments in all kinds of DAOs, continuing to play essential roles in realizing the vision of a decentralized world. 

NFTs and collector DAOs 

NFTs from well-known collections are often very expensive. Collector DAOs manage such exclusive NFT assets. To this end, they sometimes get involved in collecting art and monetization activities to support the blockchain art ecosystem, and other times they provide exciting investment opportunities.

Fingerprints DAO, for example, builds a curated NFT art collection and acts as an incubator for new art projects. The DAO’s collection includes preeminent generative art NFT pieces, such as Larva Labs’ Autoglyphs and Protoglyph, Deafbeef’s Series 0-5, and Mathcastles’ Terraforms. Members decide how DAO’s treasury should be spent to expand this collection. Membership requires holding 5,000 PRINT tokens, the governance token of the DAO. 

Another well-known DAO integrated with NFT art is Flamingo DAO which explores investment opportunities. By fractionalizing valuable NFT assets, it enables collective ownership. The portfolio of Flamingo DAO includes 215 CryptoPunks and 22 Bored Apes NFTS and is now worth $1B. It’s one of the most exclusive DAOs, though, only open to accredited U.S. investors, and new members are buying in at 3,000 ETH. 

DAOs, NFTs, and real-life events

Some DAOs have powerful social elements because, along with digital gatherings, they host real-life events. 

For instance, Friends with Benefits is a network of worldwide creators, builders, and thinkers. The DAO manages an NFT art gallery, and through real-life events like the one held in Paris, it fosters collaborations around the NFT ecosystem. 

Bright Moments, an NFT art collective, focuses on real-life NFT minting. In an upcoming event that will be held in Mexico City from November 14 – 21, more than 3,000 generative artworks will be minted live, along with several training sessions on generative art creation. 

NFTs help fund DAOs’ missions

As a valuable asset class with many forms of utilities, NFTs also serve as a means of crowdfunding.  

Krause House is a DAO governed by basketball lovers whose mission is to own an NBA team. To be a member, owning a Krause NFT ticket is necessary. These tickets come with usual NFT utilities like accessing Discord channels, claiming special community roles, and eligibility for airdrops and raffles. The DAO is funding the steps of its roadmap through these NFT ticket sales. During the first funding round, for instance, 1,000ETH was raised. 

Governance of NFT marketplaces

Another area where we see DAOs and NFTs work together is NFT marketplaces. 

These marketplaces usually issue their own governance tokens. For instance, Rarible has the RARI that grants its holders voting power and is allocated to support new web3 projects built on the Rarible Protocol. 

SuperRare DAO has RARE as the governance token. Holders can create SuperRare Improvement Proposals (SIPs) that function as soft community consensus before the official voting. RARE is also used to support SuperRare collections and curations. 

Both RARE and RARI are ERC-20 tokens that are fungible. Another NFT marketplace, Mintable, has a slightly different approach. Instead of ERC-20 tokens, it uses NFTs for DAO voting. Every user that buys votes is given a unique NFT. The NFT owners can then vote for future upgrades, choose which artists and collections will be featured, and decide on the platform’s fee policy. 

Final Worlds

These are just some ways DAOs and NFTs work together to shape the future of web3. When we think about the infinite possibilities that can emerge from the convergence of decentralized finance, different types of NFTs, and new token formats, we’ll clearly witness many more applications where DAOs and NFTs leverage the best parts of each other.