Hey all! Hope you are doing well. So, Week 5 is almost over and this week was all about DAOs. We also created our own ERC-20 token (more on that later). This time I want to start with this week's session, then we will go over study material and then the assignments.

Session with Marco about DAOs and Polygon

To start of, we had a session with Marco, who is the DAO Lead at Polygon. He talked about DAOs on Polygon and progressive decentralization. I am writing down the key points I learned from this session below.

• DAO term became popular in 2014, coined by Vitalik himself. In 2016,the DAO hack happened. The DAOs made a comeback in 2018-21 and we are finally at 2022.
• I also learned the definition of a DAO, DAOs are basically Decentralized Organizations. You can learn about them here.
• Some common problems faced by DAOs are, Plutocracy, Meritocracy, immature tooling, member onboarding, involvement, legal framework etc.
• Polygon is working on DAO Tooling, and recently they announced Polygon ID, which is a zero knowledge identity solution.
• There are tonnes of DAOs on Polygon like QiDAO, SyndicateDAO, Bankless DAO.
• Polygon also has a plethora of DAO Tooling available like Aragon, Layer3, DAOHaus, MintGate etc.
• Polygon also has it's own DAO on Polygon Mainnet, called Polygon Village. It helps developers to build and grow on Polygon. You can learn more about it here

Week 5: Study Material

Okay! Honestly most of the study material was covered in the session itself, but there were some points that were left out. I will cover them below:

The Ins and Outs of DAO (Whitepaper)

The study material referred us this paper, which provides an in-depth study of DAOs by analyzing definitions, characteristics and emerging developments.

DAOs vs Traditional Organizations

There are tonnes of points that makes DAO different from traditional organizations. These include:

• Decision Making in DAOs is led by a group of core contributors whereas in Traditional Organizations we have hierarchical structure
• DAOs have proposals and vote system vs in traditional organization, most decisions are made behind closed doors.
• Anyone can join a DAO
• DAOs are completely transparent. You can read more about these differences here.

How DAOs work

• The magic that enables DAOs operations with trust is Smart Contract. It holds the treasury of the DAOs and defines rules and logic for it. For example let's say we have a DAO that provides grants, these grants are held by the Smart Contract and released on the basis of votes.
• Usually DAOs have two modes of memberships, Token Based, where users hold tokens which act as a way to vote and share based. You can read more about them here.

Types of DAOs

There are several types of DAOs like Social, Investment, Learning, Protocol, Commerce, Media DAOs, etc. You can learn about some of these types here.

Contributing to DAOs

I loved the tweet embedded in the study material

And yeah, that's the summary of how you can contribute to DAOs, if you have less time, participate in community conversations, maybe share a meme or two. If you have more time you can start working with core teams, maybe you can write content for them or start developing for them. It's all upto you.

Week 5 Assignments:

Making an ERC-20 Token:

So, we have already done this in previous weeks, so this time I decided to do something different. Introducing ILOS token. A token made for the love of open source. The idea is simple, you can mint the token if you are a Open Source maintainer. The token can be minted only once though.

Joining a DAO

This was more of a experience based Assignment. I have decided to join Builder DAO for it.