This Week in DeFi – January 28

To the DeFi community,

This week, SuperDAO raised $10.5 million in a seed funding round, aiming to make it ‘absurdly easy’ for anyone to start and operate their own DAO. The SuperDAO framework will enable DAOs to raise funds via token sales, distribute equity to DAO members, manage a unified treasury, provide a newsfeed to DAO participants, and more.

1/ Launch day 🎉 Superdao has raised $10.5M at $160M valuation to make it absurdly easy to start and operate DAOs.

Here’s why we are building an all-in-one DAO platform

Thread👇 pic.twitter.com/7UJAIDey8J

— Superdao 🦸 (@superdao_co) January 26, 2022

A proposal to the BitDAO community authored by Matter Labs and Mirian passed, directing $200m in funding to zkDAO to advance the push for zero-knowledge based scaling on Ethereum and beyond. 

1/ New Soft Proposal: @the_matter_labs x @Mirana: zkDAO Endowment

This proposal creates and funds a community owned #zkSync ecosystem accelerator with $200M that helps bootstrap the @zksync ecosystem, empowers builders, and enables the fractal growth of #BitDAO and all DAOs. pic.twitter.com/wU4A3zyd7t

— BitDAO (@BitDAO_Official) January 6, 2022

Blockchain data provider HAL raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by CoinFund to support the growth and development of on-chain data analytics services. Aave users also voted to integrate HAL notifications into the DeFi platform, initially to provide notifications about borrowing position health factors to reduce the risk of liquidations.

@HAL_Team makes blockchain data more accessible + useful – for normal users – whether for governance, trading or compliance

It doesn’t sound sexy, but this shit is important

And is as relevant to protocol teams as to traders

Delighted to back such an amazing team & mission https://t.co/EsaHSsscdk

— Dermot O’Riordan (@Dermot_Oriordan) January 26, 2022

And Syndicate introduced Web3 investing clubs, purportedly making starting an investing DAO as easy as starting a group chat. Syndicate’s Web3 investment clubs exist as ERC-20 components so they can easily hook in with other DeFi tools and protocols, and are designed to bridge the gap between traditional investing groups and Web3 native investing by offering deposit and share management, generating legal docs, providing investment analytics, and more.

Today @SyndicateDAO launched its first DAO-powered investing tool built on Syndicate Protocol 🚀

Web3 Investment Clubs enable friends, investors, builders, and creators to come together natively on the internet and support the projects and communities they care about most. https://t.co/FpHAmebN5u

— Ian ✺ (@ianDAOs) January 25, 2022

DAOs on DAOs this week, and more about their infrastructure and tooling versus their specific investing or building goals. That’s one way you can tell this cycle is different from the ICO craze that peaked in 2017 – at the time, even the most basic tools beyond the Ethereum protocol level (a much less competitive base layer race back then!) were still under development, even as projects with little more than a whitepaper raised millions.

An easier means to make intelligent investment decisions is also an exciting result of these new DAO tooling announcements, increasing the efficiency of non-institutional investors pooling their knowledge and resources by 10 or 100x. These advancements in payroll, share funding collection and distribution, productivity management, analytics, and more should help capital allocators separate the good projects from the bad, while also laying important groundwork for DAOs with even wider ranging goals.

Likewise, quiet projects like HAL that materially improve the user experience for everyday users through better data availability stand to have a huge long-term impact on widespread adoption of decentralized protocols. The Aave integration is also a nice example of community governance bringing small but meaningful proposals into the spotlight, allowing them to be prioritized and implemented much faster than in a top-down organization.

When you see dozens or hundreds of investing DAOs making positive contributions to the Web3 industry a year from now, think back to weeks like this, when the tools were just being released. DAOs are already experiencing explosive growth, and the recent emphasis on the metaverse and our lives online in general will only accelerate the trend. Have you joined a DAO yet?

Thanks to our partner:

Total Value Locked: $76.24B (down -17.45% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $102.32B (down -18.27%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $19.82B (up 56.91%)

DAI Supply: 9.1B (down -1.07%)

[Owen Fernau – The Defiant] – MakerDAO’s Expulsion of Content Team Stirs Debate About Tougher Governance

[Fabian Klauder – DeFi Times] – Is 2022 the Year of Cosmos Airdrops?

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Decentralization Matters – The Daily Gwei #426

[Polynya – Bankless] – Why Layer 2s are the future

[Chris Williams – Crypto Briefing] – Daniele Sestagalli Projects Tank Amid Wonderland Drama

Alex is a Content Writer at Circle, with previous experience at tech startups, Fortune 500 corporations, and as a freelance writer and analyst. Interests include cutting-edge technologies in blockchain, energy, supply chains, transportation, urban living, and more and he has been in the crypto community since 2014.