How Can DAO Facilitate Efficient Fundraising?
In the recent Russia-Ukraine conflict, the value of crypto assets is being discovered and adopted by an increasing number of people. Russia has attempted to use crypto assets for counter-sanctions, while Ukraine has used crypto assets to collect donations. Since the outbreak of the war, a large number of crypto assets, including tokens and NFTs, have been sent to Ukraine. Of course, recent donations are not as simple as directly sending money — more Web3 technologies and community power are making unique contributions to peace and humanitarian efforts.
Knowledge and technology, civilization and goodness, art and beauty — these know no borders and can even transcend stance and ideology. In times of crisis, we see crypto assets playing a borderless role. This is made possible by years of Web3 development and accumulation.
1. DAO Supports Humanitarian Aid
One of the major values of blockchain technology is that it can embody consensus as value in the form of tokens or NFTs, and transmit that value to where it is needed. Many bottom-up forces are gathering in the Web3 community to help those suffering from war.
RELI3F is a humanitarian aid initiative launched by the Web3 community, in which 37 artists raised funds through crowdfunding by donating 37 NFT works. These NFTs sold out within 30 seconds of launch, raising 370 ETH. As of March 3, the trading volume of these NFTs has exceeded 620 ETH. These funds will be donated to non-profit organizations in war-affected areas. RELI3F founder Andrew Wang said, "If web3 empowers artists, we can unite artists and lead with art to make an impact. People within the NFT community and ecosystem can see how passion for art/collectibles can quickly translate into practical help."
Ukraine DAO is a DAO organization launched by the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, NFT studio Trippy Labs, and NFT bidding organization Pleasr, aiming to provide support to Ukraine and help those suffering from the war. People around the world can directly donate crypto assets to the organization and receive corresponding native LOVE tokens; they can also participate in bidding for Ukraine's 1/1 national flag NFTs and receive POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol, an ERC-721 token).
On March 3, the national flag NFT was sold for 2,258 ETH (approximately $67.5 million), with $1.86 million coming from the NFT collection "Censored" created by digital artist Pak and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The proceeds from the auction will be donated to the non-governmental organization Come Back Alive, which will distribute supplies to Ukrainian civilians. Ukraine DAO also provides support to war-affected areas in child rescue, hope projects, medical aid, and journalist protection, while also recruiting psychologist volunteers to provide psychological counseling to civilians who have suffered mental trauma from the war.
The Unchain Fund has also launched a crypto-native fundraising campaign, with more than 700 volunteers supporting humanitarian aid in Ukraine. The fund has received donations from multiple crypto communities, and these funds will be used to purchase food, clothing, medicine for civilians, and to assist with evacuation, repairs, reconstruction, and more. This week, the Unchain Fund also plans to launch a DAO to decide how to use these funds.
In the face of war, we have witnessed a perfect use case for crypto assets and DAOs. Due to their inherently global nature, crypto assets have become a powerful new crowdfunding tool in practice. Donating through crypto assets not only eliminates the many steps of cross-border transfers but also facilitates transparent public audit trails for donations. DAO organizations have also demonstrated their efficiency and flexibility — when faced with a single goal, people quickly gather and form communities, rapidly decompose tasks, and act in parallel. Amid the cruelty of war, technology does seem to be making the world a better place.
2. DAO Applications and Practical Accumulation
Since the outbreak of the war, the rapid launch and effective organization of numerous fundraising and aid efforts by the crypto community has been made possible by years of DAO development and accumulation.
DAO is a brand-new organizational collaboration method that enables organizations to achieve self-operation, self-governance, and self-evolution through intelligent management tools and token economics incentives, without being controlled by centralized institutions.
Specifically, DAO possesses both decision-making and execution capabilities: it can sense the collective will of members, make decisions in a gentle and smooth manner, and incentivize members to cooperate and execute through methods such as tokenizing decisions, achieving DAO's collective goals with minimal trust costs. At the same time, all economic activities and rules of DAO are recorded on the blockchain without third-party involvement, giving DAO strong independence.
On April 30, 2016, The DAO project launched, formally opening up the imagination space for on-chain collaboration. In the summer of 2021, YGG gaming guilds were in full swing, drawing ordinary people from underdeveloped regions into the crypto world. In November 2021, Constitution DAO raised $45 million from 17,437 global donors in just 6 days to bid on a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Although the bid failed, Constitution DAO announced it would shut down operations and return the funds. However, after going community-based, Constitution DAO achieved broader success, becoming a model for DAO practice and meme movements.
Constitution DAO also sparked a wave of DAO fervor, followed by Free Ross DAO, Open DAO, Assange DAO, and others emerging in succession. The decentralized self-governance vision of DAOs perfectly aligned with various grand narratives. People funded and protected freedom of speech through joint NFT bidding, protected online privacy and anonymity, or users gathered to launch their own tokens to pressure project teams, or even sent ordinary people to space to explore the stars……Everyone worked towards common ideals and symbols of freedom, launching spontaneous online social movements. Of course, tokenized incentives also attracted speculators, putting rebellious ideals to the test of reality. Nonetheless, this was undoubtedly disruptive and provided inspiration for DAOs today that are helping humanitarian aid.
DAO is certainly not limited to grand narratives. At present, many DAOs with different orientations are emerging, such as creator DAOs, which aim to build a brand-new creator economy and bring stable, decent income to quality creators. The basic model involves using NFTs to tokenize ownership of digital content, forming a closed loop of content-based production, investment, trading, and consumption; groups gathered around content form temporary DAOs to collaborate on decentralized content production. This loose, heterogeneous connection makes creation more dynamic. Today, the practical applications of creator DAOs have expanded from text content to music, video, film, and more, continuously giving rise to increasingly complex and large-scale crowdfunding and sharing models.
In addition, DAOs are also combining with various hot sectors and entering every corner of the Web3 world. For example, fractional bidding DAOs focused on NFT investment, where members collectively decide which NFT artworks to invest in, and can split, lend, curate, or collateralize the acquired NFTs on other DeFi platforms; or venture DAOs focused on investing in DeFi projects, which pool individual strength through DAO organizations and use collective wisdom to reduce investment risk. In these DAO practices, community participants have accumulated extensive experience, including how to establish reasonable incentive systems, token issuance and distribution, community voting and decision-making, member communication and collaboration, and more.
These inspiring applications and practices are made possible by the technical support provided by various DAO tools and ecosystems.
3. Modular DAO Tools Enable Efficient Fundraising
In the past two years, various services for DAO operating systems have gradually improved. These projects provide standardized templates, frameworks, tools, and other underlying services for DAO creation and operation, enabling users to launch a DAO with zero code. This has largely reduced the time and technical costs of establishing on-chain aid organizations, making DAOs more flexible and efficient.
DAO operating systems can be divided into DAO launchers and tools. DAO launchers are functional frameworks for starting and running DAOs. Their specific functions can be divided into six major modules: proposal submission systems, proposal discussion systems, proposal approval systems, resolution and module systems, network service systems, and Gas fee systems. Each major module can be further subdivided and implemented through different methods.
Most existing DAO launcher projects cover all six modules simultaneously, but differ in their implementation methods, forming unique DAO governance suites. Representative projects include Aragon, Moloch, Elastic DAO, and DAO Stack. Compared to a few years ago, DAO launchers have become more diverse and modular.
Overview of DAO Launcher Ecosystem Source: deepdao
DAO tools can help teams create customized functional modules or facilitate DAO participant governance. Specific functions include asset management, governance tools, voting platforms, data and statistical analysis, identity verification, media and social tools, etc., covering the needs of an increasing number of DAO creators and participants. Representative tools include Gnosis Safe, Tally, Snapshot, Collab Land, Parcel, IDX, and more. Among them, Gnosis Safe's托管 funds量和Trading量 grew threefold in 2021; authorization activity on Snapshot has increased significantly since September of last year.
Among the various crypto fundraising efforts during this period, the most representative projects are Juice Box and Party Bid. Juice Box helps solve DAO treasury management, while Party Bid is used for collective bidding on NFTs. These modular governance tools have made establishing and carrying out a donation campaign no longer difficult.
With the help of modular DAO launchers and tools, some emerging DAOs like Nns DAO allow their members to join any subset of DAOs, contribute to projects, move between platforms, or run different programs and applications. Meanwhile, the autonomous organization LAO has begun spawning other DAOs focused on investments in specific areas, becoming a DAO incubator.
It can be foreseen that various types of DAOs will further explore new features of being open, interoperable, and composable, gradually solving the "DAO island" problem; and adapt to the diverse needs of existing or future projects, becoming a true "organizational Lego" and Web3.0 infrastructure.
DAOs may also integrate the power of more ordinary people, convert more consensus into value, and transmit goodwill to every corner of the world.
Disclaimer
This article may contain product-related content not applicable to your region. This article is only committed to providing general information and is not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. This article represents only the author's personal views and does not represent the views of OKX. This article is not intended to provide any advice, including but not limited to: (i) investment advice or investment recommendations; (ii) offers or solicitations to purchase, sell, or hold digital assets; or (iii) financial, accounting, legal, or tax advice. Holding digital assets (including stablecoins) involves high risk and prices may fluctuate significantly or even become worthless. You should carefully consider whether trading or holding digital assets is suitable for you based on your financial situation. For questions specific to your situation, please consult your legal/tax/investment professional. The information in this article (including market data and statistical information, if any) is provided for general reference purposes only. Although we have taken all reasonable precautions in preparing this data and these charts, we assume no responsibility for any factual errors or omissions expressed herein. © 2025 OKX. This article may be reproduced or distributed in its entirety, or excerpts of 100 words or less may be used, provided that such use is for non-commercial purposes. Any reproduction or distribution of the full article must prominently state: "This article is copyrighted © 2025 OKX, used with permission." Permitted excerpts must cite the article title and include attribution, for example, "Article title, [author name (if applicable)], © 2025 OKX". Some content may be generated or assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Derivative works or other uses of this article are not permitted.
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