Grants: Virtually every major DAO has a Grants Program at this point. These are often run by a small group of community-elected contributors who are responsible for reviewing grant requests and allocating capital accordingly. Protocol DAOs like Compound, Uniswap, Aave, and others have massive pools of capital that they’re distributing to those that... See more

Coordinape: Coordinape is a web3-native compensation tool that spun out of the Yearn ecosystem. To quickly summarize, it’s a peer assessment-based tool where contributors can allocate “GIVE” tokens to their colleagues based on the amount of work they’ve done over some period of time. At the end of the round, users split the pool of funds pro-rata b... See more

Bounties: Bounties have been around the crypto ecosystem for a while, but are starting to pick up traction again due to the emergence of digital work for DAOs. Bounties typically feature discrete tasks that allow individuals, especially newer community members, to get involved and add value to the DAO in return for native token compensation.

SourceCred: SourceCred is another web3-native tool that’s arisen in popularity among certain communities, namely FWB. SourceCred offers an interesting way to reward community members for their participation in discussions like Discord and Governance proposals on the forum. To summarize how this works, similar to Coordinape, the SourceCred software ... See more

DAO infrastructure is an emerging sector, and novel compensation mechanisms are a key part of it. Fortunately, over the past year or so, we’ve seen more tools to help compensate contributors in various ways. The sector has also seen well-funded DAOs adopt more traditional mechanisms like USD-based salaries that feature token-based compensation pack... See more