Solana DAOs can now get you to vote with phone calls and text messages

Fry Electronics TeamApril 28, 2022
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Solana DAOs can now get you to vote with phone calls and text messages

You’ll never have an excuse to miss another government vote when the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) calls or texts you to vote.

The Notifi network is using this concept to help improve the miserable turnout rates in governance votes. It starts with Solana DAOs and combines popular centralized methods used by the Web3 community like Telegram and Discord pings with more traditional and harder to ignore notifications like phone calls, text messages or emails.

Backed by crypto venture capital firms Race Capital and Hashed, on April 24, Notifi applied its notification service to all DAOs launching on the Solana Realms DAO platform.

Notifi founder Paul Kim told Cointelegraph that his project’s mission is simple:

“We want to encourage communities to become more active. You bought the tokens, so you should use them.”

Currently, chat rooms on Telegram and Discord are among the most common ways DAO participants stay in touch with the project. However, Kim considers this method to be inefficient, as he said, “Most users keep their crypto chats on mute due to the high volume of messages.”

This makes it difficult for users to know when new proposals have been made in time for a vote.

Kim hopes to turn the tide on the low turnout by allowing DAO participants on realms to choose different ways they can be notified when a governance proposal is issued. Those notifications could start with Telegram or Discord direct messages, but Kim said they can be “escalated” to email, text messages, and even a phone call if they don’t respond at first.

Although email, SMS and especially phone calls are not common means of communication in the Web3 world, Kim believes they should serve a very important function for DAOs.

“For some reason we just skipped email from Web2 when we jumped to Web3. Can we challenge Web3 paradigms by using Web2 primitives?”

There is clearly a turnout issue with Solana DAOs. According to data from DAO tracker DeepDAO, less than 1% of the governance token holders of Solana’s top three DAOs – UXDProtocol (UXP), Mango DAO (MNGO) and Serum (SRM) – are active members. According to Kim, there are 500 DAOs on Realms with a collective appraised value of $1.5 billion.

In an April 24 blog post by Notifi, Solana Labs DAO software engineer Sebastian Bor agreed that notification services do not currently benefit from DAOs. He explained, “Notifications are an essential part of letting community members know about DAO activity.”

Related: Decentralized Funding: The Best Ways to Participate and Operate

Finally, Kim said his service “can be used for all on-chain activity, including trades and airdrops, sales and liquidation alerts.” For now, Realms is the proving ground to see if its solution can allow users to step away from their keyboard:

“We are curious to see what the data shows us and what trends there are actually in the use of messaging platforms.”