Solana DAOs can now bug you to vote with phone calls and texts

You’ll never have an excuse to miss another governance vote if the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) calls or texts  to badger you to vote. 

The Notifi Network is banking on this concept to help improve abysmal participation rates in governance votes. Launching with Solana DAOs, it combines popular centralized methods used by the Web3 community such as 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 that launch on the Solana Realms DAO platform.

— Notifi (@NotifiNetwork) April 26, 2022

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

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

As it stands, chat rooms on Telegram and Discord are among the most common ways DAO participants stay in touch with the project. However, Kim feels this method is inefficient as he said “most users keep their crypto chats muted due to the high volume of messages.”

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

Kim hopes to turn the tide on low participation by allowing DAO participants on Realms to choose various ways they can be notified when a governance proposal has been issued. These 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 do not initially respond.

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 around email from Web2 when we leaped into Web3. Can we challenge the paradigms of Web3 by using Web2 primitives?”

There is clearly a problem with voter participation on Solana DAOs. According to data from DAO tracker DeepDAO, fewer than 1% of governance token holders on Solana’s top three DAOs — UXDProtocol (UXP), Mango DAO (MNGO), and Serum (SRM) — are active members. There are 500 DAOs on Realms with a collective treasury value of $1.5 billion according to Kim.

In an Apr 24 blog post by Notifi, Solana Labs DAO Software Engineer Sebastian Bor agreed that notification services are currently not pulling their weight for DAOs. He stated, “Notifications are an integral part of informing community members about DAO activity.”

Related: Decentralized finance: The best ways to participate and operate

Eventually, Kim said his service “could be used for all on-chain activity including trades and airdrops, sells, and liquidation alerts.” However, for now “Realms is the proving ground” to figure out if his solution can enable users to step away from their keyboard:

“We’re eager to see what the data shows us and what trends actually exist about messaging platform utilization.”