The MetaDAO Thesis

MetaDAO is my highest-conviction low-cap altcoin. And this is my thesis.

metadao.fi

But first, let’s lay some groundwork — WTF is MetaDAO?

MetaDAO is building decision markets. It’s similar to Polymarket but with some key differences. In a prediction market, you bet on what you think will happen. In a decision market, you bet on what you think should happen. Prediction markets are passive. You sit on the couch, watch the game, and bet on who you think will win. You have skin in the game but no control over the outcome. Decision markets are active. By speculating, you are actually influencing the outcome.

At the heart of MetaDAO is “futarchy,” which is essentially just prediction markets for decisions. Futarchy is not a new idea. It was invented by famed economist Robin Hanson in 2000, and Vitalik wrote about it in 2014. But MetaDAO is the first attempt to bring futarchy onchain.

Futarchy is not some niche governance tooling or another ve-voting ponzi. It’s a new tool for human coordination based on the belief that markets are superior to human decision-making. In futarchy, markets make decisions, not elected officials or voters.

Let’s walk thru a quick example:

You are the CEO of UpOnly Protocol, which has a whopping $50 million treasury. You want to use a portion of the funds — $UPONLY tokens — to accelerate adoption of your protocol, so you decide to spend $1 million on a marketing campaign. You’re considering spending it all on Twitter ads, but first want to gather feedback from the community. At a high level, there are three ways to do this:

  1. Token Voting
  2. Prediction Market
  3. Decision Market

Token Voting:

It’s exactly what it sounds like. 1 token = 1 vote. If 100 tokens vote for ‘Yay’ and 99 tokens vote ‘Nay’ then ‘Yay’ wins and you proceed with the ad campaign on Twitter. Token voting is the current paradigm in crypto governance and is riddled with issues. The biggest issue is that most people are lazy and refuse to participate in governance. A close second is token voting is relatively easy for whales to man

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the key issue i'm grappling with is the following - as a profit-seeking individual trading on metadao, i'm not really incentivized by thinking what's best for the protocol, but rather i'm thinking what most people will think will be best for the protocol. these two don't necessarily always align.

for example, a protocol might run a proposal on whether to deploy on three additional chains. in most cases it's probably not a good idea, but this being an industry trend, the wisdom of the crowd will probably vote for it. hence, i'd also trade in favor in order to profit, despite knowing it probably won't move the needle for the protocol.

this is different to polymarket where i know i will be financially rewarded in the end if i'm right about the core of the issue, even if the wisdom of the crowd points to the other direction before the market resolves.

Just checked out the docs/website and this doesn't look easy to use tbh. I reckon that's where your reference about AI comes in for a future write-up.

Echoing the other comment: What's the value accrual for the token?

And what do you think about Gnosis trying to implement futarchy for ages w/out any success? Is their failure purely due to being overly focussed on prediction market design?

yea the UX needs work. metadao is working with paradigm's designer on this right now. it will get better, they just need some time. this is also a totally new concept so i think there will naturally be some "how do we best present this info" type lessons the team needs to work thru

there is no value accrual for the token right now, just like 99% of crypto tokens. i think going forward there's a couple ways to think about this. 1) teams might pay some SaaS-type model for access to metadao's futarchy platform. i think this would be a bearish outcome. or 2) metadao could charge a small taker fee on every futarchic market trade. i think this would be the bullish scenario as its obv more scalable

monetizing on volume is nice too bc its partially a function of arbitrage. metadao essentially spins up parallel (futarchic) markets for tokens so as long as there's a discrepancy in price b/w the futarchic market and the normal spot market, there's an arb oppty which drives volume and could eventually fuel value accrual for the META token

also, prophet - the metadao founder - is laser focused on value accrual, more than most founders i've seen. he doesn't want meta to be "just another worthless computer coin." check out this tweet:

https://x.com/metaproph3t/status/1760135748781547985

on gnosis - my understanding is they never really tried it. they wrote a bunch of blog posts about it but were never willing to give up control. metadao is actually using futarchy into prod. they let the market decide the founders' salaries, whether they should burn 99% of the treasury, and whether they should get VC funding. they are all it on futarchy, gnosis never was

I hadn’t realized that $Drift is the first real protocol to implement the Futarchy approach with MetaDAO for all their governance votes.

I’m a huge fan of this step-wise improvement to alignment of investors/asset holders in governance. But I didn’t see anything in any of the MetaDAO docs about potential value accrual to the token.

Is there an active discord community worth paying attention to? It seems very early stages for this project, with a huge TAM, I can’t wait to see where this new gov model can take the industry.

i would highly recommend joining the metadao discord

discord: https://discord.com/invite/metadao

the reason i first became interested in metadao was bc i noticed some of the smartest ppl in the solana eco talking about it. many top solana founders are active in the metadao discord - phoenix, solana labs/foundation, temporal, drift, etc. the caliber of conversation in the chat is really high

yea value accrual will come. i think probably as some sorta small taker fee. the important thing to watch here is the volume metadao proposals are doing bc that's prob the best leading indicator

https://x.com/airtightfish/status/1829274711253278740