The Badger Enabled Tool Stack for On-Chain Communities
Decentralization comes with pros and cons.
As anyone that has ever been in a club of peers outside of the professional world can attest, coordination does not come easy. Take that group, make it digital and semi-anonymous, and management of members and overhead becomes near impossible without the right systems and infrastructure in place.
Organizations all come with their unique functions and needs, but the foundational components necessary for effective operation are generally the same. All have to enable their members within the systems they use, protect valuable information and assets, provide direction and guidelines, facilitate communication, and collect data on their functions.
Membership management is vital to interface with a majority of the tools available for Web3 organizations that are needed to operate an org. Yet, there has long been a lack of viable solutions with the flexibility and ease of access necessary for organizational usage; until Badger.
Access and Identification
The primary need of all organizations is the ability to determine access and identification.
- Who are the members?
- How do they get access?
- What roles are they in?
- How is all of this managed?
Badger provides access for the members of on-chain organizations in the form of ERC1155 NFTs, or Badges. Badges can represent members’ roles, accomplishments, reputation, level of access, or permissions and can be customized and managed to any degree desired. Badger allows organizations to:
- Deploy their unique contract
- Create and customize NFTs for their on-chain member identifiers
- Identify, group, and label members
- Manage ownership through minting, claiming with criteria, revoking, and locking transfers
With Badges, organizations have full control of how they integrate their services and resources with the other foundational DAO tools, as well as everything else the blockchain offers. Badges are the keys to the locks of Web3, unlocking the plethora of features gated behind token ownership.
Badger operates as a no-code solution for organizations seeking an on-chain presence. The site provides forms, documentation, and data dashboards for the membership, permissions, and analytics of an org.
For more technical users, Badger also acts as a customizable framework utilizing open-sourced smart contracts. The contracts can be inherited from and provide a foundation for altering to fit all of the nuanced requirements that an organization may need.
Dynamic versioning even allows the ability for third-party developers to create their unique implementations and charge a fee for usage. These dynamic versions are still indexed and able to be utilized with the Badger application.
Governance
With DAOs avoiding a traditional leadership structure, a system of member governance is crucial to handle major decisions and align the organization with its members. A secure and trusted platform to conduct the decision-making and voting drives engagement with governance and provides confidence in a fair process.
Snapshot is the most accessible and prominently used platform for managing voting and proposals. Voting is done off-chain, with no gas fees or transactions necessary for a member to vote.
On-chain voting is more involved and requires more setup, but Tally offers a platform and detailed guide. Paying gas is required for each voter, but the results are more secure and can be used as a method of controlling other on-chain effects.
Using Badges, governance with Snapshot and Tally can be easily gated, as well as customized to provide members with varying amounts of voting equity.
Badges can be used to designate a vote restricted to a specific Badge or role, such as those who have been involved for more than a couple of months. They can also act as a balance, similar to ERC20 votes used by many DeFi protocols, where members receive more than one instance of a Badge that represents their voting power.
Communication and Organization
There isn’t a water cooler to hang around and discuss the daily ongoings within a digital organization (at least until Meta spends just a few billion more on VR). As a result, internal comms necessitate a more casual environment than Slack, Zoom or Google Meets
Many people oppose Discord for a variety of reasons, and it may not be a native Web3 or decentralized tool, but the accessibility and customization are hard to beat. There is a reason it is the choice of the majority of Web3 projects. With the right setup and server structure, a Discord can also fill the role of the office water cooler in a very effective and personal way.
For managing access to pertinent information and protecting the more sensitive conversations, Guild.xyz is the tool preferred by the market to manage what digital spaces the members of an organization have access to.
Combining Badger with Guild, Discord channels, Telegram groups, Google Workspaces, and GitHub repositories can be gated behind the ownership of a role-based Badge with a negligible amount of time and effort on the Badger and Guild apps. Guild also has extremely thorough documentation, quick indexing of token ownership changes, and a team that continues to ship new features.
Properly utilized, the Badger and Guild synergy enables organizations to have full control over the communication avenues offered to their members.
Treasury Management
Every organization, from two members to two thousand members, should take every precaution when it comes to protecting their assets and administrator access.
We have all seen the extremely regular occurrence of hacks, phishing attacks, and private key leaks that result in huge sums of money lost and protocols exploited — yet, they still happen. Everyone thinks they would know better and avoid the same situation until they become a victim themselves.
For organizations and groups, multi-sigs provide massive security for held assets and permissions. Setting up a multi-sig for important holdings and actions is STRONGLY recommended.
Multi-sigs are wallets that cannot execute transactions without a quorum from those designated as multi-sig signers. To complete a transaction, a certain threshold of the designated signers has to submit a signature approving the transaction before it is written to the chain. This extra step of security goes a long way in organizational security, as the phishing or key exposure of one wallet does not lead to loss of held assets.
GnosisSafe’s multi-sig is widely adopted and interoperable with most of the Web3 ecosystem. GnosisSafe multi-sigs are very easy to set up, have a browser, desktop, and mobile app, and even provide internal “Safe Apps” for interacting with the popular applications directly from the Gnosis interface.
Badger’s app can be used directly by a GnosisSafe wallet to ensure the keys to your organization’s gates are protected from abuse and exploitation as they should be.
Data Analysis
Analysis of an organization’s reach and engagement of members and products enables a clear perspective and data-driven decisions. Instead of guessing at the vital aspects that determine the success and failure of ventures, curating data can mean making the crucial pivots and changes necessary to maintain efficiency as an organization.
Despite all on-chain information being publicly available, as is the case with blockchains, clear pictures of the relationships between different sets of data are difficult to come by without external assistance.
Flipside is a convenient source of data, free to use, and expediently provides a clear picture of any sought-after analysis. Flipside offers aggregated data from all major chains and an easily accessible dashboard and query editor to create customized reports for analysis. The dashboard pictured above is used to gain an understanding of the reach of Badger and how organizations are utilizing it to support their tool stack.
Organizations using Badger can utilize similar queries and dashboards powered by the distribution of Badges to visualize who their members are, the reach of their members, overlap between members and other organizations and tools, and much much more. The variety of queries and data analysis offered by Flipside is enormous, and the integration of clearly defined roles, memberships, and relationships facilitated by Badges goes even further to empower organizations in their decision-making.
Integrating Your Org With Badger
With ten minutes and less than one MATIC, your organization can be set up with customizable tokens. After creating a Badger organization, managing ownership of the Badges is trivial with the help of the app UI and documentation. Distributing to members just takes uploading a CSV or copying and pasting addresses in, and a click to run the transaction.
Once members have their Badges, your organization can get off to the races integrating your on-chain membership records with all of the Web3 tooling mentioned above. Visit https://trybadger.com/ or read the docs and create your keys to the gates of Web3.
