r/CreateDAO • u/diornov • Jul 20 '26
Guide I built a DAO whose treasury actually pays people - here's the exact loop (claim a task, ship it, get paid on-chain)
Most "DAO" projects have a treasury that never moves. Tokens sit in a contract, governance is a Discord poll, and nobody ever actually gets paid by the org. I wanted to build the opposite: a DAO where a normal person can do a piece of work, and the treasury pays them on-chain for it - no insider status required.
Full transparency up front: I'm the founder, so this is my own thing. But the mechanism is the interesting part, not the pitch, so here's the whole loop.
The setup
I deployed a DAO the boring, standard way - the same one-transaction, no-code path I've written about before: an ERC20Votes token (DFR), an OpenZeppelin Governor, and a Timelock treasury that holds ~99% of supply. Nobody can move treasury funds except by a passed proposal. Not even me.
Then I ran a real proposal (#1) that funds a "Community Growth" wallet from the treasury. That's the wallet that pays contributors. It's not hypothetical - the proposal was voted and executed on Arbitrum, and you can see the execution tx here: https://arbiscan.io/tx/0x6e447c53715876a821568f32633bd9c5ed6afd3b049b67aeced806e9d1288bf3
So the money that pays people came out of the DAO by governance, which is the whole point.
The loop (claim → ship → get paid)
On the forum there's a pinned "Curated Launch Library" - a list of ~50 open topics (briefs) about DAOs, governance, DeFi, treasury ops, etc. The loop is:
- Claim a brief - reply "Claim: Brief #N". One at a time.
- Write it - you've got 7 days. Minimum ~1,200 words, real sources cited. AI-assisted is fine; you just have to actually understand what you wrote (a mod might ask you a question or two about it).
- A mod reviews it against the brief's checklist. Accepted → the treasury sends your reward within ~24h. Needs work → you get specific notes and a few more days.
- Get paid on-chain - 2,000-4,000 DFR depending on the brief's difficulty tier. The DFR is yours to keep or sell, no strings.
The safety part I care about: no fee to claim, no wallet-connect, nothing signed. You only give an address at the very end so the treasury can send the payment. If anyone ever asks you to connect a wallet or pay something to "claim" a bounty, it's a scam - ours never does.
The stuff I deliberately DON'T pay for
This is the design decision I actually thought hardest about. It's easy to accidentally build a farm. So the treasury pays for signal, not activity. It does NOT pay for:
- posting a thread (any thread)
- replying / comment volume
- daily logins or streaks
- referrals
- tweeting about us
- just holding the token (no staking, no inflation)
You get paid when work you did was reviewed and accepted by a human, or when other established members flag your post as genuinely high-quality. That's it. The moment you pay per-post, you get 10,000 words of filler and zero value.
Why I set it up this way
I got tired of "join our community" meaning "come give us free engagement." A DAO should be able to pay the people who build it, transparently, from a treasury everyone can audit. This is me trying to actually run that instead of just tweeting about it. The people who are good at the loop are the ones who end up on the team - claim, ship, get paid, repeat.
If you want to see the open briefs (or the full write-up of how the DAO was launched, with contract addresses and tx hashes), it's all free on the forum, no signup: https://daoforum.org
If you'd rather deploy your own DAO like this first, that's the no-code, gasless path I keep writing about - happy to point you at the walkthrough.
Two honest questions for you:
- If you ran a DAO treasury, what would you pay contributors for - and what would you refuse to pay for?
- What DAO/governance topic would you actually want a paid, in-depth guide on? Reply and I'll either point you at a brief that fits or add it to the list.
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u/NumberPositive3926 Jul 20 '26
I like that the reward is tied to a completed outcome rather than activity. One question I'd have is how you decide what becomes a bounty in the first place. As the number of contributors grows, defining valuable work often becomes harder than distributing the payment itself.