Hey all,
I wanted to give an update on the Creatives DAO funding process.
History & context
Post NEARCON in September of 2022, we had decided to pause the funding for Creatives and Marketing DAO to re-align on the objectives and goals. During this period, we’ve been working closely with the DAO council (in case of the marketing DAO) and the moderators (in case of the Creatives DAO, which is a DAO of DAOs) to set up OKRs, metrics and define the scope of the DAO verticals.
The Marketing DAO was re-launched recently with a reduced scope. However, for Creatives, we received a proposal from the Creatives DAO community. This proposal was focussed on the indie creator community, creative projects that were DAOs and community run/social impact projects. Largely similar in terms of the former audience of creatives DAO.
Around this time, we also had a proposal from 171 Studios for setting up an incubator for NFT projects in the NEAR ecosystem.
In December 2022, we facilitated conversations between Creatives DAO and 171 Studios to explore synergies of a unified proposal addressing both indie creators as well as established companies in the creative space. However, despite efforts to align, this didn’t materialize as both the proposals were targeting different audience segments. This process also resulted in some delays in re-launching the Creatives DAO vertical.
In line with the NEAR Foundation’s grant and funding approach, all DAO verticals will now be funded by the NDC and the NF will no longer be making direct capital deployment. This means that NF will not be able to support initiatives such as those from 171 at this time. However, we recommend that the NDC look to explore proposals like this moving forward to best support the NFT projects. .
Next steps:
- We have worked closely with the Creatives DAO mods on re-aligning expectations and to ensure that we’re set to have the DAO vertical launch soon. The guidelines and process are outlined here.
- Creatives DAO is setting up legal structures, based on the legal structure of other DAOs within the ecosystem.
- This process should take roughly a month, after which they’ll be in a position to fund new proposals. They will be ready to accept new proposals from March 1.
- As with other DAOs, they will transition into the NDC.
We’d like to thank the entire community for being patient with us through this process, Creative DAO mods for working with the community on the proposal and the 171 Studios team for expressing their interest in supporting the NFT projects building on NEAR.