DAOrayaki Reserach |Syndicate: Decentralized investing protocol and social network

DAOrayaki

5 min readNov 18, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount: 180 USD

Category: Syndicate, Social Network, investing, investment DAOs.

Contributor：Jones，julie @Daorayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/daorayaki-syndicate/

Brief Overview About Syndicate

Syndicate is a decentralized investing protocol and social network, aims to build a new model of the investment economy, democratizing access to investing to everyone and transforming the way the world thinks about networks of capital. Syndicate allows anyone to start an on-chain investing syndicate for less than $100. Way less, actually. While the typical fees to set up an investing syndicate average $12,000, as of recent gas prices syndicate method costs a bit less than $3, making syndicate thousands of times less expensive than traditional methods.

Project Summary

The team behind Syndicate, a new protocol that enables anyone to set up an investment DAO, announced on Aug 31, 2021 a $20 million Series A funding round raised with participants led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Over 150 new and diverse investors were involved, including Bill Ackman’s Table Management; Coinbase Ventures, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and Snoop Dogg Ventures.

“Syndicate is creating a decentralized investing protocol that enables anyone to create an investment syndicate on the Internet for less than $10 in less than a minute,” the protocol’s cofounder Ian Lee said in previous June, while speaking on a panel on investment DAOs Coinshares Conversations.

What are investment DAOs?

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are the latest tool to democratize investing and can take the form of anything from small groups that curate NFT art to investors that pool their capital, talen and networks to seed early-stage projects. They are designed to operate globally, which means a much bigger, richer playing field than a traditional fund.

DAOs have no hierarchy — and consequently no one point of failure; there’s no company HQ and rules are written in open-source code, with the decision-making processes encoded into smart contracts which execute autonomously on a blockchain. DAO participants use the entity’s own governance tokens to vote on which projects to invest in.

Almost $9 billion is currently held by DAOs according to tracker DeepDAO, while Moneyweek has declared the 2020s “the decade of the DAO.” Yet spinning up a DAO can be a challenge, which has led to the emergence of DAO creation platforms, such as Aragon, Colony, Gnosis Safe, Moloch, and DAOStack.

Syndicate aims to simplify the process and lower the amount of capital needed, thus encouraging new types of DAOs to empower and enrich the ecosystem they emerged from. And the protocol also contains the necessary legal components and infrastructure to support organizations should they choose to become full-on investment funds. The vision is a powerful one. By blending investment with social networking, “Syndicate could potentially do to investing what Youtube did to film, or what SoundCloud and Spotify did to the music recording industry,” said Lee.

Currently the protocol is still in its early stages. For this reason there is not much information available about the adopted mechanics and incentives of Syndicate, we hope we can cover such information in the near future whenever they are accessible.

Syndicate features

Faster: Unlike traditional methods that require days of work, users can create a syndicate on Syndicate in 5 minutes or less. Since Syndicate is on-chain and internet-native, there’s no need to, say, wait around until the bank is open to open an account to accept funds.
More accessible: traditional methods are open only to a privileged few who know how to create a legal structure. Syndicate abstracts and automates a lot of that complexity and helps every step of the way so you can set up a fund with confidence in its legal structure, whether it’s your first or your hundredth.
More secure: Syndicate team uses world-class security practices throughout the product, And with multiple technical audits, formal verifications, a large bug bounty, and more, users can have confidence that funds are secure.
More social: Whereas traditional methods mean your community is set up alone, on Syndicate, users are joining an engaged community of investors, founders, and creators. Easily discover and connect with other syndicates to build the community and further the mission.

Team members

Will Papper — Co-Founder of Syndicate Protocol. Previously Philosophy at Stanford. Ethereum since the 2014 pre-sale. Tweeting about DAOs, smart contracts, and Loot. Creator of $AGLD.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/WillPapper

Ian Lee — Co-Founder of Syndicate Protocol. Crypto investor and IDEOVC builder. Previously was the Head of Crypto at Citiventures. Designer and Solidity Dev.