I kept running into the same question while looking at DAO work: what does a
DAO actually pay an outside contributor for, and how much? The answers are
public - they sit in governance forums - but nobody had put them side by side.
So I collected 93 proposals across 29 forums, and five of them are from here.
The thing that stood out about this forum was not the money. It was that
grantees report back.
All four completion reports in the entire dataset are from this forum - the
Wayfinders gaming report, Chance Studios, the Academic Bridge at NTUA, and The
Neighborhood's indexing work. Across the other 28 forums the sample caught none
at all. I should be careful with that: the collector took the most recent
proposals per forum, so a forum that ran its reporting cycle earlier would not
show up. But within the same recent window, this is where reporting happened.
On the money the picture is unremarkable, which is itself worth knowing. The
four extractable amounts here run $2,500 to $26,800 with a median of $10,500,
against $11,000 across all 29 forums. The indexing and dev tooling grant at
$10,000 sits exactly at the ceiling of the data and monitoring band I found
everywhere else, which runs $2,000 to $10,000 and has nothing above it.
Two things from the wider set that seemed worth passing on:
- "Treasury management" in DAO usage means running the money, not analysing it.
Risk reporting shows up only bundled inside a manager's mandate, never as a
standalone engagement.
- Channel and scope appear to matter more than product readiness. A team with a
working risk platform was declined in 48 hours applying unannounced; a risk
tool was funded inside an announced call, at deliberately small scope, with
payment staged against delivery.
The collector, the raw data and the analysis are in the repository, so any
number can be checked against its source thread, and running the script against
the committed data reproduces the CSV exactly. If something is miscategorised
or an amount is wrong, the source link is right there and I would rather fix it.
https://github.com/akarazhev/dao-funding-survey