One way to learn what a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) is and how they function is to join one. Another way to learn about them is to build one. We're already members of DAOs, so we decided to build one. In this case, rather than writing our smart contracts from scratch with Solidity, we decided to give a tool called Thirdweb a try. Thirdweb lets us create smart contracts using JavaScript.

The general idea of the app we built is for people to connect their wallet, mint a membership NFT, receive a token airdrop, and to be able to vote on proposals. We built the app using React.js, and it acts as the DAO's dashboard. After joining, members can see what's going on in the DAO.

We wrote some scripts to create and deploy our contracts, and once deployed we could interact with those contracts from our frontend easily using Thirdweb's client-side SDK. Once the contracts have been created, we can see those contracts on the Thirdweb dashboard (see images below). Note, you can create the contracts directly from the Thirdweb dashboard, however we chose to create and deploy them using JavaScript.

The contracts we created were:

▶️ deployed our own ERC-1155 NFT that people can mint to join the DAO ▶️ deployed our own custom ERC-20 governance token (TASTY) ▶️ deployed our own governance contract & seeded the DAO treasury ▶️ deployed a voting contract

Of course there is much more to running a DAO than the contracts, NFT and tokens. None-the-less it provided us with a deeper understanding of DAOs and has helped us to become better creators and participants.

If you have a MetaMask wallet and some test ETH and want to test it out, please see the link below, and remember it's on the Rinkeby testnet, not the mainnet.

Note: interacting with wallets on mobiles is challenging, so best to use a laptop or desktop if you want to try it out.