Genesis
The process through which an OVN is created, i.e. is brought into existence.
When designing this process the emphasis is put on creating a capture resistant organization, one that will preserve the main OVN features over its existence - see Ostrom’s commons principles for inspiration. The emphasis it not on permanency by default, as it is the implicitly case of most traditional organizations (seen as immortals), but on functionality to achieve the specified goals, unless the OVN has a very long lasting mission. When initiating a new OVN avoid implicit organizational permanency in the design of the genesis process. Organizations have a purpose and when that purpose disappears they dissolve. Not taking organizational death into consideration leads to waste of social resources. Think in terms of organizational repurposing, once the organization has no longer a purpose to exist, and put in place the mechanism to transfer its accumulations (resources, assets) to other actors in the immediate ecosystem.
Metamorphosis
This is a process of transformation of an organization from one organizational state to a different one. We hear a lot the expression "exit to community", which means the transition of a for-profit traditional organization to a community-governed organization.
A metamorphosis process is also designed and used in transitioning a traditional organization into a DAO.
Options
OVN-ish
- Seed value - Sensorica's approach for collaborative venture, inspired from collaborative entrepreneurship
- Bootstrapping genesis: how Bitcoin was created.
- ICO: pre-minting tokens and selling them on exchanges or ICO platforms.
DAO-ish
- Hatch: introduced by Commons Stack and Token Engineering Commons. See more.
- Prime Launch Seed: a fixed supply, fixed price token release (in exchange for capital, most likely in the form of stable coins) - automated by Prime Launch,
- offers new DAOs a way to define how a new token is created from the DAO (that may be assumed to represent certain governance, utility, or equity-like rights) and can be swapped with another token, the value of which is normally more stable – often a stablecoin.
- Prime Liquid Launch: a Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool, a token launch that leverages a dynamic and more resilient market-discovery price mechanism through a bonding curve that disincentives hoarding, and pump and dumps, speculative dynamics. Token sales through an LBPs also allow the DAO to end up with a Liquidity Pool that can be immediately instantiated as an automated market maker on a decentralized exchange allowing people to trade, stake, and farm the native token - automated by Prime Launch
- We can think of an LBP as a way to raise capital through a token sale (that could represent a percentage of the total token supply) going through a process of price discovery. Instead of pre-setting the price of the token the founders of the new DAO can reserve a certain amount of tokens to raise capital in fairness and according to demand and supply for the token, but without being exposed to bots and whales (large capital holders) that could artificially inflate and deflate the price of the token.
Integrating more quantitative and qualitative elements and more complex rules for value adjustment in the execution of smart contract-based, token-based launch processes may seem complex, but solutions such as trusted oracles – that could provide a bridge between sampled qualitative information elements and the smart contract – and conditional token release schemas (that for example can commit future funding to certain objective measures) could be successfully and rather easily integrated into the model.