This document outlines our early thoughts for the DAO. This is a point of departure. We want to include you in our thinking through our various working groups, community brainstorms, upcoming town halls, surveys and DAO channels. We will not update this document — instead, newly drafted documents will outline our best insights at any current moment.
COLORSxSTUDIOS GmbH (hereinafter referred to as “COLORS”) is starting a DAO with its community.
It will allow for COLORS to collaborate with its community in a way that allows the community to capture the value of the community’s work. This is the reason for leaning into web3 technology. It will also allow the community to unlock new opportunities and extend COLORS’ stage for non-ordinary expression to new corners.
The intention is for the DAO to exist as a governance and operational layer for COLORS’ global community of communities. It will govern a treasury and fund emergent brands launched by its communities.
Three entities:
The COLORSxCOMMUNITY DAO is not like most DAOs. It should represent a community of people who are not web3 native. Many of them may not even be aware or actively participating in the community. This is a global, multilingual community. There should be no economic barriers to participating in this community.
The DAO will carry the same brand as its founding entity (COLORS). This is not uncommon in web3, but is much less common for an entity that is primarily not web3. As far as we know, this is the first music-related brand to have such a construction. This means that we can take lessons from various places, but will have to pioneer new models. Once enough alignment and organisational maturity has been established, the DAO and COLORS need to create a brand licensing framework that factors in criteria such as mission-alignment, value-alignment and representation of COLORS’ actual community.
The DAO has been kickstarted by COLORS, which has provided the funds and core team staffing to get things rolling. Despite COLORS’ reach, COLORS is a small independent music company and thus wants to see the community & DAO become financially sustainable.
Currently the DAO still exists inside the COLORSxSTUDIOS GmbH. This means that the DAO is limited in what risks it can take, e.g. we don’t have a token, because we need to a) set up the DAO in its own entity for that first (price tag: $12k-35k depending on location & entity type), and b) figure out whether COLORS needs an entity to hold these tokens. This means we’ve launched with NFTs to create funds for community operations and the progressive decentralization process towards a DAO. This campaign was developed by people on COLORS’ payroll (both staff and freelancers). The core team focused on partnerships, identifying early minters and creating awareness both inside and outside the web3 space.
The 2022 onset of a bear market plus halving of crypto prices has led to a situation where there are very minimum funds available beyond fulfillment of promises to NFT buyers and basic core team operations. This means certain operations that are easier to decentralize need alternative sources of funding, for which the community team are exploring partnerships. A separate review of funding will be shared.
To deal with challenges of centralization and autonomy in the context of the coexistence of the above entities, we have identified three principles.
For COLORSxSTUDIOS and the COLORSxCOMMUNITY to succeed, they will need to collaborate and integrate operations over time. This may be in existing domains, such as curation for COLORS Shows, apparel, editorial, events and partnerships, but also in completely novel areas such as community-driven irl activations and web3-ventures such as NFT gallery or collaborations with other DAOs.
Through its global cultural impact COLORSxSTUDIOS will have an important lever to connect network and reach. Its brand brings authority and validation to projects. The community, represented by the DAO can call upon COLORSxSTUDIOS for amplification and other forms of operational support (e.g. connections to partners, COLORS Show alumni, industry connections, etc).