Article by Hiro Kennelly Edited by Frank America & Miss Katrina Cover Art by Cosmic Clancy

The Tally Ho Web3 wallet is starting to get the attention it deserves, and for good reason. The Tally Ho team is building a wallet with all the functionality of MetaMask, but with the soul of a solarpunk: a community-owned wallet that is open source, fully composable, and has public goods funding built into its source code. In essence, Tally Ho is a wallet that also functions as a public good.

If you’re curious about the functionality of Web3’s newest public good, you should download the Tally Ho wallet. Like many Web3 wallets, the Tally Ho wallet enables users to swap tokens within the wallet itself, with a small swap fee going to the community treasury. Though lower than those of centralized rivals, these swap fees will still provide a substantial source of revenue for the Tally Ho community, a community that will become a DAO when its governance token is fairly launched. Join their Discord and head to their governance forum to get the latest info on Tally Ho’s evolution to a DAO.

Given the responsibility that comes with managing a robust community treasury, Tally Ho has been hard at work designing a DAO structure that is strong but nimble, and focuses on maximizing autonomy and agency while following a clear, scalable roadmap.

Along with designing a multi-level coordination layer for the Tally Ho DAO, the team has also been developing a model for how the swap fees and in-wallet yield farming opportunities can empower the community, support Tally Ho, and benefit the greater Web3 ecosystem. How the funds flowing from its fees will be used is up to the DAO to decide.

DAOs are still learning operational best practices. In fact, by many measures DAO structures and governance procedures are still in their infancy. But one thing has become clear: for effective DAO operations, it’s necessary to have a mix of authority and autonomy, hierarchy and accountability, and committed core contributors.

The proposed Tally Ho DAO structure is designed with these operational principles in mind. The DAO structure is built upon three interdependent core groups: The Elder Doggos Council, Packs, and Dens. The Elder Doggos are the wise old dogs, not directly involved in the day-to-day operations but situated to provide strategic advice and high-level decision making. The Packs will run Tally Ho DAO; think of them as corporate departments or autonomous subDAOs. Dens will be organized under the auspices of the Packs or substantiated by a community proposal. Both fixed and temporary, Dens will help the Packs achieve their strategic and operational goals.

Credit: Tally Ho

The Elder Doggos Council will consist of 12 elected community members who are tasked with helping to guide Tally Ho DAO’s strategy. In some way analogous to a Board of Directors, these trusted community members will be elected by direct vote from token holders and delegates, and one representative will be appointed from each of the three initial Packs.

In addition to providing high-level guidance, the Council will potentially have limited veto power over proposals to ensure that they move the mission of the DAO forward and are not malicious. If conflicts arise between community members, Packs, or Dens, the Council will help to resolve these. Initial terms will be for six to nine months to ensure continuity through staggered elections. For providing this important service to the DAO, Elder Doggos will receive a predefined compensation package that includes a linear vesting schedule of Tally Ho’s native tokens.

Packs are the core departments within the DAO. Tasked with overseeing the Dens and providing organizational structure to the DAO, the Packs are largely responsible for DAO-wide coordination. Packs will form and advocate for Dens, including obtaining necessary funding for bounties and Coordinape.

Pack leads are core contributors who are expected to put in the time — up to 30 hours per week. They will be elected by token holders and receive fixed compensation under a framework yet to be determined.

Upon DAO formation, Tally Ho is proposing to begin with three initial packs: Growth, Build, and Operations. The Growth Pack will be focused on marketing, partnerships, and user support. The Build Pack will consist of a broad range of developers and researchers to make sure the Tally Ho wallet remains a cutting-edge product. The Operations Pack is tasked with overseeing the community-run treasury, governance, and general operations.

Dens are small, agile teams, either created by Pack leads or through a community proposal. Dens work on specific tasks or projects at the direction of a Pack or within the scope of a proposal, and either have ongoing responsibilities or exist on an as-needed basis.

Although the Dens have a defined mission and scope, they have both the agency and autonomy to maximize the efficiency of the team. Some examples of Dens are for DAO-to-DAO partnerships and marketing/education, which support the Growth Pack, or the token list or user research dens, which will help the Build Pack.

Den leaders are either chosen by Pack leads or through an election. These leaders are paid at a fixed compensation rate, while general contributors are typically rewarded via grants, bounties, and/or a monthly Coordinape epoch.

Through these three core pieces of the Tally Ho DAO structure, the Elder Doggos, the Packs, and the Dens, Tally Ho is developing a predictable but flexible model for DAO stewardship and operations.

To get a better sense of how this structure will work once the native token is introduced to the community, take a look at the organization chart below:

Credit: Tally Ho

At first glance, you should notice one thing — the Elder Doggos Council does not sit at the top of the org chart. Like a true DAO, token holders choose how the DAO will be governed and operate.

The token holders will govern the allocation of the swap fees accumulating in the DAO Treasury. Token holders will also vote on Pack budget requests and operational plans, and this budgeting can be revoked if necessary. Elections for Elder Doggos and Pack leads will be voted upon by token holders, as will updates to the Tally Ho wallet protocol itself. These protocol updates can include swap fees, contract upgrades, or deployment of liquidity pools.

Although governance is everyone’s right, it’s not realistic to assume that all token holders have the interest or bandwidth to participate in Tally Ho DAO’s governance process. To ensure that token holders’ interests are adequately represented in DAO-wide decision-making processes, Tally Ho DAO will employ a delegate model voting system, and token holders (who can self delegate) and delegates will use Boardroom to interface with Compound’s Governor Bravo Framework.

Early on, the Tally Ho team knew they wanted to deploy a delegate voting model to help steward Tally Ho DAO. This was inspired by the success of the governance model of Gitcoin and ENS, both of which use a delegate voting system for decision making, which ensures governance is community driven by encouraging people to attribute their voting power to others they trust, and helps to avoid participation fatigue.

Tally Ho posted a call for delegates on the Tally Ho forum in December 2021. This call for delegates will remain open until shortly before DAO formation. 

Delegate voting may sound complex, but it’s a fairly simple model. Essentially, token holders can assign their voting rights — based upon the number of tokens held — to a community member via their wallet address. Or they can delegate their votes to themselves. 

This type of voting is a wallet-to-wallet handshake deal between delegator and delegatee, which the delegator can revoke or change at any time. Notably, a delegator cannot split their delegation among multiple delegatees.

Delegates are expected to engage with the Tally Ho DAO community, actively participate in forum discussions, offer their opinions on proposals, and vote. Delegates may be compensated for their work on governance, but that’s up to the DAO to decide.

In order to seamlessly integrate delegate voting into the Tally Ho DAO governance framework, the Tally Ho team reviewed a number of different DAO tooling platforms. After careful consideration, they decided to deploy a triad of governance tools: Boardroom, Governor Bravo, and Snapshot. These tools will enable the DAO to implement on-chain and off-chain delegate-based voting mechanisms to minimize governance friction while maximizing token holder participation.

Boardroom is a DAO governance platform that gives many established projects and protocols a single point of interface for all things governance. Built to improve distributed decision making, Boardroom allows DAOs to easily integrate both on-chain and off-chain voting protocols into governance processes.

Token holders and delegates will use Boardroom to vote on proposals that originate on the forum. Once listed within Boardroom, users will connect their wallet to vote on the proposals. Most votes will have three simple options, ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘abstain’.

Governor Bravo was developed by Compound, a popular lending and borrowing protocol. The protocol allows for customizable on-chain voting smart contracts; DAOs can define voting parameters that best meet their needs. Boardroom facilitates users’ interactions with the Governor Bravo smart contracts.

The lifecycle of a proposal is programmed into Governor Bravo, which helps voting timelines become normalized and predictable. For example, a lifecycle may stipulate the duration of the voting period and the time between the conclusion of voting and actual execution of the proposal. Notably, the Tally Ho DAO will work to cluster votes together into a regular voting period to maximize voter participation while minimizing participation fatigue. The below graphics illustrate a typical proposal lifecycle:

Credit: Tally Ho

Credit: Compound

Because Governor Bravo is an on-chain voting protocol, vote execution requires users to pay gas fees, but Tally Ho DAO may decide to use a vote by signature process, which would enable Tally Ho DAO to batch and write these votes onto the blockchain while covering the transaction fees.

The below graphic will give you a sense of how the process works from delegation through to interaction with Boardroom and Governor Bravo to provide seamless voter participation and smart contract integration:

Credit: Tally Ho

The final piece of the governance triad is Snapshot. Ubiquitous in the DAO community, Snapshot allows for transaction-free off-chain voting while still permitting vote delegation and Boardroom integration.

While on-chain voting with smart contract integration is the gold standard for DAO-wide decision making, not all decisions require that level of formality. For decisions that will not be contractually defined in Governor Bravo, Snapshot provides a trusted method to find consensus on appropriate issues. For example, Tally Ho DAO could use Snapshot for delegate selection or choosing members of the Elder Doggos Council or Pack leads.

Taken together, the Tally Ho DAO governance triad of Boardroom, Governor Bravo, and Snapshot should provide the community with all the governance tools it needs to efficiently and effectively steward the DAO. 

And let’s face it, with a DAO Treasury fed by Tally Ho wallet swap and liquidity fees, it’s important to put mindful, sustainable, and security-oriented governance procedures at the forefront of DAO architecture.

Building thoughtful governance frameworks is an ongoing, iterative process, and we shouldn’t expect the current DAO structure to remain static. Tally Ho is leveraging the work of DAO pioneers, and standing on these shoulders orients the Tally Ho community towards adopting improved governance solutions as they become available.

As wallet user fees are the engine that will drive the DAO and its greater impact within the Web3 ecosystem, it’s important to understand how these funds will flow through the DAO, to contributors, and out into the greater ecosystem.

A well thought-out DAO governance structure does not reach its full potential unless this coordination layer is met with an equally innovative economic model. The team at Tally Ho has spent considerable time designing a token-flow model that turns the ‘command and control’ corporate product model on its head by building a wallet that also functions as a public good.

Corporate Web3 wallets have a fairly basic flow of funds. In a typical Web3 wallet model, the funds flow from the user to the corporate parent.

Credit: Tally Ho

Where Tally Ho wallet differs is that unlike a corporate Web3 wallet such as MetaMask, fees paid by users go into the DAO for the benefit of the community. As a community-owned, user-powered wallet, the flow of funds works as an regenerative feedback loop, enriching the DAO, its contributors, its users, and the greater Web3 ecosystem.

As the below diagram illustrates, fees generated through in-wallet swaps will flow to the DAO Treasury. How those funds are deployed is up to the DAO to decide, but at least initially, there are four distinct areas that we can imagine the DAO funding: 

(1) grants and bounties related to improving the Tally Ho wallet and expanding its ecosystem, (2) public goods funding through Gitcon Aqueduct and supporting open-source software libraries such as ethers.js, (3) initiatives as determined by the community, and (4) rewards distributed via the native token.

The Tally Ho team focused on creating a funding model that is flexible and can evolve as the needs of the ecosystem and community changed, but that ensures long-term sustainable development of both its wallet and the ecosystem. Key considerations were that the wallet needs to generate income, that the income stream should flow to the DAO, and that the DAO should determine how the funds are used.

Credit: Tally Ho

This flow model creates a positive feedback loop that grows each component along the way. The more users, the more swap fees. The more swap fees, the more funding can be disbursed to Tally Ho’s products, users, community, and public goods. As more people become aware of and use its products, the more users they will have. The more users … and it just keeps growing.

Although we’ve focused on the swap fees, Tally Ho DAO will also earn income and be able to diversify its treasury through its Earn feature. You can think of Earn as incentivized pools, incentives which will be allocated for each pool when the native token launches.

Although the details are still being worked out, we know that users will be able to deposit other digital assets via the in-wallet Earn functionality. These assets will earn yield and depositors will also receive rewards in the native governance token. When a user deposits an asset into the pool, the Tally Ho DAO will essentially take a ‘fee’ from that deposit. The fee will be in that digital asset currency, which will help the Tally Ho DAO Treasury to diversify its holdings.

Tally Ho has designed an innovative governance structure which emphasizes a flexible yet stable approach and maximizes autonomy, agency, and actionable authority. The flow of swap and Earn fees will help to build a robust and diverse treasury and community. So the only question left is: wen token?

Although there is no set date for the official formation of Tally Ho DAO, important aspects of the tokenomics are settled. The native token will be distributed via a fair token launch. Initially, more than one third of the total token supply will be distributed to DeFi users, builders, and members of various DAOs via a merkledrop, which is a way for users to withdraw tokens from an on-chain contract based upon an off-chain merkle tree. The native token will also be distributed through the Earn program and various growth initiatives. The Tally Ho team is even considering a mechanism to reward friends and DAOs when claiming the tokens.

Interestingly, the native token contracts will be deployed by the community, not by the developers or Tally Ho team. In a recent blog post, the Tally Ho team notes it was inspired by the CRV token launch, where an anon user first obtained from GitHub and then deployed the token contracts without notice to Curve. Upon successful deployment, Curve verified the contracts, realizing that this stealth deployment provided greater and more equal access to CRV and attendant rewards.

The team at Tally Ho has indicated they intend to use the best parts of the CRV launch, including rewards for those who deploy the contracts on mainnet and ensuring that users have a fair chance to farm the launch. 

Separating development from deployment emphasizes the decentralized and permissionless nature of our best protocols, and focuses the work going forward on the community and the DAO — just as it should be.

So while no one knows exactly wen token, be sure to keep one eye on the pack and the other on the horizon, as deployment isn’t too far afield.

‘Tally Ho’ was often used as a cry during fox hunts when a huntsman spotted the target. Tally Ho was conceived shortly after MetaMask — the ubiquitous wallet owned by crypto conglomerate ConsenSys whose fox logo we have all seen — abandoned any pretensions of a Web3 ethos shortly before launching its in-wallet swap functionality. The Tally Ho wallet was made to hunt MetaMask, to flush it from its corporate confines and give it a run for its life.

And run it must, as Tally Ho DAO won’t give up the hunt. Through its community ownership model, its commitment to open-source software and funding the public good, and its lower swap fees, superior functionality, and innovative DAO structure and flow of funds model, we can expect more and more people to take up the cry of ‘Tally Ho!’. Watch out fox, there’s nowhere to hide.

To thrive, innovative projects need people like you, and there’s never been a better time to start building with Tally Ho. Try out their wallet. Join their Discord. Become active in their community and come run with the dogs as we go on a hunt!

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and coordinator at BanklessDAO and the Editor-in-Chief at Good Morning News. He is also helping to build a grants-focused organization at DAOpunks.

BanklessPublishing is the publishing arm of BanklessDAO. Top-shelf educational Web3 content.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

Bankless Publishing is always accepting submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article here!

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Article by Hiro Kennelly Edited by Frank America & Miss Katrina Cover Art by Cosmic Clancy

The Tally Ho Web3 wallet is starting to get the attention it deserves, and for good reason. The Tally Ho team is building a wallet with all the functionality of MetaMask, but with the soul of a solarpunk: a community-owned wallet that is open source, fully composable, and has public goods funding built into its source code. In essence, Tally Ho is a wallet that also functions as a public good.

If you’re curious about the functionality of Web3’s newest public good, you should download the Tally Ho wallet. Like many Web3 wallets, the Tally Ho wallet enables users to swap tokens within the wallet itself, with a small swap fee going to the community treasury. Though lower than those of centralized rivals, these swap fees will still provide a substantial source of revenue for the Tally Ho community, a community that will become a DAO when its governance token is fairly launched. Join their Discord and head to their governance forum to get the latest info on Tally Ho’s evolution to a DAO.

Given the responsibility that comes with managing a robust community treasury, Tally Ho has been hard at work designing a DAO structure that is strong but nimble, and focuses on maximizing autonomy and agency while following a clear, scalable roadmap.

Along with designing a multi-level coordination layer for the Tally Ho DAO, the team has also been developing a model for how the swap fees and in-wallet yield farming opportunities can empower the community, support Tally Ho, and benefit the greater Web3 ecosystem. How the funds flowing from its fees will be used is up to the DAO to decide.

DAOs are still learning operational best practices. In fact, by many measures DAO structures and governance procedures are still in their infancy. But one thing has become clear: for effective DAO operations, it’s necessary to have a mix of authority and autonomy, hierarchy and accountability, and committed core contributors.

The proposed Tally Ho DAO structure is designed with these operational principles in mind. The DAO structure is built upon three interdependent core groups: The Elder Doggos Council, Packs, and Dens. The Elder Doggos are the wise old dogs, not directly involved in the day-to-day operations but situated to provide strategic advice and high-level decision making. The Packs will run Tally Ho DAO; think of them as corporate departments or autonomous subDAOs. Dens will be organized under the auspices of the Packs or substantiated by a community proposal. Both fixed and temporary, Dens will help the Packs achieve their strategic and operational goals.

Credit: Tally Ho

The Elder Doggos Council will consist of 12 elected community members who are tasked with helping to guide Tally Ho DAO’s strategy. In some way analogous to a Board of Directors, these trusted community members will be elected by direct vote from token holders and delegates, and one representative will be appointed from each of the three initial Packs.

In addition to providing high-level guidance, the Council will potentially have limited veto power over proposals to ensure that they move the mission of the DAO forward and are not malicious. If conflicts arise between community members, Packs, or Dens, the Council will help to resolve these. Initial terms will be for six to nine months to ensure continuity through staggered elections. For providing this important service to the DAO, Elder Doggos will receive a predefined compensation package that includes a linear vesting schedule of Tally Ho’s native tokens.

Packs are the core departments within the DAO. Tasked with overseeing the Dens and providing organizational structure to the DAO, the Packs are largely responsible for DAO-wide coordination. Packs will form and advocate for Dens, including obtaining necessary funding for bounties and Coordinape.

Pack leads are core contributors who are expected to put in the time — up to 30 hours per week. They will be elected by token holders and receive fixed compensation under a framework yet to be determined.

Upon DAO formation, Tally Ho is proposing to begin with three initial packs: Growth, Build, and Operations. The Growth Pack will be focused on marketing, partnerships, and user support. The Build Pack will consist of a broad range of developers and researchers to make sure the Tally Ho wallet remains a cutting-edge product. The Operations Pack is tasked with overseeing the community-run treasury, governance, and general operations.

Dens are small, agile teams, either created by Pack leads or through a community proposal. Dens work on specific tasks or projects at the direction of a Pack or within the scope of a proposal, and either have ongoing responsibilities or exist on an as-needed basis.

Although the Dens have a defined mission and scope, they have both the agency and autonomy to maximize the efficiency of the team. Some examples of Dens are for DAO-to-DAO partnerships and marketing/education, which support the Growth Pack, or the token list or user research dens, which will help the Build Pack.

Den leaders are either chosen by Pack leads or through an election. These leaders are paid at a fixed compensation rate, while general contributors are typically rewarded via grants, bounties, and/or a monthly Coordinape epoch.

Through these three core pieces of the Tally Ho DAO structure, the Elder Doggos, the Packs, and the Dens, Tally Ho is developing a predictable but flexible model for DAO stewardship and operations.

To get a better sense of how this structure will work once the native token is introduced to the community, take a look at the organization chart below:

Credit: Tally Ho

At first glance, you should notice one thing — the Elder Doggos Council does not sit at the top of the org chart. Like a true DAO, token holders choose how the DAO will be governed and operate.

The token holders will govern the allocation of the swap fees accumulating in the DAO Treasury. Token holders will also vote on Pack budget requests and operational plans, and this budgeting can be revoked if necessary. Elections for Elder Doggos and Pack leads will be voted upon by token holders, as will updates to the Tally Ho wallet protocol itself. These protocol updates can include swap fees, contract upgrades, or deployment of liquidity pools.

Although governance is everyone’s right, it’s not realistic to assume that all token holders have the interest or bandwidth to participate in Tally Ho DAO’s governance process. To ensure that token holders’ interests are adequately represented in DAO-wide decision-making processes, Tally Ho DAO will employ a delegate model voting system, and token holders (who can self delegate) and delegates will use Boardroom to interface with Compound’s Governor Bravo Framework.

Early on, the Tally Ho team knew they wanted to deploy a delegate voting model to help steward Tally Ho DAO. This was inspired by the success of the governance model of Gitcoin and ENS, both of which use a delegate voting system for decision making, which ensures governance is community driven by encouraging people to attribute their voting power to others they trust, and helps to avoid participation fatigue.

Tally Ho posted a call for delegates on the Tally Ho forum in December 2021. This call for delegates will remain open until shortly before DAO formation. 

Delegate voting may sound complex, but it’s a fairly simple model. Essentially, token holders can assign their voting rights — based upon the number of tokens held — to a community member via their wallet address. Or they can delegate their votes to themselves. 

This type of voting is a wallet-to-wallet handshake deal between delegator and delegatee, which the delegator can revoke or change at any time. Notably, a delegator cannot split their delegation among multiple delegatees.

Delegates are expected to engage with the Tally Ho DAO community, actively participate in forum discussions, offer their opinions on proposals, and vote. Delegates may be compensated for their work on governance, but that’s up to the DAO to decide.

In order to seamlessly integrate delegate voting into the Tally Ho DAO governance framework, the Tally Ho team reviewed a number of different DAO tooling platforms. After careful consideration, they decided to deploy a triad of governance tools: Boardroom, Governor Bravo, and Snapshot. These tools will enable the DAO to implement on-chain and off-chain delegate-based voting mechanisms to minimize governance friction while maximizing token holder participation.

Boardroom is a DAO governance platform that gives many established projects and protocols a single point of interface for all things governance. Built to improve distributed decision making, Boardroom allows DAOs to easily integrate both on-chain and off-chain voting protocols into governance processes.

Token holders and delegates will use Boardroom to vote on proposals that originate on the forum. Once listed within Boardroom, users will connect their wallet to vote on the proposals. Most votes will have three simple options, ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘abstain’.

Governor Bravo was developed by Compound, a popular lending and borrowing protocol. The protocol allows for customizable on-chain voting smart contracts; DAOs can define voting parameters that best meet their needs. Boardroom facilitates users’ interactions with the Governor Bravo smart contracts.

The lifecycle of a proposal is programmed into Governor Bravo, which helps voting timelines become normalized and predictable. For example, a lifecycle may stipulate the duration of the voting period and the time between the conclusion of voting and actual execution of the proposal. Notably, the Tally Ho DAO will work to cluster votes together into a regular voting period to maximize voter participation while minimizing participation fatigue. The below graphics illustrate a typical proposal lifecycle:

Credit: Tally Ho

Credit: Compound

Because Governor Bravo is an on-chain voting protocol, vote execution requires users to pay gas fees, but Tally Ho DAO may decide to use a vote by signature process, which would enable Tally Ho DAO to batch and write these votes onto the blockchain while covering the transaction fees.

The below graphic will give you a sense of how the process works from delegation through to interaction with Boardroom and Governor Bravo to provide seamless voter participation and smart contract integration:

Credit: Tally Ho

The final piece of the governance triad is Snapshot. Ubiquitous in the DAO community, Snapshot allows for transaction-free off-chain voting while still permitting vote delegation and Boardroom integration.

While on-chain voting with smart contract integration is the gold standard for DAO-wide decision making, not all decisions require that level of formality. For decisions that will not be contractually defined in Governor Bravo, Snapshot provides a trusted method to find consensus on appropriate issues. For example, Tally Ho DAO could use Snapshot for delegate selection or choosing members of the Elder Doggos Council or Pack leads.

Taken together, the Tally Ho DAO governance triad of Boardroom, Governor Bravo, and Snapshot should provide the community with all the governance tools it needs to efficiently and effectively steward the DAO. 

And let’s face it, with a DAO Treasury fed by Tally Ho wallet swap and liquidity fees, it’s important to put mindful, sustainable, and security-oriented governance procedures at the forefront of DAO architecture.

Building thoughtful governance frameworks is an ongoing, iterative process, and we shouldn’t expect the current DAO structure to remain static. Tally Ho is leveraging the work of DAO pioneers, and standing on these shoulders orients the Tally Ho community towards adopting improved governance solutions as they become available.

As wallet user fees are the engine that will drive the DAO and its greater impact within the Web3 ecosystem, it’s important to understand how these funds will flow through the DAO, to contributors, and out into the greater ecosystem.

A well thought-out DAO governance structure does not reach its full potential unless this coordination layer is met with an equally innovative economic model. The team at Tally Ho has spent considerable time designing a token-flow model that turns the ‘command and control’ corporate product model on its head by building a wallet that also functions as a public good.

Corporate Web3 wallets have a fairly basic flow of funds. In a typical Web3 wallet model, the funds flow from the user to the corporate parent.

Credit: Tally Ho

Where Tally Ho wallet differs is that unlike a corporate Web3 wallet such as MetaMask, fees paid by users go into the DAO for the benefit of the community. As a community-owned, user-powered wallet, the flow of funds works as an regenerative feedback loop, enriching the DAO, its contributors, its users, and the greater Web3 ecosystem.

As the below diagram illustrates, fees generated through in-wallet swaps will flow to the DAO Treasury. How those funds are deployed is up to the DAO to decide, but at least initially, there are four distinct areas that we can imagine the DAO funding: 

(1) grants and bounties related to improving the Tally Ho wallet and expanding its ecosystem, (2) public goods funding through Gitcon Aqueduct and supporting open-source software libraries such as ethers.js, (3) initiatives as determined by the community, and (4) rewards distributed via the native token.

The Tally Ho team focused on creating a funding model that is flexible and can evolve as the needs of the ecosystem and community changed, but that ensures long-term sustainable development of both its wallet and the ecosystem. Key considerations were that the wallet needs to generate income, that the income stream should flow to the DAO, and that the DAO should determine how the funds are used.

Credit: Tally Ho

This flow model creates a positive feedback loop that grows each component along the way. The more users, the more swap fees. The more swap fees, the more funding can be disbursed to Tally Ho’s products, users, community, and public goods. As more people become aware of and use its products, the more users they will have. The more users … and it just keeps growing.

Although we’ve focused on the swap fees, Tally Ho DAO will also earn income and be able to diversify its treasury through its Earn feature. You can think of Earn as incentivized pools, incentives which will be allocated for each pool when the native token launches.

Although the details are still being worked out, we know that users will be able to deposit other digital assets via the in-wallet Earn functionality. These assets will earn yield and depositors will also receive rewards in the native governance token. When a user deposits an asset into the pool, the Tally Ho DAO will essentially take a ‘fee’ from that deposit. The fee will be in that digital asset currency, which will help the Tally Ho DAO Treasury to diversify its holdings.

Tally Ho has designed an innovative governance structure which emphasizes a flexible yet stable approach and maximizes autonomy, agency, and actionable authority. The flow of swap and Earn fees will help to build a robust and diverse treasury and community. So the only question left is: wen token?

Although there is no set date for the official formation of Tally Ho DAO, important aspects of the tokenomics are settled. The native token will be distributed via a fair token launch. Initially, more than one third of the total token supply will be distributed to DeFi users, builders, and members of various DAOs via a merkledrop, which is a way for users to withdraw tokens from an on-chain contract based upon an off-chain merkle tree. The native token will also be distributed through the Earn program and various growth initiatives. The Tally Ho team is even considering a mechanism to reward friends and DAOs when claiming the tokens.

Interestingly, the native token contracts will be deployed by the community, not by the developers or Tally Ho team. In a recent blog post, the Tally Ho team notes it was inspired by the CRV token launch, where an anon user first obtained from GitHub and then deployed the token contracts without notice to Curve. Upon successful deployment, Curve verified the contracts, realizing that this stealth deployment provided greater and more equal access to CRV and attendant rewards.

The team at Tally Ho has indicated they intend to use the best parts of the CRV launch, including rewards for those who deploy the contracts on mainnet and ensuring that users have a fair chance to farm the launch. 

Separating development from deployment emphasizes the decentralized and permissionless nature of our best protocols, and focuses the work going forward on the community and the DAO — just as it should be.

So while no one knows exactly wen token, be sure to keep one eye on the pack and the other on the horizon, as deployment isn’t too far afield.

‘Tally Ho’ was often used as a cry during fox hunts when a huntsman spotted the target. Tally Ho was conceived shortly after MetaMask — the ubiquitous wallet owned by crypto conglomerate ConsenSys whose fox logo we have all seen — abandoned any pretensions of a Web3 ethos shortly before launching its in-wallet swap functionality. The Tally Ho wallet was made to hunt MetaMask, to flush it from its corporate confines and give it a run for its life.

And run it must, as Tally Ho DAO won’t give up the hunt. Through its community ownership model, its commitment to open-source software and funding the public good, and its lower swap fees, superior functionality, and innovative DAO structure and flow of funds model, we can expect more and more people to take up the cry of ‘Tally Ho!’. Watch out fox, there’s nowhere to hide.

To thrive, innovative projects need people like you, and there’s never been a better time to start building with Tally Ho. Try out their wallet. Join their Discord. Become active in their community and come run with the dogs as we go on a hunt!

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and coordinator at BanklessDAO and the Editor-in-Chief at Good Morning News. He is also helping to build a grants-focused organization at DAOpunks.

BanklessPublishing is the publishing arm of BanklessDAO. Top-shelf educational Web3 content.

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