Upstream Collective Review

gm gm! I’m excited to introduce my latest series, where I’ll share my personal notes and insights on various DAO services I have personally studied.

– The Upstream platform was launched in November 2019 and was initially conceived as a professional social network (Web2).
– In November 2021, Upstream Collective was announced. Collective is supposed to be a shared wallet with proposals to self-govern, fund, and run communities (professional social network) on the blockchain (Ethereum only).
– A DAO component was announced in February 2022 – Upstream Collective was represented as a “no-code, full-stack, DAO-in-a-Box” solution.
– Upstream Collective holds more than $2 million in its test user treasuries.
– Upstream has raised $15.75 million from investors; this values Upstream at $80 million after investment.

Upstream collective main features and flow

  • Creating groups (=DAOs) called Communities or Collectives. After filling in all the necessary information, one should wait until the application is manually approved/created by the Upstream team.
  • Or join the group (=DAO, Collective, Community) – existing Collective members will vote to approve or deny a new member. All community members will see the requests.
  • Raising money – funds are contributed to the Collective’s shared wallet. Each Upstream Collective sets its minimum contribution via a proposal (should be greater than $0). Upstream takes 2% of contributions to the projects it hosts as revenue.
  • Governance – Collective members make decisions by voting on proposals made by other members or writing their own. The ownership level will depend on voting power in the Collective.

When creating the Collective, the user can select whether to launch a new governance token (and mint tokens for members when they contribute ETH to the Collective) or use an existing ERC Token Contract.

  • Treasury – proposals are funded with users’ shared wallets. The money in the Collective is held in an Ethereum wallet and can only be accessed when proposals pass by majority votes of the Collective.
  • Token gating, group chat, the delegation of votes – declared, but not implemented.

Decision making

Ideas for treasury usage are brought up in proposals that members vote on. Voting happens off-chain, so it’s completely free for everyone to use. Voting can be authenticated and verified after the fact by signatures published to IPFS.

Proposals that pass need to be signed & executed by the Collective’s signatory members. Those privileged members of the Collective have decided to give special access. Usually, more than one signature is needed to execute a proposal.

The positioning is different from that used by most DAO frameworks; it is reflected in the key points.

Upstream collective key points

Pros

  • Mobile apps for iOS and Android have the same features as the web version.
  • Batch proposals – Instead of executing each proposal individually, users can consolidate and batch-execute proposals and pay one gas fee as one transaction to save money on gas fees.
  • Users can bring their existing DAO into the Upstream Collective. Not exactly white label but similar (more details to be learned)
  • Voting is done off-chain to save on costly gas fees. Once the collective has voted, the proposal is executed on-chain by the Signators of the multi-sig wallet.
  • Chats, calendars, and notifications inside the platform (also, it is an alternative to using different communication channels such as Discord).

Cons

  • Avoiding ‘DAO’ term. In an attempt to get away from crypto-terminology and adjust DAO to the usual social network, there is confusion, for example, Collectives and Communities – essentially the same thing, but for the DAO creators they are called Collectives, and for those who have not yet joined – Communities.
  • Lack of typical channels of communication with representatives of the platform – for example, Discord. You can only ask questions to support via email or chat on the site; Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin are available.
  • No documentation, no open-source, just a FAQ and knowledge base. All the backend is done by the Upstream team itself. This may be a benefit for non-technicians, but is clearly not a flexible solution for multifunctional DAOs.
  • According to Terms of Service, ‘Collectives are not to be utilized for investment purposes, nor are they intended to be used for the purchase of financial products.’ – that is also not common for a significant layer of users who use the DAO for investments.
  • A lot of gaps in the UX; for example, one page says that you are a member of a collective, and another page asks you to join. Not all of the communities you’ve joined are displayed in the list. No email or other notifications after applying to join a community. The URL does not display correctly, and so on.
  • Failed positioning – when googling for The Upstream Collective, the first and most results belong to the missionary church of the same name, which has nothing to do with Upstream DAOs.

Upstream collective pricing

  • It cost money to launch the smart contract. The company is currently covering the cost for any Collective started on Upstream while it is in private beta.
  • There is no price. There’s a fee we charge per deposit — meaning, a 0 to 2% cut each time a member deposits Ether into the collective wallet.

Major DAOs

Currently, the only way to test Collective is to join the first Upstream Collective – NFT Community – as a beta user. The NFT Collective has 2,900 members.

So far, 190 Collectives have been created, almost half of which are less than 25 people. The main focus is professional communities.