DeepDAO Launches Search Engine to Find Financial, Membership Data for DAOs

A key function of DAOs is to make the management of funds, resources, and people within these online communities as transparent as possible—but finding, researching, and connecting with these diverse groups can often be difficult for all but the most tech-savvy users.

DAO analytics site DeepDAO yesterday launched a new search engine to help make it easier to find answers to the most common DAO-related questions.

DAOs have recently become a popular way to organize online groups, such as for a new startup or an NFT project, that are typically governed using a cryptocurrency or token. Launched February 2020, Tel Aviv-based DeepDAO is a data aggregator and analytics site for DAOs, currently listing over 4,100 organizations. DeepDAO says it ranks DAOs using several key metrics, such as membership and assets under management.

DeepDAO founder and CEO Eyal Eithcowich told Decrypt that the idea for DeepDAO came while as a member of the Genesis Alpha DAO. He said he wanted to see the inner workings of the DAO’s governance, primary voters, who creates the most proposals, who is voting and with whom, and who is winning and losing.

But the Genesis Alpha DAO team didn’t have time to create an explorer, he said, so he decided to do it himself.

“People loved it so I started adding DAOs and platforms, and here we are, with thousands of DAOs and many more coming in,” he said.

Sorting through 4,100 organizations with a combined treasury of $8.2 billion under management, according to DeepDAO, is time-consuming. DeepDAO says this new search engine feature allows users to skip the long searches and quickly find the information they want. For example, the biggest bagholders in a DAO, users’ governance profiles, and interactions.

DeepDAO appears to be the first platform to include this amount of information in one place. While sites like DeFi Pulse, DAOlist, and DeFi Prime may contain financial information on different projects and their tokens, DeepDAO goes beyond that by providing the wallet addresses, and in some cases, names of DAO members, as well as links to other DAOs that share the same members.

Eithcowich told Decrypt that DeepDAO gathers its information from various sources, including directly from the DAO’s blockchain, using APIs to pull data, while the DeepDAO team curates the information it gathers about treasuries and governance systems. Eithcowich said the biggest challenge is to model and normalize all this data and bring it to one dashboard.

DeepDAO was initially funded through a $3 million seed round led by VC firm Hypersphere Ventures. While the project isn’t bringing in any revenue yet, it plans to offer DAOs premium services in the future, such as data explorers and access to its API.