Why we invested in Mainstream, crypto-native t0ken gating
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are emerging as an on-chain social coordination mechanism. But low governance participation and uninformed voting have hindered their effectiveness.
Mainstream is solving these governance challenges with a token-gated forum for DAOs. The Mainstream platform combines token-gated access and custom incentivization strategies to encourage thoughtful discussion, community engagement, informed voting, and more governance participation.
Samsung Next participated in a pre-seed SAFE round that also included angel investors Linda Xie, managing director of Scaler Capital, and Jason Kim, CEO of Big Whale Labs, and others.
Simply, we invested in Mainstream because of the founders. The founders have an incredible trajectory despite being early in their careers and education. They’ve been core members of the DAO ecosystem and have personal experience with decentralized finance (DeFi). Byeongjun (BJ) Moon, CEO, is a recent high school graduate, pursuing a degree at USC this fall. He has worked with Harvard Innovation Labs, and founded PadawanDAO, a project raising funds to send students to blockchain conferences. Jae Wu Chun, CTO, helped launch one of Western Canada’s largest hackathons, developed a high-school exam prep site for international students, and operated a boutique web development agency.
The pair have developed crypto-native governance aggregators that will enable DAOs to create basic and custom incentive strategies and governance integrations. We clearly saw Mainstream’s founder-market-fit. The company’s founders are well-connected to the DAO ecosystem, which bodes well for its ability to grow. As Mainstream gains traction, it promises to help drive the development of new governance incentive mechanisms, and to ultimately help increase DAO participation rates.
In order for DAOs to achieve truly decentralized governance, they’ll need to increase participation from their various stakeholders. The platform is using tokens to fine-tune control of forums and discussions. Participation in on- and off-chain governance is supported by auto-advancing stakes. DAOs also can customize access by using Mainstream’s Actions Builder to create and trigger on-chain executable actions.
The Mainstream platform will facilitate DAO discussions and voting on a single, integrated platform. Instead of jumping, for example, between Snapshot and Discourse, token holders will be able to discuss proposals with other users, and vote, on the same platform. Users also will earn rewards for participation via Mainstream. Moreover, DAOs will have the ability to offer native tokens and other awards to contributors. Mainstream also will enable DAOs to securely enable users to delegate voting power to anyone they choose.
When the new platform rolls out later this year, it will be free to use. Once it is up and running, Mainstream plans to introduce a tiered business model that caters to large-scale DAO customers. Support for cross-chain governance contracts is planned for this year. By early next year, the company plans to rollout an API, and the ability to integrate treasury and other governance mechanisms on its platform.
While DAOs are still in the early stages, they have the potential to become a fundamental component of web3-native organizational structures. That puts Mainstream in a position to become the home for DAOs and token-based communities.
Sam Campbell is an Investor at Samsung Next. Samsung Next's investment strategy is limited to its own views and does not reflect the vision or strategy of any other Samsung business unit, including, but not limited to, Samsung Electronics.