- 1: Open the Aragon App
Open the Aragon App. Connect your wallet and click “Build a DAO.” You’ll get an overview of the process.
- 2: Choose your blockchain
Your options are Ethereum, Polygon, and Base. For this course, we recommend building a DAO on Polygon or Base because the fees are lower.
You can also deploy on any of the testnets, but you’ll need to get testnet tokens that line up with the network you choose, such as Goerli ETH for the Goerli blockchain.
- 3: Set your DAO’s name, logo, and description
Choose a name, logo, and description that will help new members recognize your DAO on the App. You can also add links, such as to your DAO's website, Discord, Lens, or Twitter. These will appear at the top of your DAO homepage so members can easily find them.
Since this is your first DAO, you can choose something fun, like Espresso DAO (which we used as an example), or just call your DAO “test DAO.” Or, think about a shared interest you have with friends, like a cause or event you’d want to pool assets for. You can also consider shared assets you already have, like an NFT collection or assets won in a hackathon, that you can manage together in your DAO treasury.
If you chose to launch on Ethereum, you can also get a dao.eth subdomain. (Example: espresso.dao.eth).
- 4: Choose your membership: token holders or wallet addresses (multisig members)
In a token-based DAO, voting power is determined by the number of tokens you hold. In a wallet-based DAO, voting power is determined by having a wallet address on an allowlist, meaning your wallet is allowed to vote.
For this course, you can choose either option.
- 5: Mint 5 tokens to your wallet, or add your wallet as the only voting member
Now you need to add your own wallet as a member. In the next task, we will add other members, which can be other people you know or other wallets that you hold.
Token-based DAO: Select the name of the token and the symbol. Distribute 5 tokens to your wallet and gate proposal creation at 1 token.
Wallet-based DAO: Add your wallet as the only voting member and gate proposal creation to wallets on the allowlist.
On this page you can also gate proposal creation to token holders or allowlisted wallets in this step, which helps prevent spam proposals.
- 6: Choose governance settings
Governance settings are the onchain parameters programmed into your smart contract that determine if proposals pass or not. Token-based DAOs
