Baal: Moloch's Next Form

Key Insights:

• Moloch is a rudimentary framework that has given rise to Moloch DAOs, with V3 soon to release.
• Over 2,500 Moloch DAOs have been launched across Mainnet, Polygon, and xDai.

After the pain following The DAO hack faded from memory, renewed interest in DAOs emerged in 2019 with the launch of MolochDAO, which was formed to distribute Ethereum grants. It developed its own set of governing smart contracts called Moloch, and the first version (MolochV1) launched on Feb. 14, 2019. Since Moloch emerged in the depths of the bear market, the capital set aside to support Ethereum developers was limited. MolochDAO aimed to provide sufficient funding to support the development of public infrastructure as well as simultaneously solve coordination problems through the process of building the DAO and tackling blockchain’s “tragedy of the commons” when it came to collectivized funding.

To date, the DAO has distributed over $1 million in grants to developers on the Ethereum network. MolochDAO’s immediate grant focus was projects aimed towards the development of Ethereum 2.0 in anticipation of the Merge, seeing as resources and developers were slow to step up to the plate due to misaligned incentives and limited funding. Since then, this focus has slowly shifted to general ecosystem development.

Perhaps more importantly, MolochDAO’s novel governance framework has provided a rudimentary foundation for many DAOs to follow. MolochDAO built Moloch to run itself, but teams have built extensions and variations of it to support themselves.