Nfts
On the path to Vanta DAO decentralization
NFT-controlled investment DAO Vanta made serious progress on the path to decentralization.
Originally launched as an investment syndicate by Josh Field and Mike Grantis in 2021 (its founders transfer ownership of the entire company to its community), the holders of the Vanta Club NFT.
“We are going through this process of decentralization,” Field said at the press conference. Hash Rate Podcast. That means “giving up what is essentially a million-dollar company to the community that provides a lot of the capital and a lot of the value to the founders we invest in.”
What is Vanta?
Grantis and Field initially launched Vanta as a community of friends, builders and trendsetters in the Web3 space. “We’ve syndicated a lot of capital among the trendsetters, people who really have an ear for Web3. Builders, thought leaders, angel investors and marketers,” Field said.
The model was simple: the two partners would find deals themselves, offer them to the Vanta community and take a portion of the investments made by the community – initially 10%, dropping to 5% since the NFT launched in February 2024, with investments reserved for NFT holders. Vanta quickly grew to over 250 notable members, including Mark Jeffrey, Mario Nawful, Ryandcrypto, Farokh, and Seedphrase. To date, they have deployed over $12 million in capital, with notable investments including Portal Gaming, which has enabled Vanta members to increase their returns by 20x.
While there is no shortage of investment syndicates, Vanta has differentiated itself in terms of the quality of deal flow, low fees, and the quality of its investors themselves. As Vanta was overwhelmed by thousands of membership applications from new members, Grantis and Field decided it was time to take the next step in its evolution, transforming it into a decentralized, autonomous organization (DAO).
Investment DAOs were one of the first DAO use cases to catch fire after the invention of the Moloch DAO framework, which restricts governance of the DAO to approved members. Giving groups of people the ability to coordinate capital and deploy it on-chain in a decentralized manner has been a major boon to the crypto industry and to on-chain coordination as a whole.
Today, five years after the launch of Moloch DAO, there is Investment DAO and unions of all shapes and sizes. They allow investors from all backgrounds to access deal flows typically reserved for venture funds and create a sense of transparency not found in traditional investment syndicates.
It takes two to Contango
As they prepared to transform the Vanta syndicate into the DAO, Grantis and Field launched their own venture capital fund, Contango Digital. Their goal was always to create a fund, but after seeing the vibrant community they had built within Vanta, letting it fade away was not an option.
“Why break that up?,” Field said. “Why not go on and do something even bigger?” Take this business, which has essentially generated millions of dollars in revenue, and turn this vehicle over to the community and let it run on its own.
They sought to create a symbiotic relationship between Vanta and Contango that could benefit both, while creating the infrastructure Vanta needs to operate autonomously, managed entirely by its members.
Although Vanta already has a community of well-known crypto builders and thought leaders, Field and Grantis believe it needs even more if it wants to reach the same heights as its centralized competitors. “If we want Vanta to be on the same cap table as funds like A16z… we need to provide incredible value and leverage,” Field said. “The best way to do this is to recruit members who are high-value members of the crypto space.”
In order to attract even more high-quality members, its founders believe that Vanta needs to decentralize and that many in the crypto industry would not be as attracted to an investment syndicate that was essentially owned and managed by a fund , compared to a syndicate that was essentially owned and operated by a fund. they owned and controlled as members.
Contango shares its entire deal flow with Vanta, a deal flow that non-VC investors typically don’t have access to. Vanta, in turn, offers a sort of “decentralized due diligence” process on projects proposed by Contango. With the Vanta community filled with leading builders, KOLs, and investors, they provide “the wisdom of the public,” a breadth and quality of due diligence that could not be accomplished with a closed, traditional team.
The path to decentralization
As Vanta continues its path toward decentralization, there is still much work to be done. Currently, Grantis and Field generate 90% of the transaction flow and for Vanta to function as a DAO, this needs to change. The two men felt that by doing the majority of the deals, they were becoming a bottleneck to Vantas’s growth.
“There are so many different transactions that we don’t have access to or visibility into,” Grantis said. “And there are other people in different sectors of the industry who have more specialized connections to different sectors. We want to give these people the opportunity to make deals and also get paid for it.
They focus on dividing the DAO into distinct roles, including Researchers and Deal Scouts. Deal Scouts would bring potential deals to the DAO; if the DAO community is interested, the scouts receive a commission and the agreement is passed on to the researchers. The researchers would then write in-depth reports and would also be paid through the DAO.
Vanta is currently working with Decent DAO to move to a DAO structure and create a governance system and process. They expect the process to take about six months, meaning Vanta could be entirely in the hands of its community as early as next November.