Nantan DAO Chronicle (Part II)

What is the goal?

Promote the integration of rural construction and Web3.

This is the core summary of Nantan DAO's self-positioning. From the description of specific goals, it can be seen that Nantan DAO is essentially a rural service organization aimed at supporting rural construction through democratic governance and economic support. Specifically, it hopes to leverage cryptocurrency and Web3 technology to establish a new type of democratic decision-making process, achieving democratic management and allocation of treasury funds to meet local needs in infrastructure construction and cultural activities. However, there is a significant gap between ideals and reality. In practice, Nantan DAO currently resembles a rather rigid transplantation of models from other DAOs into rural areas, failing to closely integrate with the fundamental needs of the countryside, and its specific goals appear to be somewhat scattered and lacking focus.

Democracy is not the democracy of the villagers; rural construction is the rural construction of the object.

In the Nantung DAO, only two members are locals born and raised in the village, and they are also employees of the cooperative. The purpose of the DAO absorbing them is to better carry out local work, while more ordinary villagers have not joined the DAO organization, let alone participate in the organizational decision-making process. Therefore, the democracy of the Nantung DAO is merely a small-scale internal democracy, failing to widely connect and mobilize the rural community. This practice inevitably degenerates into "object-based rural construction," which is led by external entities rather than a self-driven governance model by the villagers. Due to the lack of deep embedding in the rural community, the sustainability of this model is concerning. Currently, for the entire village, both the Nantung DAO and its members largely remain outsiders.

The goal is scattered, each fighting for themselves.

"Promoting the integration of rural construction and Web3" is an attractive and ambitious goal that carries inherent legitimacy and widespread value concerns. However, this ambitious concept is fraught with challenges in practice. The establishment of the Nantan DAO, along with the departure of some core members to Chengdu to establish a new base, has made the divergence of organizational goals increasingly evident, and the team is clearly trapped in a dilemma of misaligned objectives.

Through observation at the proposal level, one may have a more intuitive understanding of the above description. As of April 23, 2025, there are a total of 49 completed proposals on the Nantang DAO voting platform, which can be divided into five categories: funding applications, project plans, institutional construction, new member admissions, and other decisions. Among them, more than half (51.02%) of the proposals are related to funding applications, mainly involving local material procurement, space construction, and member incentives; project plan proposals account for 34.69%, most of which include funding applications and overlap highly with the former. There are 13 proposals related to institutional construction, covering the establishment and revision of organizational systems, such as novice tasks, work point schemes, reimbursement systems, and voting mechanisms. There are 6 proposals related to new member admissions, involving community decisions on new member qualifications through voting. There are 2 proposals regarding other decisions, concerning the cooperative relationship between Nantang DAO and cooperatives and other DAO organizations.

Through further analysis of the specific tasks in the project proposal, a significant trend can be observed: a gradual shift from an initial focus on "rooted in the local" to "expanding outward." Specifically, the early proposals were mostly related to agricultural production (such as enzyme product creation and learning, date palm planting, etc.) and local infrastructure construction (such as the establishment of community libraries, book procurement); later, they diverged into two directions: one focusing on external communication and cooperation (such as the "Rural Web3 Bilateral Enlightenment Program" and cooperation with Chengdu Wuxiang), while the other emphasized the operation and integration of local communities (such as the daily operation of the community library and organizing local activities).

Build a community or commercialize?

Whether from an individual or organizational perspective, a DAO must weigh the potential conflicts between commercial interests and public interests. This conflict also exists in the Nantung DAO. Community building has always been the core issue of the Nantung DAO, encompassing not only the overall development of rural construction and the Web3 field but also deep integration with the local community of Nantung. As a highly active internal project, the "Bilateral Enlightenment Program for Rural Construction and Web3" is managed by core members. By facilitating communication between rural construction teams and Web3 communities through funding, this program supports team members in participating in various Web3 events both domestically and internationally, as well as conducting presentations at universities, thus generating a certain level of influence in the industry.

Meanwhile, community members have also reflected from a commercial perspective. After a period of exploration, members have gradually realized the economic unsustainability of the existing model. However, compared to the pursuit of short-term profits, the community's current exploration is more practical, focusing primarily on the real project needs and actionable scenarios in the field of rural development.

Most members believe that commercialization and community building are not contradictory; everyone is simply exploring different directions based on their own experiences. However, one objective fact is that differences in internal goals often lead to resource dispersion or even competition. As I concluded my research, core members had already gone to Jianta Village in Chengdu to explore the feasibility of promoting the "Entrepreneurship Incubation Project" using the DAO model; while another core member chose to stay in Nantang to organize local members for daily Web3 activities, continuously promoting local integration.

Experiment of Incentives and Circulation - Nantang Dou

On August 20, 2024, Nantang Bean (NT) officially launched on Optimism, with an initial issuance of 10 million pieces. In terms of value anchoring, one Nantang Bean is equivalent to one Chinese Yuan.

Functionally, Nantang Beans serve as a community incentive, fulfilling the dual roles of "contribution record" and "voting rights certificate." On one hand, Nantang DAO adopts a work hour system to record member contributions, allowing members to autonomously log their work hours through the Fairsharing platform. According to the current community standards, each work hour corresponds to a reward of 60 yuan equivalent in Ether and 60 Nantang Beans. On the other hand, Nantang Beans also possess the attributes of governance rights certificates. Members holding more Nantang Beans will have greater voting weight in community decisions. This design, which directly links contribution records with governance power, is essentially a governance incentive mechanism that theoretically enhances community members' enthusiasm and autonomy in participation.

Limitations of the Hourly System

Although the Nantung DAO has made significant strides in its incentive mechanism, the current "contribution record" system has exposed a series of issues in the process of applying for and evaluating work points, such as unclear admission requirements, a singular evaluation standard, and a dysfunctional mutual evaluation mechanism. This reflects a lack of clear admission standards in the current incentive mechanism, which is at least lacking in transparency. This "invisible barrier" prevents many members' contributions from being recognized, effectively shutting them out.

Community members generally reflect that the "equal pay for equal work" model, which uses working hours as the sole evaluation standard, has obvious limitations. Different members have varying levels of work experience and efficiency, and calculating compensation solely based on hours worked effectively "indirectly encourages low efficiency." Moreover, the types of community tasks are diverse, and the time taken for many tasks is difficult to quantify. Additionally, some members are not accustomed to self-reporting their hours, which makes the problem even more complex.

So, has the peer review mechanism played its due role in avoiding these issues? The answer is very limited. Members are generally more conservative, taking each other's feelings into account, and are unwilling to evaluate others. This reluctance to engage in peer reviews undermines the effectiveness of the mechanism. This indicates that the peer review mechanism has not only failed to alleviate disputes but has also become ineffective due to a lack of participation.

In the face of these challenges, the Nantang DAO is trying to reform its incentive system internally. Currently, the community is beginning to explore project-based funding applications, with the issuance of funds depending on the evaluation of project outcomes. Some proposals have attempted to set project milestones, evaluating progress in phases and disbursing corresponding funds. Additionally, some members have suggested adopting "retrospective incentives," which means funding would be awarded based on the quality of results after a task is completed. Although the direction of reform is promising, the community has yet to form a mature plan. There are still disagreements among members on what type of incentive should be used in different contexts. This is closely related to issues such as the clear "tension" within the community and unclear organizational goals. How to balance the flexibility and normativity of incentives, and how to ensure fairness while encouraging exploration, remains a challenge that the Nantang DAO needs to further address.

Let Nantan beans circulate

In addition to serving as an incentive and governance certificate, the community is also considering more circulation scenarios, allowing Nantang Beans to play a greater role as a "trading intermediary". The most representative event is the "New Year Goods Debt Conversion and Work Points Promotion Plan" implemented around the Spring Festival in 2025. This circulation experiment of Nantang Beans is not small in scale, primarily aiming to help the cooperative alleviate long-term debt issues by allowing creditors of the cooperative's mutual aid projects to use Nantang Beans to exchange for New Year goods, thereby creating actual usage scenarios for Nantang Beans. According to the initial design, Nantang DAO will issue an additional 20% of Nantang Beans (a total of 38,400 by the end of the year) to the cooperative's account. The cooperative will use these Nantang Beans to exchange for Ethereum from Nantang DAO's treasury, and then use this money to purchase daily necessities (such as rice, flour, oil, etc.), while also distributing the Nantang Beans evenly to creditors. Creditors can use Nantang Beans to exchange for New Year goods worth no more than 400 yuan, and the cost of these goods can be used to offset debts.

In the initial planning, the circulation experiment of the Nantang DAO was quite ambitious: by clearly demonstrating the production mechanism, system operation process, and exchange rules of Nantang beans, it aimed to cultivate the habit of using tokens among the villagers. However, reality formed a stark contrast to the blueprint—the expected scene of villagers autonomously scanning to use Nantang beans never materialized, and all token circulation ultimately relied on the cooperative administrator manually operating the digital wallet in the background. Moreover, it was recalled that there were even instances of helping elderly people transcribe wallet mnemonic phrases, although this behavior was promptly stopped. For ordinary villagers in the area, the technical threshold and difficulty of using virtual currency wallets were still too high.

Despite the fact that the system has achieved token circulation in the short term, there are obvious flaws in this flow. When reviewing the entire New Year goods plan, an intern from the cooperative pointed out sharply: "This approach is merely adding costs; the villagers don't care about points, and this method hasn't resolved everyone's issues." The circulation and promotion of Nantang beans have always been misaligned with the core demand of villagers to "collect debts and cash out." Some young creditors bluntly stated, "We want cash, not New Year goods," while the interviewed Elder Chang and Elder Liu were more compelled by the reality of "having something is better than having nothing," and could only choose to "slowly accept this method." However, the value of daily necessities is merely a drop in the bucket compared to heavy debts. At a villager meeting organized by the cooperative, several creditors expressed that they would be willing to accept this approach if the usage scenarios for Nantang beans could be expanded to include exchanges for production materials such as seeds and fertilizers.

From the perspective of the effectiveness of the Nangtang Beans, this circulation experiment cannot be considered successful. However, a data analysis conducted on April 19, 2025, revealed new findings. By tracking the public digital wallet transaction records of Nangtang DAO members, I observed a key point: around January 2025, several core participants experienced a dramatic drop in their holdings. One member saw their Nangtang Bean assets shrink by more than 70%, while another member went all-in with their Nangtang Beans.

At the same time, if we analyze the withdrawal records of the Nantang Dou wallet, we can find that the total circulation of NT at that time was about 100,000 pieces, and there were nearly 40,000 pieces in the Nantang Cooperative wallet alone, far exceeding a share of 20%. After inquiring, I learned that "