Motherboard - Case study

Overview

Motherboard, styled MTHRBRD, was an all-in-one platform for running a DAO, powered by New Order, a venture DAO that incubates and accelerates DeFi startups. As a DAO's contributor base grows, operators end up juggling separate, loosely connected tools for people, payments, treasury, communication and governance. Motherboard's answer was a single home base: everything needed to run a DAO in one place, so operators could spend their time building.

Data Subsystems did backend and frontend development. The platform brought together contributor management with roles and access control; operations with multisig transactions, a treasury overview and payment requests; a communication suite with encrypted messaging, DAO-to-DAO chat and Discord integration; governance through Snapshot; and a DAO-native accounting suite for reporting and budgeting.

Both the marketing site and the web app at app.motherboard.fi were Next.js builds using Chakra UI, and the site offered demo booking, an onboarding walkthrough and documentation on GitBook. Motherboard's site is now offline, so the screenshot comes from the Wayback Machine, March 2023.

Both the marketing site and the app it fronted were Next.js and React builds, with Chakra UI over Emotion carrying the interface - the DAO dashboards, tables and forms that a contributor-management product is mostly made of - Yup validating those forms, lodash and moment doing the data work, d3 behind the charts, and Amplitude measuring what people actually did in the product rather than only what they clicked on the marketing page.

What was built

Contributor management in one dashboard: add and approve contributors, assign and modify roles, and control access to sections and apps.

Operational management: initiate and sign multisig transactions, see an overview of treasury assets, and view, track and accept payment requests.

Communication suite for internal, community and partner conversations, with private-key encrypted messaging, DAO-to-DAO chat and Discord integration.

Governance module built on Snapshot: post, vote on and view proposals, browse scheduled, active and closed ones, and analyse results.

DAO-native accounting suite with automated internal reporting, budgeting and label-driven classification.

Marketing site with a features overview, demo booking, an onboarding walkthrough and links to the documentation and the app.

Stack

Frontend

Next.js: Framework for both the web app and the statically exported marketing site
React: UI layer of both Next.js builds, the marketing site and the DAO web app
Chakra UI: Component library used by both the marketing site and the app, visible in the archived markup
Chakra UI + Emotion: Component library and styling across the site and the app
Yup: Form validation
d3: Charting utilities behind the dashboards

Integrations & Payments

Discord: Integration inside the communication suite, next to encrypted messaging and DAO-to-DAO chat

Web3

Snapshot: Governance integration for posting, voting on and reviewing DAO proposals

Analytics

Amplitude: Product analytics on how the DAO tooling was used

Engineering highlights

Communication built for DAOs: private-key encrypted messaging and DAO-to-DAO chat, with a Discord integration in the same suite.

Governance plugged into Snapshot, with scheduled, active and closed proposals and result analysis in the same platform that handled contributors, treasury and accounting.