Despite DAOs being hailed as a new paradigm for collective coordination, compensation systems remain one of their most underdeveloped and problematic areas. Most DAOs default to token-based payouts or informal/aleatory arrangements that lack clarity, fairness, or sustainability.
From previous DAO experiences, Key challenges include:
- Unclear value attribution: Contributors often struggle to understand how their effort translates into compensation, leading to frustration and disengagement.
- Inequity between early and late contributors: Early contributors often bear high risk and long-term involvement but receive the same or less recognition than those who join post-funding.
- Speculative payment models: Many DAOs compensate in volatile native tokens, creating misalignment between labor and value, especially in bear markets.
- Lack of reliable reputation systems: Without robust, transparent metrics for commitment and impact, it’s difficult to assess who deserves what — especially in fluid, async environments.
- Overreliance on voting for decisions: Compensation decisions are often politicized or based on popularity, not value generated.
Until DAOs evolve clear, accountable, and adaptable compensation models, they risk replicating the same extraction dynamics they aim to disrupt — undermining their promise of inclusive, regenerative collaboration.
Introducing CollabBerry: Peer-to-Peer algorithmic Accounting for fair Compensation in DAOS
CollabBerry is an allocation protocol / platform / dapp focused on empowering engaged teams to co-create, collaborate, and share ownership in radically fair and inspiring ways. It embodies values of trust, inclusivity, transparency, collaboration, and fair contribution.
How does it work?
We enable decentralized ownership and fair collaboration through our AAA person-to-person protocol , designed to ensure clarity, fairness, and adaptability in team contributions.
Agreement Setting
We leverage AI and Web3 technology to define clear agreements between contributors and organizations. These agreements clarify:
- What a contributor will do based on what the organization needs.
- The contributor’s market rate vs. the organization’s compensation capacity.
- The time commitment and expected deliverables.
Assessment of Agreement
To ensure fairness and accountability:
- Contributors assess their co-contributors’ work at each payroll cycle (e.g., monthly).
- Today, the assessment is simple and transparent ; tomorrow, we may introduce arbitration protocols that require capital staking to dispute or validate assessments, remembering that simplicity is within our core values.
- The goal is not to eliminate conflicts but to diminish them and provide structured resolution mechanisms .
Accounting Protocol (Compensation Algorithm)
To ensure fair and dynamic compensation :
- Assessment scores are aggregated and multiplied by a Peer Adjustment Rate to determine variable compensation percentages .
- Compensation considers market rates vs. actual compensation rates to balance fairness and sustainability while sharing ownership across individuals.
- Long-term commitments and business expenses are factored in through specific multipliers .
What does a team obtain by using Collabberry?
- Personal and team accountability
Contributors close the feedback loop about their performace within their teams, inviting them to reflect on their work, how is perceived by their team mates as identifying gaps for personal development or improvement. - Peer-to-Peer Accounting
Enables teams to transparently track contributions and allocate resources (e.g. $SRC) based on agreed-upon metrics. - Shared Ownership Structures
Facilitates equitable distribution of ownership and rewards among contributors. - Legitimate access to teams yields
When the team delivers the promised impact and/or productivity of their work, their effort will be fairly quantified, therefore, the retroactive personal funding will be easier to distribute.
Synergy Between Scroll and CollabBerry
The Scroll community’s move toward a more inclusive and retroactive contribution recognition model (see Proposal: Gov Contribution Recognition) seems to be perfectly aligned with the core capabilities and mission of CollabBerry.
CollabBerry is a coordination and reward protocol designed to measure and compensate for the time, effort, and commitment of contributors — especially in async, trust-minimized ecosystems like Scroll.
Here’s how we can amplify Scroll’s governance goals:
1. Precise Recognition of Offchain Labor
Scroll’s governance working group is exploring ways to recognize meaningful contributions beyond token votes or transaction history.
CollabBerry provides a structured way to log and quantify sweat equity, surfacing the invisible labor of early contributors, community stewards, working group members, and builders.
2. Retroactive Reward Allocation
The Scroll proposal hints at using retroactive funding — a perfect match for CollabBerry’s reward engine, which allows:
- Peer-based assessment of past contributions
- Aggregated commitment scores tied to both reputation and compensation
- A trail of Soulbound Tokens as enduring proof-of-work across funding rounds
3. Modular, Composable with Any Governance Layer
CollabBerry integrates easily with Scroll’s governance stack — whether it’s using token-weighted voting, workstreams, or retro rounds, we serve as an accountability and tracking layer, not a competing model.
4. Strengthening Sybil Resistance Through Contextual Signals
Rather than relying solely on on-chain activity, CollabBerry builds rich context-aware reputation profiles — ideal for distinguishing high-context contributors from passive or speculative actors in Scroll’s evolving contributor ecosystem.
This is an opportunity to co-design a best-in-class contributor recognition model with Scroll — combining modular zk infrastructure with next-gen coordination tools that honor people’s real work, not just their wallets.
How to move forward?
The intent of this post here is to present Collabberry capabilities (as well as our mission and vision to revolutionize workplaces through sovereignty, collaboration, and shared accountability) to the scroll community, as well as to request for signals regarding how demanded Collabberry would be in Scroll ecosystem.
Also, your insights, experiences, comments and questions will be very appreciated, I’m open to receive comments, thoughts on issues like (but not limited to):
- How have you managed internal fund allocation within your projects?
- What challenges have you faced in ensuring fair compensation among team members?
- Would a tool like CollabBerry enhance your project’s internal operations?
Let’s collaborate to build systems that reflect our shared values at every level. Our Beta Product is ready in Arbitrum chain, and currently deploying on other chais like Celo, why not making Scroll the next one?Want to give it a try? → beta.collabberry.xyz
Both Scroll and CollabBerry share a commitment to building infrastructure that empowers communities from the ground up — emphasizing trust, transparency, and long-term contribution over hype cycles or extractive models. Our approaches are rooted in shared values of open participation, modular coordination, and regenerative incentives. By aligning on these cultural foundations, we can cultivate a more equitable and collaborative Web3 ecosystem. Read our Cultural Manifiesto here.