EIP-4824

EIP-4824 defines a minimal, consensus-driven interface for DAOs to publish their essential metadata on-chain. This metadata includes the DAO's name, a link to its governance charter or manifesto, a description of its purpose, and the address of its primary governance token. By standardizing this information in a daoURI (similar to an NFT's tokenURI), the proposal enables wallets, explorers, and other tooling to automatically discover, verify, and display a DAO's foundational details without requiring custom integrations for each organization.

The core technical mechanism is a single function, daoURI(), which returns a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) pointing to a JSON document containing the DAO's metadata. This simple, backward-compatible extension can be implemented by any smart contract that wishes to declare itself as a DAO, including governance token contracts, treasury contracts, or dedicated registry contracts. This creates a common discovery layer, allowing the ecosystem to build universal directories and dashboards that can understand any compliant DAO's structure at a glance.

The primary goal of EIP-4824 is to solve the interoperability and discovery problem in the fragmented DAO ecosystem. Before this standard, each DAO framework (like Aragon, DAOstack, or a custom solution) and each analytics platform had to build bespoke parsers to understand a DAO's governance model. By providing a single source of truth for basic identity, EIP-4824 reduces integration overhead for developers and increases transparency for participants, forming a foundational building block for a more connected and comprehensible DAO landscape on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains.

EIP-4824, formally titled "Common DAO Framework," is an Ethereum Improvement Proposal that establishes a standard interface for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to declare their existence and publish associated metadata. Proposed in February 2022 by Lucas Manuel and other contributors, its primary goal was to solve a fundamental discovery and interoperability problem: there was no universal way for a smart contract to declare "I am a DAO" and link to its governing documents, charter, or other critical information. This proposal introduced a minimal, backward-compatible standard to serve as a foundational layer for the broader DAO ecosystem.

The etymology of the proposal's identifier follows the standard EIP numbering system managed by the Ethereum community. The number 4824 is sequential and holds no intrinsic meaning, assigned simply as the next available slot in the EIP repository. The proposal's title, "Common DAO Framework," reflects its intent to provide a common, shared base layer—a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)—upon which more complex DAO standards and tooling could be built. This approach is analogous to how ERC-20 provided a common interface for tokens, enabling an explosion of compatible wallets and exchanges.

The origin of EIP-4824 lies in the practical challenges faced by DAO tooling providers and analysts. Before its existence, each DAO framework (like Aragon, DAOstack, or Moloch) and each analytics platform had to create custom, non-interoperable methods to identify and describe DAO contracts. This fragmented landscape made it difficult to build universal explorers, registries, or aggregators. EIP-4824 emerged from a desire to create a lowest-common-denominator standard that any DAO, regardless of its underlying governance mechanics, could easily adopt to become discoverable and legible to the wider ecosystem.

The development process followed the typical EIP lifecycle, moving from a Draft status through community review and discussion. Key decisions included mandating that the daoURI return a JSON metadata file, defining a standard set of recommended fields (like name, description, and governance), and ensuring the interface was simple enough for any smart contract to implement with just a few lines of code. This minimalist design was a conscious choice to maximize adoption and avoid prescribing specific governance logic, leaving those details to higher-layer specifications.

As a meta-standard, EIP-4824's success is measured by its adoption as a dependency by other, more specific DAO standards. Its legacy is providing the lexical foundation—the agreed-upon term daoURI and its semantic meaning—that allows the ecosystem to build a shared understanding of what constitutes a DAO's public identity. It represents a critical step in the maturation of decentralized governance from a collection of isolated experiments into an interoperable network of organizations.

EIP-4824 introduces a new smart contract interface, IERC-4824, which requires a single function: daoURI(). This function returns a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that points to a metadata document describing the DAO. This URI is analogous to the tokenURI function in the ERC-721 standard but is scoped to the entire DAO entity rather than an individual token. By standardizing this single, simple function, the proposal enables wallets, explorers, and other applications to discover and display consistent, verifiable information about any DAO that implements it, such as its name, description, logo, and governance links.

The metadata document itself is a JSON file, typically hosted on IPFS or another decentralized storage network, following a schema defined by the EIP. This schema includes fields for name, description, logo, and links to governance portals, forums, and other relevant resources. Crucially, the daoURI is immutable for a given contract address, ensuring a persistent and tamper-proof reference. This mechanism allows a DAO's front-end presentation and branding to be updated by changing the metadata file it points to, without requiring a complex and risky smart contract upgrade.

The primary technical innovation of EIP-4824 is its composability and minimalism. It does not define governance logic, token standards, or treasury management. Instead, it acts as a foundational layer that other standards can build upon. For example, a DAO's governance token (ERC-20), membership NFT (ERC-721), and treasury contract can all reference the same daoURI, creating a unified identity across the ecosystem. This allows indexers, dashboards, and multi-DAO interfaces to aggregate and display information consistently, solving the problem of fragmented and non-standard DAO discovery.

The EIP-4824 JSON schema is a formal specification that defines the structure and required fields for a DAO's public metadata. It is a machine-readable document, typically hosted at a URI declared in the DAO's smart contract, that provides a standardized way to describe a decentralized autonomous organization's identity, governance, and resources. The schema's primary purpose is to enable interoperability, allowing tools like explorers, registries, and dashboards to consistently parse and display information about any compliant DAO. Its fields are categorized into logical groups covering the DAO's basic identity, governance parameters, and associated links.

The schema's structure is organized into several key sections. The name, description, and avatar fields establish the DAO's core identity. The links array allows for associating relevant URLs, such as the DAO's forum, governance portal, and code repositories. Crucially, the governance section outlines the DAO's framework, specifying the type (e.g., "token-based", "multisig", "optimistic") and other type-specific parameters. For token-based governance, this includes the token object, which defines the address, symbol, and type of the governance token, creating a verifiable link between the on-chain contract and its descriptive metadata.

A critical technical aspect is the schema's extensibility and validation. The base schema defines a set of required and optional properties but is designed to be extended by DAO frameworks or individual organizations to include custom fields. All implementations must adhere to the core structure to ensure basic interoperability. The metadata document must be served with the correct Content-Type header (application/json) and should be publicly accessible. The integrity of the metadata can be further secured by storing the JSON document on decentralized storage networks like IPFS or Arweave, with the hash recorded on-chain, making the DAO's description immutable and verifiable.

For developers, implementing the schema involves two primary steps: generating the compliant JSON file and updating the smart contract. First, the DAO's information is structured according to the official schema definition. Second, the contract's daoURI function (or equivalent) must return the URI pointing to this JSON document. This URI is often an IPFS ipfs:// or an HTTPS https:// link. Prominent DAO tooling platforms, such as Aragon and DAOhaus, have integrated EIP-4824 support, automatically generating and managing this metadata for DAOs created through their frameworks, significantly lowering the adoption barrier.

The practical impact of this standardized schema is a unified discovery layer for the DAO ecosystem. Before EIP-4824, each platform or indexer used proprietary formats, fragmenting information. Now, a block explorer can read the daoURI from any compliant contract, fetch the schema, and consistently display a rich profile. Analysts can aggregate data across DAOs, and users can reliably find governance details and social links. This turns the daoURI into a universal DAO resolver, analogous to how a domain name resolves to a website, but for decentralized organizations on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains.