Coordinape
We made DAOs thrive from 2021–2025.
Coordinape helped thousands of decentralized teams recognize contribution, allocate resources, and trust one another — before any of it was easy. The app is now sunset. This page is its monument.
The Origin
"How do we pay the people who just showed up?"
It started inside Yearn Finance in 2020 — a question with no good answer. The DeFi treasury was flush, the community was enormous, and yet nobody had a fair way to figure out who had contributed, how much, or to what. Compensation decisions fell to a handful of insiders who couldn't possibly see everything.
Yearn contributors started sketching a different model. What if the team itself decided who deserved to be paid? Not managers, not token holders, not a multisig — but peers. The people doing the work, recognizing each other's work.
Coordinape launched publicly in early 2021. Within months it had spread across dozens of DAOs: Gitcoin, Bankless, Olympus, Index Coop, Synthetix. The mechanism was simple, the insight was profound, and the timing was exactly right. The DAO summer was cresting and teams everywhere were asking the same question Yearn had asked.
Coordinape gave them an answer: ask each other.
The Mechanism
The radical act of giving credit
Each epoch, every member of a Coordinape circle received a fixed number of GIVE tokens. Not for themselves — to distribute to their teammates. You couldn't keep them. You could only give them away.
This inversion was everything. It shifted the question from "what do I deserve?" to "who helped me do my best work?" It replaced competition with recognition. It made generosity the currency.
At the end of each epoch, the GIVE allocations were tallied. A contributor's share of the circle's reward budget reflected how much their peers had valued them — not a committee, not an algorithm, not a founder's gut. Peers.
The model didn't work perfectly everywhere. Like any system, it could be gamed and had blind spots. But for communities that had built real trust, it was revelatory. Teams described it as the first tool that made them feel like a team.
The Chronicle
Four years that changed how DAOs work
The Idea
Inside Yearn Finance, contributors begin sketching a peer-to-peer compensation model. The frustration is simple: large treasuries, invisible work.
Public Launch
Coordinape ships publicly. Within weeks, Gitcoin, Bankless, Olympus, Index Coop, and dozens of other leading DAOs adopt it. The DAO summer is cresting.
Rapid Adoption
Circles spread across the ecosystem. The GIVE mechanic proves versatile — used for contributor compensation, grant allocation, and internal recognition.
The App Matures
Expanded features: CSV vouching, CoLinks social graph, and deeper integrations. The platform serves hundreds of active organizations globally.
CoLinks & Social Layer
CoLinks launches — an onchain social graph linking contributors across the ecosystem. The vision expands from circle-based payroll to a broader reputation layer.
The Social Oracle & $CO Token
The $CO token launches on Base with live utility from day one, powering the Social Oracle — a system for onchain reputation and attestation. 64,000+ attestations recorded.
Foundation to DAO
Coordinape transitions governance from the founding team to CoDAO — the community of $CO token holders. The builders hand the keys to the community.
The App Sunsets
The Coordinape app closes. The contracts are wound down. CoDAO continues. The work endures in the protocols, the attestations, and the communities it shaped.
What We Built
The tools outlived the app
The Social Oracle
An onchain attestation system that let communities vouch for contributors across the ecosystem. Built on Base, it recorded over 64,000 attestations — a permanent ledger of human recognition.
Foundation to DAO
One of the more honest governance transitions in web3. The founding team transferred control to CoDAO — the community of $CO holders — and then stepped back. Not gradually. Fully.
The $CO Token
Launched on Base with live utility from day one — not a roadmap promise. $CO powered access to the Social Oracle, participation in CoDAO governance, and a new model for community ownership.
The People
Coordinape was never just software
Across four years, thousands of contributors in hundreds of DAOs used Coordinape to see each other. Not as wallet addresses or Discord handles — as people who showed up, did the work, and deserved to be recognized for it.
Some of those communities are still running. Some have wound down. All of them were shaped, in some small way, by the act of asking: who helped us, and how do we say thank you?
Archival quotes and contributor voices will be added to this section over time.
What Remains
The app is gone. Some things remain.
The work has stopped. What persists is the record — attestations onchain that can't be erased, and CoDAO as a holding place for the intellectual property and history of the project.
CoDAO
CoDAO holds the IP and continues to exist as a steward of what Coordinape built. Active development has wound down, but the DAO remains as a home for the work.
Visit CoDAO →The Social Oracle
64,000+ attestations recorded permanently onchain on Base. A record of peer recognition that cannot be taken down or altered — a permanent artifact of the project.
Link coming soon