Sandbox DAO Case Study, Part 2: Ran the System
Forty-eight SIPs. Twelve delegates. Four grant managers. Two-week cycles for nearly two years. What running a $10M DAO looks like from the inside, and the one lesson that changed how I think about governance.
This is the second of a three-part series on what I learned building, running, and winding down a $10M governance system.
Running a DAO at this scale taught me that governance is never finished. It’s a living system that needs constant attention. And the gap between “it works on paper” and “it works in practice” is where the real job begins.
The SIP machine
Every two weeks, a new batch of SIPs (Sandbox Improvement Proposals, the formal mechanism for community members to request funding or propose changes to the ecosystem) would go to vote. Each one needed curation, review, discussion, and follow-through. Our project management team reviewed and challenged every proposal before it reached the community. They were the quality gate.
Beyond the standard SIP process, we established a grants program with four elected grant managers, each given a dedicated budget to approve smaller projects (up to $15K) without a full community vote. Two separate SIPs governed this: one to approve the program itself, another to elect its members. This gave the DAO a faster pathway for smaller initiatives without bypassing governance. It also created a new dynamic: the grant managers operated with real autonomy, and building a productive working relationship with them was part of the job.
We also had twelve delegates, each granted 2 million in voting power by The Sandbox plus whatever they could gather through delegation from the community. And a Special Council, nominated rather than elected, was reviewing the SIPs and providing recommendations.
The relentless day-to-day
The day-to-day was relentless. Paying the admin team and SIP authors after milestone reviews. Reviewing contracts with lawyers. Coordinating with the director. Monitoring and animating forum discussions. Running a podcast. Liaising with The Sandbox on strategy alignment. Proposing constitution improvements. Managing a self-custody treasury with a debit card and a bank relationship.
The community was passionate, which also meant opinionated. Some members pushed for an elected “community council” to replace the nominated Special Council. What started as a campaign by a few individuals with personal agendas became a broader movement. We were designing a new constitution that would have addressed this, merging the delegate body with a community-elected council and retiring the Special Council. It never happened. The pause came first.
The lesson that changed everything
One lesson stands out above the rest. You can’t write a constitution that covers every edge case. People will always find the scenario you didn’t anticipate. So we shifted from the letter of the law to the spirit of the law: instead of trying to anticipate every possible dispute, we focused on the intent behind the rules and used that as our compass when things got ambiguous. That single shift made governance more workable than any amount of detailed drafting ever could.
Rules are important. But the spirit behind those rules is what keeps the system alive.
This is something I now apply to every governance engagement. When a client asks me “but what if someone does X?” my answer is usually: you can’t predict X. What you can do is build a system where the people in charge have the judgment and the authority to handle X when it shows up.
Next: Part 3, “Wound It Down,” on the part nobody prepares you for.
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