MetaDAO's Futarchy Gains Traction on Solana with Sanctum Partnership

Futarchy, a governance model that uses markets to make decisions, is gaining traction on the Solana blockchain. MetaDAO, the group pioneering this approach, has seen limited adoption thus far, but a recent partnership with the liquid staking startup Sanctum could change that.

Sanctum has become the first Solana project to fully adopt MetaDAO for its platform governance, with its first decision market drawing over 200 trades in just three hours. MetaDAO's pseudonymous founder, metaproph3t, sees this as a potential catalyst for wider adoption, as it builds trust in the futarchy system.

Futarchy, a term coined by George Mason University economics professor Robin Hanson, is a governance system where markets, rather than voters or leaders, make decisions. MetaDAO brings this concept to Solana governance, creating pass and fail markets for governance proposals. Users can place options-like bets on whether a proposal's success or failure will cause the token's price to rise or fall. The market that predicts a more positive outcome for the token's price succeeds, and only users who traded on the winning market see their trades executed at the market-determined price.

While MetaDAO is generally well-regarded in the crypto community, it faces competition from Realms, a more popular governance platform on Solana. MetaDAO's founder acknowledges the learning curve involved in understanding futarchy but remains optimistic about its potential to become the default governance platform for Solana within six to 18 months.

Sanctum's co-founder, FP Lee, believes that one great success story is needed for MetaDAO to become the real default DAO platform for Solana projects. If projects see that futarchy works, they are more likely to embrace it fully.

As the experiment gains traction, it will be interesting to see how futarchy evolves and whether it can indeed become Solana's go-to governance model. The success of MetaDAO and its partners will be a key indicator of the system's viability and potential for wider adoption.