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Deploying a smart contract from a DAO

Have a smart contract, but want your DAO to control it?

In this recipe, we'll walk through the process of deploying a smart contract via a proposal in DAO DAO.

This example is intended for folks who already have some amount of experience deploying smart contracts in Juno. If you'd like a refresher consider reading the Juno documentation on smart contract deployment to learn more.

Motivation​

Smart contracts are typically structured such that their owner (the person who deploys them) controls them. For example, the owner of a smart contract that collects fees for its usage can withdraw those funds. By deploying a smart contract from a DAO we can make sure that the DAO owns the smart contract instead of a potentially untrustworthy individual.

Did you know?

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is currently controlled by a four-of-seven multisig. This means that at the root of the entire system are seven people, four of whom together have complete control over the contract. As they write in their docs:

In the long term, we would like the root multisig to be replaced by some form of distributed decision making process, as such systems become available.

DAO DAO is one such system.

Setup​

Before beginning you'll need to have a DAO deployed on DAO-DAO. For a quick introduction to that see the quickstart guide.

Deploying a contract​

From the homepage for your DAO go the proposals page and press the create button to create a new proposal.

Type in the name and description of your proposal and then add a "WASM" message. We'll be using a WASM message as we'll be interacting with a smart contract.

Collecting information about the contract to be deployed​

Next, you'll need to gather some information about the contract you'll be deploying. You'll need to know the code ID for the contract and what information the contract expects to be instantiated with.

At the time of writing the DAO-DAO smart contract is deployed with code id 280 and we can learn what information it expects for instantiation by taking a look at its InstantiateMsg.

Creating the deployment proposal​

In order to deploy the contract DAO-DAO expects a WasmMsg, which encapsulates all of ways that one might interact with a smart contract on Juno. We'll be using the Instantiate variant so our message will look something like this:

{
  "wasm": {
    "instantiate": {
      "admin": "juno147huky2j39qccdw4a0j68y8xrpg7wwqfvkm29qfmsecn5nu6rl8qsle7gk",
      "code_id": 280,
      "label": "baby dao",
      "msg": {} // TODO - We'll create the message below.
    }
  }
}

Here we've set the admin of the contract to the address of the DAO we'll be deploying the contract from. This allows the DAO to perform a migration of the contract code should it want to. The admin field is optional if you'd prefer to disable migration. You can find the address of your DAO in the "Info" tab on your DAO's homepage.

The message field will vary from contract to contract and based on how you'd like to set up the DAO you're deploying so its particulars aren't terribly important. Here we'll use a pretty standard issue DAO configuration:

{
  "name": "baby dao",
  "description": "this is a dao created via a DAO-DAO proposal",
  "gov_token": {
    "instantiate_new_cw20": {
    "code_id": 279,
    "label": "bdao",
    "msg": {
      "name": "baby dao",
      "symbol": "bdao",
      "decimals": 6,
      "initial_balances": [
          {
            "address": "juno1m7a7nva00p82xr0tssye052r8sxsxvcy2v5qz6",
            "amount": "6000000"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  "threshold": {
    "absolute_percentage": {
      "percentage": "0.5"
    }
  },
  "proposal_deposit_amount": "1",
  "max_voting_period": {
    "time": 604800
  }
}

Our final message is our WASM message with the above JSON object replacing the TODO line above. With the replacement done you can go ahead and create the proposal.

Deployment​

All that is left is to chat with the other members of your DAO and vote on it. If it passes you can execute the proposal and your smart contract will be instantiated!