Launching the New Realms Ecosystem

4 min readNov 14, 2024

Decentralising Solana Public Goods Governance

To Be Released on October 22nd at 9am EST

Realms, the platform that made me fall in love with Solana, is spinning off from Solana Labs into Realms Today Trust. The new entity will develop a forked version of the popular SPL-Governance program and continue supporting the DAO needs of major protocols. This spin-off is another example of Solana’s ongoing commitment to decentralizing the entire ecosystem.

Dean from DeansList, Sebastian formerly at Solana Labs, Jose from BCB, and Adrian from Mango now lead the new management team.

At Realms, we’re shifting our focus to building multiple front-ends tailored to specific use cases. The current UI offers unfiltered access to the entire governance toolkit, providing a “one-size-fits-all” experience that, while powerful, can be overwhelming for new users. Moving forward, we’ll develop purpose-built, composable designs that cater to the unique needs of different teams; like our new Voter UI.

R.E.D. — Realms Ecosystem DAO

As part of the spinoff, Realms Today is proud to announce the launch of R.E.D — the Realms Ecosystem DAO; a fully decentralized Grants program to support DAOs on Solana, launching with $200k to be allocated to DAOs in the Solana ecosystem. R.E.D. will have an exclusive governance structure, created by the Realms Today team.

The goal of R.E.D. is to

Decentralize public goods funding through collaborative contribution and ideation
Give DAOs on Solana a common space to discuss ecosystem priorities and put planning into action
Provide new projects with a resource for funding, mentorship, and support
Pioneer a sustainable model for public goods funding

This idea was first discussed at AthensDAO in 2022 by Emon Motamedi, Head of the Solana Incubator at Solana Labs

The Member DAOs

The participating DAOs have been selected based on previous contributions to the SPL-Governance codebase, active discussion in planning for the Realms Ecosystem, and financial grants for new governance developments.

Mango
Jito
Marinade
Metaplex
Pyth
Greed
SagaDAO
Dean’s List
Dual Finance
Drift
SNS (Bonfida)
Dialect
Save (Solend)
Solblaze
Exchange Art
Orca
Kamino
Symmetry
Parcl
BONK
Realms Today

Breakpoint Presentation 2024

New Services

Realms will continue working on the no-code DAO builder, but will also add some new, much needed services to the Solana DAO landscape.

DAO Trusts and banking services

One of the biggest pain points DAOs face today is navigating the incorporation process. Our upcoming service will enable newly formed DAOs to quickly set up a trust, bank account, and handle other common needs with minimal hassle.

Advisory and Support

Realms is a massive DAO platform, but some of its features can be challenging to set up without expert guidance. Realms will offer a network of seasoned DAO professionals to assist in creating and maintaining DAO structures. We believe this team is crucial in ushering in a new era of token and NFT DAOs.

DAO credit cards

DAO’s need a better way to interact with fiat payments. Realms will be introducing credit cards backed by treasury funds to make reimbursement much easier.

Accelerator

The Realms Accelerator is designed for entrepreneurs looking to leverage powerful SPL-Governance programs and bring new, fresh perspectives to how DAOs can be used. We’ve already launched with two projects, FoSho and Marshmallow, and will share more details about the program in the coming months.

Custom DAOs

For DAOs seeking more customized experiences, they’ll be able to go beyond Realms’ no-code framework. The new voter UI, pioneered by Bonk, showcased how the Realms team can create dedicated, tailored DAO solutions for teams looking to go beyond the default template.

New Product Pipeline

As part of our strategy to launch multiple new UIs over the next year, we have started sharing a sneak peak of some of the ones we are launching first.

Network State UI