Lessons from DAOs to RWA Vaults: A Designer’s Journey

If you work long enough in crypto, you eventually notice that the problems don’t really change—only the context does.

When I started with Aragon in 2017, the whole idea of a “DAO” was science fiction. People weren’t asking, “How do I stake into a credit vault?” They were asking, “What’s a DAO? Why would anyone use one?” The challenge was to take something abstract and technical and make it legible enough that real organizations would try it.

Today, at Nest, the challenge looks different on the surface. We’re designing for people deploying millions into RWA vaults, not cooperative treasurers experimenting with digital bylaws. But the underlying design problem is the same: make an unfamiliar financial system feel trustworthy, usable, and transparent enough that people will risk real capital on it.

The continuity between DAOs and vaults isn’t obvious. But it exists.

The Problem of Legibility

At Aragon, we built templates for decentralized organizations: voting apps, permissioning systems, token mechanics. The real work wasn’t writing smart contracts. It was explaining what they meant. How do you show someone that “any tokenholder can call a vote” is not chaos, but governance?

That work taught me the value of progressive disclosure. Users needed layers: a high-level story (“this is a cooperative, now digitized”), an intermediate layer (“here’s how votes change policy”), and a deep layer for the curious (“here’s the Solidity under the hood”).

With RWA vaults, the stakes are higher but the layering is the same. You start with a story: “This vault gives you exposure to T-bills.” Then a middle layer: “Your claim to yield is represented by vault tokens, and your funds are allocated across yield bearing assets.” And finally, for the serious allocators: “Here’s the contract call, the custodian, and the redemption history.”

Designing legibility across layers is what lets complex systems feel usable.

Trust Through Visibility

DAOs failed or succeeded on the strength of their transparency. A community that could see every proposal, every vote, and every treasury movement was a community that believed in the system—even if they didn’t like every outcome.

That lesson carries over directly. In vaults, allocators don’t expect everything to always be up and to the right. They expect to see what’s happening. Show them token balances, redemption timelines, asset compositions. Don’t hide the red numbers. If withdrawals are taking ten days, display that.

Transparency is not the same as a PDF report. It’s lived visibility. DAOs taught us that people can forgive bad outcomes if they trust the process. Vaults are no different.

The Psychology of Capital

The other continuity is psychological. In DAOs, you had members putting in $100 or $1,000 and expecting to shape governance. In vaults, you have allocators putting in $10M and expecting professional-grade risk management.

On paper, those are different universes. But in practice, they share a trait: both are entrusting something valuable to a system they don’t fully understand. That makes design less about beauty and more about reassurance.

DAO users wanted to know, “If I vote, does it count?” Allocators want to know, “If I redeem, do I get my money back?” The details differ, but the pattern is the same: credibility comes from showing the system working, not just claiming it works.

Continuity Across Domains

Looking back, my DAO work feels like training for institutional finance. Not because DAOs prepared me to read term sheets, but because they forced me to think about how design mediates trust in systems that are new, confusing, and easy to doubt.

The people are different. The amounts are different. But the role of design is the same.

You build layers of legibility. You embrace transparency, even when it’s uncomfortable. You translate technical mechanics into human reassurance.

That’s the throughline—from DAOs to RWA vaults. The tools change, the domains change, but the design principles endure.

Closing

If you want to see where design in crypto is headed, don’t just look at the new frontier. Look backward. The lessons that made DAOs usable in 2017 are the same lessons that make vaults investable in 2025.

Designing for trust is not about the domain. It’s about people. People trying to understand whether to trust something new with their time, money, or reputation.

Whether it’s a cooperative of a hundred or an allocator with a hundred million, the question is the same: does this system show me enough to believe in it?

Design is how you answer.