TL;DR: Botto DAO uses Loop Crypto to schedule recurring crypto payments, saving hours of manual work every month.
Botto DAO is using Loop Crypto to schedule monthly recurring crypto payments. The DAO behind the popular autonomous artist known as Botto has been working with Loop to streamline its crypto payment processes, bringing greater efficiency and time-savings to its financial operations.
Like most DAOs in web3, Botto DAO is a global organization with contributors spread across the globe. Each of these contributors is paid in a mix of ERC-20 tokens each month for their work supporting the DAO. Before turning to Loop, the finance lead at the DAO was spending two or more hours every month manually creating, signing, and verifying crypto payments to contributors. Not only was this process time-consuming and manual, but it was also potentially prone to errors given the number of steps one individual needed to remember to do each month. As we discuss below, this is why the DAO ultimately turned to Loop Crypto to automate crypto payment scheduling.
Launched in October 2021 as a collaboration between Mario Klingemann, ElevenYellow, Carbono, and Colección SOLO, Botto is a decentralized autonomous artist. What does that mean? Botto is a machine artist, constituting an “art engine” that generates works of digital art through diffusion-based models. Each week, Botto creates tens of thousands of unique images and then presents 350 of those images to the DAO community. The community provides feedback to Botto in terms of what it believes is valuable art. The art engine can evolve based on this continuous weekly feedback from the community. Acquiring and staking Botto tokens allows community members to vote on the artwork that Botto produces.
Every week, the community votes on its favorite piece of art Botto has created, and that piece is auctioned off. It is minted as a non-fungible token (NFT) and auctioned on SuperRare. The proceeds from this sale go to fund the costs of Botto’s upkeep, such as server expenses, and to reward the community. To date, Botto has generated close to $4M in auction sales for its work.
The DAO is separated into working groups that manage different facets of Botto’s career, with members of each working group needing to be paid in crypto on a recurring basis.
Just about all of Botto DAO’s financial inflows and outflows are on-chain. The DAO generates income through token sales and auctions, which are fully on-chain. On the cost side, the majority of their expenses are also on-chain as they pay a globally distributed workforce. As a result, they need financial management tools that make it easy to operate as an on-chain entity.
Each month the finance lead at the DAO needed to pay up to 20 working group contributors in a mix of USDC, WETH, and the DAO’s native token known as $BOTTO. Each of these transactions would originate from a Safe multi-signature (multi-sig) wallet. While Safes are of course great for added security, especially within decentralized organization structures, the process of gathering a quorum of signers for each transaction can be a hassle and extremely time-consuming.
Each month, the finance lead would go through this cumbersome process of executing 20 or more multi-sig transactions to pay working group contributors. If one of the signers was unresponsive or the finance lead forgot to create the transaction at the end of the month, then contributors would be delayed in receiving their compensation. The process required upwards of two hours of manual work each month. It also required hyper-attention to detail to ensure the right token on the right network was sent to the right contributor. Any typographical errors or mistakes copying and pasting addresses would cause funds to be sent to the wrong destination.
In addition to this manual process, there was an issue with data organization. Once a payment was confirmed on-chain, the finance lead would add the link to the hash to a spreadsheet. This worked as a short-term solution, but they knew this spreadsheet approach would not scale as working groups grew larger and diversified.
In early 2024, Botto DAO began testing Loop Crypto with the goal of bringing automation to their financial workflows. With Loop’s crypto payment scheduling functionality, Botto’s contributorship could set up a series of transactions to their contributors and configure those transactions to process on a recurring basis month after month.
The first step was to provide a wallet authorization enabling a certain amount of tokens to be spent from a wallet that the Botto treasury working group used for expense payments. After providing this wallet authorization, the finance lead could simply enter the wallet addresses, the tokens, and the amounts and then click approve. The financial lead could also set a cadence so that this same batch transaction to contributor wallets is processed automatically going forward. If there was ever a change in the contributors or the amounts to be paid, this could be easily edited from the Loop dashboard.
For Botto’s contributors, implementing Loop took only a few minutes of setup and now saves them hours every month. They have confidence that the correct amount of tokens will be sent to their contributors on a set date each month. Any manual effort has largely been eliminated. Botto’s contributors can now focus on building and engaging with the DAO community to continue pushing forward Botto, the decentralized autonomous artist.
To learn more about Botto and how you can participate in the DAO, check out their website or social handles. The community already has over 3,500 members and is continuing to grow.
If you’re also facing the challenge of creating, signing, and tracking transactions month after month, let’s talk. Efficient companies choose Loop to save time and simplify their payment processes.
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About Loop
Loop Crypto is designed for companies, DAOs, and projects that need to get paid or make payments in crypto. Whether the payment is one-time or recurring, Loop supports a broad range of payment use cases: subscriptions, one-time charges, recurring bill pay, loan repayments, and donations. Loop has processed millions of dollars in on-chain transactions and powers crypto payments for the leading brands in web3 like ENS, Privy, Alchemy Subgraphs, Paragraph, Neynar, and many others.
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