Drop 005: Solana TokenDAO

A community-led initiative to improve discoverability, reputation and trust in Solana token lists.

Solana TokenDAO

Introducing TokenDAO—a Solana token list standard.

As the Solana ecosystem continues to evolve, we continue to see exponential growth in the number of SPL tokens being issued. However, there are a few issues with the current solana-labs maintained token list:

• Can’t merge fixes or updates since the repository is maintained via auto-merger bot.

• Name/symbol conflicts are allowed, which leads to scam tokens posing as existing tokens.

• Incorrect (often harmful) metadata due to lack of third-party checks.

Inspired by Uniswap’s successful Ethereum-based Token Lists project, TokenDAO aims to fix these issues thereby enhancing both Solana users and developers’ experience.

Token List Builder

TokenDAO maintains the Token List Builder (TLB) by CLB. TLB is used to build the Certified Token List, an aggregation of token lists defined in Lists.toml. The Certified Token List exists to make it easier for other projects to maintain their own token lists, without needing to modify the official Solana token list. This is especially useful for AMMs which may have hundreds if not thousands of LP tokens.

The JSON files that make up the CTL can be found on its GitHub repository.

To add a token list to be tracked by the Certified Token List, add your token list URL to Lists.toml and send a pull request.

The Future of TokenDAO

The eventual goal of TokenDAO is to operate as a Token Curated Registry (TCR). As depicted by the issues with Solana Labs’ token list, there’s little incentive for a centralized list owner to maintain what is curated on the list. Token Curated Registries do away with the need for a centralized List Owner, and instead create economic incentives for decentralized list curation.

More to come on this soon!