The Stargazers DAO is a 4-person team running open-source space-mission visualisation tools. They have a $480,000 treasury on Base, a 200-person supporter community, and — until January — six different SaaS subscriptions to keep their operations running.
By the end of Q1 2026 they had replaced all six with Sudo and were running their entire DAO from a single wallet each. This post is their story, told with their permission, and the engineering observations that came out of it.
Before: six tools, six logins
Lin (founder), Marcos (engineering), Sana (community), and Felix (research) had built a small but real DAO. They had real users, real contributors, and a real budget. They also had:
- Discord ($25/mo Nitro × 4 = $100/mo) — community + internal chat
- Snapshot (free) — governance votes
- Tally ($79/mo) — on-chain execution
- Notion ($40/mo) — internal docs
- Coordinape ($50/mo) — contributor compensation
- Gnosis Safe (free) — treasury
Total cash burn for tooling: roughly $310/month. More important: each tool had its own login, its own identity model, its own permissions list. When Felix joined in October he needed five separate invites. When a former contributor offboarded in December, Lin spent an afternoon revoking access in five places (and forgot one — they only noticed in February).
"The thing nobody talks about with running a DAO is the operations tax," Lin told us. "We were paying for tools, but the real cost was the time we spent making the tools talk to each other."
The migration
In January, after a long Twitter thread about wallet-native operations, Lin opened Sudo and started experimenting. Over six weeks, the Stargazers fully migrated to a single stack. Here's how each tool got replaced:
Discord → Sudo group chats
The community Discord became a smart group gated by holding any amount of the STARGZR governance token. The on-chain gate means there is no invite list to maintain — your wallet either qualifies or it doesn't, and Sudo recomputes membership whenever the supply changes.
Internally, the four-person core team uses a private group gated by being on a hard-coded multisig — no third-party identity provider needed.
"The first time someone bought STARGZR on Uniswap and showed up in our group chat 90 seconds later, we knew this was going to work," Sana said.
Snapshot + Tally → Sudo proposals
Sudo proposals are smart-contract calls authored as messages and signed via the wallets in the group. They display inline in the chat like a payment card: a vote count, a quorum bar, and Vote yes / Vote no / Abstain buttons.
Crucially, the execution happens in the same surface as the discussion. When a proposal passes, the multisig leads see Sign payout on the proposal card. No separate Tally tab, no third tool to confirm in. The execution and the discussion happen against the same on-chain state.
"Before Sudo, the proposal lived in Snapshot, the discussion in Discord, the execution in Tally, and the announcement in our blog. Four places, four audiences, four chances for someone to miss something. Now it's one card, one chat, one outcome."
Notion → Sudo channels + pinned docs
Sudo supports persistent pinned messages in any group, which the team uses for the canonical version of internal docs (operating principles, contributor playbook, treasury policy). Long-form documents live in a public GitHub repo that the pinned messages link to. They miss Notion's templates a little but don't miss the per-seat pricing at all.
Coordinape → Sudo escrow + reputation graph
Each contributor's monthly comp is funded into a Sudo Escrow at the start of the month with a streaming release. The funds drip out daily as long as the contributor stays active. If they leave mid-month, the remaining balance returns to the treasury — no awkward conversation, no manual clawback.
Performance bonuses are awarded by core-team vote in the same chat, signed by the multisig, and settle into the contributor's wallet in seconds.
"Coordinape was great for our use case but it had a lot of features we didn't use, and we were paying $50/month for the ones we did. Now it's a 12-line escrow card."
Gnosis Safe → Sudo multisig
The treasury still uses Safe under the hood — that part didn't change — but the interface to the Safe is now a Sudo group. Multisig members tap Sign inside the chat, hardware wallets bleep, Safe submits. No Safe UI, no metamask popup chain.
This is a small change but it shaved several minutes off the average multisig action because the team is already in the chat where the discussion happened.
The numbers, four months in
After a full quarter on the new stack, here is what changed:
- Cash burn for tooling: $310/mo → $0/mo. Sudo is free for individual wallets and the team paid $0 across the migration.
- Time on operations per week: ~6 hours → ~1.5 hours. (Lin's estimate, tracked manually for two weeks each in January and April.)
- Time to onboard a new contributor: 3 days → 4 minutes. Send them the group join link; their wallet joins automatically because they hold the contributor NFT.
- Tools to revoke when someone leaves: 5 → 1. Remove the contributor NFT from their wallet (it's a soul-bound burn) and they lose access to every Stargazers surface at once.
- Number of separate identities each team member maintained: 5 → 1. Their wallet.
The headline number Lin emphasised wasn't the dollar saving — it was the contributor-onboarding time. "We were a 4-person team. Spending 3 days per contributor on operational onboarding was insane. Now I send them a link, they tap join, and they're in every surface they need to be in."
What was rough
The Stargazers migration was not friction-free. Three things they flagged:
Discord history. Their five years of community Discord chat history did not migrate. Sudo can't read Discord; nothing can, unmodified. They published a one-page "where things moved" doc on day 1 and pinned it as the first message in the new community group. After two weeks of redirects, the old Discord became read-only and the link in the bio updated.
Voice and video. Sudo Calls wasn't quite ready when they started migrating in January. They ran their weekly stand-up on Huddle for the first three weeks of February and switched to Sudo Calls when MLS-encrypted voice rooms shipped at the end of February. The transition was clean once the feature was there.
Mobile UX for the multisig. Signing multisig actions on hardware wallets from mobile was awkward in early February. We shipped a hardware-wallet pairing flow in v3.0.0 (early March) that made this dramatically smoother. Not perfect — hardware wallets on mobile are still a fiddly category — but acceptable.
What this tells us
We work hard not to over-rotate on individual case studies. One DAO is not a market. But the Stargazers experience matches a pattern we are seeing across the early adopter cohort: small, technical teams whose entire operations live across 5+ SaaS tools find disproportionate value in collapsing those tools into a wallet-coherent stack. The savings aren't just dollars; they're operational entropy.
If you run a small team like this — under 10 people, on-chain treasury, distributed contributors — we'd be happy to talk through the migration. Stargazers were generous enough to share their notes and we've been quietly building a "self-serve migration playbook" out of those conversations. Drop us a note on the product feedback page if it sounds useful.
How to follow Stargazers
If you want to see what a wallet-native DAO actually looks like in practice, they keep a public channel with weekly updates inside Sudo — search for stargazers.sudo after you sign in. Their open-source visualisation tools are at github.com/stargazers-dao. And the smart group is gated on holding any STARGZR token, so if you want in, the path is wallet-first.
— Sudo Labs, with Stargazers DAO · May 2026