Introducing: ADIN

Since Ethereum’s early days, DAOs have aimed to automate investment and governance, but full autonomy has remained elusive. ADIN is an attempt to evolve what DAOs can do by integrating AI-driven deal evaluation, investment decisions, and automated capital allocation. ADIN eliminates bottlenecks. Its AI agent network rapidly assesses deals, streamlines decision-making, votes on investments, and customizes funding recommendations—all while humans provide oversight, verifying AI analysis and approving final allocations. By merging AI automation with decentralized participation, ADIN aims to redefine venture capital, making it faster, smarter, cheaper, and more accessible than ever.

Introduction: An Automated Era for Venture Capital

Information wants to be free. It’s a well-known adage, which accounts for the incredible success digital networks have had over the past several decades in swallowing all that came before them. Before the internet, in order to express an opinion to a wide audience, you had to incur the costs of design, printing, and distribution. But as that cost went away, the cost of sharing information lowered itself to nearly zero. Thus anyone who was willing to expend the effort to write was able to distribute his or her thoughts to anyone who was able to read. Information became free in a double sense—free in that it cost nothing to produce, and free in that nothing could prevent it from circulating.

But in the realm of investment, certain barriers to information remained. Venture funds and investor circles stayed behind closed doors, concentrated in New York and Washington (the centers of finance and politics), and later in Silicon Valley (the center of tech), rarely extending real opportunities to innovators outside those networks.

Today, that old reality is crumbling. Crypto unshackled money from geography, artificial intelligence can process volumes of data in the blink of an eye, and online-first communities are proving that entire industries can be governed without a single physical office. Against this backdrop, we’re introducing ADIN–a new approach which extends the vision of what is possible with decentralized networks by merging AI-driven insight to rewrite what’s possible for venture capital.

DAOs: The Journey Toward Democratization and Decentralization

DAOs have been a core component of the Ethereum vision since the very early days of the network. The idea that investment and governance could be automated, trustless, and decentralized has always shaped Ethereum’s culture—from the first whitepaper to today’s more sophisticated DAO structures. Yet while DAOs have made major strides in governance, one piece has remained missing: autonomy.

Long before DAOs, the tendency of companies of all kinds has bent more and more toward flexibility and autonomy. As far back as the 1600s, when explorers sought to sail to distant markets, joint-stock companies like the Dutch East India Company allowed a broader group of stakeholders to buy in and share the risks and rewards. This innovation unleashed a wave of global trade and ushered in the era of the corporation, which acted as the dominant investment vehicle for the last several centuries.

Fast-forward to 2016, and a new variant of these pooled structures burst onto the scene with “The DAO” on Ethereum. While The DAO famously collapsed after a massive hack and brought on regulatory headaches for its participants, it planted the seed for the DAO movement—one that has since evolved into thousands of decentralized communities managing capital, governance, and assets.

We at Tribute Labs have been at the forefront of bringing DAOs into the real economy. This began in 2019, when Tribute Labs became known for The LAO, a for-profit DAO for Ethereum-based venture investing and for Flamingo DAO, which (along with 20+ other DAOs) used a similar model to collect NFTs—proving that internet-native investing wasn’t just possible; it could thrive with the right mix of on-chain mechanics, passionate people, and traditional legal structure and support.

Yet, these early DAOs are still limited by inefficiencies. Although they proved that decentralized, internet-native investing was viable–and often highly successful—the process of evaluating and vetting venture deals remained overwhelmingly manual. Each proposal required deep-dive research, in-depth background checks, and subjective judgments—all of which slowed down decision-making. This reliance on human diligence not only created a bottleneck but also made it difficult to scale operations quickly, leaving many high-potential deals on the table due to the inherent limits of human speed and consistency.

AI and decentralized networks are rewriting the rules for DAOs. As the last two years have shown, we’re in the midst of a new world of possibilities with AI. AI enables faster, more intelligent decision-making, reducing costs and, in turn, expanding access to capital. We’re getting closer to the original vision of The DAO and the ability to have a seed financing machine where investors provide capital and, with minimal human intervention, funds are systematically allocated based on automated decisions.

ADIN is the product of that shift.

ADIN is at the forefront of this transformation—using AI to automate diligence, decentralization to widen participation, and human expertise to watch over the technology—all in the interest of making venture investing seamless, scalable, and smarter.

ADIN takes the ethos of decentralization, which has been key to emerging technologies since the days of the Cypherpunks, and brings it to the world of investing. The result is a model for venture funding that’s not only faster than everything that’s come before, but also more inclusive and scalable.

Introducing ADIN: The Next Step in Automating Venture Investing

ADIN is what happens when the core vision of DAOs—automated, decentralized capital allocation—meets AI. Instead of relying on manual diligence, subjective decision-making, and slow-moving committees, ADIN leverages an AI-powered agent network that can evaluate ventures, vote on deals, and even make customized recommendations on investment amounts.

The tech behind ADIN is a robust suite of AI agents built by Tribute Labs, which performs an in-depth analysis and parses everything from product and technical details about a team, to financial data, adoption, go to market, and competitive landscapes, to subtle market signals and risk metrics. These agents work together to put together a deep analysis at high speed, narrowing the window in which human-driven bias or inefficiency can slip in.

A network of AI agents work together to make a recommendation based on their respective expertise, each specializing in a distinct aspect of venture investing. At the end, five venture agents democratically vote on whether to support a given deal. Every project gets evaluated by:

• The Network Hunter, an opportunistic, highly social, relationship-driven agent that is and always on the lookout for the next big network effect.

• The Tech Oracle, a deeply technical, forward-thinking agent, obsessed with disruptive innovations.

• The Monopoly Maker, a ruthless agent focused on market dominance, scalability, and defensibility.

• The Unit Master, a number-driven agent, operationally focused, and on the lookout for financial fundamentals.

• The Value Guy, a patient agent focused on the long-term, who is pragmatic and evaluates intrinsic value.

By orchestrating these AI agents, ADIN creates a system where agents work together to perform diligence, predict valuations, give investment recommendations, and even vote. It collapses the venture process, creating a system that can move at the speed of the Internet. Instead of relying on a handful of generalist investors, ADIN leverages specialized AI expertise at every stage of the investment process.

Both the ADIN diligence reports and the agent network significantly reduce the time it takes investors to gather information, especially in the initial phases, thus freeing them to focus on deep research, rather than preliminary information gathering. In addition, ADIN is able to go even deeper–it’s increasingly able to predict the value of companies and make DAO fund-specific recommendations as to how much capital an investment vehicle should invest.

ADIN is malleable to the wants of its investors, too. It’s able to take in investment parameters, which can be dynamically set to ensure that capital moves efficiently to the best opportunities. In order to make curated investment recommendations to the investor, ADIN takes as its input the size of the investment vehicle, the amount of deployed capital, the vehicle's timeline, stage of focus, categories of interest, thesis, risk profile and target returns. ADIN then grades each opportunity for alignment to the vehicle’s core thesis and preference, outlines different exit scenarios, and even attempts to predict potential returns. By doing so, ADIN removes inefficiencies and ensures venture capital operates at the speed of innovation—allocating resources faster, smarter, and with greater transparency than ever before.

The Path Forward: AI, DAOs, and Autonomous Finance

For nearly a decade, Ethereum has envisioned DAOs as fully autonomous economic entities—self-governing systems capable of deploying capital and making decisions with minimal human oversight. With ADIN, we are closer to turning that vision into reality. By merging AI with decentralized finance, ADIN ushers in an era where venture investing occurs algorithmically, at scale, and with radical transparency. Imagine a DAO that operates like a vending machine for venture financing—deploying capital seamlessly, free from the friction of traditional funds.

Our goal is for ADIN to level the playing field for projects around the globe, ensuring that great ideas attract capital based on merit, not geography. With AI agents working in concert, the diligence cycle can keep pace with the speed of innovation, enabling capital to be allocated both efficiently and intelligently. ADIN represents a fresh turning point, leveraging AI orchestration to amplify the breakthroughs already achieved by DAOs and traditional venture capital.

Learn More and Stay Tuned

We’re putting ADIN at the center of an investment vehicle where AI-driven decision-making and community participation will be equally vital. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be unpacking more how ADIN and can change venture capital, DAOs, and venture funds as we move deeper into the Internet Age.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to become an investor, how to join the network to submit a project, how to get involved as a founder, or if you just want to sign up to hear more updates, do so here or follow us on Twitter.

If you have any questions on ADIN or would like to chat, e-mail us here: hello@adin.online.