DAO launcher and funding platform Wings.ai is gathering speed in uncertain times - the specter of the failed Slock.it DAO is still on everyone’s lips.

Can it succeed? This is the question Wings Core Developer Stas Oskin has been answering since June this year. He told Cointelegraph:

“First it’s important to understand that DAOs did not start or end with The DAO. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations is a new concept of how virtual organizations are being started, funded and managed, and The DAO was just one of many possible implementations of this concept. While it has failed, it has brought attention to the DAO concept.”

Core Dev: Wings ‘complete opposite’ of past DAOs

Other than the shared term ‘DAO,’ Wings has very little in common with its notorious market predecessor. A two-part setup, the Wings platform is something of a Kickstarter for crypto projects. It focuses on letting anyone create and manage their own DAO offering - with features designed to safeguard against malicious attacks or bad actors.

At the same time, the separate Wings DAO itself will deal entirely with meta-activities; providing consensus-driven improvements to the Wings platform.

“The Wings DAO takes a completely opposite approach to The DAO by having both itself and any launched project as completely separate DAOs, each with its own set of smart contracts and tokens,” Oskin continued. “Thus, even if any security event were to happen to one of them, it would be contained to a particular DAO, and won’t affect Wings or the project DAOs.”

Crowd control

The project has been some time in the making. After facing its fair share of inevitable criticism since DAO became a taboo phrase earlier this year, the Wings platform has nonetheless accrued over 1500 BTC.

This could be something to do with the mechanism through which projects gain attention for initial-stage funding. Wings investors have an incentive to contribute; they are rewarded with project tokens for making solid predictions as to a project’s success. The closer they are, the more they get in rewards.

Rather than a venture capital-type arrangement like The DAO, Wings is thus a crowdfunding platform that allows for project review and evaluation.

“The lack of trust and vetting tools has caused the community to be more cautious,” Oskin explained. “Wings aims to solve this by enabling the project creators to gradually build trust via such tools as DAO controlled milestones and historical performance rating.”

The ShapeShift of DAOs?

If this new form of DAO takes off, however, its real appeal may lie in its simplest premise. Non-technical cryptocurrency users looking to get into business finally have an opportunity to take advantage of decentralization without having a degree in cryptography.

Wings’ ability to allow practically anyone to start a DAO, even with zero knowledge, could land the platform a precious reputation as a first-mover, similar to what ShapeShift has as a provider of hassle-free cross-currency transfers.

“Through careful attention to detail, we expect the emergence of DAOs dedicated to various areas and fields of businesses,” Oskin forecasted.