Resource Accounts

All of the funds that are sent to a community are securely registered on the NEAR blockchain in a smart contract which provides the functionality for the community.

These community contracts have no access keys on them.  What that means is that nobody can tamper with the community code once its deployed.  That is both good and bad - good in the sense that you know it is going to work exactly as planned (barring any unforseen bugs) and bad in that it can never be changed - so there is no way to fix bugs if there are any or upgrade for more features.

That is both a feature and curse of blockchain technology.  We know that at some point we are going to want to improve the feature set provided to communities.  Many projects start labelling contracts as v1, v2, v3 and so on resulting in many versions of DAOs running on their platforms.  We're looking into providing migration paths for older communities to newer codebases.

At the top of the community page you'll see the fund, escrow, total shares and share value.  These depict various components of the resource accounts that are part of the contract.  Let's look at each in a bit more detail:

Fund

The fund (aka Community Fund, Bank, etc...) is the sum of all community resources that are freely available for allocation towards proposals.  When people become members and make a contribution (tribute or loot), once their member proposal passes, it goes into the community fund.  

Other ways the fund may increase include:  donations, additional tributes (for those looking to increase voting power), more members, payouts received as part of the community doing work for other DAOs, and so on.

Escrow

You can think of the escrow fund like a protected bank account.  Some proposals, like funding commitment proposals, move funds from the community fund into escrow where they are held until a payout proposal passes.

This is important to understand because once funds get moved to escrow, there is no way to manually move them out.  They must remain there until the reason they were put there is completed or a new proposal is submitted requesting to cancel the current commitment and move them back to being available in the community fund.

Why do this?  Because it eliminates trust issues that might be present when someone decides to commit time/effort to complete work.  If a funding commitment has passed and the funds are in escrow, they can safely work on the project knowing that when they submit a payout proposal, there will be funds available to pay them.

Total Shares

Exactly that - the total number of shares (both voting (tribute) and non-voting (loot) that the community has issued.  Every share is a piece of ownership of the community fund.

Share Value

If the community is successfully coordinating use of its resources, the community fund is going to fluctuate in quantity/value over time.  It may go up or down based on both the quantity of NEAR (and other tokens in the future) in the fund as well as the market price of those tokens.

Share value is what one share of the fund is currently worth (in equivalent USD - using a CoinGecko price pulled at regular intervals).  Share value is just there for informational purposes.  Has no direct impact on anything.  It's determined by dividing the total fund amount by the total shares to get a per share price.