Rethinking governance through AI, media entertainment, and markets.

DAO governance oftentimes feels like work: slow, scattered context, little excitement. Clank Tank flips the script by turning decision-making into a fun Shark Tank inspired show you can watch and participate in.

2025 marks my 6th year of contributing to DAOs, with much the last in Solana’s ecosystem. One thing has become painfully clear: Solana DAO tooling is practically non-existent.

Realms.today requires staking your tokens in order to vote, no Hats protocol for roles, etc. Ontop of that the experience feels unchanged. I see this as an opportunity. In a way it feels like Burning Man; a blank slate to re-imagine DAOs from scratch.

Vitalik Buterin recently said it’s time to “burn down the legitimacy of existing paradigms” and rethink DAOs from first principles. The lack of tooling is a blessing in disguise, the desert playa where we can build something new.

ai16z began as a playful idea: a DAO led by AI agents trading on-chain, with each agent shaped by community preferences. That energy evolved into elizaOS, now a leading AI agent framework.

Clank Tank brings us full circle to the founding idea of an investment DAO led by AI.

Before Clank Tank, Shaw was often live on stream writing code and sharing insights openly. That openness inspired a culture of transparency from the beginning.

During memecoin season, visibility for projects was a minefield. Sharing something cool could be mistaken as endorsing the token that was often associated with it. With Shaw’s growing Twitter following, even a retweet or wallet move sparked speculation. We needed a way to surface projects without the baggage of implied endorsements.

That’s what led to “What Did You Get Done This Week?”, a weekly X space where each person had 2 minutes to share an update. Builders came for feedback, speculators for alpha. Thousands tuned in every Friday night, making it one of the biggest spaces on CT while coinciding with eliza’s rise as the fastest growing project on GitHub.

It wasn’t billed as a pitch session, but often felt like one with builders trying to win over the room while speculators listening for signals. The appetite for discovery + feedback was undeniable.

Memecoins are supposed to be fun. Governance is usually the opposite.

Clank Tank aims to simulate governance proposals into bite size episodes. Here’s a thread about how the v1 system works (v2 mostly improves on everything):

It’s a modular and interoperable system with the ability to easily swap assets, render pipelines, submission details and AI reasoning / model configurations.

• AI handles the due diligence: research, market scan, scoring

• Humans vibe check the results: context, culture, gut feel

• Episodes compress governance into video: transparency, distribution

Our judges mirror archetypes you’d recognize from any crypto group chat or DAO:

• Peepo (casual)

• aixvc (quant)

• degenai (degen)

• Shaw AI (builder)

Their feedback and insights are tailored to different audiences. Never mind actual decision making and execution, even just simulating proposal discussions from different perspectives has been reported to be quite useful to holders and builders.

Watch this snippet from the deliberation room on how they discuss a project pitch:

Peepo and Spartan are good examples to illustrate the judge’s different perspectives.

While Peepo resonates with community and culture aspects, Spartan cares about one thing only: revenue and profits. IMO to make an informed decision one must hear both sides, because a strong community in memecoins can lead to market price action later.

The verdict comes down to Pump, Dump, or Yawn. One can imagine that a 5th vote by humans as being a tie breaker, and perhaps simulate a multisig configuration where 3/5 pumps can approve a proposal / pitch.

Right now Clank Tank judges are all representatives of our DAO, but in the future we could have each judge representing a different group competing with each other like the actual Shark Tank show. We can also modify the system to go beyond memecoins and judge hackathons, grant proposals, partnership requests, etc.

Traditional politics works (when it works) because there’s a media ecosystem translating governance into something people can digest: news outlets, talk shows, debate clips. DAOs have nothing like that, yet.

The next paradigm won’t just be voted on, it’ll be watched.

Rethinking governance through AI, media entertainment, and markets.

DAO governance oftentimes feels like work: slow, scattered context, little excitement. Clank Tank flips the script by turning decision-making into a fun Shark Tank inspired show you can watch and participate in.

2025 marks my 6th year of contributing to DAOs, with much the last in Solana’s ecosystem. One thing has become painfully clear: Solana DAO tooling is practically non-existent.

Realms.today requires staking your tokens in order to vote, no Hats protocol for roles, etc. Ontop of that the experience feels unchanged. I see this as an opportunity. In a way it feels like Burning Man; a blank slate to re-imagine DAOs from scratch.

Vitalik Buterin recently said it’s time to “burn down the legitimacy of existing paradigms” and rethink DAOs from first principles. The lack of tooling is a blessing in disguise, the desert playa where we can build something new.

ai16z began as a playful idea: a DAO led by AI agents trading on-chain, with each agent shaped by community preferences. That energy evolved into elizaOS, now a leading AI agent framework.

Clank Tank brings us full circle to the founding idea of an investment DAO led by AI.

Before Clank Tank, Shaw was often live on stream writing code and sharing insights openly. That openness inspired a culture of transparency from the beginning.

During memecoin season, visibility for projects was a minefield. Sharing something cool could be mistaken as endorsing the token that was often associated with it. With Shaw’s growing Twitter following, even a retweet or wallet move sparked speculation. We needed a way to surface projects without the baggage of implied endorsements.

That’s what led to “What Did You Get Done This Week?”, a weekly X space where each person had 2 minutes to share an update. Builders came for feedback, speculators for alpha. Thousands tuned in every Friday night, making it one of the biggest spaces on CT while coinciding with eliza’s rise as the fastest growing project on GitHub.

It wasn’t billed as a pitch session, but often felt like one with builders trying to win over the room while speculators listening for signals. The appetite for discovery + feedback was undeniable.

Memecoins are supposed to be fun. Governance is usually the opposite.

Clank Tank aims to simulate governance proposals into bite size episodes. Here’s a thread about how the v1 system works (v2 mostly improves on everything):

It’s a modular and interoperable system with the ability to easily swap assets, render pipelines, submission details and AI reasoning / model configurations.

• AI handles the due diligence: research, market scan, scoring

• Humans vibe check the results: context, culture, gut feel

• Episodes compress governance into video: transparency, distribution

Our judges mirror archetypes you’d recognize from any crypto group chat or DAO:

• Peepo (casual)

• aixvc (quant)

• degenai (degen)

• Shaw AI (builder)

Their feedback and insights are tailored to different audiences. Never mind actual decision making and execution, even just simulating proposal discussions from different perspectives has been reported to be quite useful to holders and builders.

Watch this snippet from the deliberation room on how they discuss a project pitch:

Peepo and Spartan are good examples to illustrate the judge’s different perspectives.

While Peepo resonates with community and culture aspects, Spartan cares about one thing only: revenue and profits. IMO to make an informed decision one must hear both sides, because a strong community in memecoins can lead to market price action later.

The verdict comes down to Pump, Dump, or Yawn. One can imagine that a 5th vote by humans as being a tie breaker, and perhaps simulate a multisig configuration where 3/5 pumps can approve a proposal / pitch.

Right now Clank Tank judges are all representatives of our DAO, but in the future we could have each judge representing a different group competing with each other like the actual Shark Tank show. We can also modify the system to go beyond memecoins and judge hackathons, grant proposals, partnership requests, etc.

Traditional politics works (when it works) because there’s a media ecosystem translating governance into something people can digest: news outlets, talk shows, debate clips. DAOs have nothing like that, yet.

The next paradigm won’t just be voted on, it’ll be watched.