Crypto is nothing but pump and dump schemes. The whales and VCs just use us as exit liquidity. Everything is a gamble in this industry—you literally have to spend all day and night staring at charts if you want to make any money.
I’m not here to argue about this. It’s partially the nature of faulty incentive structures and obfuscated tokenomics that drive the actions of all market participants—not just the VCs. Everyone needs to cover their basis.
Crypto is still in the early stages: much like the dot com era there are plenty of growing pains and Wild West type of risks, which is certainly one of the reasons why it has gotten such a bad rap over the past few years, especially from the uninitiated. It’s dog eat dog out there if you want anything better than beta… and the majority fail to outperform ETH.
But you don’t have to participate in such ruthless markets or constantly be trying to frontrun the mercenary capitalists to make a living in this industry.
Arguably the next step in the evolution of human organizational structures, the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) presents a whole new paradigm for how we look at work.
By flattening the hierarchy of traditional corporate structures and putting responsibility solely into your hands as a participant, DAOs provide tools to get involved and apply your skills for the greater good of the ecosystem. If there’s a concept that you believe in, a DAO might be the springboard you need.
On the individual level, a DAO enables contribution to be rewarded proportionate to effort. Participants unite under a common cause and work to take that product to market. Yes, this sounds much like a company, but the difference here is the financial incentives—those who believe more in that cause can get better rewarded if they work harder and contribute more.
Contributions are tracked and compensated with tokens—like an equity share. Typically a team uses a tool like Coordinape and operates in fixed periods called epochs. At the end of each epoch, each individual allocates these tokens to the other members according to how much work they did. These tokens represent a share of equity from the treasury upon launch of the product.
As a result, there is a more egalitarian compensation structure and greater flexibility around the concept of work since people can opt in as much or as little as they want and be rewarded accordingly.
However, the “opt-in” culture and the “work as you please” construct are not without their problems.
Since compensation is retroactive—most DAOs begin with little to no funding—many are unable to dedicate more than a few hours and tend to be rather flighty. Corporate structure at least gives us the guarantee of commitment with salaried employees and regular working hours.
Because participants tend to have full time jobs and treat a DAO like their side hustle, getting it off the ground is the hardest part of all. On the one hand, you don’t want to bring too many people in because it can cause confusion in project direction and dilute equity. But on the other hand, you need people available to help when work needs to get done.
Oftentimes DAOs start off as a tight-knit group working in a closed community, and then once a product is taken to market, those who resonate with the concept naturally gravitate towards it and help bring it to the next level.
Tech companies don’t have only code wizards working for them.
DAOs are usually broken down into various working groups based on skills. There is of course, the product and development team that is responsible for the code. But also working behind the scenes is the community management, content creation, marketing, business development, and on and on.
Artists especially have a great opportunity with DAOs. They can leverage a community of skilled individuals who appreciate the art to bring their work to the world and get better value for it. When an artist has work that resonates, people are naturally attracted and want to help build that concept.
That’s the most difficult question to answer. DAOs don’t often post job opportunities.
The best way is to be integrated with communities to hear about these things. The first project I joined was by asking someone from a community I’m in.
Lots of sub-DAOs emerge from already successful projects. Protocols like Curve and TreasureDAO have spawned a number of sub-DAOs / guilds that base their core offering off the initial protocol.
Keep in mind that one of the key concepts in crypto is decentralization. This means information is often distributed across different sources which can be frustrating to sift through.
So if you already spend a lot of time in crypto but don’t know where to start, reach out and ask someone. Information may be asymmetric but us people are here to support each other.
Start with people you know in the Twitter or Discord communities that you spend time in. Look for opportunities to work on a common project you both believe in. Don’t worry if you feel underqualified—nearly everyone is. Just get started.
Or you can look on sites like CryptoJobsList, Cryptocurrency Jobs, AngelList Talent.