3 July 2022

"Proof of Love is the future." — Overheard at DAO Palace

Abstract

Web3 allows people and communities to document value and digital asset ownership on-chain most commonly with the ability to transfer these values and assets freely.

Some organizations have been using forms of non-transferrable governance for many years now.  See DAOstack’s Genesis governance framework used by DXdao and MolochDAO governance framework commonly accessed via DAOhaus.

Weyl, Ohlhaver, and Buterin’s The Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul paper brought more popularity to the idea of “how non-transferable “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of “Souls” can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation.

The next step in our journey is to create a system that allows people to capture, express and share feelings and love on-chain with heart-bound tokens (“HBTs”).

Let’s start with LOVE.

Let’s give people the ability to express love on-chain.  There are actions that a user can take to start generating selfLOVE (“sLOVE”) tokens.  At any time, the user can call the minting of these sLOVE tokens allowing them to come into the user’s possession.  SelfLOVE is something that can only be generated over time.

Time is all we have.  Where and who you chose to spend your time with is the most basic building block of love.

Alice can express love to Bob by sending Bob her sLOVE tokens, the single time sLOVE tokens can be transferred, transmuting them into LOVE tokens.  If Bob receives LOVE from Alice, Bob can not send the LOVE to Charlie.  The LOVE belongs only to Bob.

Next, because Bob has received LOVE from Alice, Bob begins to generate sLOVE over time.

This dynamic is similar to the system of Potato (an extitutional concept) where enbulbing and debulbing is a continuous cycle.  It leads to a mesh or a network.

The system also has a unique phenomenon.  Bob can acquire Alice-ness and Charlie can acquire Bob-ness.

LOVE can be stored and nurtured and this generates sLOVE over time.

This new system becomes an additional building block in our ecosystem, allowing for new types of relationships and connections, which can spur new types of communities and ideas.

The highlights for me have been meeting new people in the space via tribes and also becoming closer with familiar faces.

We’ve had lots of fun in lots of chats along the way.

I am very happy to be a part of the final grouping.

In general, I spend a lot of time thinking about making our space better (we still have many issues) and more recently I’ve been diving deeper into the Public Goods arena.

I helped launch Public Nouns (https://publicnouns.wtf/) and have been contributing to this community since its inception.

Public Nouns DAO is a collective that is funding wild experiments in the Public Goods space.

The cool thing about Public Nouns is we took an exciting novel mechanism (Nouns DAO) and applied it to Public Goods.

Now, when I look at CTG, I see another exciting novel (and fun) mechanism.

As I sit here in the final grouping, I can only think of how we can leverage this mechanism to make our space better.

Below is what I’ve arrived at:

Title: Crypto The (End) Game

What: Vote for Sky (0xSkyMine) and we will do something really cool.

How: I will purchase and distribute Public Nouns (these guys: https://twitter.com/PublicNouns) to all 20 other CTG finalists.

I will also purchase and distribute at least 40 Public Nouns to Voters via a fair on-chain drawing. All Voters will be included (this is not a bribe).

The starting auction price for a Public Noun is minimum 0.33 ETH.

Why: Together, this will bring another 60 amazing people into the Public Nouns community where you will get to govern how to distribute over $400k to experiments in the Public Goods space.

Some people have been telling me that the people playing CTG don’t give a f*ck about Public Goods or making our space a better one.

I don’t believe this so I am going with my gut.

Others will come up with their own reasons to vote for them: they will give the funds to Coin Center, they will throw a huge party for everyone, they will maybe even make bribes. These are great, but not for me.

I feel my “proposal” is a win for everyone involved, which is what crypto is about for me.

You can do as you please, but you will be a part of something really cool and good if you choose to support.

I appreciate all of you!

Dream DAO's Learning Together Sessions are a great way for people to learn about new topics in the space and I was excited to introduce Public Nouns to many for the first time.

Below are the pages I presented along with some additional commentary to help frame the conversation.

Let's get started!

Started with a light overview of what Public Goods are and why they are important!

In 2021, there was very interesting, sizable movement happening around Nouns DAO attracting the interest of many.

The numbers were big...

A few of us got together and discussed what it would mean to put a few interesting pieces together...

bleep...blop...bloop...

And getting even more brainpower together to push things forward...

A crew at DAO Palace 2022 played around with and iterated on some working ideas...

Gathering observations...

Tweaking mechanisms...

Playing with art...

Gathering relevant parties...

Refining the "memes" and sharpening the art of the founding organizations of:

MetaCartel spicy chilis...

Gitcoin bot heads...

Panvala Stampees...

Radicle seedlings...

Moloch DAO heads...

Optimism OPossums...

and CLRfund bubble heads...

and putting the tech magic all together...

et voila...

Public Nouns was launched!

Listing some of the experiments in the Public Goods space that Public Nouns DAO has supported...

Expansion of the Public Nouns community...

a 4-month long art exhibit all about Public Goods in the Colorado state capital building...

an initiative to make Ethereum green...

on the ground web3 education...

feeding the homeless...

supporting Ethereum core development with Protocol Guild...

DAO-focused open source tooling...

DAO Palace 2023 and DAOESCO stewarding cultural heritage sites...

educating Raid Guild's next cohort and others...

a web3 hacker space in Vancouver...

a hyperlocal community information application...

supporting and contributing to Giveth's launch of Quadratic Funding...

public scaling infrastructure to reduce gas fees...

web3 educational content via storytelling...

and supporting CLRfund's first ever Dominant Assurance Contract ("DAC") experiment...

DAOs need to get much better at evaluation and Public Nouns to trying out news ways to make this better...

The next few pages can help give you a feel for how special the Public Nouns community is...

Where...

Who...

What...

Projects...

and more...

Public Nouns have been showcased and talked about in a variety of places across the web3 and public goods space...

Green Pill podcast...

GM Podcast...

Devcon Bogota...

Devconnect Istanbul...

and more!

We are currently at...

Public Nouns DAO has a treasury to put to work funding experiments in the Public Goods space!

Public Nouns has a goal to raise some additional funds that can go towards expanding the operations and awareness of Public Nouns via mechanisms like Giveth...

and Gitcoin...

Thanks!

You can learn more at https://publicnouns.wtf

Note: This article was originally published on Medium on November 11, 2021

Below is the original post (with some updated hyperlinks):

The Ethereum Name Service (“ENS”) is getting a lot of attention this week with the airdrop of its governance token.

ENS is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain.

Today you will learn why DXdao uses ENS and why it’s so powerful.

“There are ENS users and then there are ENS users” — Martin Koppelmann, Gnosis founder

Before we get into what makes DXdao a hardcore ENS user, it’s important to understand what DXdao is.

• DXdao is a decentralized sovereign collective that develops, governs, and grows DeFi protocols and products. DXdao lives mainly on the Ethereum blockchain

• DXdao uses reputational (non-transferrable) governance to make decisions as a collective. This on-chain governance system of over 400 addresses pays contributors, makes product updates and controls a $100m treasury.

• DXdao does not use Web2 domain names. All products and DXdao’s homepage are hosted using ENS

On the Ethereum blockchain, DXdao looks like an Ethereum wallet address. Seen here: 0x519b70055af55a007110b4ff99b0ea33071c720a

Offchain, DXdao looks like a community of people all around the world that communicate with each other through different communication channels (text chat, audio, video, and even in person). Some community members are anonymous, others have faces.

As a whole, DXdao is a community of people and entities working together to achieve goals.

Why use ENS?

So this brings us to the question — how can an on-chain, decentralized collective build, launch, own and most importantly, govern products for the world to use?

Here’s where ENS comes in. ENS names like dxdao.eth, swapr.eth, and omen.eth can be owned by an Ethereum wallet address. In this case DXdao itself is the owner of the ENS names and has full control of them.

One of the features of ENS is that the owner of the ENS can set the ENS to resolve to an IPFS hash (or coming soon, a SkyNet ID).

This is VERY powerful. Therefore, DXdao via on-chain proposal can point the swapr.eth ENS to the product front-end.

Therefore, any user that wants to use Swapr knows that by going to swapr.eth, she will be accessing the latest version of Swapr recognized by DXdao.

There are some other details that matter. Most browsers currently do not resolve ENS names. Luckily, anyone with a Metamask wallet in their browser can simply type https://swapr.eth/ and Metamask will resolve the ENS for you. Other wallets, like Status also have this feature.

There are other ways to access an ENS name through a regular browser. The most common is using eth.link or the newly launched eth.limo. These mirror all ENS domain names with their unique top-level domain (TLD).

Throughout the DeFi space, most dApps are currently accessed by users through a centrally controlled DNS domain. This becomes a central point of failure for what is supposed to be a decentralized application. This central point of failure can be compromised, attacked, censored, or taken down.

A front-end that is actually owned and controlled by a decentralized group is more robust, antifragile and censorship resistant.

How does DXdao use ENS in practice?

Establishing DAO sovereignty as an on-chain entity from day 1, DXdao has focused on building products and capabilities that can be owned and governed by DXdao. How do you get a website approved and put control into the hands of DXdao governance?

Soon after its launch, DXdao solved this problem in what has become known as the ENS Update Proposal Process and is now used for all DXdao products and sites.

It works like this:

1. DXdao contributors build a site and share the release with the community

2. A community member uploads this to IPFS and verifies the IPFS hash

3. An on-chain proposal is made to point the DXdao.eth ENS to the IPFS hash of the latest release

4. The website is updated when DXdao governance approves and executes the proposal.

This same process is used for every DXdao product release and website update. Only proposals from DXdao governance could change the site, trail blazing new levels of censorship resistance for DAOs.

DAO-owned Front Ends

Each user-facing DXdao product is what we call a “DAO-owned front end”.

DXdao believes that as we move towards a truly decentralized world, more and more products will want to remove central points of failure. Central points of failure jeopardize DAO autonomy by giving outside powers exploitable leverage. Decentralization is vital to maintain open access to the decentralized economy for all.

DXdao has been operating with this process since the middle of 2019, so has over 2 years of experience owning and running decentralized front-ends.

How Do You Access dApps in “DeFi”?

Conclusion

DXdao’s use of ENS is a fundamental product fit, and while it’s still uncommon even in crypto, it’s powerful as a backbone for DeFi’s future. Decentralized dApps that enable users to exchange billions of dollars demand such infrastructure, and hopefully soon the space at large will begin to move in this direction.

DXdao is leveraging ENS to explore innovative approaches of owning and decentralizing its applications.

DXdao is leveraging ENS to explore innovative approaches of owning and decentralizing its applications.

Check out DXdao: DXdao is a decentralized collective that builds and governs DeFi products.

Check out ENS:* See the ENS DAO Constitution and get your own ENS here.*

Below is the original post (with some updated hyperlinks):

This article attempts to broadly outline some of the arguments for why Ethereum will continue to dominate as the most important blockchain for people to own, acquire, sell, trade, display and build with NFTs (that matter). Each topic can easily be its own deeper article, but the goal here is to introduce some of the ideas and push the conversation along.

A deep ongoing discussion already exists around whether Ethereum will continue to be the dominant smart contract blockchain in general. There are many articles around this topic, so I won’t go into details here. I will focus specifically on the far less discussed vertical specific to non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, within the greater blockchain ecosystem.

As we all know, Ethereum has issues (block size limits, high gas, expensive transaction fees, slow confirmations, semi-centralized points of failure around tools, etc… the list goes on) yet it has been and continues to be the most important blockchain in the world besides maybe Bitcoin (some would say it’s even more important — but not a topic for this article!).

The NFT World… so far

The NFT world currently revolves around Ethereum. It’s where NFTs started, it’s where most people have acquired their first NFT, it’s where most of the sales are happening, and it’s where the biggest NFT creators and collectors are. At this stage, it’s currently the only chain on which most people would hold highly valuable NFT collections.

Recently, we have seen interest around NFTs spread and pick up steam, which is not surprising to those of us who have been deeply focused on NFTs for a few years now.

Below, I break down the arguments into sections, but you will see that some sections blend into other sections, which I find to be a strong characteristic in this space.

Ethereum has a huge head start

Nothing new, but this advantage is a big benefit. The head start and community around Ethereum (compared to other smart contract blockchains) is often discussed when comparing blockchains in general, but this is also relevant when it comes to NFTs. The developers, the tooling, the history, the platforms, the wallets, the familiarity — all these things matter when people are interacting with NFTs.

The Ethereum brand is super valuable. As the NFT space grows and newcomers enter, whether that is creators, builders, artists, collectors, or businesses, they will first come to Ethereum because they have heard about what is happening.

As an example, popular DJ 3LAU releasing his first music-based NFT into the world was not going to happen any other place than Ethereum, and that will be the case for any important artist over the next few years, especially the big names that are about to flood our world! Each new creator and fan that enters will continue to build the momentum, strengthening the ecosystem one by one.

Strong values matter

Short but sweet — Ethereum has extremely strong values — neutrality, user sovereignty, and freedom. Not every chain has the same values, and chains often sacrifice values to chase features. This matters, and people will take this into account.

Security and safety of assets

As of today, Ethereum has proven to be a safe and secure blockchain, approaching the characteristics of Bitcoin. As the value of NFTs grows rapidly, holders of this value will be very careful about where they store this value. Much like highly valuable physical art, the security demands and systems protecting these NFTs will only grow higher.

You wouldn’t store your Mona Lisa on the wall in your unwatched vacation home.

NFT composability matters

Most readers will be familiar with composability in the Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) space. The ability to permissionlessly build on top of everything else that exists in DeFi is truly valuable and becoming one of the most powerful characteristics of DeFi, and also know as “money legos”.

This composability is happening with NFTs already, and I am calling it NFT Legos. Some examples of this include games that are leveraging outside NFTs that users own, defining certain permissions based on NFT ownership, allowing digital art collectors to prove ownership of NFT art when displaying in virtual worlds, and tokenizing baskets of NFTs into fungible tokens.

I argue that this composability characteristic is very important in the NFT world. The NFT legos that make up this composable ecosystem include the platforms, creators, collectors, virtual worlds, communities, and so on.. not just the protocols.

Virtual worlds with true ownership of assets are the pieces of the MetaVerse that are attracting the crowds.

The MetaVerse is built on NFTs and as the MetaVerse grows, it will become harder and harder for it to detach from the NFTs at its core.

You can see an example of this in action with NFT art in virtual worlds. Though these worlds are still in their infancy, one of the main use cases for these environments is to display the digital art NFTs of collectors.

The next stage which has already started is for people to build businesses in these virtual worlds. As these businesses form and grow, the value associated with this increases. Before we will realize it, there will be $10bn of value locked in the Ethereum-based NFT/MetaVerse worlds that will be interacting with each other, making it very sticky, much like DeFi.

NFTs and DeFi are blending together

I believe that products in DeFi will become more and more intertwined with NFTs, and NFTs will become more and more intertwined with DeFi.

We are already seeing this happen with projects like Aavegotchi, DeFi-staked Crypto Collectibles and NFTfi, a simple marketplace for NFT collateralized loans. MetaFactory brings together NFTs, Fashion, DeFi and DAOs! This is only the start of what is to come.

Eventually, it will be common to have assets such as digital art NFTs that own DeFi assets such as interest-bearing tokens, permissions, or other NFTs. (This is a deeper topic for an entire separate post.)

If the future of NFTs is heavily attached to DeFi and the core of DeFi stays in the Ethereum ecosystem, then that is another strong reason to believe NFTs will stay as well.

Other NFT platforms will connect to Ethereum

There are other NFT blockchains that are starting to and will continue to sprout up. I believe that these platforms will have to connect to Ethereum, and add value to participate.

Once again, we already see this happening in DeFi where the core of DeFi remains on Ethereum and any serious player that wants to participate will have to “connect to” the DeFi systems on Ethereum.

The NFT ecosystem could very well work the same way.

There will be other blockchains that are built specifically for NFTs, and when they are ready for the big leagues, they will offer certain advantages over the current Ethereum NFT experience. They may even be better at bringing the non-crypto world into the NFT space. However, they will have to be friendly with Ethereum and add value in order to attract an audience.

The decision for a collector to hold her $20k+ valued NFT portfolio on another chain versus Ethereum will not come easy. Even when that chain is more mature and there exists a very safe and strong “bridge” between those chains, it will be difficult to change minds and comfort.

There will be use cases where some NFT assets are moved across, used in some manner and eventually brought home to Ethereum, but the core will remain.

It’s kind of like when you let your cousin borrow one of your treasured toys, and tell him once he brings it back undamaged by a certain date, you’ll let him borrow another toy only then.

The Ethereum NFT space will start to suck in other NFTs platforms and activity, much like DeFi is doing by sucking in Bitcoin value as collateral on Ethereum.

NFTs will be fine on Ethereum

At this point, the critics will be asking “How will Ethereum be able to handle this?”

My answer is not Ethereum 2.0. In fact, I will ignore Serenity because it doesn’t exist yet and I know some NFT people that say it may never exist. However, what does exist is the crazy amount of research, development and progress that is being made in the Layer 2 solutions world on Ethereum.

Ethereum Layer 2 technology continues to advance. There will be different Layer 2 solutions for different use cases. Each Layer 2 solution will come with benefits and drawbacks. For example, some will have long, problematic withdrawal periods, and others will have shorter wait times. The key with all these true Layer 2 solutions is that they will have the same security properties as Ethereum mainnet.

Rollups are coming. There will be domain-specific rollups for different use cases. As an example, Optimistic Rollups which are getting a ton of excitement these days may not be the best solution for NFT-related environments.

Because of the long-latency of fraud-proofs used in Optimistic Rollups, there is a long waiting period for withdrawal to mainnet. With fungible tokens (ERC20), this drawback can be dealt with by using liquidity providers who will charge a small fee for giving you your assets quickly, mostly eliminating the wait period. However, with non-fungible tokens (ERC721), it is impossible for liquidity providers to eliminate this wait period being non-fungible by definition.

With NFTs, ZK rollups using zero-knowledge proofs may have a big advantage by having much lower latency for on-chain transactions. Once you know the ZK proof is valid, you can withdraw your assets to the main chain.

We will soon see Layer 2 solutions built specifically for NFT use cases.

Conclusion

The NFT space is currently built on Ethereum, and it is expanding rapidly. Ethereum has its drawbacks, yet there are too many good reasons why the NFT space will continue to find its core home and be built on Ethereum.

Other chains are coming, but rather than capturing the NFT market, these other chains will have to connect to Ethereum and add value to the system in order to gain adoption. All of this together will solidify Ethereum as the home of NFTs (that matter)*.

(*Though this article may not sound like it, I am actually excited to see other platforms succeed and help bring NFTs to the world!)

Note: This article was originally published on Medium on May 6, 2020

Below is the original post (with some updated hyperlinks):

The Dilemma

Question: What is the difference between the two pieces of amazing digital art created by artist Hackatao below? Look very closely.

Art Piece #1:

Art Piece #2:

Answer: The difference is that Art Piece #1 is a rare 1-of-1 edition non-fungible token (“NFT”) on Ethereum blockchain owned by a well known digital art collector, while Art Piece #2 is an exact copy of that digital art piece.

So now I ask: Which piece is more beautiful, or more special? Which piece gives you more pleasure? Which piece do you think is more valuable?

Some will say Art Piece #1 is move valuable and special because it is truly scarce and is provably and cryptographically owned by one Ethereum wallet, and only this wallet has the ability to prove ownership and only this wallet has the ability to sell or transfer this art piece.

Do you agree with this statement?

Most likely, we all believe that it is quite powerful that the world now has the ability to truly own unique digital assets, something that was impossible prior to blockchain. Still… WOW!

However, what does this mean with regards to digital art? To help figure this out, let’s compare it to physical art.

If you are lucky enough to own a rare, one-of-a-kind piece of physical art created by Pablo Picasso, you inherently have a certain power associated with this ownership. You have the ability to control who in the world can see this art piece and who can receive pleasure from this experience. If you so choose, you have the ability to remove the presence of the art piece from the rest of the world. If you desire, you have the ability to create an environment where you can charge people to see this art piece, or you have the ability to loan this piece of art to a museum, for a certain limited period of time. These are some of the powerful features that are derived from true ownership of physical art.

How does this experience compare to ownership of digital art?

SURPRISE, I tricked you — Art Piece #2 is actually the rare 1-of-1 edition owned by a well-known digital art collector, and Art Piece #1 is the exact copy. Do you now value Art Piece #1 less, or think it is less special?

I know this is just a fun example, but how does this make you feel?

With digital art, once it has been exposed to the world, typically via the internet, the exact piece of art is now available for everyone to see and to receive pleasure from. Once exposed, this can never be taken away from the world. I would argue that this is currently what happens with most digital art in the world today.

Does this take value away from this digital art piece compared to a physical art piece? Generally today, I would argue that the value of ownership of a rare physical art piece is more powerful and more valuable than the value of ownership of a rare digital art piece.

Do you agree? Do we care if this is the case?

Solving the Dilemma

What can we do with digital art to increase the value of true ownership?

I believe this is where the power of technology comes in.

Can we provide some unique “features” that allow true ownership of digital art to become more valuable?

There are some “features” that exist today that move in this direction. Some of these include:

1. One example is in the Metaverse world. In Cryptovoxels, when a true owner displays a piece of digital art in-world it receives a special sparkly frame around it (see above picture). Copies of this digital art do not receive this ownership frame.

2. Another interesting ownership “feature” has been implemented by Async Art, which currently specializes in what some call programmable art, or what I call dynamic art. With the Async platform, a single piece of art has one Master and that Master is made up of a certain number of layers.

   Because the Master art piece is a dynamic display of all the layers, it can be constantly changing, sometimes activated by owners of the Layers. Now, true ownership of the Master and deciding where to display it becomes more special. Someone that is showing a copy of the Master has a more difficult time trying to show the true current piece of digital art as it can change at any time.Plus ownership of the Layers, which allow control within the Master is a clear benefit of true ownership.

3. Another interesting idea revolves around unique experiences that only the true owner of the digital art piece can experience. This could be a digital experience or in-real-life (“IRL”) physical experience. In this case, the ownership of the digital art piece acts similarly to owning an access token. This access token allows the owner to a special experience. This special experience could be a unique way to see the art, or it could be something unrelated to the actual digital art piece. (I’ve heard Matt Kane is doing some interesting things around this)

These features allow for additional benefit (and I’d argue additional value) due to true ownership.

Still, does this make true ownership of digital art something that is equal to or more powerful that true ownership of physical art?

The Limitless Future of Digital Art

I believe there are endless possibilities to imagine when it comes to digital art. But today, I would argue that true ownership of physical art is still more powerful than true ownership of digital art, but I see this difference closing.

What am I excited about? Here are some additional ideas that are happening or to be explored in this space:

1. Embedding digital value into the digital art piece. This can be digital currency, interest bearing digital currency, or other types of digital value. (see Charged Particles for some interesting work going on)

2. Scenarios where owning a piece of digital art grants you access to a DAO — this DAO could do many different things, related to the art or something else.

3. Owning a social token that is “backed” by digital art, digital real estate and other digital assets. (see WhaleShark’s $Whale token)

4. Digital art lego blocks (DADA.nyc has been doing collaboration art for long time now). If you compare to Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”), this space has a wide open future.

5. Interoperability — We see this more with gaming NFTs, but wide open within the digital art NFT space too!

6. Every idea that we haven’t yet thought of yet!

What else is possible?!

Conclusion

In conclusion, is most current ownership of digital art less valuable/powerful than ownership of physical art today? Some will say “No”, some will say “Yes”.

Either way you answer, the really intriguing thing about true ownership of digital art is that it can adapt. You could argue that most of the interesting features that become possible in the future can still be implemented around currently existing digital art.

So the upside is potentially unlimited.

One way to think about it:

Ownership of Bitcoin today is a call option on Bitcoin becoming a global store of value in the future.

Ownership of unique digital art today is a call option on the future value of the digital art space, and everything that is possible.

If you haven’t already, I would suggest experiencing it today!

The community is slowly pushing these things forwards and I am very excited to see where we are even one year from now!

Cheers

In the middle of June 2023, I was invited to give a presentation to the Season VI cohort of Raid Guild during Brown Bag Sessions.

This season’s cohort goals included more about sharing ideas and knowledge that could help more people entering Web3.

I was happy to present some ideas around how contributors can best find their spot in DAOs.

This is not some groundbreaking invention but the idea is that having some simple structure around the issue could help some people think through the process better.

To start, what is the main problem to solve?

This makes entering DAOs new, complex and potentially confusing. So what to do?

Storytime:

One year ago in a Palace far, far away, a bunch of DAO heads gathered to think about all things DAOs.

One topic we were trying to solve was how to make it easier for DAO contributors to become DAO contributors!

The output was:

To dive into the learnings a bit more, we have three broad parts:

1) Love

2) Good At

3) Needs

At the intersections of these parts, we have:

If you can find a DAO that needs these, that’s a win-win.

Mentoring and education can be a great way to attract contributors to fill these needs.

Here, DAOs may need to find ways to incentivize the completion of these tasks.

And finally, the intersection of all three parts:

This is the Sweet Spot!

Shown in chart form:

Often, one of the hardest parts is figuring out what a DAO needs. To do this, you need to:

All of this is highly related to the the Japanese concept of Ikigai.

In fact, we realized afterwards that @tracheopteryx, an early contributor to Yearn, had already brought the two concepts together in an awesome high level twitter thread.

If you have ideas to contribute or questions, please reach out.

At the DAOist in Paris during ETHCC week in July 2023, I gave a presentation to a small, mixed audience made up mostly of people that are big fans of DAOs.

Below is a summary of the presentation using relevant slides and some in between commentary.

I initially titled the presentation:

But the topic was more about:

Over the past few years, I have seen DAOs form and live from the inside and more recently I’ve seen some DAOs end. I wanted to share some of the ways we have been thinking about the Life of DAOs.

For some background, there are an assortment of reasons why DAOs can end or die:

• Accomplished mission: when a DAOs mission is clear and accomplished, it becomes an easy

• Stagnation: Many DAOs out there have dies due to lack of attention

• Failure to Perform: If a DAO is not achieving its goals, it may be time

• Discount to NAV: There are a bunch of financial arbitragers out there are are going after DAOs with large non-native token treasuries.

• Out of Runway: Once DAOs have a token, the runway becomes more real.

• Poor treasury management: Has led to demise. At the same time, great treasury management has also led to demise.

• And there are more…

I want to share that:

DAOs like all living organisms will have life cycles.

Below is a comparison to nature. Think of a living forest more than a single tree.

Starting with at the Seed stage, it’s an interesting exercise to move through this cycle thinking about a specific DAO you may have in mind.

• Seed: a small, novel idea that comes from one or a few people’s minds. This idea is very maleable and ripe for change and improvement.

• Germination: During this phase, this idea can be explored by different groups, brought away and brought back, formed, adjusted, spread into communities, attracting different forms of capital.

• Growth: The often very exciting phase where many are interested, contributing many forms of capital (attention, money, skill, etc.)

• Life (creating): Where the DAO moves towards accomplishing its mission

• Aging: All living organisms age.

• Death: Most great things come to an end. There are many reasons why this can happen.

• Rebirth: A time for allowing the capital involved in the DAO to create a fertile soil that allows for freedom and experimentation.

• Seeds: New seeds/ideas are brought into the environment from different places. This can be from within, blown in from nearby, or from far away attached the hind leg fur of a curious animal.

As a community, most of us believe in Web3 rights, things like interoperability and openness.

This includes the Right to Exit.

Things will now never be the same. We can’t unlearn that a DAO can have an end.

There is a method that may allow DAOs to be healthier and also take more accountability.

That is:

DAOs need to get better at evaluation.

Forcing a decisions comes with benefits:

and disadvantages:

DAOs will continue to move through life cycles. In order to continue to learn and develop better ways, we need more iterations.

Thanks for reading and:

This is a light version of this topic. If it interests you, please reach out.

Start singing: “On the 5th day of DAOcember, my friend gave a talk on "Why On-Chain Matters”…

During DAOhaus’ DAOcember, I gave a short talk on this topic.

Below are a bunch of the key slides and some of my commentary to help frame them.

Decentralized blockchains now exist in our world and the following presentation aims to explain why using these blockchains matters…

What’s going on in the world these days?

AI created art for example. Check these out!

So, why not ask AI to do help with the talk?!

ChatGPT mentions transparency, immutability, security, trust and efficiency - all really important benefits.

But, what’s missing?

Before that, what else is going on in the world?

You got it…

What is my talk about?

I asked ChatGPT just to confirm…

I believe you CANNOT achieve these things without Blockchain.

THIS IS KEY:

Diving into each…

You can find an entire talk here on “Unconquerable Product Ownership”.

Important to be aware of the Risks.

It’s important for each one of us to know what we can do to improve the space.

The tools for doing things on-chain already exist. Some of them are:

You can find more details on these tools for on-chain DAOs below.

DAOhaus built on MolochDAO

Project DAVI by DXdao

Nouns DAO (nouns.build)

Thanks for joining!

If you found this helpful, feel free to subscribe!

This group wasn’t here to talk about how DAO’s will change the world.

This group was here to take a deep look into all the pieces of the DAO ecosystem, critically analyze them, break them down, figure out how to improve them and forge a plan to move forward.

2018 vs. 2023

To kick things off, the “2018 vs. 2023: Narratives in Play” session with James Young (CollabLand, MetaCartel) and pet3rpan (1kx, MetaCartel) was a great way to look back to where things started and then compare that to looking forward and figuring out what’s next?

Interoperability between many groups, what are the stacks that will emerge, identity, reputation, and scaling all these things is important.

When we started, we had small, high trust groups, but now with DAOs everywhere, how do you know who to talk to and how to work together?  Things like verifiable credentials are taking flight.  Check out Gitcoin Passport.

DAOhaus and Moloch v3

On opening day, DAOhaus organized two workshops for the DAO world.  The first was a Community Workshop where Moloch v3 and DAOhaus v3 were introduced and then working groups split off to dive into seven different DAO ideas all at different stages in their DAO journey brought to the space by eager participants.

This session was then followed by a Technical Workshop where DAOhaus devs led a live building session into DAOhaus v3.

Overall, we had the chance to explore the possibilities that DAO frameworks and tools allow, while having the chance to put these tools to new real world use cases.

For some examples of some communities that showed up, checkout WGMI Community, Baddies in Tech DAO, and Helium Network.

Ameen’s Speech

Another big highlight was Ameen Soleimani’s speech on the school’s front lawn about privacy, values and community.

After sharing details about the origin of Tornado Cash and how MolochDAO community desired and initiated it, Ameen gave a concise historical snapshot on the cypherpunk movement to liberate the use of cryptography and encryption for the masses to give us some perspective.  We are now at the beginning of the “And then they fight you” period.

Ameen then brought things back to the present:

“In my view, what we’re doing here is building hope. With our DAOs, NFTs, and zkSnarks magic, we are building towards what we believe is a better way of doing things. We are building a cultural shift towards embedding our values of privacy, sovereignty, and censorship-resistance into our running code. Together, with each and every one of our projects, we are creating narratives that other people can identify with, be inspired by, imagine themselves as part of, and ultimately join in.

I think James Young put it really well - bear markets are for iteration. Everyone who joined a DAO and went through their “DAO honeymoon period” is now a veteran DAOist. You might have thought that the OG DAO lords had everything figured out. Jokes on you. The process is product. Iterate on your governance structures, and once you make it work, share that knowledge with the community.

It’s hard to know the impact of the tools and culture we build. In 2018 imagineering MolochDAO it was a preposterous thought that there might be thousands of DAOs in just a few years. MetaCartel was formed by a bunch of broke, well-meaning crypto noobs, but somehow became the nexus for a culture of ruthless positive-sum folks to collaborate, iterate, and build meaningful tools. It took years of DAOs and NFTs to make anything useful, but this community helped make it happen, and now they are coming. The positive use cases developed by offshoots of this community serve as inspiration for the entire crypto space. Andrew Yang has a lobbying DAO. Elon's brother Kimball made a DAO to buy farmland. This community helped make this happen.

I may have been the first to call myself “summoner”, but without Peter Pan, none of this would have been possible. So I’d like to give a shoutout to Peter Pan for being the greatest DAO summoner of all time. The MetaCartel community has come far, and it has done so together. Thank you for your coordination.”

You can view Ameen’s entire speech here.

Power and DAOs Dinner

I joined a small dinner where the group discussed “power” and how this plays into DAOs.  For two hours, we analyzed the positives and the negatives, and also how to leverage this asset to help DAOs succeed.

My final takeaway was that power is a delicate asset.  We need people with power, DAO’s to delegate power, and powerful forces to affect change, yet, we must be careful of how much power individuals can control and whether this power can be taken away if necessary.

DAOs and Legal

There was a packed room for the “DAO Legal Entity Debate”.

A group of experts including Adam Miller, Sven Riva, Ben Huh, and others presented many of the DAO legal entity options available to wrap DAOs.

The group presented reasons why it makes sense to wrap DAOs with a single entity.  However, no one presented why it doesn’t make sense to wrap DAOs with a single entity.  Feels like a massive single point of failure.

What about decentralization?

Why is it better to have 800 people contribute to a single DAO legal entity, than have 800 legal entities contribute to an on-chain coordination system made of immutable code?

In order to help understand this question, the example of Uniswap DAO was raised.  Over 300,000 UNI token holders own and govern the Uniswap protocol that lives on Ethereum.  The question was raised “How would we go about creating a legal entity for Uniswap DAO?”

There was no answer that seemed to solve this.

I think the DAO space needs to iterate more around how DAOs and legal entities interact.

Unconquerable Product Ownership

On behalf of DXdao, I was able to able to give a talk on “Unconquerable Product Ownership”

In our Ethereum world, we often assume that we are building unconquerable products because we are building on Ethereum. However, we see many recent examples of how products, projects and DAOs are being conquered, attacked or censored.

If we want to build the system that we think we are building, we need to pay more attention to important factors from the beginning and through our processes.

The goal of this presentation at MCON2 was to share ideas about this topic, introduce some important tools and techniques that some might not be aware of and get more people building Unconquerable Products.

We dive into a Pretty Good Example (“PGE”) with Swapr.eth.

You can find all the slides and some added notes here: https://mirror.xyz/skywtf.eth/

Cool Node Infrastructure

In my talk, I mention a key ingredient that is very important to making our system unconquerable and that is more people running their own nodes.  Right now, it is still not super easy and it is also not that “cool” to run nodes.  What if we made it so the centerpiece of a family home was a node?

Shout out to @TheMetaFactory, @META_DREAMER, @artbyaatif and SABR STUDIOS for making it “cool” to run and showcase a node!

Pick one up here: https://opensea.io/collection/metanode

Chainlink Hosted DAO Panel

Thursday afternoon, Lauren Halstead hosted a few DAOists for a live recording of Chainlink’s “Chainlink Denver: DAOs, DApps & Digitization” show.

The group included Kevin Owocki, Yalor Mewn, Dennison Bertram and myself.  We dove into what’s excited us in the DAO space, what we’d like to see more of, what we’d like to see left behind and even what we’d be doing if we weren’t in Web3!

The show should be up on Chainlink’s YouTube soon!

From Where and What’s next?

Just a small list of some of the places people came from to attend MCON2:

Boulder Brooklyn Pennsylvania Vancouver Dubai England Portugal London New York City Canada Panama Costa Rica Campbell, CA Mexico City Tokyo Eastern Sierras France Serbia Denver California Rincón de la Vieja, Costa Rica Idaho Seoul Bangkok Train in Canada  Breckenridge, CO Inside the Grand Canyon Omaha Zoo train Los Angeles Scotland Madrid Sierra Nevada California Boston Dubai Steamboat Silverthorne @ Gulch Trail & Salmon Lake and more!

MCON2 was an amazing event.  A DAO event like no other.  The question now is “What’s next?”  Will there be an MCON3 or an MCON2.5 and where and when will it be?

For now, it’s time to keep iterating!

Where DAOist’s go to iterate on fresh ideas post MCON2:

Notes:

1. This was only a personal taste of some of the things that took place during an amazing 4 days at MCON2. There was so much more. Don’t miss the next one!

2. Special thanks to Yalor, pet3rpan and everyone else who helped make this happen ❤️🌶]

Alpha → Hope you got to taste both of these:

I had the opportunity to share ideas around “Unconquerable Product Ownership” at MCON2 in Denver in early September.

In our Ethereum world, we often assume that we are building unconquerable products because we are building on Ethereum. However, we see many recent examples of how products, projects and DAOs are being conquered, attacked or censored.

If we want to build the system that we think we are building, we need to pay more attention to important factors from the beginning and through our processes.

The goal of this presentation at MCON2 was to share ideas about this topic, introduce some important tools and techniques that some might not be aware of and get more people building Unconquerable Products.

I present the slides of the presentation and add in a bit of context.

A quick taste of some of the headlines we’ve seen recently:

Not so unconquerable.

Can we build products with more obstacles and more opposition?

Decentralization as a DEFENSE MECHANISM!

We must eliminate all central points of failure.

We need more people running infrastructure and nodes.

We haven’t figured everything out but we do have some “Pretty Good Examples” that are striving to be Unconquerable.

DXdao’s Swapr.eth is a good example to look at.

DXdao has three years of experience owning DeFi front-ends.

Take a few minutes to try to think of the weak points in this system. What can bring this down? What can conquer this product?

Find out more details about Infinite Genesis Edition hackathon in Bogota Oct 7-9, 2022 at: https://infinite-hackathons.eth.limo/

This hacker-first event has some awesome organizers:

     DXdao: https://dxdao.eth.limo/

     HOPR: https://hoprnet.org/

     Brink: https://www.brink.trade/

     Kleros: https://kleros.io/

Thank you for taking the time to view this. If you have any thoughts or other ideas, please reach out on Twitter to @sminert . Always happy to chat!