If you’ve engaged with crypto projects on any sort of scale, you’ve likely come across grants programs – there are tens, if not hundreds, of such programs in existence across Web3 today.

We’ve both worked in DAOs and Web3 for years – which means that we’ve inevitably worked around or with many of the best grants programs in the space. We’ve also both spent time at Gitcoin, where Annika was previously Grants Program Lead and Meg currently leads Product for Grants Stack. When Annika started her role as Executive Director at the Eco Association, it made perfect sense to tackle grants in her first few months.

While there’s a proliferation of grants programs out there, we have found that literature and ‘how-tos’ on running grants programs are very sparse – there are very few (almost none!) blueprints and documentation for how to run a successful grants program.

This writeup is our attempt to open-source some of the work we’ve done, and what we’ve learned, in hopes that it might help others 🫡

Grants in Web3: The Why

Given that Web3 embodies the values of decentralization and permissionlessness, it follows that the work being done itself might follow that pattern.

If you zoom out for a second, grants are a strikingly obvious starting point as a construct – if you’re looking to make a project truly community-owned and maintained, the idea of funding individuals to complete specific pieces of work is a natural one, versus hiring a lot of full-time employees into a centralized entity.

In addition, grants programs fulfill other functions beyond just “getting work done”. They can serve as excellent recruiting and marketing tools and help bring new community members into their ecosystem. They provide an attractive platform to tell the world about their ambition and what they’re after – and, tactically, how outside contributors can help.

Who we talked to

In order to effectively stand up a grants program, we researched the strategy, goals, and operating processes of some of the best in the industry: Aave Grants DAO, Uniswap Grants, Gitcoin, dYdX, Urbit, and more. Many of them were gracious enough to share their experiences. Through this research, we’ve developed a working model for standing up a grants program.

After digesting this research and talking to grants programs experts and administrators, we developed a working model for getting grants running at the Eco Association. Articulating this process helped the team crystallize the “why” and “how” initiating a grants program.

The working model outlined below is intended to call out the important decisions that need to be made before creating a grants program – without adding too much overhead!

Our working model consists of three stages:

1. Define goals

2. Decide on structure

3. Set up tools, workflow, and process

Let’s dive in.

1. Define Goals

It seems to us that some organizations jump to “let’s stand up a grants program” somewhat prematurely, without specific aim as to what they are looking to accomplish.

Hey anon, we’ll let you in on a secret: grants programs are not a silver bullet.

One meaningful thing that we found missing across many grants programs as an articulation of their goals. Even when they are clearly set up to facilitate dev work in their ecosystem and have funded interesting and successful projects, they often fail to articulate the value they’re trying to drive. How do these projects benefit the organization, and why were they chosen? Identifying and articulating clear goals sets the foundation for the right structure to be created – setting aside a budget that’s reasonable to meet those goals, recruiting individuals with the right expertise, and more. It also builds alignment and trust with the wider community by making them confident that token distributions will have direct benefits.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen grants programs espouse purposes of community engagement and marketing, decentralization, making investments, bounties, and getting projects done by outside stakeholders. We make the argument that while these are all worthwhile goals for an organization, most Web3 grants efforts should focus, first and foremost, on achieving outcomes that are in line with the macro-level goals of the organization.

In doing this, organizations should find measurable ways to track towards their goals, or they can risk getting caught up in the minutiae, process, and white space that setting up a grants program can entail.

While things like marketing and decentralization are worthwhile goals, grants programs themselves are rarely set up with the skills and tools to effectively enable them. They’re a nice side effect — not necessarily an effective program objective.

Likewise, contributing your treasury’s tokens into worthwhile projects with the hope that “rising tides lift all boats” is certainly noble, though one that few organizations have appetite for in today’s market.

2. Decide on Structure

Once a grants program has defined goals, it’s ready to create an organizational structure to support those. There are three key elements of the structure: types of grants, establishing a decision making body, and setting initial parameters (budget, timing, and SLAs).

2.1 Types of Grants

The first thing to decide in standing up a grants program is what type of grants you want to focus on at the onset. Broadly speaking, we see two categories of grants today:

1. RFPs (“top-down”) – Proposing a project idea you want to see get built

2. Community-initiated grants (“bottoms-up”) – Community members proposing their own ideas that they want to get funding for

RFPs

Many grants programs started soliciting applications by building personal connections with builders and telling them to submit an interesting proposal. While this was effective in getting grants off the ground, many of those projects failed to gain traction or benefit the ecosystem. In response, most grants programs now have a curated list of RFPs that potential grantees respond to directly or fork when submitting their application.

Though RFPs have a high setup cost, every grants program we interviewed noted that their most successful projects and relationships had originated via RFP. The most effective RFPs we saw had the following key elements:

• Project outline: what is meant to be built and delivered?

• Problem statement: what problem is this solving for the ecosystem?

• Budget: how much is the grants program willing to pay for completed work?

• Skills needed: what capabilities or expertise does the grantee need to possess to successfully complete this work?

RFPs are not only an effective way to communicate specific work to be done, but can also serve as inspiration for future projects. A few grants managers noted that their communities had “forked” previous RFPs and suggested different approaches to the project!

Community-Initiated Grants

This category is typically much more open-ended than RFPs; it gives free rein to the community to bring about ideas that they believe would advance the project and they ask for funding to execute on those ideas.

Community-initiated grants often flow through the project’s formal governance process — or, in more sophisticated projects, sometimes through other sub-governance processes — and are weighed in on by the community-at-large. These grants can be effective if done right, but we have heard program managers talk of the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ phenomenon — if you haven’t given clear direction on the objectives you’re going for in standing up a grants program, you risk receiving a lot of highly chaotic applications to manage that may not necessarily meet your focus, and can take a lot of time to sift through and respond to. For this reason, we see many projects just start with RFP grants at the onset.

Decision making bodies

The decision making bodies award grants to applicants, and in some cases are also responsible for reporting on its activities and managing grantees to ensure completion and success of their project. For RFP programs, the most common framework we see is an elected, salaried committee of 5-8 members. (For reference: dYdX Grants takes one of the most structured approaches to committee membership, with 5 committee members and a grants program administrator.) Committees allow a program to benefit from multiple points of view and bring in specialized expertise. The committee also plays a key role in sourcing builders – in conversations with Reverie, program manager for dYdX grants, they mentioned that two-thirds of successful applications had been the result of proactive networking and outreach.

Though committees have many benefits, they’re also the root of a critical problem facing grants programs: transparency and accountability. There’s rarely a process for disclosing conflicts of interest, or even for requiring committee members with a conflict of interest to abstain from voting on particular proposals. Many committees fail to give a rationale for their decisions, which perpetuates a vision of them as opaque and untrustworthy.

When setting up a new grants program, we recommend staffing the decision making body as a small committee. This allows the program to benefit from a few different points of view and allows the committee to share the responsibility of growing the program – and for new and smaller programs, the committee can be kept small and with enough oversight to prevent transparency and accountability issues.

The most common alternative to a committee is an in-house grants manager or grants team, which can be seen in programs like Uniswap that fund $1M+ of grants per year. This works well when the grants manager is also a domain expert and has the bandwidth and autonomy to both set the guidelines for the program and run it. They may benefit from grants analysts or external advisors to help evaluate proposals.

Another interesting framework comes from Urbit, where a grant is passed when a member of the community agrees to support it. A small set of members of the community have the power to support and pass potential proposals. Each of them has previously been a recipient of the grants program, and as part of their support, they will work alongside the grantee to ensure that the project is on track and keep the core team and community apprised of progress. In return, the sponsor receives a portion of the overall grant payment.

For community-initiated grants, the decision-making body is often a broad one. If a grant is going through community governance, every tokenholder might have the opportunity to vote on every grant. While this is highly democratic, it can also be chaotic and, in some cases, constitutes unnecessary work — for small ticket sizes, it may not be worth pestering the community and delegates for every single grant. One solution that is well-suited to community-initiated grants is Quadratic Funding, which uses the volume of individual donor contributions to determine how to allocate matching funds from a grants program.

2.3 Initial parameters

Okay, so you know what type of grants you want to launch with, and what your decision making bodies will look like… now what?

It’s time to get tactical — setting up initial parameters for the project.

Establishing expectations for timing, responses, and overall SLAs is key to a good grantee experience. At a minimum, grants managers will want to outline the following:

• How frequently do they approve new grants?

• When should applicants expect to hear back from the grants programs?

• What does the approval process look like, and how long might it take?

We were surprised to find how many grants programs failed to answer those basic questions, which could prevent potential grantees from investing the time in their application. Additionally, many programs failed to offer a feedback loop – responding only with a “yes” or “no” to an application.

It’s not surprising that some of the most successful grants programs have well documented processes and focus on setting grantee expectations. dYdX Grants recently launched their Grants Lifecycle, which details the different phases and timing of grant review. The Optimism Collective has a detailed page outlining the submission and evaluation process, associated timing, and criteria and participants for each step. When setting up a new grants program, use grantee experience as a competitive advantage to encourage builders in your ecosystem!

3. Set up tools, workflow, and process

Once you’ve got at least the bare bones of a structure decided on, it’s worth thinking about how you’ll manage the grants process as a whole.

By and large, from what we’ve heard, even the most prolific of programs are typically fairly scrappy and not hugely sophisticated in their software stack — Notion, Google Docs, and Airtable were frequently cited as key components of managing a grants program.

From a workflow and process standpoint — and, really, this goes without saying — the critical piece seems to be having clear owners with specific accountabilities for each part of the behind-the-scenes process. We heard a lot of complaints of grantees being ghosted or never hearing back on their applications — and we’d venture a guess that most of this isn’t being driven by malintent, but by unclear accountabilities.

Something else to note on this front: Web3 is nascent, we’re all figuring it out as we go — program managers and grantees both. Change is expected. If your program structure changes, if you’ve decided to halt giving out grants altogether, or if there’s anything your community should know, *tell them*. Unanswered grant applications and hard work from a prospective grantee’s perspective being tossed into the ether is an easy — and unfortunate — way to make a bad first impression and put a stain on your project. So, set expectations accordingly.

Conclusion

In conducting this research, we’ve been blown away by both the interest that Web3-natives seem to have in hearing about this stuff, and the passion and entrepreneurial spirit that people running these programs today showcase.

All that to say: we’re incredibly early – and if Web3 projects offer any signal of what’s to come, we’d venture a guess that grants are likely to be an important component of the future of work.

I got into crypto in the first place because I was concerned about the future of the US dollar as the world’s foremost reserve currency. I wanted to understand Bitcoin & Ethereum as assets and form my own viewpoint on whether they might be “digital gold”, as the meme goes - or even something more.

Fast-forward 2.5 years since my first real foray into crypto, and I’m convinced of two things:

• Blockchains will underpin the future of the internet

• Blockchains will do to money what the internet did to publishing

This post focuses on the second one.

Money, but make it creative

Reflecting on all the projects I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with in the crypto space over the past couple years, among all my observations around what’s different in Web2 vs. Web3, there is one thing that really strikes me as I reflect at a macro level:

Anyone can create and manage a currency out of thin air.

And, I do mean literally anyone. An extreme example:

https://twitter.com/AnnikaSays/status/1423495478809825281?s=20&t=FVvC2c_y84yobW_VC0DlKw

No, I don’t think the US Dollar is getting replaced tomorrow.

And, no, I don’t think fiat currencies are going away anytime soon.

But the early days of this shift are, in my opinion, clearly indicative of an inevitable future. Money, like any other construct invented by humans, has the potential to be disrupted.

https://twitter.com/AnnikaSays/status/1566220979873136641?s=20&t=ED8cqCF0ir9uMmNiaAQEdQ

And the status quo is so incredibly archaic. Creativity in monetary policy, at any sort of meaningful scale, has been limited to Central Banks and their mandates, scopes, and risk appetites.

Where we are & where we might be going

Already, in these early days of crypto, we’ve seen monetary policy experiments - successful, unsuccessful, and yet-to-be-proven - that we can learn so much from.

A few obvious examples that come to mind:

• Ethereum’s EIP-1559 as, what I would call, a successful monetary policy experiment (to date, at least)

• The collapse of UST (Terra/Luna), painfully teaching us about the vulnerabilities of algorithmic stablecoins

• Even Bitcoin’s simple hard-capped issuance policy - with 21M BTC as the upper limit - as a new structure to explore & entertain

And beyond these, there’s so much more. There are tens, if not hundreds, of Layer 1 blockchains with their own tokens in circulation, and hundreds more ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain. Each of these has its own monetary policy to analyze - whether fine-tuned & intentional or completely yolo’ed.

From a competitive analysis standpoint, fiat just feels so incredibly ripe for disruption. With high inflation, decreasing consumer confidence, and many Central Banks finding themselves in between a rock and a hard place - I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about this massive design space and how rapidly it’s opening itself up.

As a result of my rapidly-accelerating crypto obsession, in the past couple months I’ve gone from a near-never Discord user to waking up every morning to an overwhelming left-hand sidebar with logos and notifications galore.

These are, of course, the logos of DAOs I’m following.

Since I’m teetering on the brink of being mostly a quiet DAO lurker to becoming a contributing member of these communities, I’d like to document my experience and learnings about DAOs as they are today in 2021.

I think it’s important I do this before I get much deeper and become ‘one of them’ (“one of us… one of us…”), so that I can provide my best layman’s take for the 99% of the planet that isn’t DAO-native. I decided I’d write about my three main learnings from my involvement with DAOs to date, but as usual with my writing, this got real long real quick – so I’m splitting it into three parts to really dig into each and discuss its implications. The three things I’ve learned are:

1. DAO is an ethos (Part 1)

2. The transparency is wild (Part 2)

3. You gotta hustle

Let’s dig into #3.

Part 3: You gotta hustle

Let’s call it like it is: generally speaking, today, most DAOs are kind of a shitshow.

This is to be expected, given how early things are in crypto and in DAOs generally speaking. There’s also the fact that decentralization, by definition, just straight up requires more coordination.

And, to further pile onto the reasons for messiness, DAOs run on Discord which was built for synchronous gaming, not asynchronous knowledge work (h/t @divine_economy) and can be super overwhelming to jump into… but, I digress.

Overall, the fact that they’re kind of a shitshow is not discouraging to me, but exciting – it’s indicative of how much opportunity lies ahead.

What this means today in 2021, though, is that joining a DAO can be pretty daunting.

Stepping into a Discord group of faceless strangers, trying to make sense of everything from channels, to org structure, to group norms and who’s who – it’s a lot. It’s sort of like being invited into a mid-sized startup’s Slack group where you only kind of know what the company does, there’s nobody you know, and there is very little semblance of org structure.

Most protocols don’t have clear roles that people can just self-guide into - The Graph is the notable exception I can think of here. In general, nobody is going to reach out and tell you what to do – so if you want to get involved in a DAO, you gotta hustle a bit.

Here, I’ll share three tactics that I’ve noticed work well for first-time DAO joiners.

1. Do whatever onboarding process they have – and give feedback on it

Most established DAOs have at least some sort of onboarding process – whether it’s as basic as a one-page Google form, or as thorough as a multi-step stage gated process. Most DAOs these days lie closer to the former on the spectrum of thoroughness.

This process, which is typically outlined in a Discord channel labeled “#start-here” or something to that effect, should be your first stop.

One way you can immediately add value as a newbie to a DAO is to give feedback on that process – what’s clear? What isn’t? What ideas do you have to improve it? Very often, the people designing and iterating on these processes are so deep into DAO life that it isn’t easy for them to pull back and see it with fresh eyes – so yours are valuable. Use that as a way to contribute.

2. Reach out 1:1 to people involved

Joining a 40-person call as the one new person in the room can be intimidating.

Look at DAOs you’re interested in and search them on Twitter – see who in your Twitter follows are involved with that you jive with, check that they’re active in the Discord, and reach out to learn about their involvement.

https://twitter.com/j_asminewang/status/1445395425255694345?s=20

1:1s with people who are already in DAOs can give you so much context that you won’t get just by lurking. A familiar face on these calls is always nice, plus these people can help plug you in if they have some existing context on what you’re interested in and what you’re good at. Some DAOs, like Index Coop, are starting to stand up ‘first friend’ or ‘mentor’ programs to do just this.

I’ll note that this approach is generally accepted and pretty doable now, in 2021, while the DAO space is still small and the community is tight-knit – but in the future, at scale, onboarding processes will need to be more streamlined and adhoc 1:1s might not make sense.

3. Just start doing

In DAOs, you don’t need permission to do – you can jump right in and add value wherever you creatively see fit.

• Good at writing? Summarize a meeting with notes, and share them in the Discord.

• Have a big Twitter following? Write about the DAO, tag them, make content.

• Creatively inclined? Make a new slide template. An emoji. A meme. Whatever inspires you.

Again, all of this is often easier with context – so I’d suggest doing #1 and #2 above and joining at least one or two DAO calls so you have a sense of what’s going on – but over-indexing on doing early is an effective way to get started.

The Confidence Gap

This brings me to the confidence gap, which @chaserchapman has been incredible at amplifying. “Just start doing” sounds easy in theory, but there’s a big unspoken barrier here – there are many folks who are completely capable but might lack the confidence to step up to the plate, and they risk being left behind.

https://twitter.com/chaserchapman/status/1411010567142350850?s=20

I’ve been there - starting off as a newcomer in a group of insiders is intimidating, no matter the context.

Proactive initiatives like the Women in Index DEI initiative, which launched in the past month, are needed to help bridge that gap and empower people to hustle who might not otherwise do so on their own. This doesn’t just apply to women – but initiatives like this will undoubtedly help increase diversity and bring voices into the space that might not otherwise contribute.

In DAOs, as with anything, you get out what you put in – and, in today’s environment while it’s still early days, the hustle is necessary.

Prospective DAO members should take note, and those running DAOs should make sure they’re doing whatever they can to grab onto those who aspire to hustle and empowering them to do so.

As a result of my rapidly-accelerating crypto obsession, in the past couple months I’ve gone from a near-never Discord user to waking up every morning to an overwhelming left-hand sidebar with logos and notifications galore.

These are, of course, the logos of DAOs I’m following.

Since I’m teetering on the brink of being mostly a quiet DAO lurker to becoming a contributing member of these communities, I’d like to document my experience and learnings about DAOs as they are today in 2021.

I think it’s important I do this before I get much deeper and become ‘one of them’ (“one of us… one of us…”), so that I can provide my best layman’s take for the 99% of the planet that isn’t DAO-native. I decided I’d write about my three main learnings from my involvement with DAOs to date, but as usual with my writing, this got real long real quick – so I’m splitting it into three parts to really dig into each and discuss its implications.

The three things I’ve learned are:

1. DAO is an ethos

2. The transparency is wild

3. You gotta hustle

Let’s dig into #2.

Part 2: The transparency is wild

“Step into my company Slack, will you” – said no one, ever.

In Part 1 of this piece, DAO is an ethos, I wrote about ways that DAO norms might manifest themselves when it comes to the future of work. Here in Part 2, I’ll dig into the transparency and openness piece specifically – because I think this sub-ethos underpins one of the biggest shifts we’ll see in companies and how they recruit, organize, and raise capital.

The shift is that DAOs are, typically, Default Open.

So, what is Default Open?

Default Open is exactly what it sounds like: it means that access to information within a company is, by default, open to the entire company to view. You can think of this as akin to your sharing settings on iCloud or Google Drive; the default here is that it’s shared with the entire company base, rather than the default being private.

Only if there is a good reason to restrict access does a file, a piece of info, or a Discord channel become private – rather than the reverse.

DAOs take Web2 Default Open to a new level. If, in Web2, Default Open allows the entire company to access all its information, in Web3, this universe is extended to the entire world.

If joining a startup is signing up for a seat on a rocketship, joining DAOs is snooping on a bunch of rocketships being built, figuring out which rocket-building team you jive with, and stepping in with a wrench where you see fit.

The openness required to do this constitutes a massive mindset shift - and I was blown away when I first experienced it in practice.

When looking at joining DAOs, I assumed I’d need to fill out an application, talk to a key organizer, and get some sort of approval before starting to engage. While this is true of some DAOs, this was not my experience at large. In many cases, I gained access to the Discord pretty much right away.

What’s notable is that these Discords aren’t just for fans & end-users of the protocol. In Web2, you’ll often see community Slack groups for open-source software projects who would then also have a separate internal Slack instance for employees only. Not in crypto. These public Discords are literally where work the gets done, where calls get scheduled, where people get hired, and where governance happens. It’s incredible.

https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/1433834562182914061?s=20

If you have a Discord account, go ahead and try it out right now: visit the website or Twitter page of a given crypto project (I’d start with Uniswap), find the Discord link, and odds are you’ll click into a dark page with a pop-up saying “you’re invited to join”.

Click accept, read the T&Cs and do the required emoji reaction to confirm you’ll comply with the rules of the forum, and you’re in.

IMO, poking around in these Discords is one of the fastest ways to start to understand the DAO landscape and the ethos of the builders at the forefront in crypto, generally speaking.

https://twitter.com/chaserchapman/status/1429870422401691659

If you’re not crypto-native and the thought of doing this yourself is overwhelming, I’ll shed some light on a few examples what I’m seeing within in DAO Discords to really bring this to life.

Governance

Discussions that would be happening at the Board of Directors level in Web2, around things like “what does our employee stock options plan look like?” and “where do we want this protocol to be in five years?” are held totally in public.

Voting on key governance matters - which, again, would typically happen at the Board level - is often put forth to the community of token-holders as a whole.

Budget decisions

Conversations around treasury allocation (i.e., how the company plans to manage & spend its money, basically) are also happening in public.

The level of detail here varies, but in many cases, you can even see job offers – yes, all the way down to specific terms of an offer for a specific candidate. And, if you’re a tokenholder, you can vote on whether or not to approve that hire.

Fundraising

Fundraising, too, is happening in public.

Since decisions are made as a collective, even discussions around raising a venture round are not exempt from community participation. VCs are having to join community calls and jumping into Discords to pitch DAOs, answer questions, and articulate their value-add - not just to the CEO, but to the voting community as a whole.

Sushiswap, for one, was recently pursuing a venture fundraise, and the community was opposed to certain terms of the raise. Collectivizing Finance, a piece I recently co-wrote, goes into more depth on the dynamics of this raise.

From a transparency lens, what’s fascinating here is that the dialogue the VCs had with the community can be publicly viewed. These are conversations that would normally happen behind closed doors with a select group executives, let alone in the presence of employees, and are now visible to the public-at-large.

To close out this section, I want to pause and reflect on all this for a moment.

It feels super weird that all of this information is public, doesn’t it? Uncomfortable, in a way. This shift towards increased transparency is outside of our societal working norms and, at times, it’s an uneasy one.

To be honest, I’m not sure a 100% Default Open level of transparency is optimal. Yes, I think employees and prospective hires should generally be entitled to far more information than they currently are in a typical company and that this swinging of the pendulum in this direction is fantastic - but I do worry a bit about the level of access that bad actor outsiders with zero skin in the game might have.

For each DAO, the level of comfort with openness is likely to vary based on constituents and subject matter, and it’ll take experimentation to get to a balance that feels right for insiders & outsiders alike.

As always, it’s a spectrum

Just as Decentralization is not Binary, nor is openness – and the DAOs I described above are those that are far-to-the-left on the open vs. closed spectrum.

Beyond these highly open DAOs, we’re also seeing more and more token-gated DAOs popping up (e.g., The LAO, FWB) – that is to say, an individual needs to be a token-holder (e.g., hold 75 $FWB tokens) to gain access to the Discord and the benefits the DAO has to offer, thereby restricting openness.

And on the Web2 side, while you may not have ‘DAOs’, per se, there are companies out there that are taking openness to a new level and incorporating a lot of the DAO ethos, whether they know it or not. Gitlab, a Web2 company I very much admire, provides public access to an absurd amount of its strategy & procedures. People are thinking about transparency well beyond just crypto.

All-in-all, it’s great to see the status quo being challenged in a big way. But is today’s DAO-level transparency sustainable?

The future of transparency

While I think this ‘Default Open’ ethos is here to stay, I expect the approach and the specifics for many DAOs may get re-thought.

On one hand, it’s great that someone new to crypto has access to the depths of these protocols to poke around and learn.

On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, these protocols may be exposing themselves to unnecessary risk / scrutiny from bad actors.

In particular, I expect we’ll see more DAOs playing with different versions of gating, for example:

• Earned token-gating: Rather than needing to buy tokens to join a token-gated DAO, the DAO might offer opportunities to earn these tokens via work rather than having a cash outlay. Big fan of experimentation here in an attempt to open up access to those who may not have the capital required to join.

• Channel-based gating: DAOs might gate specific channels - and they could do this on different bases. Say, you can only join this governance channel if you’re actively engaged within the community (e.g., say, you’ve posted 10x in the Discord)

• Statements of intent: Perhaps, to gain access to a Discord, as part of the onboarding, the joiner might need to state their intent / motivations in getting involved.

These types of mechanisms are already starting to gain traction, but it’s very early days and best practices have yet to emerge.

If DAOs are a leading indicator, I expect that in five years’ time, companies-at-large will be much more fluid and open with their information, strategy, and roadmaps. Job seekers will be better informed, employees will have greater context in their day-to-day work, and fundraising will be collectivized and transparent.

It won’t come without growing pains - but building a Default Open company will become the norm, rather than the exception.

These are, of course, the logos of DAOs I’m following.

Since I’m teetering on the brink of being mostly a quiet DAO lurker to becoming a contributing member of these communities, I’d like to document my experience and learnings about DAOs as they are today in 2021. I think it’s important I do this before I get much deeper and become ‘one of them’ (“one of us… one of us…”), so that I can provide my best layman’s take for the 99% of the planet that isn’t DAO-native.

I decided I’d write about my three main learnings from my involvement with DAOs to date, but as usual with my writing, this got real long real quick – so I’m splitting it into three parts to really dig into each and discuss its implications.

The three things I’ve learned are:

1. DAO is an ethos

2. The transparency is wild

3. You gotta hustle

Let’s dig into #1.

Part 1: DAO is an ethos

DAO, as you probably know if you’re reading this, stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

This piece assumes baseline knowledge on what DAOs are - so if the term is completely new to you, start with @ljxie’s ‘A beginner’s guide to DAOs’ & @Pet3rpan’s ‘What is a DAO?’.

To state the blatantly obvious, the acronym ‘DAO’ clearly conveys two things:

1. DAOs are decentralized

2. DAOs are autonomous

But most DAOs today are not totally decentralized, nor are they totally autonomous. This, in my opinion, is totally fine – but let’s call it like it is: DAO is an ethos, not a specific construct.

Decentralization & autonomy are nebulous

To start, how one defines the terms ‘decentralization’ and ‘autonomy’ in the context of an organization altogether is, well, mildly inconsistent depending who you ask, to put it politely.

As I wrote in Decentralization is not Binary, there are many dimensions on which a project may or may not be decentralized – governance, org structure, tech, to name a few – and on each of those dimensions, the level of centralization is a spectrum.

Certain people will fight to the death for one specific dimension, yet not care about others, but we still talk about decentralization as a catch-all, as a one-dimensional thing. I’ve yet to find a project that is 100% decentralized on all dimensions – and, frankly, I’m not sure it would be desirable.

So, I struggle with the term DAO because it feels more prescriptive/specific than it actually is.

DAOs are often framed as the antithesis of traditional ‘centralized’ organizations. And yet, I’d make the case that traditional organizations themselves are typically not fully centralized – your typical pyramid org structure, for example, is a form of decentralization – so, to me, our shared terminology and our framing of these constructs as distinct opposites (and as binary outcomes: DAO vs. traditional organization) feels a little off.

Articulating the ethos

Most importantly, to me, DAOs reflect a certain ethos. A vibe, if you will.

There is a shared culture, a shared set of cultural norms amongst DAOs, that holds true regardless of where exactly a specific DAO sits on the decentralization/autonomy spectrums. For this reason, after being in a few DAO Discords, jumping into a new one tends to feel familiar.

The ethos is, by and large, one of individuals collectivizing to create something bigger, together, absent of a highly prescribed and fixed structure. Of openness & collaboration. Of work that, well, works for people.

https://twitter.com/agorismlabs/status/1427009765075570696

I firmly believe DAOs offer the best peek you can get into how knowledge work will evolve over the coming decade.

If I’m right, and if DAOs are any indication, here’s a glimpse at that future based on what I see inside of them today:

On recruiting:

• Companies will need to open their doors to the general public to compete for talent (a lot more on this coming in Part 2)

• Geographical location will cease to be a constraint

• Employees will be able to ‘try-before-they-buy’ with prospective employers of theirs

https://twitter.com/chaserchapman/status/1429870422401691659

On operating a company:

• Top-down governance will undergo a massive shift; employees will have a say in who the Board is (if there is a Board, at all)

• Employees will have a much greater voice in company decision-making; identity-based voting mechanisms will play a formal role in governance

• Broad-based & transparent equity ownership will be the norm, rather than a right reserved for senior employees

• Employees will be evaluated not by just one direct manager, but by the organization at-large

On having a job:

• Fans of a specific project will be able to jump right in and not just consume, but contribute to the growth of that project – or multiple projects – themselves and share in the upside

• Full-time, monogamous work at one company may well become the exception, not the rule

It’s the creator economy, for knowledge workers.

https://twitter.com/divine_economy/status/1423674134685388805

All of this is what it’s worth focusing on when it comes to the promise of DAOs. This ethos is still in its infancy, and the execution is happening on such a small relative scale today.

And while I’m definitely excited by the tangible revenue traction and real dollars we’re seeing flow into areas like DeFi and NFTs, frankly it’s the early glimmers of what I’m seeing inside these collectives today that get me super jazzed about the future of people’s lives as it pertains crypto, as a whole.

While there are many kinks to sort out and growing pains to be experienced, this first principles approach to re-thinking how groups self-organize and build together is likely to define the next era of work.

Creators & employers, keep watch. 👀

• Collectively commissioned by 14 backers through Ghost Knowledge

• Collectively written with contributions by Lila Shroff and Julia Lipton

• Collectively sold—we hope—through a PartyBid on Zora. Our hope is that a collective group will purchase it as a kind of meta-memento of this strange and wonderful era.

• Collectively splitting the proceeds as a donation, with 1) the original commission in USD going to All Raise & BLCK VC and 2) the NFT proceeds in ETH going to the patrons (40%), who have equity-of-a-kind in the piece, and to Mint Fund (60%), an initiative to support BIPOC and LBTQIA+ NFT creators

Want to play along? Contribute to the PartyBid here.

It’s worth noting that none of the tech that made this possible—Ghost Knowledge’s collective commissions, Party DAO’s collective purchases, or Mirror’s collective splits—existed a few months ago. That’s as good place as any, in fact, to start.

Indulge us, if you will, by stepping back in time to a different era, two weeks ago. In that far-gone epoch, before PartyDAO had enabled anyone with a crypto wallet to join in crowd-purchasing NFTs as part of makeshift collectives, multiplayer finance was already starting to signal its nascent power against incumbent investors.

What happened? In practical terms, the token-holders of the decentralized finance platform Sushiswap banded together to reject a deal that would have given the powerful Venture Capital firm Lightspeed a discounted token price. But what does that story mean? You might imagine the story as one of how crypto-native everymen collectivized to insist that they receive the same terms as the richest investors: It’s a Wonderful Life as performed on Reddit, or if you prefer, the Wallstreetbets-Gamestop-Saga played out in a way that didn’t just benefit the big financiers who were handling the deal.

Or, alternatively, you might imagine it as a story of how, in our overly-capitalized and increasingly democratized markets, the investors who matter most to protocols are those in the community who invest their time and work, rather than their money.

You might imagine it, then, as a story of how Venture Capital will soon be under siege by collective finance.

In contrast to the democratization of finance, which leaves retail investors to their own devices, the collectivization of finance brings investors together to support each other and a project, and in so doing, to increase the probability of success. Collectivization is about the group working together towards a shared objective by giving each other opportunity, leverage, and education, rather than individuals going it alone.

How did we get here? And where are we going? To understand our story here—the story of how we’ve arrived at an inflection point in collectivizing finance—we need to go back to the beginning. That beginning lies long before the development of technologies and trends that have enabled collective finance. It lies in the ways that venture capital created the perfect opportunity for its own disruption.

Below, we’d like you to join us on our own multiplayer journey into a speculation on the history and future of collective finance. We’ll cover four pieces:

• How Venture Capital created the conditions for its own disintermediation

• Why syndicates are an important start for multiplayer finance—but not enough

• How DAOs will empower collective finance through “work-to-play” models

• The Lesson of SushiSwap: why tokenization enables collectivization

This piece itself emerged from the collective crowd-commission of Ghost Knowledge, with all commissioning proceeds going to Blck VC and All Raise.

As a fun experiment, we’ve also decided to put it on the market as an NFT with splits to (1) reimburse the patrons who graciously invested in this work via Ghost Knowledge (40%), and (2) to donate to Mint Fund. Our hope is that a collective group will purchase it as a kind of meta-memento of this strange and wonderful era.

Venture Capital and The Great Missed Opportunity

One way to understand this story is to show that it is like so many stories in business: a powerful incumbent is able to extract massive value from inefficiencies that it is incentivized not to solve. In this case, the powerful incumbent is Venture Capital, and its inefficiencies are, well, many, from the illiquidity of private company equity to closed-ecosystem information asymmetries. There is one major solvable inefficiency, though, that traditional Venture Capital has refused to solve, despite the many benefits it could stand to gain. We’re referring to its treatment of its funders, the so-called “Limited Partners.”

Let’s step back. We might understand Venture Capital as a two-sided marketplace that has to justify its own intermediation between investors and founders. The sundry justifications might include VCs’ ability to scout and source great deals, or perhaps their ability to get into these with their own contributions. The point, in any case, is that VCs might be considered the travel agents of Wealth Management, charging for the added layer of intermediation between the LPs and the startup as a curatorial service: just as a travel agent would help you find a nice hotel, a VC will put your money in a nice startup.

The comparison ends there, however. While a travel agent might help the buyer make a decision about their money, a VC in today’s market instead spends their time begging the business even to take the money in the first place. Imagine a travel agent who booked you into a hotel without consulting you while explaining that they only got the reservation because of their “value-add” to the resort, and you’ll have a picture of how a traditional VC presents to an LP.

We start to sense the problem. Venture Capitalists are ultimately proxies for their LP investors, but in an era of disintermediation, there is not a lot keeping savvy LPs from seeking out these deals themselves as angels if they want to.

To put that another way, Venture Capital has always treated LPs as their customer and their investments as their product while ignoring that in a two-sided marketplace, value can easily move the other way. What if the Limited Partners, the funders, were actually the product that Venture Capital could sell to founders at startups to win deals?

You can see where we’re going.

For let’s imagine an impossible Venture Capital firm—one that rewarded LPs not only for their capital, which is cheap anyway, but their own work as entrepreneurial figures who could help build the businesses they were funding. On the surface, this firm would offer a win-win to all parties. LPs, who often offer substantial strategic value, might be especially incentivized to work with funds that would reward their work rather than extract their capital. VCs in turn could leverage those relationships to win deals.

But that’s also why this win-win model is a tough sell in the context of traditional venture: the VCs would need to give up their value in supporting companies and protocols to their own LPs. This firm would have to offer a piece of returns and fees to LPs when they perform work, rather than taking a piece of their profits in exchange for doing work for them.

That said, there are three reasons why the win-win LP model might win anyway. The first is that it could generate far better returns for VCs if it helps them win deals and the actual work of the LPs helps their companies grow. The second is that it’s already starting to happen (see Packy McCormick’s fund proposal), and early-stage VCs stand to lose top funders and founders alike when a better model emerges to support them. And the third is simply that the incredible wealth creation of the past few years, between IPOs and the crypto boom, has led to LPs seeking yield outside of public markets and becoming more active investors.

So LP engagement is starting to change—both as VCs look for new and unique ways to compete in this venture-hot market, and as the profile and needs of this customer group shifts. With hungry, intellectually curious LPs coming to the table with a capability set that extends beyond just capital and an objective set that extends beyond just returns, we’re inching towards a world wherein Limited Partners are no longer, well, “limited.” In fact, they might become a powerful community in their own right.

The greatest opportunity, in other words, is multiplayer mode—which could not only bring about more compelling options for founders than ever before, but more compelling incentive structures for LPs who roll up their sleeves and jump into the game.

The Problem With Syndicates

When we imagine a finance version of multiplayer mode, we might make the mistake of imagining something like an angel syndicate.

Syndicates, which have skyrocketed in popularity through AngelList over the past decade, certainly get a lot right. Not to be confused with angel groups / networks, which typically are pay-to-play (membership fees to join) and provide startups with lots of small checks from individual angels, syndicates are groups which pool various angels’ money into special purpose vehicles (SPVs), allowing them to invest in companies as a single entity on the cap table. At their core, syndicates understand that LPs occasionally offer tremendous value to founders, that LP collectives can actually be sold as a value-add to companies to win deals, and, quite simply, that VCs can be disintermediated by cheaper models.

In theory, syndicates represent a Best of all Venture Capital Worlds. Syndicate leads mass small-check LPs to offer meaningful money to founders—a sort of grassroots leveraging-of-the-crowd that lets them enter deals they might never have gotten into otherwise. Those small-check LPs not only get to “win” otherwise inaccessible deals but maintain full control of their investment into companies of their own choosing; unlike a VC LP investment, Syndicate LPs get to select their investments on a deal-by-deal basis. And founders get to set the terms, beholden to nobody but benefitting from all: LPs cannot contact founders, but syndicate leads can connect them to each other if there’s a way for LPs to support. Rather than take money from a single VC, founders can effectively use syndicates to crowd-fund from hundreds of top operators who can only support their company but never adversely intervene.

In that sense, syndicates might be considered as contemporaries to two-sided marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb that disintermediate the traditional “quality controls” like travel agents and taxi permits. Just as major Web 2.0 aggregators like Airbnb have thrived off the insight that buyers would rather have open access to options than to pay for intermediation, syndicates give LPs greater control over their own money to invest as they please, sans the travel-agent-VC to pick the best options. Likewise, they bundle valuable LPs together and can offer their services to companies.

It’s tempting to think, then, that syndicates represent the best of multiplayer mode—a grassroots disintermediation of the traditionally consolidated power of top VCs. But syndicates also represent an awkward halfway point to disintermediation and collectivization. For they still limit options based on their own curation and take a cut for it. Meanwhile, LPs remain beholden to them to have options. So there is no truly open or disintermediated marketplace in venture like an Airbnb or, if you like, a New York Stock Exchange—though marketplaces for secondary shares are very much in the works.

And in reality, syndicates often pit parties against each other to the detriment of all. Syndicate leads, required to put up very little of their own money, often invest the bare minimum on as many deals as possible in order to maximize their chances that one of these will be a unicorn with carry in the millions. To LPs, they practice investing as a type of virtue-signaling, extolling the billion-dollar opportunities of companies in which they have no desire to invest; among themselves, they practice investing as a kind of spray-and-pray, hitting as many deals as possible with borrowed money and zero downside in order to grease their own returns.

Ultimately, these kinds of syndicates are sub-optimal for all parties. Angels with expertise, savvy, and genuine value-adds for founders are unlikely to give up a share of profits for companies they need to diligence, can’t diligence, and could often just reach out to on their own. And since top angels are rarely part of syndicates, syndicate leads can’t leverage their individual talents to support founders and win deals.

Ultimately, a negative feedback loop ensues: top angels have little reason to work with syndicates that can’t get access to top companies, and top companies have little reason to work with syndicates that can’t support them as well as bigger players in the field. Imagine if Robinhood only gave you a limited selection of mostly mediocre stocks under the condition that it took 20% of your profit. This is what it can be like to be a member of some syndicates.

Of course, there are exceptions, as well as plenty of syndicates whose dubious decisions are the product of questionable frameworks rather than malintent. But the question remains. What would a syndicate look like that could actually get great angels to join and leverage their talents to win competitive deals? Would it even look like a syndicate?

DAOs and Work-to-Play

One answer is what we might call a work-to-play model, in contrast with the traditional concept of ‘pay-to-play’. Instead of valuing LPs who can give the most money—an easy commodity for many founders in an overcapitalized environment—syndicates should work to value those who can actually contribute ideas, expertise, and work to support the companies they want to invest in. One way of incentivizing this could be to share the carry, which has traditionally been reserved for the syndicate leads, with LPs who bring in deals, perform diligence, and write memos. Some syndicates and funds do this today, but it’s still early days. Momentum here is starting to pick up, though: AngelList recently announced it was adding carry sharing as a feature. At scale, this could offer a way to collectivize the angels, even those with little money.

But an even more radical manifestation of the ‘work-to-play’ concept might be a completely headless model—that is, it might be a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization for investors to all share deals with one another. Investment DAOs already exist in crypto (Duck DAO, Flamingo, the LAO), though they often make various tradeoffs between the benefits of hierarchy, on the one hand, and exclusivity on the other. Is it better to have a few great leaders making decisions that anyone else can back—or to create a more equitable structure of those great leaders joining on the same level? The necessary (and not always incorrect) myth of great leaders is hard to abrogate, particularly in environments where it’s far more productive for members to learn from each other’s work than to replicate it.

That suggests that there might be another solution: work-to-play DAOs where members rotate as leaders, each agreeing to perform work in order to access each other’s work as well. (This is, presumably, what Syndicate Protocol is working on.) Members could be required to generate at least one deal a year in order to partake in each other’s deals, for example, and protocols could be set on the minimum viable quality of deals (i.e. that some percentage of the members agree to back, that it raises a certain amount, etc.). Others might contribute their talents doing audits, writing memos, diligencing data, or interviewing founders, and earning access rights as well. Smart contracts and tokenization might make all of this increasingly possible: imagine if completing certain actions automatically entitled LPs to tokens representing some share of the carry, for example. Of course in theory, there would be little need for carry since everyone would be supporting each other’s deals, but that doesn’t mean that carry is a bad idea: resourceful members who can offer great opportunities but little money, for example, might receive tremendous incentivization from getting carry on their deals. Inclusivity, rather than exclusivity, could optimize opportunity.

Endless permutations are possible here, including fund-versions that would steadily deploy crowdsourced funding across deals, and not all would be fated to success. Like any collective, each DAO would face the challenge of balancing the homogeneity of members’ perspective (necessary to ensure adequate support for deals) against the heterogeneity of members’ perspective (necessary for each to learn and gain from one another and fruitfully challenge each other’s ideas). But the challenges of self-governance are the point—because they’re challenges that everyone should have.

Tokenization Enables Collectivization

In the past, we’ve written about the ways that tokenizing equity can turn private markets into something akin to public markets, open to all investors. But tokenization doesn’t just allow more investors into a project—it also incentivizes them to invest in wilder ideas. Let’s break down the ways that tokenization unlocks multiplayer investments that can accelerate development and even enhance the possibility of success in a way that simply couldn’t have been possible before.

On a recent Acquired episode, Multicoin Capital VC Kyle Samani points out why VCs have far greater risk-tolerance to make moonshot bets with tokenized web3 companies than they do with non-tokenized web2 companies: web3 VCs can always sell off the tokens, typically after a vesting period of a year. Where traditional VCs see most of their struggling investments go to 0, web3 investors can cut their losses and vastly increase their chances of getting double-digit returns. Token incentivization is much easier (operationally and legally) than carry incentivization. That in turn enables investors to back any interesting project they like in a way they couldn’t before, even with the same risk profile.

But here’s where things get interesting. Investment in crypto projects is multiplayer, open to a community of retail investors as well as the VCs, so a massive investment in an interesting idea will not only pay for development to bring the idea to fruition, but draw attention to a rising token price that will in turn draw in retail investors to support the project as well. Crypto financing is extremely performative—the investment itself generating development and further investment, which also generates further development and investment in turn—that can turn wild ideas into realities in a short amount of time.

So a moonshot bet in a risky-but-tokenized project can actually help mitigate its own risk by eliciting a community, development, and further investment around an idea. It won’t always happen, of course, and communities and projects can easily fall apart when the cycle swings into reverse as major investors discard their coins. Still, the performativity of capital—the fact that risk mitigates risk and big bets increase their own odds of success—further incentivizes investors to support communities that they couldn’t have afforded to support before. The communities, in turn, support the investment.

There is, however, a catch—a familiar one by now. The VC must be beholden to the project and its community rather than the project and community being beholden to the VC, as they would have been in the past. That means the VC must give up power to extract concessions and become a team player, accepting the same terms as the rest of the community.

Retail investors banding together to curtail the extractive power of a VC? It all sounds a bit like Wallstreetbets applied to private markets, Doge mania with a conscience. But it’s already begun. As we’ve seen, when Lightspeed proposed a massive investment in Sushiswap at discounted terms a few weeks ago, a standard operating procedure for VCs, the community of 60,000 token holders erupted in anger that the investors with the most money were getting the cheapest deals.

It is to Lightspeed VC Amy Wu’s great credit that she openly engaged the community on calls with a sharp understanding that alienating the community of a decentralized, tokenized project could destroy the investment entirely.

The Sushi community is now debating a number of proposals, but two points are clear. Lightspeed will not be getting a discount; the power of the VC wanes. But Lightspeed will likely get a warrant or call option to buy further tokens at a much higher, pre-agreed-upon price in a couple years’ time. It is still a discount of sorts, but only if Sushi is successful—a discount, in other words, that rewards early believers for their cash and their efforts.

What is more significant than the decision is the process by which it is occurring in a decentralized community that fervently debates issues of governance and equality as if they were a colonial assembly in 1775. That they speak of supporting the community is perhaps less significant than the fact they’re able to speak so loudly as a collective voice, far more powerful than any individual’s.

All of this could not happen without tokenization, which we expect to extend well beyond web3 companies to any project that wants greater power in raising money and building community. Even over the past couple days, for example, crypto creator SIRSU rallied for collective ownership of two Black Cryptopunk NFTs. The resulting collectivization of investors of all ethnicities, many of whom could never afford a Cryptopunk, leveraged tokenization of the fractionalized works to make investment accessible to anyone with a wallet—while raising the value of Black representation in NFTs.

In other words, tokenization enables collectivization. It enables community. If you assume Web3 is the future, then you have to assume that Web3 is the future of investing. And in Web3, multiplayer investing is the default.

All of this brings us back to the realization with which we started. Alongside investment DAOs and art communities investing jointly in single works, SushiSwap and PartyDAO mark an inflection point: the point where we’re starting to collectivize finance. If the traditional VC model is to maintain power and success, it will not be against but within this retail collectivization.

The collectivization of finance is not yet entirely inclusive in who it gives financial opportunity: it’s still just open to those with investment money, access to technology, and the gumption to co-invest with strangers, particularly from a token-gated Discord channel. But it is inclusive in how it gives opportunity through a town-hall operation of entertaining and voting on proposals for the shared use of capital.

It is, in other words, a start.

Edited by Lila Shroff. With contributions by Julia Lipton.

Particular thanks to the patrons of this piece, who had no idea what they were commissioning beyond a piece on “Multiplayer VC,” and without whom this would not exist: Roshan Abbas, Raji Al-Sherif, Sari Azout, Juanje FP, Mario Gabriele, Daniel Kok Ting Han, Gil Kruger, Julia Lipton, Clint Myers, Arvind Nagarajan, Sarah Noeckel, Christina Oshan, Tyler Tringas, @wacko_gabriel. With extreme gratitude as well for the kind technical support of SIRSU and Patrick Rivera.

So, this Friday afternoon - with my first post on Mirror (👋) - that's what I'm giving myself space to do.

I've only been deep into crypto for a little over a year now, but I can confidently say that nothing in my professional life has captivated me more than crypto has. What started as a light curiosity gradually became a proper hobby, and now I’d say I’m teetering the brink of obsession.

What pulls me in?

There’s a new world being created: a distributed, user-owned, community-led world. After a decade of dreamers dreaming and builders building and abstract 'what-if' use cases being pontificated, the match has caught and the glimmers of fire are obvious to anyone paying attention. Things are happening - and, fast. Crypto is quietly beginning to revolutionize how work is sourced and rewarded, how companies are governed, how and to whom ownership is granted. This world is no longer theoretical.

Part of what's particularly interesting to me is that crypto is capitalizing on a lot of things that could be done in Web2, but just aren't being prioritized there.

To that end, a common question I hear - and one I've asked a million times myself - is: "but do you need crypto for that?". Fractional ownership, decentralized governance, micro-entrepreneurship: no, you don't need crypto to do them. These are all things that are 100% possible without the blockchain. But, they happen to be first manifesting themselves in a coordinated way in a Web3 context. If you want to explore their possibilities and implementations, there's no better place today than in the crypto community.

Putting my excitement aside for a sec, I want to make it clear that I’m not here to be an all-in crypto bull. I don't want to only tout its benefits; I want to be real and offer measured context and expose my open questions and concerns. And I want to engage in debate & discussion!

So, just to put it out there...

I hold views that, in the crypto world, are pretty controversial. After re-entering the crypto space from a lens of macroeconomic curiosity, I actually don’t think Bitcoin or Ether will – or should – completely replace fiat in the near-term; in fact, while it’s the macro piece that initially pulled me back in, it’s the non-macro stuff that has me captivated.

Other controversial views? I believe there are benefits to centralization on certain levels (and I believe that decentralization is not binary, as I've written about before). I also think that many areas of business & society, today, still remain better-suited to an off-chain world.

I also could be wrong on timing. I think crypto will begin to play a non-trivial role as a new computing foundation for mainstream society in the next five years, but there’s a chance I’m still too early. Despite the fact that we’re more than a decade into crypto being a thing, it’s still very much nascent, and there’s a lot to be sorted out on scalability, security, and user experience. And, honestly, there are a non-trivial amount of crypto applications that still feel like hammers looking for nails in this workable non-crypto-led earth in which 99% of humans live.

But despite all of this, I’m here. I can’t not engage. The widespread traction that I see in crypto is at a point where, for me at least, it is becoming very hard to fathom a future in which blockchains don’t play a big role.

Still, the traction is secondary to what really gets me excited.

It's about the people. It's always about people.

Honestly, the number one thing pulling me deeper in is the humans. I used to say that it felt like the crypto world was 90% one-sided obnoxiously loud pundits, and 10% brilliant forward-thinking technologists – but that doesn’t ring true anymore. The balance is shifting, and the cast of characters is diversifying beautifully.

I cannot overstate the impact of people in my crypto journey. Countless hours of conversations - largely with people I've met online (!) - have helped push my thinking way beyond the structures of today and drive me to learn at a breakneck pace. The people I'm engaging with in crypto are intellectually rigorous, forward-thinking, measured in their analysis, and – crucially – fun. You know who you are.

Crypto sits at the intersection of my passions: data, capital markets, and macroeconomics. It’s a beautiful manifestation of those fields in one crazy world. It is so early in its journey, and I am so early in mine.

I'm going to use Mirror to unpack what I'm thinking about as I go - so if you enjoyed this, follow me here.

Happy Friday! ✌