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Ever wondered how a group of internet strangers raised $47 million in a week, or how another group actually sent two people to space? In this talk, MIDAO CEO Adam Miller breaks down exactly what a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is and shows you how to build one yourself, for free, in a single weekend.
No coding required. No money required. Just a laptop, a few friends, and the willingness to learn.
What you'll learn:
Recorded July 2026 at Maryland Blockchain Bootcamp 2026. The three short explainer videos from the talk play as narrated segments in this episode.
Governance status update (September 2026): the ENS Security Council dispute discussed in this talk was resolved with a new council seated in July 2026; ENS tokenholders separately voted in August 2026 (about 70% support) to move administrative control of the DAO's roughly $65M endowment to a new ENS Foundation, a move some in the ENS community view as governance overreach.
Litigation status (September 2026): the Lido DAO case referenced in this talk (Samuels v. Lido DAO) is stayed pending a Ninth Circuit appeal on arbitration; the merits have not been decided.
Chapters
00:00 Just DAO It! intro
00:29 Cold open and who I am
02:51 What a DAO actually is
10:16 How DAOs win, and how they blow up
13:05 The ENS blow-up and the five design questions
21:29 Explainer: A DAO in Three Minutes
24:42 The build-along: seven steps
32:11 Explainer: A Proposal's Journey
38:20 Explainer: Why Ships Have Flags
41:08 The real-world part: the Marshall Islands DAO LLC
43:51 Your move
46:24 Close
47:14 MIDAO outro
Free guide, How to Create a DAO: https://www.midao.org/guides/dao
Watch the talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAyuQyC3Bco
MIDAO is the sole registered agent for DAO LLCs in the Marshall Islands: https://www.midao.org
Just DAO It! is a podcast for people starting DAOs. Are you thinking about starting a DAO? Just DAO It! Every episode will cover recent DAO news, tweets, and posts from around the web. We’ll break down what the news means for you and combine it with great advice from people who have started or contributed to successful DAOs.
Disclaimer: Just DAO It! is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Just DAO It does **not** contain any legal or financial advice. MIDAO also does not provide legal or financial advice, and nor does your host, yours truly.
Just DAO It! is hosted by Adam Miller, the founder of MIDAO, the company that provides legal entities for DAOs.
[Opening music]
Adam Miller:
Welcome to Just DAO It!, the podcast for people starting DAOs, Web3 projects and AI agents. I'm Adam Miller and I'm your host. Today I'm sharing with you a recording of a talk I gave recently at the Maryland Blockchain Conference, which was attended by people ranging from students to blockchain professionals to U.S. Congress people and their staff. I hope you enjoyed the talk.
Chapter 1: Cold Open and Who I Am
Hey Maryland. Thanks for being here. I want to start with a promise. In the next 45 minutes, you're going to learn how to start a real organization on the internet. One that can raise money, vote on what to do with that money, and then actually go do it. From a laptop, this weekend, for about zero dollars. I know that sounds like an ad. It's not. Everything I'm going to show you is free to try, none of it requires you to write a single line of code, and all of it is real. Today you'll meet a group of internet strangers who voted to send two people to space, and then did it. You'll meet an organization so solid that the United States government publishes official economic data through its network. And you'll watch one of the most respected projects in crypto having the worst month of its life, in real time, right now, because of decisions it made five years ago. By the end, you'll know how to build one of these yourself, and more importantly, how not to blow it up.
First, who am I, and why should you listen to me? My name is Adam Miller. I'm the CEO of a company called MIDAO. Quick version of my story. I went to MIT, I grew up alongside the early internet. AOL Instant Messenger, dial-up modems, websites held together with duct tape and hope. I loved every second of it. I spent years building software and building companies, did my time in corporate America, and then around 2021, I fell all the way down the crypto rabbit hole. And then my story gets interesting. I helped write laws for a country in the Pacific Ocean, the Republic of the Marshall Islands. I'll tell you that whole story near the end of this talk because it's a good one, and it involves ships.
Our plan. First we get on the same page about what a DAO actually is, in plain English. Then real stories. How DAOs win, and how they blow up. Then the main event, we build a DAO, step by step, with the exact tools you'd actually use. And we finish with the real world part, and what your first move should be. Along the way I'll roll three short videos, and then pull the big ideas together. You don't need money, you don't need to be a programmer. You need a laptop, a few friends, and a weekend. Let's get into it.
Chapter 2: What a DAO Actually Is
Quick poll, and yes I know I can't see your hands. Raise them anyways. Who here heard the word DAO before today? Now keep it up if you can explain to a friend at lunch what a DAO is. If your hand just went down, this chapter is for you.
Let's level set. DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. And honestly, it's a terrible name. So let me start with the smallest version. The simplest DAO, the kind you could build this weekend, looks like a group chat with a shared bank account and real voting power. Piece by piece. The group chat, a community of people who found each other on the internet. Baltimore, Berlin, Bangkok, doesn't matter. The shared bank account. A DAO keeps its money in what's called a treasury. A treasury is just the organization's money, except it lives on a blockchain. And if you're brand new to all this, a blockchain is a shared record book on the internet that nobody can secretly edit. Every member can see every dollar all the time. No mystery spending. And the voting power is what separates this from your family group chat. In a DAO, votes are not suggestions. The vote itself controls the money and the rules. How does the DAO know who gets to vote? Tokens. A token is a digital item on a blockchain that proves you belong or have certain rights. A membership card that lives in your digital wallet and cannot be faked.
But that little club is a starter model, not the whole species of DAOs. Here's the real definition, the one I use with lawyers. An organization is a DAO if it uses blockchain technology for at least one of these three things. Tracking its members, making decisions together, which we call governance, and or holding and moving its money. Membership, governance, treasury. Three pillars. That's the whole test, and it covers everything from five friends with a shared wallet to organizations securing billions of dollars and critical blockchain infrastructure.
One naming note, because you'll hear this argued all week when DAOs come up. Some people now say on-chain organizations instead of DAOs. It's the same thing. The D in DAO promises decentralized, and people love to argue about how decentralized you have to be before you've earned that name. My take is that what makes these organizations special is doing membership, decisions, and money on-chain. On decentralized infrastructure, blockchains. How decentralized the decision making is, that's a dial, not a switch. Some groups set it low, a few trusted people execute everything. Some set it to thousands or millions of voters around the world. Either way it's the same machine, different setting. DAO or on-chain organization. Remember that dial, because when we build one later, we'll choose where to set it.
What do people actually build with this? Say four big buckets. One is governing protocols and public goods. Shared internet infrastructure that no one single company should own, like blockchains themselves. ENS is a good example, we'll talk more about Ethereum Name Service later. Bucket two, governing and funding DeFi, or decentralized finance. The world of trading and lending apps that have no bank or middleman in the middle. Pyth, a DAO you'll meet in a few minutes, feeds the whole world of DeFi its prices through its protocol. Bucket three, running real world missions and businesses and charities that want on-chain governance, transparent money, and global membership. MoonDAO is a good example of that. And bucket four, grant making. Communities that pool money and give it away for science, for software, for security. Good example is the DAO Security Fund, which pays for work that keeps Ethereum safe. Hold that name in your mind because we will come back to a story about the DAO Security Fund later as well.
Let's look at the old way versus the new way. Membership. A traditional organization tracks its owners or governance rights holders with stock certificates, shareholder registries, transfer agents, paper, lawyers, filing cabinets. A DAO does it with a token or other smart contract, a small program on the blockchain that runs exactly as written and keeps track automatically. Voting. A traditional organization votes in board meetings, with proxy ballots mailed around, sometimes by email. A DAO member votes from their phone or their computer, and code counts the ballots publicly and instantly. Money. In a traditional company, the CFO controls the bank account, and everyone trusts the CFO. What could go wrong? In a DAO, governance controls the money directly, and the votes move the funds. Add this all up, and the cost of starting and running an organization just fell off a cliff. The thousandth member of your DAO is as easy to add as the tenth, and it can scale at internet speed. Transparency is built into every step from the get-go.
A couple of quick stories. In November of 2021, at Sotheby's, the auction house, they announced that they're selling one of the few surviving first printings of the United States Constitution. And some people on the internet, including some friends of mine, have an idea. What if we bought it, together? They spin up a DAO, ConstitutionDAO. In about a week, 17,000 strangers chip in about 47 million dollars. In 7 days. No company, no bank, no CEO. Auction night comes, they bid. Sadly, they lose. Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, outbids them. Here's the part that's important. They had no plan for what happens next. What do you do with 47 million dollars when the reason you raised it disappears? To their credit, they wound it down and offered to refund the money to everyone who invested.
Now a story that's working. MoonDAO's mission is to decentralize access to space. Ambitious, for sure. They raised over 8 million dollars from more than 2,000 people in about a month. Then the community voted on what to do with it. One thing that they did is send two people to space on Blue Origin rockets. Strangers on the internet pooled money, voted, and two humans left the planet. And MoonDAO is still going today, still voting, still funding space projects.
So that's a DAO. Same tool in both stories, what you point it at is up to you.
Chapter 3: How DAOs Win, and How They Blow Up
First, a little vocabulary. Blockchains are blind to the rest of the real world. They can't see anything outside of themselves. Not the price of Bitcoin, not Apple stock, not the weather. Something called an oracle brings real-world data onto the blockchain so that blockchain apps can use it. Every crypto app that shows you a live price has an oracle behind it. Pyth Network runs some of the most important plumbing in crypto, and it's governed by a DAO. More than 1300 live price feeds, crypto, stocks, currencies, commodities, and more. More than 125 firms publish data into it, including Wall Street heavyweights like Jane Street. And those prices flow out to more than 100 different blockchains.
In August 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce began publishing official GDP data, the country's economic report card, directly onto blockchains. And Pyth is one of the oracle networks carrying it. The federal government publishes official statistics through a network governed by a DAO. And it earns real money. Pyth Pro is a paid subscription where institutions pay for premium market data. In June, just last month, the DAO's own report shows about $273,000 in subscription revenue flowing back to the community treasury. Real products, real revenue, with a community steering it.
One detail, Pyth DAO is a real legal entity, as is MoonDAO, both DAO LLCs created in the Marshall Islands. Remember those laws I mentioned? That's what they allow for. Before the cautionary tale, a quick story on the weird governance system that's breaking all the rules in terms of what people thought was possible. MetaDAO doesn't vote. It bets.
The design is called futarchy. Every proposal opens two markets. One betting the idea helps the project, the other betting that the idea hurts the project. Real humans, or AIs probably too, trade both with real money on these proposals. And if the pass proposal ends up with a higher value than the fail proposal, the proposal executes automatically. And the people who voted are rewarded if they voted on the proposal that generates real value for the project. It's live on Solana right now. It's proof that governance is still being invented and innovated. And it's also a Marshall Islands DAO LLC.
Okay, now the blowup. I'll be careful here because this story is still moving as I record it. ENS is the Ethereum Name Service. The system on Ethereum that gives you a human name for your identity, your crypto wallet, your socials, etc., like adam.eth, which I wish I owned. Instead of 42 characters of gibberish, your actual Ethereum address. It's respected, it's useful. Its DAO launched in November of 2021 with 100 million tokens and a written constitution.
The treasury is worth hundreds of millions of dollars now if you include its own native tokens, or about $100 million in dollar cash. And this past June, it nearly tore itself apart. Not a hack, not a market crash, a governance drama. June 19th, Katherine Wu, a board member of the ENS Foundation, floats a proposal, what this DAO calls a temp check. The idea was to create a new five-seat foundation board and hand it management of the DAO's operating funds and its endowment.
Basically move day-to-day control and money towards a foundation instead of being directly controlled by the DAO. Within hours, Brantly Millegan, who co-wrote the original DAO's constitution, pushed back. He said the DAO exists to do exactly two jobs: control the protocol and steward the treasury. Days later, things escalate. Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS, announces he'll delegate his own tokens to himself, not against the rules, and start voting them.
Quick vocabulary side note. In a lot of DAOs, you can hand your voting power to someone you trust called a delegate. Something similar to representative democracy. Most people never bother. So when Johnson pointed his own stack at himself, that gave him roughly half of all the voting power that actually shows up in the votes. One long-time delegate put it bluntly, he was essentially becoming the DAO. Then around the end of June, a separate vote comes due. The DAO has a Security Council, a small trusted group holding one narrow emergency power, like vetoing a clearly malicious proposal.
Its term was up for renewal. Johnson voted about 3.26 million tokens against, and the renewal failed. His single vote was most of the opposition, roughly 80% of everything cast. So how does one person in a well-respected DAO cast 80% of an entire vote? Here's the math that should keep you up at night. Nick holds only about 3% of all the outstanding ENS tokens. 3%. But so few people voted that his 3% equals about half of the active voting power, the people who did actually vote.
So it's not that one man owns ENS, he doesn't. It's that no one usually votes. And this is something that this DAO and others experience. Another proposal came out more recently by co-founder Alex Van de Sande saying, let's take some tokens from the DAO's treasury and delegate those to voters to decentralize control a little bit more of the ecosystem. And this proposal has not yet passed. So how will this end? Well, of course I don't know.
The Security Council's veto power expires on July 24th, and there's an active debate within the community over the future of the ecosystem and even over what this means for DAOs. So five design questions come out of this mess. Answer them on day one of your DAO while everyone is still friendly to each other, rather than waiting until you end up in your governance crisis. One, token allocation. Don't ask how spread out are the tokens on paper. Ask, is there someone who could outvote everyone else if they wanted to?
Turnout is often lower than you think, and low turnout concentrates power. By the way, separate discussion, is it bad that there's low voter turnout? Does it matter that lots of people don't want to vote? Maybe the fact that most people are not voting is an implicit acknowledgment that they're okay with whatever the founder wants to do. Or maybe there's a bigger structural problem here underlying why are people not coming out to vote, and maybe we want people to come out to vote. Two, delegation. Decide up front whether you can delegate your voting power as a token holder to others, and whether you can do that right before a big vote, or whether there's a time delay on delegation.
Three, turnout and quorum. A quorum is the minimum participation needed for a vote to count. ENS's whole crisis is a low participation crisis. And so you might think to make our lives easier, let's set the quorum low so that we can always pass a proposal. ENS is running into one potential negative implication of that, the so-called one person controlling the whole vote. And here's another. About a week ago, per BONK DAO's own confirmation and CoinDesk reporting, someone spent about $4 million buying about 1% of the BONK token supply, then used the DAO's own rules as written into the smart contract to pass a proposal sending $20 million out of the treasury to themselves.
No hack, no bug in the code. The rules worked exactly as written. Turnout was so low, like in ENS, that this person who bought the tokens was able to meet quorum and become the deciding vote. Too low of a quorum, this can happen. Too high of a quorum, low voter turnout could mean nothing passes at all. So it's an interesting design question. Back to four, emergency powers. If you create a Security Council, write down clearly exactly what it can do, what it cannot do, when its power expires, and when it renews. Decide it before you need it. ENS having to now negotiate its Security Council renewal in the middle of a governance crisis, or drama at least, is the worst possible time to be having to figure out a Security Council renewal. Five, disputes and your charter. Good thing, everyone involved at ENS is reading the same 2021 constitutional document. And so they have some thing they can rely on that sets the rules. Now, people are still interpreting these documents differently. So it's important to keep in mind that when you write your founding documents, which are generally legally binding by the way, that you think through the issues that could happen, the issues that have happened to other DAOs ahead of time. And maybe you include things like what happens when there is a fight between major token holders. Maybe you should have a mediation process or arbitration process that involves real courts like other organizations do. Maybe a cooling off period. Maybe a way for many different holders to override one holder even if they don't hold as many tokens.
DAOs are given their governance teeth at the start when you define them. There's also the idea of meta governance which is maybe you should use governance to redefine governance as you go. But it's important to keep in mind at the start that the rules you write are rules you're gonna have to follow when things get difficult.
Design for the disagreement, not just the happy path. When we build our DAO in a few minutes, we will watch how these exact decisions show up. First, a quick three-minute video before you get to hear from me again.
[Interstitial video: "A DAO in 3 Minutes"]
Every organization in history has had to answer three questions: who's a member, how do we decide things, and who holds the money.
For centuries, the answers were paper and trust. Membership lists in filing cabinets. Votes in rooms you had to travel to. Money behind a locked door with a few people holding the key. Starting something real meant lawyers, offices, and months of patience.
The internet rewired how we talk, shop, and learn. But organizations? Mostly still running on the old plumbing. Starting a group chat takes 10 seconds. Starting an organization that can hold money and make decisions together? Still slow, still expensive, still paperwork.
Then came blockchains. Shared record books on the internet that no single person controls and nobody can secretly edit. And people realized something: you could run a whole organization on one.
It's called a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. Big name, simple idea. An organization that lives on the internet, owned and run by its members.
A DAO is an organization that lives on a blockchain. The simplest one? A group chat with a shared bank account and real voting power.
Who's a member? Whoever holds a token. A digital membership card that lives in your wallet and can't be faked. No application forms, no filing cabinets. The token list is the membership list.
How do we decide? Anyone can make a proposal. Everyone votes from their phone, wherever on earth they happen to be. Code counts the ballots, out in the open. No boardroom, no proxy paperwork.
And the money? It sits in a treasury everyone can see. Every dollar in, every dollar out, public forever. It moves only when the vote says so, and only with several members approving together. Never one person alone.
And this is real. In 2021, thousands of strangers pooled about $47 million in one week to bid on a rare copy of the US Constitution. No bank, no CEO, just a shared goal and a treasury. They lost the auction, the money went back.
Another community pooled millions, voted to send two people to space, and did it. Twice.
Today, DAOs run price data used across more than a hundred blockchains, and fund software, art, science, and communities of every size.
The catch? A DAO is only as good as its rules. If nobody shows up to vote, a few people decide everything. Good DAOs write their rules down early. Who votes, how many votes count, what happens in an emergency. Write the rules like you'll disagree someday, because you will.
The tools are free. A laptop and a few friends is enough. The next great organization might not have an office. It might have a group chat.
Chapter 5: The Build-Along
Welcome back. If that video did its job, you can now explain a DAO at the dinner table.
Time to go one better and actually stand one up.
Seven steps. For each one, what you're doing, why it matters, example tools you can use, and what it looks like on screen. These are the same tools real DAOs use, including DAOs with millions in their treasuries. The difference is scale, not machinery.
One prerequisite: a crypto wallet. A free app, 10 minutes to set up, carefully. Your identity everywhere in the world on the blockchain. Every founder needs one.
To keep this concrete, let's invent our DAO right now. Say five friends in Annapolis care about the Chesapeake Bay. They want to raise a few hundred dollars for shoreline cleanups and turtle habitat. Turtle DAO. That's our example from here on out.
Step one: define it and gather your crew.
Before you touch a blockchain, two things. First, write one sentence: what is this DAO for? Ours: Turtle DAO funds cleanup and habitat projects across the Chesapeake. If you can't write that sentence, stop. You don't have a DAO problem, you have a purpose problem, and technology won't fix it. Like any organization, it's really important everyone knows why you're there.
Second, and this is the ENS lesson showing up before we've built anything, write a one-page charter, constitution, if you're going straight to a legal structure, call it your bylaws or your operating agreement. What the DAO is for, who can join, how decisions get made, how the rules themselves can change, and what happens when two founders or hundreds of founders disagree.
Name the tiebreaker now, whatever you choose, and write it down while everybody still likes each other. Remember, two smart, well-meaning groups at ENS are reading the same constitutional documents and reaching opposite conclusions. So specific beats vague every time.
Now gather your three to five founding members for our Turtle DAO and stand up a free Discord server or Telegram chat. That's the clubhouse where everything else will live, where you'll discuss things. Running total so far: zero dollars. Don't be afraid of structure. Structure is what keeps the fun parts fun.
Step two: stand up the treasury.
Your DAO needs its shared bank account. The standard tool here is Safe, at safe.global. Organizations across crypto trust it with tens of billions of dollars. Safe is a multisig wallet.
Multisig is short for multiple signatures. Money only moves when several members approve, and you pick the threshold. Which means no single person, including you, can run off with the funds.
On screen is what creating one looks like. You connect your wallet, add each founder's address as a signer, and set the voting threshold. For Turtle DAO, let's go three of five. Not uncommon.
Created on a low-cost network like Base or Arbitrum, where transactions cost pennies. Or if you're going straight to a multi-million dollar project, consider Ethereum mainnet. Creating the Safe is free, you pay only a small network fee when you launch it and when the money actually moves. And your Safe gets an address of its own. An account number of sorts that you can share. It's the smart contract address. Your grandma can send $5 to the Turtle fund, and so can anyone on earth, in addition to being able to watch the money and see what happens with it. Running total of cost: still about zero.
Now we make membership official with a membership NFT. An NFT is a token that's one of its kind. For our purposes, a numbered membership card that lives in your digital wallet. No-code tools let you create one by filling out a form. Name it, upload your turtle logo to it, mint one badge to each founding member's wallet. Five members, five badges. Minutes, not days. And have fun with it. Make it something people are a little bit proud to hold.
So why a badge, an NFT, and not a tradable token like the big DAOs have? Because our DAO is small, and small is a superpower here. And notice, this is ENS lesson one answered on day one. One badge, one vote, equals one person, one vote. And the club decides who gets minted a badge. Nobody can quietly buy up control of Turtle DAO because control isn't for sale.
And you're giving each of the five people one token, not giving certain people more tokens than others. When you're five friends especially, membership is the point. So guard it.
Step four: turn on voting. Time to give the club its voice. Snapshot, at snapshot.box, is where a huge share of all DAO voting happens. And its classic mode is free and gasless, meaning votes cost nothing to cast. You create a space, which is your DAO's voting homepage, and set the voting strategy. Hold a Turtle DAO badge, get one vote. Setup takes about 10 minutes.
Okay, let's pause to discuss that decentralization dial from earlier, because this is when we set it, and you should see the whole menu.
Setting one is multisig only. No voting tool at all, just your three of five signers deciding together, maybe discussing things on Discord or Telegram. It's the simplest thing that works. Some people will tell you that's not even a real DAO yet, and I'm not here to argue labels, it's where plenty of real DAOs start.
Setting two, what Turtle DAO just picked. Membership NFTs with one person, one vote, where you actually get to vote on Snapshot as well. It's human scale, it's fair, it grows with you.
Setting three is token-weighted voting across a big community. The more tokens you hold, the more your vote weighs. And you graduate from things like Snapshot to other tools like Aragon. That's how ENS and Pyth run. It scales to thousands of members and serious money, as it makes it easier to raise capital, selling tokens or governance rights for capital. And it carries exactly the concentration tradeoffs you watched in the ENS story. The dial turns up as you grow, and most big DAOs start small.
Two settings deserve your full brain here because this is where ENS and BONK both live. First, turnout. Set your quorum rule. In ours, we'll say at least three of five members must vote or the proposal fails. Second, delegation. If you ever allow members to hand votes to someone else, decide the limits now in writing, not in the middle of an argument. We just watched a $300 million organization improvise these rules under pressure. Don't improvise, decide early. Running cost, still zero.
So the machine is built. Badges, treasury, ballot box, rules. Steps five and six, the first real vote and follow through, are better shown than told. One proposal, $50, five friends, start to finish. Let's roll it.
[Interstitial video: "A Proposal's Journey"]
Meet Turtle DAO. Five friends, one shared treasury, one membership badge each. They raise a little money for shoreline cleanups on the Chesapeake Bay, and one rule matters most: the group decides together.
One night, an idea lands in the chat. We've got $50, let's actually use it. In most groups, this is where it stalls. Somebody says we should really do something, and nobody ever does.
Not here. First stop, the charter. One page that says what the club is for and how choices get made. The idea fits the mission. Onward.
Next, someone writes it up as a proposal. Rule one, one decision per proposal. Buy cleanup gear and change the logo and add two members is three fights pretending to be one vote. Rule two, write it so a member who missed every conversation can still vote wisely. What it costs, what happens if it passes, what happens if it fails. The vote opens and runs for two days. Three options: cleanup gear, recruiting stickers, or a donation.
Members vote from their phones, wherever they are. No meeting, no show of hands. And one rule watches over the whole thing: quorum. At least three of the five members must vote, or the proposal fails. A quiet club can't be steered by one loud voice.
The vote closes. Cleanup gear wins. No one counted hands, no one argues about who really won. The code counted, in the open, and the result is recorded forever. But a vote that changes nothing is just a poll. Now the treasury has to move.
One member proposes the payment from the shared vault for exactly the amount the vote approved. Here's the safeguard: it takes three of the five members to sign. No single person can move the money, not even the founder. One, two, three. Approved.
The money moves. One last step, the one that builds trust: the receipt. Back in the chat. Here's the vote, here's the transaction, here's your $50 at work. Idea, charter, proposal, vote, execution, receipt. That's the loop. That's a DAO doing its job.
Alright, I'm back. So that loop was steps five and six, the vote and the follow through. I've seen grown adults get chills at this exact moment. The first time the vote closes and the money moves because the group said so, it stops being a tech demo and starts becoming a real organization. It's one thing to hear internet organizations vote on things, it's another to watch your own club decide. One step left. Step seven, gate the clubhouse. Connect a tool like Guild at guild.xyz to your Discord or Telegram. Guild checks whether a person's wallet actually holds your membership NFT and automatically allows them in or hands them the member's role.
Members-only channels become actually members-only. When someone leaves or sells their badge, the bot removes their access. The code checks the badges, no human bouncer needed. Why this matters? Well, after a launch, a DAO doesn't live only in the voting tool. It lives in the daily conversation.
For most groups, that's a Discord. Plenty of crypto-native communities also gather on newer social networks like Farcaster, and that's worth a look too once you're up and running. Either way, the community layer is the actual DAO. Everything else is plumbing. And give that community a heartbeat. One proposal a week, even a tiny one. Conversations ongoing.
The DAOs that die don't die from hacks, most of the time, they die from silence. Some of you are thinking, can't I just press one button and launch this whole thing? And what about if I don't want to use NFTs and multisig? What if I want to do one token one vote across a huge community?
Well, one app called Aragon, and others, Aragon is at aragon.org, bundles the token launch, the treasury permissions, and the voting setup into one whole no-code flow. According to Aragon, more than 10,000 projects have launched with it. So why did I walk you through the individual pieces?
Because I want you to understand the machine. And one of the beautiful things about blockchain is you can compose different pieces yourself. And the day something goes weird in your DAO, and that day does come for everyone, you'll want to know exactly which layer to check. So learn the pieces, but also know that there are tools out there that make it easier to build it all at once.
Step back and look at what we've created in just one weekend. Discord is where you talk, Safe is where the money lives, the NFT badge says who belongs and gets a vote, Snapshot is how you decide, Guild keeps the doors closed to outsiders. And over the top of it all, a one-page charter or constitution that says what the organization is for, how fights get settled, all written before you needed it.
Notice something else? Allocation, delegation, quorum, emergency plans, disputes. All five of the ENS questions got answered in your DAO before it held its first dollar. Not that things won't be challenging when people start disagreeing with one another. That's a real DAO. Same anatomy as the ones running billions of dollars.
Total cost, about zero, plus a weekend and one honest conversation with your friends about what the rules should be. You now know how to do something most in this industry have never actually done end-to-end, and most people outside of crypto are still unfamiliar with what it even is.
Now, before I tell you about the most interesting job I've ever had, I need you to think about something that has nothing to do with crypto for a second. Cargo ships. Stay with me, watch this, I'll be right back.
[Interstitial video: "Why Ships Have Flags"]
Here's a riddle. Why does a cargo ship sailing between continents fly the flag of one small nation? Hold that question. First, a story about rules.
In crypto, there's an old slogan: code is law. The software is the rulebook, and whatever the code allows is allowed. Clean, simple, self-enforcing. For years, plenty of people built on that assumption.
It's a beautiful idea. It's also wrong. Code is not law. Governments have armies and police forces. Taxes still come due, courts still rule.
Your organization may live on the internet, but its members live somewhere real. And the moment it touches money, contracts, or people, the real world gets a say.
Now the trap. When people run a venture together without a legal entity, the law gives them a default label: a general partnership. And in a general partnership, every member can be held personally responsible for everything the group does. Not their share, everything. Their houses, their savings, on the line.
That's not a theory. US regulators went after a DAO called Ooki, and a court said token holders who merely voted could be personally on the hook. A California court let a lawsuit against Lido DAO's participants proceed the same way.
Humanity solved this problem centuries ago: the legal entity. A container that can sign contracts, hold money, own property, and carry the liability so its members don't have to. Lawyers call the protection a corporate veil.
Which brings us back to the ship. It loads in Singapore on Monday, unloads in Panama on Friday, spends the week in international waters. So where does it live? Everywhere, and nowhere.
And that's why ships have flags. Every ship registers with one nation, one legal home that follows it anywhere on Earth. Whole countries built registries for exactly this job. The flag answers the question: what are you, and whose rules do you play by?
Now look at an internet organization. Members everywhere, headquarters nowhere, money and rules living on-chain, sailing past every border.
It lives everywhere and nowhere at the same time, exactly like a ship. And it needs exactly what a ship needs: one legal home that understands what it is.
So, which nation would raise its flag for an organization that lives on the internet?
Chapter 6: The Real-World Part
So, does that sound like anything we've been talking about today? A DAO is like a ship. Members everywhere, headquarters nowhere, and courts asking you, what are you? And where are you?
And you already know the answer because I've been dropping breadcrumbs all talk.
The country that runs one of the great ship registries of the world decided to do the same thing for internet organizations. The Republic of the Marshall Islands, a small Pacific island nation that registers roughly a fifth of the world's shipping capacity already.
And in 2021, I got the strangest and best job of my life, helping write laws and regulations that created a new type of legal entity there. The DAO LLC.
An LLC where membership can be tracked by tokens, where a smart contract can legally do the managing, and where the blockchain itself counts as the official record books.
The nation that gave ships a flag gave internet organizations one too.
And it's not a fringe experiment. Pyth, the oracle DAO from earlier? Marshall Islands DAO LLC. MoonDAO, the one that sent people to space? Same thing.
And one more, my favorite plot twist in all of crypto. Remember the original 2016 project literally named The DAO? It got hacked and it nearly took young Ethereum down with it.
This January, The DAO is back. Roughly 75,000 ETH that nobody ever claimed after 2016, reported at around $220 million, became The DAO Security Fund.
The money sits staked, and the yield, about $8 million a year, makes grants to people doing Ethereum security work.
The governance is a different flavor again. No token votes. Seven trusted curators direct the money, led by Griff Green, who coordinated the original rescue in 2016 with Vitalik Buterin alongside him.
That's grantmaking, also done in a decentralized manner, interesting if you want to look into it as a follow-up, and it's a huge part of what DAOs do.
The kicker? It's organized as a Marshall Islands DAO LLC, literally named The DAO LLC.
The DAO that started it all finally has a legal home. Full circle.
Now, remember, I'm not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. Your Turtle DAO with $50 in the treasury does not need a flag this weekend.
The takeaway is simpler. The moment your group starts handling real money, give it real structure. Structure isn't the opposite of the dream. Structure is what makes the dream durable.
Chapter 7: Your Move
We've covered a lot. Now, three moves. Pick one.
Move one, join a DAO before you start one. Every DAO I mentioned today has public forums, public proposals, public community channels.
Pick one that matches something you already care about. Space, art, open source software, internet infrastructure, and go lurk.
Read proposals start to finish. Watch a vote happen. Then raise your hand for something small.
DAOs are communities, and every community on earth is starving for people who reliably show up. A month inside a real DAO will teach you more than a year of videos about them.
Move two, start the tiny one. Take the seven steps from today and run something you already do as a DAO.
Your school club, your robotics team, your service project. It does not need to change the world. It needs to teach you.
Write the one-page charter. Mint five badges. Run three real votes about real, small money.
And when something goes sideways, and I promise something will, fix the rules and write down what you learned.
Do that for one period of time, and you'll have something rare. Firsthand governance and blockchain experience.
Think about this sentence on a college application if you're in high school: Founded a five-member on-chain organization with a written constitution, a transparent treasury, and a year of recorded votes. Nobody else applying has that sentence.
Move three, and adults, this one's for you. Consider working in this field because it's absolutely not just for coders.
Someone has to run the community, that's a job. Someone has to write proposals people can actually understand. Someone designs voting and governance systems, which is part psychology, part political science, part organizational science.
Someone manages the treasury. And the ENS saga? The people who matter most in that room right now are writers, negotiators, organizers, and lawyers.
Community, operations, design, research, policy, and law. The industry is short on all of them. The technical people are easy to find compared to people who understand people.
Whichever you pick, here's your homework, the easiest you'll get all year. Point your phone at this QR code.
It goes to midao.org/guides. Free guides we've written. How to think about starting a DAO, how the legal side works, all no charge.
My contact info is right there too, and I actually read what comes in. If you join a DAO because of today, tell me which one. If you start one, tell me what you named it. That genuinely is the best part of my job.
Chapter 8: Outro
Let's land this thing. Three lines to remember. A DAO is an organization that lives on-chain. Its membership, its decisions, and its money.
It can be five friends with badges, or thousands of people securing an on-chain protocol with billions of dollars.
The tools are free, and a weekend is enough. Charter, treasury, badges, votes, execution, and community.
And the rules you write on day one, who holds power, what counts as a vote, what happens in an emergency, how fights get settled, those rules are the difference between sending people to space and becoming a cautionary tale.
The internet already rewired how we talk, how we shop, and how we learn. How we organize is next, and you're early to the picture.
Thanks for spending this time with me, Maryland. Now go start something. Are you thinking about starting a DAO? Just DAO it.
[Closing music]
Just DAO It! is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Just DAO It! does not contain any legal or financial advice. MIDAO also does not provide legal or financial advice, and nor does your host, yours truly.