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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.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Just DAO,
the podcast for people starting DAOs.
I'm Adam Miller, and I'm your host.
Prior to starting MyDAO,
I did consulting for people
starting and operating DAOs.
And now at MyDAO,
we do legal entities for
DAOs and Web3 projects.
As always, we're recording live,
so apologies in advance for
any technical difficulties.
We have guest Brian Peets.
I know him as BPeets.
Welcome to the show, Brian.
Hey, thanks Adam.
Thanks for having me on.
This is going to be fun.
Yeah, you got it.
So as the audience knows,
we always do the show in two parts.
The first part is going to
be the JustDAOit news report,
where we will go through
recent DAO news headlines
and tweets and casts,
and you and I will respond to the story.
So I'll summarize them for
us both and for the audience,
and we'll respond to them.
So what's our hot take?
Do we agree or disagree with the author?
What does it say about DAOs,
the future of DAOs, starting DAOs,
et cetera?
And then in the second half of the show,
we'll go into our in-depth
interview with you, B. Peetz.
But before we start the news report,
still would love a brief intro.
So could you tell us a
little bit about yourself
and what makes you an authority on DAOs?
Yeah, brief is not my forte,
so we'll see if we can pull this off.
But so, yeah,
I have always been interested
in technology and
and how it helps people.
Since a young age,
didn't really know how to
put it in those terms.
Took me through to
engineering at one point in time.
So I was a mechanical
engineer for a little while,
working on passenger rail equipment,
trying to help cities
procure new light rail or
commuter rail equipment.
it was not the place of
innovation my engineering
education in the academic
environment um and and out
there in the rail industry
it was kind of like
participating in the tail
end of the industrial
revolution and truly
feeling its end in many
ways and that really led me
to sort of calibrate with
what am I up to why am I
you know doing what I'm
doing instead of you know
punching this ticket uh at
the engineering school and
then going and working in
this field and it just
It really woke me up,
especially when this young
fellow came to work with us.
And he had been building
model railroad trains his entire life.
He loved going to the rail
side and seeing just the trains moving.
And when I saw that passion,
I knew that I hadn't found
my passion in the rail industry.
And so this is what led me to high tech.
And so I started to be very
curious about innovation and creation.
And I noticed that in the rail industry,
Not only was it an old technology,
there were just tons of
resistance to innovation in
North America.
The Code of Federal Regulations,
the airline lobby,
there was just a lot stacked against it.
When I saw what Silicon
Valley was doing in terms
of their playbook for innovation,
I was enamored and drank the Kool-Aid.
But as I started to work in
a smart city scale up,
we were growing rapidly and
I was noticing that we lost that.
It started to feel very much
like the places I was
previously in the rail industry.
And this is when I started
to have this light bulb
moment of how we're
organizing is what's
killing the innovation.
Because I was having these
experiences that I was
having in these large
you know,
passenger rail or government
organization procurement
programs that I used to be involved in,
but I'm starting to smell
them in the early stage
startup as a transition
into bringing in the
managerial hierarchy.
And this is what got me
thinking about humans and
how we organize and how we
collaborate and innovation
and progression and impact
and connecting the two together.
I was fascinated by this,
rotated through a ton of different roles,
often was pushed into project management,
product management,
executive leadership positions.
And as I was pushed into them,
I also saw the dysfunction
of my relationship to my peers.
We used to work alongside one another.
and build amazing stuff and
all of a sudden they were
asking me to make decisions
and the decision making was
centralized into me but
they had all the context so
I'd ask them you know what
was going on what their
opinions were and then I'd
have to be the ultimate
decider and it really felt
quite dysfunctional and so uh
As I got more involved as
well in considering
entrepreneurship myself,
I started to see the
dysfunctions of the capital market,
even in these innovative
Silicon Valley venture
funded setups and the ways
in which we coordinated there seemed,
you know,
like something was off.
And so I was looking for
something different.
And as I was looking for
something different in 2017,
I stumbled into the Ethereum.org website.
And I saw these ideas around
smart contracts for DAOs.
And I had also recently read
Reinventing Organizations
by Frederick Leleu.
which was taking a look at
like self-organizing teams
and holocracies and
sociocracies and how they
were actually applied out there.
And there was this,
this is the moment that
I've been on ever since is DAOs.
DAOs and using this, you know,
this trustless smart
contract to organize teams
you know, help people organize at scale,
I could see, you know,
sort of the intersection of
what was happening in the
self-organizing organic
movements that Frederick
Leleu was talking about and
reinventing organizations
and what was happening as
people were working on
these blockchain technologies.
and imagining what was
possible and calling that a
decentralized autonomous organization.
And I just haven't stopped
thinking about it over the
last six years.
So what makes me an
authority is that for six
years I've just been
obsessed and immersed.
I love immersing myself in a community.
So first immersing, you know,
when the infra was being
laid by consensus as a part
of the consensus organization in 2017,
2018,
as they were kind of proto-dowing it.
In the 2021 phase,
immersing myself in Bankless DAO,
Citi DAO as a founding citizen,
Polygon DAO as they were
bringing up their grants program,
and just many others along the way.
I guess you're saying,
why are you an authority?
Because I played alongside
those as they were
experimenting for years now
and have been having a lot
of fun doing it.
Wow.
Oh, man,
that makes me want to do the
interview now because
there's so much stuff I
want to ask you about.
But we're going to follow
the usual format and we're
going to go do the news first,
but encourage people to
stick around for at least 30,
40 minutes until we get
through the news to hear
more about BP's background in the space.
A lot of interesting stuff
we could dig into there.
um and and a lot of stuff
you haven't even mentioned
yet like what you're
working on now so we will
get to that soon but first
the just out news report so
again I will summarize each
of these stories for the
audience and for the guests
and then we will share our
reactions so the first
story of the week this is
from the royal gazette
which is a bermuda a newspaper
And the headline is BDA
legal committee establishes new doubt.
The Bermuda Business
Development Agency has
established a working group
to investigate law reform
proposals for the
introduction of digital
governance models.
So this is great in two ways, I would say.
One is that Bermuda is
looking at updating their
laws to reflect and respect DAOs,
which obviously is the line
of work that I'm in,
most of our listeners know and you know,
which is writing laws for DAOs and Web3.
And they're actually doing
it through a DAO,
which is the second time I've seen this.
I mean, they're starting a DAO
which is I think it's the working group.
I would love to know what is
different about this
working group from their
other working groups such
that they're calling it a
DAO or is it just a DAO in
name only and it's really
just a working group?
That is not something I was
able to find out,
but I think it's the second
or third time I've heard of a country,
I think Japan might have done this too,
where they said we're
starting a DAO to look into DAOs.
Even the United Nations
might have done this.
So anyway, it's exciting to see.
I must admit,
I've seen probably 10 or 15
countries now launch
working groups to look at
DAO-specific legislation,
and very few have come out
on the other side taking any action.
But I certainly hope Bermuda
will be different here.
What do you think, BP?
Well,
I think they've got the right approach.
I hadn't heard about this
being the second time.
So this is news to me of
taking the approach of
being a DAO to investigate DAOs.
And I think it's the only way.
I think that they've got the
right idea there.
And even if they're DAO in name only,
as many of the DAOs were
that I experienced in the 2021 cycle,
that in itself is its own learning.
So, you know, as I said, my intro,
immersion is the way to learn.
And so I think they've got
the right idea there.
And even if it's not
successful immediately from
this working group and the
subsequent work,
the individuals who have
participated will carry that on.
And I think that's the most
important aspect of it for
Bermuda and for the space.
Yeah, and if you're curious,
I just Googled it,
and I know we talked about
this at the time on the show,
but in December of 2023, so about six,
seven months ago, the UN,
United Nations Internet Governance Forum,
said it formed a group to initiate a DAO.
So I guess that's one step before.
They didn't say we created a DAO.
They said we created
something to create a DAO,
but still nice to see
governments and intergovernmental
national governing bodies
experimenting with dows um
the next story of the week this one is
This one is from ZK Sync.
Sorry, well, the article is from The Block,
and I also have the tweet
or post up here on X from ZK Nation.
The headline is,
ZK Sync introduces a
decentralized governance
framework called ZK Nation.
ZK Sync has introduced a new
community-driven governance framework.
It consists of three on-chain bodies,
the Token Assembly, the Security Council,
and the Guardians.
And then there's also a
linked post on X from the ZK Nation,
which appears to be the
main X account for ZK Sync,
at least for one of the ZK
Sync organizations.
And there's a whole
announcement that goes into
the details on their new governance body.
Basically, ZK Sync is Dao-ifying, right?
They're saying, hey,
instead of us being in charge,
we're giving control to
this new decentralized organization
And maybe it's fair to call
it a framework because
really they have multiple
organizations in the
traditional sense of the word.
They have these three different bodies,
which apparently,
according to the article,
also have their own legal forms.
So each has its own legal
entity and legal form,
and they all interact
collectively to govern the
ZK-SYNC protocol.
So, you know, let me see, BP, it's first.
Anything you want to dig into here?
I think this is exciting.
I hadn't heard of this news,
but I had heard that the ZK drop
uh had a large proportion of
tokens going to the
community and I think that
in itself was already a
really strong signal
following it up with this
is really uh powerful when
coupled to that um I think
and I there's some things
about this that remind me
of when optimism was
pushing their two house um
model and uh and and trying
to innovate on how we
approach uh dow governance
and I think that's done a lot of good
for us as a group to sort of
see something different.
And so if zk sync is now
doing a multi party sort of
setup has dropped a lot of
tokens to community and
continues to plan to do so
that allows for them to
have the right incentives
to do the tough work to
work on the DAO its
operations and its
governance and not just
kind of plow forward and say, Oh,
we're a DAO like they're
willing to work on the DAO
and they're putting the
correct incentives to do it.
And so that's a
exciting.
I'm curious to see where this goes.
Yeah.
And one of the things I have
to dig into here, you know,
there's just part of me
that reacts to having a well, really,
there's almost two bodies
here with veto power.
There's the guardians who
seem to have overall veto
power to keep things
aligned with the quote
unquote values of the project.
And there's also a security
council that has the
ability to freeze the chain
if there's a security threat.
And at least part of me wants to say, man,
I mean,
one of the cool things about DAOs
is that you can be
completely democratic if you want to.
You don't have to have a security council.
You don't have to have guardians.
You don't have to have a board.
You don't have to have a CEO,
stuff like that.
But I think...
increasingly,
but even since the beginning of DAOs,
you do have DAOs that have
these small groups,
I think it's fair to say
centralized groups,
that have some kind of veto power.
And I'm not necessarily against it.
I just think it's
interesting to note that even with
the option of going total
democracy a lot of
organizations are choosing
something kind of in
between and I wonder if
that's just is that just a
temporary band-aid until
dows figure out how to do
direct democracy better are
we always going to have
centralized groups in
decentralized ecosystems
what do you think yeah so I
love this and I i think
At the end of the day,
that's why I'm just
celebrating experiments and
not necessarily infusing my own opinion.
And I think it's because
it's such a complex domain
that we kind of need to be
playing with both, you know.
And I remember, you know,
from a lot of the battles
that I was participating in
the last cycle,
there was this dialogue around, you know,
how aggressively you
decentralize versus whether
you centralize things into conventions.
committees, grants committees,
these types of centralized
authorities that may or may
not last forever that are
there to kind of like protect, guard,
guardians, security, et cetera.
These are worthy reasons to
perhaps in an early phase
of experimentation, centralized power.
But I do agree with you that
like this should be
something that we're
continuing to push towards
more decentralization when
we can have the confidence
and comfort to do so.
And unfortunately,
it takes people to
experiment and risk capture,
because at the other end of
the spectrum is we push decentralization.
We don't have the right mechanisms,
tokenomics, et cetera, in place.
And and then something
beautiful that we wish
lasted actually gets captured.
And so I see this trade off
and I don't think that
there's a perfect answer.
And so I'm just enthusiastic
about people trying something.
And I hope that because
there's a lot of folks who
are token holders and
hopefully that the token
distribution is strongly decentralized,
that could at least produce
the correct pushback.
If centralization of power
is not actually serving the community,
then social pressure is just as powerful,
I think.
And we would hope that that's what drives,
I guess,
the transition to something more
decentralized over time.
even though maybe it's
starting the way it is.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean,
it reminds me even of what's
happening in purple DAO right now,
which I think we're both in, right?
Are you in purple?
So for anyone who doesn't know,
although I've probably
talked about it a lot,
but purple is a noun-ish
DAO that drives growth of
the forecaster ecosystem unofficially,
not an official forecaster ecosystem.
It's not officially the Forcaster DAO,
but in some ways it is unofficially.
And we've always actually
had a veto power vested in one person.
And actually,
so now what we're talking about doing,
there's a proposal live to
decentralize that a bit
more and elect a security council.
And so actually moving in
the direction of more decentralization.
But in that direction,
scenario I don't know it's
never really bothered me
that we have someone with a
veto power you know their
job is to make sure that we
generally stay on mission
and um I guess it's a
function that holds in some
ways like helps hold the
dow together at least from a like
I don't know.
I mean,
I'm thinking if a third of the
people wanted to go work on
a different mission, they can't, right?
They're going to get vetoed
even if they tried to vote
in a different direction.
We also saw what happens with NounsDAO,
which maybe to your point
shows the power of social
pressure because when
enough of the people
who had the actual NFT
wanted to fork and take
their money elsewhere,
eventually even the
security counsel or veto
person gave in and said, okay,
we'll have to just allow you to do it.
So anyways, interesting to note.
Yeah,
and I think that's when we play with
those mechanisms of like a
decentralized smart
contract of governance
having control over centralizing power,
then that to me,
those are more experiments
that I want to see.
I want to see,
and I'm wearing my HATS hat
and I'm a member of the HATS protodow.
And I like the idea of being
able to play with having a
very decentralized group,
being able to make those big shifts,
but moving power
functionally into roles that people play.
And Security Council is a role,
and if the community is
struggling with how that
role is being fulfilled,
that they have the
opportunity to do something,
whether it's exit,
fork or change who's wearing the hat,
there's something about
that power living with the
decentralized community that's important.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
So reflecting back on ZK Nation, if
this Security Council is
elected democratically,
that would make me feel, I think,
much better in my gut about
the direction this DAO is
going versus if it's put
into place by the founders
and can only elect itself,
then I would feel like
maybe that's a little bit
of a step back in terms of
true decentralization.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's interesting because
when I think of an L2 and
I'm like thinking on the spot,
but I feel like I should
give this more
consideration that when it
comes to things like L2B,
taking a look at this sort
of health of an L2,
that your ability to exit
safely and to move your
liquidity and to sell your
token on the open market.
Like in many ways,
these are the things that
protect you as a token
holder or a participant in the ecosystem.
And I think some of the
things that can be
concerning is as an L2 is maturing,
if the exits aren't as
clean and permissionless,
then these types of
centralization vectors have
a lot more power that they're holding.
And so the other thing that
can happen is changing the
amount of power they're
holding is another way to
deal with progressively
decentralizing this, so to speak.
Yeah, well, what I'm hearing from you, too,
is that just having a way
out is a form of decentralized power.
And so even if... I mean,
I'm even imagining it.
Let's say we started DAO
today for some purpose,
and power is actually
highly concentrated in the hands of a few,
but anyone can rage quit or
sell easily anytime.
Maybe that's just more
decentralized than a
traditional organization where...
They have the same
centralized power structure,
but they also hold a lot
more power over you as an
individual and what you get
or don't get if you leave.
Yeah.
And I think this is like the
interesting thing is it,
it takes some real rigor to
take a look at the full
complicated and complex
system that exists.
And,
and this is why it all feels like an
experiment because it's like, well,
we'll find the things that
didn't work according to design.
And some of the failures
would be catastrophic and
have been right from the very first one,
the Dow and the Dow itself.
I think we learn from these
and as someone who's in early,
I like to expect them and
encourage others to expect them.
Yep.
Yep.
Love it.
All right.
Turning to the next story of the week.
This one is a post on X from Vitalik.
And I'll just read part of it.
Vitalik says,
I am feeling quite unhappy
about this cycle's
celebrity experimentation so far.
Talking about celebrity meme
coins that have been coming out,
including Mother,
which I don't... What is Mother?
Do you know?
Is that...
that about um is that about
the political thing no no
it's I i can't remember the
famous um uh star who's
driving it and this is this
is how little interest it's
like it goes yeah famous
star created token um
mother's the token and uh there is
Yeah,
what I'm getting from Vitalik and his
commentary was that celebrities do this.
Jenner did one recently.
Previous cycles,
there's been these types of
celebrity tokens.
I think Paris Hilton got in
trouble with the SEC for one, if I recall,
or someone.
Actually, one of the Kardashians did.
So they just use their clout, pump token,
and it's basically a meme
token with a celebrity backing it.
Um,
and adding the firepower of their
existing community, which is a, that's,
that's a,
that's a shortcut to starting a
meme token really at the end of the day.
And so, you know,
where I listened to
Vitalik's commentary on this and, uh,
fully agree with it is sort of the, um,
relatively lame versions of
it we're seeing this cycle.
And so I think Vitalik was
close to Mila Kunin's
action to Kusher when they
did Stoner Cats NFT in the last cycle.
And I am a original mentor
and holder of the Stoner Cats NFT.
And so I loved what was happening there.
I saw celebrities coming in
and trying to do an animated series
where you got an insider's view.
They had to deal with the SEC.
You know, they were hoping to not,
you know,
create it such that we co-owned
the creation because they
were trying to avoid
running afoul with the SEC.
The SEC ended up ironically
shutting them down anyways on the project,
but they were trying to
create utility for fans to
get an insider experience.
Their token would unlock.
You believe you watch the
shows as they were coming off the press.
You could meet the animators and have like,
you know, town halls with them.
Like,
I thought that was really innovative.
They're using their star
power and their domain of
making shows and movies and
their connections into the
Hollywood engine.
And they were combining that
and opening it up to fans.
And they had governance to
vote on fan participation
and submissions to the show
as it was being written.
Like if you could just give
some equity to the fans,
that would have been a really,
really complete project in terms of fans,
crowdfunding,
lifting up and having return
in it and instead the SEC
shuts it down and we get
mother where maybe they're
saying you can buy some
merch with your mother
token well yeah I think
that is pretty lame and I
agree with Vitalik I'm
sorry for the rant but I was so sad
I love it.
It's perfect.
Yeah.
Well, and,
and one of the things Vitalik
says in the next post in the thread,
which is why I put this in
the Dow news report is one
of Vitalik's ideas was like, at least,
at least do a Dow, you know,
like at least,
at least give some kind of
governance rights to these
token holders so they can
decide something together.
And, and,
and I love that because actually
I think that's, it's,
I think virtually any token,
In my vision of the future,
not even that far distant future,
literally everything has a
DAO associated with it.
I don't know if we'll call it a DAO,
but when you buy Oreo cookies,
you're going to get some
Oreo tokens with them.
It's practically inevitable to me.
And those tokens,
maybe there's an NFT element,
maybe there's art.
Maybe there's a collectible element.
Maybe there's rewards, a utility.
You're also going to get to join the thing,
whatever it is.
And that's pretty much going
to be the DAO.
You join the DAO,
and then there's going to be a chat room.
There's going to be stuff you can vote on.
Maybe you get to pick the
next color for whatever Oreos.
And I just think everything
is going to work that way.
Products, communities, geographies,
everything.
And I think the reason for that is like,
it's not that hard,
especially once you're
already giving out a token,
it's pretty much a DAO already.
Like the question is just,
are you the project creator
going to create the chat room,
the token gating,
the governance mechanism,
or is someone from the
community gonna do it for you?
And I think as a founder,
that should make you seriously consider,
okay, on one hand, yes,
it's cool that in crypto we
have the ability to have
these like open ecosystems
where anyone can do anything.
So that's powerful.
And you could argue that's
what happened with like
D-Gen on Farcaster.
Because Farcaster didn't launch a token,
the community did it,
and it seems to have worked pretty well.
But I would think if I was a
Farcaster founder and for a year,
everyone, including me, was like,
when token, when token?
And they were just like, what's the point?
There's no need for a token.
maybe they're regretting
that now um either way I
think clearly like this
it's it's this little like
add-on component you can
put onto almost any token
any project any product any
ecosystem is like the doubt
component and I think it's
it's it's a miss I would
agree it's a miss not to do
that for any of these
celebrity coins too yep
yeah I think that's the uh
The ultimate fan experience
or community experience is participation.
And that's just what a DAO is.
And all it is is it's
tokenized so that it's
digital and it's on this
open and composable thing.
And I think that's really
important because that open composable,
like sure, I could create Oreo token
and have Oreo app and that's
really just points on my
backend of my Oreo app.
And we could vote on the
next seasonal Oreo design
or something along those lines.
But what's cooler is when,
uh if you think of the oreo
is actually a part of a
larger you know sort of
food portfolio um a
consumer goods portfolio
and if I'm able to have
tokens across multiple
goods um and
cross-pollinate them out
there in in uh in various
loyalty rewards
participation programs uh
or vampire attacking I
realize they don't want to
open themselves up to that
but frankly that's the future
And there's so many benefits
to being open that it's
worth also facing.
And not to mention the drama
and news that you can get
from brand when vampire attacks occur.
Uniswap is just fine,
even though SushiSwap went at it.
And so I think as brands wake up to this,
yeah, it's all going to be tokens.
It's all going to be DAOs
and it's the most intimate
experience ever for people.
Yep.
Yep.
By the way,
I think mother is Iggy Azalea
based on a little bit of
searching through X. And
I'd be surprised if she
doesn't get in trouble
because there's posts of
her just like with the hashtag mother.
And then it's just like a video of her.
And it's like,
isn't that don't you have to
have some disclaimers or
something when you do
something like that?
So I imagine it'll just take time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably.
Now,
I do think there isn't this
interesting like trend in
crypto that I think these
celeb coins are part of,
which is this idea that, you know,
a true meme coin might be
the safest way to avoid the SEC.
calling your thing a
security because the more
you literally say,
there is no reason to give,
this thing has no value.
Do not buy it.
No value.
There's no benefits.
There's no community.
There's no doubt.
There's no nothing.
Don't buy it.
Now,
maybe you're actually safer in terms
of the SEC because you're
not telling people to make an investment.
You're not giving them a
reason it'll go up.
You're not doing anything
that people can rely on for
the success of the investment.
You're telling them you're
not doing anything.
So I think it is still kind
of interesting that maybe
it's an area for...
experimentation,
extra experimentation in
crypto just because it's
the farthest thing from
what the SEC might want to go after.
So maybe there's a good
reason why we have lots of
meme coins today.
I really like that exercise,
and I think that you're
onto something there.
And in many ways, that's really,
really sad too,
because then the
introduction is exactly
what Vitalik was sort of lamenting.
The very first experience
for some of these new
retail consumer
participants is going to be
getting rugged in a meme
token game and also having
the experience afterwards
that's a really lame game to play.
I didn't enjoy that game.
We can play so much richer
games with one another
using these technologies.
But yeah, I think that in many ways,
tinfoil hat on,
uh maybe that's exactly uh
what a repressive uh regime
that's wanting to shut down
or cool or chill crypto
wants they want nothing but
trash to be able to point
that look at this garbage
and the safest thing for
you to do from a legal
standpoint is to do the
garbage thing like that
that's really sad it is
yeah like just gamble don't
don't do any of the real
value generating stuff
Yeah.
And then you can say that
it's nothing but a
degenerate gambling
environment that hurts
retail that may be coming
in slightly naive.
Excellent.
All the talking points are there.
Yeah, damn, good point.
All right,
so it's still important to be
building real things.
Everybody take note, not just meme coins.
All right,
so the next article of the week.
This one is from theconversation.com,
which is not a crypto.
It's like a deep,
looks like philosophical journal.
And the headline is,
why the future of democracy
could depend on your group chats.
Is your social media group a
budding democracy or someone's fiefdom?
All right.
So this is an article by the
author of a book called
Governable Spaces.
which I highly recommend people check out.
I read about the first half and I was like,
all right, I get it, it's enough.
But definitely a good book.
The author's name is Nathan Schneider.
And the article and the book
are about this idea that
what made democracy so
successful in America so far,
especially the first couple hundred years,
as observed actually by
Alexis de Tocqueville when
he toured the United States
in the early 1830s,
was that all over America we
have democracy, little democracies.
Every organization we're
part of tends to evolve or
devolve or whatever,
turn into a democracy of some kind.
every club in every high school,
every club that families are part of.
What are the examples that
Tocqueville gives?
It doesn't say in the article,
and I don't recall,
but he says that he sees
all over the place, oh,
organizations like garden
clubs in communities are
like little schools for
practicing the general
theory of association.
As members of small democracies,
people were learning to be
citizens of a democratic country.
And interestingly,
if you look at our online
spaces today before crypto, at least,
they don't tend to operate that way.
Look at Reddit communities,
look at literally every blog,
every comment section of every website.
Either a big company is in
charge and gets to decide
what you can say and can't
say and how you use the space.
Or a moderator is in charge.
And I guess maybe sometimes
there's two or three moderators.
For example,
I haven't been huge into Reddit,
although I certainly look at it a lot.
But the idea is maybe what
we need is moderators.
to turn these online spaces
into things that are more
like little democracies so
that people can once again
practice and experience
democracy in our entire life.
From the time we start using
cell phones as, I don't know,
13 year olds plus or minus,
we need to be experiencing
democracy so that we get
how it works and we see how
it connects from even the
smallest organization in a
country all the way up to
our national and
international government.
So this book, actually, having read it,
I wish he talked more about
DAOs because to me it was like, oh, wow,
he's describing exactly
what we're doing and
building in the DAO space.
He talks a little bit about them.
but certainly I think
aligned in values that we
need to make our technology
in general and the spaces
that we spend time in more
democratic and less authoritarian.
Wow.
I hadn't read this book.
It's been coming up a lot in conversations,
you know, over on Farcaster.
And so when I start to hear
something multiple times,
I know I have to go and pay
more attention to it.
Thank you.
In terms of,
what this is sensing into.
It's funny,
I was listening to this and
thinking of my own
experiences growing up and
I too was participating in
not-for-profits and clubs
and I was often on the
participant member side and
inevitably often was
curious and attracted to
volunteering for positions in the board.
Often as a member
representative of an
orchestra I played in or
helping as part of coaches
association or something
along those lines.
in a sport that I was playing.
And what this immediately
did in my sort of early
youth was it brought me to
Robert's rules of a meeting
and how you are
democratically approving
what we are doing as a board.
and how we run a meeting.
I mean, obviously there's some weird,
you know,
dysfunctions to these old
antiquated ways of doing things,
but it was exposure to
democracy like you're
describing and you're so
right in sort of the way
that we have experienced
our digital lives with, you know,
more authoritarian setups.
And I believe if you have
that sort of memetic and memetic desires,
then that becomes comfortable,
that becomes known.
And, you know,
you also start to have these
desires to be the mod, not, you know,
be somebody who's being a
steward for the community
and collecting the voice of
the community and trying to
vote on behalf of the community.
And so there are some interesting sort of
things that are likely
happening behaviorally just
by not being exposed.
And so, yeah,
I never really thought of
DAOs from that perspective.
And like when we were
talking about Oreo points
and tokens and voting on Oreo stuff,
like it just,
it's giving us that practice.
It's helping us muscle and
it's creating a desire and
a default that perhaps is a
really valuable one to have
that is being eroded.
And I had never really
thought about it from that angle.
Yeah, it's super interesting.
I mean,
I always took part in student councils,
at least as long as I had
them from middle school,
high school and college.
And I know it's not
something everyone's into,
but I wonder how many
people involved in the DAO
industry may have a history
of student councils, nonprofit boards,
other forms of like
I don't want to call nonprofits practice,
but maybe all the school
stuff is practice and real.
And, you know,
it's it's it's interesting
to see how much overlap
there is between people
working in this space and
people who have
participated in governance
throughout their lives.
Yeah.
And maybe it was in video
games in terms of guild governance.
Yeah.
In a World of Warcraft guild.
Maybe it was, you know, like myself,
a model UN debate club fan
or something along those lines.
Yeah, good point.
Oh, that makes me wonder, too,
like if my whatever video games I play,
if the clans I'm in were
forced to be more democratic.
Would that actually,
would people like that or
would that just turn them off and say,
would they say,
I don't want to have to vote?
I don't know.
I could see it going both ways,
maybe depending on the scenario.
I mean, certainly when things go wrong,
that's when you want,
you wish there was a democracy, right?
Like when the Klan leader
goes crazy or disappears or, you know,
make some decision everyone hates.
Yeah.
Yeah,
or when the video game developer
themselves ends up nerfing
something on you,
which I believe is why
Vitalik was drawn towards
creating Ethereum in the first place.
And so, yeah,
I think these are the types
of things where, honestly,
simplistic games like meme
tokens or more
authoritative models and
participating them in the form of play,
great.
finite games can be a lot of
fun and they're sort of
good exercise for the mind and, you know,
experiences.
But when the stakes start to
get higher with something
really matters to you and
losing it all in an authoritative regime,
if you've had that
experience once in your life,
even if it was as silly as
a character that you
invested in in a video game
and it brought you to tears
when it was nerfed,
like you start to have empathy for, hey,
when something starts to
matter to me and to others,
perhaps this model is not the best model.
Yeah.
Interesting.
All right.
We're going to fast forward
to the last article of the week.
And there may be a couple in
the show notes that we don't cover.
And then we'll turn to the interview.
The last post of the week
actually is from the Dow's
channel on Farcaster,
where B-Pizza and I both
like to spend some time.
And the post is from Coulter.
And it's actually a post of
their blog post.
The headline is,
is incorporating a doubt
contradicting its purpose?
And the headline of the article,
which is on UDHC.com,
is there is no doubt.
Okay,
so this article starts by digging
into the nuance of the
terminology of the word, the phrase DAO,
and that there's a lot of
disagreement over what the terms mean.
Now, interestingly to me, actually,
this article focuses on the
word autonomous.
as being where the confusion comes from.
But I think there's just as
much confusion from each of the words,
decentralized and autonomous.
This author points out,
is it about the
organization being autonomous of any
of other entity or individual, for example,
or is it about running
autonomously on the
blockchain such that when
decisions are made,
they are implemented autonomously?
And I think actually the
same debate happens over
the term decentralized.
Does it apply to the people
involved in the
organization and is the way they
govern themselves or the way
they operate socially and
politically decentralized
or does it refer to the
technology that the dow
runs on being on
decentralized technology
and maybe it doesn't matter
if you want to have a
centralized team you're
still running on decentralized technology
So both terms in
decentralized autonomous organization.
But actually,
I think what the rest of the
article goes on to talk
about is some confusion
without naming it around
the term organization.
This article goes on to say,
do DAOs really exist?
Because...
According to the author,
the nature of DAOs is that they're fluid.
People come and go.
They don't rely on any one person.
And as a result, and even if you try to,
let's say for a second,
you assume the word
organization means something,
like one thing.
Does that being one thing
actually make you not decentralized?
and not autonomous.
And this is a part I want to try to,
I guess this is pretty philosophical,
but I want to take issue
with this last point
because this does come up, I think,
a lot in conversations I
have with people about DAOs
because it goes from, okay,
is being one thing,
does that already make us
not really a DAO?
And therefore does incorporating, right,
by forming a legal entity,
does that make us not really a DAO?
Because now we're
acknowledging that we are one thing.
And one thing, you know,
necessarily when you draw a
thing on a piece of paper,
it's going to be maybe it's
in the center or it's going
to look like it's in the
center because it's the one
thing on the page.
And so that scares people away from,
you know, hey, well, if there's a center,
is it not decentralized?
You know, I think to me.
there is something
necessarily centralizing
about an organization, right?
The word organization means
there is something cohesive,
something consistent,
something collective about
whatever it is that you're talking about.
And maybe that's the mission.
Maybe it's the budget.
Maybe it's the vision.
It's the product, right?
Every organization is different.
But I think usually by the
time you're calling
yourself an organization,
the reason is that you are
trying to coalesce around something.
And you can do that in a
very decentralized way or
not a decentralized way.
You can do it in a more
autonomous or not autonomous way.
But I don't think that just
by virtue of being a thing,
that necessarily makes you
not decentralized,
or certainly that you can't exist at all.
Any thoughts on this one, BP?
Yeah, I feel like
sometimes when it comes to
the term DAO and dissecting decentralized,
autonomous and organization, honestly,
it starts to feel a little
bit like a religion and
fundamentalism for me
sometimes where it's sort of like, oh,
you know,
you're not truly a DAO or you're
not truly decentralized or
you're not truly autonomous
if you don't have autonomy
from X. And I feel as
though this kind of reminds me of the
another movement in the way
in which people worked,
which was the agile movement.
And so they had this
manifesto and the manifesto
was beautiful because it
was basically saying,
we want more of this and
less of that and more of
this and less than that.
And that will be a more
wonderful way and
productive way to code software.
And so when you come along to DAOs,
I feel as though
It's instructive and helpful
to think we favor
decentralization as much as
possible over centralization.
We favor enhancing autonomy,
autonomy of the
organization and autonomy
of the individual as much
as possible when building.
And we recognize we are an organization.
And like you said,
that creates friction right
away if you're trying to be
a fundamentalist in terms
of autonomy or decentralization.
And I think if you think of
it more philosophically,
like you prompted at the beginning,
this might get philosophical.
Well,
think of it more philosophically and
see it as an experimental
space and see it as nested.
groups.
Because if we know as in DAOs,
we talk about sub DAOs and
guilds and project teams and like,
you know, committees and working groups,
et cetera.
These are all nested within
this other thing that we
were calling the DAO,
which are all nested within
the Ethereum ecosystem of DAOs,
which are all nested in the
global ecosystem of organizations,
state nations, et cetera, that are,
I think the DAO movement is asking,
try to become more
decentralized and give more autonomy to
as you organize on a global scale.
And so if you zoom in and
start to attack a
particular cell and not see
the whole as attempting to
become more decentralized
with this movement and that
it is a philosophy and a movement,
then forest trees, you're missing it,
in my opinion.
Yeah.
Well, I love that.
I mean,
and just to take your metaphor
regarding agile a little bit farther,
you know,
you probably end up with a lot
of arguments over is this
agile or is it not?
Right.
But then someone coming at
it from your perspective would say, look,
it doesn't matter.
Is it are we is it more
agile than are we using
agile as the as the North
Star to make decisions?
Right.
And then it doesn't have to
be agile or not.
It's just are we following
these principles in ways that are useful?
Yeah,
I really struggle with frameworks
like scrum.org,
which are effectively there
to tell you that there's
only one way to do it and
sell you consulting hours
versus the manifesto is instructive.
Every time we're having a
discussion as a team trying
to be more agile, ask,
is this what the manifesto
was calling us to be and do?
And then have a debate and
try and experiment.
Yep.
Awesome.
All right.
Well,
that does it for the JustDAOit news
report.
We will do a quick segue here,
including an ad for MyDAO,
the sponsor of the show.
And then we'll turn to our
in-depth interview with B Pete's.
So for the ad,
just a reminder to everyone
listening that MyDAO, my company,
provides legal entity
solutions for DAOs based
out of the Marshall Islands.
We also have a network of
crypto and Web3 and DAO lawyers,
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at no cost through myDAO
and about our legal entity options.
With that out of the way,
let's turn to the featured
guest interview with Bee Peets.
You already told us, Brian,
a little bit earlier on
about how you got into Web3.
I just want to recap it and
see if I got this about
right before we turn to other questions.
So you were working, I believe,
in the railroad business,
which turned out to be a
little bit too low tech for you.
And then you were in smart
cities where you realized
in conjunction with your
experience in railroads
that there were problems
with bureaucracy and how
things were governed.
And so it sounded like to me,
you put those two things together,
high tech and new forms of governance,
and ended up finding crypto and DAOs.
Is that about how you got
into Web3 in the first place,
or did I miss anything?
No, that's the basic gist of it, yep.
Okay, awesome.
So let's dig into what
you're working on right now,
because I think there's at
least three things we can talk about.
I think we can talk about at least Hats,
Sobol, and Tipster.
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, those are really fun ones.
Okay, so where should we start?
Maybe which one was first in your life?
Yeah, Sobel was.
Sobel started when I joined
the Consensus Mesh in 2017.
It was Sobel.
What is that?
What is the Consensus Mesh?
Yeah.
So back in 2017, during the ICO boom,
consensus with Joe Lubin's
leadership and capital was
trying to figure out how to
build all of the apps and
infra that Ethereum and the
Ethereum virtual machine was promising.
And so it's the home that
incubated MetaMask, Infura, Gitcoin.
and many others.
And in many ways,
because Joe is one of the
founders of Ethereum,
was very close to the idea
of decentralization in
in organizing and in how
capital moves and decisions
around capital,
not just the technology layer.
And so ConsenSys at that
phase was experimenting
with what now we have come
to call proto DAOs.
There was what they called
the hub and spoke model.
And so they had hub services
and venture spokes that
were all being incubated
and a large global remote first talent
pool that was effectively
capable of moving across
all of these things.
And so there were like
marketing services and
design services and design
thinking groups.
And then there were ventures
called the spokes.
And so the ventures had to
make decisions regarding
capital and runway.
And initially Joe was making
those decisions, but
the power moved into the mesh itself,
we would do what was called
a resource allocation committee.
And it was kind of like
doing jury duty decisions
around how capital would
flow into the various
spokes and hub services on
a periodic basis.
And so you would rotate in
and act as a subject matter expert.
So I participated sometimes
as a product and go to market specialist,
and then would be there to
provide feedback to pitches,
and asks for funding,
which is a lot like what
DAOs do in terms of grants
and grant funding and grant
committees setups.
And so that's what they did,
but they had to do it
socially because they were
actually building the infra
that is being used by DAOs
in the next cycle in 2021.
And so it was all a little too early.
There were identity plays like Uport
There were MetaMask and then
there was Gnosis was in the
ecosystem as well of consensus.
And so, you know,
you get multisigs later and
you know how powerful they are for DAOs.
But that wasn't there at
that point in time.
So Sobel was myself and my
fellow co-founders embedded
in that mesh and trying to
understand how we can help
solve some of the
coordination problems and
challenges that were there.
And the very first one that we were given
And we were actually given
two when we sort of
researched and wanted to
support this group and build something.
And one was the information
is all over the place.
And so I can't find what I'm looking for.
which would be like the it's
in notion somewhere or in G
drive somewhere kind of thing.
And it was rapidly evolving.
And then the other was
everything is changing so
rapidly around here because
people are moving in and
out of different teams or
participating in roles on
multiple ventures or new
ventures are being created
or spokes are shutting down
and then dispersing people
back into the broader mesh
to find other spots to
participate and contribute.
And that dynamic nature
at a certain scale was
causing a lot of challenge and friction.
And we got tasked by the
mesh to go and take a look at that.
Can we visualize that?
Can we stay on top of that?
And how might we do so?
And that's what Sobel was born to do.
We were born to visualize decentralized,
autonomous organizations.
And as they rapidly evolve,
be able to create a clear picture.
Because one of the things
that we missed that was
there for us in traditional
organizations is the org chart.
The org chart is a wayfinding mechanism.
It's an imperfect one
because it's not actually
how work gets done in the organization,
as per a conversation of
Agile previously.
Uh, the org chart did help us navigate,
particularly as you're rapidly growing.
Um, you know,
you've got new people coming
in and in DAOs,
we describe this now as the
onboarding problem.
Uh,
and so Sobel really wanted to make it
easy to see what's going on
in the DAO and try to find
a spot to participate that was, you know,
bringing you at the
intersection of your
passions and skills and the
emerging business needs.
So we'd model, um, roles, um,
people and their profiles, teams,
And we would model goals and
relationships between goals
and people and roles that
are activating them.
And we would model
agreements as well was one
of the objects that came up
as we continued
investigating this with consensus.
And so teams would form
agreements with one another
to work together via the services
agreement with the marketing
department to do a
rebranding of one of the spokes.
And so these types of
agreements and making them
explicit and transparent,
you start to get a really
interesting network graph
of how the organization is
changing shape.
and the ability to navigate.
And so that's what Sobel was.
And we've been on that for six years.
We revamped it,
connected it to Discord
roles via Discord bot in
2021 and started working
with DAOs and had
hundreds of monthly active DAOs,
thousands of DAOs using
Sobol to map their
organizations and connect
it into some of the tools
that they were using like
Discord or Collabland.
We were a partner in their
marketplace launch as well.
And so Sobol was all about
visualizing that coordination graph.
Interesting.
OK, so, you know,
I was familiar with Sobel
through BanklessDAO as a
way of very literally
visualizing like the org structure.
So, you know, there were like circles.
Maybe one was a marketing guild.
One was the Treasury Guild.
One was a grants committee.
And you could see and I
could see which ones I was
in and which ones other people were in.
But it sounds like you guys
have gone a little beyond
just that if you're
integrating things like
Discord roles and
agreements between groups
or between members.
I mean,
how do you think about how far does
Sobel go?
By the way,
it's Sobel.io if folks are
looking to check it out.
How far does that go in
terms of just wanting to be
a visualization layer
versus also getting
involved in the structure
of the organization?
Is Sobel where...
these agreements are forms between groups,
or just visualized?
Yeah, so Sokol's philosophy,
and in many ways, it was way too early.
But, you know, that's kind of
half the fun sometimes as a founder.
And so Sobel's thought was that,
because it comes from sort of that 2017,
2018 era,
where there was something back
then called the fat
protocol thesis and the
idea that a lot was going
to be happening at the protocol layer.
It was going to be open and
composable and tokenized
and visible on chain, et cetera.
And so we were like, wow,
organizations are going to
get completely on chain and
there's going to be a need for clients.
And so we wanted to build
the first client.
And our hope was that our
backend would be completely
eaten by the protocol layer.
And then we were waiting and
waiting and waiting and had way too much,
you know,
living in this Neo4j graph data model,
you know, on an Amazon backend.
And we just kept waiting and
waiting and waiting.
And we watched the identity space.
And we would take a look at
decentralized identity and
the way in which it was
going to create an open
protocol of relationships
between things via
verifiable credentials.
as we waited for more things
to go on-chain, you know, like governance,
except it wasn't.
And so we were going to have
to use APIs to integrate to
things like snapshot, et cetera.
And so that was rather
frustrating to not see that
protocol gap closing as
fast as we'd hoped,
which is part of the reason
why I think the other thing
that we were mentioning,
and this is a good point to bring it up,
is HATS protocol.
HATS protocol was the first
protocol that was
structural in nature and on-chain.
Uh, and,
and so we saw hats protocol as
taking a lot of the roles
that were in discord role
tags and other web two apps,
and we're in these sort of
sequestered centralized backends and, uh,
and bringing them into an on-chain.
primitive that could be
composed into governance
and other smart contract
based automation to
automate the evolution of
structure and bring it on chain.
And I was like, wow, that's amazing.
The first time I read the
paper that Spencer and the
team were putting forward over there,
And that was the protocol we
were waiting for.
We wanted to be an ideal partner.
And so Sovel's next chapter
after the 2021 chapter of
trying to integrate to Discord, you know,
Collabland, Gnosis Safe, and then,
you know,
explore the integrations to
identity solutions and Snapshot.
And it's just like,
wasn't quite working,
we went over and we built a HATS client.
So we created a HATS client
that was a code composer
where you could compose your HATS tree.
You could compose it with
things like Gnosis Safe or
Molex Governance.
You could click a deploy
button and do an automated
deploy sequence,
and you could actually
interact with that using an LLM.
So we were playing with that as well.
we love this idea that there
can be a many client world
over top of these protocols.
And I think this is
something that now the
industry is really starting
to marinate into because of Farcaster.
And so we start to see how
Farcaster as a protocol can
produce lots of social
clients or Lens as a
protocol can produce lots
of different Lens and
Lensster style clients.
And we can see
this now more, you know, visibly.
And that was the vision of Sobel was like,
that's going to happen as
well for DAO tooling.
But it kind of didn't last cycle.
And so I'd really like to
see it in this cycle.
So I know we still want to
talk about tipster too,
but let's dig into the DAO
tooling space for a minute
because it's interesting to
hear about your
disappointment in the
progression of protocols
over the course of at least
a few years leading up to a
couple of years ago.
And I would say I've maybe
had a similar experience
over the past three years
since I got into DAOs for
the first time where
Initially, when I got into DAOs,
what was really exciting
was all the DAO tooling.
We were going from a world
where you had maybe one or
two DAO tooling platforms,
maybe like Moloch and DAO Stack,
fairly technical still.
Most people still,
if you were launching a DAO,
you'd probably be writing your own code,
to a world where you had 10
or 15 DAO tooling platforms.
where you could go and just
through a web interface,
configure your DAOs parameters,
hit a button to launch
about all the smart contracts.
And then that tool would
help you manage the DAO,
visualize the DAO, stuff like that.
And initially,
when I left my corporate job
just under three years ago,
I got into the DAO tooling space.
I was going to build new DAO
tools until I came across
the opportunity to run my DAO instead.
which was, it was a total surprise.
I mean, I'm not a lawyer,
I'm a tech entrepreneur.
I ended up now running this
legal related business.
But,
and I think over the past couple of years,
I kind of felt like, okay, like,
that's fine that I'm working
on the legal side,
it's a good opportunity,
there's a real need here,
but I'm glad to know that
lots of people are working
on the tooling side, because that's still,
we still need to see a lot
of progress there.
And now fast forward a few years,
it's not clear to me if we've made enough,
at least a lot of progress
on the DAO tooling side,
at least when it comes to like the basic,
like configure how you want
your governance to work,
what kind of token you want to use,
how you're going to distribute it,
and then like do the votes,
the proposals and the votes.
I feel like I haven't seen a
lot of progress.
If anything,
like half of the tools have
disappeared or stagnated
and the other half maybe
are relatively stagnant.
And then I don't know,
maybe there's just like a few,
and now Hatz has been the one of the few,
and then also some progress
at Aragon and Dow House.
I'm curious, though,
if you agree with my
assessment that there just
hasn't been a lot of
progress over the like,
I feel like we're still far
from mainstream.
in terms of being ready for mainstream.
Like if I was going to go to
my friend who I've been
talking about DAOs with for
the past two years, and he says,
so how has it gone?
Like,
is it time for me to start a DAO for
my local like church group or not?
I'd probably say maybe not.
And I'd feel really bad
about that because I wanted
to be ready for that by now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it's getting ready.
And I think there were a lot
of people and teams who
tried really hard to build.
And I think what really
comes down to is if you
look at Ethereum and its evolution,
and the infrastructure, the amount,
because I said it as my
beginning of my story was
actually amongst those who
were working really hard
together to try and bring
up some of the key
infrastructure that we now
take for granted and that is flourishing.
And it actually even has
diversity now in terms of choice.
Whereas, and that took multiple cycles.
I feel like because of the DAO hack,
we kind of lost a cycle on
DAOs in some ways.
And thanks to groups like
those who summoned Moloch,
they got us over our DAO PTSD.
And we started to have
something invigorated last cycle.
And so I feel like last
cycle was us testing the
gaps in the infrastructure
layer and noticing how much
we were relying on kludging
Web2 solutions or building
what I call Web 2.5
DAO tooling applications.
As a DAO tooling creator,
we created a web 2.5, not, you know,
not a full bore, you know,
web three application.
And, you know,
as I was calling out and
that happened to many, and then, you know,
the cycles do the cycles thing.
And unfortunately it dumped
some really good ideas and
some really good teams
because you have funding come in,
you try something,
and if you caught the wrong timing,
you know, it recycles back out.
You know,
that intelligence recycles back out,
but the team and what they
were attempting to do too
early was not conserved.
I'm really grateful that
HATS caught the right
timing to push through,
and there are many that
have continued to build through,
as you highlighted yourself.
And I think there was also
another key missing ingredient.
DAOs are social,
and the social layer was entirely Web2.
It had a no construct.
Yeah.
Like Discord, Telegram, stuff like that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Discourse, you know,
the place where we do governance even,
which was a little more
purpose built for the
pre-governance process, social in nature,
fully web too.
Open source software,
which is probably why
discourse was chosen.
You can post, et cetera.
It's got good properties for
a decentralized community to use,
but it has very little knowledge.
of all the other stuff
that's going on adjacent to
it that's in the on-chain world.
Not to mention the fact that
L2s as well were not
full-fledged as DAOs
started up in the last cycle.
So we had to find ways around that too.
And so Snapshot, I mentioned it earlier.
I don't mention it disparagingly.
I mentioned it as a gift in
the same way that Polygon
in the early days is a
sidechain and Gnosis Chain
is a sidechain.
We're helping.
They were a gift of scaling.
NextEye was a gift of scaling.
before scaling had arrived.
And so,
DAOs also really needed that kind
of scaling on-chain to be
able to do something like Hat.
It would be ridiculous to
try and track all your
roles and have smart
contract-based automation
around your DAO structure
uh, without, um, you know,
that more performant, uh,
execution layer.
And so there's a lot of
things that I think are
brewing in this cycle that
bring me optimism.
One is lens Farcaster have
had an opportunity to do a cycle, um,
and mature.
Um,
and in the case of Farcaster have some
daily active, uh,
user breakout recently as well.
And, uh,
And also the L2s have really hit stride.
And Ethereum L1 has been
doing a lot to improve scaling.
I think the merge happened last cycle.
DAOs were trying to do stuff pre-merge.
If you really steep in this history of it,
I have a lot of empathy for
how we built and why we
built the way we did.
And I have a lot of
appreciation for groups
that tried to glue it all together.
You know, Collabland, Guild XYZ,
trying to make sure that
our social space was
connected to our wallets
and our on-chain identities.
And so I think there's
something magical that can
happen this cycle,
and that's why we are
building tipster.bot that
you mentioned earlier.
I think Farcasters and Farcaster channels,
that protocol,
And some of the clients that
are now being built upon it
that are creating an
invitation to communities
to come and have an open
social graph layer that's
about how we socialize and
follow one another that is
connected to the token layer.
uh through the wallet so
they're verified wallets
and ens that are connected
and we're starting to see
this bigger picture plus
you know the power of um
you know cost efficient l2s
um we're we're starting to
see that the right
firepower um is there now
to go at dows again and
similar to the way in which
malik had to get us over
our ptsd of the dow hack
uh with with all of the
simplicity and precautions
that the mullet contract
had put in place to try and
give us a chance to play
with investment dows very
simplified dows to spark
the last one um I i really
am excited to uh see how
you know tipping games on
these on these social
substrates maybe get us
over sort of that trough of
disillusionment that we
came into um as dows you
know started being called
dows and name only and
treasuries got attacked and
communities folded and
The last cycle had its
experiments and had its failures.
And I think that a new wave
of tooling is right to be
built alongside those who
have kept building and
found ways to keep building.
And I think new communities
are forming and they're
taking the classic pattern
that they always took.
It was tweets that sparked
out and now it is posts and casts.
in a decentralized social environment,
which more rapidly can
transition into DAO experiments.
And we're already starting
to see them over there on Farcaster.
We're already starting to
see DAO signals through
these tipping games.
That's an early DAO
emissions game that's right
up there with the types of
things we saw last cycle
with Coordinate and frankly,
Cloudland tips.
um and tipping bots were a
big thing then too and so
yeah redoing it but on the
right substrates this time
and I think uh and the and
a web three centric tech
stack and I think that's a
really really uh discounted
unlock and I think that's
going to be the seeds of the new wave
Yeah.
So,
so just talk a little bit more about
tipster, but, and it's a tipster dot bot.
I've used it.
Uh, I think I was one of the first,
first users were using it
in the Dow's channel on Farcaster where,
uh,
anyone who's been active there has a
allowance.
So every day.
they can tip up to a
thousand quote unquote DAOs
with the dollar sign.
And there's no promise,
it's a pure experiment, right?
There's no promise as to
what these points might one day mean.
But the assumption is that
it'll be a signal that's used one day
if and when and I think the
assumption is always when
even if it's a long time from now,
we end up needing to put
some kind of structured
governance in place because
things start to get to to
we start to achieve scale
and it's too hard to just
run things manually and or
this is not values aligned.
So you know, we're starting to signal
this point system.
Anyways,
just tell us a little more about Tipster.
What's the overall pitch?
How should people think
about it and when they
might want to use it for
their own communities?
Yeah,
so tipster.bot is inspired by what
was happening with Dgen, Hire,
and many of the other
tokens that were being
token tipping games that
were occurring on Farcaster.
So communities would form,
And then they would start to
show that they appreciated
the value others were contributing.
So in the case of Dgen,
your content on Farcaster,
it will tip you Dgen for great content.
And it was set up so that
those who had been there
and embodied the vibe of Farcaster,
aka the OG accounts,
were given tipping allowance.
And so you have this
immediately decentralized
emissions of a proto-token.
Because it wasn't even on-chain.
It's like points in the same way,
but unlike points.
It wasn't a centralized
authority like a DeFi
protocol deciding who gets
points and why.
It was the community from
day zero being able to decide.
The community that was already there,
the OG posters who knew
good content when they saw
it and wanted to tip others
and encourage others to
grow the community.
And so that's what tokens
are really good at.
In this case, it's Prototoken.
And then this produces the
opportunity for progressive
airdrops of the actual tokens.
And eventually, you know,
Degen becomes an L3 on base
and a token and a whole
token ecosystem and has
inspired lots of others to
go and do this.
And so tipster.bot comes
from that inspiration and
says it's more fun
when you democratize this
beyond just those who can
develop code and build
their own bot and solution.
And because that is a barrier to entry.
So tipster.bot just means
that any community can come
together on Firecaster and
play a tipping game to
bootstrap their community
and signal what they're
finding value and give
tipping allowance to those
who have already provided
value and thus start to
create a reputational marker,
which could be used
in future on-chain games,
be it dropping a token and
establishing governance.
And I think where I want to
see this go and why
tipster.bot and these degen
tipping games were so
interesting to me is that
governable spaces thing
that we discussed earlier.
We're playing with it, as you mentioned,
in the DAOs channel over on Firecaster.
And it's because we're
creating a space that may
need communal governance in the future.
But right now it doesn't.
but we need to prepare to know who is here,
who helped make this space what it is.
And through a tipping game,
we can start to have signal
along the way of what was
valued as we as a community grow.
And that gives the
opportunity as the
affordances come on to
further decentralize
uh the governance of a space
like this uh and connect it
to you know web3 assets not
unlike the recent uh
farcaster channels um uh
protocolization um and
decentralization they've
been adding in the ability
to have curation auto mod
has been building bots that
allow you to create
moderation rule sets,
and those can be driven by token rules.
And so you can start to
connect the dots to see
that there's an opportunity for,
through something like
tipster.bot and tips saying
who should be governing
And then there's the
opportunity for the space
itself and the value it
provides of like curating
which posts should show or
be pushed to the top of the
fold is a power that is key
in governing that space.
And that today is somewhat
centralized often on
forecaster spaces to those
who were the channel creators,
AKA the Reddit model thing.
So this kind of ties all the
things we've been
discussing today together, I think.
And so I'm excited about
tipster.bot as the front
edge and these tipping
games as the front edge of
preparing for governable spaces.
Interesting.
Yeah.
What about in terms of what
you're seeing in this space?
So we've mentioned some
tools you're working on
that are really exciting, including Hats,
Sobol, Tipster.
We mentioned Snapshot.
I mentioned Dow House,
which is just the front end for Moloch,
which you mentioned a couple of times.
Are there other tools that
are exciting right now to
you because you see either
they've come a long way or
they're new and exciting or
just that you know that
there are a lot of good
people working on or just
enough good people working
on the tool and therefore
you're excited to see what
they might come out with in
the near future?
Yeah,
so I've become nounish curious and
I've seen some interesting
experiments over the years in nouns.
Um, it's on chain, uh, and, uh,
some of the most recent, uh, noun, um,
experiments that I've found
fascinating or now niche
experiments are burbs, um,
and grounds grounds Dow.
And it's because they're, they're mixing,
uh, an ERC 20 token with.
Um, the, the nouns NFT, um, governance,
you know, model, um,
allowing for a little more granularity.
Um, and so I'm curious, uh,
sort of about that, uh, experiment.
And, uh,
I think I'm also really interested
in charm verse.
Um, I think,
I think charm verse has been
trying to find ways to have
web three at the core.
as they're building
knowledge-based management
and what I call pre-governance,
that space where you make
decisions socially before
you move into on-chain
voting and an on-chain
signature of one's comment
regarding one's vote.
And so I think having those
kinds of off-chain spaces
They're fascinating to me.
And I think Farcaster itself as a protocol,
so not Warpcast the client,
but Farcaster the protocol
is massively fascinating to me because,
as I mentioned earlier,
one of the biggest friction
points of the previous
cycle was just how much is living in,
you know, sort of Web2 backends.
And what I think Farcaster
protocol has done is they
created a clever way to
have signed off-chain data,
AKA your messages, your likes, et cetera,
and that you're signing those,
and they're cryptographically verifiable,
but they're not on-chain.
And I find that really
fascinating because it then
does have a relationship to
your on-chain identity, the Farcaster ID,
and your on-chain addresses
that you've run a signed
um, you know, signing ceremony of signing,
Hey,
I own this address and I'm
associating it to this.
Um, and so that,
that is something that I
was hoping for last cycle
was to see more protocols
that are graphs in nature, um,
that show the relationships
between things and bridge
the off chain to the, uh,
the off chain to the
on-chain world and allow for a richer, um,
very web three,
clients to emerge.
And so I think my greatest
fascination fascination right now is what
social graph protocols,
signed off chain data
solutions and their
bridging to on-chain worlds
are possible in this cycle
and what relationship will
those have to decentralized
autonomous organizations because they are,
as I mentioned with my
experiences in Sobel,
just a graph of
relationships between
people and their
marketplace interactions as they do work.
together in that marketplace of work.
And so that's where I'm
seeing things going and I'm
excited to participate building into.
Yeah,
is there anything else you'd want to
share about your vision for
the future of DAOs?
So if you look forward,
maybe a whole cycle,
let's say either we're at
the beginning of the bull,
but it's got another year or two left,
or maybe we never even hit
the bull market and the
next one's not coming for a few years.
Either way,
what's your vision for where
DAOs are going to be in one, two,
three years,
assuming we do have another
bull run in crypto?
Yeah, so...
Last cycle,
DAOs showed that they are a
reasonable way to invest safely.
So they created investment DAOs.
Investment DAOs worked last cycle,
in my opinion, and they continue to work.
And so I feel as though the
innovation this cycle is
going to be social DAOs
that actually work.
And so I think that we will
have social DAOs where we
will be doing mostly social
things like the fans voting
on X and feeling like
they're participating in
the story and us
progressing towards these
governable spaces.
This is so clearly,
I need to check this book
because it's so clearly in
the zeitgeist right now.
And that I think is what's
happening right now.
And I think that this is the,
if I keep zooming out into the future,
I think these are the seeds
on which we will have all
the key sort of connections,
be it protocols and new clients emerging.
that are entwined so richly
with the social protocols
and the social attributes
of things that we will end
up in the following cycle
finally capable of doing the
types of organizations
we've been dreaming of
doing from the beginning, you know, the,
the,
the replacing what happens at the
club and not, you know, cooperative,
not-for-profit corporate
enterprise venturing and,
You can see that higher stake,
higher value,
higher problematic domain if
captured is possible.
And I think there's one
piece that I know you're working on,
which is that, sure,
it's important to have
these off-chain social
things become more
cryptographically
verifiable and connected to
the on-chain world.
But these two worlds also
need to become more
connected to the real world.
and doing the work that
you're doing and thinking
about how we uh enmesh in a
meaningful and productive
way the traditional state
nation and legal systems
while they are the um you
know sort of backbone um of
how we operate and
enmeshing them in
meaningful and productive
ways into um this emerging
social um and and on-chain
domain that triad
feels so necessary to pull
off that thing in the in
the following cycles and
subsequent cycles that that
I'm envisioning which is
you know these highly
productive full-scale like
enterprise level you know
venture um happening
productively and
efficiently on uh on chain
and uh as a dow
And that I also,
you can see that at that point in time,
if you keep zooming out,
I get excited about a
global talent marketplace.
Part of what brought me to
this space that I haven't
sort of described is that I
love moving around.
Um, I, I have, uh, uh,
I guess later in life I've
come to understand in a
self-diagnosed way that I
have ADHD and I like to
move around and it's a
superpower for me to be in
multiple spaces at once.
And then having that
percolate in my being and,
and then applying it in
those multiple spaces, um,
and feeding myself and
feeding it back out.
And that, that is where I thrive.
And I imagine, uh,
what DAOs are setting up
when they get to that sort of like,
you know,
level that we're describing here,
that you end up with a
global talent marketplace, you know,
on the perfect rails for
running a marketplace as
shown by DeFi already.
And that this fully digital
high liquidity talent
marketplace will be available.
And through remote work,
which has already happened
in previous cycle,
we will be able to plug into that.
And as individuals,
that could be a really
fulfilling way to
participate in the world.
And that ideally,
if we also solve some of
the centralization problems
surrounding AI and the data
sovereignty issues,
which I think crypto is working on too,
we could start to actually
work in fun ways at a DAO level scale
where the relationship that
honestly I have sometimes
with the AI that I'm
working with in my workflow,
it's bloody fun and it
doesn't feel threatening.
It feels exciting as a creator.
But if we can harness this
in ways that don't erode
our ability to participate
as humans in a way that
preserves our sovereignty,
we could start to bring AI
into DAOs in ways that I
can't even dream of yet.
But they would be great at
doing certain jobs that we
often today centralize into committees.
like we were discussing earlier,
like the security committee, et cetera,
or coordination prompts to
us as humans to participate
in spots that match our
skills and passions.
Auto GPT plays doubt, for example.
I think that there's an
opportunity for there to be
a really fun collaboration
between human agents and AI
agents to build things that
we haven't even dreamed of.
And I think that's where
things are headed if we do this right.
And I think there's a lot of
things that could go wrong along the way.
And I hope that we learn
those lessons quickly and
don't paint ourselves into
a corner where we can't get
out from it in a timely manner.
It's by the way,
another way the word
autonomous might apply to
DAOs is having autonomous agents.
you know, playing roles in our DAOs.
It could end up being a
major element of DAOs that
for the first time we have
organizations that are
partly or completely AI driven.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
Yeah, for sure.
I think that the future of
work is actually the future of play.
When I mean that abundance mentality,
that global talent
marketplace that has high
liquidity for opportunity
to participate in and the
right value exchange to
meet my needs personally,
if that is possible,
that in itself is the best,
best setup for the future
of work not to be work anymore.
It actually is play.
I get to play with my
friends all over the world,
building neat stuff that
feels like it has value and impact.
And to do it along with and
play with intelligences that, frankly,
will stretch our own.
Yeah, that's awesome.
All right.
Well,
that's going to be it for today's
episode.
BP,
if you want to share any closing
thoughts you didn't have a
chance to get to,
and then let us know where
we can find you and your
projects on the web or on social.
Yeah,
I think I've shared a lot and feel full.
And I think you can find me,
if any of these topics or
solutions that we've been
building at Sobel and
Tipster are interesting.
I'm bpetes.eth or bpetes on
pretty much every social
platform that you'll find
crypto folks congregating on.
And I'd love to chat.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
And for those looking for MyDAO or for me,
you can find me on
Farcaster at the Thriller
or Twitter slash X. I'm zero X Thriller.
MyDAO is M-I-D-A-O dot org
stands for Marshall Islands
DAO or MyDAO DS for
directory services dot eth or on Twitter.
And please consider liking
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Obviously,
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And just another quick ad
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Again, BP,
thank you so much for coming on the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Adam.
I had a lot of fun.
You got it.
Quick disclaimer,
none of this is ever legal or tax advice.
And finally, for the audience,
are you thinking about starting a DAO?
Just DAO it.
Thanks, BP.