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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.
Adam Miller: welcome to Just DAO It, the
podcast for people starting DAOs and Web3
projects and decentralized AI agents.
I'm Adam Miller, and I'm your host.
I'm the CEO and co-founder of MyDAO,
which provides, legal structures for
DAOs Web3 projects and decentralized
AI agents in partnership with the
government of the Marshall Islands.
And I am here today with my friend Zal.
Zal, welcome to the show.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Zaal: Yeah, for sure.
Thank you, Adam.
My name is Zal, also known as
Better Call Zal on the internet.
I've built and founded the ZAO, a place
for the, bring the profit margin data and
IP rights back to independent artists.
Ultimately, we've incubated a few
different projects throughout this
process, like Wave Wars, ZAO Festivals,
and COC concerts, all different ways that
we're trying to find individuals within
our organization to get more distribution.
Adam Miller: As much of my audience
already knows, we will spend the
first half of the show going into
recent news in the industry, and
then we'll turn to a more in-depth
discussion about what you're working on.
So for the Just DAO It news report,
the first story of the week is another
governance attack, or perhaps we
should call it an apathy attack.
This is BonqDAO.
Once again, no bug, no hack.
The governance system did
exactly what it was built to do.
The smart contracts that govern
the organization's money, hosted a
normal proposal and a normal vote.
What's being called
the attacker spent $4.4
million buying the project's token,
Bonq, some of it was borrowed,
and then proposed and passed
a proposal taking $20 million
out of the treasury to, itself.
That voter was most of the 2.9%
of voter turnout.
So once again, we have a scenario where,
if anyone had been paying attention
and willing to vote, assuming that they
really disagreed with this proposal,
they could have come in and voted it out.
The legal scenario here is what's gonna
happen here in, in this organization?
Are you gonna have some members suing
founders or, people who had a lot
of voting rights and did nothing?
And, as we've discussed many times
on this show, because the DAO does
not have a legal wrapper, anyone
who's voted in this DAO before can be
held liable for whatever went wrong.
I think aside from the whole low
turnout idea and just thinking about
this in any DAO or governance system
you create, is to have something like a
security council we talked about this,
the ENS Security Council on the last
show, and we'll cover that again soon.
You could have, some kind of, a time
lock for major transactions that
give people more time to show up.
And honestly, I'm left wondering
what really happened here?
Was there no founder who had 3% of the
tokens that could have outvoted this?
And maybe this project wanted to
be so decentralized that no one has
3%, and so there was no founder who
could even, protect the community.
So Zal, you're working on the ZAO.
Could someone spend $4.4
million and buy their way into the ZAO's
Zaal: it's actually a perfect reason on
why we created the ZAO the way it is.
The ZAO, respect token, which is our
governance token, is an illiquid and
soulbound token, meaning that illiquid
means you can't buy and sell it anywhere.
So even if someone did have $4.4
million, they wouldn't actually
be able to buy our governance.
And then soulbound means that once you do
get it, it's actually just in your wallet,
and you can't send it to anyone else.
And the goal is to create a way to prevent
things like this, where a new individual
can join a community, gain enough
governance to pass proposals through
quorum or a low turnout, and essentially
be able to do whatever they want at will.
Long as our active ZAO members are
present, it's nearly impossible for
a group of bad actors to come in and
take over enough governance within
the ZAO without raising flags that
would help us and we do have, a pretty
significant seven-day period of people
voting and a yes/no period and then as
well a veto-only period for where if a
thing did pass and a lot of people are
like, "This is not good," we have four
more days or two more days or however
many more days the consensus decides
to get enough people to veto that
Adam Miller: so the same vote effectively
stays open longer for more nos only.
Zaal: Exactly.
Adam Miller: Oh.
That's a cool way to do it.
People probably remember from our last
episode, or if they're following the Web3
news, the ENS, the Ethereum Name Service,
has been going through a lot of drama-
some of which we went into recently,
a lot of arguing and debates.
One of the issues at stake was whether
to install a new security council, which
they finally did, and it has exactly
the, capability we've been discussing.
I'm not sure they used the specific
mechanism that you were talking
about, but it's a council of five of
eight multisig, which has, a couple
of days after a vote passes to,
veto or not veto any transaction.
I'm hoping that they have a very detailed
legal or other, specific document that
outlines when they're allowed to use
this right, because that's another
huge problem that all kinds of DAOs
get into is you create the security
council, but then you just say,
"Yeah, you're the security council."
Well, what if one of those people
just doesn't like a proposal?
Are they legally allowed to
use their veto in that manner?
And generally they shouldn't be, and
that's the kind of thing that gets
written into operating agreements
for DAO LLCs, for example, if
there is a security council, is
when are they allowed to use it?
And if they break the rules,
you take them to court.
The other interesting thing about,
the ENS case, Nick Johnson, the same
founder who originally blocked the
security council proposal that failed,
and by blocked I just mean, he's the
one who had 3% of total supply when the
total amount voting was less than 6%.
He voted against.
This time he voted for.
And so the security council proposal has,
passed and, still I guess open question
is whether they're okay with the 6% of the
community voting on everything or is that
really a problem that there's low turnout?
You know, it's interesting,
I have some ENS names.
I think I even have some tokens.
I never even thought about voting.
I always assume that
my- ⦠you know, .0001%
has no impact, but perhaps
that's a philosophically naive,
position as a token holder.
Zaal: Think that's exactly the reason we
get low turnout for everything is everyone
believes that if we are in a really
decentralized system, the idea is you
can actually get like a more democratic
decision, but the individuals need to
actually show up and you have to make it
as easy as possible, as frictionless as
possible to actually make that happen.
Adam Miller: And by the way, ENS actually
mentioned, Bank Dao in their proposal
as the reason why they had to get
this done, and that seems to be what
helped, push it over the finish line.
A little bit more, governance news,
rapid fire style so that we don't
go too deep into any of these.
But, Cardano, the blockchain which is one
of the big early blockchains, they, had
their first hard fork which was ratified
entirely through on-chain governance.
So the theory here is, unlike most
blockchains where a hard fork is simply
a vote with your feet, you either fork
or you don't if you're a validator
and that's what determines the future.
They actually do on-chain governance to
try to agree first whether to fork or not,
and then I, I believe that somehow they
try to enforce that on the validators so
that if people vote you go with the vote.
Although I think with any validator set
you always have the option to walk away.
Solana also, launched formal
on-chain governance system.
You do have to have 100,000
Sol, which is about $7.7
million to open a proposal but
there is now a formal way in
Solana to, to engage in governance.
-- I-in Ethereum, there's been a debate
or discussion about whether we
should have something like this.
Why is there no official way for the
Ethereum community to come together
and vote on the future of the network?
But Ethereum's philosophy continues
to be that should-- it should be more
decentralized than that, that let
anyone who wants to participate in the
development of the network and then
govern those systems however you want.
As we covered in a recent episode,
there has been some bifurcation
recently, the Ethereum Foundation,
which has reduced its staff.
Other organizations that have popped
up and gotten funded, including
The DAO Security Fund, which is the
original DAO from Ethereum back as a
Marshall Islands DAO LLC, which is,
supporting, the security of Ethereum.
MetaDAO, which has their
concept of, ownership coins.
MetaDAO's on Solana, and the idea of
ownership coins is just let's have a
DAO with governance tokens where the
governance tokens actually own the company
and get economic rights, like a stock.
If you have 1% of the tokens,
you get 1% of the profit.
There's nothing that
crazy about that i-idea.
It's where a lot of
people would like to be.
They're just one of the projects bold
enough to actually do it, and deal
with the regulatory consequences.
But in particular, they have this futarchy
governance mechanism where decisions are
made in these DAOs through market-based
trading mechanisms rather than voting.
And so the regulatory argument is, th-this
is not a security because the token
holders, even though they have economic
rights, do not have governance rights.
If they want to engage in governance,
they have to go, participate in
a free market on decision-making
markets with everyone else.
So they held their first,
owners meeting a couple of weeks
ago, which is exciting to see.
Lido DAO, so the Lido project, which
is one of the biggest, , uh, Ethereum
staking providers, they did a major
restructuring, of the system into a new
staking router, and LDO, their token, rose
about 23% on the week, which is nice in
an environment where most tokens are down.
So Arbitrum turned on, revenue
sharing, so 10% of the net fees from
chains like Robinhood Chain, which
is an Arbitrum-based chain, flow
back to the Arbitrum network, 8% to
the treasury and 2% to a dev guild.
And ARB, their token, also rose
on the news Any reactions to the
governance rapid fire before we
turn to the next news segment?
Zaal: The last one that you spoke
about is also really interesting, the
Arbitrum turning on revenue sharing,
and it's actually something that I was
really interested in seeing taking 10%
of whatever is built on their stack
and base being built there and seeing
the potential for this powerful network
effect that I don't think we've yet seen,
which I think is really interesting.
So I'm curious to see how AARP does
it and to see if maybe that's the
L2 that can really make something
like that really powerful revenue
source for layer 2s on Ethereum.
Adam Miller: And it's also this
question of, can a network like
Ethereum succeed not only without
the governance system, but without
that treasury building system, right?
There's no fees in Ethereum that go
to the Ethereum Foundation or to any
kind of shared treasury for Ethereum.
It's all network participants
who have to raise or pony up
the cash to develop the system.
And in some ways, I think Ethereum is a
little bit lucky just because it started
so early and its token value rose so much.
There are a number of participants in
the ecosystem who are simply rich, or
people and organizations who are willing
to devote tens or hundreds of millions
of dollars to the future of Ethereum.
And so maybe it doesn't matter that we
don't have a more structured funding
mechanism, but it sure sounds like a
nice idea for a network to structurally
self-fund its own development.
All right, moving on to, regulatory news.
The CLARITY Act in the United States,
which we have been following on
this show, and everyone on the show
so far, and myself included, seems
to want the CLARITY Act to pass.
There's a lot of good stuff in
this piece of US legislation.
It's actually a really good law
that puts a lot of good structure
in place and actually, will make
things safer, and, easier for
people to build in crypto globally.
They're still fighting
about the ethics language.
A deal was reached but
Democrats, rejected the deal.
This big fight goes back to the
fact that Trump has made over a
billion dollars on his private crypto
projects while in office, and the
bill would make it illegal to do so.
I'm not sure if they're trying
to claw back that money.
I imagine not, but it's still,
making Trump uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, the SEC is not waiting.
We've also covered some of these
stories in prior episodes, but, the
SEC's agenda continues to, lead to new
proposals, and rules, which may not be
quite as good as legislation because
they can be changed by future SECs,
but they've got great stuff in them.
Things like a safe harbor that lets,
early-stage projects raise up to
seventy-five million dollars per 12
months via tokens, and then an off-ramp
that says when a token, stops being, i-
in the safe harbor and starts being a
security and how to cross that bridge
and become a registered, security.
And so it's just great to see that the
SEC is making progress in this regard.
A lot of people, for example, when Tally
shut down recently, so Tally, being one
of the early DAO governance software
systems used by a lot of major DAOs, the
founder said, the problem is that the
regulatory arbitrage is gone, and the
reason that people used to create DAOs
was because being decentralized meant
your token is not a security, and now
that that's gone, no one's starting DAOs."
And I think he's wrong on both counts.
I think people are still starting
DAOs, although not as many as we
might have hoped five years ago.
Maybe we thought we would be starting
100 or 1,000 times as more per year now.
But DAOs are still being started,
and the regulatory arbitrage or
advantage is actually being put
into structured rules in the United
States, that decentralization
really can exempt you from having
to follow normal securities or other
securities rules, which is phenomenal.
Let's move to AI agent news.
I wanna briefly go over some points from
a talk I gave at the Maryland Blockchain
Bootcamp of 2026 just last week because,
we haven't covered this much on the show.
My talk was called When Software Owns
Property, and we went into, decentralized
AI agents and AI agents in general
participating with legal personhood
or legal structures in the economy.
First of all, a little bit of history.
There was an agent named, Fraser,
who, someone put onto X and said,
"Do not give away this money."
So they gave the agent a wallet
with $47,000 and said, "You
may not give away this money."
And after 481 failed attempts of people
trying to get the agent to give away
the money, the agent actually was
tricked into giving away the money.
So obviously important, to remember
that things can, go wrong, and
when they do, people will be held
accountable and not the agent itself.
Around that time, the agent token mania
here in crypto, hit its peaks with $15
billion of market cap in, tokens like,
AI16Z, which is now being sued, both for
not truly being autonomous in addition to
pretending to be a16z, the venture capital
firm that many of us are, aware of.
But I think one of the most
interesting parts was they're being
sued for saying their agent was
autonomous when really it wasn't.
And so this thing where people
masquerade, "Hey, come talk to my
decentralized AI agent or my autonomous
AI agent," if that agent is just
running on your computer you can't say
that it's autonomous because it's not.
If you wanna be autonomous, you've
gotta really dig into what it means
to be a decentralized AI agent, which
we will do more of later in the show.
I think the other interesting, statistic
is, if you look in the media, there's some
exciting announcements about the progress
of AI agents participating in the economy.
A couple I wanna go over because
they sound exciting, but then really
they're not as exciting as they sound.
So one is, , X402, uh, which is this,
payment, processing protocol for AI
agents on blockchains, had processed 150
million payments, totaling, $40 million.
And people said, "Oh, that's so exciting."
If you do the math, that's less
than $100 per agent on average.
And so are these agents really
doing anything meaningful, or
are these all proofs of concepts?
Are they all experiments?
Are they all, popping up, buying
some maybe AI inference for
themselves and then popping down?
Relatedly, the other exciting story was
just a couple of months ago, an agent
named Manfred was the first to open an
LLC in the United States, get an employee
identification number, and open an
FDIC-insured bank account, and then went
on to proceed to enter into business.
What is the sum total of the
business that this agent has done?
It signed a contract with another agent
to design a logo for an example project.
And so, even in the most exciting
case that the media is talking about
and it's doing all this cool stuff,
nothing's really happening, right?
It designed a logo.
So we'll actually talk more
later in the show about, the
value of AI agents forming LLCs.
I mean, this is something we're
doing in the Marshall Islands.
It is cool, and it's exciting, and
it will be a meaningful part of the
future economy for AI agents to take
on some kind of legal personhood,
managing companies, et cetera.
And Zal is one of the people
who's going to be doing that.
At the same time, we have to acknowledge
that, so far the state of the art is
less than $100 per agent, and the biggest
project done by a decentralized AI
agent may be simply designing a logo.
Zal, are we gonna do more than that with,
what you're working on for your AI agents?
Zaal: Oh, yes, we will.
We're gonna bring on the next stage
of the creator economy, right?
I think there's so many middlemen in here.
It'll be really fun to start to create
something that can leverage this new
tooling to help other founders, creators,
builders, and artists out there be able
to do that same thing for themselves.
Adam Miller: Yeah, for sure.
In addition to the Marshall Islands having
its, DAO LLC or digital LLC framework for
AI agents, Delaware drafted a potential
legal entity structure for AI agents.
And Bermuda, a lawyer in Bermuda,
also made a declaration on sovereign
agents, insisting that Bermuda
will be providing some legal
structure for these agents as well.
So there is movement in the
direction that, that we will be
talking about more on the show.
So, that does it for the
Just DAO It News Report.
a quick break, and then we
will go deeper with Zal on his
background and what he is planning.
For the break, a quick ad for MIDAO.
MIDAO builds legal entity
solutions for Web3, DAOs, and AI
agents in partnership with the
government of the Marshall Islands.
This week, I wanna spotlight
the AI Agent Legal Entity Guide.
If you go to midao.org/guides,
click on the AI Agent Guide, and
this goes in depth more than we
can on any talk or podcast episode.
What are the legal problems that actually
show up if you're thinking about, creating
a legal structure for your AI agent
project, the entity architecture that
actually solves this in the Marshall
Islands, and how to look at other
jurisdictions around the world as well.
So Zol, by day, you automate
buildings at the Jackson Laboratory,
and by night, you run an on-chain
music community from Maine.
And I think you're involved in
dozens, if not hundreds of startup
projects, involving DAOs, Web3, and AI.
How does an automation engineer end
up founding a music DAO and all these
other cool things you're working on?
Zaal: I would, start it off with
where I started, uh, entrepreneurial,
journey, which was in college.
I met a musician who had, dreams
and aspirations of, being a musician
full-time, and I went from finding
different ways to get involved with
him, to then managing working with
other artists and eventually falling
into the blockchain rabbit hole.
I feel like it's been a really
awesome opportunity growing up
as an engineer 'cause it always,
taught me to solve problems.
So it was, solving the music industry's
biggest problem of how do you make
money as an independent artist in
music and how does that scale long
term to something, if you don't want
to do, a deal with a music label.
That and the infrastructure wasn't
there, for that to actually happen.
So that's kind of what brought me to
joining all these communities, always
finding the easiest way to give the solo
entrepreneur the tools that they need and
the resources that they need to succeed.
And we have been working
full-time to put the money on the
table to make all that happen.
We've been fully bootstrapped with no
plans to take any money from VCs for-
Adam Miller: So before we go deeper into
what the ZAO is and what you're up to-
Zaal: Yeah
⦠Adam Miller: what is it about the
blockchain and Web3 that allows it to
help you achieve a vision like that?
I mean, is it really even
necessary or where does it play in?
Zaal: What always interested me about
blockchain is blockchain's gonna affect
everything that money touches And I
thought that was really interesting.
The other part of it was
blockchain is, automations, so
software that can control money.
That's what smart contracts are.
So in this emerging digital
age, we're moving more and more
towards, putting things online.
How can we trust and verify that
the information that we see online
is legitimate, but then also how
can we trust and verify the other
individuals on the other side of
the internet are, real human beings?
I think that's what got me really
interested in the infrastructure in
blockchain was not only the ability to
have financial rails to move money halfway
across the world with very minimal fees
instantly, but the ability to then tie
that blockchain address to an individual
Adam Miller: It's interesting 'cause
I think to a lot of people, they
like the pseudonymity or anonymity of
blockchain, but you're saying actually
the opposite, which is the ability to tie
an identity or a person to an address.
What does that give you in the
context of a DAO or a project?
Zaal: I 100% agree, and that's where it
started, but I think it actually adds even
more value to an individual as well that
does wanna stay pseudo-anonymous a lot of
individuals that I've met on Farcaster on
a decentralized social media network that
don't have any of their information tying
to their real physical identity out there.
But they do have, over time, the trust
in the community by participating.
Or like you said, if you do put
an AI agent out there and it does
go and, and even if it doesn't
intentionally go and do bad things,
you can be held responsible, so-
, Adam Miller: It's like leave your
real world identity behind sometimes,
but have an identity in a community,
even if that's the whole Farcaster
community, this big social network, or
even if it's just in the ZAO, you know
that you're talking to the same person
you were talking to two years ago.
They can build up reputation
over time, and I think something
called respect in your system.
So why don't you tell us a
little bit more about the ZAO?
What is it?
What are you up to?
And what is this respect game, and
how does reputation come into play?
Zaal: So the ZAO is, the
community that I've created
as an incubator for our ideas.
Ultimately, our goal is to bring
individuals who have companies, songs,
ideas that are not fully fleshed out and
they feel as though they could use support
but they might not have the ability to
go and find the correct developer that
is willing to work for sweat equity on
their idea and the goal in this DAO is
to create a culture where you know the
character of the individual you might
be getting as a partner for an idea so
what we do at this DAO is we have weekly
meetings where we distribute governance
in the form of illiquid soulbound tokens.
So as long as you're coming in
consistently, being here, coming in,
sharing what you're doing and how you're
moving forward, . And by doing that, you
earn governance within our organization.
Social capital, tied to our DAO as
opposed to tying governance to financial
capital, which I feel like leads to a
lot of the challenges, like what some
of the things we said earlier today.
But , if we can iterate on progressively
decentralizing through participation, we
can create something that, yes, we might
not have that same, financial backing
that a organization in a capitalistic
society might have , but we have
something that's much stronger, which
is, the ability to outlast everyone by
hopefully creating something that's as
little overhead as possible, that can
survive through the times and the trends
Adam Miller: so in the DAO,
we talked about how you have
reputation-based voting, right?
People earn respect, and then
that gives them governance rights
we've talked a little bit about
the positives of reputation-based
voting, like the fact that no one
can just come in and buy a bunch of
voting rights and drain the treasury.
How has reputation-based
voting actually worked?
And have there been elements of
that that have actually felt like
they're harder to do, or risks or
downsides that you've run into?
Zaal: The one biggest challenge that
I've come across and friction point
with, reputation-based voting is that
people are afraid and feel bad for
voting for one person over another.
In an ideal world, you wanna vote
for all of the people all of the time
Adam Miller: So you're talking about just
people knowing who's voting on who, right?
Is that because of the reputation-based
voting system, or that's
something that exists in any DAO?
Zaal: It's a combination of both, where
the way that we distribute out our token,
right now we have a specific time and
place, but the goal is that anyone at
any time and place with a minimum of
four people can start up and create a
organization that you can actively see
what they're working on week to week
and prove that they're adding value.
But how are you affecting
your local community?
How are you affecting our
local community in this DAO?
How are you affecting
the global community?
And then how are you
supporting your peers?
Goal is to, get the consensus of
how are people contributing to an
organization, and then how do we as
a group think that should be valued?
Is just coming in and liking
someone's post the same as someone
coming in and building a whole repo
that people can come in and use?
Probably not.
One of the theories in the Fractal,
ecosystem is that in a traditional
organization, 80% of the value
or the money goes to 20% of the
individuals, usually the top 20%,
but usually 80% of the individuals
are the actual people doing the work,
and they're not part of that 20%.
So finding a way to flip that on its
head, where the people doing the work
are the ones that are rewarded, is a
big part of how we're experimenting on
this idea of how do we tie governance
to people helping an organization,
a community, without necessarily
getting paid for it directly in terms
of financial, wellbeing, but actually
status in the organization itself.
Adam Miller: So the biggest
challenge it sounds like is
divvying out the reputation, right?
Knowing who deserves how much
reputation in the first place.
Zaal: Exactly, and that's kind of
this cultural- difference in you
might get a completely different,
group one week to the next based
on how the, curator or facilitator
kind of lets it go on and continue.
But the goal is to standardize
that as much as we can across a
decentralized web, but also leave room
for fluidity and spontaneity, right?
So how can we do both of
those things at the same time?
That's the biggest
challenge with DAOs, right?
How can we have organization
while also letting new people
come in and give their piece?
But new people shouldn't come in
and take over an organization.
But I think it's a really interesting
conversation to be had where as people
earn it over time, do you get rid of it
because you're not being a participant?
Do people's time, life, and energy
getting busy, is that a negative?
Do we wanna penalize people for going
and dealing with life circumstances?
I don't personally think so, so I'm
interested in finding a way to do
this combination of the way I'm doing
Decay right now, w-we're, we're--
one, year one is 1X, year two is 2X,
year three is 3X, year four is 4X.
But the idea is that instead of burning
people's tokens, as you participate,
as the organization's been around
longer and longer, you're getting
more points because it makes more of
a difference the work you're doing.
Adam Miller: Actually a lot like
inflation in a normal capitalist economy.
Because actually in your system,
and capitalist systems, there is a
good reason for inflation, right?
Which is so that the reputation of the
prior year can maybe be deprecate it
a little bit and worth a little bit
less, and this year you'll give out 2X
or 3X what was given the year before.
But a lot of blockchains let's just say
Bitcoin, was built without any inflation,
which is actually one of the things
that people sometimes criticize it for.
And maybe there's a happy medium.
When it comes to the DAO,
what's your progress so far?
How active is the community?
What have you guys achieved?
What are some of the things on the
horizon, in terms of actual work
product or success of the organization?
Zaal: Yeah, for sure.
So for us, one of the many successes
is how we have incubated the
projects that have kept up with
people having energy around it.
So over the course of two-plus years
of creating the DAO and having the DAO
out there, we've had numerous different
projects, start, some continuing and
being successful, some, faltering out
and not having energy behind them.
That part has been a huge success of
cultivating our first project, Wave
Wars, where we're now, making money
and a profit that's going back into
the DAO, which is really powerful.
I would say that's our biggest success.
And one of the challenges is we
don't have a lot of people voting.
A lot of how I've created my DAO has
been me pushing everything forward.
So one of the things we need to get more
of is the feedback, and some of the things
we're doing really well is the cultivation
of projects within the organization
Adam Miller: So how many members
do you have today, or how many,
people have participated to date?
Zaal: We have, over 200 different
community members that have
participated in this ZAO, but that
could be them participating in,
one of our in-person events through
ZAO Festivals, and that being it.
So the active individuals that come
week to week between 6 to 12 we have
50 or to 100 monthly active members,
which in some way are contributing.
Adam Miller: What is Wave Wars?
Tell us about Wave Wars.
Zaal: For sure.
Wave Wars is live traded music battles.
We created a new vertical for
musicians to get paid off of some of
their old music that's just sitting
there on Spotify that, hasn't earned
them a dime in the last few years.
They can bring that to a battle, put
some entertainment around it, share
the story around why that song was
created, some of their new music as
well, and make money on, traded battles.
It can be looked at as a prediction
market but for a subjective answer.
The beauty of it is we give 1% to the
musician of all the volume that's traded.
The token itself is an ephemeral
token that only lasts for
the period of the battle.
You can buy and sell it, on a bonding
curve during that period of time,
and at the end of the battle, it
reaches a moment that no one can
buy or sell it anymore, and everyone
just withdraws it, whether they're on
the winning side or the losing side.
A unique part about, Wave Wars is that
a portion of the losing side goes to
the winning side, but not all of it.
The idea here is we take half a
percent, the musicians get rather than
putting it in some big poly market or
some big, organization that is around
sports gambling or whatever it may be.
Let's, pay our artists their fair share
by bringing the entertainment energy
and, beautiful things that can only
be done with blockchain because we
don't own or custody any of the funds.
It's all running through
the smart contract,
Adam Miller: so, okay, when you're
engaging in the market, are kind of
voting on who you think the winner
should be, and it's also a bet.
So if you're right, you get more of
your money back or even a profit.
Exactly.
Is that right?
Zaal: That is the idea where we don't want
someone that has millions and billions
of dollars to completely ruin the game.
We have three factors.
We have our Soul vote,
which is our trading vote.
But then we also have two other factors,
one being, a human judge, with our big
battles, where we have usually it's, three
or five judges, and the consensus on that.
And then the final factor is anyone
without money also gets a vote.
Anyone can go and participate
in a poll for the third factor.
So we do have a portion where even
someone with billions and billions
of dollars, if the consensus overall
is that that person didn't win,
they won't win the Wave Wars battle.
You can go to Wave Wars with
a Z, W-A-V-E W-A-R-Z .com,
and you can start up a community
battle, and that one percent
can go to whomever you want.
So one of the things we've done is we've
done benefit battles, where the portion
of the funds that we're getting as
profits are actually going to a charity,
a public good that we, see as a benefit.
And what we've done is we've brought
a bunch of musicians together where
they've donated their time and music,
and all of the winnings, and any
fiat that's donated during that,
event can get given to that charity.
Adam Miller: Can AI agents make music
and participate in the battles, or
is that not part of the idea here?
Zaal: We do have, uh, AI-assisted
musicians that we're running an AI music
tournament right now, where we have
musicians that are using , um, AI tooling,
for themselves, and are leveraging
that and sharing that and trying to put
themselves as musicians to new heights.
We don't have a AI agent making music
that is a part of Wave Wars yet.
We have 11 shows a week on X spaces, so
it's really easy to tell, if they're a
real individual or a musician that way.
If a bot did come in and share,
I imagine there would be a bunch
of sleuths of Wave Wars looking
out and trying to figure that.
And I think it'd be an
interesting, piece of the lore.
That'll be looked upon really poorly.
Adam Miller: Nice All right.
So before we turn to our final
segment, which is the legal
structure of your future AI agent,
projects, I think you have a music
festival coming up, sometime soon.
What's the details about that?
Zaal: So we started Zao Festivals
in 2024 when we were starting to
progressively decentralize, and we
just wanted to get our name, our brand
out there and our musicians out there.
So we hosted a event called Zao
Palooza for NFT NYC in 2024,
with six people who we had never
met until the day of the event.
We hadn't seen the venue until the day
of the event, and we had a phenomenal
time and came out even, on, in terms
of money, and then we spent the next
six months, planning for Zao Chella
in Miami, trying to do anything and
everything, experimenting on a lot of
different ideas to which I would say we
succeeded in many and failed in many more.
Instead of creating a brand-building
event where we are a loss leader, how do
we create a business around, an event?
When I moved to Maine a year and a
half ago- I found that I wanted to
do something to help cultivate, our
energy, our international energy
in this global music space, into
an event, live in my home town.
It's gonna be called ZaoStock.
It's gonna be in October this year, 2026,
gonna be our first year we are right
next to Acadia National Park, so I would
love to eventually create a pseudo summer
camp of sorts where we can just invite
people to, touch grass, quite literally.
My pitch is, "Come join us in Maine."
We're gonna be live streaming it to
raise money, from all over the world
to our little small 8,000 person town
of Ellsworth, Maine, the gateway to
Acadia, and show off my musicians.
In all kinds of different genres.
It's ZaoStock.
Adam Miller: So let's talk
about your AI agent plans.
The legal capability to wrap an AI
agent, in a legal structure has existed
for some time, even if it's, piecemeal
with the Marshall Islands being one
of the places that it's possible.
And decentralized AI agents have
technically existed for some time,
although they're challenging and,
the infrastructure is very new.
And as we talked about earlier
in the news segment, no one's
done much yet with this concept.
For you, what is it that makes you
excited about the prospect of a
digital LLC with an AI agent as its
manager or given real rights and
responsibilities within a legal entity?
Zaal: Yeah, so I have created an,
an agent, called the Zool Bot.
That I feel as though is the start
of what we can do with social agents
and blockchain by having a Farcaster
account, it has a wallet and a social
identity that it can do things with.
And I think with those, just those two
things, it can actually create many things
with the instruction of the community.
So XOL, the XOL bot is, an AI
agent that can help the Zao
infrastructure as a whole.
The ultimate idea with the, the XOL is to
create, tokens, legal entities, whatever
we need for our overall community.
It can be an entity
owned by the community.
The reason no one's done it is because
people aren't prepared, for it because
they don't have the structure that it
makes sense for, whereas the Zao does.
It's actually perfect for us.
We need something like this to have
the legal framework situated such that
Instead of having our DAO try and have
a treasury, we're gonna be able to give
the sovereign agent the money to grow
itself and just give our social capital
feedback to it, where an individual that
has five Zao respect saying something
to the XOL bot will not nearly capture
as much into its memory as, a founding
member that has 3,000, the ability
of creating this weighted system of
actually understanding who's in the
community and actively contributing.
Adam Miller: are you saying that one
of the challenges is basically if
everyone controls the money through
normal governance, it's hard to
manage, so instead give the AI agent
legal responsibility over that money
and have people engage with the AI
agent, but the agent decides what
to actually do with that money?
Zaal: And I believe that, like you said,
if we move some of the friction points
that are there with human coordination,
in DAOs especially, to the AI agent making
decisions and then asking for reassurance
on those decisions by human input, but
not being stopped by not enough people
giving that input, we can create something
that's not been possible before,, All
Adam Miller: right, Zal,
this has been phenomenal.
Where can people find you
on the web and on social?
And feel free to promote any
of the projects or events that
you've been talking about.
Zaal: Yeah, for sure.
So my name is Zal, so my
username on Farcaster is Z-A-A-L.
That's where I like to be
contacted if you have a Farcaster.
If you don't, uh, @bettercallzaal on X.
You can catch me at info@thezaal.com
if you wanna shoot an email over that way.
Wave Wars, you can check out,
like I said earlier, wavewars.com.
We have 11 shows a week.
Definitely the right place to tap
into if you're a musician or wanna get
involved with our music and crypto side.
Thanks again for your time, Adam.
Adam Miller: All right, and you can
find me on X at zero X thriller.
I am on Farcaster at The Thriller.
MIDAO is MIDAO DS on X or midao.org.
And again, check out our
legal guide for AI agent
incorporation at midao.org/guides.
And, to the audience, are you
thinking about starting a DAO Web3
project or decentralized AI agent?
If so, just DAO it