Hello, everyone, and welcome to Just DAOIT,
the podcast for people starting DAOs.
I'm Adam Miller, and I'm your host.
This week,
we have Arnold Almeida on the show.
Really excited for you to
get to meet him shortly.
As always,
we're going to do the first half
of the show as the Just DAOIT News Report,
where I will summarize
recent DAO news for our
guests and for the audience,
and then we'll each give
our takes on the story.
What does it mean for people
starting DAOs?
Do we agree or disagree with the author,
etc. ?
So before we get to the news report,
Arnold,
would you please give a brief
introduction to yourself
and in particular,
what makes you an authority on DAOs?
Cool.
Thanks, Adam, for the introduction.
So I'm an Australian from Sydney,
living in London at the moment.
And back in the day,
I heavily got into Bitcoin.
In fact,
I invested in one of the first
sort of Bitcoin ATMs in Australia.
But guys,
don't worry about hacking me
because I spent all my
Bitcoin buying whiskey
sours at Room 77 in Berlin.
That's a little bit of the crypto history.
What makes me an authority on DAOs?
In the last three years,
I've spent my time coordinating DAOs,
writing over 30 proposals
and actually using the DAO
as a mechanism to rescue a project.
Through that experience,
that has led me to
learn a lot about DAOs,
participate in various different DAOs,
and form my own opinions
that has led me to build my
product at the moment,
which is Lighthouse.
But we can get to that later.
Interesting.
I have a brief preview.
What's the elevator pitch?
For Lighthouse?
Yeah.
Okay.
So Lighthouse is a tool that...
aggregates multiple DAO governance systems,
such as Snapshot, Open Zeppelin Governor.
And what we're trying to do
is make it really simple
for normal users who may
not be familiar with crypto
to learn and participate in DAOs.
Love it.
That's awesome.
Cool.
Well, as you know,
I have used Lighthouse
myself and I could see a
good use case for both
people new to DAOs and
helping them get into DAOs
and also for someone who's
very into DAOs already and
just trying to make their life easier.
We will dive into Lighthouse
in great detail in about
half an hour after the Just
Dawit news report.
And then also, in case anyone doesn't know,
you mentioned your journey
started in Room 77 in Berlin.
For anyone who doesn't know, what is that?
So Room 77 was one of the first...
Bitcoin cafes, I believe,
that actually accepted Bitcoin.
So I had initially bought Bitcoin over,
I think,
local Bitcoins through some funny
transfer, bank transfer,
or I think maybe even cash.
And I was traveling in Europe at the time,
and I stumbled across Room 77,
and they were like, hey,
we accept Bitcoin.
And yeah,
I spent the Bitcoin that I
purchased on a good
afternoon at Whiskey's house.
nice awesome all right cool
thanks arnold so again we
will get into in the
in-depth interview with
arnold about lighthouse and
his background uh just
after the news report so
for now let's dive into the
just out news report with
the first story of the week
which is a post on x and
the post is from uh crypto uh zainab
Maybe pronouncing it wrong.
There will be a link in the show notes.
And here's the post.
I'll read and then summarize.
In a world where DAOs are dull and boring,
one protocol dared to be different.
Dex Network.
And that's spelled D-E-X-E Network,
which is also a Twitter handle.
The DAO game changer you've
been waiting for is here.
So what is Dex?
Well, Dex is,
I'm just gonna continue
reading a little bit more,
an AI powered
permissionless launchpad for
building high level Web3
products across different chains.
It's got all the tools you
need to manage
decentralized communities
and assets like a boss.
DAO constructor on steroids.
Imagine Lego blocks, but for DAOs.
DEX has got a library of 50
plus smart contracts that
let you build custom DAOs
faster than you can say decentralization.
From governance to treasury management,
they've got you covered.
Governance that slaps.
Forget one size fits all.
With DEX,
you can create galaxy brain
governance models.
Use tokens, NFTs,
or even soul bound tokens to vote.
Mix and match like a true degenerate.
The post goes on,
the thread goes on to talk
about treasury management,
to talk about rewards in DAOs,
to talk about the native token of DEX,
this new protocol,
and also talks about the
importance of customization.
So I thought this was really
exciting because, and Arnold,
maybe we've talked about
this a bit offline,
but I realized recently
that in the three years or
so I've been in the DAO space, you know,
initially I was going to
build DAO tooling like Dex, right?
That was my plan.
I was like, oh, that's what DAOs need.
I'm going to go build it.
I saw a lot of people
building DAO tooling.
And then I came across the
opportunity to start my DAO
to focus on the legal side of DAOs,
legal entity side of DAOs.
But looking back,
I think I'm either
unimpressed by how much
progress has been made
or I'm not aware of the
progress that has been made
in the DAO tooling space, like for DAO.
And I don't even mean stuff
like Lighthouse that, you know, well,
we can talk more about that too,
but like platforms for
actually launching DAOs.
So I'm excited to see DEX again,
it's D-E-X-E network.
I'm curious to meet some
folks who have used their technology
It certainly sounds very compelling.
And I certainly think there
is a need for more DAO
platforms so that anyone
who's thinking about starting a DAO,
whatever the approach you
want to take for your DAO,
that you have a tool that
helps you do it.
Because most people are not
going to write smart contracts, right?
Most people that want to start a DAO,
either there's going to be
a tool that helps them do
it or they're not going to start a DAO.
They'll go do something else.
So I'm excited to see what
Dex is up to here.
What do you think, Arnold?
Yeah, I think...
It's definitely an innovation.
Composing DAO tooling is
actually very complex and
probably cost prohibitive
to a lot of people,
which is why in the last
three to five years,
there's probably only been
a small handful of players
who've been able to deliver
on that promise really well.
And there's a really great
divide in how people want to run a DAO.
At the moment,
you would say it's either
gasless or on chain.
And I think one of the
interesting points with
DexE over here is that they
are alluding to an AI automation.
So that is also signaling
this idea of a cybernetic organization.
But with a lot of turnkey solutions,
and again,
I haven't looked into this protocol,
so I may be wrong.
I think the way most
organizations are structured,
they're very diverse,
and each of the
organizations have their own objectives.
And as such,
they might have different
internal hierarchies that
need to be purpose built
for that organization.
So I think
Yeah,
it will be interesting if their suite
of smart contracts enable that.
And at the moment,
if we want to compare it to
what's currently on the market,
we are having to leverage
different protocols to
achieve the same outcome.
Now,
whether you think it's a good or a bad
thing, I'm not sure.
But I do believe in the
power of composability.
And as the industry matures,
we'll be seeing more things
that we probably want to
compose that haven't been thought of yet.
So that's my take on that.
Yeah,
it seems like everyone or most people
in the DAO space are
probably agreed on the
importance of composability for DAO tools,
right?
Whether you're building a
big tool with 50 parts,
And then maybe people want
to pick and choose parts
and bring in another part.
Or if you're just building a
component or a part or a
platform or a layer or whatever,
either way,
it seems like most people are
looking forward to and
building towards a world of
composability.
Have you found that with Lighthouse?
I know we haven't talked a
lot about what Lighthouse does,
but have you found that
when you want to...
support different DAOs from
different ecosystems that
the tooling is actually as
composable as it would ideally be?
I wouldn't say it's composable,
but so far we have
integrated with Snapshot
and we've done integrations
with DAOs that leverage
variations of the Open
Zeppelin governor contract.
And even within that space,
what we've actually seen is that
there is such a diversity in terms of how,
even just like snapshot, that's one tool,
but snapshot has this
interesting feature called strategies,
which means they can layer
different ways based on
that organization.
So for example,
you could have a root ERC20 token,
but people might also have
a staking token,
which gives them additional
voting rights and whatnot.
And that varies quite drastically.
So even when we did our analysis of,
the top 300 DAOs, for example,
there was such a diversity
in that small set,
which makes it quite a
challenge for an indexer
like ourselves to create
consistent tooling and
deliver a consistent interface.
So yeah,
that's something to definitely consider.
Yeah, interesting.
Was there also diversity in
terms of whether the top
300 DAOs are using a
platform at all versus writing,
even if they're using open source,
but writing their own smart contracts,
uploading their own Zeppelin contracts,
stuff like that?
Yeah, there was diversity there as well.
So a lot of,
even between straight up ERC20
contracts that had balance of,
a lot of DAOs,
because they had specific implementations,
they had custom contracts
and then there would be a
strategy that would sit on
top of that custom contract
in order to deliver voting power,
which is the sort of term
used to calculate how much
a person is allowed to vote
within the snapshot system.
Yeah.
Yep.
Cool.
Okay.
Awesome.
All right.
The next story of the week.
This is actually a press
release from Tally on Business Wire.
And the headline is Tally
unveils new liquid staked
governance protocol.
Token holders will be able
to stake in the Tally
protocol and receive a
Tally liquid staked token
that earns rewards,
can be used for financial
utility anywhere in crypto,
and allows them to maintain
their governance power.
So Tally is a one of the, you know,
I'll say clearly seems to
be one of the leading DAO platforms,
one of the leading DAO tooling providers.
I have to admit,
I've never come across a
DAO that I've been part of that,
at least to my knowledge, is on Tally.
Maybe they use Tally in the
background and then you
just don't see it in the foreground.
But they're everywhere.
I mean, you see them sponsoring big events,
you see announcements like this.
So I think they're doing a lot.
And part of this
announcement is that
they're not just doing this
for themselves in terms of
allowing for staking.
This is a feature anyone can
use now who's building a DAO on Tally.
And so another good example
of more capabilities being
added to DAO platforms and DAO tooling,
certainly very exciting.
And I think staking is a
good example of the kind of
mechanism that I don't
think existed before crypto,
before DAOs in organizations, right?
Like Microsoft never said, well,
if you take your Microsoft stock
and you stake it and you
lock it up for a year,
we're going to give you a
discount on your next
Microsoft purchase or startups don't.
I mean, you're either in or you're out,
right?
You have stock or you don't.
I don't think there's ever
been an equivalent to staking,
but it's one of the things
that people are doing a lot
of experimentation with in
DAOs and crypto and this
concept that there's a
potential difference
between a person who just
wants to hold a token
And then maybe a person who
wants to stake it and lock
it up or do something else with it.
So I think this is really cool.
What do you think, Arnold?
I thought it was extremely interesting.
For the first time,
we can still maintain voting power and.
effectively have a means of
re-hypothecating the token
which can then be used for
additional yield now that's
very complicated and I'm
not really sure how that
translates to security look
security laws or whatnot
but I think we've seen
examples of this with curve
um when you sort of lock
your curve tokens and then
you get ve curve which
gives you a boost on the
sort of governance voting
power I think if I'm if I'm
sounds right yeah so
there's definitely an
upside where you retain
your voting power um but I'm just
Yeah, it's a new model.
I don't know what's going to
come out of it,
but it's an interesting experiment.
So really excited to see
what happens there.
Yeah,
and I guess maybe it's as simple as just,
in some cases,
if previously you might
have staked a token and
you're just giving it to a smart contract,
and now you no longer have
a standardized token
form representation of the
fact that you have staked
in that smart contract.
You just don't have your
token anymore now with this
kind of liquid staking
feature and not that it's
new and the others have it,
but now you're getting a
representation that you
have done that staking.
And so then you can go use
that representation,
that representation form
in other ways, borrow against it,
or sell it, or whatever.
So that seems generally good.
But actually,
let me use this as a segue to
the next story of the week,
because we actually have a
story about Curve.
And let me start by reading the headline,
and then I'll connect it
back to what we were just talking about.
So this is actually from a
website called Blockanami.
The logo looks a lot like Blockworks.
I'm kind of curious if maybe
there's a connection here.
But the headline is,
Curve DAO token CRV price
plunges 30% amid founders liquidation.
The price of Curve DAO token
plummeted by nearly 30% as
Curve finance founder
Michael Egorov faced
liquidation on his on-chain
loan positions.
Okay, so what happened here,
and this is actually,
this story has come up
before at least once,
I think about half a year ago,
the same thing happened.
And what's happening is one
of the founders of Curve,
who holds a large number of the tokens,
took those tokens and
borrowed a ton of money against them.
And this is all out in the open,
which is good,
although I'm not sure if
anyone really noticed it at first.
But what happened was the
value of the collateral
fell enough that there's a
risk that the Curve DAO
founder's tokens are going
to get liquidated,
which means the Curve
tokens could get liquidated.
They could get forcefully taken from him.
I mean,
they're already locked in smart
contracts.
taken away from him and then
sold on the open market,
which will drive the price
of the Curve token down.
So the reason I say this is connected,
I guess actually in this case,
you don't even need liquid
staking to make this happen.
You're actually just taking
the governance token and
borrowing against it.
But the liquid staking example
seems to be just kind of
another way of
financializing something so
that you can do this if you want to,
right?
Whereas before you could
have a DAO that says, all right,
by staking your token,
we have your token.
Now you cannot go borrow
against it because we have it, right?
And it's ours until you take it back.
You can't do anything with it.
Now,
if you provide a liquid staking
derivative or token in
exchange for that staked token,
now you have something you
can go borrow against.
So for better or for worse,
you're kind of
reintroducing that
financial nature of that
arrangement that you have with the DAO.
But again,
this story is more just about
something that I don't know
how we could ever get away from.
And I don't even know if
there's anything wrong with it.
I mean,
how do you get away from the fact
that sometimes you're going
to reward people with a lot
of money or a lot of shares
or a lot of tokens,
and then that person might
go sell them or borrow against them?
I think this is like a
really good lesson in accountability.
should any one person
regardless of their status
within a protocol have the
ability to single-handedly
crash a protocol and this
is really a lesson in risk
management I would say so I
think we could use this as
just a lesson for how we can
build better checks and
balances in the future to
minimize this risk.
I'm not saying that what he did was wrong.
It's just that let's also
bear in mind like Curve is one of the
most interesting and most
innovative protocols that came out.
And at the time,
we probably weren't
thinking about how this could be done.
And really, credit to,
I believe it was the Aave
team who signaled and first
identified this existential
risk and created
but perhaps some proposals
to guard against that.
And also to, I believe, Michael's credit,
he also was trying to fix it as well.
And I think there was
perhaps a commitment to
ensure that if that did happen.
So I think people are working against it,
but I guess this is one of those things,
it's a lesson learned and
let's guard against it in the future.
Yeah.
I mean,
is there any way to guard against
founders taking a big cut?
I mean, I feel like now with crypto,
we have founders taking a smaller cut,
which is good.
You know,
maybe previously the average whatnot.
I mean, every situation is so different,
but maybe a normal cut.
corporate startup,
the founders might end up
with half or a little bit
less of the company in the long run.
Maybe less if you end up
actually like going public
and stuff like that.
I think in crypto,
it's more common to see the
founders taking like 15% or so.
Although you may have like
the actual founders at 15%
and then the investors at
15% and then like the early
contributors at 15%.
And now maybe you could
argue that in some ways the
founders have half
if it's just a bigger definition,
a wider definition of the word founders,
but it seems like we're
moving in the right direction, but I mean,
will we ever get away from
founders having 10 or 15%?
And therefore that's enough
that if they do something
stupid in their personal life,
it could tank,
it could harm the whole project.
i think just this comes down
to value alignment so I
think in the last cycle um
it's quite common to see
that traditional pie chart
with the 15 advisors
insiders and whatnot but
what that really does it
creates misaligned
incentives because you're
raising a lot of money up
front and again we come
back to the idea of accountability
So if we are emitting or
creating those tokens at
the token generation event,
and even with unlocks,
which are traditionally, let's just say,
I believe like one year or even less.
If you look at traditional analogs,
like most people,
most founders don't have a
lot of the equity vested
until three or five years.
So I think...
if we start just
re-examining how we can
have more sustainable
emissions and how we can
align that with
deliverables of projects
again we can have better
outcomes for industry
because there's a lot of
great ideas and there's a
lot of capital floating
around but I think a lot of
people have been really burnt by the
promises that people have
just failed to deliver.
And that creates real
barriers to entry for
people who are trying to do
good things and as such
can't raise capital because
of these bad experiences.
Yeah.
Interesting.
All right.
Let's turn to the next story of the week.
This one is another post on
X and it's from A16Z Crypto
from the former Andreessen
Horowitz venture capital firm.
And the post is interested
in learning about DAOs.
Here are some resources, a thread.
So this thread,
I'm not going to go through them all,
but I just actually want to
call people's attention to
this thread because they've
written a lot of really
interesting articles about
DAOs from different perspectives,
ranging from research on
experimenting with governance.
Certainly one of the really
interesting things we're doing with DAOs,
you could say we're
experimenting with organizations.
or the governance of organizations,
but also governance in general.
The things we're learning about democracy,
the things we're learning about voting,
the things we're learning
about how groups of people
coordinate on a global
scale digitally can be
applied to any time we're
trying to govern anything,
not just organizations.
And so I think that's one
really interesting article.
Relatedly,
one article is about using DAOs
to study political institutions at scale.
So I think that's related and interesting.
The effects of retroactive
rewards on participating in
online governance is a video.
The DUNA, an oasis for DAOs,
is an article about a legal
entity called a DUNA that
was created by some of
ASICC's lawyers in Wyoming that goes live,
I think, in a few days.
And designing reward systems
for Web3 governance.
the evolution of decentralized governance.
And then one I just wanted
to call out in particular
is called Machiavelli for DAOs,
Principles for Fixing
Decentralized Governance.
And I actually have not had
the chance to read it yet.
I have to admit the whole
A16Z blog is in all caps
and it is hard for me to read.
And I actually sent an email
one time to one of the authors, like, hey,
do you realize your article
was accidentally published all in,
it's not all caps,
it's every word is capitalized.
It's just, I don't know,
hard for me to read.
So I haven't read it.
But I love the idea of just saying,
I think Machiavelli was
someone who's known for being
harsh and even cruel, but I think at least,
especially from a deep
philosophical perspective,
I think it was trying to be
very logical and rational about, hey,
let's look at the
incentives of the different
people in the system.
Let's look at how human
behavior really works.
And then let's design our
systems to get the outcome that we want.
And then some people would say, well,
that's cruel.
Why aren't you designing
systems for more of a
social good perspective or something?
Although I think you could
do that in a Machiavellian way too.
So I'm looking forward to
reading it in more detail
and seeing how you can
apply Machiavelli to DAOs.
And again,
just recommend people check out
this thread if they're
looking for more resources about DAOs.
Arnold,
anything that stood out to you
about this thread or any of
the articles they posted?
Yeah, look,
I love all the A16Z DAO governance stuff.
I'm also a big follower of
all the governance
literature that comes out
of Optimism as well.
But one of the things that I
find when I'm trying to DAO
pill people is that a lot
of this literature is quite dense.
And for people who are embedded in,
I guess,
traditional thinking or
traditional structures,
my favorite go-to is an
article that came from the
World Economic Forum.
It was published in January 2023.
And they have a really good primer.
And it's a good segue to illustrate that,
hey,
there are serious organizations
thinking about DAOs.
these are the problems that
are identified.
And that usually is a good
precursor to then landing in like, hey,
what should I read next?
And then, yeah, going on to the A16Z,
more hardcore theoretical stuff.
So that's how I usually doubt people.
I love that.
And I remember talking about
that World Economic Forum
report on the show some time ago.
And I'm looking at I think
there may have been even more than one,
but I just pulled it up
while you were speaking.
There's a one paper they
wrote called Decentralized
Autonomous Organization Toolkit.
from January of 2023.
And the contents are, what are DAOs?
Why do they matter?
How do they work?
How are they governed?
What are the legal structures and issues?
This whole thing was written
from a policy perspective.
So the in conclusion is,
what are their
recommendations for
governments and for other policy?
But yeah, really interesting.
I never would have guessed
and I had forgotten that
the World Economic Forum
could publish such an
interesting and useful
report,
but I think they clearly have done so.
So that's a good recommendation.
Yeah, I think like
The fact that they're
thinking about this already,
I personally believe that
DAOs have an end game in
civics and public policy.
All the work and research
that we're doing now and
the experimentation,
I think eventually will
trickle down through to
local and federal governments.
I don't know on what timescale, but yeah,
that's what I guess
motivates me to do a lot of
the work that we're doing.
It's really interesting.
You know,
when I think about like
governance in my life,
I've got as an American,
I think most people have the same stack,
which is you've got your city,
your state and your federal government.
And each of those will have
an election up to once a year.
Of course,
there are other ways of
participating other than
just voting in the election.
And then I think many people,
myself included at least,
are involved in governing
some nonprofits or just
like community-based organizations.
You know, we have on the island I live on,
We have an unofficial
homeowners association
effectively where I'm on
the committee and we make
decisions together and then
a couple of nonprofits I'm involved in.
And it all feels relatively
manageable because there's
not a lot of it, right?
It's like these three
geographic groups and then
maybe a few nonprofits and other orgs.
I find the challenge that
I've had in the DAO space
is that you end up wanting
to be part of a lot.
Because the cost of entry
and the cost to participate
at some level is so low.
You just go buy an NFT or
buy a few tokens or just
join a Discord or hit a
button or whatever it is.
Now you're part of an organization.
Now you have voting rights.
And that clearly demands a
new approach to how we
think about the things we
govern in our lives and how
to keep track of them,
how to participate in them efficiently.
And it does seem clear that
that will be applied to
these traditional forms of
governance and that that
might actually allow us to
participate in many more
forms of governance in our lives,
even the traditional form.
I mean,
once city and state governments and
your average day to day
nonprofit or community organization,
certainly once they're all on chain,
now they get to take
advantage of all the cool
stuff we're building for
DAOs and on chain governance.
And that should make them
easier and more pleasurable
to be a part of.
Yeah, no, for sure.
I think the fact that we can align,
at the moment, cultural interests.
So if you're involved in artists, manga,
music,
these are all great petri dishes
for how we can sort of see what works,
what doesn't.
And yeah,
I think this is a great time for
experimentation, and we really want
to sort of enable people to
start these communities.
And we have them already.
Like we have little skating skate clubs,
or if you're part of a local co-op,
even like a gardening
center where you have a community garden,
you manage finances,
you're trying to work out
who gets the next plot of land.
All these things apply to
have an analog to a type of DAO.
So yeah,
I'm just really excited to see all
the different types of
things that manifest.
Cool.
All right.
Turning to the next story of the week.
This one is from altcoinbuzz.io.
And I'm noticing the lowbrow
nature of a lot of the
brands we've been quoting from today.
But hopefully they're reliable.
Either way,
I know there's some truth to this story.
I've seen it other places.
The headline is Julian
Assange freed with 11k ETH.
Assange DAO's victory.
Actually,
there's things here I don't know
if I can trust and things
that I know I can trust.
And so I want to dig into those.
But the subtitle or the
subheader is Julian Assange,
the founder of WikiLeaks,
has finally achieved freedom,
largely due to the generous
contributions made by
supporters to the Assange DAO.
OK,
here's the part that definitely is true,
is that Julian Assange
reached a plea deal with
the United States
government a few days ago,
maybe yesterday.
I'm not sure.
Recently,
where he basically he's pleading
guilty and his plea deal
was he only has to serve
the time he already served
in jail in the UK awaiting
the decision on his extradition.
And so effectively now he's free.
It's over.
The part about this article
that even the article says
it doesn't know for sure.
So I'm surprised that the
headline makes it sound so
confident is actually
someone posted on X saying
time for the organization
that raised all this ETH
and supposedly was helping
free him to tell us what
they've been up to this
whole time because we have
no freaking clue.
And I brought this up on the
show a couple of months ago, too.
tens,
hundreds of millions of dollars
raised to this legal fund.
And there's no transparency.
No one knows who's in charge.
No one.
I mean, maybe someone does, actually.
If you do, obviously, please tell us.
But there's been no
transparency as to where
all this money went and how
it's being spent.
And so I think, actually,
we have no clue if this
16,593 Ethereum had
anything to do with freeing Assange.
I sure hope so.
I think I contributed to it.
I
contributed to some stuff
like that so I'm really
curious to see what we find
out in the coming weeks but
I wouldn't be surprised if
there ends up being some
kind of conspiracy here you
give someone that kind of
money with no oversight
even if it's on chain and
it's just and actually I
think I think we know that
a lot of it was spent I
think we just have no clue
where it went where did it
go yeah for sure
So I think, well, firstly, let's just,
I guess, celebrate the win.
So if Assange Dow actually
did contribute to...
Julian Assange's release
because let's just say that
they knew he had the
capital to fight them
legally indefinitely.
That's a really interesting
example of how
decentralized coordination
can work in our favor.
Now that it's achieved its primary goal,
this is really interesting
because DAOs are
in permanent structures.
So the question is, how do they wind down?
How do they report on where
the money was spent?
Maybe they couldn't report
on how they were fighting
or doing certain things,
because that could have
jeopardized the legal case.
But let's try and be
optimistic in the sense
that they will have some
sort of transparency.
They will use the funds to
provide a breakdown and
then wind it down in a way
that gives the company
additional credibility.
Because if they don't, we don't want that.
Yeah,
maybe tens of millions of dollars
potentially
misused but you're right we
should assume the best I
just I don't know I mean
should we really assume the
best I just feel I feel
like we get burned a lot by
doing that um and is what's
is there really an argument
why they couldn't have been
transparent this whole time
like what tell it like
telling the world we paid
this law firm to to go
fight for assange is going
to cause a problem for the
lawsuit I just find that to
be a bit of a stretch
we don't know we can
speculate who knows what
hands were greased um who
knows what strategies
needed to be in place um
maybe they'll make a
documentary and a movie out
of it and maybe from that
will go towards fighting
you know um other activists
who deserve not to be in jail
Yeah.
Makes sense.
You know, all this reminds me too, that,
you know, and we used to,
I used to talk about this a
lot on the show two years ago was we, we,
we hear about, Oh,
like Assange Dow raised whatever,
10,000 ETH, but then is it really a debt?
And at the time, especially, but even now,
you know,
a lot of times people raise money into,
let's say a juice box,
especially at the time.
Although I think people are
certainly still using juice box, but
You can set up a juice box
so that all the money just
gets sent to me.
Right.
And so just the fact that
you're on juice box and
saying raising money for Assange now,
that is not enough
information to know that
you can trust where the money is going.
You know,
you've really got to do your due
diligence and know what
you're getting into.
And so, you know, just I mean, I'm curious,
you know,
supposedly there was a multi-sig.
Who was on the multi-sig?
And even if it's a multi-sig
of three people,
should they ever have called that a DAO?
Was that really a DAO?
Or were you just giving
money to a foundation that
was going to... Just
because it's in crypto,
it doesn't mean it's a DAO.
Yeah, that's true.
Actually,
that reminds me of something that
I read recently,
maybe in the last week or so.
And I think it was to do
with the Indian COVID Relief Fund.
And a lot of money was donated there.
um to that fund to help um
india and one of the things
that was interesting is
that in order to sort of
promote transparency they
employed one of like one of
the big three accounting
firms kpmg or someone else
ey and they have a report
that is published on a
monthly basis to
demonstrate where the money
is being spent
So I think that's a really, if it's true,
please fact check me.
But I think that's like a
really good initiative when
big fundraisers like this happen.
And yeah,
people can see how the money is
being allocated.
Yep.
All right, let's turn to the next story.
This one is from the Dow Times,
which I highly recommend.
And the story is, the headline is,
Hedera Abandons Decentralization,
Removes Community Nodes from Roadmap.
Okay,
so Hedera is a very math-oriented
blockchain.
They're all very math-oriented,
but Hedera is like a
supposedly super high-tech blockchain.
It's faster, it's different.
uses a different underlying
consensus technology or at
least data technology called a DAG,
a directed axillic graph.
And it's been in development
for a long time.
I don't know if they get a lot of usage.
I might hold some of the tokens myself.
I think I've always been a
little bit optimistic about
what they might be able to achieve.
But anyways,
the story is about how today
the network is operated by
31 multinational
corporations hand selected
by the Hedera Foundation.
And they had on their
roadmap until recently that
soon they were going to
introduce many more nodes
run by the community as
opposed to these
multinational corporations.
and and I just put the
community in air quotes
because I think that's you
know it depends how you
define it I mean those
corporations are part of
the community too um but um
clearly they were planning
on giving control over the
network to a wider group of
people and they removed it
from the roadmap so of
course we don't have all
the details maybe it's
going to go back on the
roadmap tomorrow but what's
interesting to me about
this is just a question of isn't
running something
collaboratively on a
blockchain between 31
multinational corporations,
actually a huge step in the
right direction.
That's actually way more
decentralized than one
company running an entire system,
which is how everything
always worked until now.
I mean, yeah, you could argue, yeah,
it's one company,
but there's like five
intermediaries and there's
reconciliation.
Yeah,
all of that is because we can't trust
that one company,
so you need all this other
stuff going on.
Spreading out,
think of the blockchain as
an alternative to AWS.
It's obviously not exactly that,
but in this case,
it's either you're running
the whole system in AWS or
you have 31 different
companies running it using
a consensus mechanism on a
blockchain where everything, by the way,
can be validated by anyone
who wants to use the blockchain.
It's just the 31
organizations are the ones
choosing the transactions
and building the blocks and
stuff like that.
To me, that's actually quite good.
That's what I wanted to
highlight about this is
that it's actually there's
a lot of power.
I think same goes for Solana, by the way.
And I don't remember.
I've never been as into Solana.
I certainly hold the tokens.
I'm a believer,
at least for the past year or two,
if I wasn't before.
But Solana, too,
has run on a relatively
small number of nodes,
probably Binance Smart Chain, too.
But I think it's still...
30 or 100 or a few hundred.
And that's orders of
magnitude more
decentralization than any
piece of software that came
before the blockchain.
So that's the point I wanted to make.
But Arnold,
if you want to respond to that
or anything about this story.
Yeah,
I don't know much about Hedera
specifically,
but to your point on 30
nodes is better than one,
I totally agree because
What that gives us is the
ability to verify that the
information that's being
put out there is indeed accurate.
And that goes for any type of data, right?
So just using, I guess,
my product as an example,
I have to index a lot of
on-chain proposal data, voting data,
and I need to service that to my users.
you know,
what's stopping me from maybe
injecting the wrong
sentiment and whatnot.
I'm theoretically proving
and aggregating all that
information from the blockchain.
And in theory,
anyone else should be able
to reproduce that and
provide a similar proof.
So even if it's not
decentralized in the sense
that there's 100 nodes or 200,
as long as there's more
than one actor being able
to sufficiently prove the
authenticity of that data,
I think it's a good thing.
Yep.
Love it.
All right.
Let's do one more story for the week.
I've got a pick from the two
I had on my list.
Let's do this article from
friends with benefits, FWB dot help.
I think that's friends with benefits.
Yeah.
Friends with benefit websites.
That's,
this is their blog and by Austin Roby.
The headline of the article is, uh,
what co-ops and DAOs can
learn from each other.
The best framework for
coordinating and making a
difference may not be a
choice between the two models,
but a blend of both.
So we actually,
Arnold and I happened to be
on a different DAO related
call earlier today where
the topic came up of co-ops and DAOs.
And...
You know,
the point I was making earlier
was similar, I think,
to what's in this article,
which is DAOs and co-ops
are two different things.
But sometimes you have a DAO
that is a co-op and
sometimes you have a co-op that is a DAO.
You can also have a DAO
that's not a co-op.
You can also have a co-op
that's not a DAO.
And in particular, to me,
the biggest difference is
that what makes a co-op is
like a particular kind of philosophy.
It's a particular legal
structure in a lot of places where...
Ownership is distributed a
very particular way.
Governance is done a very particular way.
And most DAOs just don't do
things that exact way,
even if there's a lot of
kind of overlap in some of
the values between the two communities.
And some DAOs do things that way.
And similarly, most co-ops are off-chain.
I mean,
most co-ops have been around for
hundreds of years.
in various forms,
most of them are just purely on paper.
And I see no reason to call those DAOs.
They're just co-ops.
If they want to come use
on-chain smart contracts to
do their token to track membership,
I'd say, yeah, now it's a DAO.
I think you have a different opinion,
didn't I?
I think you did have a different opinion,
so I definitely want to
give you the chance to share that.
But to me,
the most important thing to
maybe emphasize here is
there is a history of
people trying to build more democratic,
more fair,
more social good oriented types
of organizations.
And some,
maybe much of what's happening in
the DAO industry and space
is related to that movement.
But I would say also a lot is not.
To me,
I think that's the most important thing.
But yeah, Arnold, do you still disagree?
Do you have a different way
of looking at it?
I mean, disagree is a strong word.
I just have, I guess...
a different angle, right?
I do believe that co-ops
provide a really good
analogue for how we can think about DAOs.
DAOs in comparison are
relatively new and some of
the principles that you've
mentioned that are defined
in co-ops may not necessarily be
alive in DAOs yet just
because we haven't gotten to them yet.
So, for example,
I'm going to reference an
article from Andy Aghast
from Hyper Co-op.
She wrote a great article on
seven cooperative
principles and how they can
translate into DAOs.
And in my opinion,
I think they do have a
almost one-to-one analogue
with DAOs from that co-op paradigm.
We don't necessarily have
all those principles
manifesting in tangible operation manuals,
but I think it's something
that we can use as a
handbook to strive towards.
Cool.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
And all right.
Well, so with that,
let's let's conclude the
just out news reports.
I'm going to do a brief segue,
including a brief ad,
and then we will turn to
the featured guest
interview with Arnold at last.
And we'll learn more about
him and his work in Web3.
The brief ad is for my company, MyDAO,
is the sponsor of the show.
MyDAO is the company that
works with the government
of the Marshall Islands,
a sovereign nation in the South Pacific,
on developing what we...
The goal is to make it the
best legal entity and legal
framework in the world for DAOs and Web3.
So if anyone is thinking
about where to form your
Web3 or DAO-related...
a company, where to form your legal entity,
please reach out to us at MyDAO.
You can find us at mydao.org.
That's M-I-D-A-O.org.
And similarly,
if you're looking for a lawyer,
so we're not lawyers,
but if you're looking for a
lawyer or a tax advisor or
any other kind of professional advisor,
we have a network of folks
all over the world who may
be able to help your DAO or your project
uh with web3 tax legal etc
happy to get people
connected with that network
so feel free to reach out
about that or if you are a
lawyer or tax advisor also
please reach out about
getting added to the network
With that ad out of the way, Arnold, okay.
Thanks for participating in
the news report.
I'm sure we'll find ways to
tie our conversation back
to some of the things we read.
But meanwhile, let's take a step back.
And would you tell us a bit
more about how you got into
Web3 and DAOs in the first place?
sure um I think I covered a
little bit of that um
earlier on but yeah so I
specifically got into web3
when I first read vitalik's
sort of promise of ethereum
as a world computer and for
me that really
opened up my mind in terms
of how as a systems designer,
so I've been a sort of CTO for 15 years,
love complex systems,
and I've always been like
having to write
integrations between multiple systems.
But to
think of a smart contract
being able to trustlessly
interrupt with another bona
fide system and not have
any human intervention,
that really sort of blew my mind.
So that's what really sort
of Ethereum pilled me.
And because of that,
I just started exploring
what people could do with Ethereum.
And over the years, that led me to
Yeah, start exploring smart contracts,
playing with voting systems,
riding bridges,
just seeing what it could do.
And the thing that actually
got me into a DAO was I was
working on a project where,
let's just say,
the founders abandoned it
and the community needed a
vehicle to really coordinate.
And because I was very interested in DAOs,
I'd seen how MakerDAO was operating.
I think Optimism just launched.
I was saying, hey,
this could be a really
useful experiment for us to
be able to coordinate and
align what we believe
should happen with this project.
And as such, I created the DAO vehicle.
And over the course of that project,
I led over 30 proposals
that covered creating constitution,
tokenomics, and
that was you know extremely
tough primarily because uh
we're in a hostile
environment people had you
know I guess different
opinions and that really
sort of taught me gave me
across a crash course and
like well how do we
coordinate the sort of
flurry of opinion and what
processes and procedures
can we have in place so
that people can coordinate
in an effective manner
And it was through that
experience that led me to
sort of conceptualize Lighthouse.
The key thing that I guess
was a launchpad for
Lighthouse was in that previous project,
I needed to send a message
to 100,000 holders, right?
And at the time, two and a half years ago,
well,
how do we actually- Like the token
holders of the DAO.
Uh, not, they,
they weren't a Dow at that point.
They were just people who
owned a token at some point.
So there were just people
who bought it from a smart
contract or from a unit swap pool.
Um, so at that stage, well.
You could either send an on chain message,
but who's actually going to
read a blockchain message
on AetherScan decode that?
Mind you,
this wasn't the height of the ICO craze.
So again,
let's just say that the people
who had the token probably
wouldn't have been looking in that area.
The other option was, hey,
we could add up an NFT with
a message saying, hey,
we need to do this because
we're going to be
converting into a DAO and
we need you to take these
options on any of the chains.
That is going to be a huge cost,
especially at that scale.
And if you're sending messages
at scale,
how do you sort of differentiate
yourself between people who
are legitimate authors in
the project versus people
who are impersonating?
So there's another sort of
edge to the problem.
And it was through that reasoning, yeah,
I came up with Lighthouse, which is, okay,
how can we use
EOA's smart accounts as a means to signal,
okay,
we know that these addresses are
associated with the project.
And when we transmit
messages from these accounts,
we know that they are, for the most part,
authenticated.
But
we know that, well,
most people aren't
necessarily going to be
receiving these messages on
any of those aforementioned platforms.
And even if we were trying
to direct them to a
purpose-built website,
Again,
it requires a person to proactively
go to that website.
So it's quite obvious to me that, well,
everything's always
competing for attention on mobile.
And because of that, I guess, idea,
I was like, okay,
in order for this to work,
we do need to have a
dedicated mobile client
where people who are
genuinely interested in
following a project
can have a narrow
purpose-built client that
is very different to having
to participate in the noise
from any of the traditional
channels such as Twitter, Telegram,
or Discord.
And as we know,
for anyone who participates
in more than one project,
um it can be quite noisy
like in my discord I've got
I think 100 dows or let's
just say communities that
I'm a part of and it is um
even if I want to it's
going to take me a few
hours to get through
everything so um using that
as a sort of basis um I
yeah develop lighthouse as a narrow
governance focused clients
so people who are genuinely
interested in following and
participating in uh actions
within the community they
can do so during that via
that mechanism yep
interesting so okay so
you're saying if I have a
dow and I want to have an app
on people's mobile phones
for my DAO so that they
will get messages related to that DAO.
That's something that
Lighthouse is helping them do,
is that right?
Yeah, that's correct.
At the moment,
we support all the Snapshot DAOs.
If your DAO or community is on Snapshot,
you can add them to
Lighthouse or I can do that for you,
just message me.
And whenever a new proposal is put out,
you'll get a push
notification and you can vote in that.
So that means you can sort
of completely avoid having
to go to any of those other channels.
You can trust that it
actually came from the
project owners and it just
gives you a bit of peace of
mind that you're
interacting with the correct information.
That was obviously easy
because Snapshot provides
great APIs for that.
But the next challenge for us was like,
okay,
in order for this to actually work
in scale,
we needed to work for the bigger
DAOs that are running on custom contracts,
such as Optimism, Governor,
such as optimism, nouns, et cetera.
So we spent some time
working out pipelines to
support those DAOs.
And now you can actually follow optimism,
stay up to date with nouns,
and have those proposals
delivered straight to your mobile phone,
which is really interesting.
And one of the interesting
things through that exploration
a lot of these proposals or
a lot of these governance systems,
they actually allow you to when you vote,
provide a comment or a reason.
And at the moment,
in the majority of systems,
I would say that a lot of
that high signal content is lost.
So the way we designed
Lighthouse was more like a
social platform where
when you look at a vote you
see the results
additionally you will see
the comments that people
have spent time putting
their opinion forward on
and that adds to a really
interesting experience and
makes the community feel much more alive
So is it one app that brings
in a feed from all the DAOs
or it's an app for each DAO or both?
At the moment,
it's one app that works with
all the DAOs with a view of
being able to support any
DAO on any EVM chain at the moment.
I've been speaking to Solana
people as well.
I'm a strong believer that
governance is one of the
sort of end games of crypto
and that is um regardless
of which tribe we belong to
um because you know crypto
primitives allow this great
tool for coordination and
um you know regardless of
what system we're on uh we
just need to be able to
coordinate effectively
Yeah, it's a good point, man.
I feel like crypto is if you
look at it in a very like
almost like historical,
philosophical or anthropological lens,
it's just a coordination
technology for people.
Right.
Although going back to your earlier,
you mentioned that one of
the things that got you
excited about DAOs was the
potentially autonomous,
not even the way we usually
use the word autonomous,
but that you could have a
real autonomous agent
living on the blockchain
with its own money doing its own thing.
I wonder if that breaks the metaphor,
but I think otherwise
crypto is a coordination
technology for people.
And part of coordination is governance.
Maybe it's just a subset or
one component of what coordination is,
but certainly it's one big part.
No, most definitely.
And I think that's a really
interesting point.
So I think a lot of the DAOs
that are present at the moment,
they are either social DAOs
with human actors.
Actually, they all are.
But if we look at the types
of proposals that are being executed,
especially when we look at protocol DAOs,
a lot of the protocol DAOs are more
optimize for configuring
like fee parameters or
mathematical concepts, right?
And I would argue that over time,
as the proposal data and
the outputs from those
information and from disparate systems,
we're more likely to see
autonomous agents or
autonomous proposals become a thing.
people can focus on human things.
But just given the way it is at the moment,
yeah, they're all human-based.
Yep.
Interesting.
Okay, so first of all,
can you tell us more about
the DAO that you started
and worked on and did the 30 proposals?
Is it gone now?
Is that why you don't
mention the name or...?
It's not gone, it still exists.
It's a DAO called Not Safe for Work,
which is controversial
because it is an OnlyFans-based DAO.
It was one of the first
head-up DAOs that came on the market,
I think were the only ones left.
I think a lot of them sort
of like came and went.
yeah it was an example of
really putting into
practice a lot of the
different theory and um
yeah it's it's a community
that has these really
interesting ideas I had to
learn a lot it's not my
industry but you know I did
speak to great people from
um there's a person called
briny cole she runs a
podcast called the future
of sex and it's all about
sex positivity uh empowerment
And the reason why I did
work in that space is
because if we look at sex
workers or even just
creators in that space,
they are actually one of
the most underserved people
when it comes to financial institutions.
So crypto is a real way for
them to be able to take
control of their own narrative.
And instead of being able to, I guess,
like my process when I was
working and creating these
systems was like,
we can do this ethically
and fairly and create
systems that are self regulated.
So instead of a small corporation who has
very outsized or different incentives,
we can have a DAO that's
owned and operated by the community.
And it's not governed by any under,
it's not governed by a
small group of people.
So yeah.
Yep.
Cool.
Okay.
And so coming from that experience,
starting a DAO, working on a DAO,
and now working on a DAO tool,
what have you seen over the
past few years being super
engaged in the DAO space?
uh what's what has surprised
you what stands out to you
and really I think part of
what I'm trying to get at
is like what are dows doing
right or doing wrong that
that really stands out I
mean what are you seeing in
the dow space to help us
get a sense of what's going
on in the dow world today
yeah it's it's a loaded
question I think a lot of
there's a lot of great
innovation and
experimentation happening I think um
fractional ownership is really interesting,
on-chain commitments, because again,
I think a lot of,
and I've mentioned this a few times,
accountability is one of
the best things that DAOs
offer to people because it
gives any individual a sort
of a genuine transparent, well,
the possibility of a very
transparent organization, right?
And how people are elected, how...
roles are surfaced and their
responsibilities,
they are no longer opaque.
And it means that
individuals can rotate
between roles and
responsibilities a lot easier.
So I think already,
I know that sounds a little bit vague,
but for example,
I really love the idea of seasons.
So DAOs are really time consuming.
They involve so much
commitment mentally and
physically to run town halls,
gather feedback,
make sure that things are presented.
um in the right manner
because dao's are a diverse
group of people um hey it's
not only english we've you
know I've had to deal with
well how do I make sure
that this is also relatable
and understandable to
people of different
languages as well and are
we communicating things
effectively in the correct
manner um so yeah I think
there's just a lot
that's happening in DAOs.
I think everyone's trying
their best to make sure
that everyone's aware of
how things operate,
but we can always be doing
better jobs at that.
Yeah.
Is there a common theme that
you see in terms of what
problems are showing up for DAOs today?
I mean, clearly,
you guys are going after
one of those problems,
which is communicating with
your users about important
messages and proposals.
But I mean,
is that is that something that
like every day I was like, man,
I can't keep operating if
we don't have a better way to do that.
One 100%.
So a lot of the user research that we did.
So
For people who operate in
like one or two DAOs,
it doesn't really matter as
much because again,
the highly engaged doesn't
take that much effort to stay up to date.
But the second you're at three plus,
it becomes a real burden,
especially when you think
about the meetings you need to attend to,
discussions, proposals.
So part of why I built
Lighthouse is to really
sort of streamline
that downstream effect of
information so that they
have people have one place
they know that okay cool
I've got a meeting tomorrow
I can attend that then I
can vote and the proposal
aspect of what I've
described so far is just
the first part of what we
are planning to build we are planning
just ways to streamline the
contributor fatigue so that people,
specifically delegates who
sit on genuinely five to eight DAOs,
they can just have an
easier time being able to
participate and actually
spend their time thinking
about the proposal at hand versus, oh,
I'm running late to this.
Yeah.
Hopefully that makes sense.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I mean, I feel like
one of,
if not the most common challenge
that I see coming up in
DAOs is communication in general, right?
Where do we communicate?
And it seems like you're going after,
maybe we could call it like
the communication between
the DAO and the community.
But then there's also the
question of just how does the community,
how do the DAO members talk
to each other?
How do the teams communicate
with each other?
Do they use Discord?
But there's a lot of issues
people have with Discord.
Do they use Telegram?
Then there's those issues.
Some DAOs like Purple are
trying to have all their
communication on Farcaster,
which is interesting,
but doesn't seem perfect either.
So that's a different challenge, right?
It's like communication...
I think it's related,
so I've definitely got some
ideas on that.
And I think one thing that
we need to consider is that
depending on the DAO,
each DAO will generally
tend to gravitate towards a
particular channel for
communication based on their objective.
So a lot of people
historically love Telegram.
I think there's a new sort
of wave of DAOs who prefer Farcaster.
regardless of what medium
you communicate on,
we have to remember that, again,
a DAO is a broad church.
We have participants who may
not necessarily are
familiar with Discord or
maybe don't want to have Telegram.
So that poses a real design
challenge in terms of where
we allow people to
congregate and also who is
allowed to participate
within certain channels.
So if we
uh just loop back to that
original example where
actually I don't know if we
talked about this here or
if that was in the dow a
town hall before but like
to say for example one of
the things that we
experimented with uh when
it came to transparency and
communications in a dow we
had a discord channel that
was for verified members we
had another channel that
was for delegates where any
of the delegates could
speak so they didn't
It wasn't cluttered with additional noise,
but we also allowed the
verified members to view
that information.
Then we also had another level,
which was for signers who
wanted to specifically or
strictly speak about price sensitive
So I think there are a lot of challenges.
There are definitely some
interesting tools that are
coming out in the next
month or two that will
potentially aid these types
of communications.
There's also technology that
we have to consider.
So again, Discord, centralized.
Telegram, arguably centralized.
And we don't know what's
actually behind the scenes.
So one of the properties
that we need if we want to
do this properly is like, well,
who actually offers intent
encrypted chat that is composable?
And the two- And can be owned by the DAO,
right?
Correct.
And it's sufficiently decentralized.
That's a key point, right?
So yeah,
there's two technologies that I'm
really interested in.
Waku Protocol.
They've been in the space
for a very long time.
They're doing some really
interesting work.
And there's another really
cool protocol called, I believe,
Hole Punch.
And that is super novel.
And I think it's actually
funded by the USDT guys.
And it's built on top of...
DHT technology,
which is the technology
that powers BitTorrent.
So it's generally
decentralized and it's
theoretically unstoppable.
So again, really interesting technologies,
but again, nascent.
Yes, it was good to hear.
I wasn't aware of those projects.
It's good to hear those are coming soon.
I can list another one that's coming soon,
which is called Common.
It's built by the founders of DAO Stack,
which was, as you probably know,
is one of the original DAO
tooling platforms alongside Moloch.
But the DAO Stack team ended
up pivoting and going in a
different direction.
I don't think anyone uses
DAO Stack anymore,
at least not if you're
launching a new DAO.
But the team is now focused
on a collaboration tool for DAOs.
So it's not out yet,
but I think it's coming soon as well.
So that's exciting.
Awesome.
Yeah,
let's put these in the show notes to
definitely get the word out for sure.
Yes.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
Although I wish we could
send people stuff they
could start using today,
but we'll have to look
forward to that coming soon.
What do you feel like is the
future of DAOs in terms of
what you're seeing,
what you're experiencing?
Where are we going to be in
a year and in several years?
Well, let's just take a macro view.
So for me,
I strongly believe that DAOs are
an important and innovation
akin to the
limited liability company.
So when limited liability
companies first came on the scene, uh,
I believe they were originally created.
So when ships went out to sea, um,
and people had to spend a
lot of money to go on these
voyages and come back and, you know, the,
the capital would be sort
of constrained in terms of
how it was lost.
I think that DAOs are
basically the next level up.
And, um, it means that for me, uh,
The more quickly we can
coordinate capital
efficiently and without any
geographical boundaries is
really where DAOs will win.
I don't know how long it
will take for us to get there.
Innovation moves extremely quickly.
So I wouldn't want to sort
of put any time horizon on that.
It could be as early as the
end of the year for all we know.
But I think the main thing
that we want to take away
in terms of the future of
DAOs is just quick capital formation,
accountability, coordination.
Yeah, that's what I'd say about that.
Cool.
Is there anything you think
that's a major blocker we
need to solve for to get there?
um, legals.
Oh yeah.
No, say more.
Well, um, to be honest,
you're probably a better
person to speak on it,
but I think just ensuring
that people have the appropriate, um,
legal protections to
participate in these
innovative structures
without fear of
repercussion is probably
the most important thing.
Yeah, I'm not an expert on the topic,
I would consult a lawyer.
But yeah,
that's probably the biggest
concern I have that is a
hindrance to this.
Cool.
Well,
it's always good to hear since that's
something I'm working on.
Um, I think, you know,
what we see is really maybe
two approaches to that problem.
Uh,
there's the one that we're taking at my
Dow,
which is to create legal forms like
the LLC, uh, you know,
called the Dow LLC or whatever.
It could be the Duna in
Wyoming that's coming out soon, um,
where you're basically, uh,
Some people have been very
critical about it.
They said, hey,
why are you taking
something that was made for
a different situation and
retrofitting it?
I mean,
another way of looking at it is
we're just taking the laws
that were written and
adapting them so they work
for DAOs and Web3.
Makes it sound very plain vanilla.
And so that way any DAO can
register a company and get
all those legal benefits
that people have been
getting for hundreds of years.
I think a different approach,
which is interesting as well,
and actually just this
morning I spoke with a
state representative from
New Hampshire where they're
working on something like the following,
which is
rather than creating a
company forum that people
necessarily need to
register with the state the
way they would a traditional company.
Instead,
maybe we need some basic
protections automatically
written into the law that
automatically apply to DAO
members and give them those
benefits even without any
kind of registered company on the books.
And so for example,
if you could create a set
of characteristics and say, okay,
if you're a token holder of
a sufficiently decentralized
system and here's what
sufficiently decentralized
means and there's maybe no
one with too much power and
everything is really done
on chain and a b c d e f g
whatever the considerations
are then we're going to
actually give that legal
protection to the token
holder to the member
that otherwise you would
have had to register a
company to get that protection.
So it's almost like building
in a default special
treatment in the law for DAOs.
And I'm not sure which one will win.
I mean, on one hand, yes, obviously,
DAOs are different.
DAOs are unique.
Maybe there should be some
different default treatment.
But the fact is that every organization
for the last several decades
and even hundreds of years
is unique and different.
And you give organizations
doing all kinds of different stuff.
But the law has been applied
about the same way.
Like either you don't register a company,
in which case you get this treatment,
or you do register a company,
in which case you get the
treatment afforded to that
company type that you're registering.
So I'm biased because that's
what we're working on.
But I don't see any reason
why that can't be the way things go.
Yeah,
I think the key word there is
sufficient decentralization.
A lot of DAOs will face a
cold start problem with a
few individuals leading it, right?
But I guess the real question is,
how can we demonstrate or
how can they prove that
there is a sufficient
pathway to decentralization
and hold them accountable to that?
And as long as that happens
within whatever timeframes,
I think it's okay.
But if that doesn't happen and, hey,
it's like the five people
who started a DAO and we're
going to keep control for
the next three to five years,
that's an issue.
Yeah, yeah, interesting.
All right,
we're getting close to the end
of the show,
so I want to ask you just an
open-ended question,
a couple open-ended questions,
and I'll share the questions at once,
and then you can share
whatever is on your mind.
Okay.
So the first thing is,
what advice do you have for
people starting DAOs today?
So if someone came up to you
on the street and said, hey,
I'm starting a DAO later,
what's your advice for me?
What would it be?
And then two is relatedly,
if you have any DAOs,
you'd recommend people
check out who are new to the DAO space.
Maybe that could be part of
your advice to this person
on the street is some
examples of cool things to check out.
If you're
just looking to see what
DAOs are like and experience some DAOs.
So what advice and what DAOs
would you recommend that
people check out?
For sure.
Okay,
so I would say the first and most
important thing that anyone
who wants to start a DAO,
develop a clear mission and
a vision first.
Because that really is going
to be the anchor that you
can always refer to in the community.
And in times of turmoil and trouble,
it's something that you can just be like,
hey, guys,
this is what we're aiming towards.
Let's make sure that we get on track.
The second thing would be
transparency in terms of
spending the funds.
Let's keep in mind that this
is consumer retail capital,
and it's really important
to be respectful of
how and where that money is being spent.
And as long as you can sort
of demonstrate that,
I think people are
generally okay with where
the money will go.
The third thing would be
open to feedback and criticism.
I think there's a lot of egos and doubts,
but if you can demonstrate
that you are open to
feedback and that feedback
is incorporated into the
governance structure,
I think people will
appreciate that for sure.
So the top three takes, I guess,
for starting a DAO.
Let me think.
In terms of tools or people
being into DAOs, I think, again, Snapshot,
great tool.
It's such a multipurpose thing,
very easy to use,
doesn't require a lot of
technical knowledge,
and you can just get
bootstrapped pretty quickly.
I think I've even seen a
soccer team run who's on rotation.
you know in their sort of
like little um weekly games
run on snapshot so it's
it's pretty fun it's pretty
interesting I really like
um joke race which is
another on-chain um tool I
think um there are some
pretty interesting
experiments happening with
that at the moment so
purple dow um they are
currently holding their
council elections on it.
So I would recommend checking that out.
Um,
and I guess from an academic point of
view, um,
I would recommend people look
into meta governance, meta gov.
Um, they are a great organization, um,
who really specialize in
some of the more esoteric
thinking around DAOs.
And, um, yeah,
I guess a couple more things let's think,
um,
Yeah, and DAO Theory, Green Pill podcast,
Kevin Iwerke, I think is amazing.
So that will give you sort
of a green take on how DAOs
can provide specifically social impact.
And one that is, I guess,
a little bit more creative
and not so serious,
I would recommend checking out HyperSub.
So HyperSub is...
again really interesting not
a dow but it is um
basically people with
subscriptions and they're
typically artists or
creators and communities
form around them and
they're really really
interesting and are they a
doubt or are they not they
are definitely a group of
people coordinating around
a goal so yeah those are
the things I would recommend
Interesting.
Yeah, those are great recommendations.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Is every newsletter and its
followers a DAO in some way?
At least once you start
putting things on chain.
I mean,
like a sub stack with 7,000 or
30,000 users, that's a community, right?
Yeah, at least a community.
Yeah.
And then it's just where do
you cross the line and go
from being a community to being a DAO?
And maybe as soon as money is involved.
I mean, I think for a lot of communities,
once there's a treasury or
a need for a treasury or an
opportunity for a treasury,
I think then you usually say, okay,
we got to just introduce a
little bit of structure
here and do it as a DAO.
Yeah,
I think it's a really great point to
end on.
Yeah.
Cool.
All right.
Well, Arnold, this has been awesome.
Before we close,
where can people find you
and Lighthouse and or
anything else you'd like to
share on the web and on social?
Yeah, you can go to lighthouse.cx,
and we have an Android and iOS app,
so we've coded for everyone.
They have a feature parody,
so we haven't forgotten about you.
And my handle on Warpcast is 1A35E1,
which is the hexadecimal code for blue.
I wanted to be anonymous at one point,
but then that got thrown out the window.
So yeah, that's the reason.
That's why I always called
Arnold Blue until about
today because of his nickname there.
Awesome.
Well,
please go look up Lighthouse and look
up Arnold.
Find me on Farcaster as well
at The Thriller or I'm
ZeroXThriller on X. And
MyDAO is MyDAODS on Twitter
for MyDAO Directory
Services and MyDAO.org, M-I-D-A-O.org.
Again,
a quick ad before we close for MyDAO.
MyDAO, my company,
provides legal entity
solutions for DAOs and Web3.
If you're thinking about
legal entity solution for your project,
please reach out.
We also have a network of
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reach out about being added
to our network again arnold
thank you so much for
coming on the show thank
you so much for having me adam cheers
You got it.
Cheers.
Quick disclaimer,
none of this is ever legal
advice or tax advice or
financial advice or any
kind of professional advice.
And finally, to the audience,
are you thinking about starting a DAO?
Just DAO it.