Just DAO It - Panel featuring Weso, Ivan Fartunov and Martin Koppelman

here today i know you could be somewhere else but thank you for being here my name is andrew rosso i am both a fintech attorney practicing as well as a news editor at beingcrypto.com we have a wonderful wonderful conversation for you guys today it's called just daoit so this is dow 101 want to get some fundamentals and basics out of the way and dive into some interesting topics we have a great lineup of panelists beginning with weso to my left who is the head of strategic partnerships at beefy finance to his left we have ivan fortuneof head of ecosystems at aragon and to his left we have martin koppelman co-founder and ceo of gnosis so a quick round of applause for our panelists please [Applause] gentlemen thank you very very much for being here and because this is a fundamental discussion let's start with what a dow is so who wants to to start with that sure i'll give it a go uh that's like a question that there was a different answer in each room at this event um my my personal favorite is it's the next step it's a it's a digital cooperative um because a lot of people have in our lifetime corporations have been the dominant form of collaborative organizations not very collaborative but like you know coordinated organizations but if we look further back in history cooperatives have existed for much longer and and the ethos of daos as they are today is closer closer to such a such a parallel go ahead i would simply say experimenting with organizational forms at the speed of software development are we premature in these conversations and the reason i ask and uh so maybe this is a question uh for for you but four days ago the republic of the marshall islands formally announced that they will be recognizing dowse as legal entities so you know how serious are we about this right now yeah so it's interesting so uh beefy in itself we're trying to engage more retail users and as crypto becomes more and more mainstream uh you know we're looking at like traditional like marketing aspects of ways to do that and so as a dow you know we're just like a kind of like if we're just in the middle of the ocean right so we don't really uh aren't incorporated anywhere we're just like global community um and so we're like looking at how do we structure ourselves right so it's interesting from that perspective of like okay well they're giving us an opportunity to maybe like you know register as a dow instead of like an llc um because we've seen other structures of dao's like instead have like an llc that was like maybe the entity that was working on behalf of the dao so it's interesting to see like okay well how do we have to um be able to have the the ability to be able to interact with you know traditional uh like let's even marketing initiatives or traditional partnerships that are like okay well we need to see you know your llc or what's your state different corporation right in order to interact with you and so then somebody has to take on that liability so maybe the dao is being able to you know get some of that and be able to you know now okay well i'm i live here in the islands right uh it opens up those doors a little bit so you know without actually like reading through you know what it actually can look like and how um it would actually work within like let's say our dow you know it might be another avenue for us to be able to you know do things that we traditionally can't do as a doubt right now and what's interesting about that i was having a conversation this morning uh with a project and something he said resonated with me goes i wouldn't be surprised in two to three years if most people are in some form or fashion employed by a dow whether they realize it or not and whether or not that actually makes a difference does that change anything here yeah so i think the taos have to grow up a little bit so like we can't offer benefits right yet or but even though i think there was a partner here today um at the conference that was actually doing something for dao's uh and their contributors and offering benefits so i think like the infrastructure of like okay well we can start to actively pursue more people to get out of their um we always call it in real life jobs and into like participating as a as part of the dow and getting an active like reoccurring uh contribution like you know i guess salary and get benefits i think those capabilities are starting to come up and we're all trying to figure that out because our dow has been growing exponentially and we're you know need more and more contributors in all aspects right marketing moderation development graphic design and so we want to be able to enable those people to come and work for us in a full-time capacity so we need the tools to be able to do that and from an educational standpoint and ivan and martin maybe this is a question suited for you but you know two years going through a pandemic academic institutions being shut down students being out of the classroom and now finally starting to come back how do we teach this type of infrastructure in your business management classes and you know you know from a legal standpoint business organizations where you have to understand or be somewhat familiar with what an organization is and the benefits of such how do you teach the notion of a dao or how would you want to teach it in the classroom i i think what martin said in the previous round is is how you teach you play around with it like it's it's a it's an experimentation space um there isn't really a playbook yet and the playbook is going to be different depending on the purpose of the organization you want to set up um so yeah that's i i i don't think there is going to be um in in the next couple of years there's not going to be something which is like this is what a dao is because the definition is still in flux yeah absolutely um i think it's too early to write the books about the house i mean first you can write already something but it is in in reality there are a handful or many many exciting experiments but a lot of things are still being kind of figured out like different voting schemes different potential legal setups different yeah kind of stuff like minority protection or kind of a lot of things are and but again the exciting piece here is how quick innovation can happen and again that was yeah this earlier comment that you can suddenly program uh yeah organizations and that means um yeah you can try out things much quicker and as soon as they work they become available uh puzzle pieces and they can be reused and we are seeing that there are things that start to stick and then people are reusing it and it suddenly becomes so much more uh cheaper to to start amazing projects like i mean yeah just two recent examples this constitution dao and then it's now a sound style that that basically took the playbook or kind of the playbook that was somewhat there and and again so the the costs of setting up an organization were an organization with thousands of people in hundreds of countries the legal costs a few years ago would be millions of dollars to kind of try to find a proper structure for that now it's going down to it's already by effective thousand down you can do it with probably a few thousand dollar you can set up those things uh nowadays and it will further go down so and you jumped into my next question about you know constitution down assange dao i mean these are two really big topics and i think you know regardless of what side of the spectrum you're on on you know the longevity of one or both they both serve an interesting function for strengthening these case studies and arguments for what a doubt could be what a dow should represent so why don't we dive in uh to you know either constitution dao and or uh dao for those who may not be familiar yeah so i think first it's it's important to say the the range of dows is well enormous so you can have doubts that are more like corporations but but yeah this constitution dao or assange though i guess i would call them yeah special course dowse so you have just like one one shared idea or some shared um project and it might be behind the constitution or it might be freeing assange it might be in the future trying to solve global uh global or climate change or stuff like global upi or whatever i mean there are hundreds of possible hundreds of thousands of possible topics and you kind of just provide a structure to say well everyone who is interested in this topic well can first yeah i mean in this case in those cases it started basically or the main thing was the fundraise so you pull resources together into a thing that has a clear narrative of this is what we uh want to do with uh with those funds and then yeah i think much further well we aren't much further yet so i think it still needs to be seen kind of how or the amazing part is the first step worked so the first step was getting thousands of people together and contributing various amounts and suddenly you have a few million for specific costs and i think now we will see how effective is this yeah kind of swarm of people or kind of this dow to actually then allocate those resources or do something um then together and the question for you uh so um you know martin mentioned you know an attempt to fundraise which is a big part of what assange dao has been doing but in retrospect is it really about fundraising because we could always look at other ways to fundraise crowd crowdfund what's really i mean what what is what's going on behind the scenes here i mean what's in your opinion what what's the overarching goal that these projects think that they're trying to accomplish i mean because some people laugh at some of the at these projects you know why do people laugh i mean i mean isn't it it's just a global community coming together for you know one thought right so even if it's just that like a way to gather um you know mutual thoughts together uh you know it's pretty much endows at any level right you're all moving towards one specific goal whether it's you know building up a d5 product or you know it's for a cause you know it's giving you the accessibility to communicate with so many people around around the globe but i think it's just the the ability to gather so many people together and to have a forum for them to be able to to do and to act on you know one thought process absolutely and i think uh ivan or martin yeah um so it was it was very expected that this sort of of organizations would be the first to emerge because ultimately dows to a massive extent are about coordinating better and financial capital is the like historically has been the one that is easiest to coordinate around um but i'm personally excited about um the opportunity to start coordinating other types of capital so we're seeing a lot of um work collectives that are coordinating human capital uh with the explosion of of creatives entering the space we're seeing groups that are coordinating around cultural capital and how to preserve and grow cultural capitalism in a community and those would be like spaces where there will be a lot more innovation just because this form these other forms of capital are more difficult to quantify i would i would say you mentioned there would be other ways to fundraise yes but i would argue or i'm pretty certain if someone would have come and just said i want to fundraise for the course of um well getting julian's orange free sanchez-free and and said yeah here's here's the um the bank number or the whatever please send money here i'm pretty sure they wouldn't have raised 50 million in in in a few days so obviously there was something that made it for people more um yeah engaging or kind of that that this prospect of uh in a way becoming then part of a of a community or part of a course that is partially also symbolized by well in the case you also kind of got tokens of that dao which of course is kind of a symbol of of um yeah of belonging to this course apparently well plays a big role and and kind of makes it much more yeah engaging to to contribute to the course then kind of just give giving a donation and that's it and then kind of you have nothing to do with that you have no influence over it anymore or you have yeah kind of nothing uh that you still keep or hold from from that contribution i also want to point out that like we're not delusional we are aware that a lot of a lot of the interest in this sort of thing is driven by speculation like it's it's all that we're like kumbaya drinking the cool end like not realizing that this is not all idealistic but ultimately we get to have experimentation in in human organization with actual money on the line which makes it a lot more practicable than than any any type of other experimentation we can have through models and just surveys around it right so and how does the gaming industry for example you know gaming is a hot topic right now how does gaming play into a better strength or a stronger uh you know dow system regardless of you know what area of gaming you're in i mean any thoughts i'll hand over to martin because k key from from from from gnosis is is the person that had a lot of thoughts around gaming guilds and daos yeah well i mean [Music] certainly the concept of a yeah of a guild or a gamer guild um is is something that is one can be one form um of dowse um i certainly also think that elements from uh kind of gamification can play a role uh in yeah in in the governance processes and again i i think the field is large and kind of that is one um one aspect to explore so uh yeah kind of how can how can you how can you be incentivized or again gamified that um things you contribute to dao are kind of somehow counted or scored or um those things just something um again coordination and uh basically through dows but more specifically through blockchain um this creates the it creates opportunity to revolutionize the gaming industry from the aspect that i mean a game it is about great graphics and and great you know gameplay and all that but most of the modern games are about the other people that are in there playing with you and because of proliferation of blockchain enabled games for the first time ever like the other players that are in there with you are actually having a say into how the game evolves and are also having some financial upside without like having to be a world level uh competitor of gamers yeah i think it's kind of funny we're seeing um i think games uh in like communities within communities so it's almost like dials within dows like different factions so uh you know we've actually talked to a couple different like partners um that we're starting to build like these you know overall games but then within those games there's now like specific dow communities and so it's funny because all these tools that everybody's like you you know we're all using now um now all of a sudden it's like you're enabling all these different like uh you know you know game projects to also like build these now communities within communities that also can utilize all the dials the dow tools and so it's now becoming even a more like expanded product so it's it's kind of fun to see the evolution of how they're all taking it because i mean uh gaming it's like nfc is just like kind of you know just the gaming whole industry and crypto has just taken off in general but it's like every time i look now they're getting even more like complex and even more uh built on top of each other than they were before and i think with a conference like ethereum denver right now i mean the conversations that are going around person-to-person building the building i mean what are some of the more exciting conversations that you've heard or been part of uh during your time here and i'd like to go down down the line here yeah so it's been first of all unreal like it's like way larger than i ever expected i think they told us that it was going to be like 2 000 people and then it'll be like 38 000 people registered so awesome it's awesome to see so many people want to participate in this so many different like partners i mean we had uh i know we had one partner that was waiting inside to come and talk to beefy outside for two hours yesterday and had to leave and then come back today um but we're starting to do uh it's like especially in the d5 space you know the the money legos are starting to really become more intricate so uh all these protocols that are building now uh we're all able to build on top of each other and so i think over the next year especially with all the stuff that we're kind of talking about with all these people who are building here um we're going to see even more advanced products so more traditional finance stuff that's coming in and being onboarded what's even more exciting is you know obviously ethereum is the hotbed for all of that innovation but now we're seeing across all of these smaller chains where gas efficiency or other gas costs is so much cheaper it enables you to be able to interact with these products you know at a more frequent basis and to do even more fun things so i think uh you know out of com outcoming all of this it's like all these now you know potential partners moving together and to be able to kind of build on top of each other you know quicker ivan uh for me the the most interesting conversations i've had were around the software aspect of the house if so if you think of like the the tools that we're building that those this this as being the hardware um the software is around practices and um journeys of contributors within within those organizations and how to think about that and you know it's really cool to see that um we're because of of these questions are reaching out and engaging a lot of people who've been thinking about digital communities for a very long time um and because there's this meme of blockchain solves this and like i think i think uh you know basically by 2021 we figured that like blockchain doesn't solve everything and it's not universally solvable so now we've started exploring um more deeper problems and chat not problems but challenges related to coordinating humans and actually doing things that um help the the proliferation of communities without necessarily like having to feel like oh that's my product use it that's gonna solve your problem without having this feedback of like well what are you actually trying to achieve how and what are the challenges you see yeah one scheme i've seen and i'm quite happy about it is and it was i think one of the promises of ethereum is yeah interoperability and that is currently yeah very much happening i would say in the in the dow space um that yeah you can start to yeah compose your dao out of a range of different tools um that you can kind of kind of morph or upgrade dows from from from one system uh to another and that's that's definitely currently happening that the teams are well ethereum lays a good ground work for that but now teams are using that and kind of having compatible somewhat standards um yeah that allows to mix it together in interesting new forms i can tell you for lawyers you know it's going to be an interesting i don't know if it's an uphill battle but definitely a battle for for us both on the educational front you know we have a duty to zealously and competently represent our clients so what happens if our client is you know a group that says we want to put together a dow we have this dow you know what arguments are we supposed to be able to put forth uh walking into a courtroom where a judge may not even understand half of the words coming out of our mouth or on on paper and you know fighting that battle and even if it isn't a gray zone so i think um you know we can all agree we're all learning this together and and moving forward together so i know we're running short on time but i did want to open up the floor to some questions uh yes sir we'll just wait for the mic thank you just andrew young is speaking close by but i came all the way from miami