The New DAO Frontiers - Panel Shawn Cheng, Aaron Wright, James Young and Kei Kreutler

hi everyone my name is sean chang it's great to see a lot of familiar faces out in the crowd uh and hello to the 25 000 people tuning in on twitch right now wow i'm just kidding [Laughter] all right just loosening up the crowd all right all right just listen in but uh thanks so much for coming in i was so excited to host a panel about new dial frontiers and pick people that had been here for the last bowl eaten and then have still stuck around so that's the common denominator amongst all three folks on stage right now and each of them comes at the problem of what daos could possibly become from three very different places and jos so just to set the table if you were to think about dow taxonomy there's lots of way to ways to cut it but one of my favorite is to think about a investment dows b both protocol slash product based daos and c social based styles which i think even though all three representatives from their collectives represent one of those things they also kind of overlap with all three of those things and so as we kind of go into a very short conversation amongst three veterans um we're gonna have some quick conversation and hopefully my hope is that this is as spicy as possible just kidding um i hope that there are strong opinions loosely held and that uh we don't all agree because a lot of panels are boring and everybody agrees yeah right uh so kicking things off i want to start with kia from gnosis guild and gnosis if you've been sleeping under a rock has been part of the bedrock of what dows are all about safe now secures a hundred billion dollars of assets and from there they've taken the lessons from our friends at synthetics and a number of other major protocols to actually decentralize itself so just in a very briefly kia do you mind just uh sharing a little bit about what's going on with gnosis sure so i've been at gnosis for the last almost four and a half years and recently um our different product lines have kind of reached escape velocity and autonomy and we've taken the opportunity to also establish a new product line of dow tools called the zodiac dow tools and a lot of the site thinking around how we approached it was born from our own need but also observing needs in the ecosystem so it's an open standard composable tools for devs that can evolve and basically looking at different needs across the board so check them out definitely gnosis guild is powering some of the largest and best dowels out there such as yearn as well as safe cow swap um gnosis chain if you haven't checked that out and had a couple hundred projects already commit to the next chapter of what ex-die was all about um and also assange dao so just thinking a little bit about juicebox and what the future might look like for crowdfunding speaking of juicebox i'm actually going to go over to aaron to talk a little bit about investment dials so tribute labs has been around for quite some time and powering some of the largest and best investment dolls out there total aum is now 175 million dollars and they've reached 10 of the best communities out there from that they now are continuing to expand and uh i think they probably have three or four more on deck but aaron just to speak a little bit about the future of what tribute and tribute's all about would love to hear um what you think about uh investment dows i guess in the near term specifically yeah absolutely and it's uh thanks so much sean uh for pulling this together it's great to be on the panel with with both of you it was actually first time i met james was before all this started uh right at the last eat denver was right when the first investment dows were being launched uh there was a couple panels talking about it and we were like whoa we need to say something big and splashy by the end of 2020 there's gonna be a hundred billion dollars and and at all dows and we were like whoa that's crazy we should definitely do that um and obviously the entire ecosystem has grown leaps and bounds ahead of it due to the great work of gnosis and what james i'm sure is going to unpack and obviously the stuff that we're doing as well um there's different flavors of dowels because they're different ways for people to work together that the dowels that we uh help pull together i i believe really are the future in the way people invest our dows which include the lao which supports projects flamingo dao which is focused on collecting nfts uh red which is focused on digital fashion noise which is focused on music ready player dow which is focused on play to earn opportunities uh and there's a bunch of others including neon which is focused the metaverse they're just showing that people don't need to be in silicon valley they don't need to be in new york they don't need to be in london they can get together from around the globe they can begin to work together to spot opportunities and make investments and actually perform as well if not better than these traditional legacy institutions so they're really serving as a check on silicon valley hedge fund industry and i think ultimately hollywood as well just in terms of being able to pool capital deploy it more efficiently and generate a superior return so i think it's pretty exciting it kind of reminds me at least of how uh we saw hedge funds and venture capital funds emerge in the 1970s in the u.s and that changed the way capitals deployed that changed the way uh at least in the u.s how society was structured we're beginning to see that same trend and i think that's going to increasingly point towards dow's in particular investment dows thanks for cleaning the background noise and that too so investment dows i mean the future involves maybe all of us and not necessarily just coastal elites pretty cool switching gears over to james young from collab land which helps to power a lot of the largest social dials out there so right now i think the last stat that i had heard was that there's 50 people a second that is now using collab land so if you've used a token gated discord and there's basically i think millions of people that are discovering web 3 through a lot of these discord communities james i guess one of the things that came out in our prep talk would love to for you to share a little bit about collab but also share a little bit about how you think that's going to evolve especially in the near term yeah i appreciate it um you know just as aaron was mentioning like in 2020 at the beginning of it and we met at east denver eat denver looked very different than it does now right i think it's like whether it's this macro economic or the kind of backdrop backdrop of the pandemic you see this a lot of people entering the space and i think that when we started collab land we didn't know what we were actually unleashing and i think part of it it was because of this well first it was defy summer and then it was like nfts and it just kind of once it left the gate there's no going back and so for us at collab land and what we're sitting on now we're like okay well what are we going to do and so last night i announced that we're going to decentralize so we're trying to figure that out it's going to be a dow um it was actually three years ago this last this week that uh helped launch molok dao which kind of kind of reset this interest in daos and been operating in dallas and so it's going to be really interesting because we don't have all the answers we're all trying to figure it out as we go along there's different types of dowels like investment dials and like these nft kind of social clubs if you will and i think there's going to be a lot of interesting byproducts of not just owning an asset and being able to like be token gated but also uh you know what that asset unlocks on these different platforms and my understanding of how web 2 and web 3 can interoperate has changed a lot through just witnessing this kind of explosion that's happened with collaboration thanks for that so being three optimists that weathered the storm through cryptowinner saw 80 to 90 drawdowns um being probably eternal optimists i actually want to ask the question of something negative actually in a negative case in a bear case given all of these frameworks all of the exuberance because we're in a bull right now what happens within all of these dow frameworks in the worst sense because we've spent a lot of time thinking about the bull case but coming from each of your perspectives and studying their history where could these things lead us that could not be an intended consequence and i want to call out kia's post from july of 2021 if you haven't read it it's definitely going to be in the crypto cannon it's the priest history of dowse and it's probably uh maybe a 20 minute read but it'll probably take you about 20 hours to chew on each of the concepts but kia what do you think in terms of where we're headed and in the short term where there's lots of activity each of you have either pulled millions of dollars or millions of users what is something that we need to watch out for especially as people that have been here for a very long time building this sure so i think there's a lot of ethical frontiers that we haven't even begun to face in the dao ecosystem and what permissionlessness really means online um i think maybe to be a little bit more subtle there's there's a whole realm of things there but a little bit more subtle one thing i'm worried about at the moment is that daos can be fully kind of legible and integrated with our existing financial and organizational system without any friction whatsoever if we continue focusing on the kind of traditional firm and it maximizing the goals of a traditional firm i feel like we haven't actually produced a different type of medium of organization like what does return look like for dao we don't exactly know that yet and if it can be fully kind of encapsulated with existing economic structures i worry that that sort of capture is both right on the ethical side for disturbance but also on the just you know it's a passing fad and it just maximizes the capacities that we already have so gnosis guild i mean is the the leading i guess uh steward of the zodiac protocol which is built to be modular which a lot of other dow frameworks are not necessarily modular they are built for a specific purpose and we've seen historically ones where by which there's too much measurement or there's an analysis paralysis or they're trying to put too many things on chain why do you think a more modular approach would lead to something a little bit more collaborative and hopefully avoid some of the things that you just mentioned sure so i think that the most resilient infrastructure is infrastructure that can evolve over time to some degree where you have a baseline this is actually quite contrarian in terms of if you look at protocol governance that should change very slowly but looking at the needs for doing gnosis dao and other dials in the ecosystem we realized there was a huge issue that you started it down you were basically locked into one platform one voting type one membership structure and if you wanted to change you often had to change platforms so the approach with zodiac built around nosta safe but it's ultimately framework agnostic is that you can essentially have like a core contract that establishes the dow and then build up different modules over time so different voting mechanisms different membership structures different access to different layers of the treasury different actual kind of like discord roles for safes so that basically you can start and evolve over time and you can really have a dao that feels much more like a kind of living organism than a traditional static kind of membership shares structure yeah and aaron i guess to switch gears over to you and thinking about all dows should be judged by their outcomes so we might be talking a lot about on chain or off chain whether or not it should be you know majority rules majority minus one someone dissenting a snapshot like we're all somewhat uh in in a shell shock and one of the things that i love about the tribute down network is that the members right now i think if you were to pull them on on average are extremely satisfied with the outcomes of the decisions which is much much more flexible than being highly explicit having all of this documentation and then onboarding people in a way that's through kind of like one one path um the question of uh i guess is there any negative outcome from that or are there only positive ones by being i guess a little bit more fluid with how you approach onboarding people into the system yeah so there's lots of conversation just around dows and decision making governance i think they're they're largely informed by the early experiments with protocol level dials or defy dows which are a very distinct use case and frankly don't do that much together yet many of them are quorum-based it takes you know the deliberative process is very slow it's much more like an eip type process than what people want to do if it's a social community or an investment dow there the cadence needs to be a lot faster so our dows are flat there's nobody that's in control there's no manager people are making decisions in a very collaborative way and by working with not just a handful of people but a larger group of people you begin to create what appears to be like a hive mind you begin to see little germs of ideas that bounce off other people it generates some energy and then people move to take action together so in an example with like flamingo people got very excited about crypto punks very early so this is way back in like october of last year they were super excited about it you felt the energy that was moving around the project they decided that they wanted to allocate to go purchase those assets and then they purchased a tremendous amount of them like 215 or so off the bat and they were able to do that because they could tell just from the conversation that this is what everybody was interested in not just what one person was and that i think enables people to act together hear different viewpoints and make better decisions and broader decisions related to it um and i think that those decision-making processes are proving to be better than expert driven models i i can only speak for myself but i feel like my entire life has been classified by failures of experts whether that's experts that were running corporations or the government or other parts of society and taos to me really present a new way to begin to explore how we can make better decisions and we're beginning to see that really emerge in the investment dow and i think social uh club models as opposed to the defi daos which i think are on their own island and that's really exciting so i am an eternal optimist i don't actually think that there's any downsides to dowse i actually think what we're witnessing is the birth of the first internet native organization we've seen this at every major epic of history whether that's the industrial era whether that's the modern global era that we're just ending basically the end of the boomer era and now we're in the internet era and the internet era is going to be defined by people working together in these structures we don't have all the answers as i'm sure james uh indicated before but i think we're seeing that this is the platform to figure it out and by having these more open permissionless organizations we now have the toolkits uh to begin to do that so whether it's using something like zodiac we also have a a dao framework that's less opinionated than some of the earlier ones called the tribute dao framework we can begin to build more organic organizations figure out what governance works for it make better decisions and then the internet can actually have a real world impact in so many different ways so no downsides for me so that's going to be my spicy texture hot take so i think we all know that web 2 companies are already extremely hard to build but i think everybody else would also agree on this panel that building a web 3 company is probably 10x harder and so james switching gears to you choosing to decentralize your company at this specific point in time what does it mean and why like why now when you yourself are a three-time founder you've seen what can be done and you know what to do next in the pre-existing blueprint so why make your life complicated i the way i think about it is that the clay is still wet we have this opportunity instead of repeating old models on new rails maybe there is a different way maybe there's a way where in web 3 and i think all of us agree we don't want to create the facebook of crypto that ownership of your data belongs to you as a user and not only that and what i'm excited about is what actions get unlocked based off of the assets that you own so we're looking heavily into verifiable credentials the example is you know i have a board ape and i might have bought into it late with a verifiable credential actually i can show and prove that i was in early i had these roles in discord so that now when i go to a new project not only do i maybe i've sold my ape but i have these verifiable credentials that show that i was early on in the team building process and that resume building that reputation building i think is the data exhaust that comes out of asset ownership and that should be owned by the user the user should have control of that uh and this is what we're really excited about to go back to this kind of spicy take in terms of like spicy james let's get spicy let's get spicy um so i think in in like the the you know i guess is ptsd from like previous cycles just always thinking like when's the other shoe gonna drop i think of the scenarios of like you have these huge dowels that are like zombie dowels right and then just assets are locked up people have voter apathy all that stuff and so from that i would wonder from a thought experiment what if you had a bunch of dows they're all networked together they're composable right because you need like not only money legos but what you're unlocking is composable communities communities change and they all evolve and so what i was thinking of instead of lighting like having the largest dow possible what if you contained it to a small group and you contained the time limit in which that dow could exist right that gives us like you know let's say okay in six months if you don't spend this money it gets burned like extreme case right so then what you have is groups forming networks of dows trying to collaborate and you know what will end up happening i think is that like the high performers if there's a time limit in a dao will want to congregate and kind of like there will be a shelling point of people that actually have been productive in other dows to continue to work together and i think that like melds well with what we're doing with verifiable credentials i love that so we've got only three or four minutes left we're going to do a quick lightning round you have to predict something that is non-consensus what do you think is going to happen that most people don't do not believe should make some bold predictions yeah it can be multiple too well i mean i think one broad prediction i do think the next 12 to 18 months it's primarily just going to be entirely focused on nfts and dows i think the headwinds with defy are really strong defense dead i think dfi's dead i'm and i'm gonna sit on it um i think it's largely dead and i think we're gonna see the next 12 to 18 months be almost entirely about nfts and endows i think nfts are much broader than people are giving them credit for i think they've simplified the mechanics down to such a degree that it's palatable for mainstream audiences it's understandable there's not layers of ponzinomics that are baked in that hurt projects so they can build sustainable ecosystems and i think taos will continue to grow and will in 10 20 years be a dominant form of organization and then the full vision of what dows will be will not just be organizations focused on making investments or or online communities but broader uh nation-building or quasi-nation building like organs so this is a big category crypto right now is in a inflection point i think there's lots of folks that are focused on the first six years of crypto which is very focused on financials i think the next 20 years of crypto are going to be focused on culture they're going to be focused on nfts and i think they're going to be focused on trading ideas memes uh art culture you name it and that is the end point for crypto there's very few headwinds number one and people love it and that's most important um so don't get stuck in defy hot takes hot takes y'all all right non-consensus predictions over the next uh six to 12 months i have one that's um more negative than i would like to be because continuing working in the space i am quite optimistic and i really do believe in working for more long-term aims um but one as i offer more as a challenge is that dao's could go very very extremely mainstream become like as common as the typical firm and not change anything and i would like to challenge that that doesn't happen whoa i got dark quick your efforts will accomplish nothing and that man that's that's that's a that's a spicy take james i i'm sorry i just want to quickly i agree with it though like the dictator dows and like these hierarchical doubts they really they really just don't excite me like if you want to do that just go start a startup or a corporation try something new flatter newer governance whether that's quadratic or there's plenty of new models that people want to experiment with just try it out like do something different yeah and just quickly to say like i think what both of you are doing like really contributes to dao's being different and i would really like us to challenge that imaginary so that that doesn't happen keep agreeing this is not the the syllabus no sorry james uh yeah um one of the things that kind of uh led me down uh this rethinking of of dows and then having like these smaller dials is that i think with this emergent design this kid was talking about we don't want this hierarchical top-down organization i think that dao's actually allow for scaling leadership so you can join a dao work hard at it be the shining star and not have these like traditional social constructs and this is where i say like the clay is still wet right the the kind of like there's gonna be a cultural or social norming that's going to be happening and i think this is what we can all affect and i think that on chain voting on chain like transactions you'll be able to see who's performing and i think on top of that again i'm going to pitch verifiable credentials as another data layer on top of that that people are going to be able to reason about uh people's performance so i think dials are going to be about like where the next leaders are going to come from thank you so much distinguished panelists thanks appreciate sean thank you everybody