2020: The Year of the DAO – Panel

my name is Ruben market consensus on identity so I'm not the DAO expect but I'm here together with a lot of experts in that field so I'm very curious and very looking forward to the conversation maybe to start everybody just a very brief intro who you are and what project brings you here my name is Griff green I work on the common stack and giveth my name is Amanda Casas and I'm here on this stage in my capacity as secretary of marketing Dow my name is Mario Gomez and I work in Aragon one in the team working in developing a mouse framework everyone my name is Aaron Wright I'm the co-founder of open law and putting together a project called collab hi there I'm James Duncan I'm a co-founder to bridge and part of the Medicare tell the James Dow we recently launched the signal down so I have a number of Dow experiences going on hey everyone my name is Matt Dunn co-founder of double sec so the type of is the year of the Dow maybe anyone just everybody just stop who it's like why do you think this year could be the breakthrough for the house I see a lot of opportunity in the simulation space there's this really cool open-source tool called cad cad and not only can we use it to start designing our economic systems which like I feel like dowels are cool but they get cooler when there's a when there's an economy built around it and you're managing in a decentralized way in economy but the challenge is that as we saw today with fulcrum when you have a complex system there's a lot of things that could go wrong that you may have not have predicted and this is why it's really important that we start simulating and our designs but what's really cool is once you have the simulation then you can start any it actually matches the behavior you can start doing predictive modeling and something that we call out the common stack call computer-aided governance so it's not like an AI that makes all the governance decisions it's more like when maker Dowell decides oh should we raise the interest rate you know up 2% you take the simulation you run a like a Monte Carlo like so you get a thousand or a million simulations and you take the worst case in the best case scenario and it informs people of like what could happen after this decision yeah I don't know I think it's the year of the Dow's because Dow's were always a good idea they never stopped being a good idea and people have had enough time to forget about the dow hack that there's been enough time to like rehabilitate the word Dow and there's been so much great technology being built that we actually have the convergence of you know enough time has passed that that meme has sort of floated away mixed with it staying a good idea mixed with building great tools not just Moloch down stock but also really integrating with the world of doing things legally and responsibly so that's what I'm excited about yeah I also think that it is going to be the year of the Dow because there are many tools and applications that people can use now that wasn't the case at the beginning of 2019 for example and so yeah now people can experiment with different frameworks different governance systems and also we see projects now working on the legal side of the things so things are getting real now yeah I think Amanda you're right there the hang the Dow hangover is over I also think the ico hangover is a bit over but I think we all know that what's really important and impressive about what if the rim can do it can pool capital right we can pull capital incredibly fast we've got huge advancements now on the smart contract side with Moloch and now Moloch v2 which we had the pleasure of working with with the folks for meta cartel and amine and we also now have the legal frameworks that are in place to do this in a way that should really create a new opportunities for projects to raise capital for to create for-profit venture funds that may fund those projects and I think we all know that particularly in the venture side they've got it wrong when it comes to aetherium they missed a lot of projects a lot of great opportunities and I think we can do do it better as a community so a theorem can fulfill its mission we can build the commercial world and rebuild it but also rebuild Silicon Valley and rebuild it in the sky and that's a great point actually I think one thing that the medicore tell specifically does really well is it kind of it's a community of founders within the space and in in some ways it's maybe the best corollary to a YC within etherium today and so for that like your point about rebuilding a Silicon Valley type mechanism where you actually have revenue that's sustainable that can refeed the ecosystem and grow and continually recycle that I see that as being extremely valuable the other thing that I think will be happening this year is bringing the threshold to entry lowering that threshold so that more people can participate in down structures and we can be more creative about how communities can collectively manage and participate in in resource aggregation and management I think there are three forces that's come into play here so one force is just technology has so much much Road up so right now we actually can 2,000 force is that there is a really strong craving impatience in the good sense that we are all waiting for the killer app but killer app that gets all the way to the input user so I think dphi is incredible but that's not the mainstream user so I think there is a strong craving which even means that people are willing to compromise or balance between such a decentralization and use the penalty and the third force is the external consciousness which I think he's quickly maturing up for the adoption both because of just of the learning curve that happen but more so I think there is a growing pressure out there that are coming from corrupted central structures and people impatience to the artifacts from those structures and thus much more openness for those new ideas and we see those like I don't know governor governance of Wyoming and Colorado here this is something that would not happen three years ago and I think just as like this kind of level of people are open to blockchains I think I see the same level people are open to thousand is because of that so what do you think is the your favorite tower project at the moment maybe Maria you wanna start your favorite project isn't what the favorite tower project not yourself obviously not your own what's the mode pick another one which is not yours please so my favorite project is the Wow the loud not surprising yeah you should be excited with one other ones no co-option I'll do you're you and you me okay collusion it works it works well fine I'll go uh well I guess I'm kind of part of meta cartel but for me they're my favorite just because there's so much fun you know they're they're making it fun they're having a good time out there and it's not about making money it's a it's a effectively a charity project that's trying to improve you accent almost like a beautiful incubator for like young startups that don't know where to fit in exactly and and Peter Pan and and the amazing crew it just all come together and give like a little family vibe you know and and they just have fun I mean it's called meta cartel you know it's not a serious project they're not trying to like have a killer app they're not pushing really hard they're just having a good time and I feel like if we have more projects like you know bringing more fun into the space it would you know it would be more fun and there would be I don't know it would just be great like that's all I'm super excited other than marketing Dow about the Lao and about the general trend of Dow's being the next icos which they think is what's gonna happen there's a bunch of energy that's trying to do something like that that hasn't had somewhere to go and this could be that vehicle and that could be pretty exciting that's maybe a chance for you to discover this what is it Wow I and also marketing now is pretty important I think we've seen that we've been out marketed in part by some other protocols so as so I do think like we can do an incredibly better job at that as a collective community and the marketing has a really great experience and experiment in order to do that in terms of the lami allowed to talk about it I mean listen we all remember the Dow the Dow I actually think was the first killer app for aetherium and I think we forgot about that because we got story died when it came to token sales and I SEOs they really showed us that we had the ability with this powerful new technology to pull a tremendous amount of capital I think if we had the Dow and it didn't explode spectacularly we may not have had the token boom we would have had a more curated way to begin to fund great projects that were helpful for the ecosystem and that's what we're trying to rebuild and what's really interesting because of the great laws that we have in the US and in various different states we can do that and we can do it all aboveboard and we can begin to start funding some really incredible projects in the etherium ecosystem and even beyond that right so projects that may come out of meta cartel projects that may come out of other other corners of the ecosystem will now have a place to get fun funding and financing which really exciting yeah and I am I think there's so much innovation happening right now with in Dallas across thousand whether that's at you know you see like D org maybe at Dow stack they're one of the first proper dev shops that are generating revenue coordinating via down structure they have their own reputation system for distributing you know I think like Dallas x-gen token at a at scale whenever we get 10,000 people in a Dow that's focused on global warming investment or or you know pushing the ball there I think that will be really really fascinating and interesting to see as a mechanism you also have like common stack and Aragon building these fundraising apps with an augment of bonding curve design and having a bonding curve implemented to fundraise has yet to happen I'm really curious to see how that's gonna happen and so all of these are ready to ship in the next like 12 months more or less right like they're they're in stages and they've been ideas and been in development for a long while and so I'm really excited to see that continue to emerge okay firstly I think it's an unfair question I truly admire honestly all of the projects here if I need to choose internal I actually join I think the org is amazing thing and now my if I but he still I need to make a choice just and it's not it's not a collusion III literally took the choice before I really like the the new start I really think a bridge is super innovative and I'm really excited about the opportunities but coming up from there I just want to give a shout out to two projects that were mentioned Penn valla which doesn't get nearly enough credit they bootstrap like like a token with no value and then it just shows up on unis WAP and now they're found in a new economy to support grants I mean it's it's a magical thing and then source cred which is an up-and-coming meritocracy Dow which is just like dude dandy-lion like they're just killing it there it's a it's a beautiful thing to check out for me I was going to say that one surskit you know it's a way to set up these doubts on an open way you know and in another project it's Friday D I think is it's not that popular but they are building a social identity Network and they are using a towel since their beginning so - - their community and their funds and yeah they are using they also have illegals their legal instructor and they are working in two connected to the data that they are using but one of the projects last year was a which was I think quite interesting was the DX Dao project so nothing will you be willing to explain a little bit what it was about and make some lessons learned from their experience right yeah I see oh maybe people are aware of that but maybe it also there was a big talk about it but maybe I can share I don't know a couple of lessons let's see so I think one is that you know I think the biggest challenge in dows or one of the biggest challenge is design of their configuration and in particular the voting distribution so what we called reputation but doesn't really matter there's some voting distribution and you design we design I mean we design a game for that and one of the lesson is that it's really critical that the outcome of that game is fairly decentralized because once it's kind of a little bit centralized it disengages everyone else but the few actors which practically control Dao just disengages which i think is a good signal for what thou good are are good but it's really critical to design for that secondly I think it's super important that a Dao starts its life with a very clear narrative once the narrative is not so much clear it's very hard to engage because people don't really understand how to engage like what to propose so it's I think an agenda clear agenda is super important for persons that will start what do you think are the biggest challenges we are still facing I mean like lots of progress a lot of innovation but what other things which hinder the success for this year private key management private key management just simply private key management so madam asked if you if you I don't know crypto kitties a an interview with with the diaper labs team revealed at one point that 99% of people who had to download venom ask decided not to use crypto kitties because they didn't want to download meta mask that's still happening that's still the case so you know I think like what needs to happen is really still it's that interface it's that onboarding for web 3 and I'm you know super excited to be able to work with James Young who pioneered the idea of a counterfactual account account contract in order to allow for someone to have an account prior to receiving eat or even purchasing you without interact with the blockchain so that's yeah that's my perspective at least I think the cultural build is totally underestimated there you don't just like deploy it down and think it's gonna solve your problems that Dow is just almost like a legal structure there's no point in putting just like I'm gonna start a company and it'll work out you know like that's silly and it kind of goes after what Matan said where it's like you need to have a vision of mission policies how are you going to make decisions you know there's some amazing work from Elinor Ostrom eight principles of comments it's a [ __ ] top eight list okay just read it please and like let's do some other research on how other organizations without blockchain enable actually like organize themselves in a flat hierarchical non hierarchical way I love what Philippe is in the front row over here what he has done with doubt canvas if you're starting it out just like Coke download Dow canvas it has all these questions that just walk you through like it's almost like just like asking the right questions so you can really visualize what you're trying to do with your Dow right like if we could spend like just like half the time we spent developing Dells developing the culture of adèle we'd be so much better off yeah definitely starting a doubt take some doing but I also want to make kind of a counterpoint to the u.s. point you made which is if you're comparing the UX of just like playing a normal online game with the UX of like meeting meta masks and then doing it then it's a bad comparison and you're gonna lose a lot of people but what if you compare the UX of needing to set up like a venture fund to starting it out like Dow's actually have amazing um compared to starting a venture fund because it's super expensive to do that and super time-consuming and there's a lot of paperwork and it's like everyone's least favorite thing so I wonder whether the place to really insert dows as a UX solution is where the alternative sucks and the alternatives suck yeah so I've been watching as my partner starts up a venture fund and the alternative sucks like just spinning up a dao is super easy and we're getting to that point which i think is encouraging you know there's definitely problems with the private key management and obviously norms around organizations have been vexing human beings forever but i think the headline is the big pieces are here right we can actually begin to experiment for the first time substantively so to me it really does feel like you know 2016 when people were talking about tokens and then we saw year c20 kind of drop and standardize it my supposition and assumption is the Moloch v2 smart contracts are going to be the ERC 20 standard for organizations they're incredible they provide a lot of flexibility they can interoperate on a number of different platforms we're already starting to do that and that's kind of the fertile ground which we need to begin to rebuild this and that's [ __ ] amazing like let's be honest like the fact that we've gotten to this point is pretty cool on the pieces that we've added together we are able to actually wrap them and create a legal environment for them so you know thinking of it like a developer we can set up the development environment so that you can begin to play with these organizations so it all sits in the background what that means is that it doesn't need to be limited to just folks that are you know really into crypto right that means that we can begin to onboard people from outside of this community and bring them in because the UX for the real world is pretty cruddy and the UX for aetherium is pretty great and the fact that you can pull capital literally like water across the internet ISM is magical I don't know when I think about those I I think about communities and you know open open groups of people and what web 2.0 has an amazing UX compared to web 3.0 you know and when these communities and these huge projects they want to onboard their community and they have to learn about seedy human answer and it's it's it makes it difficult of course if you compare like a VC fund and like setting up a dau yeah I mean in Oregon they use of the UX is amazing but still if we want to reach that end user you know in those open communities there is a lot of work to do so firstly going back to a previous question I just want to just throw it out there I think fence Dow is something that you'll pay attention to is real something real happening there and regarding challenges I think it's totally dependent on the use case that you're focused on but if you are focusing on any use case that goes to the mainstream I think UX is by far the big big challenge so with all the like 2019 or the defy stuff all the LEGO pieces do you think or what is the most exciting thing stuff like using this pieces now in the Dow the buffer Dow is just behind you yesterday do you think that from all the developments we have seen in the last week last year I'm totally confused so one thing I thought I was really excited about for d5 just bringing the pool of capital that's in Bitcoin is to defy with projects like TBT CE o and then thinking about that with dows imagine if you could bring all the capital that's in Bitcoin across into Dallas as well so I take that I mean guys amazing so with allow we're able to accept contributions or pledges and eath and then payout and die so the fact that there is a stable currency that we can now reasonably rely upon is pretty pretty amazing I also think what Amanda mentioned is pretty huge so once we have T BTC the concept of bringing in capital not just from a theorem ecosystem but also the Bitcoin ecosystems is pretty amazing you know I really think a theorem is the bridge of the this emerging commercial world and you know being able to serve that and actually use Bitcoin as collateral more productively is pretty cool so you can imagine a world where it's t BTC to die right and its funding maybe projects that are needed in the Bitcoin ecosystem which I know may ruffle some people's feathers but I think we need to create a bigger tent and not you know separate tents so I'm pretty excited about that as well can you repeat the question so I was obviously because we don't have that much time I sure were to shift a bit more towards the risk I mean was the Dow we all have seen what excitement around house can can can do I think we learn a lot and I think some of the smart contacts are obviously way more secured but what other kind of biggest risk can we see that some of these dollars actually become so popular and suddenly we see Bitcoin or PTC or going in there and Sony's so big what are the rest like what do you think from a PR perspective the problem is that one thing is going to be poorly constructed and make a mess and then there will be a headline that conflates everything and just says douse RMS and then brings it back to the original Dow and it's like why do people do this what didn't we know from before that this is a mess it's like every time there's a random DAP or exchange or something that gets hacked the headline is always aetherium is hacked and when I was um you know at consensus and you know just calling up journalists to say can you please clarify that this one thing happening doesn't mean the theory of got hacked I think we're gonna have to do a lot of clarification that maybe one day had a problem maybe one down had a scandal that doesn't reflect on all doubts it's a new thing but let's be serious about qualifying each project differently because there could each gonna be run by different people some are gonna be wildly successful some might not there's gonna be arranged and there needs to be the knowledge base to withstand like miscommunication I mean the other risks are legal right so the Dow was just on the federal government's radar I mean that's really what kicked off the US government's push back on tokens more broadly but we've largely solved that through legal structuring so we're able to classify what these tokens are we're also able to limit the liability of members of something goes sideways on the security side you know I do think mark v2 is a huge step improvement it's been audited by consensus and other other folks are taking a look at it and so far it looks pretty good so hopefully we've limited that risk although obviously there's always a possibility related to that but I think those are the two big the two big risks that are that are out there if things get too big I think that's a good problem to have I'll take those 1% problems right yeah I was going to say that like those things already happened like like a case like the Dow and probably we are going to see more many more and I think at the end that helps as well and also the legal risk is is always there it has always been like that for me a big risk right now that I'm seeing is that we are still like very close we are a very small community in general we are building for each other and yeah we need to start open up and thinking about that and userra more well I think it was already said I think the biggest risk our security and securities or security and legal just to add that I think both solutions are coming I think the risk is that solution will come a little bit too late or not too late but later then adoption will come but then that might create a problem good are there any use cases which you think are super exciting but very unexplored yeah so I have a friend who is building a thing called the global correlation and so this is a coral reef restoration network or a project where they're creating these massive concrete structures sinking them to the ocean and and then it's both like a crawl restoration as well as an art project and I love the idea of millions of people contributing five dollars at a time to that kind of project and then giving whatever five hundred dollars just to give a stipend for others to do the same PlayBook in areas that they also need to restore korra's so that's a basic examples what I see like a mass you know at mass scale could could provide as a benefit to society so I think using dows to fund new decentralized protocols token-based protocols is really the most unexplored I think people are giving up on token models and I think that they're giving up too soon and I think actually using a dao as a way to pull the capital that's necessary to support open-source development is the path forward i think it creates an appropriate governance between them where you kind of have software developers doing what they do well which is develop software you have folks that either support the project or want to fund the project in a set for an entity effectively and then the two needs interact in many ways that's how we structured aetherium I think tezo's was structured in part that way and I think that that's the path forward for projects so that we can actually have open decentralized token-based protocols and I don't think we should give up on that just cuz some people got upset I would really like to see a 1 million people purchase group like one meal people let's let's say I think that I've heard that this the cell phone packages in the US are really shitty we had the same thing in Israel for many many years and in one year something in the regulations change and the price of packages dropped like 5 X 10 X overnight so I'm suggesting in the u.

s. we just do one of you people who put hundred dollars and then they come to the go she ate about a package with a hundred million dollar independent back so I think that's such a simple use case I'm just excited to see more unique and innovative governance models and decision-making models there that are designed for a specific use case like forget what we know about like time-based voting and yes or no or picking from a list let's get creative and start finding other things other decision processes that fit our use case is there something specific which you think it's most exciting everyone well I work with block science and they came up with a conviction voting which is our it's made specifically for working with a bonding curve and a list of proposals and having really good UX and limiting voter apathy by taking away the time based voting and blah blah blah you know can go read a blog post but I'm not I don't want to I don't want to like chill conviction voting I want to see more creative and in a approaches because I think we're running out of time so taking in one year from now we sit here and we look back at 2020 the year of the dog maybe one statement of like what was so special in 2020 looking back I think we'll have well over 100 million dollars managed via Dallas by the end of the year 100 million dollars I think that that's pretty reasonable I think that that's an goal that I think we can all achieve and I think that that would be pretty awesome marketing Dow I would love to see the marketing project having made tangible recorded impacts in terms of growing the size of the etherium ecosystem oh I'd love to love to see more grants programs and processes be facilitated by doubt structures with smaller groups making specific like decisions within their specific domain utilizing maybe a Moloch or meta cartel or Aragon a any sort of the down structures essentially to be integrated more for coordination within our ecosystem I would like to see a few thousands users non blockchain completely regular endpoint users and more so a growth rate like constant growth rate in last four months appear Maria I will have loved to see more experiments in governance like grave mention it I develop love to see I don't know future key on you know we have that application would love to see people start using it and also I would love to see the five projects like really resent realizing their projects I have to say two things I can't help it standardizing the cultural build like what Dowell canvas has done as well as being able to fork designs instead of forking code and simulating them before you deploy them awesome can I add one thing I would really like to say 2020 integrations between platforms I think it's possible oh yeah that's nice great on that note thanks a lot for the panelists Big Boss [Applause] [Music] you