Beginning

0:00

Great. As we’re gonna get going, I’m gonna get our deck here.

0:06

I’ll introduce Nicole Kelly Westman, who’s 221A’s Education and Learning Programmer.

0:11

She’s going to open our session today with a territorial acknowledgement. Thanks, Jesse. I’m Nicole Kelly Westman. We have a bit of a different territorial acknowledgement today, obviously. So, I’ll get started.

Territorial Acknowledgement

0:27

So, I’ll get started. This is the time that we need to mourn with our Indigenous relatives

0:34

it is with great grief that we recognize that the land itself is holding within it the loss of Secwe̓pemc children.

0:45

Oral stories about the magnitude of this loss have been told for generations by survivors of the residential school system,

0:53

and only now was it proven through Western science with ground radar investigations.

0:58

For those of you calling in from outside of Canada we’ve included a list of articles to contextualize this devastating news.

1:06

These lost children were not able to grow up and tend to their communities, care for their kin, or bring love and delight to those surrounding them.

1:14

Rather, their absence has left a void of endlessly echoing and ricocheting grief.

1:20

The truth of this nation’s history is one of genocide.
It is one of greed.

1:25

All guests of this unceded and unsurrendered land need to sit with the discomfort of this tragedy, and think critically about what to do,

1:35

to show up for our Indigenous hosts. The work of reconciliation should not be left to Indigenous folks to sort through on their own.

1:44

I tend to write my land acknowledgments as specific celebrations of place, to remind myself and audience attendees of the significance in the uniqueness of varying ecosystems.

1:56

But I can’t think of ways to celebrate the land when that can only think about how long she has been grieving, how long she has been waiting for restitution and justice.

2:06

Please, should you have the financial means, I would ask you to redirect surplus resources you might have to provide support to Indigenous folks through this harrowing trauma.

2:16

In this slide is the list of resources for you to support the Secwe̓pemc Nation and other Indigenous groups protecting their territories from ongoing colonization

2:26

and the displacement enacted by the governments of Canada and British Columbia. We’ve also included additional resources for you to learn further about the industrial exploitation of old growth forests

2:39

most specifically the Fairy Creek Watershed, which is currently being protected by frontline activists and many brave Indigenous youth and land defenders.

2:47

We’ll paste links into the chat window as well. As you can see in the slide provided, Jesse’s also included a really incredible artwork by Whess Harman,

3:01

which brings some critical perspective to land acknowledgments, and this work is installed at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

3:11

In front of it, we can see a memorial with 215 tiny shoes to recognize the loss of those children.

3:21

Thank you. Thank you, Nicole for your territorial acknowledgement, and for sharing where we’re at in Canada this week with a heavy heart and a wounded psyche.

Program Introduction

3:29

My name is Jesse McKee, and I’m the Head of Strategy at 221A. I lead the organization’s research, programming, communications, and advancement.

3:37

We’re gathered today for a program as part of the launch of 221A’s digital strategy titled Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks.

3:43

We’ve just completed our research phase of the initiative and published a research report of our findings, values, and recommendations.

3:49

We convened a research cluster to investigate the potential of blockchain as an institutional technology,

3:55

and through this collective work, we published a freely available 200-page PDF.

4:00

It includes papers that survey our culture’s ability to enable a mass collaborative financial turn, developed with new models for digital cooperativism.

4:08

The emergent strategy is one that enables the conditions for recommoning land, data, and objects through the development of responsive and resilient asset-sharing,

4:16

power-distributing, and value-generating networks. We’re supported by the Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Strategy Fund,

4:22

which awarded a multi-year grant to 221A through the Organizational Transformation stream of its awards. This funding program, which awarded grants from 2018 to 2021,

4:30

supported strategic initiatives that will help artists, groups, and organizations better understand the digital world,

4:36

engage with it, and respond to the culture and social changes it’s producing. Today, I’m joined by the roundtable participants, co organizers, and co-hosts.

4:44

First, there’s our Digital Strategy Initiatives Editorial Director, Rosemary Heather, as well as Daniel Keller, co-founder and co-host of New Models.

4:52

This pro-complexity media aggregator, podcast stream, and Discord community began in late 2018,

4:58

and I’ve been a member pretty much since then. Daniel was a researcher on our strategy and led an early workshop with us at Blockchain@UBC called “Imagining Collapse,”

5:07

which gave our project an urgent planetary acknowledgement of scale and scope. Rosemary’s been working with 221A since 2019 in developing this overall project.

5:16

She authored a research paper titled “The Staking Internet,” included in our report, and she’s going to continue working with us at 221A to plan a nonprofit crypto finance working group,

5:26

which will begin to model a staking pool between some cultural nonprofits in Canada. The topic of our conversation is social tokens and distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs).

5:36

That’s exactly why I thought 221A should research and develop blockchain tech. From our operating model you can see how moving towards these new models in the blockchain,

5:45

being developed by crypto communities, will enable hopefully a more cohesive and collectivized form of an institution, or some kind of practice in common.

5:55

How we socialize trade and value information and culture in the digital space is what we need to better plan, so that we can provide for our communities with sustenance, opportunities, and a viable digital economy that could be more equitable than the one we have now.

6:07

Thanks, Jesse. Thanks to everybody at 221A for organizing this, and thanks to everybody for joining.

6:17

And as Jesse mentioned, the focus of the Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks project is,

6:27

what relevance does blockchain have to arts organizations?

6:34

And with this group, we have the type of arts organization that’s probably best suited to blockchain, which is a self-organized arts organization.

6:47

Maybe you don’t even think of yourself in that way. Because blockchain really leads to

6:54

a different type of online collaboration to anything that might be considered like an art institution.

7:03

So, we’re really interested to know what you found out.

7:10

The thing about blockchain is that it’s hard to understand. I think I’ve only recently really understood what decentralization means—

7:24

it happened in a conversation I had with Jesse and Tao, so that was helpful—but I really understand blockchain as something that allows collaboration at scale.

7:37

Bitcoin is the first use-case and a really good model for understanding that:

7:45

you have this mass collaboration, globally, and everybody’s working in their own interests, but together, they produce this value.

8:03

Another way to think of it: Bitcoin is like user generated content,

8:10

but it’s the users and not the platform that captures all the value.

8:16

That’s super interesting, that’s really important. But the bigger question is,

8:27

what else can you do with a blockchain? Is it only good for this use of creating value (which it’s doing in ever-more complex ways, of course)?

8:40

Or is it just the case that the value helps underpin other types of activity on the internet, but in an important way—

8:52

in terms of incentives and penalization for bad behaviour, one important functionality that blockchain brings to coordinating of groups online.

9:08

So, again, really interested to hear what you found out. Thanks for joining. I’m going to pass the mic over to Daniel now.

9:18

Thanks everybody for joining us. Thanks, especially to Jesse for doing all the hard work of organizing and facilitating everything.

9:29

You’re really, really good at facilitating things! I’m always really impressed.

9:34

When you said that there was this opportunity to get a lot of these people together in one place to have this roundtable, I was really excited.

9:45

I haven’t really had the opportunity to be part of the conversation

9:51

about this topic, even though I’ve been adjacent to it so much.

9:56

I think that right now is a really interesting time for all of us to come together to talk about DAOs and social tokens.

10:04

First off, I know that those are broad terms.

10:09

There’s a lot of use-cases for DAOs. Considering the context of 221A, and generally what we’re all interested in,

10:17

I want to focus more on the cultural applications rather than, you know, defi governance—although,

10:26

of course, there’s a lot of overlap there and we can explore that. I just want to say thank you for everyone for being here.

10:33

I think that right now is a very specifically interesting time,

10:38

because we’re in a pause in the bull market.

10:44

I think this is a good time to reflect on what is real and what is hype

10:50

and what can actually be sustained. What’s been developed recently, that is exciting and genuinely going to be useful?

11:00

It’s still a hopeful time, and I think that there’s a lot of potential for this type of technology to yield

11:12

really, really interesting results in the near term, not just in a sci-fi future.

11:18

My experience with New Models has given me some insight into managing online communities

11:28

and the pitfalls and stuff there, and we are discussing some types of DAO, like migration.

11:36

So, I also really want to pick your brains and get some insight into how to do this kind of stuff.

11:44

With that, can we go around and have everybody introduce themselves and their projects?

Participant Introductions & What Projects Are You Inspired By?

11:52

Sure. Thanks, everyone. Thanks a lot Jesse and everyone at 221A for organizing this and Daniel for putting me in touch with you guys and organizing this as well.

12:03

I’m Louis. I’m currently working with the SuperRare team.

12:09

SuperRare is a crypto art platform that connects artists—tokenizing their art—and collectors.

12:24

This platform is built on the Ethereum blockchain, which implies a number of interesting characteristics.

12:34

I do community things there: I love to think about online communities,

12:41

and I came into this space through DAO projects.

12:46

So, I’ve been working in the crypto space for around three years now.

12:51

Started working in the space through Aragon (which is a DAO project),

12:56

which enabled people to handle funds on the blockchain through voting mechanisms.

13:04

I’m deeply passionate about this space and getting people to collaborate together online, in general,

13:13

and how we can achieve that. I’ve been writing about that as well at Albiverse.blog. That’s it.

13:23

Hi. My name is Neïl and I’m an artist, or filmmaker, or something.

13:37

I’m interested in blockchains as well, but it was at the beginning on a personal level,

13:44

and I make some jokes. And out of those jokes…

13:51

My studio became a production company, slowly in the past years,

13:56

and since the pandemic happened, the production company took over with technicians and developers,

14:06

and we produce films and cultural stuff discreetly.

14:11

This year, we’ve made a lot of small attempts at structuring and restructuring

14:20

and playing with models of cultural production and diffusion. Yeah, we are doing stuff now about that.

14:30

I’m Greg McMullen. I’m a lawyer. I’ve been working with Alberto on various blockchain things,

14:36

starting with ascribe back in 2015. And we’ve kind of kept up with projects since then.

14:43

With SayDAO, it’s DAO for loosely organized organizations, funded by Human Data Commons.

14:49

The goal is to incentivize ongoing quality participation by awarding people who are active participants more influence,

14:59

or what we call Say, in the decisions made by the group. There’s a couple of things about how it works I would want to note before passing it off to Alberto.

15:09

The tokens are awarded for participating in things that the group itself decides are worthwhile.

15:15

It’s done on an inflationary model: so, we give more tokens for each subsequent event than the one previous,

15:22

which allows newcomers to not have much influence at the beginning but quickly catch up to people

15:28

who have been there for a while, as long as they keep taking part.

15:34

Say can’t be traded, because your contributions to the community are only really meaningful to that community.

15:40

We don’t want people to be able to just buy in and suddenly have a lot of control.

15:48

Finally, to do this really successfully, to make sure that people are

15:54

using it to build community, we want the tech to be as invisible as possible:

16:00

making it about the community rather than a blockchain project. Ideally, people wouldn’t even know that

16:07

what they’re doing is on a blockchain, and Alberto has done some really amazing magic to make that possible.

16:14

So, Alberto. Hey, everyone. My name is Alberto, and I’m a software engineer from Berlin.

16:20

As Greg said, we built SayDAO to incentivize participation.

16:25

As I guess you know, onboarding people to a blockchain product can be daunting and intimidating for the end users.

16:34

For example, some projects require you to use MetaMask or other wallet-enabled browsers.

16:41

For us, the main technical challenge was to build this fully decentralized app without any central server and

16:47

without expecting users to have a wallet or funds in their wallet to be able to use the app.

16:54

We spent quite some time working on usability and hiding all the blockchain parts as much as possible.

17:02

For this reason, we decided to use an approach called Burner Wallets.

17:07

So basically, you don’t need MetaMask or a wallet on your browser to use the product,

17:13

you just need to open the page and the wallet is generated on the fly for you.

17:18

Also, we are using Open Gas Network. This basically allows people to do transactions

17:28

on Ethereum without having funds. Those are the two key things we put in the product. Thank you.

17:35

on Ethereum without having funds. Those are the two key things we put in the product. Thank you. My name is Billy. I’m also based in Berlin. I worked as an artist for many years and after an artwork involved cryptocurrency began in 2017,

17:48

I became more interested in technology and started building in Ethereum and a bunch of different specialty areas:

17:55

early NFT works, DAO works, some defi stuff, automatic market makers.

18:03

In parallel, I got involved with a project called Cosmos, which is building a new proof-of-stake application-specific paradigm

18:13

for blockchains that all applications should be energy efficient and scalable.

18:18

You do that by having one application per blockchain. Since 2019, I’ve been focused on the Cosmos ecosystem.

18:27

I’m now on the board of management at the Interchain Foundation, which is the foundation behind that project.

18:34

Since early this year, I got involved with a project called Folia—

18:41

which was a marriage of my previous art networks and my current skill set—which is a very small scale, highly curated,

18:54

and really managed NFT gallery where we build out custom blockchain solutions.

19:02

We try to make sure that the artworks are really engaged with the medium in meaningful ways.

19:09

I’m Penny. I’m working as a cultural theorist, mostly out of Berlin, but also within the Goethe-Institut, Furtherfield Gallery,

19:24

and Serpentine Research and Development Lab for DAOs across Europe.

19:31

I’ve sat in Black Swan from a very early position, and there’s been a lot of voices that have been active in the thinking and traversing around Black Swan.

19:43

Black Swan, first of all, was a paper prototype of a way we could decentralize, criticize,

19:54

and create an autonomous organization, where the users (who are artists in this case)

20:00

are in charge of their assets and resources, which they acquire from silent stakeholders.

20:05

The reason why we acquired from silent stakeholders was very much a political act. We’re coming from a Berlin context,

20:13

but I guess this is fairly global: a lot of artists work to a certain degree and level, and then often they are

20:24

creamed off the top from a lot of unpaid labour, which is potentially coming from project spaces, unpaid curators, unpaid interns, etc.

20:36

Then they’re taken from the top after they’ve acquired a certain body of work, from commercial galleries, museums, etc.

20:47

In Berlin, we’ve termed this grooming. From that position, we thought that it would be fairly important to move away from that archaic traditional model,

20:59

and instead hold these institutions and individuals accountable

21:06

for basically paying into the system and providing resources and value from this very low level, which actually allows

21:15

allows the kind of birthright of most artists. We wanted to allow these people to support the local art scene.

21:24

This is also coming from Berlin, which has had a huge amount of

21:35

art spaces’ and studios’ rent increase over the last decade, basically exasperating and accelerating gentrification.

21:47

So really, it was about trying to find a unique model that could actually become,

21:55

in a sense, a practice of paying back into—

22:02

and also, on the other side, ensuring that—Berlin’s art world and scene is still dynamic, radical, and full of potential.

22:17

Calum, do you want to talk about the next part of Black Swan? Thanks, Penny. I’m going to frame a bit more the relationship between Black Swan and Trust.

22:30

So, Trust is many things. We describe it as a collective project for the research, development,

22:37

and maintenance of shared infrastructures and imaginaries. We have a space in Berlin, in Schöneberg, and grew into a Discord over the pandemic,

22:45

which now has 300 members who research six core topics ranging from play and active forums through world building.

22:54

In general, people come to Trust for the ability to explore and

23:00

discuss knowledge in the broadest sense, and emerging fields of knowledge. Trust, as a collective project, builds infrastructure to

23:07

support the interdisciplinary and collaborative creative practices that have emerged around it.

23:14

One of these infrastructures is Black Swan: my role is bridging

23:21

the Trust context and the Black Swan context. Over the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, we did research specifically in the Trust Discord

23:35

around governance models and ways of making collective decisions for digital communities and digital creative communities.

23:43

Over the course of this, we called it a roleplaying activity where

23:48

we encouraged people to push the frameworks to the fullest and to explore the

23:55

possibilities and the attack vectors of different decision-making processes.

24:01

We looked at quadratic voting, a simple one person/one vote system, and a lottery.

24:06

In discussion with these working group participants, we reflected back on the different affordances of these decision-making mechanisms

24:17

and built them into our designs for our first digital tool, which Laura will talk about.

24:26

Hi, everyone. I’m Laura. I’m a researcher, I’m based in Berlin as well.

24:31

With Calum and Penny, I’ve been working on Black Swan.

24:37

After the last working group that we held at Trust, that Calum has just talked about,

24:46

we developed a prototype for a quadratic voting interface called Signet,

24:51

which is a result of tackling the questions, or the problems,

24:58

of how can we decide together, how to create an experience and a useful tool that

25:05

enables people to have more of an expansive experience

25:13

of what it means to participate in such a decision-making process.

25:20

Also, we really wanted to take seriously the role of the

25:26

interface as a site where knowledge is created. So, part of what was really important for us while developing Signet

25:36

was to make explicit the mechanisms underpinning the voting process.

25:44

Following on this first prototype, now we are currently looking to tackle some of the other questions to realize

25:58

the initial vision of Black Swan—beginning to

26:05

try out and experiment with different economic models on the

26:12

basis of the same methodologies: through working groups, workshops, and roleplaying exercises.

26:21

Artemij? Do you want to say hi? One sec. Yes, I can.

26:27

Congratulations on your baby. Thank you. Hey everyone, just a brief introduction.

26:39

My name is Artemij. I’m a final-year PhD candidate at Blockchain@UBC. I’m focusing on the usable security and the human aspect of blockchain tech.

26:51

I see some familiar faces, so hopefully I will be able to participate

26:57

in the discussion as well as I can, considering the circumstances.

27:03

I’m Sarah Friend. I’m an artist and software developer. also based in Berlin and also part of the Trust community.

27:12

I’m here today to talk to you in my capacity working with Circles UBI

27:18

project that I’ve been the lead smart contract developer for since 2018.

27:28

Circles is an alternative currency

27:34

that has mechanisms that try to lead to more

27:39

equal distributions of wealth over time. There’s a lot that goes into how that works, but I’m not going to explain it in the intro,

27:47

I will explain it if you ask. I did bring some slides with diagrams to help if it comes up.

27:55

Circles has been in development for a long time. The project was first founded in 2015.

28:00

There have been a few different incarnations of the Circles team, I’ve been on three of them.

28:07

We launched publicly in October of last year.

28:13

The launch was really successful, also— as an insider who had to keep everything running—quite painful.

28:21

We had 60,000 signups in the first weekend.

28:26

When I last checked the numbers, which was a couple of months ago— actually, I haven’t looked at them since February—but it was over 180,000 then.

28:37

So, Circles continues. The development team has been restructuring.

28:43

I’m no longer operating as the smart contract developer to the project.

28:49

As you might imagine, when you launch a blockchain application, the smart contract developer becomes the least important person on the team after a while,

28:57

because you don’t update that part. I’m now acting more as an advisor to the project. So, I already introduced myself, I’m Daniel Keller, you probably all know that already by now.

29:11

I have some experience with New Models, and I’m also working—generously, I’ll say it’s in the nascent phases—

29:18

on a project called Channel: which will be basically a NFT, or as we like to say, a subscription token-gated podcast network,

29:29

starting with a RSS feed with a bundle of content, with New Models, Interdependence,

29:36

and Joshua Citarella and will probably grow from there. I’m in the active stages of transitioning existing projects into more of a DAO framework

29:46

and also working on other stuff in the space, but I have no technical experience whatsoever. I was an artist for many years, now I speak on podcasts, basically.

29:57

I have a little bit of experience with DAOs,

30:02

enough to ask productive questions, but not enough to answer them.

30:08

I think that we are at an important crux when it comes to all this stuff.

30:16

Clearly COVID, the economic conditions subsequent to that, various other trends—

30:23

they’ve all accelerated the development of this stuff by many years. Now there’s the economic framework to facilitate some of the development,

30:33

or to hype it anyways. Having some experience in Friends With Benefits—

30:40

and for everyone who is not familiar with that, it’s one of the first tokenized communities which

30:47

basically just means it’s a private Discord, for which you need 60 FwB (which is an ERC 20 token) to get access to it.

30:57

It’s using pre-existing tools, which was a huge vulnerability. It used Roll to issue its token immediately, which ended up being disastrous to say the least.

31:09

I think we should really talk about that, because I think this is one of the more interesting things that happened,

31:15

one of the more exciting things that happened with DAOs and social tokens.

31:21

Also very dependent on Discord and other tools and Collab.Land,

31:29

but there is this idea of incremental decentralization,

31:37

which I guess is what is essential to do in these cases.

31:42

I think it was notable, with Black Swan, that you talk about it as being roleplaying.

31:48

A lot of this stuff is still in LARP phases. The governance with Friends with Benefits is another thing that I’ll mention,

31:57

not to beat up on Friends with Benefits too much, but I saw a recent statistic that 3% of the users are voting on the governance things.

32:07

This is ostensibly a group of people who are very interested in these things.

32:13

I don’t know the specifics if it was bigger wallets that voted on it, or the distribution of votes.

32:20

I think it’d be really interesting to look at that data more granularly when it’s available,

32:27

but that seems like a huge barrier. Then the other major barrier with Friends with Benefits that clearly turns off a lot of people is the pyramid scheme nature

32:39

basically, early adopters profiting at the expense of later adopters.

32:45

So, when you talk about having an inflationary currency with SayDAO, I think that’s really interesting, we should talk more about that.

32:52

Clearly, inflation isn’t necessarily theft, as libertarians talk about it,

32:57

but it is also redistributive and essential, probably. I think that’s really important. I also think the idea of silent stakeholding is interesting and we should talk about that, too.

33:09

I think these are a few issues that we already mentioned. There’s also the legal framework.

33:16

A lot of the more interesting things that are happening in the space, there’s not really the legal stack to back it up, which also

33:23

shows you this LARP stage that we’re in. I’m wondering if everybody has any perspectives on things like the Wyoming DAO law and other developments,

33:33

if we are moving towards a place where there’s actually a legal framework to make this stuff worthwhile.

33:39

Another thing that was brought up—again, I’m not gonna keep on bringing up Friends with Benefits, but if there were no talented engineers on the team,

33:50

there’d be no way that they would have recovered from the Roll hack. So, the idea that any community can spin up their own DAO,

34:00

their own social token, and plug and play—that’s clearly a myth. If you don’t have those people on staff,

34:07

it’s a huge liability to be using blockchain in general. So, I think another question is,

34:13

what positive things can we get out of DAOs, or these types of collaborative frameworks, without necessarily falling into these pitfalls of inequality,

34:26

technical risk, and maybe cultural stigma?

34:33

I think the bull market has made the most of the things that have been built over the past three years or so.

34:47

Personally, the excitement has gone down on some of these things, so I want to go back to doing more use-cases and finding new things.

34:58

Upcoming projects that I think are exciting, on my end I’m really into how people cooperate within DAOs and beyond governance.

35:05

Once funds are allocated, how do you manage operations inside a DAO?

35:13

How do you map the different members and gradually equip this organization

35:20

so that they can really operate on higher and higher efficiency and on more and more use-cases?

35:31

Crypto is, you know, value on the internet, so DAOs often start with pooling resources in the treasury.

35:38

These have been the most widely used tools so far. I mean, there are memes going around saying DAOs are just Gnosis multisig

35:48

from most of them, and it’s pretty true. DAOs are also a lot of Discord stuff.

35:57

Basically DAOs are performing this kind of collective ownership today.

36:02

After that, I think will come new ways because we’re still stuck with 1p1v, multisigs, high Gas fees and stuff.

36:13

I think there’s a new wave of thinking around how to make that be beyond these ideals of decentralization,

36:25

collective ownership, democratic voting and stuff.

36:30

Now that there’s many people wanting to do DAOs and experimenting, they’re starting to understand, like, maybe we’ll have to make compromises here and there,

36:40

have subcommittees, subtreasuries, give up some of the so-called decentralization

36:48

to centralize some of the powers, some of the decisions with the right governance mechanism. I’m quite optimistic about these new projects that are allowing committees to adopt more granular structures.

37:01

So not only the single multisig treasury, but more like a subset of committees

37:07

with different roles and permissions, and different ways of doing governance that are not about everyone voting on every decision,

37:22

or one person deciding for everything. There are new voting mechanisms as well.

37:28

Indeed, they’re definitely not new—they’ve been around for some time— but some committees, like 1Hive, have been starting to experiment with

37:35

conviction voting in the past month. This is an interesting innovation as well.

37:41

Just to finish here, I’m sure everyone will have great takes and we can dive deeper in any of these thing, but I’m quite interested in

37:52

how reputation can flow within these communities and how this impacts decision making.

38:00

There are projects like the Coordinape project built by the Yearn community that’s basically allocating resources

38:09

in a DAO through this gifting mechanism, where everybody has a number of gift credits

38:16

and spreads that to members around them in the organization, and that’s the way resources are allocated.

38:23

These bottom-up, emergent ways to allocate resources are very interesting,

38:29

instead of this top-down voting, 1p1v methodology.

38:36

Yeah, lots of interesting things behind the scenes, which I think are going to come up in the next couple of months, probably 12 to 24 months. Always takes time.

38:46

Was that 1Hive that you said? Coordinape?

38:53

Yeah. Coordinape. Greg and Alberto. First, I’ll ask you the question about what you’re excited about.

39:01

But I do want to talk specifically about the inflationary element,

39:07

I think that’s really interesting, and then also a bit more about the voting mechanisms that you’ve settled on.

39:13

But first off, what other projects are you looking at right now?

39:18

Sure, one thing that you mentioned was how the lack of a proper legal framework has left all of it in a LARP zone.

39:26

I think it’s exciting that some jurisdictions are starting to think about it. I don’t think the Wyoming law does very much,

39:33

except reskin existing corporate law to allow DAO pieces to come in.

39:39

But it doesn’t really recognize the new things that DAOs can do, and the kind of elements of corporate law that are designed

39:49

for a technological environment that aren’t really necessary under DAOs.

39:55

So, one project I have been involved in over the past year

40:02

has been working with a group called COALA (Coalition of Autonomous Legal Applications)

40:08

that has been working on what we call the DAO Model Law.

40:13

It’s a full addition to corporate law that looks at the goals of corporate law,

40:22

like protecting investors, protecting shareholders, protecting the public,

40:28

and providing a framework for an organization, and looks for what DAOs actually do

40:34

and creates a legal framework that would give DAOs legal personality and limited liability,

40:40

as long as they comply with these public protecting things. A draft of that should be public for comment in the very near future.

40:50

We’re hoping that that can start a conversation about how DAOs can be recognized and more fully able to interact.

41:00

Because right now, there’s a really risky legal situation for anyone getting involved with DAOs, in that they might just be held responsible for anything that the DAO does.

41:10

DAOs can’t technically enter contracts. So, it’s dangerous to interact with the DAO if the smart contract winds up

41:18

doing something different than you thought it would, or if there’s a security breach. So, I think that’s one really exciting thing that’s going to unlock a whole world of new possibilities.

41:31

Did you want to talk about the inflationary element now, or should I—? Sure, maybe Alberto, do you want to say something? Also, should we go to that?

41:39

I guess the question is, what is the most exciting use-case for DAO, right?

41:45

I want to share something that maybe is not that exciting. But for me, two years ago, it was extremely exciting and had a lot of fun,

41:53

because I took part of LeapDAO: a DAO of developers that were working on scaling solutions for Ethereum.

42:04

At the time, I had two wow moments, one that was related to the community

42:11

and the other that was related to the technology itself. With the community, I had the impression that the people that participated in the DAO felt deeply involved

42:22

and committed in the project, because the project itself was

42:27

technically stimulating for the developers there. Also, because the payments were continuous, there was no “pay day,”

42:35

let’s say. So every time you finished a task, you would receive the money.

42:41

There was also a token that was distributed based on the effort that people put into projects.

42:47

On the other dimension, that is the technical one,

42:52

at one point we had to work on a spinoff project. At that point, we created a new DAO.

43:01

We moved some of the funds in there, we created a new ERC-20 token for the project, 20 token for the project,

43:08

and in a few minutes, we had our own company that was a spinoff of the previous one, and our own economy.

43:16

This can be of use if you know what DAOs can do.

43:21

For me—years ago, I incorporated my own limited company in Italy—

43:27

working in this way was a paradigm shift. It was extremely empowering that I could create something

43:36

new without going to the notary and paying 10,000 euros to some lawyer.

43:43

I was ready to collaborate and work with other people and share value.

43:52

That’s my small story around DAOs. What I’m excited about is also what Greg said, I want to see something legal.

44:00

I want to see a legal DAO, and something that is recognized by governments

44:05

and can play at the same level of traditional companies.

44:11

Great. Now we can talk a little bit more about the inflationary mechanism?

44:17

Because I do think this is just one of the fundamental flaws with a lot of this stuff,

44:25

if you’re trying to have any type of leftist or social program implemented with this stuff,

44:32

and not fall into the path of least resistance, which is sort of

44:38

anarcho-libertarianism when you’re dealing with this tech. I think it requires extra effort to not just go that route.

44:47

I’m wondering how you implement that, and I’d like to talk more about quadratic voting

44:53

because I honestly don’t understand it, and I would love it if you could just ELI5 for everybody.

45:01

Okay. So, we started by cataloging existing DAOs and looking at the ways that they’re doing voting.

45:10

Most are doing the traditional shareholder voting, or one-person one-vote, membership-based voting,

45:19

with a few experiments in things like liquid democracy and quadratic voting.

45:25

We were thinking that in small communities, really what’s valuable is participation.

45:30

You don’t want to have one person collecting all of the vote.

45:38

You don’t want a whole pack of newcomers coming in and it becoming a popularity contest.

45:43

Really, what you want is to have the people who are actively involved have a dominant say in what’s happening.

45:56

Now, I don’t think this would work on a societal level, or for corporations—where you have people who are passively investing money in expecting a return.

46:06

But for small group projects, I think this model really works well. We hit on this as a way to allow people to build up influence over time,

46:19

but also to let newcomers come in and have a say.

46:25

I can’t even remember at this point how the idea came about, but it was a revelation when it did.

46:32

Alberto modeled out different kinds of inflationary curves

46:39

that would work for different groups, and tested to see how it would happen in the long run.

46:46

We just found that this was, or could be, a pretty good model for letting groups function this way.

46:55

I guess the tricky part is deciding what counts as a contribution, and a lot of the reputation-based systems

47:04

in the past have run into this thing where showing up for a meeting, or writing a paper for the group,

47:14

was recognized as something that should get points, but the person who brings

47:21

snacks for the group every time they meet feels like that caring

47:27

contribution is devalued if they asked for a financial return for it.

47:32

We are hoping that taking the financial element out— by not letting the token be traded—might ease those concerns.

47:41

And the token just has an ecosystem use only for voting specifically, basically?

47:49

Exactly. Okay. Interesting. Well, let’s move on, then.

47:55

Billy, I’m very curious to hear what you have to say.

48:03

I’m wondering specifically if you can talk about how you think NFTs can fit into this, beyond being just a sort of treasury that’s backed the DAOs,

48:17

but what other use-cases you’re looking at. But first off, what other stuff are you looking at?

48:23

I’ve been really excited about the project Mirror.xyz lately.

48:28

They launched relatively recently, and it’s meant to be sort of a publication platform, like Medium or something.

48:38

Talking to the founder early on, he said that the vision is actually much more of I call it a dashboard for Web 3.

48:45

I think the idea is that it would be a place for access to blockchains to become coherent,

48:54

and lower the barrier of entry in a lot of ways. So, the first feature would be publishing text to decentralized storage solution arweave.

49:06

Your username would be the Ethereum name service subdomain.

49:12

So, those are two features of decentralized internet, but the user story also could be very Web 2-feely.

49:21

Then they started very quickly adding features, moving really fast, adding mini products to the whole thing.

49:28

One of the first ones was a fundraising capability. So, anybody who has an account can just say, “hey, I want to do this thing.

49:34

I’m trying to raise five ether. If you submit to this, you’ll get a token in exchange that represents a proportion of what you submitted.”

49:42

Sometimes there’s guarantees, like “if that happens, and I sell this thing, I’ll put all the money back in,

49:49

and your proportion will pay back out as an investment or dividends.” There’s also not necessarily that requirement,

49:56

it can be like, “now you own some tokens which show that you were involved in something that I did, and I can use that in all sorts of interesting ways in the future.

50:04

Maybe I’ll give you rewards, maybe I can use it as like access to something else.” It’s a paper trail for the fact that you are involved in this thing.

50:11

This is to say that all of this is extremely gray-zone legal. The founder, who used to be a partner at… I don’t know if a partner….

50:22

but at a16z, the investment firm, they were in charge of the crypto part, him and his partner from a previous project.

50:30

Talking to both of them independently, and brainstorming other project ideas—

50:37

like, is this a good idea, is that a bad idea, that seems like it could be extremely legally dubious—

50:43

they were like, our general attitude right now is just throw caution to the wind. If you don’t do this, some 16-year-old will, who doesn’t know or care about the risks.

50:56

Every step of the way of me working in blockchain, I’ve always been like, this is a good idea, but I’m not gonna do that idea,

51:02

because I don’t know if it’s illegal, and I don’t want to break a law. VCs or founders, you know, now that Dennis is actually doing the project himself,

51:13

he’s probably the one who is legally liable in all these scenarios, just be like, fuck it, just move fast break stuff.

51:19

There’s not enough regulation to really hold yourself accountable

51:24

and to see if it’s popular before you realize that you’ve violated international law or something like that.

51:30

I think the legal thing is exactly the issue, and what I wanted to talk about more.

51:36

Because, the bull case for most governance token is that you’ll have the right to vote,

51:43

to get on-chain revenue delivered to that token, which I’m pretty sure makes it a security token.

51:52

But if it doesn’t start as a security token, but it evolves into that, is that some kind of legal loophole?

51:57

Does anybody know? Is that how that works, or is that also just full gray zone?

52:04

It’s pretty gray. You can go back and forth. The SEC said that Ethereum started as a security but now it’s not.

52:11

So, I’m guessing that they’ll find that you can start as not a security and become one.

52:17

Okay. Also looking at say, Kin, the cryptocurrency that came out of the Kik messaging app

52:28

was tried and found guilty of performing sale of an illegal security.

52:35

It was $5 million, the fine, and they raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

52:42

So, maybe it is worth breaking the law in this wild west phase?

52:51

Okay. Yeah. Well, I think that’s an interesting line of questioning. Calum, Laura, Penny? Penny, I guess you went first before, so maybe you want to go again?

53:05

I’d love to. I guess we’re gonna start with this question of what’s exciting.

53:11

Yeah, why not? I think in general, what’s been really exciting about this move towards

53:20

DAOs is also this cosmic shift between technology and human.

53:29

How instead of looking at technology from a very centralized perspective,

53:35

and then molding the human usage around it, instead, the way in which a DAO can actually act and become a sentiment for building

53:46

the technology and assets around culture, as opposed to structure.

53:51

That leads me on to what I find exciting at the moment is about the potential of what DAOs have in relation to asking questions like,

54:02

who has the authority to make reality anyway? And reality, in a sense, can be this DAO as a world, and what happens within it?

54:14

Trying to move—because we’ve had a lot of examples now—

54:21

into more art-based context, I would probably say that I find Deluge’s

54:33

new DAO really exciting, which I think Folia has also been having a hand in,

54:39

at least setting up or beginning the kind of stakes in that.

54:45

Basically, from what I understand, it’s a publishing DAO, which creates a funding part that particularly works with queer, trans, and experimental writers

54:59

that are particularly underrepresented in the publishing world. I think this is also super important right now,

55:07

because for those of you who are following publishing, there’s been real problems with COVID.

55:13

Actually, publishing is very much in decline, and a lot of books have been pushed by two or three years.

55:23

That’s really interesting in relation to relevance, and the history of what is left and what are the artifacts that are circling beyond the online world.

55:34

So, I would probably go for that one right now. I wanted to mention, because some of these mechanics have come up

55:41

in the projects people are talking about, and I’m not sure if everyone—or if anyone—

55:47

knows, Circles actually uses some of the mechanics we’ve talked about. Circles is inflationary as well.

55:55

I’d love to hear maybe a little more detail from SayDAO about exactly how you’re handling inflation.

56:02

We inflate annually 7%, and then there’s also payouts

56:09

being minted to token holders per second. Also, what Calum was describing with 1Hive and their calls,

56:22

where you touch your nose—the leveraging Bright IDs as an identity layer— Circles actually also uses a web of trust identity layer very, very similar in structure to Bright ID.

56:32

We do these corny calls where we make people verify themselves in an online trust party too.

56:41

It’s descended from the older PGP primitive of a key signing party, just adapted to the COVID era.

56:54

How did you settle on 7% a year?

57:00

We had some spreadsheets of how inflation would change, what percentage of the inflation would be the monetary supply at different points.

57:13

But to be honest, at the end of the day, we just went with it.

57:19

Our team also talked a lot, we were like, 5? 10? 7? Split the difference, yeah. Is there a mechanism for changing it, or—?

57:30

No. Also, we were very, very scared of trying to govern a project like Circles.

57:36

An international project with currently over 180,000 signups—

57:42

how are we going to decide democratically what the inflation rate should be? We thought it was better to actually just lock it in and let people fork if they want to.

57:51

Okay, that’s interesting. And in the models of inflation, you can do this sort of thing about how long before…

58:02

in a human’s life, do they end up with the same amount of money

58:11

as someone who signed up 10 years before them? But it’s been a long time since I looked at this, so I probably shouldn’t go into detail.

58:20

Now that we got an overview, I want to stick onto this inflation topic.

58:28

Do you want to talk about how you’re doing it with SayDAO? Okay, I can quickly answer Sarah’s question on how we calculate the inflation.

58:36

It’s totally arbitrary. We made a model that is based on two factors. One factor is how much times… Sorry, I’ll start again.

58:45

We allocate tokens every time an event happens, and people participate to the event.

58:51

So, every time the event ends, we distribute tokens, we mint new tokens to the participants.

58:59

The amount of tokens we mint is a quadratic function based on how much time

59:08

passed from the last event to the current one, and also how many people participated to the last event.

59:16

I don’t want to go too much into details, but I’m happy to share the calculation, in the smart contract with people that are interested.

59:26

Just to give you a rough idea on how it works over time, I want to share with you the simulation that we have done.

59:35

So, here we have some participants in the DAO. Alice, Bob, Carol—ABCDE—up to Judy.

59:42

Then here on the left, we have a series of events that the DAO is organizing.

59:49

For each event, we have how much people participated

59:55

and how much time passed between one event and the other. Based on that, we have a nice distribution of the tokens.

1:00:03

As you can see, Alice, Bob, and Carol—the first three members of the DAO—

1:00:09

at the beginning, they have the majority of the tokens. The sum is always 100%, as you can imagine.

1:00:15

What is interesting is that over time, you have new people participating. For example, here towards the end, you have Judy and Ivan.

1:00:25

Even if they joined the DAO late, basically if they keep participating in events,

1:00:33

they can get a decent amount of tokens that they can use to vote.

1:00:40

As Greg mentioned, people should not get mad about the inflation

1:00:45

because tokens have no monetary value, so we’re not diluting the amount of money you have.

1:00:52

And tokens are not transferable. So, it’s an ERC-20 token that you cannot transfer.

1:01:00

Just another thing, given that people mentioned how to have a proof of person or proof of human.

1:01:07

I recently found this other project called IDENA and they have a blockchain for proof of person.

1:01:17

It’s another blockchain I think, not yet integrated with Ethereum or as far as I know, there is no bridge between IDENA blockchain network and Ethereum.

1:01:28

What they do is basically… blockchain that mines humans,

1:01:35

I don’t know if this sounds good, but I kind of like it.

1:01:41

What you do is basically when you participate, you have to create flips that are basically CAPTCHA, and then basically everyone in the network creates

1:01:50

CAPTCHA that are distributed and must be solved by humans

1:01:57

during the ceremony that happens every two weeks. If you’re good enough, passing all the ceremonies, then you’re labeled as a human

1:02:05

and need to keep your status, you need to keep producing CAPTCHA and solving CAPTCHAs.

1:02:14

That’s interesting. Would that work for… for instance if you had multiple wallets,

1:02:21

then that wouldn’t necessarily solve for individual persons, just proof that you are human at all, right?

1:02:30

I don’t exactly know the details, but what I can tell you is that it should be

1:02:35

difficult/impossible for a human to be able to have multiple wallets,

1:02:43

because it will be too difficult to be able to participate in every ceremony and be successful.

1:02:52

Okay. Can you implement this protocol, or is it just too early to be integrated into something else?

1:03:06

I mean, if you were going to make a social token project, or Friends with Benefits for instance, could you integrate it with that?

1:03:14

I have to tell you that I don’t know. I know that you can have smart contracts in the IDENA network. But to be honest, I didn’t investigate too much.

1:03:23

I’m curious. I’ll look into it. I noticed you said that you were trying

1:03:30

to make it as invisible as possible that you’re interacting with the blockchain. Do you think that logging in with MetaMask is too much to ask for people?

1:03:38

Because I wonder, I see it as being a pretty user-friendly model going forward

1:03:47

for logins in general. What would be more invisible than that?

1:03:54

I think logging in with MetaMask is easy. What is difficult is what you have to do before:

1:04:00

that is, installing MetaMask, understanding what a seed phrase is,

1:04:05

where your seed words are, why they’re important, and why they’re secret. Understanding that it’s an account that you cannot recover.

1:04:14

In my opinion, it’s not that difficult to use MetaMask or install MetaMask,

1:04:20

but it’s just another mental model and you need to put a lot of effort to understand how it works.

1:04:27

I’m incentivized, I guess you are as well, and all the people here are incentivized to play with this, because we understand that there is a lot of potential and a lot of value.

1:04:37

But it’s not the same for other people. It’s not that they’re… technically, they can do it.

1:04:46

Maybe it’s just a matter of incentives and understanding a new model. MetaMask makes some assumptions about the user.

1:04:54

For example, that they’re on a desktop computer. Then also, the invisible portion of getting crypto in the first place into MetaMask

1:05:05

is actually a pretty big hurdle that becomes invisible to you once you’re onboarded.

1:05:11

Yeah, I think SayDAO said, you’re using a burner wallet?

1:05:17

We made the same choice for Circles UBI and we’ve been criticized for it a lot, but I think it can be a more user-friendly option.

1:05:32

It’s a temporary disposable key created in the browser’s local storage, so it lives only on the device

1:05:42

and it’s a lot more insecure, and you can accidentally delete it really easily.

1:05:49

The user doesn’t even realize it’s there, and the app just works for them. If I can add something, I also wouldn’t mind a hybrid approach like custodial approach,

1:05:59

as long as you can always eject, let’s say, your identity or your key, your wallet from the service.

1:06:09

So in my opinion, you can onboard people and have custody of their wallets, but if the person is interested, or if they’re managing funds, and they want to take full ownership of their stuff,

1:06:23

they can always eject their identity and use a browser extension. To me, that’s reasonable.

1:06:33

Maybe anyone can jump in here, but what other things do you think that people who are working on these projects can do to help onboard people or make it appealing?

What can developers do to help make onboarding easier and joining projects more appealing?

1:06:45

Especially to people who, let’s say are aesthetically or ideologically…

1:06:52

let’s say they find the whole space distasteful? How do you convince someone who’s skeptical, a smart person who’s skeptical?

1:07:01

So, I encountered Bitcoin probably in 2010, and then tried to use it for a project in 2015.

1:07:08

It was an awful developer experience. It wasn’t until 2017 that Ethereum was at a point that I was like,

1:07:15

oh me—definitely not a genius—is able to do this thing.

1:07:21

That was a big moment, but what made me actually want to start working

1:07:28

in the industry was this recognition that the times that

1:07:33

I’d encountered it in the previous bull cycles. When it was in headlines, and you’re sort of reminded,

1:07:38

“Oh, yeah, cryptocurrency is a thing, I guess I should figure that out,” or, “I should try to understand that eventually but honestly,

1:07:44

it’s too confusing or too many moving pieces.” It was the 2017 moment when I was like, this is not going to go away—

1:07:52

the way that it’s built is specifically so that it will not go away.

1:08:01

So, I need to actually make sure that I understand what this thing is, because it’s only going to grow, as more of a problem for me not getting it.

1:08:09

Even if I disagree, or the aesthetics like… I better get involved to make sure that,

1:08:18

I don’t know, it’s not like I’m going to steer it in the right direction, but it’s only going to get worse unless I play an active role,

1:08:24

rather than continue to try to pretend like it’s not going to keep growing. That was convincing for me to engage, don’t disengage.

1:08:35

I think personally, what I find so exciting with the space is how participatory it is compared to other deck.

1:08:43

Because it’s so small scale, you can actually have some influence within a project, it’s not crazy to think that.

1:08:49

Whereas in Web 2 paradigm that just doesn’t exist. So for me, it’s a no-brainer that if you’re interested in participating in stuff,

1:08:56

there’s something that’s just really intrinsic to crypto that you don’t find anywhere else. It’s also participatory in terms of finance, in interesting ways.

1:09:07

People could be excluded from traditional legacy finance, like you can’t be unless you’re an accredited investor.

1:09:15

So that’s something that people, once they understand that, it’s is a selling point; something that I’m very positive on about the space.

1:09:29

I think one important thing is to decide whether you’re joining a community or a DAO.

1:09:38

If the point of it is to have a community that does stuff, and the thing that enables that is the DAO,

1:09:45

then the DAO part should be invisible to people who just want to do the community stuff.

1:09:51

But if it is purely intended as an investment vehicle,

1:09:56

or a way to allocate funds, then maybe the DAO rises in prominence,

1:10:03

and there’s a bit more importance in understanding those mechanisms. I can also add in an example, which I think relevant here.

1:10:13

Decentralized Detroit had a really interesting way of getting this information

1:10:21

to the people that they wanted to be using their technologies by using stewardship.

1:10:28

They actually got on board priests and kindergarten workers…

1:10:38

I can’t remember what the English word for that is… small children, teachers, and people that are members of the society.

1:10:50

They actually taught them how to use the technologies and the onboarding systems, and then they actually created community classes.

1:11:00

Because there was already a trust of understanding these people to be outside of the tech world, this actually onboarded a lot more people quicker.

1:11:09

They also had Saturday schools for youth to basically go

1:11:17

to churches and community centres, and particularly people of colour

1:11:22

were targeted to create these community coding education classes.

1:11:30

So maybe it’s also about this osmosis, of bringing on board

1:11:36

other members of society into the tech world, rather than always trying to think that other way round of us going in there.

1:11:49

I’m curious about that project. Do you know how that community outreach effort—which sounds comprehensive—was funded and supported?

1:11:58

Because I think a big problem in crypto spaces is that people don’t understand the type of social labour

1:12:06

that is required to onboard new communities. I think that it was co-opted by funding from the local senate level,

1:12:17

because it was also this community outreach project. I think also, particularly with Decentralized Detroit,

1:12:26

it was also sitting in this notion that people need to be

1:12:32

in control of the resources there, and to also understand what’s going on, because it’s an extremely difficult political position there of opacity,

1:12:45

where resources are funded in the percentage of Black to white citizens that are active in that city.

1:12:53

I think this was also maybe affiliated with a need as well, at that very present moment in time.

1:13:03

One might also see that as part of the reason why it also worked to bring these people on board as a form of solution.

1:13:16

I don’t know about that project, but I just did some research about Mesh networking in Detroit.

1:13:23

That was funded by a Washington-based open society organization,

1:13:30

the Mesh Network, so maybe something similar.

1:13:40

Just a follow up on that, these are just really early conversations we’re having.

1:13:46

There’s a few partners who couldn’t join us today. There’s a group here in Vancouver called Ethos Lab

1:13:51

that’s run by a really amazing woman named Anthonia Ogundele. She used to be a disaster financial planner for the major

1:13:58

credit union here called Vancity Credit Union, but she started an online space for her daughter,

1:14:04

basically to learn and create a good space. So they’ve grown, and they’ve described it now as like Hogwarts meets Wakanda for youth,

1:14:11

in terms of building out digital space and in the metaverse. But we’re trying to think through this problem in what we do,

1:14:17

and how we get communities on board. So we were also speaking with a group in Toronto, another artist-run centre called InterAccess,

1:14:24

which is a great media art space since at least the early 1980s there. But we thought, could there be a space for people to learn and for people

1:14:33

who teach and train on crypto also to learn from each other? Could it be some kind of supportive space, like a Vaccine Hunters Discord, or something like that?

1:14:42

So you could have open questions there? It could also be a space where educators teaching this stuff

1:14:47

are learning how to do it better, are learning how to fail faster at their teaching methodologies as the space is so active, and there’s so many things coming up.

1:14:55

So again, just like a decentralized model to think about the education of this,

1:15:01

and how to grow usership and reach. Calum, you had your hand up, do you have something to say?

1:15:08

Yeah, it’s kind of been addressed by everyone’s comments, but I think tying into what Jesse was just saying… it can’t just be in the form of education.

1:15:22

I think we need different metaphors for grounding the development of blockchain technology.

1:15:30

So much of the existing DAO tools have this idea of trustlessness—

1:15:37

like an inability to trust the people you’re working with—built into them. They use metaphors of raids or attack, like attack groups.

1:15:49

I think what we’re interested in—in Black Swan and the way we think about these different role playing exercises—is how can we think about infrastructure that

1:15:58

already exists within social groups, and then think about how digital tools could support that or amplify things that are already happening,

1:16:07

rather than trying to retrofit something designed for a very different purpose onto people.

1:16:13

I kind of first encountered… My first speculative blockchain project was attempting to build renewable energy

1:16:24

networks in Russia, which is extremely absurd, but then it forked into trying

1:16:29

to get German renewable energy cooperatives to use

1:16:36

a cryptocurrency and communication platforms to organize. I had some meetings with the largest German energy cooperatives,

1:16:44

and they just asked me, “Do you know how old the members of our cooperatives are?”

1:16:50

I said, “No, not really.” And they’re like, “They’re seventy years old. They don’t even have smartphones. You’re not going to get them to use some weird technology.”

1:17:00

I think not everybody needs to use a blockchain, or know they’re using a blockchain.

1:17:08

Yeah, there’s two points of departure there: What tools are missing in the stack?

1:17:13

And also, do you need a blockchain for most of these use-cases? I don’t know which one you want to go towards, but I think they’re both really important things.

What is missing in our stacks and do you need a blockchain for most of these use-cases?

1:17:22

Clearly, with your experiments, it was about governance, it was online, but there was no smart contracts involved at all, right?

1:17:30

There’s scripts? Is that latest iteration that you’re working on the same?

1:17:35

Or is there some integration with multisigs and stuff?

1:17:41

Our design currently is fully off chain, it’s a tool for existing digital communities to signal preferences.

1:17:51

The way that we’re planning Black Swan now is to design a module after a different roleplaying activity.

1:18:03

So in this initial one, we’re looking at decision-making mechanisms.

1:18:09

We’re gonna do one in September, looking at modes of exchange, really trying to put guilds against artists’ studios as organizational models,

1:18:23

testing for different organizational models and how they exchange with the economy.

1:18:31

Then later in the year, we also want to do one looking more at how groups construct value and how different ontologies of art construct different forms of value.

1:18:43

Actually, if we were to build a digital tool around a form of value, how could we actually do that in a way that makes sense?

1:18:54

I don’t know if Laura or Penny had anything to add there.

1:18:59

Just what Calum was saying made me think of… or what you were originally asking, Dan: do you need a blockchain, etc.?

1:19:10

Something that I spend a lot of time at Cosmos thinking about is dissolving the

1:19:15

border between traditional technology sets and cryptocurrencies. You know, why would you need a blockchain?

1:19:23

Short answer is because your application deals with money. But really, it’s been more about trusted third parties.

1:19:30

It means it’s dealing with something of value that you wouldn’t want to trust a single person. So, it might be the ability to decide something, but more likely than not, it’s money.

1:19:41

And so, it’s a software stack that has money as a primitive.

1:19:46

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to have a fully decentralized public blockchain that uses strong cryptography at every step of the way to have

1:19:57

a software environment that uses money as a primitive. There’s a lot of work that’s happening with application-specific blockchains in which you could

1:20:08

imagine the same sort of technical requirements as running a traditional web server. It’s a single person who has root access to an Ubuntu server that’s on DigitalOcean, or something like that.

1:20:18

Same as running a Ruby on Rails app, by default, you would want

1:20:26

to use something like cryptography for verifying users, which means they have to manage a private key.

1:20:32

There are ways you can reduce that load, but you could also remove that entirely, if you decide that your stake machine doesn’t need cryptography to verify its users.

1:20:40

You can use traditional web logins, you can use traditional anti-spam methods like email verification. Like email verification.

1:20:46

All of that is technically possible. The design space for that, or the ability to use that, is only really present in the last year or two,

1:20:56

through application-specific blockchain frameworks. But the point of those is that you’re able to design every layer of the stack

1:21:03

instead of having only the features that Ethereum or some other blockchain provides to you.

1:21:10

After hitting my head against all of these things a million times, it’s really started to dissolve the distinction between software and blockchains.

1:21:18

I think that more projects should really embrace this idea that decentralization should be a function of the use of the application.

1:21:30

For many of these DAOs, it really fits perfectly with the proof-of-stake model or the proof-of-authority model, where it’s not about economically incentivized participants

1:21:42

who are securing your blockchain, but maybe politically or community oriented.

1:21:49

So, Alberto’s been working on this project with Left Gallery to create a proof-of-stake version of that.

1:21:55

I think one of the ways that you guys have been talking about it is you would actually have cultural institutes operate nodes.

1:22:02

So, the security of the network isn’t about the fact that those institutes have World War Three server architectures or something like that.

1:22:11

It’s that you know that they’re culturally incentivized to be good operators of this network,

1:22:17

to keep the node online, and to make sure that people can access it. Just the idea that the network itself could reflect the participants in a much more tight-knit way.

1:22:27

So, you can have a DAO, which is itself an entire blockchain. The members of the DAO are the ones who operate the infrastructure because they want it to run.

1:22:38

The line gets very blurry between a coordinated multisig and a blockchain at that point.

1:22:43

The real difference is that you’re able to still have software logic that uses money as a primitive

1:22:49

in order to facilitate coordination problems, or make sure no one person can run off with the money at any given point.

1:22:58

The barrier of entry will continue to decrease, the user experience will continue to improve.

1:23:05

There’s this real race of access, though the user base that exists today is essentially on Ethereum.

1:23:14

Ethereum just happens to have one of the worst user experiences out there. So, if you want to build a product—which is interesting because it has users—you better do it on Ethereum.

1:23:23

But if you want to build a product which will limit your userbase to a very specific subset of people on this planet who know how to install MetaMask, that’s the price of having users.

1:23:34

The operational costs and the development costs are still quite high when you build things from scratch, or when you try to do these other configurations.

1:23:41

But I do think that is where you’ll be able to start getting those two sides meeting in terms of access and usability.

1:23:52

Interesting. If there’s one tool that you could identify, that you think is missing from the DAO stack right now that

1:24:04

would that would make it reach an inflection point, as far as more widespread uses?

1:24:13

What would you say it is? What’s the one crux? That’s for everybody, but Billy, I guess you probably have a good answer.

1:24:21

It might be the faucet. All of tokens essentially are anti-spam mechanisms.

1:24:29

If everybody’s allowed to have Gas token, then anybody can just take up as much space as they want.

1:24:35

So the faucet is supposed to be a way to give out free tokens that don’t allow somebody to take as many as they want, and really run amok or something like that.

1:24:44

So, finding a better faucet solution, finding a way to utilize other more traditional anti-spam techniques like email verification… you know, you can verify your email,

1:24:53

you can execute as many transactions as you want on this blockchain. You don’t have to worry about what Gas is, you don’t have to freak out about it.

1:25:00

You can actually interact with the token that you’re interested in or the use that you’re interested in without all of this baggage that comes with blockchains.

1:25:07

Every DAO that I’ve interacted with, tried to sign up for, just has such a huge onboarding overhead through something as simple as Gas.

1:25:19

Yeah, I want to answer the question with something that isn’t a tool.

1:25:26

I think the biggest obstacle to DAO adoption is cognitive overload.

1:25:35

This isn’t to say that DAO interfaces are usable, because they’re not! I was recently part of attempt to do some DAO explorations, Billy was part of it.

1:25:47

We struggled to deploy and we are fully onboarded people.

1:25:55

I think cognitive overload—of understanding the implications of the

1:26:01

different types of tokens I have, the different types of votes that are available when I’m configuring my DAO—this is actually not simple and not well explained.

1:26:11

If you do get over that, then you have a second ugly demon to rear its head, which is decision fatigue.

1:26:19

Making decisions on many different aspects of what’s going on is actually also exhausting, and a big consumer

1:26:26

of a very scarce not well-tokenized resource: attention.

1:26:32

So, I know there’s so many Discords turning into DAOs. But I’m part of 25 Discords, I can’t read all the messages, and I don’t, I have them muted.

1:26:43

I think that mechanisms for addressing that problem are also very important.

1:26:50

I know DAOstack has done some work on this with their holographic consensus mechanism,

1:26:55

but I have not been part of a DAOstack DAO that really sees this in action in order to weigh in on whether it’s effective.

1:27:05

Decision fatigue is really interesting, especially when it’s trying to come up with governance models from scratch.

1:27:11

I think it’s a matter of there being best practices developed.

1:27:16

So, there won’t be necessarily quite so much customization that is expected from you.

1:27:22

You’re trying to start a DAO, which of the popular DAO frameworks are you going to use? You’re going to have decision fatigue already, before you’ve even gotten to having the DAO!

1:27:32

Right. There could be a bit of more of a wizard type of experience for that.

1:27:37

But you’re right. For sure. And also, it’s just so hard to foresee how…

1:27:46

a government is a process, it’s not an immutable thing. I think it’s very hard to know how to set up initial

1:27:53

parameters with these things that don’t lead to a butterfly effect of… you know…

1:27:59

Before you know it, you’re gonna have to decide how to decide, then you’re going to have to have a meeting about when your next meeting is.

1:28:07

I mean, fundamentally, the problems are the same problems with any human coordination organization.

1:28:12

I guess the goal here is to make DAOs make those problems better, and not just accentuate them or replicate them, which is often a problem.

1:28:23

Anybody else have an answer to that, though? About tools or not tools?

1:28:30

I have some stuff, kind of similar to Sarah’s point. What’s missing is facilitators,

1:28:38

like the bridges between the DAO and the physical or tangible social group.

1:28:49

I think there’s interesting discussion to be had around the role of institutions.

1:28:54

I guess we’re talking about artistic communities, could this not be

1:29:00

be the role of the museum or the cultural institution to facilitate groups of

1:29:06

artists working together and managing the translation of a repository

1:29:15

or treasury, and the people who are organizing around it?

1:29:21

I think there’s interesting scope for… if you shift the location of the gatekeeper, or you distribute the

1:29:30

responsibility of gatekeeping—I’m not saying get rid of it altogether—

1:29:35

then maybe the gatekeepers could actually play more of a role facilitating these processes.

1:29:48

In terms of a module for DAOs, I think it’s great if you want to collect

1:29:55

NFTs or different cryptocurrencies, but it doesn’t translate

1:30:00

well into other forms of value, I think.

1:30:05

Could you have a knowledge base or something that is collectively governed, that is the source of value for that community?

1:30:16

I’ve got two points. One, on the more theoretical end

1:30:22

is that a lot of DAO projects seem to want to reinvent the wheel on everything.

1:30:29

I think this is a common problem in blockchain land, in general but there’s been a lot of work done on how groups coordinate

1:30:39

how groups work together, different organizational forms. There’s been a lot of learning in how to delegate decision-making

1:30:47

authority to a board of directors, to a staff of an organization.

1:30:53

I think DAOs will eventually fall into something in that vein, maybe not exactly the same,

1:30:59

but in a way that allows operational decisions to not be in the hands

1:31:05

of people who just want to be in the community, but still gives them influence over those, if the staff gets out of control.

1:31:13

So, I think there’s a lot of learning that can be done there and I think eventually, those tools will fall into place.

1:31:23

The other thing is a more practical thing with DAOs on Ethereum in particular.

1:31:32

Ways to deal with transaction fees are really important right now and it’s both really difficult because of how high those transaction fees are

1:31:42

and this limits the amount of stuff that can be done.

1:31:49

Just the notion of transaction fees is really impenetrable to new users and I think that needs to be addressed.

1:31:56

Yeah, anecdotally, Circles has been forming new legal entities. I mean, it’s been forming new legal entities since it started

1:32:03

and it keeps discarding them and making new ones. But recently, it decided to be a co-op, like a traditional co-op with

1:32:10

working groups and a board, not a DAO for a variety of reasons.

1:32:18

The world of legacy organizations has things to offer crypto projects, too.

1:32:27

Did you put a co-op on chain? Is it different than a DAO in format, actually?

1:32:33

That’s a great question, but I would defer it. I’m not sure. I actually wrote it down as one of my questions for the group myself.

1:32:41

What is different from a one-person one-vote DAO from a co-op, legally speaking?

1:32:47

Yeah, that’s a good question.

1:32:56

Not sure if anyone has an answer to that. I got a quick answer. The big difference is the distribution of profits.

1:33:07

For membership-based associations which is kind of what a one-person one-vote DAO is

1:33:14

there’s not really any entitlement to ownership of anything. You get to take part and the association owns itself and all of its assets.

1:33:23

But if the association dissolves there’s not an entitlement for the member to take their toys and go home.

1:33:29

With a co-op, that’s a little bit different, because everyone actually is an owner and is entitled to profits and sometimes liabilities, but that’s kind of distinct for different jurisdictions.

1:33:48

I also wonder, is there some middle ground between one-vote one-person and token voting?

1:33:54

Has that ever been implemented like vote on a curve, where there’s still levels of influence, but it caps out at a certain point?

1:34:02

If you have more than a million tokens, it caps out there, or something like that?

1:34:08

Billy, do you know if there’s anything like that? It makes me think of quadratic voting a little bit, where there’s diminishing returns.

1:34:16

So yeah, the difference between a million and a billion is maybe not a good number example. Sorry, Greg?

1:34:24

I think quadratic voting is usually thought of as a way to allow people to weight their preferences, but it can also cap inequality.

1:34:33

So, if you have a really steep curve, then if you have that billion votes as

1:34:39

compared to my 10 votes, sure, you’ll have more influence than me up to a point.

1:34:47

But maybe your influence is only double mine, rather than a billion times because if the curve is steep enough, then your 20th vote will cost half a billion tokens

1:34:56

and you won’t be able to outweigh the entire vote just by

1:35:03

virtue of having more money at stake. How do you avoid the attack surface though, of people making multiple wallets

1:35:10

in that situation, and overcoming it that way? Especially if there’s a hard cap, where you could just split your wallet in half?

1:35:17

I guess that’s just a problem there but is there any specific method for addressing that?

1:35:22

Quadratic voting requires identity, like other civil resistance.

1:35:29

Okay, that makes sense. Maybe we can just focus on art institutions, or cultural institutions.

How can traditional cultural and arts institutions incorporate DAOs & NFTs?

1:35:36

I’m just wondering how… what will the first art institution that turns into a DAO look like?

1:35:44

How could an institution turn into a DAO if they wanted to? I mean, an institution like 221A, for instance

1:35:50

but let’s say more like an actual museum? Yeah, I don’t know if there’s any thoughts on that?

1:35:57

First step is that they need to own crypto. I don’t know. I mean, some institutes are taking more of a

1:36:05

concrete investment strategy of keeping some of their assets in crypto But like

1:36:12

managing USD with a DAO, it’s just not really gonna be possible. Yeah, that’s not enough of a reason.

1:36:21

Yeah, probably not traditional art institution. But recently, Museum of Crypto Art, which is amazing, founded

1:36:33

I think it’s native to crypto, it was founded by Colborn [Bell]

1:36:39

who’s actively curating in this space. They recently launched their token.

1:36:44

So, they have a whole plan and model around how they want to do that. I don’t have any specific detail.

1:36:53

Yeah, in order to become like a DAO… I mean, you could definitely operate like a DAO

1:37:04

just through adopting the right culture and practices and stuff.

1:37:16

But that’s where tokens become interesting in a way

1:37:22

that they act as this way to enforce this system of ownership.

1:37:30

So yeah, they’d have to spin up there the Louvre will have to lock down token or something.

1:37:40

Does anybody know of any art institutions that are talking about this at this point?

1:37:50

Or any collections or anything? Other than NFT-specific— I think Left Gallery has been working with some institutions on this, but I don’t remember the details.

1:37:58

Just a very quick word about institutions adopting DAOs. I don’t know if, in the past couple months, you guys have seen in your surroundings

1:38:12

which are not the blockchain space, or the crypto space, or the tech space but I think DAOs and communities and doing things collectively on the internet

1:38:24

basically, these trends are real in many different areas of society.

1:38:32

Coming back to the acronym that we use, decentralized autonomous organization

1:38:38

which is very barbaric, very techie kinda jargon that nobody’s going to understand.

1:38:45

I think DAOs are existing in different ways, in many parts of societies.

1:38:50

Yesterday, still, you could hear about this these people

1:38:56

collectively administering common goods and doing that

1:39:01

through some governance systems and stuff without blockchain and stuff. Taking a step back, these DAO things are just the application

1:39:11

of the technological tools that are emerging but in the rest of society, you can see through social movements, artistic movements

1:39:21

even the teenagers are just doing things in these ways, remixing and social media stuff and whatnot.

1:39:30

and so

1:39:35

I think now, we’re just so far from the real adoption in mainstream.

1:39:41

So, my question to you guys, not being from the traditional art world

1:39:48

is the concept of a DAO going to imply a shift also in how these art institutions think and work?

1:39:56

Because I already see these changes and these social trends in society today.

1:40:04

These teenagers are going to use these tools without knowing that they’re called a DAO

1:40:09

very naturally, because maybe that’s already developed by some

1:40:15

through some products today, or everything is already there. It’s just about bridging the gap.

1:40:21

So the question is, do traditional arts institutions need to adopt DAOs?

1:40:27

Or is it going to create new institutions that are adopting the values of the current social trends, and

1:40:35

these new collectives that we see today on the internet, and what you guys are doing?

1:40:43

Yeah, maybe just to respond to Louis I hope it changes the structure of the institutions.

1:40:50

That’s the hope behind this technology is that it changes you know, you meatspace to go with it.

1:40:56

One of the groups we were learning from and partnered with us for some programming was in Berlin, there’s the Bee coin

1:41:03

project that’s run out of the Haus der Statistik.

1:41:09

What’s interesting about that project is they’re trying to find a way to build a DAO around an already decentralized form of cooperation within a community.

1:41:16

I think there’s ways that you can find existing forms of DAOs already just behaving in the world.

1:41:22

And then, I think you can find ways to code them and bring them into this space to better recognize the

1:41:28

value and to better distribute the value. I think it could be an interesting way for institutions to take more

1:41:34

seriously how they work with decentralized forms of culture because I think the traditional art institution has always been focused on the author.

1:41:41

That’s about singularity and the value of the artwork being driven higher and higher through that.

1:41:47

In Canada, no, we didn’t have much talk back from the institutions about blockchain.

1:41:54

This was earlier, before 2020. We started some conversations in 2019, with some larger orgs here

1:41:59

and there wasn’t much uptake there. But what was hopeful, and this is something that Tao Fei (who’s operating the call and is our program producer here)

1:42:07

she brought this article to our attention, which was around the NFT Boom earlier in the spring.

1:42:13

Essentially, it was an idea for the British Museum to work with NFTs to

1:42:22

decommission works and to repatriate them. So works that have been stolen from processes of colonization over centuries

1:42:28

like the museum no longer retains the object but maybe they can retain a memory of the ghost of their colonization.

1:42:35

And what does that mean? What kind of community forms around that ownership? Then what kind of community can respond to that repatriation

1:42:43

of that artwork at the same time? I don’t know if the British Museum answered that article, or really took part in the conversations that were happening around it,

1:42:51

but it did create a bit of a comet’s tail behind it as an interesting idea for legacy institutions to learn from.

1:43:04

I wanted to offer a practical answer to the question of what I would say to a legacy institution that wanted to start a DAO.

1:43:12

Disregarding the fact that I may not be fully bullish on the prospect

1:43:17

but I would suggest that they LARP their DAO before they commit to a DAO,

1:43:24

and also before they commit to software development. I feel like there’s a tendency in organizations who get involved in blockchain

1:43:32

to think that the first thing they should do is hire a software developer. That’s actually expensive, and you’ve signed yourself up

1:43:38

for a lengthy amount of maintenance. I think Black Swan is doing this, creating prototypes of how Black Swan should work

1:43:47

that aren’t interacting with the blockchain and don’t have a system of smart contracts. You could even do this in a spreadsheet.

1:43:52

This would help that organization understand if the mechanisms

1:43:57

they’re introducing their governance process are going to fit their goals without a significant financial investment,

1:44:06

or technical investment in a code base.

1:44:14

I can give two examples that are actually functioning DAOs within an art infrastructure.

1:44:23

The first one would be a zine, which is based in London

1:44:29

and run by Peter Holsgrove and Ben Vickers. It was originally run in a top-down way,

1:44:37

and they work with editions that are commission-led.

1:44:42

Then they decided last year to bring on this DAO structure

1:44:47

in order to think about what could be potentially group curation of the zine

1:44:54

and so their DAO works as in they have a group of curators that basically work

1:45:01

together in order to manifest the decisions and allocation of funds and that which commissions go ahead and support.

1:45:08

They also use voting protocol for this. I think that this is one way that it works, I would be really wondering what the implications

1:45:23

would be on a level that is outside of a selling platform for art.

1:45:33

Because then, what you’re giving up as an institution to a DAO framework

1:45:40

can potentially or maybe lead to the deprofessionalization

1:45:45

of certain positions within the art organization. Harm from Left Gallery has a lot of really interesting points on this

1:45:55

about how to actually keep professionalization. People whose work is led through years and years of research—

1:46:05

and by no means is curation an easy thing to do so giving that up to a structure of voting would definitely not be something

1:46:17

that I would be for on all levels. I think what’s really interesting, in this vein of giving up certain points of curation

1:46:27

would be the new project that Furtherfield Gallery has launched in London called the People’s Park Plinth.

1:46:44

Maybe Sarah can talk about it a little bit more. But just very quickly, as I understand it

1:46:49

it is a modus where they’ve decentralized the park on digital art works

1:46:56

that can be voted on through the contracts that are

1:47:02

maybe Sarah could you explain?

1:47:10

I want to be cognizant, I’ve seen a couple people their hands up, but it’s a quadratic voting platform, developed by an arts organization

1:47:18

to take into account the different types of stakeholders and what goes into the park.

1:47:24

There’s a number of things that they do, one of them is like vote weighting. So, depending on where and how you’re voting

1:47:30

and which organization you were channeled through your vote is weighted differently in the final outcome. This is what Penny is talking about, about preserving

1:47:37

expertise or considering different stakeholders in a different way.

1:47:45

I would say that existing institutions should not become DAOs right now

1:47:51

and probably can’t become entirely DAOs. First on the technical side, on the voting methodology side

1:47:59

there’s a lot of experimentation that should be done first. I think institutions that are interested in DAOs should do that experimentation.

1:48:07

I think the prototyping idea is wonderful.

1:48:15

But the idea of locking yourself into the tools that we have now

1:48:22

for the long term, is probably not a great idea and doesn’t really work within existing legal frameworks.

1:48:30

Institutions would be still relying on existing legal frameworks,

1:48:36

but hollowing out their insides and plugging in DAOs. I think that might be a good idea for some, but they would need to try it first.

1:48:46

So, I think a lot of this is reliant on these new legal structures emerging.

1:48:53

Until that happens, an extended prototyping phase is probably the best bet for institutions.

1:49:03

One thing I would like to add is that the goal of SayDAO

1:49:09

is to incentivize participation in some kind of communities. The model can work for some organizations

1:49:16

but maybe doesn’t work for others, and that’s totally fine. Because the beauty of a DAO is that you can define your model

1:49:26

what kind of thing you want to incentivize

1:49:31

and you can, more or less, code it. Just to continue what Sarah said, I totally agree

1:49:38

don’t hire a developer, don’t hire two, don’t hire three developers until you have a clear idea on what you want to incentivize.

1:49:50

To continue what Billy said before, what I think is that most

1:49:56

of the DAOs we see now, they have a quantitative approach. So, they try to quantify the amount of time spent on

1:50:03

something, or tokens you have, you can use the tokens to vote. But there are other models that are, I’m not sure if it’s totally correct, but more qualitative.

1:50:15

In the Left Gallery example that Billy mentioned before the idea was to have some nodes run by some institutions.

1:50:24

In this case, you have something that I would define more like a qualitative approach

1:50:29

where you select some of the participants. It’s not specifically on either no time or tokens, let’s put it like this.

1:50:41

I just wanted to go back to this question around museums becoming DAOs

1:50:49

what that would mean or what that would look like?

1:50:54

Jumping on what some other people were saying, there’s just an incompatibility between the current idea of a museum or a cultural institution

1:51:02

and the idea of a DAO or like the way that a DAO functions.

1:51:10

I think it comes down to also this idea of jurisdiction and the nation

1:51:17

state and the way that cultural funding is often structured as coming from a government and then playing into this idea of national patrimony and cultural heritage.

1:51:31

Maybe the museum-as-DAO is more a federation of existing cultural institutions.

1:51:38

I think there’s something interesting in this panel we’re in now, and the work that Furtherfield also has been doing

1:51:47

in building networks of cultural communities that are interested in these questions

1:51:53

and are interested in new ways of coordinating distributed resources and making decisions.

1:52:00

I don’t know what 221A’s plans are after this, but there seems to be interesting

1:52:06

scope for some sort of roleplaying activity between the people present here around what a cultural institution would look like if we all came together in some way.

1:52:21

I guess this idea of what comes after this panel, like someone was

1:52:28

mentioning this before also: every DAO tries to reinvent the wheel.

1:52:34

Also, within cultural DAO projects there’s not much dialogue between activity

1:52:45

It’s more work to try and share and communicate what you’re doing than just do the project that maybe you got funding to do.

1:52:53

So, how can we actually facilitate this, a building of some sort of code base

1:53:00

or theoretical code base, for the questions that were asking?

1:53:09

Thanks for the prompt. Yeah, we don’t know what comes next, but we want to stay in touch. And we don’t want this to just turn into a Discord chat.

1:53:17

I think we can see what we can do together.

1:53:23

But I think what’s important to group think and keep in perspective, is that we’re running up against this either/or

1:53:32

option: like, let’s just turn the museum into a DAO. But I don’t think it’ll happen like that. Because, the culture and technology are such a garden of forking processes

1:53:41

that I think DAOs can start to assemble within museums and outside of museums and it will start to influence what happens at that institution.

1:53:50

And also, to say that institutions, older institutions, those very dusty ones

1:53:56

or now we could call them Lindy institutions, with internet slang. Lindy just means it’s something very, very old

1:54:06

and it’s probably going to stick around for a long time because people are used to it and understand it and it’s functioning well enough for the majority right now.

1:54:16

So, with that in mind, I’ve just recalled earlier in May, when Dan, Rosemary, and I did a session

1:54:24

with Artemij’s Summer Academy for Blockchain@UBC. Where we kind of talked about DAOs.

1:54:30

The group I was working with came up with a really interesting model for an academic DAO

1:54:36

that was coming from students, saying, well, we need to learn things, we need to introduce new things into the curriculum faster, and we need to learn better on how

1:54:45

to introduce these ideas and what’s working across different schools. So they came up with a structure for a DAO that could be a consortium

1:54:52

of different institutions across the world, and then different levels of people within each institution could decide how a curriculum could shift and change.

1:55:00

Then the consortium itself could then vote across the board how that should change with a discipline amongst those schools.

1:55:08

So that was like a super interesting idea that the DAO becomes maybe a fresh add-on to a very old institutional model, but all of a sudden

1:55:16

but all of a sudden, can also accelerate this change process, very quickly, using traditional means. Of course, it would take a lot of planning to get all of the schools and

1:55:23

everybody on board to agree about what should be happening and then how those decision makings and processes, but that’s the cultural work that we’re interested in.

1:55:32

We’re interested in those messy longer-arc processes, and see this as an institutional technology.

1:55:42

This is going to be a superficial note to end on, but I was just wondering if anybody has a better idea for a term other than DAO

1:55:51

because I think everyone hates it. Same with NFTs or any of these acronyms. But let’s say DAO in general, because I think also, eventually

Is there a better term than DAO to describe what’s going in in this space?

1:56:00

not every DAO is going to have DAO in the title, right? So, what’s a better way of describing these things?

1:56:08

At Cosmos, we just call it governance. Every blockchain has token voting built in. And it’s also like… it’s awful.

1:56:20

Not that the tech is bad. I mean, the tech is probably better than a lot of the experience we’ve had.

1:56:26

But you don’t realize what you’re inviting into your life, when you invite thousands or tens of

1:56:33

thousands of strangers to make demands on you, you know what I mean? If you’re worried about companies who are bending to the will of the shareholders

1:56:41

most of those shareholders don’t have direct voting rights. You invite chaos, and the loudest and the worst voices are often

1:56:50

the ones that are the most persistent, and the ones that have the least to contribute are the ones who demand the most. It’s like the worst customer configuration you can imagine.

1:56:57

So actually, really, I mostly encourage people not to do especially large-scale DAOs because you’re gonna only worsen the whole process of

1:57:08

making decisions, especially when money is involved. This entire industry of lobbyists is finally evolving.

1:57:15

In Cosmos, you actually need a lobbyist to help you get an issue voted on to get people to show up, to get people to do a positive vote.

1:57:23

It’s just ripe for the worst nepotism. You have people who

1:57:28

have time to make tweets and run marketing campaigns and you have people who don’t, but that is not often relevant to the value of the proposal.

1:57:38

So, there will be an emergence of a politician class, basically, or a lobbyist class, which is a little bit different.

1:57:44

I don’t see that as necessarily a horrible thing. It’s sort of inevitable that you’re gonna have delegates

1:57:51

but I think governance, that is a more neutral way of calling it, that’s for sure. Louis?

1:58:02

Yeah, I feel like DAOs, it’s more of a logic and a way of thinking and seeing a collective way

1:58:13

of organizing, distributed or ownership or whatever we’ll call it. I think some of the institutions that are emerging are going to remain this very DAO.

1:58:25

So if you’re Cosmos, these big defi protocols are these

1:58:31

on-chain technologies that operate through token voting.

1:58:36

All of them bear the mark of the time they came up.

1:58:46

Bitcoin is this first DAO that came up and doesn’t change and stuff.

1:58:53

I mean, change is also dependent on culture. Bitcoin doesn’t change, because it’s part of the culture.

1:58:59

And Ethereum, it changes slowly, because there’s another culture. When it comes to communities, I felt that—now, we’re talking about tokenized communities

1:59:10

we’re talking about DAOs and stuff—let’s see if token remains the thing and then people

1:59:17

start to use it to denominate things or if it’s coins or whatever. I feel like these communities are going to remain communities

1:59:24

that leverage technology, like some other communities leverage social network.

1:59:30

Eventually, for most of these DAOs, and there’s different categories

1:59:38

for example, like startups that are going to eventually issue their own own token and have their own treasuries and hand off part of the governance to their users and stuff.

1:59:51

I don’t think these are going to be called DAOs, although they operate like DAOs and same for these communities, I think they’re just going to

1:59:58

have a name like most of the things that we know today. Maybe some of these things like these [unclear] protocols, and layer ones and stuff

2:00:09

could be called DAOs, although they were not even called DAOs at first. I’m quite optimistic that the word DAO would be more like a technical

2:00:18

operation or something that remains behind the scenes in the future and that we could just name things by their name.

2:00:30

Yeah, I think it’ll remain a useful umbrella term for a certain category of organizations.

2:00:39

But I think as this work is done, and people experiment and find an infinite variety of kinds of organizations that it makes possible

2:00:48

and we’ll see different names for the different functions come out that are probably more fun and more descriptive than DAO.

2:00:56

Great. Jesse, we’re over, right? Yeah, thanks, Dan. That was great hosting gig, epic session.

2:01:03

Thank you everyone for joining and sharing and being so generous and curious with us

2:01:09

So, if there’s no last comments, enjoy the rest of your evenings and days, and we’ll talk soon.

2:01:15

Ciao.

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