Spencer Graham
@spengrah
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Build more housing 🥑 • DAOs, burritos, & puns @hatsprotocol 🧢 • @solidityguild ♦︎ prev: @daohaus 🏰 • @RaidGuild ⚔️ • @groundw3rk 🌾 • KB0
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ANTICAPTURE
A framework for capture-resistant governance
(an introduction)
🧵
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The idea that governance is about making decisions is outdated, wrong, and dangerous
The goal of governance is to DO stuff; it is about taking ACTION
Making a decision is just one phase of taking an action
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Today is my last day at corporate-salaried-job 👔
Monday is my first day as an official full-time member of the Ethereum community! ♦️
This community has been so incredibly welcoming and an absolute joy to be a part of. I am beyond thrilled to devote my time to growing it 🥰
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hot take:
DAO tooling and infra should be built by DAOs not c-corps
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For the past couple months I've been on a journey to better understand what makes a DAO a DAO
After several false starts, I've recently had a breakthrough that I want to share
This thread represents my current best thinking. Here we go!
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An interesting problem in DAOs:
"Work to be done" is a scarce resource
The challenge - when there are no bosses - is how to ensure that it's allocated to the people who are best equipped to do it well
How do self-managing orgs address this?
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Damn, this is sad. I used to be really into her market-forward approach to progressive values.
Now her entire identity is in opposition to one of the few things that could actually help achieve her earlier goals.
What a fall from grace.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 US Senator Elizabeth Warren launches "anti-crypto" re-election campaign.
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17 months ago, I started work on an idea to address a big problem I was experiencing in DAOs
Now, that little idea has turned into my dream job, with dream co-founders, team, and community
I'm incredibly proud of what we've built so far, and even more excited for what's next 🧢
Put on your party hats... Hats Protocol and the Hats App v2 are now live & ready to use! 🥳
Give revocable roles and authorities to your people and code, save time, and get things done.
What makes Hats the ultimate coordination tool? ohhh baby, here we go...
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Prediction: we will soon see nmcDAI, which is
@compoundfinance
cDAI with built-in
@NexusMutual
contract cover.
Wallets/DeFi interfaces will then be able to offer uses the option between the full interest rate or a lower rate (by ~2%) that includes smart contract bug insurance.
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DAOs are dead. Long live CROs (Capture-Resistant Orgs).
DAOs are dead. Long live SSOs (Self-Structuring Orgs).
<What is dead may never die. DAOs are here to stay.>
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DINO sighting! 🦕
Warning: "DAOs" formed this way heavily favor the founders, who can attract fast capital and maintain final control over the funds via their powerful position as multisig signers
iow, this is just an ICO that allows token holders to signal their preferences
Start a DAO in four steps.
1) Create a token using a Mirror crowdfund.
2) Store funds in a Gnosis Safe multi-sig.
3) Setup a Snapshot space for governance.
4) Make a Discord with token-gated access.
All of which is free to use (minus gas).
Good luck!
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I couldn't disagree more strongly.
Here's what I posted in response to a similar concern shared in the badgeholders' tg chat.
It’s disappointing to see multiple projects that have raised millions in funding participate in public goods funding programs, like RetroPGF.
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“Eventually we’re gonna zksnark the EVM” -
@VitalikButerin
👀 👀 👀
It's here...
Our new
@BanklessHQ
episode w/
@VitalikButerin
We discussed:
- Why coin voting sucks
- How high TPS chains fail
- Why Ethereum is breaking out
Every Vitalik episode is worth listening to at least thrice.
I amn't exaggerating.
LISTEN:
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Last full day in Tokyo and I still can’t stop thinking about 帽子
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Barely able to contain my excitement over what the
@hatsprotocol
team has been working on. I think its the most impactful thing we've done since the protocol itself.
(sorry not sorry for the announcement of announcement)
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This elon-buying-twitter threat thing is pretty intriguing evidence in favor of
@js_horne
's claim that a public good can have high market value even without revenues solely based on the "threat of the fee", or in this case the "threat of localized authoritarianism"
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Been saying this for 18 months
"Let's not gate-keep what it means to be a DAO" turned into a real problem
We were too into "DAOs as vibes" and we failed to establish strong norms of creating real DAOs before the mops arrived and weren't as aligned with the DAO ethos as us geeks
The reason why it’s so important to try and build a true DAO is that people who do intend to scam use the legitimate projects, and their legitimate shortcuts and an excuse to build without the safeguards and decentralization that DAOs offer.
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Strong disagree. If you are creating a DAO with entrenched executive power at the center, you are sacrificing much of what makes DAOs better than traditional orgs
If you want efficiency, start a c-corp and do an ICO
In 2020, DAOs were decentralized and autonomous
In 2022, most DAOs are centralized and run by humans
What happened and why it's likely a good thing 🧵👇
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somehow we went from onchain summer to offchain points winter
regression really is mean ☹️
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I've had a few people ask me to elaborate on how I make this work, so here's a thread👇
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It’s aliiiiiive! 🌱
I couldn’t be more excited for this next chapter, err… season, of Hats Protocol!
And I’m honored and thrilled to be working with such a phenomenal group of founding stewards and contributors in our community.
🧢
🫡
TODAY IS THE DAY — Hats protoDAO has launched! 💥
This is a major step in our commitment to decentralizing the governance & operations of Hats Protocol 🌀
A short 🧵👇
- what the protoDAO is all about 🌿
- how to join the community and get involved 🧢
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New from me in
@DefiantNews
In which I call for *trustless* web3 crowdfunding
Trusted fundraising with sexy tokens sprinkled on top is...fine, but we can do SO much better, and its important that we do
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There are lots of tools for coordination
DAOs are the first coordination tools that own themselves
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Now that I don't have to win a popularity contest to have a
@viamirror
account, I'm going to be re-publishing the Goodhart's Forest series originally posted to
@nowdaoit
's newsletter almost a year ago.
Gauging interest...should I mint NFTs for each of the three articles?
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One of my favorite things: when people tell me they're leaving their day job and going full time in DAOs
The best part? It's happening more and more
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If you're interested in learning how to build a
@hatsprotocol
module, join our live coding session tomorrow!
I'll be sharing my screen and building a new
@gitcoinpassport
-powered hats eligibility module
We'll dig into the innards of hats modules and cover some useful patterns.
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your periodic reminder that its incredibly difficult to relinquish power and control once you have it
only the most virtuous among us are capable of doing so
we need coordination models that understand this reality
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just submitted my speaker application for
@EthereumDenver
:
<Full-spectrum rule enforcement: the 10x unlock from DAOs>
builds on my
@DAOcember
talk
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One really big thing people don't understand about retroPGF is that it is much more like revenue than investment, and that has subtle but major implications for how it can and should be used
rPGF is revenue, not capital investment
Hear me out: simple little metric I’m proposing
If you can afford to throw a happy hour at one of the biggest Ethereum events on the global calendar, you shouldn’t be asking for public goods funding
Retroactive or otherwise
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Introducing Moloch
AI-generated with this seed:
"Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!"
@EponymNFT
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We start with actions, the atomic unit of coordination
All actions have 2 phases:
1. DECISION phase, ie coming to consensus on what/if/how ("what button should we press?")
2. EXECUTION phase, when the result of the decision is made manifest (pressing the button)
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I'll go one step further: DAOs govern roles*, not people
*multidimensional objects encapsulating...
- responsibilities
- authorities (eg permissions)
- accountabilities
- context
- incentives and compensation
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hot take: "Digital" does not belong in the *definition* of DAOs
Digital is a class of technologies that DAOs use to achieve the foundational properties that make them DAOs
It is fine to describe DAOs as digital, but a *definition* should focus on foundational properties
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As a badgeholder for OP's RetroPGF Round 3, I was asked to provide some feedback. I had so many thoughts I decided to publish them as a blog post (link in next tweet).
I explore what makes the mechanism is so promising, and I also make some recommendations for future rounds.
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Here it is, the thing I've been so excited about! 🤩
A giant step closer to the DAO promise of fully programmable organizations, and a huge new design space for developers
I'll have lots more to share in the coming days, but for now, check our launch posts 🧢
Today we are launching Hats Modules!
This is the most impactful release we've shipped since the protocol itself, and it's already catalyzing a new era for programmable organizations
Here's why:
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Nearly our entire government
Mitch McConnell inexplicably freezes during press conference, is quickly escorted away
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Moloch DAOs (via ragequit) create a superposition of
- public and private property
- individualism and collectivism
You really have to experience it to fully understand the beauty
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Welcome to Goodhart's Forest 🌲🐆🌲🌳
In this permissionless and adversarial ecosystem, tokens are under constant threat from
- Goodhart's Law
- Noisy markets
- Dark Forest predators
Combined, those dangers make tokens make poor coordination mechanisms
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While I do see value in some forms of onchain negative reputation, this example was a big miss from
@VitalikButerin
Criminal records are very far from measuring untrustworthiness by the holder, and in fact they are often more like records of injustice *against* the holder
The most unsettling part of the SBT VC/DID podcast was on negative reputation -- especially the example "lack of criminal record to prove you're trustworthy".
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Updated working definition of a DAO:
"A DAO is an organization that meets the following criteria:
1. All members have at least some direct control over the org's assets and actions, and
2. Nobody other than the members can shut it down"
@jbrukh
@VitalikButerin
I’ve been going with
“A DAO is an organization in which the all members have at least some direct control over the org’s assets and actions”
Still working on it, but so far it’s been pretty good
(Under this definition, token+multisig+snapshot is not a DAO)
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The
@nounsdao
concept is wonderful for engaging a community around advancing a meme
This makes it a great fit for funding the propagation of ideas, culture, media, etc, but it doesn't extend to funding products/protocols/tools themselves
...Or does it?
A half-baked idea...👇
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today I...
- submitted my first (proto)DAO proposal in months (we're back!)
- built a
@hatsprotocol
eligibility module live on a community call, using
@gitcoinpassport
and
@eas_eth
- had a burrito for dinner 🌯
good day
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Three of the reasons DAOs will be better than tradOrgs
A) Better collective sense-making ⇒ solve more important problems (particularly in the currently underserved concave realm)
B) Better talent (autonomous work is highly attractive)
C) More efficient
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Many important public goods require significant up-front investment
It's critical that we create conditions that encourage investment in large scale public goods that don't always require an upfront governance decision to fund via grants
the idea that large companies shouldn't receive funding when they *checks notes* provide public goods, is incredibly damaging to ethereum
the nyc MTA is a large public benefit corp - should it not get funded for services? should we only prioritize "small" subway providers? jfc
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The point of reputation is to predict future behavior, not merely to measure past behavior
The reason reputation is such a hard problem is that predictive modeling -- especially of human behavior -- is incredibly difficult
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Tell me you don’t understand the point of what we’re all doing here by… checks notes… telling my you don’t understand the point of what we’re all doing here
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hey upstream how many signups have you gotten from ads placed on the “DAOhaus” keyword?
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Writing coherently in your non-native language is hard af. Huge props to all the ESL (or third or fourth language) people who communicate hard things every day in English.
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We don’t need flat orgs. We need self-structuring orgs.
Decentralized governance power is compatible with structured operations.
Minimal hierarchy. "Flat" organizations. Decentralized governance. Self-management.
These forms of anti-hierarchical thinking are actually horrifically disempowering.
How?
The Tyranny of Structurelessness:
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The Progressive Permissionlessness Playbook
Start decentralized and permissioned. Progress towards permissionlessness.
👇
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[obligatory friendtech post]
friendtech experiments with the type of onchain mechanisms I have been in love with since 2018
but I'm not using it because I've been around the social media block enough to know how commodifying my social identity wreaks havoc on my psyche
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When everything is crashing around you, there's only one thing to do
Put on your hat and build 👷♂️🛠️
Will you join us?
Introducing
HATS PROTOCOL 🧢🎩👒
A new protocol for flexible & composable DAO-native roles ("hats") represented as NFTs
Using Hats, DAOs can:
- delegate & revoke authorities
- hold contributors accountable
- create role legibility
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@chaserchapman
I’m quite biased here but imo the best DAO tooling is built by DAOs — either by existing DAOs filling an urgent need of their own, or a DAO explicitly formed to build DAO tooling
This space has such unique workflows and UX considerations that make dogfooding super important
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Been thinking recently about the DAO governance design space, and IMO there are two key dimensions:
1. Executability (ability to execute arbitrary transactions + social overhead involved)
2. Decentralization
Here's how I'd place some current gov frameworks w/in that space:
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🏰 DAOhaus v2 is a castle -- lots of awesome rooms and amazing amenities, but a little too hard to add new things
🌇 DAOhaus v3 is designed more like a city -- stronger and more flexible infra, plus enabling anybody to build & integrate new tools and apps for DAOs
Get excited!
The future of DAOhaus is Composable 🧩
In our update, we share what we've been working on & how DAOhaus v3 gives DAOs more options by enabling developers to integrate their tools into our platform 🤝
Join us on our path to composability! 🚀
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In ~2018, I had an idea for a DAO with my present, near future, and far future selves as members
The goal was to make decisions in the present that appropriately account for my future selves's interests
I believe this is now ~possible by using AIs to represent my future selves
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Starting to work my way through this paper exploring free rider problem / public goods funding / tragedy of the commons through the lens of ergodicity economics
My math skills aren't up to the task of confirming the analysis, but... well lets just say Big if True
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Organizations simultaneously need to protect against adversarial behaviors (eg capture) while empowering individual members to build great things
Traditional orgs rely on the legal system to create this adversary-aware foundation
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If you've made it this far, thank you, you are truly amazing!
And you're exactly who I'd love feedback from on this framework
Please do not hesitate to comment, DM, or otherwise share your input 🙏
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Many Web2 services (eg Github) have free public plans and paid private plans
Increasingly, web3 apps are offering the opposite: free private; paid public
Such a clear indication that the source of value for web3 projects really is different than for web2
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PS I'm definitely planning on expanding this into an article, probably with some visualizations to help put together all the pieces. But wanted to share this barebones thread first to get faster feedback. So if you're confused, please tell me what about so I can improve it!
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Composable protocols powering beautiful purpose-built apps ftw!
Cabin is ALIVE across the chainverse, embracing protocols like
@hatsprotocol
,
@otterspace_xyz
and
@unlockprotocol
.
Pulling all of this activity into a single experience was no small feat.
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Reminder: using a financial instrument to define DAO membership and governance power is not the only way to do it
Hundreds (if not thousands) of DAOs use structures that don't involve tokenized DAO membership
The structure I'm most familiar with is the Moloch DAO framework
reconstructing dao membership is where my head is at rn.
you can't have governance w/o members, and token bags are a shit membership primitive.
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I'm a proponent of Progressive Permissionlessness over Progressive Decentralization
I've tried multiple times to write an article about it, but I've never found the time to make meaningful progress
That's why I've applied for funding from
@headline_dao
to write and publish it
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So what can be done about this? Thankfully, a lot!
Instead of a multisig in step 2, use a different gov framework that gives members trustless control over the DAO's assets and actions, such as:
- Compound Governor
- moloch dao, eg on
@nowdaoit
-
@gardensdao
-
@AragonProject
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I'm so proud of our team's work on Hats Modules 🤩
1. an open developer platform
2. true app-layer composability
3. no centralized control
Pulling this off has required building at multiple layers of the stack, w/ coordination across our entire team
Here's how it works 🧵👇
HATS MODULES ACROSS THE STACK
Sitting within the broader stack, Hats Modules have four key layers:
0. Smart Contracts
1. Indexed Data
2. Middleware
3. Applications
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There are three classes of autonomy in DAOs
1. Protocol autonomy
2. Organization / community autonomy (aka sovereignty)
3. Member autonomy
They are not mutually exclusive
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You fold under pressure
I fold laundry under pressure
We are not the same
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Under scarcity, we have critics and gatekeepers
Under abundance, we have curators and remixers
Which would you prefer?
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The conceptualization of governance as decision-making is an artifact of a world in which there was literally no way to distribute the ability to execute actions on shared resources
It is a reflection of the incompleteness of the gov systems we've been able to create in the past
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This is how i've felt for the last several years, and it's incredible.
I feel really lucky, but I have conviction that if we get DAOs right, it'll become the norm rather than the exception
Reality is, work is not work, if you feel like it has meaning.
I've worked 80 hours a week for my entire adult life, but solely on things I was passionate about.
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This shift is profoundly important. We may look back on it as one of the most important advances in human history.
We finally have the tools to design gov systems that actually cover the full breadth of governance
Let's use them to their full potential. Let's build real DAOs.
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@owocki
@OpenZeppelin
@hatsprotocol
@otterspace_xyz
All 3 of these are amazing tools!
Properly evaluating them deserves a more detailed treatment, but here are some quick thoughts for now...
We can compare them along three dimensions:
1. Programmability / devX
2. Composability / DAO UX
3. Legibility / end user UX
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at this stage in our collective smart contract protocol s-curve, composability-first development is cheaper and faster than a not-invented-here attitude
a key responsibility of any smart contract developer is staying up to date on the latest protocols and standards
Just spoke with a team that burned 3 months of build time and $50k in audits creating vesting contracts for their token. Didn't know we existed.
If you're about to do this yourself, Hedgey has 100% free onchain vesting contracts audited by Consensys Diligence.
Use them 👏👏
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The Global Untrusted
The set of all people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in a scenario where other people cannot trust them
As a result, They are excluded from opportunities & from meaningfully participating in our current trust-reliant society
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And they will also distribute their tokens in return in the form of usage mining
In the DAO economy, we all co-own each other's projects
This is how we grow the gross DAOmestic product
Startups that service DAOs + web3 communities will start accepting governance / community tokens as a form of payment in < 1 yr
Exposure to upside of a community you service > subscription revenue
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maybe DAO is a verb
Decentralized Autonomous Organizing
@spengrah
@AaronSoskin
That’s how I see it as well. We have a tendency to think of DAOs as monolithic organizations with discrete boundaries, but in reality it’s an amorphous gradient of humans and interactions, some of which are more or less “DAO-like”
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💯
A couple thoughts:
1. Distributing executive power creates space for more leaders to emerge
2. Permissioned containers create structure without bureaucracy or hierarchy
For DAOs to thrive they need:
1. More leadership.
2. More structure.
(My non-consensus take of the day)
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if you are building in crypto and you don't think its important for your users to not have to trust you to not mess with their points, I have to ask: why are you building in crypto?
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DAOs, Tokens, and Goodhart's Forest
Part 1 of a series about why tokens are so powerful and dangerous for DAOs, how things can go awry, and what can be done about it
My first post on
@viamirror
!
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Limiting your conception of governance to just one part of the whole is a great way to design bad governance systems
If you ignore the actual goal of governance -- taking actions -- you're liable to create a system that is exposed to capture
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Moloch v3 is a fantastic way for DAO’s to do this
Start with non-transferable erc20 shares (“non-speculative tokens”)
Then turn on transferability to “launch” a liquid token
Non-speculative tokens enable projects to 'soft-launch' and iterate on the community ownership, contribution systems, and web3 native product integrations they need to survive the pressure and overhead that comes with having a liquid token.
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probably the most exciting thing I've discovered after working on
@hatsprotocol
is that it *is* possible for an organization to be both capture-resistant *and* effective at doing real work
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Last week I introduced ANTICAPTURE, a new framework for understanding capture-resistant governance.
What can we use it for? Lots of things!
Our first case study is from the article:
𝕎𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕞𝕒𝕜𝕖𝕤 𝕒 𝔻𝔸𝕆 𝕒 𝔻𝔸𝕆
ANTICAPTURE
A framework for capture-resistant governance
(an introduction)
🧵
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OK I think I grok NFTs now
A collectible draws its value from 2 sources:
1) how much the owner likes it
2) how much social reputation the owner accrues based on how much other people like it
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composability: still amazing
We're back and rolling into 2024 with some exciting news as we compose with our friends in the ecosystem
@guildxyz
and
@SnapshotLabs
! We're bringing hat abilities to the forefront to make responsibilities and authorities easily accessible.
(1/6)
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For the Chicagooooors
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