DAO Panel | Kain Warwick, CoopahTroopah, Tracheopteryx

DAOs are heating up. In 2021, the tools and infrastructure surrounding DAOs have taken off at an incredible pace. Digital organizations have the potential to fundamentally change the way we coordinate as a species. We bring on DAO experts Kain Warwick, Cooper Turley, and Tracheopteryx to provide insights into this budding movement. What is different about DAOs? Why are we excited about them? ------ 📣 TracerDAO | Building DeFi Infrastructure. Join the Discord! https://bankless.cc/TracerDAO ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/uniswap ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Kain, Cooper, and Trach 6:32 Are DAOs Different? 10:55 Leadership in DAOs 16:32 Keys to a Successful DAO 23:08 Purpose and Values 29:13 Optimal DAO Size 36:20 The Goal of DAOs 41:00 Does Coin Voting Suck? 51:49 The DAO Lifestyle 57:21 Fluidity, Growth, and Community 1:04:07 The A in DAO 1:10:45 Slaying Moloch 1:15:11 How DAOs Change Lives 1:19:32 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Kain on Twitter https://twitter.com/kaiynne?s=20 Cooper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cooopahtroopa?s=20 Tracheopteryx on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tracheopteryx?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey Bankless Nation, this is Panel Time on Bankless. The panel is an opportunity to deep dive into a topic with a number of guests who are experts in the space. And today, we are talking about DAOs. This is how to DAO. And we've got a fantastic group of panelists for you where we're going to have this conversation. David, why don't you give us a preview?

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a number of conversations to have about DAOs, about like, are they really all that fundamentally different? What rules about organizations have changed now that we are in the DAO world? And also, what rules are actually exactly the same? What does it mean to have a good DAO? And do all DAOs follow the same rules about what it means to have a good DAO? What are all the same problems that DAOs are faced with? And what problems do only some DAOs have? There's a lot of things to unpack here because collectively, as an industry, we are all learning how to DAO. And so we've brought on some of the best leaders who have some of the most experience with DAOing to get their perspectives as to how to DAO.

• 1:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. So we've got Kane Warwick, Cooper Turley, and Trake from the Y Earn Protocol. We're going to be talking to all of them. And we really think that DAOs are the new opportunity to front run in crypto. There's a massive amount of opportunity. This is really how crypto is coordinating human capital, as well as, you know, asset capital. DAOs will replace companies one day. We firmly believe this. Do you remember our Josh Rosenthal episode where you talked about the crypto Medici? Well, we are the new crypto Medici. And joining a DAO is one way to dive deeper down this rabbit hole. You will not regret it. Speaking of which, Dow opportunities, our friends at Tracer Dow have just launched a Dow.

• 2:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're working on a DeFi perpetuals product, pretty exciting stuff. They're looking right now for governors and contributors. So if you're interested in that, join their Discord, get involved. We'll include a link in the show notes. Guys, we will be right back with our panelists, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 2:35David Hoffman?

  Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the ledger hardware wallet and the ledger live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite D apps all in one place, Ledger is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like Paraswap, which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control. DeFi never stops growing and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it.

• 3:19David Hoffman?

  So click the link in the show notes to see all the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has. And stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your ledger, download Ledger Live and get all of your D apps all in one place.

• 3:38David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dows have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO.

• 4:20David Hoffman?

  Apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni-grant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 4:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back. This is the How To DAO panel. Really excited to introduce our three guests to you. The first is Kane Warwick. He's the founder and benevolent prefrontal cortex of Synthetix. Back on Synthetix these days. Kane, how you doing?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Doing really well, yeah. It's been a good couple of weeks to stop back from our Western Hemisphere offsite, where I met about 15 of the four contributors for the first time. So that was really cool.

• 5:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, hey, people in a DAO actually meet in person. Good to know. Cooper Turley, he leads crypto strategy at Audius Governance Friends with Benefits, another DAO, also an advisor to the Variant Fund. They are big into DAOs and the creator economy as well. And he's a general DAO operator. I feel like he's in every DAO I've ever seen or been a part of, including Pleaser, C Club, Forefront, Fingerprints, probably some other DAOs we don't yet know about coming in the future. Cooper, how you doing? Doing wonderful. I'm excited to dive into it. I think this is a hot topic, and you've got some of the best on the call today. So thank you for having me. I think it's the hottest topic. And the reason I say that is because we're front-running everybody else right now. It's kind of, I think you said this last time we were on together, Cooper, is like where NFTs were at this time last year.

• 6:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lastly, we have Trey. He is a contributor at Wyarn, Lexpunk, and Coordinate, really cool infrastructure for decentralized compensation servicing DAOs to. Trey, how you doing?

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Doing great, man. And I'm, yeah, also psyched to be here and talking about this amazing stuff with you guys.

• 6:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Man, we are psyched to have you on psyched to be in crypto at this time. So we're going to dive right into some Dow topics. You guys ready?

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Let's do it.

• 6:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. All right. You know, I'm going to start with this, uh, play the devil's advocate because like, you know, why not? Let's, let's start with a skepticism first. So the skeptic says, even the skeptic in me, quite honestly, are DAOs really that fundamentally different from say, a traditional LLC? Maybe it's just like a, an LLC or a corporation without a nation state registration, but isn't it fundamentally sort of the same thing? And if so, why are DAOs even special at all? Why are we having this panel? Why are we excited about DAOs if that's all they are? Why don't we start with you, Ken? What's your take?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  So yes and no, right? Like, yes, uh, you know, corporate governance is a coordination mechanism. It's just a really shitty one compared to DAOs. And so, you know, when you look at what a DAO enables, you have the ability to kind of transcend any one regulatory jurisdiction or like any legal structure. You don't need to be domiciled in a particular place, but the, the DAO itself is kind of the arbiter of, uh, of the rules. As opposed to, you know, needing to kind of resort to some external court law or, you know, legal jurisdiction.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  And that's a really powerful mechanism that, you know, DAOs enable is this kind of self-contained coordination mechanism that is, you know, autonomous, right? It's, it's outside of, uh, you know, any, any particular, uh, any particular place. And I think that's powerful. And I think that's why we're seeing people from all over the world come together to form these DAOs in a way that you couldn't probably do, uh, certainly easily with corporate governance.

• 8:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so Kane making the point that DAOs are supranational, they're outside of any single nation state jurisdiction. Cooper, what do you think about that? Is this still the same like corporate governance, just in a supranational structures? Or is there something more here?

• 8:31Speaker 04

  I think that it's a lot more fluid. You know, the biggest thing I'd call out is there's no team and user dynamic, you know, team and community are one and the same. What that does, it allows for people to come in in a much more free flowing manner. So with the DAO, you don't need to worry about going through an HR process to be hired to a multi-year contract with a vesting schedule. You can jump in and start contributing today. I think that ethos to allow people to come in and contribute as they see fit. It opens a design space for a lot more collaboration. It also allows there to be a lot more ownership in that project. And so beyond the legal structure, I would say the precedent behind working for a DAO has a lot more ownership involved with it. And as a result, you see people coming in and doing things in a much more fluid manner that we haven't really seen outside of like a cooperative or a freelance model, which I'd say is fundamentally different from the ways that DAOs work today.

• 9:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Trey, it's this idea that we've got this supranational entity exists outside of the nation state, that's also permissionless, anyone can join, anyone can contribute. Everyone has sort of a vested interest in what goes on. What would you add to this question then, Drake?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say it's part of a developmental process in the collective consciousness. You know, you can look back, they're not fundamentally different than former forms of human organization, but they are fundamentally better. And they're kind of breathtakingly better in so many ways. Just as like the capabilities of a tribe or a religion or a nation or an incorporation. Now you have a DAO and each one of these different shapes of organization emerges from different financial, legal theories, different theories of personhood. And on top of blockchain, you know, beyond nations out in cyberspace, where anybody can be whoever they want and they're permissionless and open, DAOs are just kind of radically different and better.

• 10:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  One thing that's striking to me, Trick, as I'm looking at your avatar, right? Like, I see, you know, I don't see a person here, right? And so this is the idea that you're getting at of kind of pseudo anonymous contribution as well. You could never contribute to a company in this way. There are probably few organizations we could contribute in this way. But like a DAO is much more meritocratic. You don't have to have a nation state ID in order to contribute. And here you are contributing as a... What would you call your insignia here, Trick?

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Well, here I'm a kind of shaman dinosaur, which is actually pretty close to what I am.

• 10:54David Hoffman?

  So one question that always arises with me and DAOs is in the name DAO is the word decentralized. But there's hasn't really changed any sort of role with regards to leadership or has there? And so my first question, my question on this is maybe to you, Kane, as the founder of Synthetix, and which has then morphed into Synthetix DAO. How is leadership in DAOs the same as previous organizational schemes? Or how is it totally different? You're muted as well.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Thanks. Yeah, it's a topical issue for Synthetix, I think. So it's honestly a hard question to answer. I think that there is always a necessity when you have a group of people for, you know, some level of kind of responsibility, right? Diffusion of responsibility is very dangerous when coordinating people. And I think that that's one thing that we haven't maybe solved yet. Like, right now, we're really powered by enthusiasm, right?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  People like Cooper, who are in 85 DAOs and, you know, just working 24/7 and, you know, just super excited about the space. There does come a time, and I think Synthetix, you know, being four years old or whatever it is. Where people need to be, you know, put into some kind of leadership role when it comes to organizing other people, right, who are going to be doing something. But the critical thing, I think, and the critical difference in a DAO versus even, you know, the old synthetics, open source software foundation model is in the foundation, there was a person who was the ultimate, you

• 12:49Speaker 02

  know, controller of that organization, right? In the synthetic style, there is no person who sits at the top of the hierarchy, right? There's a council, which is a, you know, representation of the will of the token holders, but the token holders are, you know, tens of thousands of people spread all around the world. And so you have this idea of there isn't one person who controls the outcomes or decisions or whatever of this organization. But there may need to be people who help coordinate the individual humans doing some specific activity. They can't choose what to do, but they can help coordinate what has been chosen by the community.

• 13:30David Hoffman?

  Cooper, as Kane said, you're a part of roughly 85 DAOs. So how has leadership changed? Or how have different DAOs chosen different leadership models? And what have you seen that has worked out in some of the DAOs that you're a part of?

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Great question. I'd like to clarify. It's actually 87 DAOs.

• 13:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  He just, he just joined two more as we, as we started this podcast.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  I mean, I think that framing was really accurate from Kane. You know, I think that in the early stages of a DAO, obviously someone's going to play a pretty key role in getting it off the ground. I think that's necessary for it to get started. But what you start to see is that after that first operator is hired to sort of run the day to day, you know, those responsibilities start to get positioned outwards. And I think the more that people are taking key roles in DAOs that are not that specific leader, that's when the conversation around decentralization starts to happen more meaningfully. You know, to me, when I heard that word, I think about, what does it mean to have a voice in this project? You know, are my criticisms, thoughts and feedback actually being heard? Or are they being deflected? You know, this is not a support desk, we open a Zen, like a ticket on Zen desk and then have someone respond to you two weeks later, you know, there's a discord. A channel where you can talk to a leader in real time and really voice your opinion.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  And with token-based governance, you now have a way to show that in a way that actually is meaningful and impactful. You know, and I think that in the in the world before this, there was never really a structure to voice those opinions very meaningfully. And so to answer your question about how have they evolved over time? I think we're still figuring out what a DAO looks like at full decentralization scale. What we are seeing now is that leaders are becoming more comfortable empowering contributors to actually take on meaningful stakes in these projects. And over time, I think that's a really powerful precedent. I don't have to be best friends with Kane to work for his protocol. If I show up and I do meaningful work for a community, the people around me are going to see that and I'm able to own a significant stake in this network.

• 15:12David Hoffman?

  Trey, you've been on the front lines with coordination inside of Urn and also started building out your own tooling to solve your own problems with regards to coordination in Urn. How have you seen leadership inside of Urn grow and develop? And what thoughts do you have on the leadership question with regards to DAOs?

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a really important question and I really resonate with what both Kane and Cooper said. One important thing, a lot of people think that, you know, in evolved corporations or organizations, Freudian slip there, evolved organizations, that there should be no hierarchy. And but that's really kind of just kind of logically false. I mean, the sun's bigger than the earth, you know, like there is hierarchies in the world, like somebody knows more about something than me. That's important. What the problem is around rigid hierarchies, you know, which is kind of by default what happens in a legal corporation. You have to have these kind of rigid structures. In DAOs, what's really important and different is that you don't have to have it, but it doesn't mean that you don't need leadership.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  You still need leadership and we really also need to develop new processes, new tooling that can support natural and fluid leadership. Like we say at Urn and at Coordinate, the leader is the one who knows what to do next. You know, you really want to be able to support that type of leadership.

• 16:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's super cool. The leader is the one who knows what to do next. Very cool. Let's talk about this. So I feel like DAOs are in the early stages, maybe, but they're starting to enter sort of the crypto, Zeke guys, the crypto hype cycle, if you will. And I feel like some people think, oh, yeah, all it takes, we'll take this idea that we have or this model we have, and we'll sprinkle a little DAO on it. It'll just grow and like it'll be successful and it'll flourish and it'll be worth millions and everyone will be excited about it. But we've seen through history. I mean, right now is not the first generation of DAOs. We've seen many generations of DAOs. And those of you who've, you know, been in the space for a while, remembers like cycles of

• 17:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  previous failures. So I want to ask this question because we've all been a part of DAOs that have failed. We've been part of some that are successful. What is the difference? What's the differentiator between a successful DAO and an unsuccessful DAO? Trey, why don't you weigh in on that question?

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So actually, I'm going to coin a term here, the three Ps. We just came up with this today. Purpose, principles, and process. And it's a nice way to talk about things that we're doing at Yarn now and have been thinking a lot about. You have to know why you're doing something and then you have to know who you are, who you're trying to be, you know, in the organization, what your principles are, and then how you're doing it. And if you're doing those three things in a DAO, it's really important. I know some people will kind of don't like the idea of stating principles because it reminds them too much of like Google's bullshit principles or whatever, right? You don't have to do it in a boomer way. We all have principles, right? And actually, most

• 18:10Speaker 03

  of the DAOs that I'm in or that I know, they actually have really strong vision and principles. Just often it's not stated. It's almost like if you state it, you're going to become an old dude. Like, it's kind of how you hold it. That's the, it changes. It's alive. It reflects the system, but it helps you remember, you know, what you're doing. So yeah, purpose, principles, and process.

• 18:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I ask about the last one really quick, Trey, in a follow up? Because I feel like there are some DAOs out there that have maybe the first two sort of down. They get the principles and they got the purpose, but they fall down on the process. And we do need to reinvent processes for this new organizational construct. Do you have any insight into successful DAOs from a process perspective? What do they do differently?

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's super important, like, but also important, you don't want to over define processes. You know, you don't want to like rigidly structure everything, but you need process. How do you make decisions in a DAO? You know, of course, there's coin voting, but there's so many other types of decisions that people need to make. You know, how do you, you know, elect members to the Synthetix Council? You know, how do you, how do you handle somebody, you know, being an asshole to somebody else? Like, there's a lot of types of processes that DAOs need. And it doesn't mean that they have to be the old bad style of business process, by the way, but you still do need process.

• 19:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and I wonder how much of these things we can borrow from the old world, from different organizational structures. For instance, Cooper, I want to turn the same question to you. I know you've been a part of eighty seven DAOs and like so successful ones versus unsuccessful ones. What's, what are the big differentiators in your mind?

• 19:50Speaker 04

  I would say broadly oversimplifying, did it go to zero? It's a yes or no binary question. I would say if people are showing up on a recurring basis to meet and discuss the purpose of that DAO, it's considered successful, in my opinion. I think the biggest unlock that we've seen from the first chapter of DAOs is that we now have liquid tokens representing ownership in these communities. You know, in the first chapter of DAOs, you typically had non-transferable shares that represented social capital and some claim on assets. But it was fundamentally different from being able to expand and have an asset that traded on a secondary market. And so now we can use key metrics like token price as a way to sort of gauge sentiment there. But I think successively, that was actually much more on the human side. You know, if you go into a Discord, if you come to a community call, is that DAO scaling and operations? Is it consistently taking on new work and shipping new things?

• 20:34Speaker 04

  And if the answer is yes, I would say that that's successful in my mind. And if it clearly doesn't have a recurring contributor base that's coming back to discuss things, then I would say that that basically went to zero and is a failure.

• 20:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, Kane, Cooper is saying if the DAO has a pulse still alive, then that's some measure of success here. Let's talk about the mega DAOs, like the ones that are going to like dwarf companies in size and their success. What is it about, Kane? Is it like, is it talent? Is it about community? Is it about better process? Do they, are they, do they have first mover advantage? What do you think are the core things that make a DAO super successful?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  In my experience, the things that have really enabled DAOs to be successful and have continuity is a sense of legitimacy, right? That the processes and the systems that the DAO uses are legitimate, right? And this is really important for some of the things that both Kuber and Trigg mentioned. Like, people need to be able to come in and contribute and feel like, you know, there is some meritocratic principles that they're operating on, that it's not just some kind of clique of people that can exclude you or whatever. So they need to be open, they need to be transparent, they need to be legitimate, all of the processes that they're using.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  But I also think that there's another, and this goes for the Synthetix community. I think there needs to be a level of kind of buy-in of all the community members that they're all kind of working towards some shared vision, right? And if you go back to the bad days of Synthetix, there were only like 20 people. But there was a really, you know, a strong sense of like purpose, what we were doing. And everyone felt like they could contribute, ideas, concepts, work, whatever it was. It was very, you know, open, low barrier to entry community. And, you know, there was a lot of engagement from, you know,

• 22:40Speaker 02

  even back in the foundation days, myself and other, you know, members of the team with the community. You know, it was a collective effort that we were all working towards. Obviously, as we've, you know, moved more towards a DAO and deprecated those kind of legacy functions, that's gotten even more powerful. But I think now, today, you can turn up in Synthetix, you can start contributing, and, you know, there's a real sense of, you know, legitimacy of the processes that we've implemented.

• 23:08David Hoffman?

  Trey brought up the word purpose and all three of the panelists used that word in their most recent answer. And so I kind of want to dive into the values and visions that we see inside of DAOs. And I want to start with you Kane, because you know, Synthetix and other, you know, DeFi DAOs like Uniswap or Urn have a very concrete purpose, right? Like Urn is to optimize yields. Synthetix is to generate a Synthetix asset trading platform. And then we have DAOs like Bankless DAO, which is a little bit more nebulous in their vision, right? Like it's to propagate the bankless meme, the bankless message and bankless infrastructure and education, which is, you know, not as specific as simply just like,

• 23:48David Hoffman?

  you know, maximizing trading volume or Synthetix market cap. So let's start with what you think is the values and visions of Synthetix and how that plays a role in maybe DAO membership, DAO organization, DAO coherence. What is overall the role of values and visions for a DAO to succeed?

• 24:10Speaker 02

  I think within Synthetix, the kind of, you know, primary guiding factor for us has just been solving hard problems. You know, like iteratively experimenting towards a solution to this very difficult problem of how do you have a collateralized, you know, network of synthetic assets. And, you know, we've had a lot of iteration and a lot of experimentation and not all of it's been successful. But, you know, we've, we've always had this very kind of open-minded approach that, you know, we test things and, you know, anyone can come in and suggest something that they think would be, you know, a good potential solution. And so I think that that, that kind

• 24:54Speaker 02

  of overarching principle has allowed us to be very fluid in how we've kind of tackled problems. We haven't locked into this is the thing we do and we only do it this way. And, you know, everything outside of that is kind of, you know, excluded. The solution space is open with Synthetix. But I think even more broadly, outside of, you know, trying to build a synthetic asset platform.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  More like over time, my my sense is that the community is as kind of interested and and as driven by this idea of coordination, right? And and actually building a governance framework that is legitimate and you know, can allow this to operate. Now, the fact that we need to be decentralized for a whole bunch of reasons, you know, is has kind of been a forcing function for us to get this right. But we've started, you know, we started this process, you know, a long time ago, and it's been a continuous process of moving decision making more and more into the hands of open holders. So I think that that maybe, you know, Vitalik kind of talked about this, like D-Gov versus D5.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  In my mind, you know, the D-Gov part of Synthetix is probably more important than the D5 part of Synthetix. You know, in 20 years' time, when we look back, the experiments that we ran on on governance will probably be far more important for the overall ecosystem than the experiments we ran on synthetic assets.

• 26:23David Hoffman?

  Turning to you, Cooper, Kane is the, you know, the, like, like we said in the intro, the benevolent prefrontal cortex of one specific DAO. But I think you might be up to 80 DAOs at this point now in in the call. And so with all these DAOs that you're a part of, how how is values and visions an important component of all these different DAOs? What's the general role of values and visions in DAOs?

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'd start by saying that most of the DAOs that I am are more social clubs than they are financial protocols. And so I think fundamentally, that, you know, view on the way that the DAO is meant to operate changes sort of the focus. You know, I'd say for a lot of the DAOs that I'm in, it's about meeting people online. It's about finding a sense of purpose and community in the way that you spend your time on the Internet. And I think when you start to think about values from that perspective, it's less outcome driven. You know, if I can go into a Discord community and meet three people in my local city and make a friendship online, that's kind of the end state that I'm driving forwards towards. And I think that when you start to think about culture as a means for value accrual and for sort of just identity, you start to get into very different situations. And so I'd say a lot of the stuff happening right now around the NFT market with profile pictures, a lot of stuff happening around social clubs like Friend

• 27:28Speaker 04

  With benefits, you notice that there's not sophisticated financial products being built. But when you look under the surface, you notice that people are far more interested in governance because they feel a sense of purpose and ownership over the way that they're contributing. And as you scale that outwards, I think the mission here is to make sure that no matter where you go in the world, any city at any time, you can find someone that has a shared value as you and go and hang out and have a good time, grab a beer, grab a coffee, whatever. And so long as there's, you know, these sort of pockets around the world to meet community members, I think the values of the DAO is simply make friends online. If we can do that well, that's a successful DAO in my book.

• 28:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trey, take us home on this one. What is the role of values and visions inside of a DAO?

• 28:06Speaker 03

  Well, it really helps align people's effort and helps unlock their creative energy, you know? So knowing what you're headed towards and how you're going to get there. So, you know, it's an active, living discussion at Urine. Urine kind of came from chaos and, you know, we're, we're growing all these new organs all the time. But there are principles that matter to the people at Urine, like action, creativity, innovation, initiative, collaboration and integrity, you know, like what I find in, in Urine and in many places in DeFi is that not just trying to make a ton of money and like take over the world, you're trying to do something more meaningful, you know?

• 28:48Speaker 03

  And that's, I think, where a lot of also the organization stuff comes in. I really resonate with Kane is saying like, when I look at the things that are most exciting to me, it's like how we are learning to coordinate. And we're doing really hard things, you know, and doing it, you know, with no nets. We're, we're, we're walking this tightrope and you need incredible trust and incredible integrity and to coordinate like that.

• 29:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trey, I want to ask you this question about like DAO size, like David and I have talked about from the earliest stages of, of Bankless, that this whole crypto movement is about social scalability, essentially scaling human coordination, right? And we have this hardwired constraint called Dunbar's law or Dunbar's number, which is like inside of our

• 29:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Biology and inside of our DNA and that's, that's the idea that any human being has a hard time managing over 150 personal connections. So I, I'm curious about DAOs as we think about like the size, the optimal size for a DAO. Like what is the optimal size for a DAO? Sometimes it seems like DAOs can be very successful early on when you've got a core team dedicated and focused, almost like a mini, mini startup, if you will. But then like, can we scale beyond that? Or are DAOs meant to be sort of small, tight knit teams? What, what's your take on the optimal size for a DAO and how it, how it might scale in the future?

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's so many different types of things that people will use DAOs to do, you know? And often when we're talking about Dunbar's number or looking at research from like Mark Granovetter or Bill Putnam around weak ties and social cohesion. You know, you're, you're thinking about certain types of activities in certain environments, but in DAOs, there's going to be even every type of activity. Like I could be part of a science fiction book club DAO, right? With tens of thousands of people. And if the decisions they're making is just what book are we reading next? That'll be a pretty effective DAO, you know? But if that DAO is trying to do things like create an incredibly complicated piece of software with a certain design, et cetera, it's going to be hard to do that with so many people.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  You need a smaller group to do that, or at least you need groups of smaller groups that can coordinate in an effective way. So it really depends on what you're trying to do, but I think we'll see DAOs from one person to billions of people.

• 31:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kane, for, for what Synthetix has done, you guys started as sort of a very small, even like a centralized team. And now it's this decentralized community. What's your take on a DAO's size and how, how that has scaled with Synthetix?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  So just first to go back, you asked a question earlier about like, actually there was a question about early DAOs, right? And I think one of the issues that we had with early DAOs is the DAO.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Created some fear in people, you know, to have this like unconstrained thing that was just like deployed immutable and, you know, it could go wrong in all kinds of fun ways. And I think that then a lot of this kind of subsequent DAOs that launched were really just bullshit DAOs, right? Like Synthetix was not a DAO, MakerDAO was not a DAO, right? Just because it had DAO in the name did not mean it was a DAO, right? It was a foundation, it was run by, you know, one or two people. We've, it's only been, you know, in the last, like, what, three weeks or something that MakerDAO actually became a DAO, right? By winding up the foundation and kind of, you know, handing over control to, you know,

• 32:26Speaker 02

  the system itself, right, to token holders. And so I think when we look at, you know, that evolution from these very centralized entities that were not really DAO-like at all to now, the big difference is that we have tools. You know, there's a lot of tools. There's still a lot of tools to be built. And I think that there's a huge open space, you know, solution space for people to build better DAO tooling. The project that got me most excited in the early days of Ethereum was Aragon. Right now, you know, Aragon obviously blew up spectacularly, again, not a DAO. So there's something we said for that as well, right? Like, it's amazing how these non-DAOs, you know, have such, you

• 33:08Speaker 02

  know, interesting coordination failures. But there's, there's no question that there's a lot of room for better tooling in the DAO space. You know, things like Snapshot, SafeSnap, you know, Compound Governance Module, there's, there's definitely stuff out there, but there's a lot more work that needs to happen. But when you've got something like Synthetix, I think you are kind of inclined to just roll your own tooling to an extent. And one of the things that I've been pushing for within the community is for us to kind of try and get this tooling a little bit more accessible so that other people can use it. And I think that that's a really big thing that we need to be pushing for all DAOs. If you build something cool, Urn does a really good job with this. You

• 33:52Speaker 02

  know, as I said, Compound has done, you know, some really cool stuff. Balancer, you know, snapshot, like you, it, the onus is on you to get it out there and, and, you know, make it accessible for people to use. I think that's really critical. Um, and, you know, it's something that it's like, uh, it should be a really, you know, uh, important part of not just building your own tooling, but making sure that it's tooling that's accessible to the rest of, you know, the, the group of community, because that's the only way we can kind of test and experiment and iterate on these things.

• 34:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, so Cooper, how about you? I want to bring you in on this, uh, the same question about DAO size. Like so Jeff, Jeff Bezos, I think Amazon has implemented in the past, something called like the two pizza rule, where no meeting size should be larger than the amount of people who can eat from like two pizzas, right? So like, if you run out of slices, your meeting's too big. It's the idea. And that's the idea that like, large numbers make things inefficient, ineffective, hard to make decisions. Do you think there's an optimal DAO size? I mean, Trey said kind of it depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but what have you seen from your travels?

• 34:57Speaker 04

  I would say that, um, for the core working, working groups of a DAO, anywhere from five to 10 people that have legitimate, you know, responsibilities. And that feel really good to me. I think having a circle for passive contributors to come in and contribute makes a lot of sense, but being able to assign key ownership roles to five to 10 people. And feeling confident they can always report back to a wider structure has been what I've seen work well. You know, I'll call out that there's no one size fits all DAO model. You know, I'm in one DAO called Fires where it's four of us and we are very intentional about not opening that up. We want to keep that at four members. You know, I'm in another DAO called Friends with Benefits that has 1,500 members and counting. And both of those are working extremely well. You know, on Monday, we had a town hall where 270 people came together. We had about 10 of our 80 contributors come to the call and discuss what they're working on.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  And what I'd call out here is that while there were, you know, 50 to 80 people in the DAO that are doing work on a day-to-day basis, the fact that those thousand members can come and hear about that and feel a sense of ownership on what they're working on. They then feel more inclined to take that next step and get involved. And so the thing that I'm spending a lot of my time on is it's very clear to me, people really want to work for a DAO. There's a lot of people that have a lot of skills to offer and they want to get involved. But right now we just don't have good onboarding funnels. And so organizational structure of DAOs to be able to identify, you're really good at something. I'm going to put you into a team to work on that. I think that's the single biggest hurdle we need to make DAOs more scalable. And that's something that I'm spending a lot of my time on to figure out.

• 36:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Onboarding talent specifically, you're talking about Cooper.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 36:20David Hoffman?

  Cooper, you earlier said that you are largely a part of like social DAOs. And so I want to ask this question to you. There could, I could, I think I could argue pretty effectively that it was, the goal of all DAOs collapses down into increasing capital. And that's extremely obvious when it comes to DAOs like Urn, which is trying to, you know, put a bunch of, you know, YFI and ETH on the treasury or DAOs like Uniswap, which is trying to take trading fees and they all have their own tokens and they want token price to go up. Do you agree that the goal of all DAOs is to increase its capital? And I also want to put into, into your, your brain, when our episode with Joel Menegro really opened up the definition of what capital really is.

• 37:02David Hoffman?

  It's not just, you know, the financial capital that's on, on the balance sheet, but it's perhaps the social capital and human capital, which maybe that, maybe that fits into the social DAO conversation. But in your opinion, what is like the end game for DAOs? What is the goal for all DAOs?

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would definitely double click on the fact that capital is both financial and social. I think increasing relevance in the world is extremely important. And so when I think about, you know, what is the purpose of these social DAOs? How do you value culture? You know, this is a question that I ask a lot. I think in crypto, so far, we've been able to value financial assets, which has been fantastic. But now that you're seeing a lot more interest in sort of meme and speculative investing, what does it mean to place a price tag on a community ethos or to place a price tag on a fashion brand or something like that? And so I think it's a new asset class fundamentally. But to answer your question directly, I would say the mission for all DAOs is to increase relevancy and mind share in the world. And whatever you define as capital to be able to define that, that's kind of what a DAO looks like to me.

• 37:59David Hoffman?

  Trey, with the goal of Urn, is the end game simply just to collect as much fees as possible and have the DAO be as well capitalized as possible? Or is that overly reductive?

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's, that's one of the goals, but the goal is also to just continue to find new ways to innovate, to create, to work together, to improve the space. Yield aggregation is the thing that we're focused on now, but that could change. Who knows?

• 38:25David Hoffman?

  Kane, same question to you.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  I think, you know, again, it comes down to purpose, right? Like, the purpose of synthetics is absolutely to, you know, expand the market capital synthetic assets, because that's the utility that, that's the service that we're all coming together to coordinate, to provide. But, you know, as I kind of alluded to, it may be that in chasing that purpose or chasing that goal, we end up developing something that's far more powerful, which is, you know, these decentralized governance tools, right? So I think that there are positive externalities for DAOs because they operate in the open, they're transparent, all the software is open source, or should be. If it's not, you need to take a look at yourself, not naming any names. But, you know, I think that they're, you know,

• 39:13Speaker 02

  creating public goods in a sense, right? You know, when you're, when you're building this tooling. And so, yes, like, in a very narrowly defined sense, like, synthetics is about expanding the capital, the assets under management and the market cap. But I think that that can throw off some, some positive things that are outside the scope of just capital accrual.

• 39:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, this is a hot panel. We've still got some more things to cover, including Vitalik says coin voting sucks in his recent article. I want to get into that topic. Also, talk about opportunities. So the average listener who's not yet joined a DAO wants to be more active in DAOs. How do they get involved? What are the opportunities in this space? But before we get to those questions, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 40:00David Hoffman?

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• 40:38David Hoffman?

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• 41:14David Hoffman?

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• 41:55David Hoffman?

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• 42:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, we are back. Fantastic panel so far. We've got a few more topics to cover. We've got Kane, we've got Cooper, we've got Trey illuminating us on the world of DAOs. How to DAO. I want to get to an article that Vitalik published actually earlier this week. And Kane, you made reference to it earlier, this idea of D-Gov being really important. Let's figure out decentralized governance. Maybe that is what the biggest thing that crypto is actually doing. Maybe that's even bigger than going bankless and bigger than DeFi. I don't know. But one of the points he made was it's kind of like coin voting sucks, right? Like, we can do better than simple coin votes in how we govern our DeFi protocols and govern our DAOs. I'm going to throw out something from his summary here.

• 43:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Coin voting is attractive because it feels credibly neutral. Anyone can go and get some units of governance token on Uniswap. In practice, however, coin voting may well only appear secure today precisely because of the imperfections in its neutrality. Namely, it's an important part, large portions of the supply staying in the hands of a tightly coordinated clique of insiders. So I want to ask you, does coin voting suck? And if so, what's better? Where can we evolve to? Kane, what's your take?

• 43:47Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, Maker, aside from being an incredible solution to the stablecoin problem, was also kind of a natural experiment in proving that coin voting sucks. Like, I think pretty definitively put the nail in that coffin that like, direct coin voting has so many negative aspects to it, including like chilling effects. It's, you know, lack of participation, lack of engagement, all kinds of things, right? So I'm 100% in agreement with Vitalik that the direct coin voting on kind of individual proposals is really suboptimal. The thing that we, this view that we had, I guess, in Synthetix was like,

• 44:31Speaker 02

  How do we maintain rough consensus while overlaying some control for token holders? Right? Like, how do you balance those two things? And so in the early days, it was like just Discord, right? You had a personality in Discord, you could be a non-whatever. And that was the kind of, you know, one person, one vote, rough consensus about specific proposals. And then I think that, uh, over time, it evolved into a coin voting system. But that coin voting system was sort of established in such a way as to ensure that it wasn't one coin, one vote. It was sort of, uh, you know, we applied like quadratic weighting to voting.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  You can only vote for one council member, so you can't, you know, run, uh, run the table and get all the council members on there. So there were a number of things that we did to kind of constrain the direct coin voting and create something that was more, uh, robust. So, you know, there's still a lot of experiments in, in that direction, I think, around delegation and representative democracy. But in my mind, that's kind of a hybrid thing, because I still think you need some control for token holders. You don't want to divorce, you know, the, the tokens from governance. But you also don't want to have it so coupled, you know, so tightly coupled that you get the, you know, all of the issues that we've seen with Maker and some of the other, uh, direct token voting systems.

• 45:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trey, what's your take on this? The, the suckiness of, of coin voting? And is there something less sucky?

• 45:58Speaker 03

  The suckiness is, uh, enormous of coin voting. And, um, you know, I mean, there's so, there's so much to this question. I love Vitalik's article, um, agree with it very much.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  You know, you need, uh, I don't even know where to start. The, you know, Urin has developed a whole system of, of, of governance in order to do both listen to Wi Fi holders and allow for people to make independent autonomous decisions without having to go for, to, to whip votes for every new decision, which is just a nightmare.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  And you know, one of the things that happens, I think, in crypto is we get so obsessed with adversarial environments and blockchain. And we think that everything's supposed to work that way, but it doesn't make any sense. You know, like, there is a role for trust. What a world with no trust in it is not one I want to be in, you know? But the beautiful thing is that because blockchain creates this incredibly strong, trustless foundation, you see so much more trust flourishing on top of it. And it's not about just open trust, do whatever. It's about being thoughtful with how you create structures and how you bestow trust and making it transparent. So that, you know, one of the nice things about trust is that it can be broken. And it can teach you how to make new systems to avoid that happening in the future and to get stronger

• 47:18Speaker 03

  and to share things in a better way. And so we develop all of these tools, like you're in governance too. You know, we've been having this awesome collaboration with Synthetix recently, looking at our two sides of different ways of governance, which both have solved similar problems in different ways. Neither of us have done direct on-chain voting for, you know, direct control of treasury or contracts. You know, for good reason, it can be, just like Vitalik lays out, there's a lot of ways it can go wrong.

• 47:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cooper, what do you think about this coin voting?

• 47:46Speaker 04

  You know, I struggle with this topic a lot. I think when you take a step back, governance is such a small, small problem for so many people in the space right now and more broadly, the world. You know, I think for a lot of people, the idea of using any asset to vote on something that you have a role in is a very new topic. You know, for the vast majority of people in this world, they've never participated in a governance decision. Most likely, they never will. And so I think that this article highlights a lot of really accurate points for like deep crypto governance systems today. But where I get caught up with it is recognizing that we're not in a place yet where we've gone to a large enough scale for these experiments to play out in like a really meaningful manner. And so to me, what stood out from that article was just sort of the emphasis on quadratic voting. You know, I think that Kane touched on this as well, but we're slowly shifting into a world where

• 48:29Speaker 04

  it appears that, you know, the amount of individuals voting on something is the larger signal than the people with the most capital voting on that. And so I think that trying to run more experiments in that direction where you're encouraging participation, you know, you're allocating capital to governance and you're trying to make sure that people recognize. This is something to pay attention to. I think we can get to a place where, once we have more diverse opinions in the conversation, we can start to see more meaningful conversations around this. But right now, I think that, for the most part, it's the same hundred token holders voting on every protocol. And I think, to me, that's a very small subset to make definitive, you know, decisions about whether or not systems are broken, when in reality, we're still so early in the conversation of what global governance would look like.

• 49:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's a really good point. And while I also agree with the Vitalik's article, Coin Voting Sucks, I think it's also important to like, take a step back and look at, all of our existing legacy systems suck more, right? Like, when's the last time you, or any users, had any influence in what Twitter does, or Uber drivers, they have any influence in their network, right? So like, even the the basic zero to one of now users in the community, to your point earlier, Cooper, have a vested interest in this network? That is a big step forward. So, yeah, coin voting still sucks, and we can drive towards better solutions. But like, everything in the old world sucks way more. Like, I want a piece of every network I am a part of as a user in this world. This is what crypto has taught me.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe to say.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, so I think like, Vitalik's counter argument to that, if I could be so bold as to speak for him, would be that like, you can have ownership of a thing without, you know, resorting to like, direct token voting, right? Like, those things don't need to be coupled. And yes, like, the ownership component is far more powerful of a thing than existing systems. But you can have, you can have an ownership component with no governance rights, right? And, and you know, that would still be better than, you know, the the status quo.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Because you don't have governance right now, governance rights, or, you know, or a stakeholder, you know,

• 50:43Speaker 02

  in these systems like Uber or whatever. So I think that the, like, we should be careful not to couple those things too tightly.

• 50:50David Hoffman?

  Good point. Cooper, you have anything to add there before we go on?

• 50:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think that came exactly accurate there. I think the education around why governance matters is something that I care very deeply about. You know, I don't think that a lot of people understand that if they take the time to learn about governance, there's financial freedom at stake, there's social freedom at stake. You know, I think for a lot of people, when we hear governance, we think about electing the next president, which is a conversation that has not been naturally very exciting to them. What I've found a lot of purpose in in crypto is being able to use governance as a means to work on what I love. And so, you know, outside of the mechanics for how governance is used, I think that being able to educate people that by participating in the deepest nuance of the networks that you know and love, you can work on literally whatever you want in the world. And I think as we get to a point of figuring out what that looks like, you know, the mechanics for how we do governance will get more defined.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  You know, as that kind of opportunity gap closes and everyone recognizes if I spend 10 hours a week on a governance forum, chances are I'm going to make more money than any salary you could ever pay me in my life.

• 51:45David Hoffman?

  Guys, so far, this conversation has really been about DAOs holistically. So I want to actually turn the conversation to individuals who make up these DAOs and how a DAO lifestyle is different than the lifestyles that, you know, we would find ourselves in a typical legacy job. And so, Cooper, as somebody who's part of all these social DAOs, how does, what is a DAO lifestyle mean to you? What does it mean to work for a DAO? And how does that change how an individual can live their life?

• 52:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And how do you explain it to your parents?

• 52:16Speaker 04

  A great question. The way I live my life now is ownership stakes and all the products that I contribute to. So I'm slowly supplementing any form of consistent income on a fiat basis to just ownership stakes and networks. And I think that principle of going into a community and being able to earn a significant ownership portion for the value you contribute, it's extremely scary, you know, to my parents than me telling them, hey, I'm not going to take USD per month to pay my rent. I'm going to earn magic internet tokens. They're going to be worth more. You know, for the last three years, they were like, what the hell are you doing? But, you know, as this started to pan out more, and we saw specifically this last year, those ownership stakes become valuable. I think that it's easy to recognize if you go into a network and you start working for ownership over capital, there's going to be a path forward there. I think to answer that question very directly of how I spend my time, it's a connector role.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  You know, I think that the single most important thing to do for DAOs is putting people into the right pockets together and then helping to coordinate that effort. And so a lot of my time is basically identifying who are the key contributors in that DAO. How do I make sure that they're actually owning things that matter? And how do I make sure they're touching base with all the other people that know what matters? So that the ball is moving forward and they're communicating that to every other member of that DAO.

• 53:20David Hoffman?

  Trey, can you kind of compare and contrast what your life was like before you started working at Yearn? And how just the lifestyle of working inside of a DAO has changed how you live your life?

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Well, I was writing a science fiction novel before I started working here and it's pretty different. But before that I ran a company, you know, and it's super different.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  In so many ways, like one of the things that I'm most passionate about with with working in DAOs is is creating, I call it like the party bike. You know, a system where on a party bike, anybody can pedal as much as they want. You know, somebody wants to steer, they can, they can drive. And you want to stop pedaling and just chill and drink your beer? That's fine. Like DAOs can be the system that harvest all the action from all of the contributors in any way that they want to contribute it. Which really supports this kind of self sovereign respond individual responsibility of what is it that I care about? What do I want to work on? I'm not going to sign my life away as a wage slave for X number of hours. Any hour of my time is worth more than than money, you know?

• 54:26Speaker 03

  But if I just do those things that I'm called to, money flows through the magic of DAOs and through the magic of crypto, just like Cooper was saying. Like I just, when I started at Yearn, I didn't know, I like wasn't involved that much in crypto until last summer. And I just showed up at year and I was like, holy shit. DAOs are incredible. I'm, there's nobody's in charge here. I'm just going to make the role that I want to do and I'm going to do that. And it has, I mean extraordinarily beneficial in my life and it's wonderful.

• 54:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is that role, by the way, Trey?

• 55:00Speaker 03

  That's a good question. I mean, I work on governance and compensation and organization stuff. Yeah.

• 55:06David Hoffman?

  Stuff. It's stuff, Ryan.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:09David Hoffman?

  So fun fact, Kane also was working on a book before he came to Synthetix, if you guys didn't know that. But Kane, you've been a serial entrepreneur, dare I say, workaholic for like years now. So as somebody who's had a perspective on the laborers inside of Synthetix, as well as yourself, what is like, what is work like inside of Synthetix? And how do you see that as a model for DAOs at large?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we had a really interesting contrast, right? Because Blue Shift, the company that I founded before, Synthetix, which was this payment gateway that a bunch of the crypto exchanges in Australia used to get around banks, because banks didn't like crypto. Back then, they still kind of don't. They're a little bit more open to it. So we, in our office, Synthetix kind of grew, you know, out of the Blue Shift office, right? There was, you know, there were kind of similar people working on it. And so you had this very like rigid corporate hierarchical structure with like investors and, you know, a CEO and like all these different things. And then you had this like crazy thing over,

• 56:20Speaker 02

  you know, the other side of the office, right? Which was a very flat structure even from the beginning. But I think the primary difference when we transitioned from Foundation to DAO is we went from a model where people had to do what I said, right? Like they were actually obligated to do what I said, right? And, you know, I like to think that I was pretty open about, you know, collaborating with people, listening to them, all that sort of stuff. But the reality is that if I said, you have to do this, like you had to do it, right? And then we went to this model where that didn't exist anymore and you didn't have to do anything that I said, right? You didn't have to do the fuck you wanted. And so now we've got, you know, all of these different stakeholders in the project.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  And people just do whatever they think, like Trey was saying, you know, they make their own roles, they carve out positions for themselves, et cetera. And it's a very different working environment. It's much more open and I would argue a lot more fun. It's a bit more chaotic, but it's more fun than a rigid hierarchy.

• 57:21David Hoffman?

  Trick, I want to ask this next question to you. DAOs we've seen are a lot looser in their borders, right? If you're a part of a DAO, you can freely become part of another DAO and there's no jealousy, there's no employment contract like there are with legacy companies. And that's kind of opened up the design space for the products that DAOs can build. And so now that members can be a part of multiple DAOs and DAOs can more freely collaborate with other DAOs, what kind of things can we unlock with DAO-to-DAO collaboration? Now that there's less of a competitive environment and more of a collaborative environment with DAOs, what can we do now?

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a really cool concept, really. And like the thought experiment, like what if like 1/3 of Apple employees also worked at Microsoft? You know, like what, or if that was the dominant paradigm for, you know, the FAANG cadre? I think so much, and I think in order to get there, I mean, we can do so much in terms of just collaboration and really shifting what is the purpose of what we're doing? Is the purpose to create these gigantic immortal company entities that extract resources and turn it into work product? You know, is that the purpose of what we're doing here? No, you know? So does it like, we have all these trappings from the past, like this corporate veil and legal boundaries and, oh, I've got this salary and this compensation

• 58:45Speaker 03

  and I've got this lock-in investing, all this stuff. And we import all this stuff into crypto just because, you know, we haven't invented anything better yet in a lot of ways. But a lot of what I'm working on is like better ways to do compensation. So you don't even need to worry what other projects you're working on. Who cares if you're moonlighting or if you're working on another project? If you're bringing value to a project, it should be rewarded. So we need more fluid systems for enabling that type of, you know, contribution.

• 59:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cooper, since you're a part of so many social DAOs, do you notice a lot of the same members in one DAO being a part of another DAO? And how does that change the dynamics of all the different DAOs you're a part of?

• 59:24Speaker 04

  I think it just encourages positive some games. We see a lot of the core contributors to social clubs leaning into every community that they're in. They'll do recurring panels in one DAO, they'll host workshops in another one. And you start to see that the camaraderie in that sector is a lot stronger because people are sharing everything together. To Kane's earlier point about open sourcing valuable tooling, I've been recommending so many people use their vesting contracts, the liquidity mining contracts they may have been the market standard. And I think in the next three to six months here, we're going to see those same level of open source tooling for more social applications. So things like Coordinate, I think, are a fantastic example around getting paid. We're now seeing stuff around like tokenized membership events. So for FTV, we've built like a gatekeeper product that allows you to go to IRL events using an RSVP system. So something that we're now going to open up and allow other communities to use.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  And I believe over the next year or so here, we're going to see both like financial products that are shared between communities and more important, you know, social coordination mechanisms. So that if you have a group of 20 people on the internet, how do you assign identity and reputation? And the more we can figure out systems on that front, I think the more we're going to win together as a whole.

• 1:00:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cooper, just a quick follow up on this. Like at some level, I used to say this in the early days of DeFi, that it feels like we're beta testing. We're all beta testers in the world's future financial system, right? It still feels that way. But like, I also feel that way with DAOs, right? You're talking about like, all of these ways to participate in community. Well, like, what has community? Just about everything, like everything. Like, you talk about artists, you talk about like, you know, fan clubs, you talk about like, the video gaming market. These are all little pockets of a community. It feels very much like crypto is just alpha beta testing. All of this infrastructure that the rest of the world is about to use. Any reflections on that, on how big this could get?

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, the biggest mental model I've been following for DAOs specifically is community meets product, not product meets community. You know, in the world previously, teams would build a product and try and find users to go out and adopt it. With DAOs, you are building a community and that community is deciding what to build together. And even if it's the shittiest product in the world, they're all going to go out and go to bat for it because they built it together. And I think that precedent of only building things because a community thinks it's valuable actually helps us to identify what should be built and reduces a lot of the friction around things that don't really matter.

• 1:01:38David Hoffman?

  Kane is the, again, the prefrontal cortex of Synthetix, which is a very goal-oriented project. It has very explicit outcomes that it wants. Would you ever notice the people, the contributors of this Synthetix ecosystem, have their attention drift elsewhere to other projects? And was that ever a problem? Or was that kind of cool?

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  You may recall DeFi Summer.

• 1:02:09David Hoffman?

  That was very distracting, sir.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  It was unbelievably distracting. Oh, my God. But you know what? Like, and this is where I think the difference between, you know, go back to like, you know, my former life as the CEO of Blue Shift versus, you know, the founder of Synthetix.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  It would not have been acceptable for all of the staff of Blue Shift to just like run down the street chasing after some fucking crazy thing, right? Like, that just was not like, that wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen, right? Like, there is a lot of oversight around what people are doing, their very defined roles. You had, you know, people within the Synthetix community, like, helping out to launch new projects. They were like, you know, helping out with community, helping out with coordination. They were just yield farming themselves. They were de-gening. They were, you know, doing all kinds of crazy shit. They were, you know, doing code reviews for people, audits, like, and there was no real way to kind of constrain that. And there was, at one point, I think there was a little bit of concern

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  within the project of like, everyone is very distracted. And I just sort of said, like, this is the process, right? Like, you know, everything that everyone's doing, people are going to learn from. And, you know, it's going to come back and it's going to, you know, populate the project with a whole bunch of, you know, good and bad information that people have gathered out in the outside world. And that's just the way it goes, right? So, you know, we took a very kind of, you know...

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  I guess, open view of, you know, letting people do whatever they wanted and, you know, and now with the, with current kind of structure, what we're trying to work out is how do we have some level of coordination within the core contributors, right, who are paid, they're paid to start monthly to work on specific things, to make sure that the outcomes that we're looking for, you know, from those people are kind of met. But it's a hard problem, right? Like, when you start from a very open kind of framework, it's hard to apply retrospectively, some rigidity to it. So we'll see how that goes, but it's definitely an experiment's running right now.

• 1:04:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's super interesting because you definitely want accountability, but you also in the DAO world have such loose ties on talent. But, you know, I, I think that can actually be an advantage for crypto in that, like, hey, talent's not going to want to work for handcuffs anymore. Like, your Google, your Silicon Valley non-compete clause, like, forget that, right? Doesn't exist in crypto. So I do think this is going to be a boon for, for bringing talent in this space. This new way of working is going to catch on. I want to ask another question to the panelists. David and I have had a reoccurring discussion, right? So this term is DAO, that we've been seeing the entire time, decentralized autonomous organization, DAO, right? The A in that, sometimes I find a little bit, not troubling, not that there's

• 1:05:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  intentional deceit, but like, doesn't necessarily reflect the meme of DAO, right? Because a lot of what we're talking about is not autonomous. By autonomous, we just mean like, written in code, right? Ideally immutable code on something like Ethereum, for instance. Do you think that these are really DO's, digital organizations, instead of DAOs that we've been talking about this whole time? And how do you square that in your mind? Is the meme sort of wrong? Kane, what are your thoughts?

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you know, my, my sense of autonomous, even if it wasn't the original intent, and I think it kind of wasn't like, again, if you go back to the DAO, right? The idea was that it was this, you know, set of, uh, you know, contracts running on Ethereum that, um, you know, didn't require any intervention, right? But again, I think what is that intervention? Because it still required humans, right? Humans were an input to the process of the DAO, right? So it had to compel humans to want to do something, right? Which was like, put up proposals to be funded, et cetera, right? So it was never like autonomous to like the human species, right? It was never just a piece of software that was going off and doing something that never interacted with humans, right? Humans were an input to the process.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  But I think for me, the autonomous component, as we've kind of iterated on this, this concept, is more about being, you know, self-contained, right? It doesn't, it doesn't require, like, the, the humans that are an input to the process are within the DAO, if that makes sense, right? And it doesn't, the rules are self-contained, um, and, and coherent, and it doesn't require, uh, sort of resorting to some external arbiter of, of, you know, uh, like a legal system or something like that, right? Everything that is done within the DAO happens within the rule set that's created within the DAO. Um, and that rule set can obviously change, right? You know, there's, there's DAOs that evolve and, and rules change.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  But even the changing of the rules is encoded in the DAO itself, right? So, you know, there's this evolutionary concept, but, um, but still, there is this sense that they are distinct and self-contained, and that's where the autonomous for me really resonates.

• 1:07:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trey, what do you think about this? Way in for us.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's an awesome explanation. And, yeah, I like to think about the autonomous part as kind of recursive or holarchic, which is that the whole object is autonomous. And then DAOs are really this kind of soup of human and software objects, all functioning autonomously. And the people inside the DAO are also autonomous. And I think it really brings it back to that core crypto of value of sovereignty, self-sovereignty. And it's like, I am responsible for my actions, uh, with the other people I work with. And together, we are responsible for our actions. We are autonomous.

• 1:07:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cooper, I love that description that Trey just made of this software and human soup. That's really what it feels like, it's being in like a stew, other human beings intermixed with code. Do you have any thoughts on this question of how autonomous are DAOs, or should we even care?

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think to echo some of the earlier comments, when I think of the word autonomous, I think about independence. You know, we've heard multiple panelists say that many contributors in DAOs are self-defining their own role. They're self-defining their own responsibilities. They're leaning into something that feels very empowering to them. And so I think of autonomous, I think less about will this thing work in the absence of humans? I think more about will this thing work with people feeling fulfilled from the work that they do in that DAO organization? And so when you start to look around at all these DAOs and sort of judge the mental health of the people working on them, I think you're going to find that it's much more autonomous and sort of how those people are living their day-to-day life. And in aggregate, I think that that energy just brings about such a new level of productivity that, you know, I could care less honestly if it's being run by software or humans, but so long as there's sort of a collective consciousness that's pushing it forward in a meaningful way. I think that's the degree of autonomy that I measure.

• 1:09:00David Hoffman?

  I think the original definition of DAOs really focused on the humans on the periphery and code at the center definition of DAOs, where we, and this was these very pie in the sky ideas of like Uber and Airbnb on the blockchain. And Uber, instead of being like a bunch of bureaucrats with a bunch of, you know, people in the middle, with the, with the value creators on the outside, we could just replace the inside with code and the value creators would just talk to this like robotic, like hive mind Uber app that was somehow a bunch of contracts on Ethereum. And there would be actually no internal human organizations. And I think the way we've gone from that OG version of DAOs, which we actually have never actually seen before, to where we are now, which is kind of how everything is a DAO.

• 1:09:42David Hoffman?

  The way that that definition really changed is the A started to be inclusive of human incentives. And so now we are just making big assumptions that humans are going to act rationally. And basically, our entire industry is based on that assumption, that human incentives are now going to make this thing take the next step forward. And so that's really where we regain control and Appropriateness over that word autonomous in digital organizations. Just wanted to add a few sense of my own thoughts there.

• 1:10:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  So David, are you saying you're okay with it being called DAOs now? That's what I heard you say.

• 1:10:17David Hoffman?

  Well, it was, it's not like we're ever going to be able to change that. I do think the more appropriate name is dues, but for digital organizations, but it's that ship has absolutely sailed.

• 1:10:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Remember we tried to open finance rather than DeFi?

• 1:10:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, we got slaughtered on that.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  I remember. Don't worry. I remember it very well. I won't forget.

• 1:10:36David Hoffman?

  Guys, I want to turn to the last few questions that we have in this panel. And this panel has been absolutely mind blowing. I'm going to have to go back and listen to it myself. And on the Bankless program, we are obsessed with the concept of slaying Moloch. He is the god of coordination failure, and we want him to retreat forever and ever and ever. And that is kind of the through line that we think this crypto industry can really help us achieve in this world. And so from your perspective, how do DAOs fit into this conversation? How can DAOs help slay Moloch? Cooper, let's start with you.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  I mean, in short, I think that communities have never had the opportunity to share financial and social capital together. So when you think about the way that you spend your time online, it's not about going and working nine to five to spend your time on the weekends doing what you love. I think DAOs are the means in which we can work on the things we love and get paid for that. And so as far as it relates to Moloch and sort of slaying coordination failure, I think when you start to shift focus away from financial capital as ends meet to instead like financial capital as a mean to work with your peers in a more productive manner, I think DAOs are the single most important way that we can get to a place that feels really positive in that conversation.

• 1:11:43David Hoffman?

  Trick, same question to you. How can DAOs help slay Moloch?

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  I think every different shape of organization has a different cognitive capacity, basically. And what a child is capable of doing or solving is far different from what an adult can do. And the best level of organizational technology we've had in the past, these corporations are kind of like rusty machines compared to DAOs, which can be like nature. And if you look at what nature can do, it can, it can grow a grasshopper from dirt, you know? Like, yeah, we can make a Boeing 747, but there are classes of problems on this planet that we are so far from solving that DAOs will be able to unlock for us.

• 1:12:23David Hoffman?

  Kane, why don't you take us home on this one? How can DAOs slay Moloch?

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  So one of my favorite books of all time is Inadequate Equilibrium by Eliza Wachowski. And I think when I was reading it, it was, it was like 2017, 2018, something like that. And to me, it was almost like a roadmap of like every problem that like better incentive mechanisms and coordination games could solve, right? Like, you know, the, the book goes through like 10 different things, right? That like are just a kind of equilibrium that exists in the world that, you know, are kind of hard to break, right? There's a bunch of examples like, you know, replication studies in, you know, academic literature, the fact that like no one's

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  set the bus to do that. You just want to, you know, publish novel results and it doesn't matter. And I think that a lot of the reason for these things is corporations, right? Like corporations have captured academic literature, right? Like there's, you know, huge corporations that are, you know, responsible for publishing certain journals. They want, you know, the eye popping headline things, right? It's a little bit like, you know, media as well, right? You know, they don't, there's no, there's no money in replication studies, even though that's what we need to actually kind of get science done. And so when I look at something like a DAO to solve this, this problem of like academic literature coordination, it's obvious that that as a

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  coordination mechanism could solve it. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to do it, but I hope that someone somewhere, you know, gets this idea and kind of runs with it because, you know, it's, it's a really hard thing to kind of publish and distribute academic research, right? And peer review and do all that stuff. It takes a lot of resources. And, you know, to Trey's point, like corporations were the only ones that could kind of accumulate enough resources to do something like that on a global scale. And now we have DAOs, right? Like maybe governments, maybe we're like the alternative, but governments are pretty, pretty slow and shitty and corporations kind of ran rings around them for a long time. But now we have these DAOs that have the ability to accumulate the resources to actually do things on a global scale and, you know, can

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  basically reset incentives and create new economic incentives and set up new coordination games that can really shift the equilibrium, you know, on a number of these problems.

• 1:14:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  A super cool framing, government's slow and shitty, corporations a little bit faster, DAOs, order of magnitude faster than that, maybe, able to tackle new class of problems. Super cool. That book was called Inadequate Equilibria, if you missed it, as Kane mentioned, adding it to my reading list. Maybe go join a reading club DAO and get more of those recommendations. Guys, this has been a fantastic panel, and I want to end with this question. So we're just talking super big picture, right? Like pie of the sky, like, how is this going to, this social technology going to change the face of humanity? How's it going to make the world better? I want to zone in on you guys individually, right? So tell us about kind

• 1:15:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  of your DAO story. How have DAOs changed your life? And in what ways? Cooper, let's start with you.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  I mean, I can confidently say DAOs are the single only reason that I have the name I do in crypto right now. You know, my entire trajectory in the space is owed to DAOs, you know, starting out from Maloch DAO and Metacartel, working my way in for shares, for writing articles, to then getting involved with DeFi DAOs, to now more of these social clubs. If DAOs were not a thing, I simply wouldn't be here today. And so I think for anyone out there that's looking to get involved, I'm not a developer by trade. I have absolutely zero technical skills, but the fact I've been able to build a career on the back of this cool new internet technology, solely thanks to DAOs, I think it's an incredibly powerful precedent that if you go out of your way to find people to work with online, you know, there are going to be financial opportunities greater than anything you could have ever imagined.

• 1:16:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  21st century upward mobility. Cooper, do you mind if I ask how old you are for some of the folks listening? You're like in your shoes?

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just turned 26 in June.

• 1:16:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crazy guys, crazy. Kane, how about you? Have DAOs changed your life?

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  I think, you know, as someone who's done a lot of startups, and as someone who has tried to tackle some pretty hard problems and failed to do so.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  The ability to kind of coordinate people, coordinate capital and work on really hard problems is, you know, I think something that just wasn't really contemplated in like the startup world. You know, 20 years ago, there was this idea you had to go to VCs. What VCs would fund is a bunch of old white guys on San Jose Road, right? Like the solution space of problems that they were willing to tackle is very, very narrow. As much as they would like to think that's not the case. And I think that DAOs and crypto capital formation and DAO capital formation just opens up a world of different problems that can be tackled.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  You know, and it's incredible and I'm obviously super excited to be involved in that.

• 1:17:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trey, how about you? How have DAOs changed your life?

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Well, you know, yeah, I mean, I worked really, really hard for many years, starting companies, running companies, doing project work for clients and it burned me out hard. You know, I tried to, I tried to bring in a lot of these new ideas into those old companies, like TL organizations and tried holacracy and things like that and worked okay. But, you know, I ended up like, you know, selling my last company a few years ago. And I was like, you know, I just spent time like a year just healing, you know? I was like, from all that work, I didn't really expect that I'd come back in anything like this. And, you know, when I found DAOs though, it was like, there was a few times in life where you're like, wow, this is like the combination of all the things that I'm excited about. And I actually have the skills that I can really help this space.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  And so it's, it's, yeah, it's brought me back into this kind of, you know, creating impact in the world. And another way it's changed my life is it really challenges me personally. You know, it makes me question a lot of my assumptions about myself, a lot of my psychological hangups. You know, because when you're in this space of like infinite possibility, you really have this chance to question what the fuck you're really doing. And that's a beautiful question to ask. What do you really want? And DAOs helped me ask that.

• 1:18:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Super cool. Guys, I think there are hundreds of stories like this, maybe thousands of stories, but they're about to be hundreds of thousands of stories, maybe millions. DAOs are really going to change the face of how we organize collectively, how we do work in the future. Like, so many things, like I always, I always think about this when we have a really insightful panel or Bankless episode. It's just like, you look at the world and the world sucks. Like, it sucks sometimes. But crypto is something that gives each of us hope, right? Like, I am optimistic because of crypto. And it's super exciting to see these new social technologies emerge in this way, and the spirit of optimism. And guys, thank you for making us even more optimistic on DAOs. Panelists Kane, Cooper, Trey, you guys have been phenomenal. We appreciate it.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  It's good to be here, Ron.

• 1:19:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, if you're hanging on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe. David, I fit this one in. Like and subscribe. Again, David's nodding his head. Happy about that. Risks and disclaimers, of course. DAOs are risky. ETH is risky. Bitcoin is so is crypto. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:20:05David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where

• 1:20:48David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we