The Building Blocks Are In Place For DAOs To Scale…& 6 Other Takeaways From Our DAO Conf.
On April 8th, CryptoMondays (now in VR) and DAOfest co-hosted our second “conversation” on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)…
On April 8th, CryptoMondays (now in VR) and DAOfest co-hosted our second “conversation” on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) featuring four thought leaders:
James Duncan — CoFounder of Abridged, building crypto applications with amazing UX that don’t sacrifice key custodianship.
Zefram Lou — Co-Founder of Betoken, a decentralized crypto hedge fund that uses meritocratic incentives to optimize performance.
Daniel Kronovet- Research Engineer at Colony.io, a platform for community collaboration.
Luis Cuende — Co-Founder of Aragon, a digital jurisdiction for digital organizations.
It was an interesting and informative conversation, as they shared their views on the massive potential of DAOs. You can watch a replay of the call below:
While I encourage everyone to watch the conversation, as it’s time well spent. I’ve also taken the time to highlight my major takeaways:
1. “Continuous” Processes Are A Better Way To Manage
In crypto, we often highlight how our markets are open 24/7. Another, more expansive way of saying always on, is the concept of being “continuous”. The concept that we no longer need to work based on snapshots/points of time. That processes can be managed and iterated on a continuous basis.
Daniel highlighted (via a 1974 quote by Stafford Beer) that this isn’t a new concept. But what is new is that we now have the technology to make it a reality across all aspects of an organization
The end result being a continuous output of value.
2. DAOs Need To Enable Dispute Resolutions
Both Daniel and Luis highlighted the need for dispute resolutions as DAOs get more complex. If the system self regulates, it needs to give people a way to say something bad occurred, and a system (like Aragon Court) to challenge it.
3. DAO “Safety” Should Be A Consideration
While most people are focused on the positive potential impact of DAOs, Zefram focused his talk on highlighting the dangers that could result if DAOs prove to be even “more scalable than traditional companies.” If for example, Facebook gets replaced by a “Super Facebook”, which is unstoppable and uncensorable:
Among Zefram’s potential “safety” features is the ability for any human to have a say in any DAO, and DAOs that are aligned with human values.
4. James Introduced A Construct of Two Types Of Decentralized Organizations
On one end are more “open” networks (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) that anyone can join and reap rewards based on the code. Coordination in these systems are truly autonomous.
The other type is not autonomous, so the “A” is taken out. These systems (like MolochDAO or MetaCartel) are more permissioned and reliant on social structures. As a result, they’re more susceptible to attack via social capital. .
5. Finding Product Market Fit Requires More DAO Experiments, Which Requires Better UX
The general belief is the more DAOs created, the more likely we are to find product market fit and reach mass market. James highlighted several keys to enabling more experimentation starting with “no code” tools that could dramatically increase the number of people who could build DAOs.
Better on-boarding is another key to mass adoption. Today, 99% of people find on-boarding tools like Metamask too complex. James believes that simpler onboarding requires not being decentralized at the start. This could enable cleaner UX that is mobile, that doesn’t require a private key download or ETH, and is feeless via meta-transactions or layer two solutions.
6. The Building Blocks Are In Place To Enable Functional Scalable DAOs
Luis highlighted how far the DAO ecosystem has come since Aragon was founded in 2016. With these building blocks now in place, Luis believes that the ecosystem is ready to scale.
7. The Favorite DAO of the Panelists Is MetaCartel Because Of The Importance Of The Social Layer
It is ultimately always about the balance of code and social structure.
Daniel used the analogy of the human body. It has a skeleton (the structure) and the tissue (which contains the information). It’s only when they’re in balance that the human body works most effectively.
Zefram believes the technical layer that Aragon and others have built is sufficient. It’s the social coordination problem that is now needs solving, and that’ charge is being led by MetaCartel. Zefram is most excited about DAOs that are self sustainable and not dependent on donations.
James highlighted the SignalDAO (another MolochDAO fork), that deals with reputation-based, non-monetary signaling via a friendly Telegram chatbot that makes programmatic Web 3 calls using the Abridged SDK.
Thx for the claps below (up to 50)!