Just DAO It: A Podcast for People Starting DAOs

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Just DAO,

the podcast for people starting DAOs.

I'm Adam Miller, and I'm your host.

Prior to starting MyDAO,

I did consulting for people

starting and operating DAOs.

And now at MyDAO,

we do legal entities for

DAOs and Web3 projects.

As always, we're recording live,

so apologies in advance for

any technical difficulties.

We have guest Brian Peets.

I know him as BPeets.

Welcome to the show, Brian.

Hey, thanks Adam.

Thanks for having me on.

This is going to be fun.

Yeah, you got it.

So as the audience knows,

we always do the show in two parts.

The first part is going to

be the JustDAOit news report,

where we will go through

recent DAO news headlines

and tweets and casts,

and you and I will respond to the story.

So I'll summarize them for

us both and for the audience,

and we'll respond to them.

So what's our hot take?

Do we agree or disagree with the author?

What does it say about DAOs,

the future of DAOs, starting DAOs,

et cetera?

And then in the second half of the show,

we'll go into our in-depth

interview with you, B. Peetz.

But before we start the news report,

still would love a brief intro.

So could you tell us a

little bit about yourself

and what makes you an authority on DAOs?

Yeah, brief is not my forte,

so we'll see if we can pull this off.

But so, yeah,

I have always been interested

in technology and

and how it helps people.

Since a young age,

didn't really know how to

put it in those terms.

Took me through to

engineering at one point in time.

So I was a mechanical

engineer for a little while,

working on passenger rail equipment,

trying to help cities

procure new light rail or

commuter rail equipment.

it was not the place of

innovation my engineering

education in the academic

environment um and and out

there in the rail industry

it was kind of like

participating in the tail

end of the industrial

revolution and truly

feeling its end in many

ways and that really led me

to sort of calibrate with

what am I up to why am I

you know doing what I'm

doing instead of you know

punching this ticket uh at

the engineering school and

then going and working in

this field and it just

It really woke me up,

especially when this young

fellow came to work with us.

And he had been building

model railroad trains his entire life.

He loved going to the rail

side and seeing just the trains moving.

And when I saw that passion,

I knew that I hadn't found

my passion in the rail industry.

And so this is what led me to high tech.

And so I started to be very

curious about innovation and creation.

And I noticed that in the rail industry,

Not only was it an old technology,

there were just tons of

resistance to innovation in

North America.

The Code of Federal Regulations,

the airline lobby,

there was just a lot stacked against it.

When I saw what Silicon

Valley was doing in terms

of their playbook for innovation,

I was enamored and drank the Kool-Aid.

But as I started to work in

a smart city scale up,

we were growing rapidly and

I was noticing that we lost that.

It started to feel very much

like the places I was

previously in the rail industry.

And this is when I started

to have this light bulb

moment of how we're

organizing is what's

killing the innovation.

Because I was having these

experiences that I was

having in these large

you know,

passenger rail or government

organization procurement

programs that I used to be involved in,

but I'm starting to smell

them in the early stage

startup as a transition

into bringing in the

managerial hierarchy.

And this is what got me

thinking about humans and

how we organize and how we

collaborate and innovation

and progression and impact

and connecting the two together.

I was fascinated by this,

rotated through a ton of different roles,

often was pushed into project management,

product management,

executive leadership positions.

And as I was pushed into them,

I also saw the dysfunction

of my relationship to my peers.

We used to work alongside one another.

and build amazing stuff and

all of a sudden they were

asking me to make decisions

and the decision making was

centralized into me but

they had all the context so

I'd ask them you know what

was going on what their

opinions were and then I'd

have to be the ultimate

decider and it really felt

quite dysfunctional and so uh

As I got more involved as

well in considering

entrepreneurship myself,

I started to see the

dysfunctions of the capital market,

even in these innovative

Silicon Valley venture

funded setups and the ways

in which we coordinated there seemed,

you know,

like something was off.

And so I was looking for

something different.

And as I was looking for

something different in 2017,

I stumbled into the Ethereum.org website.

And I saw these ideas around

smart contracts for DAOs.

And I had also recently read

Reinventing Organizations

by Frederick Leleu.

which was taking a look at

like self-organizing teams

and holocracies and

sociocracies and how they

were actually applied out there.

And there was this,

this is the moment that

I've been on ever since is DAOs.

DAOs and using this, you know,

this trustless smart

contract to organize teams

you know, help people organize at scale,

I could see, you know,

sort of the intersection of

what was happening in the

self-organizing organic

movements that Frederick

Leleu was talking about and

reinventing organizations

and what was happening as

people were working on

these blockchain technologies.

and imagining what was

possible and calling that a

decentralized autonomous organization.

And I just haven't stopped

thinking about it over the

last six years.

So what makes me an

authority is that for six

years I've just been

obsessed and immersed.

I love immersing myself in a community.

So first immersing, you know,

when the infra was being

laid by consensus as a part

of the consensus organization in 2017,

2018,

as they were kind of proto-dowing it.

In the 2021 phase,

immersing myself in Bankless DAO,

Citi DAO as a founding citizen,

Polygon DAO as they were

bringing up their grants program,

and just many others along the way.

I guess you're saying,

why are you an authority?

Because I played alongside

those as they were

experimenting for years now

and have been having a lot

of fun doing it.

Wow.

Oh, man,

that makes me want to do the

interview now because

there's so much stuff I

want to ask you about.

But we're going to follow

the usual format and we're

going to go do the news first,

but encourage people to

stick around for at least 30,

40 minutes until we get

through the news to hear

more about BP's background in the space.

A lot of interesting stuff

we could dig into there.

um and and a lot of stuff

you haven't even mentioned

yet like what you're

working on now so we will

get to that soon but first

the just out news report so

again I will summarize each

of these stories for the

audience and for the guests

and then we will share our

reactions so the first

story of the week this is

from the royal gazette

which is a bermuda a newspaper

And the headline is BDA

legal committee establishes new doubt.

The Bermuda Business

Development Agency has

established a working group

to investigate law reform

proposals for the

introduction of digital

governance models.

So this is great in two ways, I would say.

One is that Bermuda is

looking at updating their

laws to reflect and respect DAOs,

which obviously is the line

of work that I'm in,

most of our listeners know and you know,

which is writing laws for DAOs and Web3.

And they're actually doing

it through a DAO,

which is the second time I've seen this.

I mean, they're starting a DAO

which is I think it's the working group.

I would love to know what is

different about this

working group from their

other working groups such

that they're calling it a

DAO or is it just a DAO in

name only and it's really

just a working group?

That is not something I was

able to find out,

but I think it's the second

or third time I've heard of a country,

I think Japan might have done this too,

where they said we're

starting a DAO to look into DAOs.

Even the United Nations

might have done this.

So anyway, it's exciting to see.

I must admit,

I've seen probably 10 or 15

countries now launch

working groups to look at

DAO-specific legislation,

and very few have come out

on the other side taking any action.

But I certainly hope Bermuda

will be different here.

What do you think, BP?

Well,

I think they've got the right approach.

I hadn't heard about this

being the second time.

So this is news to me of

taking the approach of

being a DAO to investigate DAOs.

And I think it's the only way.

I think that they've got the

right idea there.

And even if they're DAO in name only,

as many of the DAOs were

that I experienced in the 2021 cycle,

that in itself is its own learning.

So, you know, as I said, my intro,

immersion is the way to learn.

And so I think they've got

the right idea there.

And even if it's not

successful immediately from

this working group and the

subsequent work,

the individuals who have

participated will carry that on.

And I think that's the most

important aspect of it for

Bermuda and for the space.

Yeah, and if you're curious,

I just Googled it,

and I know we talked about

this at the time on the show,

but in December of 2023, so about six,

seven months ago, the UN,

United Nations Internet Governance Forum,

said it formed a group to initiate a DAO.

So I guess that's one step before.

They didn't say we created a DAO.

They said we created

something to create a DAO,

but still nice to see

governments and intergovernmental

national governing bodies

experimenting with dows um

the next story of the week this one is

This one is from ZK Sync.

Sorry, well, the article is from The Block,

and I also have the tweet

or post up here on X from ZK Nation.

The headline is,

ZK Sync introduces a

decentralized governance

framework called ZK Nation.

ZK Sync has introduced a new

community-driven governance framework.

It consists of three on-chain bodies,

the Token Assembly, the Security Council,

and the Guardians.

And then there's also a

linked post on X from the ZK Nation,

which appears to be the

main X account for ZK Sync,

at least for one of the ZK

Sync organizations.

And there's a whole

announcement that goes into

the details on their new governance body.

Basically, ZK Sync is Dao-ifying, right?

They're saying, hey,

instead of us being in charge,

we're giving control to

this new decentralized organization

And maybe it's fair to call

it a framework because

really they have multiple

organizations in the

traditional sense of the word.

They have these three different bodies,

which apparently,

according to the article,

also have their own legal forms.

So each has its own legal

entity and legal form,

and they all interact

collectively to govern the

ZK-SYNC protocol.

So, you know, let me see, BP, it's first.

Anything you want to dig into here?

I think this is exciting.

I hadn't heard of this news,

but I had heard that the ZK drop

uh had a large proportion of

tokens going to the

community and I think that

in itself was already a

really strong signal

following it up with this

is really uh powerful when

coupled to that um I think

and I there's some things

about this that remind me

of when optimism was

pushing their two house um

model and uh and and trying

to innovate on how we

approach uh dow governance

and I think that's done a lot of good

for us as a group to sort of

see something different.

And so if zk sync is now

doing a multi party sort of

setup has dropped a lot of

tokens to community and

continues to plan to do so

that allows for them to

have the right incentives

to do the tough work to

work on the DAO its

operations and its

governance and not just

kind of plow forward and say, Oh,

we're a DAO like they're

willing to work on the DAO

and they're putting the

correct incentives to do it.

And so that's a

exciting.

I'm curious to see where this goes.

Yeah.

And one of the things I have

to dig into here, you know,

there's just part of me

that reacts to having a well, really,

there's almost two bodies

here with veto power.

There's the guardians who

seem to have overall veto

power to keep things

aligned with the quote

unquote values of the project.

And there's also a security

council that has the

ability to freeze the chain

if there's a security threat.

And at least part of me wants to say, man,

I mean,

one of the cool things about DAOs

is that you can be

completely democratic if you want to.

You don't have to have a security council.

You don't have to have guardians.

You don't have to have a board.

You don't have to have a CEO,

stuff like that.

But I think...

increasingly,

but even since the beginning of DAOs,

you do have DAOs that have

these small groups,

I think it's fair to say

centralized groups,

that have some kind of veto power.

And I'm not necessarily against it.

I just think it's

interesting to note that even with

the option of going total

democracy a lot of

organizations are choosing

something kind of in

between and I wonder if

that's just is that just a

temporary band-aid until

dows figure out how to do

direct democracy better are

we always going to have

centralized groups in

decentralized ecosystems

what do you think yeah so I

love this and I i think

At the end of the day,

that's why I'm just

celebrating experiments and

not necessarily infusing my own opinion.

And I think it's because

it's such a complex domain

that we kind of need to be

playing with both, you know.

And I remember, you know,

from a lot of the battles

that I was participating in

the last cycle,

there was this dialogue around, you know,

how aggressively you

decentralize versus whether

you centralize things into conventions.

committees, grants committees,

these types of centralized

authorities that may or may

not last forever that are

there to kind of like protect, guard,

guardians, security, et cetera.

These are worthy reasons to

perhaps in an early phase

of experimentation, centralized power.

But I do agree with you that

like this should be

something that we're

continuing to push towards

more decentralization when

we can have the confidence

and comfort to do so.

And unfortunately,

it takes people to

experiment and risk capture,

because at the other end of

the spectrum is we push decentralization.

We don't have the right mechanisms,

tokenomics, et cetera, in place.

And and then something

beautiful that we wish

lasted actually gets captured.

And so I see this trade off

and I don't think that

there's a perfect answer.

And so I'm just enthusiastic

about people trying something.

And I hope that because

there's a lot of folks who

are token holders and

hopefully that the token

distribution is strongly decentralized,

that could at least produce

the correct pushback.

If centralization of power

is not actually serving the community,

then social pressure is just as powerful,

I think.

And we would hope that that's what drives,

I guess,

the transition to something more

decentralized over time.

even though maybe it's

starting the way it is.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean,

it reminds me even of what's

happening in purple DAO right now,

which I think we're both in, right?

Are you in purple?

So for anyone who doesn't know,

although I've probably

talked about it a lot,

but purple is a noun-ish

DAO that drives growth of

the forecaster ecosystem unofficially,

not an official forecaster ecosystem.

It's not officially the Forcaster DAO,

but in some ways it is unofficially.

And we've always actually

had a veto power vested in one person.

And actually,

so now what we're talking about doing,

there's a proposal live to

decentralize that a bit

more and elect a security council.

And so actually moving in

the direction of more decentralization.

But in that direction,

scenario I don't know it's

never really bothered me

that we have someone with a

veto power you know their

job is to make sure that we

generally stay on mission

and um I guess it's a

function that holds in some

ways like helps hold the

dow together at least from a like

I don't know.

I mean,

I'm thinking if a third of the

people wanted to go work on

a different mission, they can't, right?

They're going to get vetoed

even if they tried to vote

in a different direction.

We also saw what happens with NounsDAO,

which maybe to your point

shows the power of social

pressure because when

enough of the people

who had the actual NFT

wanted to fork and take

their money elsewhere,

eventually even the

security counsel or veto

person gave in and said, okay,

we'll have to just allow you to do it.

So anyways, interesting to note.

Yeah,

and I think that's when we play with

those mechanisms of like a

decentralized smart

contract of governance

having control over centralizing power,

then that to me,

those are more experiments

that I want to see.

I want to see,

and I'm wearing my HATS hat

and I'm a member of the HATS protodow.

And I like the idea of being

able to play with having a

very decentralized group,

being able to make those big shifts,

but moving power

functionally into roles that people play.

And Security Council is a role,

and if the community is

struggling with how that

role is being fulfilled,

that they have the

opportunity to do something,

whether it's exit,

fork or change who's wearing the hat,

there's something about

that power living with the

decentralized community that's important.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

So reflecting back on ZK Nation, if

this Security Council is

elected democratically,

that would make me feel, I think,

much better in my gut about

the direction this DAO is

going versus if it's put

into place by the founders

and can only elect itself,

then I would feel like

maybe that's a little bit

of a step back in terms of

true decentralization.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's interesting because

when I think of an L2 and

I'm like thinking on the spot,

but I feel like I should

give this more

consideration that when it

comes to things like L2B,

taking a look at this sort

of health of an L2,

that your ability to exit

safely and to move your

liquidity and to sell your

token on the open market.

Like in many ways,

these are the things that

protect you as a token

holder or a participant in the ecosystem.

And I think some of the

things that can be

concerning is as an L2 is maturing,

if the exits aren't as

clean and permissionless,

then these types of

centralization vectors have

a lot more power that they're holding.

And so the other thing that

can happen is changing the

amount of power they're

holding is another way to

deal with progressively

decentralizing this, so to speak.

Yeah, well, what I'm hearing from you, too,

is that just having a way

out is a form of decentralized power.

And so even if... I mean,

I'm even imagining it.

Let's say we started DAO

today for some purpose,

and power is actually

highly concentrated in the hands of a few,

but anyone can rage quit or

sell easily anytime.

Maybe that's just more

decentralized than a

traditional organization where...

They have the same

centralized power structure,

but they also hold a lot

more power over you as an

individual and what you get

or don't get if you leave.

Yeah.

And I think this is like the

interesting thing is it,

it takes some real rigor to

take a look at the full

complicated and complex

system that exists.

And,

and this is why it all feels like an

experiment because it's like, well,

we'll find the things that

didn't work according to design.

And some of the failures

would be catastrophic and

have been right from the very first one,

the Dow and the Dow itself.

I think we learn from these

and as someone who's in early,

I like to expect them and

encourage others to expect them.

Yep.

Yep.

Love it.

All right.

Turning to the next story of the week.

This one is a post on X from Vitalik.

And I'll just read part of it.

Vitalik says,

I am feeling quite unhappy

about this cycle's

celebrity experimentation so far.

Talking about celebrity meme

coins that have been coming out,

including Mother,

which I don't... What is Mother?

Do you know?

Is that...

that about um is that about

the political thing no no

it's I i can't remember the

famous um uh star who's

driving it and this is this

is how little interest it's

like it goes yeah famous

star created token um

mother's the token and uh there is

Yeah,

what I'm getting from Vitalik and his

commentary was that celebrities do this.

Jenner did one recently.

Previous cycles,

there's been these types of

celebrity tokens.

I think Paris Hilton got in

trouble with the SEC for one, if I recall,

or someone.

Actually, one of the Kardashians did.

So they just use their clout, pump token,

and it's basically a meme

token with a celebrity backing it.

Um,

and adding the firepower of their

existing community, which is a, that's,

that's a,

that's a shortcut to starting a

meme token really at the end of the day.

And so, you know,

where I listened to

Vitalik's commentary on this and, uh,

fully agree with it is sort of the, um,

relatively lame versions of

it we're seeing this cycle.

And so I think Vitalik was

close to Mila Kunin's

action to Kusher when they

did Stoner Cats NFT in the last cycle.

And I am a original mentor

and holder of the Stoner Cats NFT.

And so I loved what was happening there.

I saw celebrities coming in

and trying to do an animated series

where you got an insider's view.

They had to deal with the SEC.

You know, they were hoping to not,

you know,

create it such that we co-owned

the creation because they

were trying to avoid

running afoul with the SEC.

The SEC ended up ironically

shutting them down anyways on the project,

but they were trying to

create utility for fans to

get an insider experience.

Their token would unlock.

You believe you watch the

shows as they were coming off the press.

You could meet the animators and have like,

you know, town halls with them.

Like,

I thought that was really innovative.

They're using their star

power and their domain of

making shows and movies and

their connections into the

Hollywood engine.

And they were combining that

and opening it up to fans.

And they had governance to

vote on fan participation

and submissions to the show

as it was being written.

Like if you could just give

some equity to the fans,

that would have been a really,

really complete project in terms of fans,

crowdfunding,

lifting up and having return

in it and instead the SEC

shuts it down and we get

mother where maybe they're

saying you can buy some

merch with your mother

token well yeah I think

that is pretty lame and I

agree with Vitalik I'm

sorry for the rant but I was so sad

I love it.

It's perfect.

Yeah.

Well, and,

and one of the things Vitalik

says in the next post in the thread,

which is why I put this in

the Dow news report is one

of Vitalik's ideas was like, at least,

at least do a Dow, you know,

like at least,

at least give some kind of

governance rights to these

token holders so they can

decide something together.

And, and,

and I love that because actually

I think that's, it's,

I think virtually any token,

In my vision of the future,

not even that far distant future,

literally everything has a

DAO associated with it.

I don't know if we'll call it a DAO,

but when you buy Oreo cookies,

you're going to get some

Oreo tokens with them.

It's practically inevitable to me.

And those tokens,

maybe there's an NFT element,

maybe there's art.

Maybe there's a collectible element.

Maybe there's rewards, a utility.

You're also going to get to join the thing,

whatever it is.

And that's pretty much going

to be the DAO.

You join the DAO,

and then there's going to be a chat room.

There's going to be stuff you can vote on.

Maybe you get to pick the

next color for whatever Oreos.

And I just think everything

is going to work that way.

Products, communities, geographies,

everything.

And I think the reason for that is like,

it's not that hard,

especially once you're

already giving out a token,

it's pretty much a DAO already.

Like the question is just,

are you the project creator

going to create the chat room,

the token gating,

the governance mechanism,

or is someone from the

community gonna do it for you?

And I think as a founder,

that should make you seriously consider,

okay, on one hand, yes,

it's cool that in crypto we

have the ability to have

these like open ecosystems

where anyone can do anything.

So that's powerful.

And you could argue that's

what happened with like

D-Gen on Farcaster.

Because Farcaster didn't launch a token,

the community did it,

and it seems to have worked pretty well.

But I would think if I was a

Farcaster founder and for a year,

everyone, including me, was like,

when token, when token?

And they were just like, what's the point?

There's no need for a token.

maybe they're regretting

that now um either way I

think clearly like this

it's it's this little like

add-on component you can

put onto almost any token

any project any product any

ecosystem is like the doubt

component and I think it's

it's it's a miss I would

agree it's a miss not to do

that for any of these

celebrity coins too yep

yeah I think that's the uh

The ultimate fan experience

or community experience is participation.

And that's just what a DAO is.

And all it is is it's

tokenized so that it's

digital and it's on this

open and composable thing.

And I think that's really

important because that open composable,

like sure, I could create Oreo token

and have Oreo app and that's

really just points on my

backend of my Oreo app.

And we could vote on the

next seasonal Oreo design

or something along those lines.

But what's cooler is when,

uh if you think of the oreo

is actually a part of a

larger you know sort of

food portfolio um a

consumer goods portfolio

and if I'm able to have

tokens across multiple

goods um and

cross-pollinate them out

there in in uh in various

loyalty rewards

participation programs uh

or vampire attacking I

realize they don't want to

open themselves up to that

but frankly that's the future

And there's so many benefits

to being open that it's

worth also facing.

And not to mention the drama

and news that you can get

from brand when vampire attacks occur.

Uniswap is just fine,

even though SushiSwap went at it.

And so I think as brands wake up to this,

yeah, it's all going to be tokens.

It's all going to be DAOs

and it's the most intimate

experience ever for people.

Yep.

Yep.

By the way,

I think mother is Iggy Azalea

based on a little bit of

searching through X. And

I'd be surprised if she

doesn't get in trouble

because there's posts of

her just like with the hashtag mother.

And then it's just like a video of her.

And it's like,

isn't that don't you have to

have some disclaimers or

something when you do

something like that?

So I imagine it'll just take time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably.

Now,

I do think there isn't this

interesting like trend in

crypto that I think these

celeb coins are part of,

which is this idea that, you know,

a true meme coin might be

the safest way to avoid the SEC.

calling your thing a

security because the more

you literally say,

there is no reason to give,

this thing has no value.

Do not buy it.

No value.

There's no benefits.

There's no community.

There's no doubt.

There's no nothing.

Don't buy it.

Now,

maybe you're actually safer in terms

of the SEC because you're

not telling people to make an investment.

You're not giving them a

reason it'll go up.

You're not doing anything

that people can rely on for

the success of the investment.

You're telling them you're

not doing anything.

So I think it is still kind

of interesting that maybe

it's an area for...

experimentation,

extra experimentation in

crypto just because it's

the farthest thing from

what the SEC might want to go after.

So maybe there's a good

reason why we have lots of

meme coins today.

I really like that exercise,

and I think that you're

onto something there.

And in many ways, that's really,

really sad too,

because then the

introduction is exactly

what Vitalik was sort of lamenting.

The very first experience

for some of these new

retail consumer

participants is going to be

getting rugged in a meme

token game and also having

the experience afterwards

that's a really lame game to play.

I didn't enjoy that game.

We can play so much richer

games with one another

using these technologies.

But yeah, I think that in many ways,

tinfoil hat on,

uh maybe that's exactly uh

what a repressive uh regime

that's wanting to shut down

or cool or chill crypto

wants they want nothing but

trash to be able to point

that look at this garbage

and the safest thing for

you to do from a legal

standpoint is to do the

garbage thing like that

that's really sad it is

yeah like just gamble don't

don't do any of the real

value generating stuff

Yeah.

And then you can say that

it's nothing but a

degenerate gambling

environment that hurts

retail that may be coming

in slightly naive.

Excellent.

All the talking points are there.

Yeah, damn, good point.

All right,

so it's still important to be

building real things.

Everybody take note, not just meme coins.

All right,

so the next article of the week.

This one is from theconversation.com,

which is not a crypto.

It's like a deep,

looks like philosophical journal.

And the headline is,

why the future of democracy

could depend on your group chats.

Is your social media group a

budding democracy or someone's fiefdom?

All right.

So this is an article by the

author of a book called

Governable Spaces.

which I highly recommend people check out.

I read about the first half and I was like,

all right, I get it, it's enough.

But definitely a good book.

The author's name is Nathan Schneider.

And the article and the book

are about this idea that

what made democracy so

successful in America so far,

especially the first couple hundred years,

as observed actually by

Alexis de Tocqueville when

he toured the United States

in the early 1830s,

was that all over America we

have democracy, little democracies.

Every organization we're

part of tends to evolve or

devolve or whatever,

turn into a democracy of some kind.

every club in every high school,

every club that families are part of.

What are the examples that

Tocqueville gives?

It doesn't say in the article,

and I don't recall,

but he says that he sees

all over the place, oh,

organizations like garden

clubs in communities are

like little schools for

practicing the general

theory of association.

As members of small democracies,

people were learning to be

citizens of a democratic country.

And interestingly,

if you look at our online

spaces today before crypto, at least,

they don't tend to operate that way.

Look at Reddit communities,

look at literally every blog,

every comment section of every website.

Either a big company is in

charge and gets to decide

what you can say and can't

say and how you use the space.

Or a moderator is in charge.

And I guess maybe sometimes

there's two or three moderators.

For example,

I haven't been huge into Reddit,

although I certainly look at it a lot.

But the idea is maybe what

we need is moderators.

to turn these online spaces

into things that are more

like little democracies so

that people can once again

practice and experience

democracy in our entire life.

From the time we start using

cell phones as, I don't know,

13 year olds plus or minus,

we need to be experiencing

democracy so that we get

how it works and we see how

it connects from even the

smallest organization in a

country all the way up to

our national and

international government.

So this book, actually, having read it,

I wish he talked more about

DAOs because to me it was like, oh, wow,

he's describing exactly

what we're doing and

building in the DAO space.

He talks a little bit about them.

but certainly I think

aligned in values that we

need to make our technology

in general and the spaces

that we spend time in more

democratic and less authoritarian.

Wow.

I hadn't read this book.

It's been coming up a lot in conversations,

you know, over on Farcaster.

And so when I start to hear

something multiple times,

I know I have to go and pay

more attention to it.

Thank you.

In terms of,

what this is sensing into.

It's funny,

I was listening to this and

thinking of my own

experiences growing up and

I too was participating in

not-for-profits and clubs

and I was often on the

participant member side and

inevitably often was

curious and attracted to

volunteering for positions in the board.

Often as a member

representative of an

orchestra I played in or

helping as part of coaches

association or something

along those lines.

in a sport that I was playing.

And what this immediately

did in my sort of early

youth was it brought me to

Robert's rules of a meeting

and how you are

democratically approving

what we are doing as a board.

and how we run a meeting.

I mean, obviously there's some weird,

you know,

dysfunctions to these old

antiquated ways of doing things,

but it was exposure to

democracy like you're

describing and you're so

right in sort of the way

that we have experienced

our digital lives with, you know,

more authoritarian setups.

And I believe if you have

that sort of memetic and memetic desires,

then that becomes comfortable,

that becomes known.

And, you know,

you also start to have these

desires to be the mod, not, you know,

be somebody who's being a

steward for the community

and collecting the voice of

the community and trying to

vote on behalf of the community.

And so there are some interesting sort of

things that are likely

happening behaviorally just

by not being exposed.

And so, yeah,

I never really thought of

DAOs from that perspective.

And like when we were

talking about Oreo points

and tokens and voting on Oreo stuff,

like it just,

it's giving us that practice.

It's helping us muscle and

it's creating a desire and

a default that perhaps is a

really valuable one to have

that is being eroded.

And I had never really

thought about it from that angle.

Yeah, it's super interesting.

I mean,

I always took part in student councils,

at least as long as I had

them from middle school,

high school and college.

And I know it's not

something everyone's into,

but I wonder how many

people involved in the DAO

industry may have a history

of student councils, nonprofit boards,

other forms of like

I don't want to call nonprofits practice,

but maybe all the school

stuff is practice and real.

And, you know,

it's it's it's interesting

to see how much overlap

there is between people

working in this space and

people who have

participated in governance

throughout their lives.

Yeah.

And maybe it was in video

games in terms of guild governance.

Yeah.

In a World of Warcraft guild.

Maybe it was, you know, like myself,

a model UN debate club fan

or something along those lines.

Yeah, good point.

Oh, that makes me wonder, too,

like if my whatever video games I play,

if the clans I'm in were

forced to be more democratic.

Would that actually,

would people like that or

would that just turn them off and say,

would they say,

I don't want to have to vote?

I don't know.

I could see it going both ways,

maybe depending on the scenario.

I mean, certainly when things go wrong,

that's when you want,

you wish there was a democracy, right?

Like when the Klan leader

goes crazy or disappears or, you know,

make some decision everyone hates.

Yeah.

Yeah,

or when the video game developer

themselves ends up nerfing

something on you,

which I believe is why

Vitalik was drawn towards

creating Ethereum in the first place.

And so, yeah,

I think these are the types

of things where, honestly,

simplistic games like meme

tokens or more

authoritative models and

participating them in the form of play,

great.

finite games can be a lot of

fun and they're sort of

good exercise for the mind and, you know,

experiences.

But when the stakes start to

get higher with something

really matters to you and

losing it all in an authoritative regime,

if you've had that

experience once in your life,

even if it was as silly as

a character that you

invested in in a video game

and it brought you to tears

when it was nerfed,

like you start to have empathy for, hey,

when something starts to

matter to me and to others,

perhaps this model is not the best model.

Yeah.

Interesting.

All right.

We're going to fast forward

to the last article of the week.

And there may be a couple in

the show notes that we don't cover.

And then we'll turn to the interview.

The last post of the week

actually is from the Dow's

channel on Farcaster,

where B-Pizza and I both

like to spend some time.

And the post is from Coulter.

And it's actually a post of

their blog post.

The headline is,

is incorporating a doubt

contradicting its purpose?

And the headline of the article,

which is on UDHC.com,

is there is no doubt.

Okay,

so this article starts by digging

into the nuance of the

terminology of the word, the phrase DAO,

and that there's a lot of

disagreement over what the terms mean.

Now, interestingly to me, actually,

this article focuses on the

word autonomous.

as being where the confusion comes from.

But I think there's just as

much confusion from each of the words,

decentralized and autonomous.

This author points out,

is it about the

organization being autonomous of any

of other entity or individual, for example,

or is it about running

autonomously on the

blockchain such that when

decisions are made,

they are implemented autonomously?

And I think actually the

same debate happens over

the term decentralized.

Does it apply to the people

involved in the

organization and is the way they

govern themselves or the way

they operate socially and

politically decentralized

or does it refer to the

technology that the dow

runs on being on

decentralized technology

and maybe it doesn't matter

if you want to have a

centralized team you're

still running on decentralized technology

So both terms in

decentralized autonomous organization.

But actually,

I think what the rest of the

article goes on to talk

about is some confusion

without naming it around

the term organization.

This article goes on to say,

do DAOs really exist?

Because...

According to the author,

the nature of DAOs is that they're fluid.

People come and go.

They don't rely on any one person.

And as a result, and even if you try to,

let's say for a second,

you assume the word

organization means something,

like one thing.

Does that being one thing

actually make you not decentralized?

and not autonomous.

And this is a part I want to try to,

I guess this is pretty philosophical,

but I want to take issue

with this last point

because this does come up, I think,

a lot in conversations I

have with people about DAOs

because it goes from, okay,

is being one thing,

does that already make us

not really a DAO?

And therefore does incorporating, right,

by forming a legal entity,

does that make us not really a DAO?

Because now we're

acknowledging that we are one thing.

And one thing, you know,

necessarily when you draw a

thing on a piece of paper,

it's going to be maybe it's

in the center or it's going

to look like it's in the

center because it's the one

thing on the page.

And so that scares people away from,

you know, hey, well, if there's a center,

is it not decentralized?

You know, I think to me.

there is something

necessarily centralizing

about an organization, right?

The word organization means

there is something cohesive,

something consistent,

something collective about

whatever it is that you're talking about.

And maybe that's the mission.

Maybe it's the budget.

Maybe it's the vision.

It's the product, right?

Every organization is different.

But I think usually by the

time you're calling

yourself an organization,

the reason is that you are

trying to coalesce around something.

And you can do that in a

very decentralized way or

not a decentralized way.

You can do it in a more

autonomous or not autonomous way.

But I don't think that just

by virtue of being a thing,

that necessarily makes you

not decentralized,

or certainly that you can't exist at all.

Any thoughts on this one, BP?

Yeah, I feel like

sometimes when it comes to

the term DAO and dissecting decentralized,

autonomous and organization, honestly,

it starts to feel a little

bit like a religion and

fundamentalism for me

sometimes where it's sort of like, oh,

you know,

you're not truly a DAO or you're

not truly decentralized or

you're not truly autonomous

if you don't have autonomy

from X. And I feel as

though this kind of reminds me of the

another movement in the way

in which people worked,

which was the agile movement.

And so they had this

manifesto and the manifesto

was beautiful because it

was basically saying,

we want more of this and

less of that and more of

this and less than that.

And that will be a more

wonderful way and

productive way to code software.

And so when you come along to DAOs,

I feel as though

It's instructive and helpful

to think we favor

decentralization as much as

possible over centralization.

We favor enhancing autonomy,

autonomy of the

organization and autonomy

of the individual as much

as possible when building.

And we recognize we are an organization.

And like you said,

that creates friction right

away if you're trying to be

a fundamentalist in terms

of autonomy or decentralization.

And I think if you think of

it more philosophically,

like you prompted at the beginning,

this might get philosophical.

Well,

think of it more philosophically and

see it as an experimental

space and see it as nested.

groups.

Because if we know as in DAOs,

we talk about sub DAOs and

guilds and project teams and like,

you know, committees and working groups,

et cetera.

These are all nested within

this other thing that we

were calling the DAO,

which are all nested within

the Ethereum ecosystem of DAOs,

which are all nested in the

global ecosystem of organizations,

state nations, et cetera, that are,

I think the DAO movement is asking,

try to become more

decentralized and give more autonomy to

as you organize on a global scale.

And so if you zoom in and

start to attack a

particular cell and not see

the whole as attempting to

become more decentralized

with this movement and that

it is a philosophy and a movement,

then forest trees, you're missing it,

in my opinion.

Yeah.

Well, I love that.

I mean,

and just to take your metaphor

regarding agile a little bit farther,

you know,

you probably end up with a lot

of arguments over is this

agile or is it not?

Right.

But then someone coming at

it from your perspective would say, look,

it doesn't matter.

Is it are we is it more

agile than are we using

agile as the as the North

Star to make decisions?

Right.

And then it doesn't have to

be agile or not.

It's just are we following

these principles in ways that are useful?

Yeah,

I really struggle with frameworks

like scrum.org,

which are effectively there

to tell you that there's

only one way to do it and

sell you consulting hours

versus the manifesto is instructive.

Every time we're having a

discussion as a team trying

to be more agile, ask,

is this what the manifesto

was calling us to be and do?

And then have a debate and

try and experiment.

Yep.

Awesome.

All right.

Well,

that does it for the JustDAOit news

report.

We will do a quick segue here,

including an ad for MyDAO,

the sponsor of the show.

And then we'll turn to our

in-depth interview with B Pete's.

So for the ad,

just a reminder to everyone

listening that MyDAO, my company,

provides legal entity

solutions for DAOs based

out of the Marshall Islands.

We also have a network of

crypto and Web3 and DAO lawyers,

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other professionals all over the world.

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at no cost through myDAO

and about our legal entity options.

With that out of the way,

let's turn to the featured

guest interview with Bee Peets.

You already told us, Brian,

a little bit earlier on

about how you got into Web3.

I just want to recap it and

see if I got this about

right before we turn to other questions.

So you were working, I believe,

in the railroad business,

which turned out to be a

little bit too low tech for you.

And then you were in smart

cities where you realized

in conjunction with your

experience in railroads

that there were problems

with bureaucracy and how

things were governed.

And so it sounded like to me,

you put those two things together,

high tech and new forms of governance,

and ended up finding crypto and DAOs.

Is that about how you got

into Web3 in the first place,

or did I miss anything?

No, that's the basic gist of it, yep.

Okay, awesome.

So let's dig into what

you're working on right now,

because I think there's at

least three things we can talk about.

I think we can talk about at least Hats,

Sobol, and Tipster.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, those are really fun ones.

Okay, so where should we start?

Maybe which one was first in your life?

Yeah, Sobel was.

Sobel started when I joined

the Consensus Mesh in 2017.

It was Sobel.

What is that?

What is the Consensus Mesh?

Yeah.

So back in 2017, during the ICO boom,

consensus with Joe Lubin's

leadership and capital was

trying to figure out how to

build all of the apps and

infra that Ethereum and the

Ethereum virtual machine was promising.

And so it's the home that

incubated MetaMask, Infura, Gitcoin.

and many others.

And in many ways,

because Joe is one of the

founders of Ethereum,

was very close to the idea

of decentralization in

in organizing and in how

capital moves and decisions

around capital,

not just the technology layer.

And so ConsenSys at that

phase was experimenting

with what now we have come

to call proto DAOs.

There was what they called

the hub and spoke model.

And so they had hub services

and venture spokes that

were all being incubated

and a large global remote first talent

pool that was effectively

capable of moving across

all of these things.

And so there were like

marketing services and

design services and design

thinking groups.

And then there were ventures

called the spokes.

And so the ventures had to

make decisions regarding

capital and runway.

And initially Joe was making

those decisions, but

the power moved into the mesh itself,

we would do what was called

a resource allocation committee.

And it was kind of like

doing jury duty decisions

around how capital would

flow into the various

spokes and hub services on

a periodic basis.

And so you would rotate in

and act as a subject matter expert.

So I participated sometimes

as a product and go to market specialist,

and then would be there to

provide feedback to pitches,

and asks for funding,

which is a lot like what

DAOs do in terms of grants

and grant funding and grant

committees setups.

And so that's what they did,

but they had to do it

socially because they were

actually building the infra

that is being used by DAOs

in the next cycle in 2021.

And so it was all a little too early.

There were identity plays like Uport

There were MetaMask and then

there was Gnosis was in the

ecosystem as well of consensus.

And so, you know,

you get multisigs later and

you know how powerful they are for DAOs.

But that wasn't there at

that point in time.

So Sobel was myself and my

fellow co-founders embedded

in that mesh and trying to

understand how we can help

solve some of the

coordination problems and

challenges that were there.

And the very first one that we were given

And we were actually given

two when we sort of

researched and wanted to

support this group and build something.

And one was the information

is all over the place.

And so I can't find what I'm looking for.

which would be like the it's

in notion somewhere or in G

drive somewhere kind of thing.

And it was rapidly evolving.

And then the other was

everything is changing so

rapidly around here because

people are moving in and

out of different teams or

participating in roles on

multiple ventures or new

ventures are being created

or spokes are shutting down

and then dispersing people

back into the broader mesh

to find other spots to

participate and contribute.

And that dynamic nature

at a certain scale was

causing a lot of challenge and friction.

And we got tasked by the

mesh to go and take a look at that.

Can we visualize that?

Can we stay on top of that?

And how might we do so?

And that's what Sobel was born to do.

We were born to visualize decentralized,

autonomous organizations.

And as they rapidly evolve,

be able to create a clear picture.

Because one of the things

that we missed that was

there for us in traditional

organizations is the org chart.

The org chart is a wayfinding mechanism.

It's an imperfect one

because it's not actually

how work gets done in the organization,

as per a conversation of

Agile previously.

Uh, the org chart did help us navigate,

particularly as you're rapidly growing.

Um, you know,

you've got new people coming

in and in DAOs,

we describe this now as the

onboarding problem.

Uh,

and so Sobel really wanted to make it

easy to see what's going on

in the DAO and try to find

a spot to participate that was, you know,

bringing you at the

intersection of your

passions and skills and the

emerging business needs.

So we'd model, um, roles, um,

people and their profiles, teams,

And we would model goals and

relationships between goals

and people and roles that

are activating them.

And we would model

agreements as well was one

of the objects that came up

as we continued

investigating this with consensus.

And so teams would form

agreements with one another

to work together via the services

agreement with the marketing

department to do a

rebranding of one of the spokes.

And so these types of

agreements and making them

explicit and transparent,

you start to get a really

interesting network graph

of how the organization is

changing shape.

and the ability to navigate.

And so that's what Sobel was.

And we've been on that for six years.

We revamped it,

connected it to Discord

roles via Discord bot in

2021 and started working

with DAOs and had

hundreds of monthly active DAOs,

thousands of DAOs using

Sobol to map their

organizations and connect

it into some of the tools

that they were using like

Discord or Collabland.

We were a partner in their

marketplace launch as well.

And so Sobol was all about

visualizing that coordination graph.

Interesting.

OK, so, you know,

I was familiar with Sobel

through BanklessDAO as a

way of very literally

visualizing like the org structure.

So, you know, there were like circles.

Maybe one was a marketing guild.

One was the Treasury Guild.

One was a grants committee.

And you could see and I

could see which ones I was

in and which ones other people were in.

But it sounds like you guys

have gone a little beyond

just that if you're

integrating things like

Discord roles and

agreements between groups

or between members.

I mean,

how do you think about how far does

Sobel go?

By the way,

it's Sobel.io if folks are

looking to check it out.

How far does that go in

terms of just wanting to be

a visualization layer

versus also getting

involved in the structure

of the organization?

Is Sobel where...

these agreements are forms between groups,

or just visualized?

Yeah, so Sokol's philosophy,

and in many ways, it was way too early.

But, you know, that's kind of

half the fun sometimes as a founder.

And so Sobel's thought was that,

because it comes from sort of that 2017,

2018 era,

where there was something back

then called the fat

protocol thesis and the

idea that a lot was going

to be happening at the protocol layer.

It was going to be open and

composable and tokenized

and visible on chain, et cetera.

And so we were like, wow,

organizations are going to

get completely on chain and

there's going to be a need for clients.

And so we wanted to build

the first client.

And our hope was that our

backend would be completely

eaten by the protocol layer.

And then we were waiting and

waiting and waiting and had way too much,

you know,

living in this Neo4j graph data model,

you know, on an Amazon backend.

And we just kept waiting and

waiting and waiting.

And we watched the identity space.

And we would take a look at

decentralized identity and

the way in which it was

going to create an open

protocol of relationships

between things via

verifiable credentials.

as we waited for more things

to go on-chain, you know, like governance,

except it wasn't.

And so we were going to have

to use APIs to integrate to

things like snapshot, et cetera.

And so that was rather

frustrating to not see that

protocol gap closing as

fast as we'd hoped,

which is part of the reason

why I think the other thing

that we were mentioning,

and this is a good point to bring it up,

is HATS protocol.

HATS protocol was the first

protocol that was

structural in nature and on-chain.

Uh, and,

and so we saw hats protocol as

taking a lot of the roles

that were in discord role

tags and other web two apps,

and we're in these sort of

sequestered centralized backends and, uh,

and bringing them into an on-chain.

primitive that could be

composed into governance

and other smart contract

based automation to

automate the evolution of

structure and bring it on chain.

And I was like, wow, that's amazing.

The first time I read the

paper that Spencer and the

team were putting forward over there,

And that was the protocol we

were waiting for.

We wanted to be an ideal partner.

And so Sovel's next chapter

after the 2021 chapter of

trying to integrate to Discord, you know,

Collabland, Gnosis Safe, and then,

you know,

explore the integrations to

identity solutions and Snapshot.

And it's just like,

wasn't quite working,

we went over and we built a HATS client.

So we created a HATS client

that was a code composer

where you could compose your HATS tree.

You could compose it with

things like Gnosis Safe or

Molex Governance.

You could click a deploy

button and do an automated

deploy sequence,

and you could actually

interact with that using an LLM.

So we were playing with that as well.

we love this idea that there

can be a many client world

over top of these protocols.

And I think this is

something that now the

industry is really starting

to marinate into because of Farcaster.

And so we start to see how

Farcaster as a protocol can

produce lots of social

clients or Lens as a

protocol can produce lots

of different Lens and

Lensster style clients.

And we can see

this now more, you know, visibly.

And that was the vision of Sobel was like,

that's going to happen as

well for DAO tooling.

But it kind of didn't last cycle.

And so I'd really like to

see it in this cycle.

So I know we still want to

talk about tipster too,

but let's dig into the DAO

tooling space for a minute

because it's interesting to

hear about your

disappointment in the

progression of protocols

over the course of at least

a few years leading up to a

couple of years ago.

And I would say I've maybe

had a similar experience

over the past three years

since I got into DAOs for

the first time where

Initially, when I got into DAOs,

what was really exciting

was all the DAO tooling.

We were going from a world

where you had maybe one or

two DAO tooling platforms,

maybe like Moloch and DAO Stack,

fairly technical still.

Most people still,

if you were launching a DAO,

you'd probably be writing your own code,

to a world where you had 10

or 15 DAO tooling platforms.

where you could go and just

through a web interface,

configure your DAOs parameters,

hit a button to launch

about all the smart contracts.

And then that tool would

help you manage the DAO,

visualize the DAO, stuff like that.

And initially,

when I left my corporate job

just under three years ago,

I got into the DAO tooling space.

I was going to build new DAO

tools until I came across

the opportunity to run my DAO instead.

which was, it was a total surprise.

I mean, I'm not a lawyer,

I'm a tech entrepreneur.

I ended up now running this

legal related business.

But,

and I think over the past couple of years,

I kind of felt like, okay, like,

that's fine that I'm working

on the legal side,

it's a good opportunity,

there's a real need here,

but I'm glad to know that

lots of people are working

on the tooling side, because that's still,

we still need to see a lot

of progress there.

And now fast forward a few years,

it's not clear to me if we've made enough,

at least a lot of progress

on the DAO tooling side,

at least when it comes to like the basic,

like configure how you want

your governance to work,

what kind of token you want to use,

how you're going to distribute it,

and then like do the votes,

the proposals and the votes.

I feel like I haven't seen a

lot of progress.

If anything,

like half of the tools have

disappeared or stagnated

and the other half maybe

are relatively stagnant.

And then I don't know,

maybe there's just like a few,

and now Hatz has been the one of the few,

and then also some progress

at Aragon and Dow House.

I'm curious, though,

if you agree with my

assessment that there just

hasn't been a lot of

progress over the like,

I feel like we're still far

from mainstream.

in terms of being ready for mainstream.

Like if I was going to go to

my friend who I've been

talking about DAOs with for

the past two years, and he says,

so how has it gone?

Like,

is it time for me to start a DAO for

my local like church group or not?

I'd probably say maybe not.

And I'd feel really bad

about that because I wanted

to be ready for that by now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think it's getting ready.

And I think there were a lot

of people and teams who

tried really hard to build.

And I think what really

comes down to is if you

look at Ethereum and its evolution,

and the infrastructure, the amount,

because I said it as my

beginning of my story was

actually amongst those who

were working really hard

together to try and bring

up some of the key

infrastructure that we now

take for granted and that is flourishing.

And it actually even has

diversity now in terms of choice.

Whereas, and that took multiple cycles.

I feel like because of the DAO hack,

we kind of lost a cycle on

DAOs in some ways.

And thanks to groups like

those who summoned Moloch,

they got us over our DAO PTSD.

And we started to have

something invigorated last cycle.

And so I feel like last

cycle was us testing the

gaps in the infrastructure

layer and noticing how much

we were relying on kludging

Web2 solutions or building

what I call Web 2.5

DAO tooling applications.

As a DAO tooling creator,

we created a web 2.5, not, you know,

not a full bore, you know,

web three application.

And, you know,

as I was calling out and

that happened to many, and then, you know,

the cycles do the cycles thing.

And unfortunately it dumped

some really good ideas and

some really good teams

because you have funding come in,

you try something,

and if you caught the wrong timing,

you know, it recycles back out.

You know,

that intelligence recycles back out,

but the team and what they

were attempting to do too

early was not conserved.

I'm really grateful that

HATS caught the right

timing to push through,

and there are many that

have continued to build through,

as you highlighted yourself.

And I think there was also

another key missing ingredient.

DAOs are social,

and the social layer was entirely Web2.

It had a no construct.

Yeah.

Like Discord, Telegram, stuff like that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Discourse, you know,

the place where we do governance even,

which was a little more

purpose built for the

pre-governance process, social in nature,

fully web too.

Open source software,

which is probably why

discourse was chosen.

You can post, et cetera.

It's got good properties for

a decentralized community to use,

but it has very little knowledge.

of all the other stuff

that's going on adjacent to

it that's in the on-chain world.

Not to mention the fact that

L2s as well were not

full-fledged as DAOs

started up in the last cycle.

So we had to find ways around that too.

And so Snapshot, I mentioned it earlier.

I don't mention it disparagingly.

I mentioned it as a gift in

the same way that Polygon

in the early days is a

sidechain and Gnosis Chain

is a sidechain.

We're helping.

They were a gift of scaling.

NextEye was a gift of scaling.

before scaling had arrived.

And so,

DAOs also really needed that kind

of scaling on-chain to be

able to do something like Hat.

It would be ridiculous to

try and track all your

roles and have smart

contract-based automation

around your DAO structure

uh, without, um, you know,

that more performant, uh,

execution layer.

And so there's a lot of

things that I think are

brewing in this cycle that

bring me optimism.

One is lens Farcaster have

had an opportunity to do a cycle, um,

and mature.

Um,

and in the case of Farcaster have some

daily active, uh,

user breakout recently as well.

And, uh,

And also the L2s have really hit stride.

And Ethereum L1 has been

doing a lot to improve scaling.

I think the merge happened last cycle.

DAOs were trying to do stuff pre-merge.

If you really steep in this history of it,

I have a lot of empathy for

how we built and why we

built the way we did.

And I have a lot of

appreciation for groups

that tried to glue it all together.

You know, Collabland, Guild XYZ,

trying to make sure that

our social space was

connected to our wallets

and our on-chain identities.

And so I think there's

something magical that can

happen this cycle,

and that's why we are

building tipster.bot that

you mentioned earlier.

I think Farcasters and Farcaster channels,

that protocol,

And some of the clients that

are now being built upon it

that are creating an

invitation to communities

to come and have an open

social graph layer that's

about how we socialize and

follow one another that is

connected to the token layer.

uh through the wallet so

they're verified wallets

and ens that are connected

and we're starting to see

this bigger picture plus

you know the power of um

you know cost efficient l2s

um we're we're starting to

see that the right

firepower um is there now

to go at dows again and

similar to the way in which

malik had to get us over

our ptsd of the dow hack

uh with with all of the

simplicity and precautions

that the mullet contract

had put in place to try and

give us a chance to play

with investment dows very

simplified dows to spark

the last one um I i really

am excited to uh see how

you know tipping games on

these on these social

substrates maybe get us

over sort of that trough of

disillusionment that we

came into um as dows you

know started being called

dows and name only and

treasuries got attacked and

communities folded and

The last cycle had its

experiments and had its failures.

And I think that a new wave

of tooling is right to be

built alongside those who

have kept building and

found ways to keep building.

And I think new communities

are forming and they're

taking the classic pattern

that they always took.

It was tweets that sparked

out and now it is posts and casts.

in a decentralized social environment,

which more rapidly can

transition into DAO experiments.

And we're already starting

to see them over there on Farcaster.

We're already starting to

see DAO signals through

these tipping games.

That's an early DAO

emissions game that's right

up there with the types of

things we saw last cycle

with Coordinate and frankly,

Cloudland tips.

um and tipping bots were a

big thing then too and so

yeah redoing it but on the

right substrates this time

and I think uh and the and

a web three centric tech

stack and I think that's a

really really uh discounted

unlock and I think that's

going to be the seeds of the new wave

Yeah.

So,

so just talk a little bit more about

tipster, but, and it's a tipster dot bot.

I've used it.

Uh, I think I was one of the first,

first users were using it

in the Dow's channel on Farcaster where,

uh,

anyone who's been active there has a

allowance.

So every day.

they can tip up to a

thousand quote unquote DAOs

with the dollar sign.

And there's no promise,

it's a pure experiment, right?

There's no promise as to

what these points might one day mean.

But the assumption is that

it'll be a signal that's used one day

if and when and I think the

assumption is always when

even if it's a long time from now,

we end up needing to put

some kind of structured

governance in place because

things start to get to to

we start to achieve scale

and it's too hard to just

run things manually and or

this is not values aligned.

So you know, we're starting to signal

this point system.

Anyways,

just tell us a little more about Tipster.

What's the overall pitch?

How should people think

about it and when they

might want to use it for

their own communities?

Yeah,

so tipster.bot is inspired by what

was happening with Dgen, Hire,

and many of the other

tokens that were being

token tipping games that

were occurring on Farcaster.

So communities would form,

And then they would start to

show that they appreciated

the value others were contributing.

So in the case of Dgen,

your content on Farcaster,

it will tip you Dgen for great content.

And it was set up so that

those who had been there

and embodied the vibe of Farcaster,

aka the OG accounts,

were given tipping allowance.

And so you have this

immediately decentralized

emissions of a proto-token.

Because it wasn't even on-chain.

It's like points in the same way,

but unlike points.

It wasn't a centralized

authority like a DeFi

protocol deciding who gets

points and why.

It was the community from

day zero being able to decide.

The community that was already there,

the OG posters who knew

good content when they saw

it and wanted to tip others

and encourage others to

grow the community.

And so that's what tokens

are really good at.

In this case, it's Prototoken.

And then this produces the

opportunity for progressive

airdrops of the actual tokens.

And eventually, you know,

Degen becomes an L3 on base

and a token and a whole

token ecosystem and has

inspired lots of others to

go and do this.

And so tipster.bot comes

from that inspiration and

says it's more fun

when you democratize this

beyond just those who can

develop code and build

their own bot and solution.

And because that is a barrier to entry.

So tipster.bot just means

that any community can come

together on Firecaster and

play a tipping game to

bootstrap their community

and signal what they're

finding value and give

tipping allowance to those

who have already provided

value and thus start to

create a reputational marker,

which could be used

in future on-chain games,

be it dropping a token and

establishing governance.

And I think where I want to

see this go and why

tipster.bot and these degen

tipping games were so

interesting to me is that

governable spaces thing

that we discussed earlier.

We're playing with it, as you mentioned,

in the DAOs channel over on Firecaster.

And it's because we're

creating a space that may

need communal governance in the future.

But right now it doesn't.

but we need to prepare to know who is here,

who helped make this space what it is.

And through a tipping game,

we can start to have signal

along the way of what was

valued as we as a community grow.

And that gives the

opportunity as the

affordances come on to

further decentralize

uh the governance of a space

like this uh and connect it

to you know web3 assets not

unlike the recent uh

farcaster channels um uh

protocolization um and

decentralization they've

been adding in the ability

to have curation auto mod

has been building bots that

allow you to create

moderation rule sets,

and those can be driven by token rules.

And so you can start to

connect the dots to see

that there's an opportunity for,

through something like

tipster.bot and tips saying

who should be governing

And then there's the

opportunity for the space

itself and the value it

provides of like curating

which posts should show or

be pushed to the top of the

fold is a power that is key

in governing that space.

And that today is somewhat

centralized often on

forecaster spaces to those

who were the channel creators,

AKA the Reddit model thing.

So this kind of ties all the

things we've been

discussing today together, I think.

And so I'm excited about

tipster.bot as the front

edge and these tipping

games as the front edge of

preparing for governable spaces.

Interesting.

Yeah.

What about in terms of what

you're seeing in this space?

So we've mentioned some

tools you're working on

that are really exciting, including Hats,

Sobol, Tipster.

We mentioned Snapshot.

I mentioned Dow House,

which is just the front end for Moloch,

which you mentioned a couple of times.

Are there other tools that

are exciting right now to

you because you see either

they've come a long way or

they're new and exciting or

just that you know that

there are a lot of good

people working on or just

enough good people working

on the tool and therefore

you're excited to see what

they might come out with in

the near future?

Yeah,

so I've become nounish curious and

I've seen some interesting

experiments over the years in nouns.

Um, it's on chain, uh, and, uh,

some of the most recent, uh, noun, um,

experiments that I've found

fascinating or now niche

experiments are burbs, um,

and grounds grounds Dow.

And it's because they're, they're mixing,

uh, an ERC 20 token with.

Um, the, the nouns NFT, um, governance,

you know, model, um,

allowing for a little more granularity.

Um, and so I'm curious, uh,

sort of about that, uh, experiment.

And, uh,

I think I'm also really interested

in charm verse.

Um, I think,

I think charm verse has been

trying to find ways to have

web three at the core.

as they're building

knowledge-based management

and what I call pre-governance,

that space where you make

decisions socially before

you move into on-chain

voting and an on-chain

signature of one's comment

regarding one's vote.

And so I think having those

kinds of off-chain spaces

They're fascinating to me.

And I think Farcaster itself as a protocol,

so not Warpcast the client,

but Farcaster the protocol

is massively fascinating to me because,

as I mentioned earlier,

one of the biggest friction

points of the previous

cycle was just how much is living in,

you know, sort of Web2 backends.

And what I think Farcaster

protocol has done is they

created a clever way to

have signed off-chain data,

AKA your messages, your likes, et cetera,

and that you're signing those,

and they're cryptographically verifiable,

but they're not on-chain.

And I find that really

fascinating because it then

does have a relationship to

your on-chain identity, the Farcaster ID,

and your on-chain addresses

that you've run a signed

um, you know, signing ceremony of signing,

Hey,

I own this address and I'm

associating it to this.

Um, and so that,

that is something that I

was hoping for last cycle

was to see more protocols

that are graphs in nature, um,

that show the relationships

between things and bridge

the off chain to the, uh,

the off chain to the

on-chain world and allow for a richer, um,

very web three,

clients to emerge.

And so I think my greatest

fascination fascination right now is what

social graph protocols,

signed off chain data

solutions and their

bridging to on-chain worlds

are possible in this cycle

and what relationship will

those have to decentralized

autonomous organizations because they are,

as I mentioned with my

experiences in Sobel,

just a graph of

relationships between

people and their

marketplace interactions as they do work.

together in that marketplace of work.

And so that's where I'm

seeing things going and I'm

excited to participate building into.

Yeah,

is there anything else you'd want to

share about your vision for

the future of DAOs?

So if you look forward,

maybe a whole cycle,

let's say either we're at

the beginning of the bull,

but it's got another year or two left,

or maybe we never even hit

the bull market and the

next one's not coming for a few years.

Either way,

what's your vision for where

DAOs are going to be in one, two,

three years,

assuming we do have another

bull run in crypto?

Yeah, so...

Last cycle,

DAOs showed that they are a

reasonable way to invest safely.

So they created investment DAOs.

Investment DAOs worked last cycle,

in my opinion, and they continue to work.

And so I feel as though the

innovation this cycle is

going to be social DAOs

that actually work.

And so I think that we will

have social DAOs where we

will be doing mostly social

things like the fans voting

on X and feeling like

they're participating in

the story and us

progressing towards these

governable spaces.

This is so clearly,

I need to check this book

because it's so clearly in

the zeitgeist right now.

And that I think is what's

happening right now.

And I think that this is the,

if I keep zooming out into the future,

I think these are the seeds

on which we will have all

the key sort of connections,

be it protocols and new clients emerging.

that are entwined so richly

with the social protocols

and the social attributes

of things that we will end

up in the following cycle

finally capable of doing the

types of organizations

we've been dreaming of

doing from the beginning, you know, the,

the,

the replacing what happens at the

club and not, you know, cooperative,

not-for-profit corporate

enterprise venturing and,

You can see that higher stake,

higher value,

higher problematic domain if

captured is possible.

And I think there's one

piece that I know you're working on,

which is that, sure,

it's important to have

these off-chain social

things become more

cryptographically

verifiable and connected to

the on-chain world.

But these two worlds also

need to become more

connected to the real world.

and doing the work that

you're doing and thinking

about how we uh enmesh in a

meaningful and productive

way the traditional state

nation and legal systems

while they are the um you

know sort of backbone um of

how we operate and

enmeshing them in

meaningful and productive

ways into um this emerging

social um and and on-chain

domain that triad

feels so necessary to pull

off that thing in the in

the following cycles and

subsequent cycles that that

I'm envisioning which is

you know these highly

productive full-scale like

enterprise level you know

venture um happening

productively and

efficiently on uh on chain

and uh as a dow

And that I also,

you can see that at that point in time,

if you keep zooming out,

I get excited about a

global talent marketplace.

Part of what brought me to

this space that I haven't

sort of described is that I

love moving around.

Um, I, I have, uh, uh,

I guess later in life I've

come to understand in a

self-diagnosed way that I

have ADHD and I like to

move around and it's a

superpower for me to be in

multiple spaces at once.

And then having that

percolate in my being and,

and then applying it in

those multiple spaces, um,

and feeding myself and

feeding it back out.

And that, that is where I thrive.

And I imagine, uh,

what DAOs are setting up

when they get to that sort of like,

you know,

level that we're describing here,

that you end up with a

global talent marketplace, you know,

on the perfect rails for

running a marketplace as

shown by DeFi already.

And that this fully digital

high liquidity talent

marketplace will be available.

And through remote work,

which has already happened

in previous cycle,

we will be able to plug into that.

And as individuals,

that could be a really

fulfilling way to

participate in the world.

And that ideally,

if we also solve some of

the centralization problems

surrounding AI and the data

sovereignty issues,

which I think crypto is working on too,

we could start to actually

work in fun ways at a DAO level scale

where the relationship that

honestly I have sometimes

with the AI that I'm

working with in my workflow,

it's bloody fun and it

doesn't feel threatening.

It feels exciting as a creator.

But if we can harness this

in ways that don't erode

our ability to participate

as humans in a way that

preserves our sovereignty,

we could start to bring AI

into DAOs in ways that I

can't even dream of yet.

But they would be great at

doing certain jobs that we

often today centralize into committees.

like we were discussing earlier,

like the security committee, et cetera,

or coordination prompts to

us as humans to participate

in spots that match our

skills and passions.

Auto GPT plays doubt, for example.

I think that there's an

opportunity for there to be

a really fun collaboration

between human agents and AI

agents to build things that

we haven't even dreamed of.

And I think that's where

things are headed if we do this right.

And I think there's a lot of

things that could go wrong along the way.

And I hope that we learn

those lessons quickly and

don't paint ourselves into

a corner where we can't get

out from it in a timely manner.

It's by the way,

another way the word

autonomous might apply to

DAOs is having autonomous agents.

you know, playing roles in our DAOs.

It could end up being a

major element of DAOs that

for the first time we have

organizations that are

partly or completely AI driven.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah, for sure.

I think that the future of

work is actually the future of play.

When I mean that abundance mentality,

that global talent

marketplace that has high

liquidity for opportunity

to participate in and the

right value exchange to

meet my needs personally,

if that is possible,

that in itself is the best,

best setup for the future

of work not to be work anymore.

It actually is play.

I get to play with my

friends all over the world,

building neat stuff that

feels like it has value and impact.

And to do it along with and

play with intelligences that, frankly,

will stretch our own.

Yeah, that's awesome.

All right.

Well,

that's going to be it for today's

episode.

BP,

if you want to share any closing

thoughts you didn't have a

chance to get to,

and then let us know where

we can find you and your

projects on the web or on social.

Yeah,

I think I've shared a lot and feel full.

And I think you can find me,

if any of these topics or

solutions that we've been

building at Sobel and

Tipster are interesting.

I'm bpetes.eth or bpetes on

pretty much every social

platform that you'll find

crypto folks congregating on.

And I'd love to chat.

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

And for those looking for MyDAO or for me,

you can find me on

Farcaster at the Thriller

or Twitter slash X. I'm zero X Thriller.

MyDAO is M-I-D-A-O dot org

stands for Marshall Islands

DAO or MyDAO DS for

directory services dot eth or on Twitter.

And please consider liking

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it would appreciate if anyone

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And just another quick ad

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Again, BP,

thank you so much for coming on the show.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, Adam.

I had a lot of fun.

You got it.

Quick disclaimer,

none of this is ever legal or tax advice.

And finally, for the audience,

are you thinking about starting a DAO?

Just DAO it.

Thanks, BP.