30 MCON Discussions

Random Observation/Comment #771: DAOs – still so hot right now.

Why this List?

MCON is a gathering of brilliant DAO minds. It’s focused on growing community of organizers and tool builders to tackle the hard questions like – What’s the best way to fight discoordination and harmonize towards a single mission? Does my DAO need a legal entity? Will we all go to jail for participating in unregulated pre-sales? These were some of the fun side conversations I had over at the “unconference conference”.

Looking forward to more conversations next year!

1. Treasury management needs optionality. This requires a balance between available liquidity and longer term investments.

2. A healthy treasury of a DAO may have as much as 50% of their holdings in stablecoins with diversified farming strategies.

3. DAO Treasuries participating in ETH beacon chain staking or liquid staking derivatives exposure. Also seeing some general “DeFi bluechip” set exposures with Syndicate DAO

4. DAOs will continue evolving with legal entity layering and standardized usage. We are waiting for that advancement similar to the early days of legal associated to music streaming.

5. The consolidation and M&A of DAOs are needed so the people contributing are not pulled across more than 3 DAOs. You can’t effectively contribute and pay attention to so many communities. We’d all rather have more focus than more tokens or else you’d see some quiet quitting of DAOs.

6. The DAO freelancer and consultant will extract a high value across multiple groups, but each DAO will likely be missing consistency. DAOs need to have more loyalty and team efficiency.

7. There might be a need for more project managers and revisiting higher efficiency of execution on projects.

8. DAOs look like an evolution of open source. Protocol governance with common tools and incentives are great ways to reduce single points of failure.

9. Hiring structures within DAOs are interesting because you’re actively interviewing with moderators and likely rewarded by just being a member of the community.

10. DAO unionization and coordination with the mission should layer the gig economy gamification aspects.

11. Incentives need to be simplified. You don’t need 20 ways to contribute with user story sizing or bounties. You need one game with clear monetary rewards. Drive a car, pick up passengers, and get paid for distance with tips.

12. The metaverse is more like a network experience than a product. This will exist with both private and permissionless access from the development side. A private metaverse could be the games we have today with local points and random drops. A public metaverse may be a farther reach for coordination by gaming ecosystems

13. DAOs provide abstracted superset layers connecting and enhancing influencers across social and protocol networks.

14. The creator economy allows people to focus on their strengths without adding overhead. A journalist with direct subscription readership like in Substack is currently more powerful than the ability to initialize a DAO and grow a paying community. You can’t just magically add a token and hope to raise funds for the product.

15. Opportunities to offset climate change impact are intriguing to protocols, enterprises, and individuals. ESG is still a major trend in investments.

16. Lean services and ubiquitous utility like Snapshot stay lean and build for the community instead of growing out of control with fundraising. It seems anti-culture to the silicon valley outcome of business exits.

17. Hedgeys NFT wrapper provide a protocol for vesting NFT contracts. I really love the idea of time-locked contracts with releases of known fungible tokens. This is a less exclusive engagement than doing superfluid streaming of funds.

18. It makes sense to take a step back from web3 and just build components to reset expectations. Let’s not forget that we’re likely putting some other opportunities in the side burner that might be interesting as an overlap.

19. We’re at a stage of experimentation where the decentralization tribalism should not be the main focus of the conversation. We should be okay that decentralization of validators would come afterwards.

20. Mina protocol with the cascading Zero Knowledge Proofs are super interesting for identity use cases and collaboration across multiple wallets

21. Enterprise adoption of Web3 needs a different outlet than CeFi rebuilding TradFi patterns with DeFi. I still think NFTs and DAOs have an edge of community formation and aggregation without focusing too much on value transfer.

22. MetaMask Institutional needs Access, Education, and Flexibility. It currently takes a few weeks to onboard the hedgefunds to the standard IT ops applications and treasury management tools. Custodial integration takes a few months.

23. Private key management is a big part of the initialization ceremony for protocols, networks, and new projects. It’s better to have multiple wallets and multi-sig setups with initial protocol contracts, DAO contracts, NFT contracts sent to DAOs, treasury measures, and platform logins across off-chain networks. The discussion led to a surprise that password management tools like OnePassword and single sign-on aggregators like Okta are not providing services for the funds being traded.

24. What would happen if Wikipedia was a DAO? Is the value the contributions from buying access via a token or are the rewards properly provided to the moderators and contributors? Similar to standard valuations of companies, the operations and community might be the most valuable piece.

25. DAOs might be all hype until Go To Market is cheaper. Currently it’s too expensive and unknown on the legal entity side plus the launch of tokens.

26. Non profit DAOs might be a great way to show transparency for spending of funds and receiving tax breaks for institutions. Cross entity regulations could be a great outlet of grants and allocations to necessary foundation research.

27. DAOs need a namespace standard (perhaps a dedicated subset of ENS) that can be reviewed, registered, and approved by government entities. This could be similar to registering the .gov, .org, and .edu domains for websites.

28. While we’re trying to avoid centralization, I think the mainstream adoption of Web3 will likely be more of a Web 2.5 attempt by leveraging existing social network layers. There is definitely something there with representing ownership of assets with fewer middlemen institutions and the verifiable trust layer that crosses nations while leveraging crypto as a payment rail.

29. DAO Community growth managers should likely start their own DAO to share strategies on how to engage with the right members. This seems like a weird cross over of social media, marketing, and hiring managers.

30. We all need to think about digital trusts and legacy. A DAO-based legal trust would be extremely interesting as a way to pass on assets in the vault to beneficiaries.

~See Lemons DAO-ify it all

Originally posted on seelemons.com