Bankless - DAO Panel | Kain Warwick, CoopahTroopah, Tracheopteryx

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

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

Hey, Bankless Nation. This is panel time on bankless. The panel is an opportunity to deep dive into a topic with a number of guests who are experts in the space. And today, we're talking about Dow's. This is how to Dow. And we've got a fantastic group of panelists for you where we're going to have this conversation. David, why don't you give us a preview? Yeah, there's a number of conversations to have about Dow's, about like, are they really all that fundamentally different? What rules about Organism? organizations have changed now that we are in the Dow world. And also what rules are actually exactly the same? What does it mean to have a good Dow and do all DAOs follow the same rules about what it means to have a good Dow? What are all the same problems that DAO are faced with? And what problems do only some DAO have? There's a lot of things to unpack here because collectively, as an industry, we are all learning how to DAO. And so we've brought on some of the best leaders who have some of the most experience with Dowing to get their perspectives as to how to Dow. Yeah, absolutely.

So we've got Kane Warwick, Cooper Turley, and Trache from the Y Earned Protocol. We're going to be talking to all of them. And we really think that DAWS are the new opportunity to front run in crypto. There's a massive amount of opportunity. This is really how crypto is coordinating human capital as well as asset capital. Dow's will replace companies one day. We firmly believe this. You remember our Josh Rosenthal episode where you talked about the Crypto Medici.

Well, we are the new Crypto Medici. And joining a Dow is one way to dive deeper down this rabbit hole. You will not regret it. Speaking of which, Dow opportunities, our friends at Tracer Dow have just launched a Dow. They're working on a Defi Perpetuals product. Pretty exciting stuff. They're looking right now for governors and contributors. So if you're interested in that, join their Discord, get involved.

will include a link in the show notes. Guys, we will be right back with our panelists. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet.

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and stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your D-Apps all in one place. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure.

Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a man. money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor.

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

and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. All right, guys, we are back. This is the how-to-doubt panel. Really excited to introduce our three guests to you. The first is Kane Warwick. He's the founder and benevolent prefrontal cortex of synthetics. Back on synthetics these days.

Kane, how are you doing? It's been really well. Yeah. It's been a good couple of weeks. Just got back from our Western Hemisphere offsite, where I met about 15 of the four contributors for the first time. So that was really cool. Hey, hey, people in a Dowell.

meet in person. Good to know. Cooper Turley. He leads crypto strategy at Audius, governance, friends with benefits, another Dow, also an advisor to the variant fund. They are big into Dow's and the creator economy as well. And he's a general Dow operator. I feel like he's in every Dow I've ever seen or been a part of, including pleaser, C-club, forefront, fingerprints, probably some other Dow's. We don't yet know about coming in the future. Cooper, how are you doing? I'm doing wonderful. I'm excited to dive into it. I think this is a hot topic, and you've got some of the best on the fall of day. So thank you for having me. I think it's the hottest topic. And the reason I say that is because like we're front running everybody else right now. It's kind of,

I think you said this last time we were on together, Cooper is like where NFTs were at this time last year. Lastly, we have Trache. He is a contributor at Wiren, Lex Punk, and coordinate really cool infrastructure for decentralized compensation servicing DAWs to. Trache, how are you doing? Doing great, man. And I'm yeah, also a psych to be here and talking about this amazing stuff you guys. Man, we are psyched to have you on psyched to being crypto at this time. So we're going to dive right into some Dow topics. You guys ready? Let's do us. All right. You know, I'm going to start with this play the devil's advocate because like, you know, why not? Let's start with a skepticism first. So the skeptic says, even the skeptic in me, quite honestly, are Dow's really that fundamentally

different from, say, a traditional LLC? Maybe it's just like an LLC or a corporation without a nation-state registration. But isn't it fundamentally sort of the same thing? And if so, why are DOWs even special at all? Why are we having this panel? Why are we excited about DOWs if that's all they are? Why do we start with you, Kaine? What's your take?

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

you know, DALs enable is this kind of self-contained coordination mechanism that is, you know, autonomous, right? It's outside of, you know, any particular, any particular place. And I think that's powerful. And I think that's why we're seeing people from all over the world come together to form these DALs in a way that you couldn't probably do so easily with corporate governance. Okay. So Kane making the point that DOWs are super national. They're outside of any single nation state jurisdiction. Cooper, what do you think about that? Is this still the same like corporate governance just in a super national structures? There's something more here. I think that it's a lot more fluid. You know, the biggest thing I'd call out is there's no team and user dynamic. You know,

team and community are one and the same. What that does is that allows for people to come in in in a much more free-flowing manner. So with the Dow, you don't need to worry about going through an HR process to be hired to a multi-year contract with a vesting schedule. You can jump in and start contributing today. I think that ethos to allow people to come in and contribute as they see fit, it opens a design space for a lot more collaboration and also allows there to be a lot more ownership in that project. And so beyond the legal structure, I would say the precedent behind working for a Dowell has a lot more ownership involved with it. And as a result, you see people coming in and doing things in a much more fluid manner that we haven't really seen

outside of like a cooperative or a freelance model, which I'd say is fundamentally different in the ways that DAOs work today. So, Trey gets this idea that we've got this super, supernational entity exists outside of the nation state. There's also permissionless. Anyone can join, anyone contribute. Everyone has sort of a vested interest in what goes on. What would you add to this question then, Trache? Yeah, I would say it's part of a developmental process in the collective consciousness.

You know, you can look back. They're not fundamentally different than former forms of human organization, but they are fundamentally better. And they're kind of breathtakingly better in so many ways. just as like the capabilities of a tribe or a religion or a nation or an incorporation, now you have a Dow in each one of these different shapes of organization emerges from different financial legal theories, different theories of personhood. And on top of blockchain, you know, beyond nations out in cyberspace,

where anybody can be whoever they want and they're permissionless and open, DAOs are just kind of radically different and better. One thing that's striking to me, Trey, as I'm looking at your avatar, right? Like, I see, you know, I don't see a person here, right? And so this is the idea that you're getting at of kind of pseudo-anonymous contribution as well. You could never contribute to a company in this way. There are probably few organizations we could contribute in this way. But like a Dow is much more meritocratic.

You don't have to have a nation state ID in order to contribute. and here you are contributing as a, what would you call your insignia here, Trig? Well, here I'm a kind of shaman dinosaur, which is actually pretty close to what I am. So one question that always arises with me and Tao is in the name Tao is the word decentralized. But hasn't really changed any sort of role with regards to leadership or has there. And so my first question, my question on this is maybe to you, Kane, as the founder of synthetics, which has then morphed into synthetics Dow, how is leadership in Dow's the same as previous organizational schemes, or how is it totally different?

Thanks. Yeah, it's a topical issue for synthetics, I think. So it's honestly a hard question to answer. I think that there is always a necessity when you have a group of people for some level of kind of responsibility, right? Diffusion responsibility is very dangerous when coordinating people. And I think that that's one thing that we haven't maybe solved yet. Like right now, we're really powered by enthusiasm, right? You know, people like Cooper who are in 85 Dow's and, you know, just working 24-7 and, you know, just super excited about the space.

There does come a time, and I think synthetics, you know, being four years old or, you know, whatever it is, where people need to be, you know, put into some kind of leadership role when it comes to organizing other people, right, who are going to be doing something. But the critical thing, I think, and the critical difference in a DAO versus even, you know, the old synthetics open source software foundation model is in the foundation, there was a person who was the ultimate, you know, controller of that organization, right? In the synthetics Dow, there is no person who sits at the top of the hierarchy, right? There's a council, which is a, you know, representation of the will of the token holders, but the token holders are, you know, tens of thousands. of people spread all around the world. And so you have this idea of there isn't one person who controls the outcomes or decisions or whatever of this organization. But there may need to be people who help coordinate the individual humans doing some

specific activity. They can't choose what to do, but they can help coordinate what has been chosen by the community. Cooper, as Kane said, you're a part of roughly 85 DAWs. how has leadership changed or how have different DOWs chosen different leadership models? And what have you seen that has worked out in some of the DOWs that you're a part of? Great question. I'd like to clarify it's actually 87 DOWs in telling. He just joined two more about it as we started this podcast. I mean, I think that framing was really accurate from Kane.

You know, I think that in the early stages of a Dow, obviously someone's going to play a pretty key role in getting it off the ground. I think that's necessary for it to get started. but what you start to see is that after that first operator is hired to sort of run the day-to-day, you know, those responsibilities start to get positioned outwards. And I think the more that people are taking key roles in DAWs that are not that specific leader, that's when the conversation around decentralization starts to happen more meaningfully. You know, to me when I heard that word, I think about what does it mean to have a voice in this project? You know, are my criticisms, thoughts and feedback actually being heard or are they being deflected?

You know, this is not a support desk, reopened a ticket on Zen desk and then have someone respond to you two weeks later. you know, there's a Discord channel where you can talk to the leader in real time and really voice your opinion. And with token-based governance, you know, have a way to show that in a way that actually is meaningful and impactful. You know, and I think that in the world before this, there was never really a structure to voice those opinions very meaningfully. And so to answer your question about how have they evolved over time, I think we're still figuring out what a doubt looks like at full decentralization scale. What we are seeing now is that leaders are becoming more comfortable empowering contributors to actually take on meaningful stakes in these projects. And over time,

I think that sets a really powerful precedent that I don't have to be best friends with Kane to work for his protocol. If I show up and I do meaningful work for a community, the people around me are going to see that and I'm able to own a significant stake in this network. Trache, you've been on the front lines with coordination inside of yearn and also started building out your own tooling to solve your own problems with regards to coordination in urine. How have you seen leadership inside of urine grow and develop? And what thoughts do you have on the leadership question with regards to Daos? Yeah, it's a really important question. and I really resonate with what both Kane and Cooper said. One important thing, a lot of people think that, you know,

an evolved corporations or organizations, Freudian slip there, evolved organizations that there should be no hierarchy. But that's really kind of just kind of logically false. I mean, the sun's bigger than the earth. Like there is hierarchies in the world. Like somebody knows more about something than me. That's important. What the problem is around rigid hierarchies, you know,

which is kind of by default, happens in illegal corporation. You have to have these kind of rigid structures. And Dow's what's really important and different is that you don't have to have it. But it doesn't mean that you don't need leadership. You still need leadership. And we really also need to develop new processes, new tooling that can support natural and fluid leadership. Like we say at Yerne and coordinate the leader is the one who knows what to do next, you know, and you really want to be able to support that type of leadership. That's super cool. The leader is the one who knows what to do next.

Next. Very cool. Let's talk about this. So I feel like DAOs are in the early stages maybe, but they're starting to enter sort of the crypto Zieg guys, the crypto hype cycle, if you will. And I feel like some people think, oh, yeah, all it takes, we'll take this idea that we have or this model we have and we'll sprinkle a little Dow on it. It'll just grow and like it'll be successful and it'll flourish and it'll be worth millions and everyone will be excited about it, but we've seen through history, I mean, right now is not the first generation of DAOs. We've seen many generations of DAOs. And those of you who've, you know, been in the space for a while, remember like cycles of previous failures. So I want to ask this question, because we've all been

a part of DAWS that have failed. We've been part of some that are successful. What is the difference? What's a differentiator between a successful DAO and an unsuccessful DAW? Trache, why don't you weigh in on that question. Yeah. So actually, I'm going to coin a term here. The three P's, we just came up with this today, purpose, principles, and process. And it's a nice way to talk about things that we're doing at year now and have been thinking a lot about. You have to know why you're doing something. And then you have to know who you are, who you're trying to be, you know, in the organization, what your principles are. And then how you're doing it. And if you're doing those three things in a Dow, it's really important.

I know some people will kind of don't like the idea of stating principles because it reminds them too much of like Google's bullshit principles or whatever, right? You don't have to do it in a boomer way. We all have principles, right? And actually most of the Tao's that I'm in or that I know, they actually have really strong vision and principles. Just often it's not stated. It's almost like if you state it, you're going to become an old dude.

Like it's kind of how you hold it. It's the poor. It changes. It's a lie. It reflects this. system, but it helps you remember what you're doing. So yeah, purpose, principles and process. Can I ask about the last one really quick, Trache, and a follow up? Because I feel like there are some DAOs out there that have maybe the first two sort of down. They get the principles and they

got the purpose, but they fall down on the process. And we do need to reinvent processes for this new organizational construct. Do you have any insight into successful DAWs from a process perspective? What do they do differently? Yeah, it's super important. But also important, you don't want to over-define processes. You know, you don't want to like rigidly structure everything. But you need process. How do you make decisions in a Dow? You know, of course, there's coin voting, but there's so many other types of decisions

that people need to make. You know, how do you, you know, elect members to the synthetics council? You know, how do you handle somebody, you know, being an asshole to somebody else? Like, there's a lot of types of processes that Tao's need. and it doesn't mean that they have to be the old bad style of business process, by the way, but you still do need process. Yeah, and I wonder how much of these things we can borrow from the old world from different organizational structures, for instance. Cooper, I want to turn the same question to you. I know you've been a part of 87 Dows.

And so successful ones versus unsuccessful ones, what are the big differentiators in your mind? I would say broadly oversimplifying, did it go to zero? So yes or no binary question. I would say if people are showing up on a recurring basis to meet and discuss the purpose of that Dow, it's considered successful in my opinion. I think the biggest unlock that we've seen from the first chapter of Dow's is that we now have liquid tokens representing ownership in these communities. You know, in the first chapter of Dow's, you typically had non-transferable shares that represented

social capital and some claim on assets, but it was fundamentally different from being able to expand and have an asset that traded on a secondary market. And so now we can use key metrics like token price as a way to sort of gauge sentiment there. But I think success of a Dow is actually much more on the human side. You know, if you go into a Discord, if you come to a community call, is that Dow scaling and operations? Is it consistently taking on new work and shipping new things? And if the answer is yes, I would say that that's successful in my mind. And if it clearly doesn't have a recurring contributor base that's coming back to discuss things, then I would say that that basically went to zero and

is a failure. So, again, Cooper is saying if the Dow has a pulse still alive, then that's some measure of success here. Let's talk about the megadowls, like the ones that are going to like dwarf companies in size and their success. What is it about, Kane? Is it like, is it talent? Is it about community? Is it about better process? Do they, are they, do they have first mover advantage? What do you think are the core things that make a Dow super successful? It made my experience, the things that have really enabled Dow's to be successful and have continuity is a sense of legitimacy, right, that the processes and, you know, the systems that the Dow uses are legitimate, right? And, you know, this is really important for some of the things that,

you know, both Kuber and Treg mentioned, like, people need to be able to come in and contribute and feel like, you know, there is some meritocratic principles that they're operating on, that it's not just some kind of click of people that, you know, can exclude you or whatever. So they need to open, they need to be transparent, they need to be legitimate, all of the processes that they're using. But I also think that there's an, you know, and this goes for the synthetics community. I think there needs to be a level of kind of buy-in of all the community members that they're all kind of working towards some shared vision, right? And if you go back to, you know, the bad days of synthetics, there were only like 20 people. But there was a really, you know, a strong sense of like

purpose, what we were doing. And everyone felt like they could contribute, ideas, concepts, work, whatever it was. It was very, you know, open, low barrier to entry community. And, you know, there was a lot of engagement from, you know, even back in the foundation days, myself and other, you know, members of the team with the community. You know, it was a collective effort that we were all working towards. Obviously, as we've, you know, moved more towards a Dow and deprecated those kind of legacy functions, it's, that's gotten even more powerful. But I think now today, you can turn up in synthetics, you can start contributing. And, you know, there's a, there's a real sense of, you know, legitimacy of the processes that we've implemented. Trache brought up the word purpose.

And all three of the panelists use that word in their most recent answer. And so I kind of want to dive into the values and visions that we see inside of DAOs. And I want to start with UKIN because, you know, synthetics and other, you know, defy DAOs like UNISWOP or YERN have a very concrete purpose, right? Like, urine is to optimize yield. Synthetics is to generate a synthetic asset trading platform. And then we have DAOs like bankless Dow, which is a little bit more nebulous in their vision, right? Like it's to propagate the bankless meme, the bankless message, and bankless infrastructure and education, which is not as specific as simply just like, you know, maximizing trading volume or synthetics market cap. So, so let's start with what you think is the

values and visions of synthetics and how that plays a role in maybe Dow membership, Dow organization, Dow coherence. But what is overall the role of values and visions for a Dow to succeed? I think within synthetics, the kind of, you know, primary guiding factor for us has just been solving hard problems, you know, like iteratively experimenting towards a solution to this, you know, very difficult problem of how do you have a crypto collateralized, you know, network of synthetic assets. and we've had a lot of iteration and a lot of experimentation and not all of it's been successful, but we've always had this very kind of open-minded approach that we test things and, you know, anyone can come in and suggest something that they think would be, you know, a good potential solution. And so I think that that kind of overarching principle has allowed us to be very fluid in how we've kind of tackled problems. We haven't locked into this is the thing that we do and we only do it this way.

And everything outside of that is kind of excluded. The solutions space is open with synthetics. But I think even more broadly outside of trying to build a synthetic asset platform, more like over time, my sense is that the community is as kind of interested and as driven by this idea of coordination, right, and actually building a governance framework that is legitimate and can allow this to operate. Now, the fact that we need to be decentralized

for a whole bunch of reasons, you know, has kind of been a forcing function for us to get this right. But we've started this process a long time ago, and it's been a continuous process of moving decision-making more and more into the hands of token holders. So I think that that maybe, you know, Vatala kind of talked about this, like DGov versus D5. In my mind, you know, the DGov part of synthetics is probably more important than the D5 part of synthetics.

You know, in 20 years' time, when we look back, the experiments that we ran on on governance will probably be far more important for the overall ecosystem than the experiments we ran on synthetic assets. turning to you Cooper Kane is the you know the like we said in the intro the benevolent prefrontal cortex of one specific Dow but I think you might be up to 80

Dow's at this point now in the call and so with all these Dow's that you're a part of how is values and visions an important component of all these different DAOs? What's the general role of values and visions and DAOs? Yeah so I'd start by saying that most of the DAOs that I am are more social clubs

than they are financial protocols and so I think fundamentally that view on the way that the Dow was meant to operate changes sort of the focus. You know, I'd say for a lot of the DAOs that I'm in, it's about meeting people online. It's about finding a sense of purpose and community in the way that you spend your time on the internet. And I think when you start to think about values from that perspective, it's less outcome driven. You know, if I can go into a Discord community and meet three people in my local city and make a friendship online, that's kind of the end state that I'm driving forwards towards. And I think that when you start to think about culture as a means for value accrual and for sort of

just identity, you start to get into very different situations. And so I'd say a lot of the stuff happening right now around the NFT market with profile pictures, a lot of stuff happening around social clubs like friends with benefits. You notice that there's not sophisticated financial products being built. But when you look under the surface, you notice that people are far more interested in governance because they feel a sense of purpose and ownership over the way that they're contributing. And as you scale that outwards, I think the mission here is to make sure that no matter where you go in the world, any city at any time, you can find someone that has a shared value as you and go and hang out and have a good time, grab a beer, grab a coffee or whatever. And so long as there's,

you know, these sort of pockets around the world to meet community members, I think the values of the Dow is simply make friends online. We can do that well. It's a successful down in my book. Treyk, take us home on this one. What is the role of values and visions inside of a Dow? Well, it really helps align people's effort and helps unlock their creative energy, you know. So knowing what you're headed towards and how you're going to get there. So, you know, it's an active living discussion at urine. The urine kind of came from chaos and we're growing

all these new organs all the time. But there are principles that matter to the people at urine like action, creativity, innovation, initiative, collaboration, and integrity. You know, like what I find in urine and in many places in DFI is that not just trying to make a ton of money

and like take over the world, you're trying to do something more meaningful, you know? And that's, I think, where a lot of also the organization stuff comes in. I really resonate with Kane is saying, like, when I look at the things that are most exciting to me, it's like how we are learning to coordinate. And we're doing really hard things, you know, and doing it, you know, with no nets. We're walking this tightrope.

And you need incredible trust and incredible integrity to coordinate like that. Trache, I want to ask you this question about like Dow size. Like David and I have talked about from the earliest stages of bankless that this whole crypto movement is about social scalability, essentially, scaling human coordination, right? And we have this hardwired constraint called Dunbar's Law or Dunbar's number, which is like inside of our biology and inside of our DNA. And that's the idea that any human being has a hard time managing over 150 personal connections. So I'm curious about DAOs as we think about like the size, the optimal size for a DAO.

Like what is the optimal size for a DAO? Sometimes it seems like DAOs can be very successful early on when you've got a core team dedicated and focused, almost like a mini, mini startup, if you will. But then like can we scale beyond that? or are Dow's meant to be sort of small, tight-knit teams? What's your take on the optimal size for a Dow and how it might scale in the future? I think there's so many different types of things that people will use Dow's to do, you know. And often when we're talking about Dunbar's number or looking at research from like Mark Granaveter or Bill Putnam around weak ties and social cohesion, you know, you're thinking about certain types of activities in certain environments.

But in DAOs, there's going to be even every type of activity. Like, I could be part of a science fiction book club DAO with tens of thousands of people. And if the decisions they're making is just what book are we reading next, that'll be a pretty effective DAO. But if that DAW is trying to do things like create an incredibly complicated piece of software with a certain design, et cetera, it's going to be hard to do that with so many people. You need a smaller group to do that, or at least you need groups of smaller groups that can coordinate in an effective way.

So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But I think we'll see DAOs from one person to billions of people. Kane, for what synthetics is done, you guys started as sort of a very small, even like a centralized team. And now it's this decentralized community. What's your take on a Dow's size and how that has scaled with synthetics? So just for us to go back, you asked a question earlier about that. actually there was a question about

early DAOs, right? And I think one of the issues that we had with early DAOs is the DAO created some fear in people to have this like unconstrained thing that was just like deployed immutable and you know, it could go wrong

in all kinds of fun ways. And I think that then a lot of the kind of subsequent DAOs that launched were really just, bullshit dows, right? Like synthetics was not a dow. MakerDAO was not a Dow, right? Just because it had Dow in the name did not mean it was a Dow, right? It was a foundation. It was run by, you know, one or two people. It's only been, you know, in the last like, what, three weeks or something that Maker Dow actually became a Dow, right, by winding up the foundation and kind of, you know,

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

there's no question that there's a lot of room for better tooling in the Dow space. You know, things like snapshot, safe snap, you know, compound governance module. There's definitely stuff out there, but there's a lot more work that needs to happen. But when you've got something like synthetics, I think you are kind of inclined to just roll your own tooling to an extent. And one of the things that I've been pushing for within the community is for us to kind of try and get this tooling a little bit more accessible so that other people can use it. And I think that that's a really big thing that we need to be pushing for all dows. If you build something cool, urine does a really good job with this.

You know, as I said, compound has done some really cool stuff, balancer, you know, snapshot. Like you, the onus is on you to get it out there and, you know, make it accessible for people to use. I think that's really critical. And, you know, it's something that it's like it should be a really, you know, important part of not just building your own tooling, but making sure that it's tooling that's accessible to the rest of, you know, the crypto community, because that's the only way we can kind of test and experiment and iterate on these things. So Cooper, how about you, want to bring you in on this, the same question about Dowside? So Jeff Beza, I think Amazon has implemented in the past something called like the two pizza rule, where no meeting size should be larger than the amount of people who can eat from like two pizzas.

So like if you run out of slices, your meeting's too big. It's the idea. And that's the idea that like large numbers make things inefficient, ineffective, hard to make decisions. Do you think there's an optimal Dow size? I mean, Trach said kind of it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But what have you seen from your travels? I would say that for the core working groups of a DAO, anywhere from five to 10 people that have legitimate responsibilities and that feel really good to me.

I think having a circle for passive contributors to come in and contribute makes a lot of sense, but being able to assign key ownership roles to five to 10 people and feeling confident they can always report back to a wider structure has been what I've seen work well. You know, I'll call out that there's no one-size-fits-all Dow model. I'm in one Dowell called Fire Eyes where it's four of us and we are very intentional about not opening that up. We want to keep that up for members. You know, I'm in another Dow called Friends with Benefits that has 1,500 members in counting, and both of those are working extremely well. You know, on Monday, we had a town hall where 270 people came together. We had about 10 of our 80

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

I'm going to put you into a team to work on that. I think that's the single biggest hurdle we need to make Dow's more scalable. And that's something that I'm spending a lot of my time on to figure out. Onboarding talent specifically, you're talking about Cooper. Correct. Cooper, you earlier said that you are largely a part of like social, DOS, and so I want to ask this question to you. I think I could argue pretty effectively that the goal of all DOWs collapses down into increasing capital. And that's extremely obvious when it comes

to DOWs like YERN, which is trying to put a bunch of YFI and ETH on the Treasury, or DOWs like Uniswap, which is trying to take trading fees, and they all have their own tokens, and they want token price to go up. Do you agree that the goal of all DOWs is to increase its capital? And I also want to put into into your brain, our episode with Joel Mnegro really opened up the definition of what capital really is. It's not just the financial capital that's on the balance sheet, but it's perhaps the social capital and human capital, which maybe that fits into the social Dow conversation. But in your opinion, what is like the end game for Dow's? What is the goal for all Dow's? Yeah, I would definitely double click on the fact that capital is both financial and social.

I think increasing relevance in the world is extremely important. And so when I think about, you know, what is the purpose of these social DAOs? How do you value culture? You know, this is a question that I ask a lot. I think in crypto so far, we've been able to value financial assets, which has been fantastic. But now that you're seeing a lot more interest in sort of meme and speculative investing, what does it mean to place a price tag on a community ethos or to place a price tag on a fashion brand or something like that? And so I think it's a new asset class fundamentally.

But to answer your question directly, I would say the mission for all DAO's is to increase. relevancy and mindshare in the world. And whatever you define as capital to be able to define that, that's kind of what a DAO looks like to make. Treyk, with the goal of yearn, is the endgame simply just to collect as much fees as possible and have the DAO be as well capitalized as possible? Or is that overly reductive? Yeah, I think that's one of the goals. But the goal is also to just continue to find new ways to innovate, to create, to work together, to improve the space. Yield aggregation is the thing that we're focused on now, but that could change. Who knows?

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

But, you know, I think that they're, you know, creating public goods in a sense, right? You know, when you're building this tooling. And so, yes, like in a very narrowly defined sense, like synthetics is about expanding the capital, you know, the assets on the management and the market cap. But I think that that can throw off some positive things that are outside the scope of just capital accrual. Guys, this is a hot panel. we've still got some more things to cover, including Vitalik says coin voting sucks in his recent article. I want to get into that topic. Also, talk about opportunities. So the average listener

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To keep up to speed with Arbitrum, follow them on Twitter at Arbitrum and join their Discord. Hey, guys, we are back. Fantastic panel so far. We've got a few more topics to cover. We've got Kane, we've got Cooper, we've got Trache illuminating us on the world of Dow's. How to Dow. I want to get to an article that Vitalik published actually earlier this week. And Kane, you made reference to it earlier, this idea of DGov being really important.

Let's figure out decentralized governance. Maybe that is the biggest thing that crypto is actually doing. Maybe that's even bigger than going bankless and bigger than DFI. I don't know. But one of the points he made was kind of like coin voting sucks, right? Like we can do better than simple coin votes in how we govern our D5 protocols and govern our DOWs. I'm going to throw out something from his summary here. Coin voting is attractive because it feels credibly neutral.

Anyone can go and get some units of governance token on uniswap. In practice, however, coin voting may well only appear secure today precisely because of the imperfections in its neutrality. namely, this is an important part, large portions of the supply staying in the hands of a tightly coordinated clique of insiders. So I want to ask you, does coin voting suck? And if so, what's better? Where can we evolve to? Kane, what's your take? I mean, you know, Maker, aside from being an incredible solution to the stable point problem, was also kind of a natural experiment in proving that coin voting sucks. Like, I think pretty definitively put the nail in that coffin that, like,

direct coin voting has so many negative aspects to it, including, like, chilling effects that's, you know, lack of participation, lack of engagement, all kinds of things, right? So I'm 100% in agreement with Battalik that the direct coin voting on kind of individual proposals is really suboptimal. the thing that we this view that we had I guess in synthetics was like how do we maintain rough consensus while overlaying some control for token holders right like how do you balance those two things and so in the early days it was like just discord right you had a personality in discord it could be a non whatever and that was the kind of you know one person one vote rough consensus

about you know specific proposals and then I think that over time it evolved into a coin voting system but that coin voting system was sort of established in such a way as to ensure that it wasn't one coin one vote it was sort of you know we applied like quadratic weighting to voting you can only vote for one council member so you can't run run the table and get all the council members on there so there were a number of things that we did to kind of constrain the direct point voting and it creates something that was more robust. So, you know, there's still a lot of experiments in that direction, I think, around delegation and representative democracy. But in my mind, that's kind of a hybrid thing.

Because I still think you need some control for token holders. You don't want to divorce, you know, the tokens from governance. But you also don't want to have it so coupled, you know, so tightly coupled that you get the, you know, all of the issues that we've seen with Maker and some of the other direct token voting systems. Treyk, what's your take on this? The suckiness of coin voting, and is there something less sucky? The suckiness is enormous of coin voting. You know, I mean, there's so much this question.

I love Vitalik's article. Agreed with it very much. You know, you need, I don't even know where to start. You know, urine has developed a whole system of governance in order to do both listen to Wi-Fi holders and allow for people to make independent autonomous decisions without having to go to whip votes for every new decision, which is just a nightmare. And, you know, one of the things that happens, I think, in crypto is we get so obsessed with adversarial environments and blockchain, and we think that everything's supposed to work that way.

But that doesn't make any sense. There is a role for trust. A world with no trust in it is not what I want to be in. But the beautiful thing is that because blockchain creates this incredibly strong, trustless foundation, you see so much more trust flourishing on top of it. And it's not about just open trust, do whatever. It's about being thoughtful with how you create structures and how you bestow trust and making it transparent so that one of the nice things about trust is that it can be broken

and it can teach you how to make new systems to avoid that happening in the future and to get stronger and to share things in a better way. And so we develop all of these tools. You're in governance too. We've been having this awesome collaboration with synthetics recently looking at our two sides of different ways of governance, which both have solved similar problems in different ways. Neither of us have done direct on-chain voting for direct control of treasury or contracts, you know, for good reason. It can be, just like the italic lays out, there's a lot of ways. can go wrong. Cooper, what do you think about this coin voting? You know, I struggle with this topic a lot. I

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

just sort of the emphasis on quadratic voting. You know, I think that Kane touched on this as well, but we're slowly shifting into a world where it appears that, you know, the amount of individuals voting on something is the larger signal than the people with the most capital voting on that. And so I think that trying to run more experiments in that direction where you're encouraging participation, you know, you're allocating capital to governance and you're trying to make sure that people recognize this is something to pay attention to. I think we can get to a place where once we have more diverse opinions in the conversation, we can start to see more meaningful conversations around this. But right now, I think that for the most part, it's the same hundred token holders voting on

every protocol. And I think to me, that's a very small subset to make definitive, you know, decisions about whether or not systems are broken when in reality we're still so early in the conversation of what global governance would look like. I think that's a really good point. And while I also agree with the Vitalik's article, Coined Voting sucks, I think it's also important to like take a step back and look at all of our existing legacy systems suck more, right? Like when's the last time you or any users had any influence in what Twitter does or Uber drivers? They have any influence in their network, right?

So like even the basic zero to one of now users in the community, to your point earlier, Cooper, have a vested interest in this network. That is a big step forward. So, yeah, coin voting still sucks, and we can drive towards better solutions. But, like, everything in the old world sucks way more. Like, I want a piece of every network I am a part of as a user in this world. This is what crypto has taught me. Yeah, maybe just that.

I think, I got it. Yeah, sorry. I think, like, Battalic's counter argument to that, if I could be so bold to speak for him, would be that, like, you can have ownership of a thing without, you know, resorting to like direct token voting, right? Like those things don't need to be coupled. And yes, like the ownership component is far more powerful of the thing that existing systems.

But you can have you can have an ownership component with no governance rights, right? And, you know, that would still be better than, you know, the status quo because you don't have governance right now, governance rights or, you know, or a stakeholder. in these systems like Uber or whatever. So I think that we should be careful not to couple those things too tightly. Good point. Cooper, you have anything to add there? Before we go on?

Yeah, I mean, I think that canes exactly accurate there. I think the education around why governance matters is something that I care very deeply about. You know, I don't think that a lot of people understand that if they take the time to learn about governance, there's financial freedom at stake, there's social freedom at stake. You know, I think for a lot of people,

when we hear governance, we think about electing the next president, which is a conversation that has not been naturally very exciting to them. What I've found a lot of purpose in crypto is being able to use governance as a means to work on what I love. And so outside of the mechanics for how governance is used, I think that being able to educate people that by participating in the deepest nuance of the networks that you know and love, you can work on literally whatever you want in the world.

And I think as we get to a point of figuring out what that looks like, you know, the mechanics for how we do governance will get more defined, you know, as that kind of opportunity gap closes and everyone recognizes if I spend 10 hours a week on a governance forum, chances are I'm going to make more money than any salary could ever pay me in my life. Guys, so far this conversation has really been about DAO's holistically. So I want to actually turn the conversation to individuals who make up these DAOs and how a DAO lifestyle is different than the lifestyles that we would find ourselves in a typical legacy job. And so Cooper, as somebody who's part of all these social DAO's,

How does what does a Dow lifestyle mean to you? What does it mean to work for a Dow? And how does that change how an individual can live their life? And how do you explain it to your parents? The great question. The way I live my life now is ownership stakes and all of the products that I contribute to. So I'm slowly supplementing any form of consistent income on a fiat basis to just ownership stakes and networks. And I think that principle of going into a community and being able to earn a significant ownership portion for the value you contribute,

It's extremely scary, you know, to my parents, then me telling them, hey, I'm not going to take USD per month to pay my rent. I'm going to earn magic internet tokens. They're going to be worth more. You know, for the last three years, they were like, what the hell are you doing? But, you know, as this started to pan out more, and we saw specifically this last year, those ownership stakes become valuable. I think that it's easy to recognize if you go into a network and you start working for ownership over capital, there's going to be a path forward there. I think to answer that question very directly of how I spend my time, it's a connector role. You know, I think that the single most important thing to do for DAOs is putting people into the right pockets together and then helping

to coordinate that effort. And so a lot of my time is basically identifying who are the key contributors in that Dow. How do I make sure that they're actually owning things that matter? And how do I make sure they're touching base with all the other people that know what matters so that the ball is moving forward and they're communicating that to every other member of that Dow. Trigg, can you kind of compare and contrast what your life was like before you started working at Yearn and how just the lifestyle of working inside of a Dow has changed how you live your life? Well, I was writing a science fiction novel before I started working here. And so it's pretty different.

But before that, I ran a company, you know, and it's super different in so many ways. Like one of the things that I'm most passionate about with working in Dow's is creating, I call it like the party bike, you know, a system where on a party bike, anybody can pedal as much as they want. You know, somebody wants to steer, they can drive. And you want to stop peddling and just chill and drink your beer? That's fine. Like, Dows can be the system that harvest all the action from all of the contributors in any way that they want to contribute it, which really supports this kind of self-sovereign, individual responsibility of what is it that I care about?

What do I want to work on? I am not going to sign my life away as a wage slave for X number of hours. Any hour of my time is worth more than a month. than money, you know. But if I just do those things that I'm called to, money flows through the magic of Dows and through the magic of crypto, just like Cooper was saying. Like, I just, when I started at Yerne, I didn't know, I like wasn't involved that much in crypto until last summer. And I just showed up at Yerun. I was like, holy shit, Dows are incredible. I'm just, nobody's in charge here. I'm just going to make the role that I want to do. And I'm going to do that. And it has, I mean,

extraordinarily beneficial in my life. It was wonderful. What is that role, by the way, Drake? That's a good question. I mean, I work on governance and compensation and organization stuff. Yeah, that's my most... It's stuff, Ryan. So, fun fact, Kane also was working on a book before he came to synthetics. If you guys didn't know that. But, Kane, you've been a serial entrepreneur, dare I say, workaholic for like years now. So as somebody who's had a perspective on the laborers inside of synthetics, as well as yourself, what is work like inside of synthetics? And how do you see that as a model for DAOs at large?

Yeah, so we had a really interesting contrast, right? Because Blue Shift, the company that I found before, synthetics, which was this payment gateway that a bunch of the crypto exchanges in Australia used to get around banks. because banks didn't like crypto back then. They still kind of dove. They're a little bit more open to it. So in our office, synthetics kind of grew, you know, out of the blue shift office, right? There was, you know, there were kind of similar people working on it.

And so you had this very, like, rigid corporate hierarchical structure with, like, investors and, you know, a CEO and, like, all these different things. And then you had this, like, crazy thing over, you know, the other side of the office. right, which was a very flat structure even from the beginning. But I think the primary difference when we transitioned from foundation to Dow is we went from a model where people had to do what I said, right? Like they were actually obligated to do what I said, right? And, you know, I like to think that I was pretty open about, you know, collaborating with

people and listening to them and all that sort of stuff. But the reality is that if I said, you have to do this, like you had to do it, right? And then we went to this model where that didn't exist anymore and you didn't have to do anything that I said, right? You didn't know who the fuck you want it. And so now we've got, you know, all of these different stakeholders in the project. And people just do whatever they think, like Treyk was saying, you know, they make their own roles, they carve out positions for themselves, et cetera. And it's a very different working environment. It's much more open.

And I would argue a lot more fun. It's a bit more chaotic, but it's more fun than a rigid hierarchy. Trick, I want to ask this next question to you. Dow's we've seen are a lot looser in their borders, right? If you're a part of a Dow, you can freely become part of another Dow, and there's no jealousy, there's no employment contract like there are with legacy companies. And that's kind of opened up the design space for the products that DAWS can build. And so now that members can be a part of multiple DAWs and DAWs can less, more freely collaborate with other DAO's,

what kind of things can we unlock with Dow to Dow collaboration? Now that there's less of a competitive environment and more of a collaborative environment with Dao's, what can we do now? Yeah, it's a really cool concept, really. And the thought experiment, what if one third of Apple employees also worked at Microsoft, you know, like what, or if that was the dominant paradigm

for the feing cadre? I think so much. And I think in order to get there, I mean, we can do so much in terms of just collaboration. and really shifting what is the purpose of what we're doing. Is the purpose to create these gigantic, immortal company entities that extract resources and turn it into work product? Is that the purpose of what we're doing here?

No. So we have all these trappings from the past, like this corporate veil and legal boundaries, and oh, I've got this salary and this compensation, and I've got this lock-in, investing, all this stuff. And we import all this stuff into crypto just because, you know, we haven't invented anything better yet in a lot of ways. But a lot of what I'm working on is like better ways to do compensation. So you don't even need to worry what other projects you're working on.

Who cares if you're moonlighting or if you're working on another project. If you're bringing value to a project, it should be rewarded. So we need more fluid systems for enabling that type of, you know, contribution. Cooper, since you're a part of so many social dows, do you notice a lot of the same members in one Dow being a part of another Dow? And how does that change the dynamics of all the different dows you're a part of? I think it just encourages positive some games. You know, we see a lot of the core contributors to social clubs leaning into every community that they're in. They'll do recurring panels in one now, the host workshops in another one. And you start to see that the camaraderie in that

sector is a lot stronger because people are sharing everything together. You know, to Kane's earlier point about open sourcing valuable tooling, I've been recommending so many people use their vesting contracts, the liquidity mining contracts they may have been, you know, the market's standard. And I think in the next three to six months here, we're going to see those same level of open source tooling for more social applications. So things like coordinate, I think are a fantastic example around getting paid. We're now seeing stuff around like tokenized membership events. So for FTV we've built like a gatekeeper product that allows you to go to IRL events using an RSVP system. You know, so something that we're now going to open up and allow other communities to use.

And I believe over the next like year or so here, we're going to see both like financial products that are shared between communities and more important, you know, social coordination mechanisms. so that if you have a group of 20 people on the internet, how do you assign identity and reputation? And the more we can figure out systems on that front, I think the more we're going to win together as a whole. Cooper, just a quick follow-up on this. Like, at some level, I used to say this in the early days of defy

that it feels like we're beta testing. We're all beta testers in the world's future financial system, right? It still feels that way. But, like, I also feel that way with DOWS, right? You're talking about, like, all of these ways to participate in community. Well, like, what has community? just about everything, like everything. Like, you talk about artists, you talk about like, you know, fan clubs.

You talk about like the video gaming market. These are all little pockets of the community. It feels very much like crypto is just alpha beta testing. All of this infrastructure that the rest of the world is about to use. Any reflections on that, on how big this could get? Yeah, the biggest mental model I've been following for a doubt specifically is community meets product, not product meets community. You know, in the world previously, teams would build a product and try and find users to go out and adopt it.

With Dow's, you are building a community and that community is deciding what to build together. And even if it's the shittiest product in the world, they're all going to go out and go to bat for it because they built it together. And I think that precedent of only building things because of community thinks it's valuable actually helps us to identify what should be built and reduces a lot of the friction around things that don't really matter. Kane as the again the prefrontal cortex of of synthetics which is a very goal-oriented project it has very explicit outcomes that it wants would you ever notice the people the contributors of this synthetic ecosystem have their attention drift elsewhere to other projects and how was that ever a problem or was that kind of cool?

you may recall defy summer that was very distracting sir it was unbelievably distracting oh my god but you know what like and this is where I think the difference between you know go back to like you know my former life as the CEO of Blue Shift versus you know the founder of synthetics it was it would not have been acceptable

for all of the stuff of Blue Shift to just like run down the street chasing after some fucking crazy thing, right? Like that just was not like that wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. Right. Like there's a lot of oversight around what people are doing. They're very defined roles. You had, you know, people within the synthetics community like helping out to launch new projects. They were like, you know, helping out with community, helping out with coordination. They were just yield farming themselves. They were degening. They were, you know, doing all kinds of crazy shit. They were, you know, doing code reviews for people, um, audits. Like, and there was no real

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

open view of, you know, letting people do whatever they wanted. And, you know, and now with the current kind of structure, what we're trying to work out is how do we have some level of coordination within the core contributors, right? We're paid. They're paid a stipend monthly to work on specific things, to make sure that the outcomes that we're looking for, you know, from those people are kind of met. But it's a hard problem, right?

Like when you start from a very open kind of framework, it's hard to apply retrospectively, you know, some rigidity to it. So we'll see how that goes. But it's definitely an experiment that's running right now. It's super interesting because you definitely want accountability, but you also in the Dow world have such loose ties on talent. But, you know, I think that can actually be an advantage for crypto in that. that like, hey, talent's not going to want to work for handcuffs anymore.

Like your Google, your Silicon Valley non-compete clause, like forget that, right? It doesn't exist in crypto. So I do think this is going to be a boon for bringing talent in this space. This new way of working is going to catch on. I want to ask another question to the panelists. David and I have had a reoccurring discussion, right? So this term is Dow that we've been seeing the entire time. Decentralized autonomous organization, Dow, right?

the A in that, sometimes I find a little bit not troubling, not there's intentional deceit, but like doesn't necessarily reflect the meme of Dow, right? Because a lot of what we're talking about is not autonomous. By autonomous, we just mean like written in code, right? Ideally immutable code on something like Ethereum, for instance. Do you think that these are really dues digital organizations instead of Tao's that we've been talking about this whole time? And how do you square that in your mind?

Is the meme sort of wrong? Kane, what are your thoughts? Yeah, so, you know, my sense of autonomous, even if it wasn't the original intent, and I think it kind of wasn't, like, again, if you go back to D Dow, right, the idea was that it was this, you know, set of contracts running on Ethereum

that, you know, didn't require any intervention, right? But again, I think what is that intervention? because it still required humans, right? Humans were an input to the process of the doubt, right? So it had to compel humans to want to do something, right? Which was like put up proposals to be funded, et cetera. So it was never like autonomous to like the human species, right? It was never just a piece of software that was going off and doing something that never interacted with humans, right?

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

the DAO. And that rule set can obviously change, right? You know, there's, there's DAO's that evolve and the rules change. But even the changing of the rules is encoded in the Dow itself, right? So, you know, there's this evolutionary concept, but still there is this sense that they're distinct and self-contained. And that's where the autonomous would really resonates. Treyk, what do you think about this? Way in for us. Yeah, that's an awesome explanation. And Yeah, I like to think about the autonomous part as kind of recursive or halarctic, which is that the whole object is autonomous. And then Dow is really this kind of soup of human and software objects all functioning autonomously.

And the people inside the Dow are also autonomous. And I think it really brings it back to that core crypto, a value of sovereignty, self-sovereignty. And it's like, I am responsible for my actions with the other people I work with. and together we are responsible for our actions. We are autonomous. Cooper, I love that description that Tray just made of this software and human soup. That's really what it feels like. It's being in like a stew with other human beings intermixed with code.

Do you have any thoughts on this question of how autonomous are Dow's or should we even care? Yeah, I think to echo some of the earlier comments, when I think of the word autonomous, I think about independence. You know, we've heard multiple panelists say that many contributors in Dow's are self-defining their own role. They're self-defying their own responsibilities. They're leaning into something that feels very empowering to them. And so I think of autonomous, I think less about will this thing work in the absence of humans? I think more about will this thing work with people feeling fulfilled from the work that they do in that Dow organization? And so when you start to look

around at all these Dow's and sort of judge the mental health of the people working on them, I think you're going to find that it's much more autonomous and sort of how those people are living their day-to-day life. And an aggregate, I think that that energy just brings about such a new level of productivity that, you know, I could care less, honestly, if it's being run by software or humans, but so long as there's sort of a collective consciousness that's pushing it forward in a meaningful way, I think that's the degree of autonomy that I measure. I think the original definition of DAO's really focused on the humans on the periphery and code at the center definition of DAWs, where we, and this was these very pine the sky ideas

of like Uber and Airbnb on the blockchain and Uber instead of being like a bunch of bureaucrats with a bunch of people in the middle with the value creators on the outside we could just replace the inside with code and the value creators would just talk to this robotic like hive mind Uber app that was somehow a bunch of contracts on Ethereum and there would be actually no internal human organizations

and I think the where we've gone from that OG version of DAOs which we actually have never actually seen before to where we are now which is kind of how everything is a DAO the way that that definition really changed is the A started to be inclusive of human incentives. And so now we are just making big assumptions that humans are going to act rationally. And basically our entire industry

is based on that assumption, that human incentives are now going to make this thing take the next step forward. And so that's really where we regain control and appropriateness over that word autonomous in digital organizations. I just wanted to add a few sense of my own thoughts there. So David, are you saying you're okay with it,

being called doused now. That's what I heard you say. Well, it was, it's not like we're ever going to be able to change that. I do think the more appropriate name is dues, but did for digital organizations, but it's, that ship has absolutely sailed. Yeah, remember we tried to open finance rather than the defy. Yeah, no luck. We got slathered on that. Don't worry. I remember it very well. Thanks, I love to guess. Guys, I want to turn to the last few questions that we have in this panel, and this panel has been absolutely mind-blowing. I'm going to have to go back and listen to it myself. And on the bankless program, we are obsessed with the concept of slaying Moloch. He is the god of coordination failure.

And we want him to retreat forever and ever and ever. And that is kind of the through line that we think this crypto industry can really help us achieve in this world. And so from your perspective, how do Dows fit into this conversation? How can Dows help slay Moloch? Cooper, let's start with you. I mean, in short, I think that communities, I've never had the opportunity to share financial and social capital together. So when you think about the way that you spend your time online,

it's not about going and working nine to five to spend your time on the weekends, doing what you love. I think DOWS are the means in which we can work on the things we love and get paid for that. And so as far as it relates to Mollock and sort of slang coordination failure, I think when you start to shift focus away from financial capital as ends meet to instead like financial capital as a mean to work with your peers in a more productive manner, I think DOWS are the single most important way that we can get to a place that feels really positive in that conversation.

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

Kane, why don't you take us home on this one? How can Daos slay Molok? So one of my favorite books of all time is Inadequate Equilibria by Lazio-Wiakowski. And I think when I was reading it, it was like 2017, 2018, something like that. And to me, it was almost like a roadmap of like every problem that like better incentive mechanisms and coordination games could solve right like you know the book goes through like 10 different things right that like are just kind of equilibrium that exists in the world that you know are kind of hard to break right there's a bunch of examples like you know replication studies and you know academic literature, the fact that like no one incentivized to do that. You just want to, you know,

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

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to do it, but I hope that someone somewhere, you know, gets this idea and kind of runs with it because, you know, it's a really hard thing to kind of publish distribute academic research, right, and peer review and do all that stuff. It takes a lot of resources. And, you know, to Trade's point, like, corporations were the only ones that could kind of accumulate enough resources to do something like that on a global scale. And now we have doubts, right? Like, governments maybe were like the alternative, the governments are pretty slow and

shitty, and corporations kind of rings around them for a long time. But now we have these dows that have the ability to accumulate the resources to actually do things on a global scale and, you know, can basically reset incentives and create new economic incentives and set up a new coordination games that can really shift the equilibrium, you know, on a number of these problems. That's super cool framing. Government's slow and shitty corporations a little bit faster. Dow's order of magnitude faster than that may be able to tackle new class of problems.

Super cool. That book was called inadequate equilibrium. If you missed it, as Kane mentioned, adding it to my. reading list, maybe go join a reading club Dow and get more of those recommendations. Guys, this has been a fantastic panel. And I want to end with this question. So we're just talking super big picture, right? Like pie in the sky, like how is this going to, this social technology going to change the face of humanity? How's it going to make the world better? I want to zone in on you guys individually, right? So tell us about kind of your Dow story. How have Dow's changed

your life and in what ways? Cooper, let's start with you. I mean, I can confidently say DOWs are the single only reason that I have the name I do in crypto right now. You know, my entire trajectory in the space is owed to DOWs, you know, starting out from Mollick Dow and Meta cartel working my way in for shares for writing articles to then getting involved with DFI DFI to now more of these social clubs. If DOWs were not a thing, I simply wouldn't be here today. And so I think for anyone out there that's looking to get involved, I'm not a developer by trade. I have absolutely zero technical skills, but the fact I've been able to build a career on the back of this cool new internet technology solely thanks to Dow's. I think it's an incredibly powerful precedent that if you go out

of your way to find people to work with online, you know, there are going to be financial opportunities greater than anything you could have ever imagined. 21st century upward mobility. Cooper, do you mind if I ask how old you are for some of the folks listening? You're like in your shoes? Yeah, I just turned 26 in June. Crazy guys. Kaine, how about you? How have Dow's changed your life? I think, you know, as As someone who's done a lot of startups and as someone who has tried to tackle some pretty hard problems and failed to do so, the ability to kind of coordinate people, coordinate capital and work on really hard problems is, you know, I think something that just wasn't

really contemplated in like the startup world, you know, 20 years ago. There was this idea you had to go to VCs. What VCs would fund is a bunch of old white guys on Sand Hill Road, right? Like the solution space of problems that they were willing to tackle is very, very narrow, as much as they would like to think that's not the case. And I think that Dow's and, you know, crypto capital formation and Dow capital formation just opens up a world of different problems that can be tackled, you know, and it's incredible. And I'm obviously super excited to be involved in that.

Trache, how about you? How have Dow's changed your life? Well, you know, yeah, I mean, I worked really, really hard for many years, starting companies, running companies, doing project work for clients, and it burned me out hard. You know, I tried to, I tried to bring in a lot of these new ideas into those old companies, like TL organizations and tried holocracy and things like that and worked okay. But, you know, I ended up like, you know, selling my last company a few years ago. ago and I was like, you know, I just spent time like a year just healing, you know, I was like from all that work.

I didn't really expect that I'd come back in anything like this. And, you know, when I found Dow's though, it was like, it was a few times in life where you're like, wow, this is like the combination of all the things I'm excited about. And I actually have the skills that I can really help this space. And so it's, yeah, it's brought me back into this kind of, you know, creating impact in the world. And another way has changed my life is it really challenges me personally. You know, it makes me question a lot of my assumptions about myself, a lot of my psychological

hangups, you know, because when you're in the space of like infinite possibility, you really have this chance to question what the fuck you're really doing, you know? And that's a beautiful question to ask, what do you really want? And Dow's helped me ask that. Super cool. Guys, I think there are hundreds of stories like this, maybe thousands of stories, but they're about to be hundreds of thousands of stories, maybe millions. DOWs are really going to change the face of how we organize collectively, how we do work in the future.

Like so many things, like I always think about this when we have a really insightful panel or bankless episode. It's just like you look out the world and the world sucks. Like it sucks sometimes. But crypto is something that gives each of us hope, right? Like I am optimistic because of crypto. And it's super exciting to see these new social technologies emerge in this way. and the spirit of optimism. And guys, thank you for making us even more optimistic on DOWs, panelists, Kane, Cooper, Treyk.

You guys have been phenomenal. We appreciate it. Thank you, guys. It's good fun. We did it around. Guys, if you're hanging on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe. David, I fit this one in. Like and subscribe again.

David's nodding his head. Happy about that. Risk and disclaimers, of course. Dow's are risky. Eat this risky. Bitcoin is so is crypto. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west.

This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.