Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Tally: The Software Layer for Tokenized Organizations - Dennison Bertram

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Tally is a software platform designed to support tokenized organizations, particularly Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and crypto communities. It provides tools for launching tokens, governing protocols, and enabling staking to foster community participation and growth. Tally facilitates onchain governance, allowing transparent and decentralized decision-making for managing funds, grants, and protocol upgrades. It powers major blockchain ecosystems like Arbitrum, ZKsync, Uniswap DAO and Wormhole DAO by providing interfaces for proposal creation, voting, and staking. The Tally Protocol further enhances this by offering a liquidity layer for governance tokens, that allow token holders to earn staking rewards while retaining voting rights and participating in DeFi.Topics covered in this episode:Dennison’s backgroundHas crypto won?Does privacy still matter?The vision behind TallyThe evolution of DAOsAre grassroots DAOs viable?Corporate vs. DAO PMFHow developer activity & contributors evolvedTally’s roadmapICO vs. IPOEpisode links:Dennison Bertram on XTally on XSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

I had felt that there's a lot of sort of like inequality in the sort of standard corporate system and how corporations work and how, you know, borders prevent, you know, sort of human capital from crossing them. I really thought that we could basically incorporate organizations on the internet rather than in legal jurisdictions and that we could use software to incorporate them. And this software could define the relationships and mechanisms by which organizations came to consensus. If you create an organization in software, it can actually scale to billions of people, billions of dollars, and it might exist for 15 minutes, something that's not possible

in the traditional world. And it brings incredible amounts of scale to creating organizations. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Ernst, and I'm speaking with Dennis and Bertram today, who is the CEO and co-founder of Talley, which is a decentralized governance platform. But before we get into all of that, these are our sponsors this week. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Corse 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like BitGo, Pintera Capital and Ledger trust Corus 1 with their acids. They support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos ensuring your stake,

is responsibly managed. Thanks to the advanced MEV research, you can also enjoy the highest staking rewards. You can stake directly from your preferred wallet, set up a white label note, restake your assets on eigenayer or symbiotic or use their SDK for multi-chain staking in your app. Learn more at chorus.1 and start staking today.

This episode is proudly brought to by NOSIS, a collective dedicated to advancing a decentralized future. NOSIS leads innovation with circles, NOSIS pay, and Metri, reshaping, open banking, and money. With Hashi and NOSIS VPN, they're building a more resilient privacy-focused internet. If you're looking for an L1 to launch your project, Nosis chain offers the same development environment as Ethereum with lower transaction fees. It's supported by over 200,000 validators making NOSIS chain a reliable and credibly neutral foundation for your applications. NOSISDAO drives NOSIS governance where every voice matters. Join the NOSIS community in the NOSISDAO forum today.

Deploy on the EVM-compatible NOSIS chain or secure the network with just one GNO and affordable hardware. Start your decentralization journey today at NOSIS. Cool. Dennis and it's super nice to have you on the show. Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Yeah.

you have been in Web3 for a very, very long time. Tell us about yourself and kind of like your provenance and what brought you into this space. Yeah, so I've been in Web 3 almost since the start. I really got involved in earnest in 2011 when I had read the Bitcoin white paper and really clicked for me at the time. It was just this thing that I read it and it just made total sense, right like you know having gone through like 2008 and sort of seen what you know happened in terms of like you know financial policy fiscal policy and you know what happened a lot of my friends in terms of just like what happened to their careers and jobs and opportunities uh bitcoin really just like stood out to me it's like oh this makes sense this is a narrative for the future and it was pretty

interesting at the time because there wasn't really i felt like anything else that was really competing for ownership of the future, right? And Bitcoin was this sort of like very revolutionary paper, but more revolutionary than I think people give it credit for. It was the, it was really a statement about using like the power of like math and mathematics to upend, you know, the control of the state over, over money, right? And it really leaned into this idea that like money is imaginary in the first place. And that means that, you know, anyone can create. it, but to be successful at creating it and not have the power of the state to sort of like, you know, enforce it. You had to use something that would be universally secure for everyone.

Of course, that was Matt. And, you know, that just struck me to sort of elegance of it. And, you know, it was something that I just immediately got into. So I, you know, started mining and got really involved in a lot of the early alt coins. And that was really my start. since then I've done a really a large number of things I started one of the first Bitcoin exchange of the Czech Republic a year later in 2012 that was a very scarring experience but it was very educational for a little while I was working like a Bitcoin hardware wallet I at the time I had a other career I was actually a very really well-known fashion photographer in Europe and I started a creative technology business so I had actually

started doing a lot of like creative technology implementations around a lot of stuff just in general as like the sort of fashion industry came online, but also around like the application of things like Bitcoin and supply chain tracking and how we could use it for providence of like art. You know, I was an early employee at Opens Eppelin and I first met Manu, one of the co-founders of Openzoplin in 2013 when he was working on a project called Proof of Existence. And that was like a timestamping service built on Bitcoin in 2013. and I had been really interested in using that to like do early NFTs, like using as like the provenance for art.

So, you know, I've been in this space for a really long time. That's at this point ancient history. Sometimes people talk about, you know, now on crypto Twitter, like how many cycles they've been and it stretches back all the way to like 2017. And, you know, it's funny because even in 2017, we had already done everything in a really strange way. You know, this sort of came up recently for me. I was at an event and people were talking about like decentralized AI and they were like really talking about like there's all this unused GPU power out there of like, you know, teams, you know, like people who've got extra GPUs so we can put them

them as decentralized network and decentralized processing. I was like, wow, you know, like crypto people were working on that in like 2013, you know, like a decade. Oh yeah. Yeah, but even before. Gorlum, right? There was made safe. And what was the other one? There was another one as well that they were trying to do these decentralized, you know, processing networks. And so it's funny to see, you know, to have been in the space so long to sort of see everything come around again and again and again. You know, we're sort of like back of that phase of like a bear market where we're all talking about like mass adoption.

And it's like, oh man, I've been like listening to the mass. mass adoption like it's almost here. People are like, we're still early. I'm like, really? Because I feel like I'm, I've lost hair. I've gone gray. You know, like I've been through this like countless times and like we're still not there yet.

It's still early. Right. So, you know, the journey's been very long. I think though, kind of interestingly, maybe finally, it's not that it's coming to an end, but like maybe finally like crypto. will move on, right? Like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty amazing that blockchain Bitcoin started as this really like political statement.

Like, we can, we can affect political change through code, through sort of like the free speech of like encryption. And, you know, that power has, has won, right? Like, you know, I used to say this thing, which, you know, now sounds probably really controversial. But, you know, now it's sort of like, hello. bit of anachronism. It's kind of funny. But I used to say that like, you know, Bitcoin was an example of being like a revolutionary without violence, right? You could use technology to,

to affect this political revolution without violence. And it was really fascinating in the past 10 years, watching that sort of like really culminate in how the Biden administration treated, you know, us shadowy super coders. And, you know, and use, and use, and use language like, you know, Elizabeth Warren, you know, she's going to create an anti-crypto army, right, to go to war against the shadowy super coders, just hacking away, doing open source, giving away their like time, energy and lifeblood for free to the internet. And, and now it's won, right? And we used to say, like, you know, first they mock you, then they fight you, then you win.

and it seems like now we win. What's the metric by which you would say we've won? Well, I think the obvious metric is the president of the United States is all-in, owns tons of crypto, has promised a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which, funny enough, I actually suggested, I think it's probably somewhere in the... It's a bailout for crypto. It's like 2008 all over again. It's very funny, I think, to like, you know, there's that whole, there's, you know, there's all these,

these sort of like adages that sort of like becomes so fun to use. But, you know, you either, you either die a hero or live long enough to be the villain. You know, so it's like Satoshi, Satoshi or Bitcoin lived long enough to be the villain in some really weird way, right? But, I mean, if you kind of think about kind of the reasons for which, I assume you and definitely me kind of got into the space forward. It was kind of like this idea that you could build things on this new form of the Internet that previously you couldn't build. So kind of like you could have these shared ownership structures.

You could have individual agency. You would have the ultimately resilient and efficient kind of substrate to kind of build stuff on top of. you would have platformification and with that kind of a radically better user experience for your users and so on. And while I do agree that kind of like, yes, the president of the United States has launched more than one shit coin, I would very much say that this was not kind of what got us here in the first place, right? kind of like in in the process of kind of like winning kind of that version of crypto that kind of we came here for it was marginalized would you so so this is why I'm kind of pushing back on the kind of like we've

want I think kind of like yes someone's won but it's not it's not kind of like who I meant used to be so I have a little bit of a take a problem going to come across like a bummer, but it's like it's a little bit of a multi-part take. One of it, and this is something I was talking about for years now, is that crypto actually never had a plan for winning, which is actually pretty common in revolutions, right? Like revolutionaries, they're like driven by this desire for the revolution for this change, but they don't actually plan what winning looks like, right? And oftentimes the best, most successful strategies for revolutionaries or just somehow to like implement like perpetual revolution.

And crypto had very much this problem where it didn't plan for success. And like most revolutions, it got co-opted along the way by the powers that be. And I think that this has happened with crypto in many ways. But the world also changed at the same time. You know, one of the things I always used to like to say. There's a lot of things I used to like to say. I don't know I like to say these days. But one of the things I used to like to say is that, you know, sort of like the end of like the Cypherpunk manifesto,

it talks about how like, you know, cypher monks have the like root access to the future, right? And that's like part of the power of it. You've root access to the future. And my sort of response to that is like, yeah, but what if that future was already a long time ago, you know? And when we say, That's very deep.

Yes. Yes, because when we started crypto, right? I remember, thinking about it, 2011, crypto started. You know, I, you know, I was dating my now wife, and her father had a video camera on his doorbell. He built it himself. His video camera on his doorbell. And the sort of like running joke in her friend group was how creepy that was. Oh, my God.

He has like video camera on his doorbell. And there was like video cameras around the house. And it was like creepy. It was like, okay, every time I'd go over. And so I'm like, wave, okay, you know, dad and my girlfriend. I guess you're like watching me, right? Um, and privacy was something that, you know, had already been eroded substantially post September 11th, right? I was, you know, I was in college in September 11th.

I, you know, people today don't remember a world where you flew without security checks and you flew where you flew where you could go. visit the pilot up front where people trusted one another in society, right? Like people don't remember America and American freedom and global freedom before September 11th. It was a big difference, right? Like September 11th really chilled the nature of freedom. You know, freedom went from the freedom to to the freedom from, which is very, very powerful and very sort of like autocratic switch, right? But, but, but, you. I can't always get off track here. But so when we think about when Bitcoin and, you know,

and Web 3 and all that started, we talked about privacy and self-sovereignty, right? And you fast forward to today and everyone has a door, as a video camera on the doorbell, right? And people have video cameras in their homes. Nobody thinks it's creepy. Nobody thinks it's weird. I know people with video cameras in their bedroom, right?

Their security camera system has video cameras in their bedroom. And everything that happens with their bedroom is streamed live to Google or Amazon, right? And they're fine with it, right? So a lot of the values that we had when we came into the space actually are no longer values that society really hold, right? Like privacy. What is privacy today? You know, before people would be like, well, I don't want the government looking at naked

pictures of me. Today, there's a million people making naked pictures of us using AI every minute. Right. Like nothing is real anymore. We don't take anything to be real. Any information you might particularly give us. Before there's a sense of like you need your privacy because information somehow had truth. And that truth is like very scary if it was like something private. But today, nothing is true. Right. Like it doesn't even matter if it actually happened and people saw it with their own eyes. Like, you know, nothing is true anymore. So a lot of the values that we started Web 3 with society no longer actually holds. Right. Like young people,

even not young people. Everyone streams their life all the time. Everyone talks about, I mean, if you go on TikTok or Instagram, people talk about the most intimate experiences of their life, the most humiliating, the most degrading, the most uncomfortable experiences of their life. And they share it to millions of followers. There's no more privacy, right?

And people don't care about privacy, right? Like we gave it all to Zuckerberg years ago and we're fine. But do you think that's irreversible? because kind of like the optimist in me hopes that kind of this is this is a switch that we can kind of, you know, push back on and kind of revert to this state of privacy by default. So and I think kind of like I honestly, I don't object to kind of like people streaming their intimate lives on whatever service. I don't care about that. but I think kind of like you should be able to kind of live a privacy, a pretty private life if you choose to do so.

So to me it's kind of about the choice. And kind of like just because a lot of people don't value that doesn't mean that kind of like the choice itself doesn't matter. So I agree with you. The choice does matter. But I kind of think two things. first I think is generational so and I actually think everything is like generational and like cohort based generationally um so I don't think that actually we can like teach new generations things that they don't sort of like naturally come to on their own um but also I think there is this interesting trade off like I'm not sure we're if you spent time in the Americas in the 1990s you were able to feel the moment. In the 1990s in the early 2000s, you could feel the moment when you were losing your privacy. And that's because we converted to the society that had credit cards and cell phones.

And what happened was very slowly you couldn't access society without tools that innately spied on you. I remember we're going to like blockbuster and trying to to rent videos when I first was going to get my own blockbuster card, you had to have a credit card, right? Like, you couldn't participate in, you know, renting a hotel room. You couldn't participate in renting, you know, hotels existed before credit cards, but you can't book a hotel today without a credit card, right? So you can't, you can't use a hotel today without giving up your private information, your privacy to the payment processors and all the different entities that exist in that sort of like data pipeline. So society slowly moves in a direction that actually

forces you to give up your privacy or it sort of forces you out of society, right? Where it's just like, well, you know, if you don't have a credit card, you can't use Uber and you can't fly and you can't have a hotel. So yes, you're welcome to have privacy, but, you know, you're also not no longer able to like participate in society in general. Certainly in many parts, you know, in America and a lot of like, you know, Western cities has sort of become de facto, right? It'd be very difficult to like exist without it.

Certainly you can, but the sort of like amount of personal effort gets really high. So eventually, like I remember when September 11 happened and I would just opt out of those full body scanners, right? I would just be like, this is no, you're not going to like irradiate me to like, you know, just pat me down, right?

Like, why are you, you know, today I just walked through the scanners, right? Like, you know, it was a decade of like hands up, the big whirring machine going around you. You know, it's like how much effort eventually society kind of wears you down because you also want to live, right? You want to raise kids. You want to like go to birthday parties. You want to like, you know, rent a movie. You know, you want to go on vacation somewhere. So eventually it wears you down.

I do hope that it's reversible. But I think it's probably going to have to live. look different than how we came at privacy, you know, 10 years ago, where maybe it looks more like your real data is indecipherable from like the noise of your data, right? Like if you think about like, you know, the value of like encryption, like, you know, when you, you know, back of the day, at least when you like encrypt your hard drive, you just filled it up with noise and your actual data was indistinguishable from noise, right? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe privacy of the future is some version of that where your actual information is just,

just, it's impossible to like, you know, from the outside of you, distinguish it from the data about you that's not real, right? Maybe that's actually. This is, this is, this is strangely not very, not very comforting. It's like, well, you know, the privacy you now get is, you don't. know which of these 5,000 nudes of you is the real one and which one's just the AI generated one. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I know it's bizarre, right? And maybe I am become a little bit pessimist. But it feels hard to do it any other way now. Because, you know, like for me and my life, like what it would take to. to unwind the, you know, the doctor office privacy documents that I've signed and, like, you know, raising kids and, you know, like the level of effort it would take would require me sort of like leaving society.

I think kind of, like, I think kind of, maybe it's on us to kind of build alternatives that kind of are usable for regular people, but are still privacy preserving and ideally things like self-custodial. on. Maybe let's talk about that a little bit later because kind of like we went on a very interesting tangent, but nevertheless a tangent. Maybe that's kind of talk about kind of like the, I mean, you were in Web 3 for a pretty long time before you actually started Tally, the project we're here to talk about today. So in a nutshell, what was the set of problems that you were looking to attacker in starting

Tally. Yeah, so Talley was the sort of genesis of Talley was, you know, a lot of the optimism that we're talking about. I had felt that there's a lot of sort of like inequality in the sort of standard of corporate system

and how corporations work and how you know, borders prevent, you know, sort of human capital from crossing them. And I really thought that we could basically incorporate organizations on the internet rather than in legal jurisdictions, and that we could use software to incorporate them. And this software could define the relationships and mechanisms by which organizations came to consensus.

Right. You know, blockchain comes to consensus through a very programmatic way. Well, humans also have to come to consensus. And the way we do it in the sort of traditional world is very unreliable, right? You have to rely on, like, legal system. You have to rely upon force. And there was this idea, of course, like the Dow, you know, Dow's like decentralized autonomous organizations where they've always been like a big part

especially the sort of like Ethereum lore and the Ethereum sort of history. And the idea behind Talley was like, okay, let's say you could incorporate in software. What would that look like? What sort of tooling would you need? Like, how would that be done? And it was pretty clear that would actually be extremely complicated, right? especially when you thought of like, okay, if you create an organization and software, it can actually scale to billions of people, billions of dollars, and it might exist for 15 minutes,

right? Something that's not possible in the traditional world. And it brings incredible amounts of scale to creating organizations, incredible amounts of scale, right? Like you can just go today and create an organization on Talley and it can scale to billions of people and billions of dollars. And it costs nothing. You know, maybe a few, dollars in gas fees, right? So this is sort of like real origin and root of tally. And at the time, a lot of people were thinking about DAWs, you know, me and my co-founder, we used to like talk about them. We were really interested in them. But the early incarnation of like DAWs, you know, with with an exception for the DAW, was really kind of like these, these cooperatives on the blockchain.

There's sort of like very utopian ideas of like social society structures built on the blockchain. and for us it didn't really seem particularly useful. It was like, okay, that's nice, but I'm not going to live in a smart contract and I don't need to like, you know, use all the sort of like obtuse tools to sort of like negotiate these things. But then we saw the sort of like start of defy, right,

particularly compound finance. And they launched a Dow to operate compound finance and it became really clear what the opportunity was, which is there are not only going to be Dow's, these decentralized organizations, But first, they're going to be protocols. They're going to be software things, protocols that are very valuable. They have a lot of money.

They generate money. They generate revenue. They control very important smart contract parameters. And they really do need some sort of mechanism, some sort of tooling to intermediate political disputes and to come to consensus on things like changing the parameters and, you know, sending money and like updating things. So from there, it was very clear that like, oh, you know, when we looked at how people were doing it, they're using things like Google. docs and like Excel sheets and you know sort of like hodgepodge of different things. It was like okay really actually we need we need to start building the tooling and infrastructure to manage this.

So that's where Talley started. It started as a TOW tool. Today it's really grown into the infrastructure for tokenized organizations, right? So you know, in the beginning is like primarily around like, oh, you create proposals and vote. Today Talley actually does the, you know, entirely, you know, nearly entire flow of operating a tokenized organization, from identifying the political stakeholders to launching the actual token, to distributing the token into people's hands, to the governance and operation of protocols, the administration of roles and permissions, to staking and value accrual mechanism so that

the protocols that generate revenue have trustless modular structures for returning revenue to participants. So it's really become this complete platform for operating these, these tokenized infrastructure, these protocols, at really massive scale. You know, we just, the other week we passed our big milestone where now over a billion dollars has been been transferred through our tools, which is, which is an incredible milestone and sort of a statement to how real that initial idea that we can, you know, make organizations and software, it really is. Mm-hmm.

If you look at Dow's today, I mean, I think kind of Dow is for the past eight years or so. Every year has been hailed, kind of like the year of the DAO and so on. And kind of if you look at the state of DAO's on chain, by and large, they're pretty dysfunctional. So kind of like, what's, where are we going wrong? Sure. So you're not wrong, but I think it is useful to compare it to the alternative, right?

there is a corporate entity structure in every jurisdiction on the planet and by and large the vast vast majority of companies are dysfunctional poorly run entities that eventually fail right the vast vast majority of them right um none of them live you know almost none of them live for hundreds of years or even decades you know uh so It is useful to say to like put into comparison that with DAOs, there's a level of transparency that's currently part of the sort of like ethos of a DAO. Maybe the transparency doesn't actually have to be there. That's sort of like another question, which might solve some of these problems. But corporations don't have that level of transparency. So because we don't see what's happening in regular corporations, we don't see how dysfunctionally are.

It's only when they, you know, Enron is a great example. It's only when they like spectacularly collapse. you know, or Lehman brothers that we sort of realized like, oh, it was a shit show all along, right? But that isn't to justify the fact that there is a lot of dysfunction in Dow's today. I think there's a number of different reasons for this. The structure is still new, still pretty, pretty early. So early. So, yeah.

Yeah, it's still early. Yeah, look at that. Look at that. Maybe it's so early is just an excuse for not doing a good job. you know, oh, we don't have mass adoption yet because it's so early. Oh, we're doing a bad job. Yeah, there's been a lot of dysfunction and it has been disappointing. I'll admit it's been disappointing.

I think that there's a lot of folks now looking at ways to improve this. And I cast a lot of blame actually on the previous administration, on the Biden administration, and, you know, the Gensler SEC, where a lot of the, a lot of the ways that Dow's in the past four or five years have been structured have been deliberately structured to just play this kind of like acrobatic yoga twisty thing around regulations to make it possible.

Right? Like when you think about how you know, you build something in America and then you make a foundation in the Caymans and then you have an agency in the British version islands that like contracts an anonymous dude in like Chile to like launch a token that's transvers to the BVI that goes to the foundation, which goes back to the company and then air drug. It's really kind of like many of these structures were set up deliberately to make it not work, right? You know, you see this

with meme coins, right? Like the industry has been hurt so much by this sort of, by this legislate, not it's not, it's not even legislation, right? By these like rulings that, make us contort into deliberately non-successful structures. And the great example is the sort of like foundation setup and design. You're supposed to, you're a founder and you create this idea. And now to make the idea work, you have to really protocolize and have a token. But to do that, you have to have another entity that does the token. And that entity has to be totally separate from you.

So you now have to give over control over what you're building and what you're trying to do to another entity that deliberately has to not be connected in any way. And you instantly create an opportunity for there to be divergence and goals, right? And you, this has been kind of like a root of, if you talk to like a lot of the lawyers in the space, especially in a lot of the people, you know, had to build these DAOs. this sort of like regulatory acrobatics has made it very difficult for these organizations to be successful, right? They're set up deliberately to have to fight really hard to make it work. And then a lot of the energy and effort goes into kind of making it work rather than working on the thing that the project is about in the first place. A hundred percent agreed, but wouldn't you expect? if that is kind of like the main course of dysfunctionality in Daos to kind of have a number of

grassroots DAOs kind of that are not incorporated anywhere that kind of just kind of chug along kind of in their non kind of universe and kind of create value. So kind of because in principle, I mean, because because what you're describing very much arises from the fact that there is this duality in systems, right? So kind of we say kind of like, okay, the organization should live on chain, but kind of like obviously things, also things that kind of live on chain are constrained technically, at least kind of by legacy legal systems, right? So by kind of saying, okay, we will bow to that ahead of time before anyone even comes to us.

I understand that creates a lot of overhead and destruction and so on. But why aren't there more functional grassroots styles without any legal setup? So I think there's a couple of reasons there. And the first one is that I don't think that situation that you describe actually can ever exist. And I think compound is a great example, right? the compound Dow is not, there's no legal entity behind the compound Dow currently, right? And the result of that is that you have these sort of shark private plaintiff lawyers who buy a dollar worth of compound.

And then it goes down to 90 cents. And then they file a lawsuit. And they go after anyone they can find, right? So if you hold tokens, if you're a delegate, if your name is on it, they go after you. name you in the complaint. You know, this is, this is what happened to pool together, right? Pool together was a Dow, a really cool organization. And they ended up spending all their money and all their time and resources fighting these private plaintiff lawsuits where they were, you know, people in the Dow were named personally liable for this sort of like general partnership. So unfortunately, you can't, unless you have like complete anonymity, which, you know, goes back, I think, to your earlier point around privacy. It's very, very, you can't. difficult to actually have that state of a truly, you know, decentralized org that doesn't have any of this because of the regulatory setup allows these private plaintiffs, you know, legal folks to actually go after any person they can find, right? And this has happened. This is, you know, there's these groups of law firms that go around and they raise money and they just, you know, pick off these projects one by one. So I think that is majorly a big blocker into making, that sort of setup that you describe actually work. You know, a room with Maker for a long time, you know,

was trying to require everyone to be private, to be anonymous. Because this risk is very real, right? Like, if they go after you and they say that's a general partnership, they go after you for your dog and, you know, your children's school fund and your house, right? So I think that, again, it goes back to regulations where you actually can't have that because there are these opportunistic entities who will just find any individual and hold them liable.

I think that's kind of the root of it. If they have a U.S. angle, right? So kind of like if you're just someone on the other side of the world, say kind of like you're someone in the Philippines, what would stop them from starting an organization like this? Well, I think it wouldn't. But what it does mean, though, is many actors who might be high-quality participants won't participate. Your access to things like on-ramps and off-ramps or trading locales is very limited.

All of these things in aggregate work against your success, right? And if you do deal with U.S. persons in any way, shape, or form, those people become exposed. So, yeah, you can certainly have an organization completely firewalled from the U.S. Maybe part of that is I don't really know about them, right? I'm in the U.S. I deal maybe more with, like, U.S. entities. But it definitely limits your ability to have success. But this isn't the only cause. So this is just like one of many things.

I think probably what you're getting at is that like people are messy and kind of like shit on the internet and they're very difficult to like, you know, coordinate to do useful things together. No, this is not what I'm getting at at all. So I think kind of like in principle, I think kind of like humans are the same off chain and on chain to a large extent, I think. I wonder whether to some extent it's a question of culture, right? Because kind of like in Dau's kind of like we have started Dau's with this idea that they're kind of like this egalitarian place and kind of like you vote on everything and so on. And I think kind of not everything should be voted on. Maybe this is my controversial take for today. But kind of like if you're running an organization kind of like decisions are not mix and match, right?

Kind of like they kind of you have to commit to a strategy and kind of someone has to wear the hat. it doesn't work. And I think in principle, there's no there's, this is not impossible kind of you could have very hierarchical Tao, but somehow that's not in our culture

understanding of Daos. So Daos don't have a CEO and maybe they should. Yeah, so I think you will see most Dow's have a CEO going forward for the reasons you describe.

it disappoints me a little bit, but I do think it's inevitable. And it's actually probably good, especially in this period that sort of feels very intermediary. Like it's sort of like a in between time. For some reason, especially right now, I think going back to like our principles, there was a time when maybe we were looking towards more decentralization. And actually much of the world has kind of gone more centralized, right? Like there's a very strong authority streak right now in the world globally.

Even the idea of founder mode is very much, you know, top down as an idea that sort of like permeated the space. Organizationalally, also I think that these DAOs have had problems in how they initially distribute their membership, right? Membership is a big determinant of like success, right? Like if you give the wrong, you can't really say wrong, but an organization has to have a culture. And if you don't have an aligned culture, it's very difficult to make decisions collectively, especially when actually everyone in organization has different cultures. I think a great example of this is salaries in these organizations. You know, some of these organizations are extremely valuable.

You look at like Uniswap Foundation, Uniswop Dow, you know, this multi-billion dollar organizations. and, you know, people really complain about the foundation's proposal and how much they're going to pay people. And you have these sort of like participants in the space who are like, yeah, well, I got this cousin. He like, you know, he's in like, you know, some place and he would do it for cheaper. And it's just like, this is one of the most competitive financial organizations in the world based in New York City. They need to hire the most competitive, highly sought after talent that exists. That's expensive. and you have a natural divide between participants of what, like, a lot of money is and what a little bit of money is and what's worth something, what's not worth something.

I think this comes up a lot between the sort of, like, programming community of Europe and the programming community of, like, San Francisco. Always on Twitter, like, you know, European programs are like, why does this person earn $300,000 a year when I earn, you know, $80,000 a year? And these sorts of like geographical issues filter into organizations too, along with cultural ones. And it makes it very difficult for people to come to like a common alignment, right? These organizations end up bickering about how much the dog gets paid instead of like what they need the dog for. Right. And that really drives these organizations to like do a bad job or like, you know, they sort of like descend and sort of the there's a, oh, what was it? Someone put it really well recently where decentralized organizations end up mostly talking about themselves in their organization rather than getting anything done, which it's kind of a truism now that we need to think about it.

But not to get too far off topic. I think you are right that we will see more CEO of Dow's, right, where if you read Miles Jennings, how, you know, A16 and he are kind of. thinking about what decentralization means, right? Like, we kind of came into this years ago with decentralization meaning like everyone and their grandma participates in voting on everything. And, you know, that has turned out to be a bad idea for a lot of different reasons. And now it's like, well, we have to redefine or sort of think what does decentralization mean, right? Like, who is involved in decentralization? Is it everyone on everything? Is it just the experts who determines when an expert is? What's the oversight? All of these are very complicated questions.

which, you know, corporations have sort of figured out by just saying, like, he's the boss, and these are the board members that oversee the boss. And these are the shareholders that oversee the board members. But I mean, that's also a structure that's grown over time, right? I mean, it's not like kind of like someone. I mean, we've had corporations for hundreds of years and kind of, I'm sure we've tried out many different things that didn't work. Sure.

Sure. And I mean, even now, we kind of have different modi for a, Right? Kind of like you can have, you can have a cooperative, you can have a foundation, you can have a company limited by shares, you can have a public company and so on. And I think all of these kind of, I mean, to some extent, kind of you can, you can transition between them, but kind of they all kind of have found product market fit in a way, right? Right. Right. Yes. Yeah, I, we are, I think, think in search of our product market fit for decentralized organizations. But I think we have

some form of it, right? Like protocols have to be decentralized. You know, I think a great example is arbitrable, which is on like kind of like the grandest experiment of them all at the moment, where they fundamentally are operated by their token holders. And the token holders have an extreme level of power, right? Like they, they can fundamentally alter the way the network works. And you see this characteristic leading to their success, right? Their success being, you know, you look at like Tether having chosen them as being like one of their new home bases. You look at the different organizations that build directly on top of them. And a big piece of that is because they have this certainty that they are building on top of infrastructure in which they

have a tangible say in how it's governed and operated. So I do think that we've found that nugget of product market fit, right? Like you wouldn't trust, you know, like a Chinese company wouldn't necessarily build directly on an American company because they're always exposed to like geopolitical issues, right? But, you know, a truly decentralized network where you have a credible share, you know, the platform itself is incredibly neutral and you have a credible participation level on it. That is very valuable, right? Like that is something that you can trust that you can build on as infrastructure. Something I like to say is like, you know, if you're building on Facebook, you're the next Zinga. And I think that idea of like being able

to trust the infrastructure that you build on is super important, right? Because we've seen that in, you know, the Web 2 space, you know, whether it's Twitter and the Twitter API, Reddit and the Reddit API, Facebook and Facebook API. If you build something that's large enough and valuable enough, the underlying layer will steal it from you. Do you think that's borne out by the state

of which networks currently see developer adoption? Because to me it seems that there's kind of the networks that are currently very successful. They are not the most centralized. They are not the most credibly neutral. They are

are the ones that somehow managed to hire their right marketing people. Oh, that's a spicy, spicy hint there. Yeah, you know, that's a tricky one. And it's tricky for a lot of reasons because, you know, who are the developers today versus the developers 10 years ago or five years ago and, you know, two years ago? And I think that they look very different, right? Like when crypto, when I found crypto, it was very much about self-sovereign everything, right? And privacy and all this stuff.

I think people who find crypto today find it through very different mediums, right? Like it's not coming to them through some, you know, cryptography newsletter or, you know, group chat. It's coming to them through, you know, meme coin prices and payments and stable coins and stuff like that. So I think we're also maybe catering to a different type of developer, if you want to use like developer sort of like metrics, right? There's a different kind of contributor who is joining the ecosystem. And I think this, you know, I think a great example of this was NFTs and video games, right?

Like a big, big, big selling idea behind NFTs was like, wow, you know, video game, if you, if you participate in a video game, you could own your loot and it would be portable between games and this is actually genuinely a really awesome amazing idea. But the larger video game developer ecosystem came to NFTs through like Ford apes and like million dollar JPEGs and they hated the idea. Right. And then we could never get them off of that. Right. Like they were like, oh no, Ethereum, it burns the rainforest and it's for dumb JPEGs. It's just like, no, no, no, no. We built this thing to like make it better for everyone. And they were like, only heard the scam and they entirely rejected. So we sort of like missed out on our entire

like premise because they came to it in the wrong way. So I think today's developer base doesn't really come to crypto through the cipher funk values or the Web3 values. Right. In fact, you know, I think, you know, a lot of criticism are going around is that we don't do a very good job of even like expressing those. For a long time, you know, the words world computer just stopped being used in the Ethereum space, right? It went from like world computer and like all this stuff to, you know, effectively just money, money, money, money, which was good for the price.

And, you know, I wouldn't mind some aspect of that coming back. But that changes who comes and builds. And the centralization component, it's efficient, right? The centralization is efficient in these organizations. It means that, you know, someone is tasked with the responsibility of making each one of these developers who come in the door feel good and feel recognized and feel unique and feel special. And that drives participation, right? You want to be somewhere where people are excited. You know, I go to both Ethereum conferences and I go to both in Salonac conferences. And, you know,

one of the things that struck me about the last few Salon of conferences I went to is that everyone's really excited about making money, but really excited, right? They're like, wow, we are all here. we're going to make money. What are you building? I'm building money, money, money, money. Oh, I'm building money, money, money plus. I'm building money, money with JPEGs. And everyone's like really psyched.

And that sort of real clarity of purpose, I think is extremely powerful for that community, right? But you definitely don't have people saying, like, oh, actually, we need to start decentralized, right? Like you don't have that, you have a very different ethos.

And that's totally fine, right? Like, this is not, in any way, dig. This is totally fine. Like, there are so many more ecosystems in crypto today than there were in 2011, right? In 2011, there was just one, right? There's actually a couple really soon after that. But, but today, there's just, there's just thousands of the communities. So, you know, some days it's like you wish it were a bit more decentralized, but some days you recognize that there's going to have to be some like path in the middle to make sure you get to that product market fit, to make sure you build something that works that people need,

to make sure that like you're focused on the task at hand rather than sort of like this real oneristic, just like it's about how we organize all the time, you know? Yeah. I think kind of I'd make the point that kind of like decentralization in itself is not a value. It's not kind of, it's not something that people should, pay to have, it depends on the use case, right? So kind of like there's many things for which it's totally fine, kind of build on a proprietary network somewhere. I just like kind of like I have stuff running on AWS.

But yeah, there's other things like, I don't know, for instance, if I had my identity on chain, I would be very worried about having it on a poorly decentralized chain. So we've talked about kind of like the general Dow space for pretty long time. Tell us about kind of the things that are currently on your plate at Talley. So kind of what are you guys working on? What are you excited about? What do you think is going to move the needle on how DAO's operate in the future?

Yeah. So at Talley, we are really excited about the. this new political landscape. We can now build organizations, or it looks like we can now build organizations that are more functional, that have more focus on success early on, that allow founders to have higher agency, that allow teams to build more transparently with a lot of like the sort of like shackles and limitations taken off. So we actually think that we are probably closer to the original vision of like being able to, you know, incorporate organizations and software than we've ever been, which is incredibly, you know, exciting. Obviously, the whole

global economy is going through a little bit of a weird rough patch right now. And, you know, I guess we kind of all have to see how that shakes out. But at its core, the idea now that you could just build an organization, you can incorporate it on chain, you can have high agency decision making, but you can have a large community. And by, community. It could be just people who have an opinion or it could be actually like people who have power, right, and who have operative power is really exciting. For us, there's actually some pieces here that are still missing. Very early on, we recognize the need to have tokens that actually accrue value, right? The problem with governance tokens, and this is another big thing. Historically,

the problems with governance tokens has been that we've had to specifically say they don't have any value and that negatively selects for the participants of your ecosystem, right? Because most savvy participants aren't interested in like the opportunity cost of like holding something that cost money but should be valueless, right? Like that's, that's a horrible relationship. And that's actually been a big contributor to, you know, the success or failure of different organizations. So now we're building a lot of great modular tooling around value accrual for tokens. You know, we've been working closely with teams around the idea of staking, using staking as this core primitive to drive this sort of like productive behavior necessary to operate protocols,

which we think is really critical for their long-term success. We also have been working really closely with teams to help launch their protocols, right, help launch their tokens. So really today, it's about serving these teams in their whole journey and like getting them out there. Because if you look at kind of like the history of like where the stock market has been in terms of like, you know, IPOs, there's sort of stats here, right? In 2024, there was around 220 like IPOs. You know, in 2022, there's like 175. When you look at how many organizations are actually launching on software today, it's really pretty incredible. And when you look at how many of them are doing it on top of Talley, right? Like just the number that like we've passed a billion dollars in payments like money, money, moves on the platform really shows that like we have this really exciting opportunity to really compete with the wider ecosystem of like how do companies sort of like chart their path forward, right? You know, maybe we're going to even get to the point where companies are going to

realistically, you know, look at Talley and say, hey, we would like to go token instead of even going IPO, right? Like this is kind of like this idea that really has got it. I know, it's very excited where we could actually be an alternate way for this new kind of organization to really go public in a sense, but in a very different way, you know, and obviously within, you know, a now a clear regulatory framework. Yeah, that's very, I mean, this kind of very much rings of 2017. And I think kind of like this, the kind of ICO era in some way kind of it's been maligned needlessly over the past couple of years. I mean, yes, there were pretty bad ICOs out there,

but there were also a bunch of really good ICOs out there. And, yeah, so I think kind of like having this way of doing a crowd sale without, and kind of having an investor base, that's not necessarily kind of accredited investors only. And that's not that doesn't kind of require you kind of have prospectors and whatever.

I think, yeah, I think that is tremendously worthwhile. And it very much goes back to kind of like this vision of shared ownership, right? Kind of that we talked about in the beginning as kind of like one of the core tenets of Web 3.

Yeah, I agree with you. You know, people love to speak negatively about the ICO boom, but a lot of very good stuff came out of that. A lot of infrastructure got built. You know, Safe was an ICO project originally. You know, there's a lot of great. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Full disclosure is yours. You know, like there's a lot of actual great infrastructure that was built during this. And there's a lot of magic around that capital formation, primarily using an asset that was created from its own ICO, right?

Ethereum itself was an ICO, which I did not participate in because of, you know, poor choices, poor life choices. So, yeah, in many ways, like, you know, going back to sort of like, certainly our original vision, and I think a lot of people's original division, we can do incorporation vastly cheaper, faster, more efficient, greater scale by using software as our jurisdiction than we can using, you know, Delaware and the state registrar's office. So what we would like, of course, we don't want a world coming back where, you know, I think, you know, people love to knock like denticoin, you know, the ICO like for for dentists. Like that's like the running sort of like

punching bag. Although I will note that they might even still be around. But, you know, most businesses aren't a success anyway. So, you know, it's hard to hold that against them. And we've seen the same with IPOs, right? I mean, kind of like, yes, we have Google, we have Google, but we also have, we also had pets.com, right? And kind of like that went exactly the way that Dentacoin went. So it's.

Exactly. And, you know, I, I hope that actually we get really clear regulation around this because the efficiencies and opportunities here for builders. and, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't mention for the Made in America builders is incredible, right? Like that's sort of like efficiency, that opportunity is you can't really ignore that, especially today when, you know, we are finally even contending with the idea that maybe even like AI and machines are going to start companies and build software and stuff like that. So, yeah, I would very much like to see we are very much positioning ourselves for World War regulatory. clarity allows us to build many more exciting things where founders can, you know, maintain control over their vision for a lot longer, um, so that they can get to, you know,

PMF. Um, you know, I think this is just, you know, extremely exciting. You know, we just have to get through this little rough patch that we're in right now. But, you know, ideally, you know, the president has promised legislation in the, in the summer. So I think by fall, we may actually know, what the future is going to look like. Yeah, absolutely. So, Denison, where can we send people to kind of find out more about Talley? So the most obvious place is Talley or the website itself, tally.xyZ. You know, we also have a newsletter, a podcast, a Twitter as well.

These are probably the best places to check out. You can also follow me as well on Twitter. I'm at Dennis and Bertram. If you are building a project, if you're thinking about building a project, if you're thinking about building a token or launching a token, we are probably your best partners for that in the industry. If you're thinking about value accrual mechanisms, thinking about modular, secure governance that, you know, secures tens of billions of dollars across the ecosystem, we are your, you know, your best partner that you could have.

So if you are, you know, a founder of any of this sort or sort. builder, you know, even legal, right? We have great, great recommendations and experience helping team set up even the legal sides of things. We're not lawyers, but, you know, we can give you a lot of great recommendations to wonderful, wonderful teams as well. You know, reach out, reach out. We can be your partner in this, in this process and help, you know, help you succeed the way we, you know, helped hundreds of other organizations succeed. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on, Denison. Thank you. It was a real, real pleasure. I loved having this conversation.