Rebecca Lamis is the Co-founder of UnicornDao, Head of Partnerships at mixed reality startup Playlayer, previously worked with Quantum, and is an active DAO organizer and advisor. She has been in web3 since 2018 with a focus on making the industry and its opportunities more accessible. Recorded on March 8, 2023 for Crypto Packaged Goods Genius Call series.
Rebecca Lamis is the cofounder of Unicorn DAO and Head of Partnerships at the mixed reality start-up Playlayer. She has been in the Web3 space since 2018, working to make the industry and its opportunities more accessible and is an active DAO organizer and advisor.
"If it is inaccessible, it is neither radical nor revolutionary." - Rebecca Lamis
In this episode, you will learn the following:
Follow Rebecca at https://twitter.com/RebeccaLamis
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To learn more about Crypto Packages Goods, visit https://www.cryptopackagedgoods.com/
GM GM. We are back with another genius call. Who we have is really special today. I have been excited to have a DAOtalk for a long time. And we have a banger of a guest. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Rebecca Lamis, who is the cofounder of Unicorn Dow. You may have heard of that one. She's also the head of partnerships at the Mixed Reality start up Playlayer, and she previously worked on Quantum Who. We also had a special partnership and event in Santa Monica not too long ago. She's an active DAOorganizer and advisor, which is why we would love to have her speak here. And she's been in Web Three since 2018 with a focus on making the industry and its opportunities more accessible. So, Rebecca, welcome to the genius call. It's great to have you. How's everything down in La?
Great. Nice to chat with you. Thank you so much for having me. Can't complain. In La. The cold front finally stopped. We had some snow and hail, which was nuts last week. So nice to get that California sunshine again. I'm excited to chat with you guys father about Dallas.
Indeed, when we first met many months ago and started exploring the idea of this Genius Call, it was a totally different time. And so I think this is actually the perfect timing to do this call. Do you have a bunch of slides? I'm going to help tee them up and queue them up. And then as we go through it, when we get to the end, we'll have a whole bunch of questions that we've sourced from our community, which I think are fascinating and interesting. So with that, Becca, please take it away.
Thank you. Thank you. So, yeah, today I will be talking about all things dows and really everything you might want to know about them. So just kind of before I jump in a little bit more about who I am specifically, as mentioned, I've been in the space since 2018. I do a lot of work as a consultant. I also am personally a grassroots organizer, and so that was how I got started in this space is a lot of kind of my nonprofit co op work is very similar to what Dows look like. So I'll definitely share a bit more about that when we jump in from projects that I've worked on. Most notably, I'm a co founder of Unicorn DAOwith Pussy Riot Unicorn Dow. We have some more information later on in that, but it is an organization that focuses on supporting women and LGBTQ plus members within the Web Three space by investing and collecting their work and their startups. In addition to that, I've worked at other organizations known as Quantum Art City Dow, the first DAOin Tezos, which was called Staker Dow, one of the first Dows at the Harmony Incubator. Dow, and then Ukraine Dow, which maybe most notably raised $7 million for the Ukraine Community when the War Started last Year. And Before We kind of move off of this, a Quote I have on the slide that I Think really kind of represents My Mindset in this space is If It Is inaccessible, it is Neither radical or Revolutionary. Now, The Way that I kind of think about that is there are So many opportunities coming out of the Web Three Ecosystem. Now, as we all know, It is very clear that this technology is going to change the entire landscape of almost every Industry. But unfortunately, it has been Extremely gatekept over the last ten years. And so my big priority in this space is how can we break down those barriers to entry, to really allow Web Three to be for everyone, as we say it? And So in this Quote, if it Is inaccessible, it is Neither radical or revolutionary. No Matter How Revolutionary This Technology is, if The Majority of the World Can't access it or utilize it, what's the Point at the end of the day? So that's really kind of my mindset when I go into the web. Three space is how to make it more equitable and really use real world scenarios of how we can utilize crypto farther in this ecosystem. So moving on from that first, I'm going to kind of do big picture. What is a dow? There's a lot of words on this slide. On A lot of these slides, we have quite a bit of content in General. The Reason Being is I find that a lot of folks, after these presentations, want to look at the Deck Again. So I like to provide more information than not. I'll Definitely Go through it, so don't feel like you need to read it all Quickly. So, first and foremost, for those that might not be familiar, ada stands for a Decentralized autonomous organization. At its core. What that means is it's utilizing smart contracts on the blockchain technology to essentially develop a digital organization. And at its core, Dows do what we call operate autonomously, apologize autonomously, which means, essentially, there is no central place of control within the organization. So you can think about the corporate world today as a very much top down structure. Right. You have your general employees. You have your execs. You have your CEO. Whatever the CEO traditionally says goes. And then that kind of feeds down the different levels within the organization. What's really Beautiful about Dows is it Kind Of Takes Away That Concept Of A Top Down Structure and really Works As A collective. So the goal of a DAOis to not only be operated autonomously, but to be operated by the collective, the community of the Dow. How it's organized as a collective depends from DAOto dow. That's really at its core. Now because we are using blockchain technology dows traditionally organize governance via tokens. So whether that's Nfts or a crypto token themselves currency. That's traditionally how we see dows organizing their governance. And I'll get into it a little farther on, the different models of Dows and the different kind of tokenomics behind them, but kind of big picture. Dows are run by a collective. It is run autonomously. And there is a token that allows the governance to decide kind of what happens. And so the reason people find that they like Dows beyond the traditional collective decision making is because everything of this organization happens on chain. We see, I would say much more what's the word I would use? I would say transparency is the right word. You see a lot more transparency, trust and as I said, kind of community driven decision making rather than the traditional CEO deciding kind of behind closed doors what happens. Anything that happens within the organization is now out there. And the collective can see where the funds are going, where the votes are going, et cetera. So that's a lot of information. No worries if none of that clicked, or only some of it. I'm really going to go into each of these topics slide by slide. But I first just kind of wanted to start with the big picture of what a doubt is. So the next slide that I want to jump into is specifically the philosophy behind Dows. So what is decentralized governance? Decentralized governance is truly the core philosophy that is driving Dows and their models. So decentralized governance is a model of governance where decision making power and authority are distributed across a network of individuals rather than being concentrated in the hands of a central authority. So that goes back to what I was saying, the top down structure. It's not a CEO at top that's making the decision anymore. The philosophy of Adao is that the community is governing. It is distributed across whatever this network may be of Ada now moving into that direction. As a result, the decision making power is shared among the members of the network and decisions are made through a consensus building process that involves active participation and input from all members. This might be tokenomics, for example, this is often how governance is utilized within the DAOto make these decisions. And what's phenomenal about this model is as decisions are made through a consensus building process or a specific protocol, it involves active participation and input from all members of the organization. This allows for greater transparency, accountability, and really trust in the decision making process that all members have an equal say and are able to contribute to a formation of policies and rules that govern the network. So I know that's kind of a big chunk of text to wrap your head around, but I definitely want to keep building on it first. This core philosophy is decentralized governance. The community as a collective is deciding what happens. The next kind of philosophy of that is the blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency aspect. Dows could not be run without it being on chain. A DAOthat is not on chain is very similar to a cooperative. To be honest cooperatives for those that may not be familiar are pretty popular organizational model within the US. It's kind of this concept of a community that works or utilizes. The co op organization gets to vote and decide the goals of the cooperative. And then, hypothetically, any profits that are made within the cooperative are then redistributed to the members. So that kind of philosophy is very similar to Dows themselves. But the key difference here is that because it is decentralized governance, it runs on blockchain technology and really utilizes the best of these decentralized networks to validate transactions and maintain a secure and transparent ledger of the activities of this decentralized organization. Now. However, the concept of decentralized governance can also be applied to other areas such as social and political organizations, businesses, communities really anywhere that can enable more democratic and participatory decision making processes. So kind of big picture, quite a few words, but those are kind of the core, I would say. Goals and philosophy behind how dows are run. And on the right, I kind of labeled six points that I really think are kind of the key items that make a DAOa dow. So first decentralization we've gone into that. Second, Transparency. Because it's on chain. We see all of the governance. We see where funds are flowing. It is very clear to the organization, to the community how this DAOis operating. In addition to that, community governance, as we discussed it, is what makes the DAOrun. Dows are designed to be governed by the organization, and voting is typically done on a one member, one vote basis. Now we'll get into that a little bit more. There are other models of voting, but that is really one of the core. Philosophies now, one of the things we haven't touched on as much is autonomy. So this is really interesting because Dows, as the A stands for, are autonomous organizations that hypothetically should operate on their own. So all of these protocols should be built within a DAOto really make it operate and run properly, right. Well, what's really unique right now is because we are at the very beginning stages of dows. Truly, there are a lot of protocols and developmental aspects of dows that haven't necessarily been implemented yet. So, as a result, in the ideal dream world, dows are fully autonomous, right? We coded in a way that AI meets the autonomous vessel of blockchain to allow us, as a community, to vote on XYZ happening. And then the protocols make it happen. Right. The funds get sent to XYZ, which trigger the creation of this next protocol, et cetera. Now we are in such baby phases that we don't see that level of autonomous aspects of the DAOorganizations happening quite yet. But we will definitely see the autonomy continue to grow as Dows scale. Now, the next aspect that I put up here is the cryptocurrency token aspect. This should be pretty clear by now that the core vessel that allows Dows traditionally to vote from a governance perspective has something to do with the tokens, whether that's an NFT collection or a currency or some other form of token. Next up here, I put down the larger just kind of purpose of Dows. It can really vary from organization to organizations. So what you see, as well as a very kind of core philosophy of Dows, is just experimentation at large. We are in such a new industry, a whole new generation of organizations are really going to launch soon. And so it's so important for us to be experimenting with this technology and the legal and regulatory statuses based on the jurisdiction. So that is kind of, I would say, the core principles philosophies behind Dows. And I'll definitely dive in to a bit more of how these philosophies of Dows in practice look in some kind of use cases, real world scenarios. But before I jump into that, I want to touch on the next slide, which is the history of Dows. So what's really unique is not a lot of folks know kind of how DAOstarted or for those of us that are new in this space who really came with the NFT boom, you may not be familiar with one of the most notable hacks in Ethereum history, blockchain history, which was called the DAOHack of 2016. So before I get into that, let me kind of lead you up to how we got there. So blockchain cryptocurrency, it really started to scale back in 2013 with the creation of Bitcoin, the creation of the Ethereum Mainnet, et cetera. And pretty quickly the concept of a DAOwas created. It really first started to get socialized back in 2013, from 2013 to 2016, because this whole community network was very new. We saw a lot of papers come out, a lot of kind of theoretical, very length these scholarly papers of how Dows could be implemented to create a more equitable society that allows the collective to decide where the organization goes, what the organization does with its profits, rather than the traditional corporate centralized top down structure. And then came along one of the first use cases and it was called the Dow. The DAOwas launched on the Ethereum blockchain back in 2016 and it raised over $150,000,000 from thousands of investors. The goal of the DAOwas to essentially act as an Ethereum incubator of sorts and they raised a big chunk of capital. They then distributed tokens to anyone that put in capital to the Dow. And then you could use these tokens to kind of vote on what projects you wanted to fund to invest for this DAOincubator of sorts to then help launch. So it became a really wonderful way at the beginning of Aetherium to crowdsource thousands of projects to Aetherium because now there was this gigantic pocket of funds, honestly, that was being allocated to up and coming Ethereum based startups. This was very new for its time. This was a huge deal and it worked great. It worked great for a couple of months. It was really the first proof of concept of Dows. It was a huge press push, I would say globally, because really it was one of the first real world use cases of how you can utilize the best of this technology to now redistribute funds in a more equitable manner and really help invest in the future of Ethereum. Unfortunately though, as all that were part of this ecosystem know, in 2016 is a couple of months into the launch of the Dow, it had a hack and it was really, really tragic for the ecosystem. It lost over 50 million, I think it was closer to 60 million as a result of this hack that was taken right out of the Dow, as they called it. And so when this occurred, this notorious hack, now the DAOhack of 2016 is really how people refer to it. It scared everyone, right? This was one of the first Dows that we could see. We saw it as a really applicable use case of how to channel funds, et cetera. And then it got hacked. And realistically, the biggest concerns of Dows at the time, which are still very prevalent today, was the security around Dows. And I'll definitely chat a bit more about some of the biggest pros and cons of Dows at large, especially in today. But for the history of Dows, for you guys to understand, the DAOwas one of the first Dows, right? That's why it was called the Dow. And so for thousands of people to be interacting with this DAOto then be hacked, it was clear to the community that Dows were not in a place to be secure. Now, whether or not that was true is really interesting because this DAOis still one of the largest Dows to operate to date. We have seen very few other Dows properly launch and onboard that much capital and that many people get. And part of the reason why is because it was too risky to have that many people and that much funds in a secured network. Could we do it today? Probably. But at the time, the tech was just not quite there to have this run securely. And after the DAOwas hacked, it led to a big market crash. It was part of the reason that we went into another bear coming into the 2017 era.
One quick question for Clarification, because I can't recall in listening to Vitalik, was this a software bug that was exploited or was it a governance protocol that was exploited?
So I need to triple check, but I'm pretty sure it was a governance protocol that was exploited, which was part of the reason and concern to the use case of Dows as a whole and the scalability of them. And we'll get into SEC regulation as well. But a lot of the SEC regulation that has come up now it really started in 2017 was a direct result of the Dow. It was too difficult for them to control and manage and run properly without it being hacked, as we saw. And what's really interesting there is a lot of the cons associated to Dows now are results of the SEC regulation that is very, I would say, Timid, that we'll go through it. But a lot of the DAOmodels now only allow 100 members max. And it's for this reason that the governance was not in a place that it got exploited. And now the SEC kind of looks back at this and is a lot more cautious and strict with the regulation that they have put out there. Whether or not it's true, you know, I still there is 100% a world where Dows have thousands of people again and control this much money. It's just going to take us a couple of years one, to gain the trust of the community again and two, to feel that we are in a technological place where we can actually control that and ensure that an exploitation of this nature does not occur again. And so kind of wrapping on this if anyone ever refers to the DAOhack, this is what it is. And so as a result, we didn't really see Dows get launched again until 2019. You know, people kind of just pushed it out. You know, we're like, all right, Dows don't work. They're not secure. Even though there's so many pros and benefits, theoretically, we're not in a place to securely launch Dows. And so not many Dows were launched for a couple of years. There were still a handful, but for the most part, we just didn't see them really. 2016 to 2019 was the time to both rebuild the market and also grow D Five protocols.
Do you think that the legislation in Wyoming that you have listed there was a helpful catalyst for it? And in your mind, what was the significance of that piece of legislation?
Yeah, 100%. So as I kind of mentioned, the next step into the growth of Dallas was this DAOlegislation that was passed in Wyoming. And to kind of give some context, the community behind this DAOlegislation were some of the kind of OG ethereum guys. A lot of them worked at consensus. A lot of them were at the very beginning, they knew what Dows could do. They understood kind of the long term potential and opportunities of Dows even after the DAOhack. Right? And so a lot of them came together. And one of the people that I always love to shout out, if you're looking to kind of learn more about Dows, one of the OG DAOkings, his name is Aaron Wright, he is the founder of an organization called Tribute Labs. I actually have them as an example later. But most notably, it's basically a protocol and a team that helps launch dows. And they've done flamingo Dow, which a lot of you may be familiar with. They launched Unicorn Dow, which is one of the organizations I co founded, et cetera. I'll get into that in a bit. But Aaron's a lawyer, a professor, and him and a core group of teams started working with Wyoming city council to now pass this legislation that allows us to legally incorporate Dows within the US. Because it was very clear to them, and I completely agree, for Dows to be able to grow, it has to be legal. It realistically has to be legally done by the books for us to be able to move in any direction forward. And so with Wyoming, we really saw a very basic, like, version zero of DAOlegislation. And what it essentially allowed was the kind of DAOincorporation equivalent of an LLC. So Dow, it is this kind of concept, decentralized governance, et cetera. But the model itself that is used for a Dow, it varies from DAOto Dow, right? Every corporation has a different model from the top down structure that they are implementing to successfully launch whatever their product or business may be. So Dows are the same way. So this legislative piece allowed dows to incorporate legally under the state of Wyoming and have 100 person DAOmembers. The reason why they capped it at 100 members is from a kind of security perspective, and we'll get into SEC as well in a bit, and their specific kind of policies, what they allow, what they don't allow. But the very basic version, the first legislative piece was, okay, you can start a DAOwith 100 members. It is called a DAOLLC, and you have to follow XYZ. We'll get into those pieces in a bit, but now in 2018, you can legally do it. And that was a huge opportunity for the larger DAOcommunity to start to get dows moving again. And so Aaron Wright, who was one of the key lawyers and a part of this project, he then launched what was called Tribute Labs, which was this kind of not quite an incubator, but organization to launch these 100 member dows. And so it was really kind of the first step in the right direction for dows. And why Wyoming, you might ask? So Wyoming is actually before Delaware, it was known to be the state that passed the most progressive policy from a corporation standpoint. So it was the first state to allow unions to exist back in the 18 hundreds. So they were kind of when they got pitched by this community to pass down legislation, they saw it as an opportunity to bring more income naturally to their state and really set them apart from other states as leading this forefront of this whole new ecosystem. And then quickly following Wyoming, Delaware did pass a very similar piece of legislation and since then we have started to see other states start to pass different aspects of DAOlegislation in addition to general blockchain and Web three legislation. And so I'll definitely kind of get into more on the different legal classifications of Dowels in a bit and the way you can incorporate and what that allows you to do and not do. But this is kind of big picture history of the Dowels. So moving on to the next slide, we've gone through a lot of this so I won't spend too much time but here are kind of the key DAObenefits I would say that you see in our ecosystem today. So first and foremost operates through smart contracts on chain. We don't really see any other organizational structures utilizing this tech quite the way a DAOdoes. Dows are decentralized as we've discussed. They are not controlled by a single entity, but rather a network of stakeholders. And that's really kind of the most, in my opinion, powerful component of Dows is we've never had the tool sets to collectively organize and run an operation fully on chain, fully using the best of what tech offers today. In addition to that, as we said, is as smart contracts as blockchain continues to grow and scale, we are going to be able to automate all decision making, which is a huge, huge, huge perk from a longterm perspective. It saves a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of people, a lot of resources and this is why a lot of people believe most organizations in the future will be Dows. If the people at top are willing to allow there to be collective decision making of some nature, it just streamlines the product and the organization at a much quicker rate. In addition to that, Dows offer greater transparency, accountability. As we discussed, participation in governance is just way superior compared to traditional organizations. And then finally, Dows can really be used in any industry. No one DAOfits all and especially in these beginning stages, we're going to see lots of different forms of Dows and organizational models of Dows. But like I said, at its core it is this thought process of collective decision making utilizing blockchain and that can almost be applied to any industry. It's just a question of do we have the resources to make it happen today versus five years from now versus ten years from now? And then finally, Dows have the potential to fundamentally change how all organizations operate, how decisions are made, they offer greater efficiency and it offers superior security and trust when operated at its kind of core thesis and its core potential. Like I said, from the security perspective, it's a lot rockier today than it will be five years from now, obviously, but it's a lot better today than it was five years ago. So I really like to think of Dows as the next kind of book of the American corporate system. And we are really in like chapter zero. We are in the very beginning stages. So I definitely encourage folks who are thinking about launching Dows all for it. It's just about making sure you feel there are resources in place to help you launch that DAOright now. And we'll get more into that in a bit. So now I want to jump into some DAOuse cases on Dowels that you guys may be familiar with, that I can kind of explain how they operate, how they compare to each other and the different models they are using. And as I've mentioned, after I go through these use cases, I will talk a little bit more about the legal structures and the larger challenges we face. But first, I want to kind of paint a picture for you guys on how a couple of these Dowels operate. So the first one I like to always use, as I mentioned, is Flamingo Dow. I'm sure there are some Flamingo members that are part of the Pop CPT crew. And Flamingo DAOwas started by Aaron Wright Tribute Labs. Like I said, I definitely encourage you to look them up if you're thinking about starting a Dow. They have really become the superior organization in my point of view of launching what we call Collector Dows. So in legislation today, one of the easiest doubts that you can legally incorporate is this 100 person DAOLLC. And most of these kind of organizations that incorporate this way act as what we call a Collector Dow. A Collector DAOis this thought process that a bunch of members come together, they pool their funds as a collective to then collect in whatever their thesis may be behind the organization. So Flamingo Dow, for example, launched in, I think it was 2020. I want to say the summer of 2020 might have been 2021. But right before the first NFT bull, really, like when Nfts were just starting, they kind of had this thesis that Nfts, and they were completely right, were going to completely take off from both a digital arts standpoint and a collectible standpoint. So they decided to do, I believe it was a 25 east buy in at the time, 25 or 50 buy in, and they could accept up to 100 members. And so I think at the beginning, about 20 individuals joined Flamingo Dow. They all put in this capital and then they had a governance protocol that essentially allowed the community to put up proposals on, I think we should put 200 ETH into crypto punks. Let's buy the ten punks that are at the floor, so then they go use their capital to purchase those punks. And now those Nfts are collectively shared among all the members. So any, I would say return on investment based off of how these Nfts increase in their worth. And. Value is all collectively shared. And so what was really kind of beautiful with Flamingo DAOis these members figured out where Nfts were going before they even went there, right? And so they were able to collect thousands and thousands and thousands, truly, of Nfts before the NFT bull even happened because they all believed in it so deeply, and they felt they knew where the NFT market was going that they knew Which Nfts to purchase, right? So, the initial buy in was about $25,000 at the time, whatever that equivalent was an ETH. Now, today, the value, or I guess the peak of the last bull, the value of one seat to buy in was $10 million. So, as you can see, in a span of about two years, their return of investment is quite insane. Now, what's important to note is that these Collector Dows I use the word investment, but technically, they're not investors. Technically, it is community members that are collecting these Nfts because they appreciate them, believe in the value of them, and want to collectively own them. Now, if I for, say, I was a Flamingo DAOmember, I was like, wow, our Nfts have increased in value so much, my seat is now worth 10 million. Hypothetically, I at that time could be like, okay, I want out. I want to trade in my Flamingo DAOtokens and my governance tokens for my 10 million equivalent. And that's how you would then exit the Dow. So you're not technically investor. Rather, you're a member that's now leaving the Dow, and you get your share. And so that's kind of how Flamingo DAOor Collector Dows work, right? The collective community, they pull their capital, and then they choose to go and invest in different companies projects. The Lao, which you may be familiar with, which also falls under the Tribute Labs ecosystem, does the exact same thing as Flamingo Dow. But rather than focusing on Nfts, they focus on web three companies, right? So they had 2030 members come together, pull their capital, and now go and invest in different organizations. Collector Dows can almost be considered as the next version of venture capital. It's a very similar model. It just requires those that are putting their capital in to act more in a governance way. They have more decision making than a traditional venture capital firm, which you have your hired VCs that then go and spend the money however they see fit. So I really love the Collector DAOmodel, and Unicorn DAOis an example of one of these models, and I'll jump into it in a bit. So that's kind of the first example. And Collector Dows are really easy to incorporate. As I said, if you have a kind of idea of this sense that can be under 100 members, you all want to put your resources and capital to a specific idea and invest in it. A Collector DAOis definitely the one for you. The next example I want to use is Ukraine DAOso some of you may be familiar with Ukraine DAOthis is actually launched by Pussy Riot and a team of us at Unicorn DAOalong with the larger public and community that is involved in the Ukraine ecosystem. And so, as we know, war started about a year ago within Ukraine. Nadia, at the time my co founder and one of the co founders of Pussy Riot she immediately was like, how can I utilize the larger web Three ecosystem to collect funds to send to the community in Ukraine? So this is a really great example of a real world use case on how can you utilize blockchain technology in Dows to now support a cause that is really in need of our help. So the thought process for Ukraine DAOwas Nadia gathered together a team. I would say there's probably 20 to 30 of us of just people she knew in the web three ecosystem who cared a lot about what was happening in Ukraine and was ready to essentially support them, make it happen and figure out a way to raise funds to send to them. So the idea that kind of came about of that was, okay, let's put up a mint of the Ukrainian flag anybody that contributes to this mint is an open edition. You could mint as many as you wanted you could put in as much east as you wanted. The thought process we were very clear is this Ukrainian NFT flag is not supposed to increase in value it just resembles and symbolizes your donation to Ukraine, right? And so the DAOcomponent was not necessarily the community members that were putting funds into Ukraine DAOthe DAOcomponent then became the 20 to 30 community members that were collectively organizing all of this, right? So we were the ones that were deciding kind of the governance of Ukraine DAOwhere the funds went. We set up the wallet, making sure everything was very transparent to those that donated to Ukraine Dow, et cetera. But we weren't necessarily taking opinions from the larger community at the time. When we launched, the reason being, and this was completely right of Nadia was she was like, we need to act quickly. We don't have time to decide as a collective what we're going to do. If the Ukraine DAOwants to do other forms of raising funds, which they completely do now, they can decide that as a collective after we do this first. But first this community is going to raise funds by using blockchain technology in this way and then we're going to have it all happen on chains. So it's super transparent to the community then where those funds are going and how we're distributing the resources we've obtained. And at the time, I believe Ukraine Dell forget the final number but raised close to like 7 million it was really, really crazy to watch it happen in about The Span Of A Week. And this was really kind of right at the beginning of the war, but it was a really beautiful and one of the first, in my opinion, real world use cases of how you can organize so quickly on web three and blockchain to help support and send funds to other community members. That doesn't necessarily take the bank waiting ten days to send the funds over and things of that nature. All of these middlemen processes that exist in typical corporate America. These were all bypassed because we were able to just take funds by individuals purchasing in FT's and then directly send it to Ukrainian community members to then distribute out among Ukraine. And this is just, I think, a really kind of beautiful example of the ways that nonprofit type efforts can happen within this ecosystem. Utilizing dows. And one of the things that Ukraine DAOended up doing and Unicorn DAOdoes this now, too, is we now have nonprofit partners. So even though we're not incorporated as a nonprofit, by having that nonprofit counterpart, essentially we can raise funds and still get the tax deduction if it's necessary, for whatever reason, for big companies or big investors, donors, et cetera. So that was a really wonderful way to see an activation like that happen. And it's important to note here that there has been no legislation passed that allows for a nonprofit doubt to exist. Yet I think the biggest use cases of Dows are taking the nonprofit model, the cooperative manual, the union model, these kind of collective, community run organizations and implementing tokenomics, implementing blockchain into how they operate to really streamline the process, allow it to scale. But none of these legally exist. Yet from a DAOlegislative standpoint, and that's something that I think in the next five years, once that happens, we're going to kind of see a world of opportunities start to grow, because there are just so many obvious use cases for dows from a kind of nonprofit standpoint. But for now, we are stuck with partnering with already existing nonprofits. So the next kind of DAOmodel that I want to use is the LLC community DAOmodel. So this is different than we talked about Wyoming. We talked about Delaware. How you can incorporate an LLC. Dow. Right. A really common model that we're seeing from community dowels, like friends with benefits. They have more than 100 members. They have a bunch of community members that are doing various things as a collective whether it's social engagements, whether it's investments, whether it's helped launching projects, et cetera. There are obviously organizations that do not necessarily fit this 100 person LLC collector model. So what we're seeing these dells start to do is to incorporate as just a traditional LLC and then have the kind of top function of the LLC be a dow. Now here. The biggest cause of this is nowhere from a legislative standpoint or an incorporation standpoint does it say that the organization must decide things as a collective. Right? So it's not written into the incorporation paperwork. It's not written into the traditional kind of structure and model of Dows. You have to incorporate it just like any other LLC. But what I would say and Friends with Benefits is a great example, is when they incorporate it, there's no legislation that allows us to run the DAOlike we want to run it today. So we're just going to incorporate it as an LLC. And once the legislation gets there, then we're going to move from a traditional LLC to a true DAOco op LLC model that fits them. So that's what I really like to kind of put out there for folks that are like, this 100 member DAOmodel maybe doesn't work for me. These other legislative models don't work great. Remember that it's okay to just incorporate as an LLC and have your top layer be a DAOand just the operational how you run your organization from a day to day standpoint. You have to be very transparent with your community that that's what's happening. Because from a, as I said, legal standpoint, you can't hold, let's say, the ones in charge accountable as a collective. Rather, individuals are now held accountable, just like in a traditional LLC. But as long as you're kind of open with your community, I've never seen a community that was, like, anti this. Right? People understand that legislation is not where it needs to be today. So you have to have incorporated something else. It's not the end of the world. And then the last one that I want to mention is City Dow. So this is actually the first big DAOthat I was a part of, and they're a really interesting example of utilizing the DAOlegislation that is out there to kind of spearhead one of their projects. So a guy on Twitter went viral back in, I think it was 2019, who went, okay, this new update of Wyoming legislation has come out. Who wants to be part of the first DAOthat owns property? And so that was a crazy concept at the time. There had been a lot of, I would say, papers, research theories that had come out on how we can streamline property ownership as a Dell. Think of it as almost like a real estate investment model of, okay, you have ten different investors put in money to this apartment complex that they now share as a collective from an ownership perspective and then receive the benefits that they would traditionally receive from a profit standpoint from the renters. Right? And so City DAOwas the first organization that wanted to champion this in the sense of let's get a community together under the DAOLegislation Act within Wyoming and buy our first piece of property in Wyoming. And that was really, really cool to see. But one of the reasons I like to use them as an example is that when this idea came out, they didn't they were able to crowdsource thousands of people into a discord. And this was during a bear. So this is really powerful in a lot of ways. And it was like, wow, this new idea. People are talking about Dows again, we could own property. That's such a phenomenal use case. So we have thousands and thousands of people in this discord almost overnight because this content went viral. But what was a shame is because the individual who started this conversation didn't have a background in Dows. And once again, Dows were so new at the time, there weren't that many actual use cases. They were able to get so many people into this discord. And it took us months to even decide what we wanted to do. So one of my biggest recommendations to a lot of folks that are starting Dows is find your core contributors and your core idea before you launch it publicly or before you announce it. And you don't have to, but what we see time and time again for Dows that launch without, let's say, more of a core idea at the beginning, what happened with City Dows, what ends up happening, you have thousands of people sharing their opinions on what to do. You have tens, dozens, hundreds of polls on within discord, on should we do this versus this, that it really, really slows down the potential of the DAObecause there wasn't a core place to start. And so City Dow, even after months of trying to figure out what they wanted to do, once they decided the idea they wanted to do, they learned they couldn't do it because it wasn't legally allowed based off of the legislation within Wyoming. So it actually took them a year from the day the DAOlaunched to actually buy their first piece of property. And so it took time, it took a lot of legal support to get something of this nature to happen. But it is possible, and big ideas like this are certainly possible. You just have to be very careful with how you use the legislation today to actually allow it to run properly. So, yeah, City DAOis a very fun one. And so then this last use case I want to share is a bit on Unicorn DAOfor those that aren't familiar. And this will be the next slide. Unicorn DAOis the organization that I co founded with Pussy Riot. We started it about a year ago. And I won't go too much into it just because we did talk about flamingo doubt, but it was a very similar mindset that back in 2021 into 2021, there was a stat that came out that only 5% of all Nfts purchased were created by women, which is insane. You know, back in 2021, after a huge bowl with Nfts, only 5% were developed by women. And so, you know, to me and nadia that was obvious on, okay, what can we do immediately to help give a larger platform to both women and the larger LGBTQ plus community within Web Street? And so we were like, okay, let's do kind of two things at the same time. Let's start a collector DAOwhere we kind of pull funds from a community of well established people in this ecosystem. So moon pay and put funds in. People put funds in. A lot of really great people put funds in to now invest and collect nfts from organizations and creatives that identify as woman or in the LGBTQ plus community. And that was really great. We raised about 5 million for that specific goal. Then simultaneously, what we did as well is because there's this almost nonprofit component to a lot of what we want to do kind of community organizing component. We simultaneously, as a doubt for one off projects, partner with different nonprofits to then raise community funds that go directly to whatever our kind of nonprofit counterpart is. And so an example of that this week is sotheby's on Tuesday is doing a huge drop curated by Nadia. It's auctioning off about 30 different pieces of both physical and digital art. And all of the funds raised are going towards Planned Parenthood. And it's actually the first time Planned Parenthood is accepting cryptocurrency. So Nadia and her team has worked really closely with the Planned Parenthood community planned Parenthood team to get them set up with a wallet, et cetera. So unicorn DAOis a really nice example of one size doesn't fit all. And we even use both the model of a collector's DAOand the kind of nonprofit DAOmodel within our organization. But I use it as an example because I say this time and time again, there is no one DAOstructure. Every DAOstructure is going to look different from person to person. It really comes down to your idea and your community. So, moving on to the next slide, this is just a quick. I found this while he's doing some research on just different types of dowels. So, like I said, again, there are dowels that are specifically focused on defy and protocol. There are dowels focused on philanthropy nonprofits. There are dows that do this collector kind of model, but with grants, there are investment dows, venture dowels, media Dowels. Decrypt is a great example of that. There are so many different models and types of dows, and we are just really at the very beginning of it. So we'll say this until the day I die. But every dial is different. The structure is different. The governance model is different. So you really want to spend your time learning about different dials, learning about the different models to figure out what structure makes the most sense for you. And because dials are governed by the collective, there's a good chance the structure will change. It likely will. A year from now, two years from now, two months after launch, your community may decide to focus in a specific way. Go a different direction, have a different governance model. But that's okay. That's part of the DAOecosystem. You're always going to be collectively deciding how to make the DAObetter. And so how you start as a DAOmight be completely different than where you are five years from now. But just remember that that's okay. And there are so many different forms that you just got to pick a place to start that makes sense for your organization and your idea. And so now, in this next slide, I'm going to briefly go off the DAOlegal structure. There is a lot of content here because this is one of the most common questions we get. So I really wanted to kind of put the content here and leave it here for you guys to come back to. But there are really kind of five corporate DAOmodels that I would say we are seeing most kind of Dows get incorporated as from a legislative standpoint today. But first and foremost, just remember that the legal ways to form and incorporate your DAOreally vary depending on the jurisdiction and local regulations. And so most dows that are incorporated within the US. You're not actually living in the state. You're incorporating in. The incorporation laws are very flexible for the ones that have been put out there on where you're actually based or if you're a global company. But just remember, do your own research. Make sure you talk to a lawyer. Make sure you talk to other kind of doubt leaders. That the way you're incorporating your DAOoff the get go makes sense and is the right model. So just reading through this, the five big ones LLC, which we've talked about a DAOcan be formed as an LLC in some jurisdictions. It just provides liability protection from the members and is a flexible structure for governance. So this is the most common model. You see dell LLCs. As we've talked about nine out of ten times. So just kind of be on the lookout for that. It's probably what will fit most use cases. Next one is a nonprofit corporation. So in some jurisdictions, DAOcan be formed as nonprofit corpse, which allows for ten status in certain legal protections. Now, this is a very new model, as we kind of talked about. Both nonprofits and Coops make a lot of sense as Dows. Traditionally, they are formed as just a nonprofit and just a co op. They don't have the DAOword on the end. But if you work really closely with a legal team, both definitely in Delaware and I believe in Wyoming as well, there is a way to potentially get your incorporation as a nonprofit DAOif you work correctly. If you ask your judge properly, it's a lot of extra steps. So For Both Nonprofits And Co Ops, my Go To Recommendation for you guys is to just incorporate it as a plain nonprofit, a plane co op, and then put that kind of DAOlayer over it, but work towards incorporating it officially as a DAOnonprofit, as a DAOco op. The next one is a foundation. This is relatively new as well. We're starting to see jurisdictions that allow dows to be formed as foundations, so essentially legal entities that typically operate for charitable, educational, and other public benefit purposes. As you can see, there's a very common theme here and the types of dows that are allowed, so this is definitely one of them. And then the last one is a trust. So dowels can actually be formed as trust. We've started to see that quite commonly with real estate related dows and it provides legal protection and flexibility in governance itself. So those are kind of the five typical different ways I would recommend you guys incorporate and are the most popular kind of models. So the last slide that I have today to just chat through are the biggest problems with dowels. I always like to touch on this because dowels sound great in theory, they're a little utopia, right? But realistically, there are a lot of problems with them. I've definitely faced quite a few in my many organizations, so just want to kind of run through those with you guys real quick. So, first, regulatory uncertainty by and far, the biggest problem with Dows as we've discussed, it's getting better. But just know your ability to run a DAOdoes not stop here. But you just need to be very mindful cautious and ensure you have the right legal team before moving forward. The next one is the technical complexity which we've gone through because this is such a new ecosystem, we're like at the beginning stages of the Internet back in 2000, right? So because it is a little more difficult than normal to use this tech today, dows themselves have a lot of complexity towards building and launching multi six to actually creating your first community wallet, et cetera. So because there's no one right size fit all and two already existing kind of steps and opportunities for Dows to form, you see a lot of technical complexity and having a good Dev team or organization that you can work with to help build out the governance tools of the DAOis really, really important at the beginning stages. Next, scalability. The end goal of dows is to scale globally. There has all the opportunities too, because everything can happen remotely. That's one of the biggest perks. But from a governance perspective, it's much harder to scale, right? Getting community members from across the globe to all vote on the same thing, it's no easy feat, it definitely can be done, but it's one of the bigger challenges. The governance and the scalability really goes hand in hand, right? And dows are designed to be decentralized and community driven, but this can create challenges around decision making and conflict resolution as well as the potential for malicious actors to manipulate the system, for example, the DAOhack. And then of course, there are always financial risks associated. So always, always do your own research from a security perspective. Make sure you understand if you are utilizing tokens, how or how not they're not going to be regulated by the SEC. How you incorporate as a DAOwill tell you your financial risks and will tell you what you are allowed to do and not allowed to do with your tokens and when you need to potentially go through the SEC to regulate them properly. So it's really important to kind of do that deep dive before you launch a Dow. And then the last kind of point, I guess the last slide I have here is the future of Dows. So where Dows are going, I definitely want to emphasize with everyone that we're really at the beginning stages, right? We're so new when it comes to Dows. So at the end of the day, what you see today is just the very beginning. And so for anyone that wants to start a Dow, I just encourage you to find those community members within your ecosystem to really help you get it going and come with that core idea, that core model from a governance perspective, a tokenomics perspective. Find your DAOleaders. See what they think. Find other individuals that have been really successful in the industry, and then allow them to help teach you on what your DAOcould look like, how it could be shaped. Allow the community members to give you input in your initial DAOstructure, but have that kind of working thesis of your dial before you launch it. But once again, we're just in the beginning phases, it's such a beautiful kind of use case of all things blockchain and how we can streamline this tech to really create beneficial opportunities to Dows or to the ecosystem at large. And if you're thinking about starting in a Dow, I would definitely encourage you and do your own research, as I'll keep saying. But I definitely think at the end of the day, so many organizations are going to benefit so greatly from this because it does allow for a much more equitable ecosystem. It allows for the community to decide where funds go, how they get there, how the organization is operated rather than leaving it to one person or a set of people. And that at the end of the day, is what I care about the most. It's giving more opportunities to the community and allowing the community to decide the future of an organization, et cetera, rather than one person. So yeah, so that's all things Dows. I hope I didn't bore you and definitely for the larger community, feel free to reach out to me in general. And, yeah, I had one additional slide, which is kind of questions on tokenomics and other aspects of dows, if you want to get into that. But I also know we're at an hour, so whatever you think, Mikey, makes sense.
If you're able to keep going, we will keep going. My brain is lit up with a ton of questions around it. I think my experience is sort of small and limited and kind of like, in my opinion, a little bit charming, in that the first NFP I was ever gifted was a gooptroop. The gooptroop was a 10,000 pfp of a nouns. DAOand then the proceeds purchased a noun that then goes and participates as a vote in the larger ecosystem. So it's like a nested voting structure to vote on what the noun will do. That, then the noun votes on the larger set of proposals that come through on a daily, weekly basis. I have questions into kind of three larger buckets along the research line for our community. We've had a ton of interest in how people can get more involved in Web Three. And so this feels like a subset of, like, how do you get involved? And what are dows looking for in general, other than the broad be a good community member? Kind of the jobs to be done in dows that are kind of easy to pick up and then add value and contribution. What are your thoughts there?
Yes, Certainly. So one of the first things I say in general to this question is I believe the most successful dows are the ones that allow community members to enter and exit the DAOas their time allows them. Any DAOwill successfully operate that is run by the community, covered by the community. But realistically, unless the DAOhires them from a full time perspective, which a lot of Dows do, a lot of Dows will collectively decide, we need to hire these five people. They get the final applicants, and then they vote as a collective whether or not to employ them. Right. But for most folks, this is almost like a hobby for them or a side gig or something. They're very passionate about that. They don't feel the need to be their full time job. And so in that manner, the most successful dows, in my opinion, are the ones that allow these types of community members to enter and exit dows at ease. They don't depend on the individual member to make or break what the DAOis doing, but they provide a lot of opportunities for community members to be involved as they would like to. And so I would say from DAOto dow, it really varies on the kind of opportunities associated. It could be anything from social media marketing to running an activation to just being kind of on the grounds at a community event to being a kind of discord mod that any role you've seen a traditional organization could be in a dow. Right. So what? My biggest recommendation is to folks. Is that one? Before you start a dow, make sure you're involved in a dow. It's a great, as you were saying, first way to get involved in the larger web three ecosystem. And I think dows are such a beautiful way to connect with other people within the larger ecosystem and find opportunities to put your skills to work. I say to a lot of folks that are new to this space, get involved in the space for six months, join some dows, be active on Twitter, learn as much as you can, and usually by the end of it, you'll have a full time job offer somewhere. When it comes to dows, I encourage you to find ones that you just resonate with you you find really interesting. You like their long term mission and goals and then jump into their discord, jump into their telegram, follow them on Twitter and that is where you'll see the opportunities start to pop up. But very rarely do you have someone coming up to you as an individual saying please do marketing for us. If you want to be involved in Adele, you have to find those opportunities yourself. You need to be there so that when they go, oh, wouldn't it be nice if we have a videographer? You go, oh, I actually live in La. And I'd be happy to do that. Dows, because they are run by collective, you just don't see as much individual request as you see kind of opportunities for the larger ecosystem and you kind of put your name out there first as I can do this, I can handle this. And that's how you build your resume as well, right? That's how you build your resume within Web Three. Dows are such a fantastic way to kind of start that. And we see with a lot of these Nft communities now they're launching dows. So that's definitely kind of I would encourage you to find dows that you're passionate about, that resonate with. You just get involved in those conversations and I have no doubt you'll find ways that you as an individual can be involved 100%.
I think a way that I've thought about it and have participated myself is no one is going to ask directly, but if you see something and you can set aside the time and put it forward and be open to the feedback that maybe it's not ideally what is necessary, but the community can help steer it. There's a ton of value in being able to put something into the world that you get a lot of great smart folks looking at and then can refine it and iterate it further. There's a lot of examples, I think, of that. Switching gears slightly, we have a question of like is there a situation in which a startup should definitely not form a dow? And I guess, like the overall question is like when to DAOversus when not to dow? And do you have an opinion on that currently? Is it your Default is like you have one? Or is It with the caveat of do your own research or is it Like no, no, you really have to go through a framework to Decide.
Yeah, I would Say first and Foremost, the question is, can Collective decision Making help this Organization run? At the end of the Day, that's the first Question I Would ask anyone who's considering starting a Dow. And the Reason I start with that as well is that's the core thought process behind decentralized Governance. It's a community making Decisions and then programming Them in a way that they Happen autonomously. And so for a lot of folks, in my opinion, you can launch that Model with almost any Organization, right? Some people wouldn't agree, but from my mindset, the Collective is almost always superior to the individual from a decision making Power. But you as a kind of startup founder, if you don't feel that's, what's going to Further your Organization and your idea and your Startup right off the gate? I'm going to Say probably Dows are not the right model for you. But if you are comfortable with this idea of a Community deciding where the organization goes and how it's going to run as a Collective, then I think that's correct. That's the first step then, kind of as you're saying, the next thing I would encourage anyone to do that is wanting to start a DAOis, yes, do your research. But Two, start to practically think about what does this model look like and Can I legally do It Today based off of regulations? So when I Say Do your own research, it's really not only doing your own research on Dows at large, but it's your specific model and Idea. How do you make this Happen? Practically. What is the incorporation model? That makes sense for your DAOto run properly. And like I said before, you do not have to incorporate as a dow. You can incorporate as a different type of Entity, but still have DAObe the top Layer for now, if you can't incorporate it Properly. But that would be kind of the next Step is make sure you, as an Individual feel comfortable enough with How Dows work, that you feel You Can launch a DAOat itself and that you understand the model you're starting with as a Dow. It'll probably Change, as we've talked about from a governance perspective, but having that Core Model in place for Your Community to utilize right off the get go is Going To Be really Important for the success of the Dow. So those are kind of the key things that I personally recommend for anyone to think about or keep in mind before launching a Dow, because Nothing makes me sadder than a Dow. It is a fantastic idea, getting launched, but not having any direction or having the right community or resources and then just failing. Or for city doubt, for example, taking a year to get anywhere, because those are going to be your biggest roadblock. So make sure you spend that time and energy just like you would before you pitch to investors right on what this organization looks like, how you're going to make it happen, who the key people are at the beginning, and what that governance protocol in your mind realistically looks like from day one.
What comes to mind for how you mentioned experimentation is a really important piece of it. And just from my own observations of watching lots of dows kind of form organically the concept of a subdoao and or kind of you have a group of folks that are focused on a specific area and sort of nested under a larger function. Seems to be a really earnest way to work out a lot of kinks, minimize your own risk, actively move some things forward. And I think to the point you made about Wyoming and the city DAOfor a start up, every second counts. And so you have to kind of strike this balance where you can bifurcate your to be like things that are not necessarily as critical to make a very timely decision, can live in one space. And things that are like, they just have to get acted upon and kind of be a benevolent dictator of sorts. Can live in a separate area. What are the starting points that you are seeing most commonly in that framework? That are nice and I wouldn't say too safe, but are kind of a proven path for what you would start as a subsection of a larger organization. That's like this is the DAOpart.
I love that. And that's a really great point that I didn't necessarily bring up in my models or examples. But a lot of the time, too, when I say incorporate as a different corporation, and then you have your DAOlayer on top, Another option is you have a fully functioning corporation, LLC, et cetera. And then you have smaller dowels or a single DAOfor a very specific focus. A great example of that is Bright Moments. Right. Bright moments started with this concept of crypto Venetians. They started launching these crypto Venetians in many cities, and they were like, okay, everyone that holds a crypto Venetian is now going to be a part of the bright moments now that decides which cities we go to next and a handful of other things. Right? That's a fantastic example of a company that's running really successfully within the web three ecosystem, but then has a kind of subsector DAOfor their community for specific XYZ things. I think kind of the model of subdal is such a fantastic way, as you say, in use case to be able to try it out with less risk. Right? You still have the company operating as you see fit. There are even organizations and really well established web three companies today that are doing just this. They're starting to launch their community dow, et cetera. Or other things. And so I think from, like, a subdoubt perspective, the biggest thing is figuring out what you want your community to decide versus the company. Right. What is in the power of the company's hands versus the community's hands. And then how much power and control do you give to the community? At the end of the day. This is part of the reason why I keep saying it. It's great to have a model off of the very initial start of whatever the DAOmay be forming. And so especially when you're a company that's already existing that's kind of launching the sub sector dow, you definitely want to have kind of a specific idea and how much money should go behind it and how much governance goes behind it. But I do think a lot of web three companies they are launching like Incubator, DAOEquivalents That's a very popular model that we're seeing today from a sub DAOperspective is okay. We're going to invest in 50 companies a year. Rather than consensus deciding this, we're going to allow the consensus doubt. Consensus. Doubt, to be clear, does not exist. But this is an example of something that I could see practically happening. Right. Or maybe it's a nonprofit organization and they want to host a big kind of nft competition. Everyone that submits an Nft pays $100. And all of this money raised goes to the nonprofit Tao that decides how it's allocated. Usually for the subsector DAOcommunities. It's figuring out a DAOmodel that is in vain with the larger organization. It is a similar kind of mindset. Goals, mission. But it's putting a chunk of capital and allowing the community to decide how to allocate it rather than the top down structure, as we've discussed. But what's really beautiful about that and often works really well, is then you have the typical corporation to maybe handle the operations and the logistics and the debt requirements towards anything that might be voted and decided upon within the Dow. So I definitely like I would say, for a lot of corporations, it's a really smart model if you're trying to figure out how to dip your toe in. And maybe you have an idea. Maybe this idea could be the company in 510 years from now. But you want to test it out first. Work out the kinks before you scale it in any regard. And I think definitely the sub DAOmodel is a great way to do that.
Switching gears like slightly. It feels like you talked about the DAOhack of 2016, and I believe that was kind of like an unintended consequence that came home to Roost. And we've had a lot of time since then to kind of explore and experiment. Are there in your estimation, kind of common pitfalls that arise very easily. And then in terms of a detailed plan, how do you steer people to arrive at avoiding those unintended consequences? And also how you develop and communicate what is effectively a game out in time with a fixed amount of resources. What have you seen most commonly since then?
Yeah, that's great. I would say number one, biggest pitfall, beyond launching too early, kind of as we've talked about, that's a big pitfall. It's just not having kind of your ducks in an order. But let's say you have your ducks in an order, right? I would say the most common pitfall we see day one is not having enough people vote. From a governance perspective, that is a very common problem we'll see is that you'll have 10,000 members, whatever it may be, but only 10% of them are voting at the end of the day. And so if that's what's occurring, one, it really makes you look at your DAOand go, why is it such a small voting rate? And two, sometimes it can prevent governance from passing because some people will put into their governance policies and protocols that they need 25% of all token holding members to vote. So this is like, in my opinion, kind of day one problem. If you're able to get past legislation concerns and the governance itself, this is something that we see happen a lot. And that's why one of the favorite kind of solutions that I've seen start to pop up is delegating votes. I think this is a fantastic idea and it makes sense on chain, right? So you have 100 members, only 10% of them are voting. What you can then do, and actually unicorn DAOis a great example of this. So we, for example, have a lot of really big names that put funding into Unicorn down, became Unicorn Down members. As a result, they don't really care about the day to day people is not going to be voting every day on our discord on which NFC is to buy. He's got other things going on, right? And so as a result, for the last six months, I would say, especially with the bear, we're seeing maybe at best a 30% voting rate. So it's pretty small. Sometimes it's a small five to 10%. So something that we're working as a collective now to do is delegating votes. And I love this model, right? You basically find other vote holding members or voting members and you're like, I trust you, Mikey. I'm going to send you all ten votes of mine because I know we're aligned. You do not actually own them. The text should be built in a way that you can send the tokens. So you're truly delegating them, you're not giving them to you. But then what you see happening is the community is still happening because the person they want to vote is still voting in the same manner. But as a result, for folks that may not be as active, they then are able to either bring someone new in that will Vote On Behalf Of them or delegate To Other folks. So that's one of the biggest recommendations I have for, like, pitfall day one that I've seen time and time Again is the Voting Concern. And the Second thing that I Would add to that as well is that beyond Delegating, just Looking back at how the DAOoperates and making sure it's really accessible to your members is Going to Be really important. A really common voting model we've started to see pop up is Emoji Consensus, which I absolutely love. It's a way to pass legislation, way to pass kind of DAOprotocols really quickly within A DAOwithout having to submit an official proposal, right? We can say, oh, we want to bid on this Claire Silver piece. We're willing to bid up to 20 east. Vote yes. In favor, thumbs up. In favor, thumbs down, not in favor. Right? So this is an example now of, okay, we're all on Discord most Days. It's really easy for us to just click the thumbs Up Button. We don't have to take A call, we don't have to go through our process a proposal really kind of looking at your voting and governance model and making sure, okay, is this actually easy for our Members to use? Is it accessible? Is it achievable, et cetera. Because if It's not, that's obviously only going to hurt kind of the governance associated. And then the second biggest Pitfall, I Would say, among kind of community activation and Governance is Compensation. That's a really big one. You see Right Now is that a Lot Of these Dows are fully operating off of People's free labor. That, for me, is a big problem. Personally, there are a Lot of folks that don't see that as a concern if they're more financially well off or have done really well in the Web Three Pools. And it Is Something that I Think actually the ecosystem as Itself really kind of clashes heads about. But realistically, for a Lot Of Dows who are not necessarily operated by the whales of Web Three, struggle with figuring out how much time as I, an individual, can put into this DAOif I'm not going to be compensated. And People have different philosophies and theories like me and Aaron Wright don't agree on this. Right, Aaron? His thought process is a DAOshould be 100% autonomous. It should not depend on a Handful Of people to operate it. So as A collective, any decisions that are happening, it just happens as A Collective. And that's good in theory, but Realistically, a lot of Dows are still going to require five to ten people to run the day to day logistics, especially if there's not an already existing business or operating company, as we've talked about, that can handle that. And So one of the things that I really encourage core DAOmembers when you're getting the DAOready put together, is thinking about okay, one, how are we going to raise funds if we intend to be compensated for our time? And two, how do you decide as a collective, who gets compensated and how much? One of the great ways is a mix of compensation in DAOtokens in addition to currency based off of what they've raised. Another great example is voting on allocating hours to specific members. Rebecca is going to go work for a max of 30 hours at $100 an hour, whatever it may be. I track my hours, I send it to the DAOand then they pay me via the wallet and the transactions already occurring by the multi sick. So this is something that I really request people to be mindful of when they're starting. The DAOis like, okay, it doesn't have to be the core DAOmembers that end up getting compensated or working in a larger capacity. But if you're finding that maybe you're not having as many DAOmembers active as you would like, perhaps it reflects on what you're asking DAOmembers to do, the compensation associated and whether or not it's worth people's time. Realistically, you can't run a company on the backs of free labor at the end of the day, and especially for DAOfounders, you see a lot of them get burnt out because they're not being compensated in the way they should be. So there's definitely no right answer there. But that is a huge pitfall we see with a lot of Dows today because the ecosystem is so new and there's not already like, systems in place, right? And so that's just something that I really recommend kind of right off the gate. Be mindful of this, think about it and think about who you would compensate and how you think it would be fair to from a governance perspective, because another option would be, okay, we trust Mikey and Pop CPG dow, we're going to allocate $100,000 to him to disperse among potential team members. That's a completely fair option. There's so many different models on how you can actually compensate people for their time. It's just making sure you have it in place and it's clear to the community so they're being rewarded for the energy that they're putting into the organization.
There are interesting dynamics that come to play with the free versus paid. I 100% agree with you that you need to have a very clear plan and that maybe for a fixed amount of time you can have some goodwill come forward for people to establish themselves. But a payment and compensation structure, whatever the compensation is, probably needs to be well understood ahead of time. I think the thing that piqued my interest about this is, again being kind of adjacent to being active in the Nouns Dow. The Nouns famously late last year shut down their discord and it was a reason that was the folks that were running the discord were paying for the discord. It was not necessarily an officially sanctioned place, but sort of formed organically, but they were having outsized influence on decision making because of that kind of dynamic. And so it's a really interesting case of like, well, they were giving away their time and their resources, but they were getting back this level of influence. And so I think when you start to think about Dows and the game, there is like, and I don't want to say sound negative in this sense because I think power dynamics are things that exist, but there has to be some consideration of who holds power and how is that power executed. And I think to your point of the unicorn DAOand being very much leaning into equitable outcomes, I think it's really fascinating to understand and think about that and put pen to paper on it of like, hey, this is the structure that we want and this is where we want things to flow. And that's what I think the Dow, like you had said, the beautiful way of like, the dream of what happens with Dows really comes to be practical and for people to get involved in a very lightweight sense. I love emoji that DAOvoting. I think people could probably come in and hit the like button on stuff, though, for his own we'll get him.
Any more, he's going to hear this now and go, I got to go get you.
Doesn't even have the time to hit the thumbs up or thumbs down. No, that's not what we'll do. If there's anything we haven't covered, please, let's wrap this up. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. This genius call to me is like, exactly what we need for expanding the minds of folks and getting the information that's critical into the hands of these web three folks that are super passionate. So with that, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Yeah, no, really, final words. Read out. I think I definitely dove right into quite a few important aspects of it. I would just say you guys can definitely follow me on social media at Rebecca Lamis. It's just my name. I am very open to talking to people about Dows at large. I do consult and the way I consult is based on what you can afford. And so if you are just interested in chatting a little bit, see kind of what kind of opportunities are, who you should connect with, who you should look at, feel free to reach out to me free of charge. I always want to share the resources and opportunities that I know of with the larger community about Dallas, there's just so much information out there, it's hard to kind of get through in these beginning stages. So, yeah, definitely don't hesitate to reach out to me if you want to chat through an idea and if you want to consult in a larger manner, I'm always around, but yeah, definitely. And then unicorn DAOis unicorn underscore XXX. So definitely feel free to follow along with a lot of what we're working on there. But, yeah, super grateful for this time. It's dows all the way down, maybe that's what I say. So definitely love sharing a bit more about my time in this ecosystem. And I really appreciate you having me on, Mikey.