Our previous post, PsyDAO Tokens and Governance, detailed our new governance model for BioDAOs: a two-token system that follows the design principles of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-Prize winning work on governance to build the PsyDAO Commons.

This post details one of the two, PSYC, which unlike PSY is not going on sale on Bicycle Day.

PSYC are soulbound tokens (SBTs, a.k.a. transfer-restricted NFTs) derived from Puja Ohlaver, Vitalik Buterin, and Glen Weyl’s seminal work on decentralized society.

PSYC are real-world assets (RWAs). But not like TradFi-adjacent boomer RWAs of Ondo, Clearpool, or Realio. Like avant-garde RWAs Unisocks, Saint Fame shirts, Milady FUMO dolls, Radcat Nuigurumi, and the Winds of Yawanawa by AI artist-du-jour Refik Anadol and the Yawanawa indigenous tribe from the Brazilian Amazon, famous for their mastery of psychedelics like the drink ayahuasca and the snuff hapé.

If you don’t know ayahuasca and hapé then we’re happy for you because you are about to read some of the most compelling information collected in human history. Enjoy your dive down the rabbit hole.

More on hapé: Richard Evans Schultes, A New Narcotic Snuff from The Northwest Amazon (1954); and ayahuasca: Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1998).

If you don’t know Unisocks, Saint Fame, Milady FUMO, and Radcat Nuigurumi then you are in for a treat.

PSYC are Unisocks meets ayahuasca. With royalties to native tribes.

PSYC have rights to claim RWAs based on ayahuasca, hapé, and psychedelic eyedrops made from river grass, kené huasté, which is infected by Balansia endophytes producing a LSD analogue. These RWAs are called kené.

This video shows the process of harvesting kené huasté and producing kené, which the first batches of PSYC can claim.

We licensed the PSYC kené from the video’s producer, the Kene Rao Foundation, a Shipibo IP defense fund in the Upper Amazon. In the future, we’ll share more about how IP and our crypto payments are transforming the Shipibo community through PsyDAO’s work with Kene Rao.

Shipibo kené synesthetically express shamanic songs called benshoa in Shipibo (ícaros in Spanish) which you can listen to in this recording from the founder of Kene Rao, and so kené are a form of Indigenous-language sheet music bringing into 2D the circuit boards of consciousness visible in 3D space with the aid of magic plants kené huasté and ayahuasca. Shipibo women wear them as skirts.

Here’s a picture of one: Simi Vasquez Maldonado, artist for a kené we licensed for one of the first 8 PSYC NFTs.

Here are 3 samples of kené we licensed from Kene Rao Foundation and attached to PSYC tokens.

The holder of a PSYC can claim, at first, two kené:

1. a RWA: the hand-woven physical kené about the size of a yoga mat that is the source of their art

2. digital assets: tokenized sublicenses of their attached kené using an ERC1155 extension of the PSYC ERC71 smart contract

The PSYC holder has rights to the IP of their attached kené. Those IP rights include the right to issue tokenized sublicenses to third parties for use in derivative works, e.g. furniture, home goods, album artwork, web design, etc. with royalties from those works paid back to the artist and the tribe.

But PSYC are not just tokenized RWAs expressing Shipibo psychedelic knowledge of the fabric and structure of consciousness itself through synesthetic sheet music.

PSYC have many rights and powers: legal rights to RWAs (as described above), smart-contract powers to mint new tokens (as described above), and legal rights and smart-contract powers to control treasury assets, mint new PSYC tokens, claim PSY tokens, and to vote on activating a function called EgoDeath, where PSYC holders can claim pro rata portions of certain PsyDAO Cooperative assets when quitting the Cooperative.

Let’s go through those starting with the most important: art. Because Thou Art That.

• Kené and Kene Rao Foundation

A PsyDAO team member who wishes to remain anonymous for the purposes of this article but will gladly yap about kené for hours if you identify and reach out to to them, started the Kene Rao Foundation using Ethereum during the double whammy of COVID and DeFi Summer 2020. The foundation also received a gracious donation from a family foundation from the billionaire founder of Interactive Brokers.

The purpose of Kene Rao, other than providing private economic stimulus during a trying time for the Shipibo community, is to promote and defend Shipibo IP, specifically kené. And kené in all its forms: kené patterns, the benshoa (ícaro) songs, and the medicinal plants kené huasté, ayahuasca, and the rest of the psychedelic pharmacopeia precipitating visions of the structure of consciousness beyond the veil of ordinary reality when the scales fall from our eyes.

A curious reader can learn more about kené from this Google Doc describing them from the Chicago Field Museum, especially the highlighted portions on pages 29 - 39. An inquisitive mind can unravel the mysteries of kené huasté by beginning with this excerpt from the ethnobotanical cult classic Garden of Eden by Snu Voogelbreinder with attention to the section on Cyperus and their respective Balansia endophytes.

Today, Kene Rao is the main organization for Shipibo IP protection, working together with the Peruvian copyright office INDECOPI, the Peruvian Ministry of Tourism, and various international organizations to proliferate the concept of IP protection in Shipibo communities.

People with rich culture should be rich people. IP is a key to unlocking generational wealth for indigenous peoples. We found that key can be expressed in hexadecimal form beginning with “0x.”

Kene Rao is PsyDAO’s on-the-ground in-the-Amazon partner for licensing and digitizing kené for PSYC.

• Indigenous Art for future PSYC

PSYC begins with Shipibo, but doesn’t end there.

Another PsyDAO member, who will also remain anonymous for the purposes of this article but would also gladly chat about the subject, is deeply connected with the Yawanawa tribe.

The Yawanawa recently came to crypto prominence with ai-artist Refik Anadol’s Winds of Yawanawa collection currently sitting above a 4 ETH floor price on OpenSea.

Future PSYC will have Yawanawa art. And then others: Huni Kuin, Huichol, and more, creating a cycle of reciprocity and opening channels for poverty alleviation through wealth creation using intellectual property.

• Prior informed consent, Nagoya, and our IP licensing framework

With two team members trained as psychedelic lawyers, PsyDAO employs robust compliance measures for PSYC with prior informed consent laws, Nagoya protocols, and IP licensing with royalties paid to not only the artist but also the tribe as a collective.

If you’re curious about our legal machinations, reach out via our Discord to learn more.

For the marginally curious, here’s the top of the license agreement we drafted–intentionally keeping it simple to make it easy to understand for people with low literacy and near-zero exposure to the concept of IP–and paid for in crypto.

PSYC holders’ IP rights to their underlying kené include the right to create derivative works and issue tokenized sublicenses, minting new tokens that represent prints of the original work, for others to do the same.

They are bound by a royalty, where 20% of the revenues from resales and derivative works are returned to the artist and the tribe, who have ethical veto where if the derivative work goes against tribal mores, e.g. a kené skin for a pornographic AI waifu, then tribal representatives can stop it.

• EgoDeath

We borrowed the RageQuit concept from MolochDAOs and renamed it EgoDeath for PSYC.

EgoDeath is a dormant function coded in to the PSYC smart contract that can be enabled by a vote of PSYC holders and empower PSYC holders to burn their PSYC in exchange for a pro rata portion of the PSYC treasury. Separate from the PsyDAO Treasury, the PSYC treasury will grow through sales of PSYC and means such as collecting revenues from PsyDAO products.

• PSYC supply constraints

PSYC have unlimited supply but can only be minted along the Fibonacci scale, so that the number of PSYC minted in each band is the number needed to reach the next Fibonacci band, i.e. because the Fibonacci scale is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. the number of PSYC minted for each new band is the previous number in the Fibonacci scale.

PSYC holders must mint the next band of PSYC after every 3 governance decisions, forcing governance minimization and preventing government shutdown.

Why Fibonacci growth? It’s biomimetic based on the best examples of sustainable decentralized growth in nature. This means governance and ownership of PsyDAO grows, but not too fast; decentralizes, but not without losing ties; mimics, but doesn’t copy. At every Fibonacci step, the number of tokens released is less than half of the existing amount of tokens, so there is never a dilution of more than 50% at each mint.

This supply constraint protects the democracy at the heart of the DAO, embracing the Ostrom principles by building responsibility for governing the PsyDAO Commons in nested tiers.

• PSY Claims

PSYC holders can claim PSY, but can only claim it if they actively participate in governance.

29% of the PSY supply is reserved for PSYC holders, which is equal to 29,676,904.95 PSY. That PSY is split into 40 buckets, one for each of the first 40 bands of PSYC, equal to 767,506.1625 PSY per band.

Each band of PSY is claimable by PSYC holders pro rata based on governance participation. Here is the formula for PSY claimable by PSYC holders pro rata in each band:

PSY claim = (d/p) × (767506.16/n)

where:

• d is the number of government decisions the PSYC holder participated in,

• p is the number of PSYC government proposals made during the band,

• n is the number of PSYC in existence.

This is subject to change based on votes from PSYC holders.

• Other utilities

Just imagine: tickets to token-gated IRL events, retreats in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and derivative artworks by PSYC holders.

So, now what? You know what PSYC are and what they do. How do you get your hands on one?

PSYC are available to only those who contribute labor or capital.

PSYC holders are initially only natural persons, must agree to the terms of a PSYC Membership Agreement, and must be a member of at least one PsyDAO working group.

People who want to contribute capital to purchase PSYC can do so either through reaching out to the PsyDAO team and making their case or waiting for the PSYC auction to deploy, which will be similar to the auctions of Nouns or Auragamma: art-focused, time-bounded and, unlike Nouns but like Auragamma, supply-limited.

Until then (when you can get PSYC) get psyched.