gm DAO frens (🌳,🌳)

TLDR:

• I am moving my writing to Mirror. Long Mirror
• Join the fun at Constitution DAO (📜,📜)
• I joined Squiggle DAO, Cabin DAO, and Own.Fund
• DAO tooling and standardization is needed desperately
• Entities DAO launches their MetaGeckos
• New Atlantis DAO is taking flight to inspire every citizen on the planet to become an ocean innovator, advocate, and activist.
• Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mettemeier will be participating in Ocean Drop starting December 3rd.
• Klima DAO changes the conversation and brings 9.5M tons of carbon onchain
• Americana attempts to bring IRL goods onchain
• Story DAO - a new decentralized production studio using NFTs to incubate and accelerate IP

Mirror

Now that Mirror has opened up access to everyone, I will be publishing here as well moving forward. Wherever possible, I am trying to support native web3 businesses, especially ones as badass as Mirror. Mirror started its journey by initiating a weekly $WRITE RACE that encouraged participation within existing communities and rewarded the creators of the best content through a community vote. Now Mirror has increased its functionality to help creators with NFT projects like this one from Tyler Hobbs and Bright Moments DAO. Mirror is creating a platform for all kinds of creators to engage, interact, and monetize their audiences with unique experiences or opportunities. Take a look at this crowdfund from MadRealities, a project that I recently supported because I believe that web3 and realty TV are a perfect match and because every time I speak with Devin, I walk away impressed. Plus, as we have now learned through the ENS airdrop as well as the recent Botto airdrop, it pays to play in the metaverse. So, maybe a Mirror airdrop is in our future - William Peaster at Bankless certainly seems to think so. And after meeting Patrick from Mirror last week, let’s just say I am long Mirror. Now our words and stories can become infinite.

Constitution DAO (📜,📜)

Please contribute and follow along. Thanks to Packy McCormick for helping get the word out!

DAO Activity, Tooling, and New Governance Models

I have joined a few more DAOs recently, including Squiggle DAO, Own Fund, and Cabin DAO. I am particularly excited about Cabin DAO and what they are trying to accomplish. The creativity of the community, the blending of IRL and metaverse activity, and the far off chance that they could help bring Balaji’s vision for a Cloud Country to life IRL is too compelling an experiment and opportunity to not be a part of it. Cloudcountry.eth was my first ever ENS Domain, afterall.

DAO life continues to amaze me. There is so much innovation happening every day and yet so few people actually diving into this new model of governance. There is a strong overlap in communities right now that feels unsustainable long term if these communities want to grow faster. But we are so early that this level of overlap withiin communities feels necessary in order to build out the proper tooling and start to standardize in some ways across the ecosystem. We cannot be as productive if we have to jump across different apps for treasury management, discourse, voting, onboarding, etc. The context switching is too difficult and the onboarding process too confusing and disheartening. And in order to create part-time productive people within our communities, we need to make joining, on-boarding, voting and governance, discussions, IP building, etc all stupid simple for the community members. These communities will start to explode in their numbers once we have better tooling and products that allow for stronger coordination, participation, and productivity. Right now, all the tools are evolving, and DAO masters has put together a great list of all the products out there today. If you are interested in furthering DAO tooling, you should jump into their discord.

I wish I had a single app that I could do all my DAO activity within. At Own.Fund we recently saw a pitch from Commonwealth, and I walked away thinking that they have a pretty decent chance of being one of the dominant players in the DAO tooling space and creating a meta DAO UI layer that incorporates all the pieces a community would need to run and operate a DAO.

I also recently had a conversation with Anthony Avedissian from Seed Club, and he mentioned something that I had also been thinking a lot about related to new DAO formation. Community membership should be gamified like an MMORPG, where members earn NFTs and POAPs for activity, and when combined with other factors like activity within Discord, Squad representation, coordinape voting, etc it levels people up within the DAO. Those levels would confer augmented voting power in some way so that the most engaged people within the DAO have the largest voice within the DAO. You could also layer in token rewards based on new levels being hit. You could also gamify onboarding by having the new community member perform specific tasks to move to a basic earning level within the DAO. Bankless recently posted an article about some of the processes they have adopted. They continue to be at the cutting edge of DAO productivity and experimentation.

Entities DAO

Entities launched two weeks ago, and the community seems fired up about the direction of the DAO. The Metageckos look amazing, some of the 1:1s by Trent Kashiuga were brilliant, and Ferb and Metafox crushed it. While the art is great, the geckos come embedded with utility that includes the ability to earn $NTTZ once the token is launched by holding a MetaGecko. $NTTZ will be the governance and utility token that powers the Entities ecosystem. We are now organizing the DAO in squads, and the participation so far has been really encouraging. We recently announced our partnership with Trent Kaniuga, who is designing the Gen1 Geckos. We also recently announced that we joined Seed Club’s latest accelerator program - SC03 - the same cohort as Atlantis DAO (see below). We are passionate about building communities around art and helping other DAOs fortify their culture through art. So, we wanted to surround ourselves with the best DAOists out there to help the community navigate these uncharted waters.

New Atlantis DAO

Our Ocean project that was also accepted and recently graduated from SeedClub SC03 now has a name. New Atlantis DAO. The vision and strategy for New Atlantis DAO is beginning to come into greater clarity for the DAO creators. Our vision is to inspire every citizen on the planet to become an ocean innovator, advocate, and activist. We will do this by using web3 technology to create a decentralized community that uses NFTs to drive its culture and a web3 economics to drive incentives in order to leverage the ocean’s power as a critical solution in healing our planet from climate change. We believe that exponential decay curves need exponential solutions, that current governments and institutions are not suited to solve the problem, and that currently people feel like their personal choices make no impact (because statistically that is true, unfortunately). We believe that web3 can uniquely solve some of the greatest problems facing our species by creating community ownership where people feel empowered to make a difference, all fueled by a robust and growing treasury that won’t require constant fundraising (like most NGOs out there today) that helps catalyze and power a decentralized global ocean conservation, advocacy, and innovation movement.

Cristina and Paul will be graciously donating one of their amazing photographs to the Ocean Drop that will be occurring starting December 3rd. All proceeds go to the OpenEarth Foundation, who are doing incredible work in the Ocean innovation space. Martin Weinstein and his team are true ambassadors for the planet, and they are on the cutting edge of web3 and NFTs. They had an insanely successful drop last year for their Carbon Drop, where Beeple headlined and they raised $6.9M. This will be Paul and Cristina’s first foray into NFTs!

We plan to open up the DAO to the community and officially announce the DAO at that time. If you are interested in a early contributor role within the DAO, please ping me. We are looking for devs and smart contract engineers, community managers, DAOists, and Climate Entrepreneurs. Last week we welcomed Craig Wilson into the community, who reached out to me after seeing my last blog post. We want to optimize for size and impact. We have 8 years left to solve the climate crisis, so LFG!

Klima DAO

We are very close with the Klima DAO team ;), and I have been a strong supporter of their mission. Klima is a DeFi protocol based on the Olympus Pro model, but instead of bonding stables and other assets in their treasury to get liquidity into the market, they are working with Toucan Protocol (who is bringing carbon credits on-chain) to bond that carbon in their treasury. In three weeks, Klima has grown to be valued at over $800M and has bonded 9.5M tons of carbon. Klima is a black hole for carbon credits, which in turn creates tremendous supply side pressure for companies looking to offset their carbon emissions. This then creates a pricing surge that forces Companies to start making more ecologically friendly decisions that are financially motivated.

With Klima and Olympus (and the other DeFi 2.0 liquidity providers), we are seeing a new paradigm of how DAOs can bootstrap liquidity by incentivizing the bonding of specific assets in their treasury (and other creative means). This in turn allows for communities to secure their treasury with various interesting off-chain assets that further their mission. Jonathan Hillis, Julia Lipton, Zakk and I had a brief Twitter thread about how an Olympus Pro model can be used to potentially bring land deeds into their treasury as a bonding mechanism that can then turn into IRL Cabin DAO locations. These types of assets likely need much better pricing oracles in order to facilitate this, but they are coming, and the explosion of off-chain assets being brought on-chain by DAOs bonding those IRL assets is likely right around the corner. I suspect that this will open up a ton of new use cases for DAOs to begin having IRL impact.

Americana

I recently syndicated a new deal called Americana. Americana is building a tamper-proof chip that gets attached onto IRL goods and collectibles. Americana then brings those goods on-chain. The opportunity to bring real world items on-chain is massive. Everything could eventually trade in a more trust-less way, and real world goods could start being used in DeFi. Centifuge is tackling this problem with digital goods (titles, mortgages, etc), while Americana is solving for physical goods (purses, shoes, cars, etc). There is still a lot to accomplish with regard to ensuring authenticity, but perhaps companies like Americana and Boson Protocol will begin to tackle these areas using game theory and other oracles.

Future DAOs

My brother and I are co-creating a new decentralized production studio using NFTs to incubate and accelerate IP. It is called Story DAO. The people and funds supporting the project are incredible, and we are humbled and excited by the team we are assembling for the project. More details to come at a later date, but exciting times ahead!

All the communities I am supporting are looking for new community members to dive in and be a productive force for our economy. If you are interested in discussing any of the projects or ideas mentioned in here, my DMs are open!

-Justin