Life has gotten weird lately, and this piece of writing will also be somewhat weird. It has to be - it is the story of an incredible, weird, fun organization, and the struggle we’ve all faced as we’ve birthed it. Let’s dig in. This is the story of the PageDAO.
I have to explain a bit about myself, my own weirdness, for this to work. But I will keep it brief because I’m just one person, and PageDAO is composed of many people. My name is Thomas Dylan Daniel, and I go by epicdylan (a username I made up when I was much younger) online. In my life, I’ve never quite fit anywhere, which causes me no end of heartbreak as life continues. I have always struggled to earn money, just as I struggled in school when I was younger. My brain works well to solve problems, but in some professional contexts my drive to always get at the root of the matter makes me difficult to employ. I published a peer reviewed philosophy book - a monumental accomplishment! But I cannot seem to find the means to support myself by my first professional love, teaching philosophy.
The story of my academic background is full of broken dreams - I studied philosophy as an undergraduate because I wanted to be a lawyer, which didn’t work out. Then I went to work selling cell phones, which was a great fit until the world adjusted to the omnipresence of these devices, and the pay collapsed. I went to graduate school, aiming for a Ph.D in philosophy, but wasn’t able to get into a top program. I taught for a few years, but had to leave because I made far more money Ubering than I could earn in the classroom. And every step of the way I acted in good faith, learned as much as possible, and treated people with respect.
I got pulled into the Austin startup culture once I left the philosophy classroom, and from there things have only gotten weirder. I worked as a researcher for the publishing arm of Keller Williams and got introduced to the publishing industry I had been flirting with, learned about the scams and shams authors pulled to make their books work. The publishing industry was repulsive, and I was soon fired. I got a month of severance and used it to fund the finishing touches on Formal Dialectics, which seemed like a good idea but completely flopped as many academic books do. Then it was off to my first startup, which also flopped, and on to my first glimmer of light: a biotech company–I held the distinction of being the first employee–called Zeta Biolongevity. We raised money, built a scientific theory, got a patent, but ultimately folded.
Then, in 2020, when shelter in place came along, I began to dig into Web3 with gusto. The tools writers needed to get their work out there and get paid for it seemed within reach.
I became friends with EZINCRYPTO, a lovable and omnipresent host in the crypto world, and we did a podcast together. We decided to create a magazine behind a token gate. Soon the idea blossomed; watered by our creativity, optimism, and openness, it shifted and changed. We decided to build the Library of Alexandria on the blockchain.
I dove into books and research, studied the concept, and found it to be incredible - in ancient times, this library hadn’t served as a mere book repository. It had been much more. Agents from the library sought out books in the cargo holds of ships in port in Alexandria. They would copy and translate whatever they found. This tradition continued over the centuries and eventually led to the Recovery of Aristotle–considered by many scholars to be the most significant moment in Western Philosophy’s long history, when Aristotle’s works were translated into the modern European languages and discovered by St. Thomas Aquinas, whose work helped end the Dark Ages and usher in the birth of modern science.
The Library of Alexandria was more than a library; it was a culture. It funded scholars’ work, and it supported their interests. It was burned down many times, not only by Julius Caesar, but also by many others who were threatened by it. Knowledge is power, and sometimes people who are in charge want to take power away from others. Every few decades the Library would burn.
In many ways, these repeated conflicts resemble the modern publishing industry, which itself can be a sort of enemy of free knowledge. Modern publishing uses algorithms and advertising to compel authors to write something other than what they have an interest in, to do it the marketing way instead of the writer’s way. This truly is a sort of burning, destroying works before they’re even created. A burning of the inner muse.
Funding for research should be a sacred thing. It should not matter what you want to research or how good a politician you are - instead, it should be as it was in ancient times, when your own interests were taken to be the best guide. This is fundamental to the way human minds work, and after a long life of not fitting in and never having basic economic stability for myself, I was ready to give whatever I had to give so that this dream could become a reality. And let’s be entirely honest here: I want to make enough money that I don't have to worry about my parents’ medical costs or paying my bills - in fact, I want to make enough money to live a luxury lifestyle if possible - I want to be comfortable! And let’s face it - that isn’t an easy thing to do.
I remember a verse from my days studying the Bible that seems relevant here - it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into Heaven. It means a variety of things and can be read in a variety of ways, but I take it to mean that making a lot of money in an ethical way is next to impossible. Making money in contemporary America as a writer or scholar is next to impossible because our culture prizes money and derides ethics. PageDAO doesn’t work if we forget about ethics, though, and neither would the Library of Alexandria. What we need is a system that positively reinforces good behavior and also manages to be financially rewarding for its users.
How PageDAO Formed
The route to PageDAO was a circuitous one. We started with a whitepaper about the Alexandria concept, then dropped that name and pivoted toward something more technical and decentralized with Libernet. The idea was to get people running something like IPFS on Raspberry Pi microcomputers and build out this decentralized system to facilitate learning and knowledge around the world. The end of Libernet came when I joined an accelerator based in Austin and realized we needed a C-Corporation to receive funding, start a bank account, set up health insurance for employees, and perform all those other basic support functions that are so necessary to build quality technology. We couldn’t show enough potential economic upside to Libernet to justify the existence of a C-Corporation around it to investors, so soon the concept fell off and we got our first look at the new publishing + technology company we would be building: WIP Publishing.
This next iteration, shortened to WIPP and soon given a mascot - an anthropomorphic book affectionately dubbed Wippy - was named after a joke; work-in-progress publishing. It worked for technology and for written works equally well! We published a few books during the height of NFT mania and rapidly discovered that we weren’t going to be able to make that business model work - people were buying ‘dickbutts’ but they weren’t buying books. We wanted to support self-publishing authors more than we wanted to contribute to the cesspool of shady modern publishing, so that summer we discussed DAOs endlessly and came up with the basic core concept of our first major product, the PageDAO.
There have been a million very frustrating things along the way, but the worst is definitely fundraising. Either it’s some disinterested goon who only cares about turning less money into more money, or it’s some wannabe coach who gives you advice and you don’t get anywhere even if you follow it, all they want to do is feel empowered by getting attention from you. Neither is particularly helpful.
Anyone with some money can be an investor, so the variety among investors in terms of personality, goals, and temperament is massive. At my biotech startup back in 2018, we raised a lot of money in a short period. I thought I had it figured out going into WIPP – we just needed a good lead who gave a shit about the project. That person could come in essentially as an employee alongside us and help push things forward, and we could really get some results that way. Though we’ve searched and searched for that special person to help lead PageDAO fundraising efforts, we have simply not found anyone who quite fits the bill and that has left us struggling to serve the DAO - and it makes me feel like the proverbial square peg to try to fit into the round hole of fundraising.
As a DAO, we did a few things – we released the $PAGE token, which we did not want to become a security, and its lack of security-ness has essentially made it the sort of thing people don’t want to buy. A recent Bankless episode equates bullishness with security-ness, and that seems to resonate given what we’ve learned with the Page token over the years. But all is not lost, and we still take meetings with investment firms who have varying levels of interest in providing liquidity against $PAGE, which is important because it lets people swap our native cryptocurrency for others.
We’ve pursued nearly every grant offer in Web3, but so many of them are merely gambits by teams who want their chain to see greater adoption and not altruistic investments in the future of the ecosystem. We ended up chasing our tail over the “value proposition” to the ecosystem in question each time, and ultimately they didn’t end up writing the check despite our best efforts.
What really rankled my nerves here was the way in which people struggled to connect the dots to see how they could get a return on their investment instead of seeing the value of the functional community we were working to create. People with a lot of money generally don’t care what your idea is and how it works, but sometimes you get lucky and find a great one. Back in my biotech days, I got firsthand experience with a really good investor who came in and did the work and pushed the ball forward right alongside me. We didn’t get there, though. The research got too heady for my friend and our company suffered. Without someone willing to wade into the research beside me and support the efforts of the project, it wouldn’t work, we couldn’t even decide what to do anymore. Thus, the rubber never quite met the road even though we went through all sorts of experiments in our lab and spent a great deal of money building and testing things.
With PageDAO, everything is open source and the project addresses two 9-figure markets (Books, $100B+ and Content Marketing, $400B+). There are opportunities here for people to invest their money and earn more. However, when we were shopping WIPP around and talking to people about backing us in that for-profit venture, the issue was primarily that we couldn’t get people hyped up about it. People don’t care about books very much in today’s world. That’s why we shifted gears to PageDAO, and while $PAGE is not a security, it is nonetheless quite capable of funding the DAO thru issuance if the price would stabilize and liquidity levels would increase. The mechanism that makes this happen is called utility. Mainly what happens is we issue $PAGE to people and they dump it in the liquidity pool because they’re writers looking to earn money by writing, or community builders seeking to pay for things in their lives. We don’t yet seem to have an exciting enough roadmap or the necessary hype that leads to the people who can afford to hold huge amounts of our token to actually pull the trigger and buy in with gusto, but there are market forces that $PAGE can tap into that will help anyway - and we can build them together.
There’s a cargo cult thing here somewhere. We see people create companies and fund them, we see people start cryptocurrencies and others get excited about them, but when we do these things the money just never shows up. Why? Well, it has a lot to do with our networks, our personalities, and our general demeanor - but at the end of the day, some of it just boils down to luck. Luck in meeting the right people at the right times, luck in them deciding to trust our fledgling team and join us and have input, and luck in choosing good ones and not bad ones for the long-term health of the project.
Behind the scenes in most successful business plays is a network of wealthy or at least comfortable people working together to move an agenda forward. We don’t have that, we are a network of creatives and misfits. To raise funds successfully, money people have to be excited – and that’s tough to do without having money people already involved, regardless of utility, technology, or traction. It’s a tough task made harder by the sorry state of current American cryptocurrency laws. We can’t simply go the security route and file with the SEC because there is essentially no guidance, a fact made more obvious by big well-funded operations like Kraken just cutting off that part of their business in the US. What is our little literary project supposed to do when there are essentially no rails? Our intention is and has been to build an international organization, but I’m American and so are most of the money people I know.
We started the DAO July 28, 2021. Since then, we’ve built some amazing technologies together, gotten feedback from the market and users, and iteratively designed and built new structures to address the needs we uncovered. We don’t know exactly what to build, but we have a very good idea of where to go next at any given point. Still, under the present regulatory framework, we’re just not able to make the clear ROI pitch we need to win the money people over. When someone says “Here’s $XX amount, I want 10x back and I see how that can happen here,” we have to say wait a minute, you’re treating the token as a security, and it isn’t that.
All of this has been ongoing the whole time we’ve been at it with PageDAO, but that initial meme, the indestructible library, has kept us motivated and moved us forward despite the lack of money.
The positive side to all of this is that we’ve essentially constructed an indestructible DAO that sits on the sidelines and watches as other projects come in and build things we can’t afford to build. A dose of humble pie never hurt anyone, but for the people in the trenches building with little or no financial support, the taste is poor indeed. The good news is that we had the unbelievable lucky break of recruiting an incredibly talented programmer who has single handedly fought Moloch and won, over and over again. Between our team and the other teams hard at work in Web3, the future of this new generation of FOSS looks bright.
Aside from the money issues, PageDAO is fun. And every day we are learning more about what it is going to take to solve this problem of a publishing industry that takes as its purpose the pure and simple exploitation of writers. Eventually we will be able to create a powerful market offering capable of taking a real solution to the writers who need it.
Just as Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part. Personally, I’ve put everything I had behind this project in one way or another, got hit by the $LUNA collapse, and now I’m broke. I’ve been looking for work – surprise! – it’s impossible for me to get my foot in anywhere. My qualifications and personality aren’t quite what anyone is looking for. Oof. I’m stuck in Web3 and my project can’t raise money and I haven’t found anyone who wants to pay me to write!
The truth is, sometimes I really do just feel hopeless. Even so, I know the story always has happy moments coming up again. It’s almost impossible not to fall into a well of depression with major uncertainties looming from Russia’s absolute barbarism and nations like China somehow supporting their unconscionable acts of violence, hate, and genocide. The instability to markets has simultaneously been a direct blow to me and to most of the folks who would help if they hadn’t also been negatively impacted. There is a liminality to every level of our existence these days. Nuclear war, World War 3, regulatory opacity from the US Government, extremely low wages for writers in general, and a publishing industry that essentially consists of a client list owned by publishers who control pursestrings and choose writers who get a chance and mostly don’t make it…
Has there ever been a time that something like PageDAO was needed more?
Preserving & optimizing the world’s written knowledge using decentralized tech seems like a prime area for exploration. Our strategy, to use the new tools brought to us by cryptocurrency to create a micro-economy with rules designed to make it more rewarding to be a writer, is a very compelling one. And some of our problems can start to fade as we find traction moving forward. Raising a lot of money would help us solve the regulatory clarity issue by enabling us to defend ourselves in court should the need arise, but flying under the radar with a low market cap provides its own sort of protection.
The fundamental issue of PageDAO seems to be the need for money to defend, build for, and to benefit writers - balanced on the knife’s edge against all of the potential downsides that can result from doing the wrong thing or working with the wrong person to get this money. Can we find a way to fund this project without signing a deal with the devil? A bad investor could take massive control over the project, force bad business decisions, steer the project away from its intended purpose to help writers, etc. So at some point, raising money the wrong way is the surest possible way to kill PageDAO and burn the library. We need to find someone who understands the importance of openness in research and is willing to start the flywheel spinning; from that point the project will grow and build itself via the DAO/community structure. Or, perhaps we can bootstrap it if we just keep at it long enough. The issues are complex, but that’s enough discussion of the financial difficulties for now. Whatever the future specifcally holds, it is bright because of the team that has crystallized from a growing community of writers excited about Web3.
PageDAO’s All-Stars
I’ve written about the struggles I faced personally, here, but PageDAO is far larger than simply me. I have had incredible luck in finding dedicated, hardworking, talented people to work with on this project and none of this would exist without them.
Robbie Pollock - Indefatigable
At the top of the list, Robbie’s name should show up. He’s been slogging away in the trenches since the WIP Publishing days, digesting the Web3 components and the technical bits that have to be set up just right to make any of this work at all. In the beginning of the project, I searched high and low for a talented Web3 developer and couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t simply looking for money I didn’t have. And then I met Robbie, who cares about publishing and people. Robbie is the brain behind the DAO, and he’s taught me almost everything I know about Web3 technologies. Without Robbie, PageDAO would be nothing.
CD Damitio - Vagobond
CD is a dedicated, talented former radio host whose love of wacky literature has led him to write book after book. A disenfranchised enthusiast like myself, CD’s books haven’t sold millions of copies or been made into major motion pictures, but CD has a gift for Web3 project tracking that nobody else I’ve met seems to equal. He works tirelessly to stay on top of the space and somehow manages to pull incredible talents into his projects from Vagobond Magazine to Bald Jesusism. CD had his own Web3 publishing project called LitEther when we first met, and though that project has spun down, the clarity of sight it gave him has made him a very powerful PageDAO core contributor.
Rionna Morgan
Rionna Morgan is the only member of the main PageDAO team who has managed to sell many books at all. She outsold Stephen King at one point! I remember meeting her through CD and instantly recognizing her love of literature and community. Her dedication to the mission of author empowerment is second to none, and her endless support has made it possible to take DAO elements such as the PageDAO Show to new heights. Her strength as a marketer is unequaled by anyone else in the DAO.
Ezra Levinger - EZINCRYPTO
EZ, as we call him around the DAO, is perhaps the most godfatherly PageDAO member. With connections and projects all over the Web3 space, EZ manages to somehow keep his schedule together despite the absolute torrent of content he produces. The brain behind Pass the Pen, EZ writes lots of stories and has one of the most creative minds in the DAO. He’s also been here since the very beginning, standing up for the little guy around the world. His other projects include Cipher Collectible Hip Hop and the Key to Crypto onboarding events he has been known to run in Latin America.
Greg Fishbone - Cryptoversal
Cryptoversal is another publishing talent from the Web2 world. A lawyer and a writer with impeccable prose and grammar, Cryptoversal manages to stay on top of a wide variety of daily tasks and has the distinction of being the first to create a Web3 NFTBook store. His Wordlers project has grown massively since he first took it up, and Cryptoversal is always involved in whatever the DAO is up to. Most recently, he appeared on Pass the Pen, as the first guest since EZ’s break concluded.
Nathan Gulka - Dragonate
Dragonate is a longtime friend of mine since the good old days in late 2019 when I first discovered the Cent social media platform. A TokenSmartie from the get-go, Dragonate frequently attends the WIP Meetup and helps PageDAO get its complicated Discord server working properly. Over the years many PageDAO members have come and gone, but Dragonate has been a constant presence helping keep things secure and safe for PageDAO members, who have not had to suffer many hacks or compromises thanks to his diligence.
Philip Loyd - PhilofAustin
Phil has been my friend for the better part of a decade now. A product guru and web technology expert, Phil has stepped out for a little while to build in Web2 with a steady paycheck and to focus on his family, but we never would have gotten the Readme Books NFTBook Minter put together without him. Phil is the mind behind our first Minter, and his strength in a team environment comes from a powerful personality who also has an innate ability to organize people around goals.
Cam Hejazi
Cameron Hejazi, founder of Cent, is the only investor the project has been able to attract thus far. Cam’s genius is mainly occupied with Cent, but he has provided guidance aplenty for myself and Robbie as we struggled to figure out how to raise money, what to build, and just generally where things should head from here. Cam is a partner at WIP Publishing as a result of his generous early investment, without which we would not have been able to build the Readme Books NFTBook Minter.
Mike Smart - Smart Digital Payments
Mike Smart, founder of Meta-Builders, contributed a great deal of support to PageDAO last fall. We worked to get a DeWork board put together and managed to write dozens of articles together with writers from around the world, but in the end it wasn’t quite enough. Or perhaps we were too early. Mike has a strong mind for business and is a big fan of the PageDAO concept, so we haven’t seen the last of him. The team at Meta-Builders will always be friends of PageDAO.
There are so many more people who deserve shout-outs that it seems a bit impractical to tell the stories of them all. Plus, PageDAO has a fairly open door, which means that people leave and come back and leave again as they like. We’re a creative organization full of creative people who have loads of projects, ideas, and commitments. The beauty of the DAO structure is that there are no contracts or obligations in place; people are free to come and go as they see fit. We are always grateful for their beautiful contributions.
Aside from the issue of fundraising, things are coming along quite nicely, more than nicely actually. PageDAO’s second generation minting technology has made it up the hill, despite the lack of interest in supporting it expressed by venture capitalists and grant purse string managers alike. Our very own Indefatigable truly has earned his nickname, and thanks to his efforts it is unlikely that funding problems will be able to force PageDAO to shut down. The Second Generation PageDAO NFT Minter is now in testnet phase. Released February 20, 2023, this unique decentralized application enables the user to bring a manuscript and create a unique NFTBook asset with a variety of never-before-seen features. To find out more about the second generation NFTBook Minter Technology, have a peek at our announcement here: