The ACRE DAOs Origin Story

For my first post on Mirror, I wanted to begin by introducing myself and sharing some of the private things that inspire my work. Skip to the bottom for the details on ACRE DAOs and “How it Works.”

You could say my Web3 journey began in 2016 when I launched my own law practice, Daverington PLLC, to assist clients involved in the global over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives and physical commodities trading markets. That was the year the blockchain-not-bitcoin meme really exploded and I heard about Ethereum.

“Woah,” I thought, “this is the next niche I need to conquer.”

By 2018, I was spinning up Metamask and lurking in the Pepedapp Telegram to catch the latest dank memes I could buy as NFTs.

But really, my Web3 journey began much much earlier:

1903

That was the year my Great-Grandmother Lottie DaSilva was born, and the year her mother left her to come to America.

What’s in a name?

The name ACRE OF AMERICA came to my husband Peter Daverington in a dream. In the dream, he saw it written on a t-shirt (true story!). The year was 2015 and I had recently returned to my legal career after a 6 year sabbatical in the art world recovering from Lehman Brothers PTSD. At the time, Peter (who is an artist) and I thought that “Acre of America” would make a wonderfully ironic name for a contemporary art space, so I reserved the .com domain and Twitter handle for kicks & giggles.

I say, ironic, because anything that smacked of actual sincerity and patriotism would have been abhorrent from a hip liberal New York City perspective. Yet, reverence for my birth nation was core to the name’s appeal even if I didn’t know what to do with it.

ACREinvest

Fast forward to today and Acre of America is the name of a firm I founded in 2018 with the ambition of building a new kind of institution fit for the crypto Wild West. I now lead Acre of America Partners LP, an impact investment management & advisory firm working at the intersection of new technologies & rural problems from headquarters in Hudson, New York, USA.

ACREinvest is our new blockchain venture focused on creating compelling Web3 infrastructure, virtual network services and social incentives for DAOs and other peer-to-peer permissionless stakeholders. We recently launched ACRE DAOs, a Web3 portal for a decentralized impact investment club and its related community ERC-20 token: ACRE Impact.

Our Mission at ACREinvest is to regenerate the way capital markets work & for whom.

ACRE stands for Autonomous Communities for Regenerative Economies.

2018

At the time of founding Acre of America in the bear market depths of a long crypto winter, I spent my hours mostly watching over three things: (1) red candles, (2) rigs and (3) the Statue of Liberty poised outside my Wall Street home-office window.

It was a poignant juxtaposition: daily gazing across the very waters surrounding Ellis Island where my Great-Great Grandmother arrived from St. Kitts, West Indies 115 years earlier, whilst I toiled on the virtual shores of a new digital promised land.

2020

I relocated Acre of America to Hudson, New York full-time in March 2020, just as New York State was going on a “short” PAUSE to flatten-the-curve. Once the full impact of the pandemic rugged us in the months that followed, making my work in crypto more tangible became a personal imperative.

I was no longer content to buidl in a virtual frontier town cut off from the material world and local communities I cared so much about in the Hudson Valley (and beyond). In the “real” world around me, what did I have to say to those for whom life “ain’t been no crystal stair”?

Generations

I am the daughter thrice descended from an immigrant single-mother who left my grandmother during the week to serve as a live-in domestic for a wealthy Long Island family. Because… ‘murica, Lottie lived to 100 years of age having retired comfortably to the Crown Heights brownstone and garden she owned thanks to her later years as a seamstress union factory worker.

Such a progression of fortune is unfathomable for single mothers immigrating to the United States today.

I am the niece four times descended from an immigrant janitor who was promoted to clerk at a Wall Street investment firm and fed an entire neighborhood during the Great Depression. Pop’s wife, Aunt Georgie, kept a pot of hot soup perched on the porch of their Bed-Stuy home to feed the many who were without and hungry in the 1930s.

If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food,

And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?

~James 2:15-16

Their stories, their courage and their resilience are what “America” represents to me. Accordingly, I hope the name “Acre of America” can be seen in metaphorical terms and embraced by people all around the world, as has been done in generations past. Our firm’s raison d'être is making life for all people better through the financial products and services innovation work that we do.

ACREs and DOERs

HOW IT WORKS: Two Tokens, One Mission

Token One: ACRE Impact (ACRE) - Community

There are over 2.2 billion acres of land in the United States of America. This number was the inspiration for the total fixed supply of ACRE Impact tokens that ACREinvest minted to seed the ACRE DAOs Web3 impact investment club, a diverse community of change agents who believe that large numbers of people can effectively and dynamically organize into smaller groups for the funding of targeted regenerative solutions.

The ACRE Impact token is a pure utility token that provides access to the ACRE DAOs community portal(s) and is used by the $ACRE community to measure the value of each member's contribution according to the standards and mission defined by the group. We are using SourceCred DAO tools to track and reward the generators of that value.

Token Two: ACRE DAOs Angels (DOER) - Sponsors

Contributors to the ACRE DAOs Sponsorship Pool are rewarded with $DOER, the ACRE DAOs Angels governance token, and can actively contribute to keeping ACRE DAOs community membership accessible to all. Through their active governance and stewardship of the Sponsorship Pool treasury, ACRE DAOs Angels token holders ensure that the meaningful engagement of passionate people in Autonomous Communities for Regenerative Economies is financially sustainable without regard to the contributor’s income level or amount of investible assets.

Neither the $ACRE nor $DOER token has any intrinsic value.

The Open Call for ACRE DAOs Founding Members launched on December 1st with the firepower of an incredible DAO of humans at dOrg.

Should you join the ACRE DAOs Community or donate to the ACRE DAOs Angels Sponsorship Pool, or… BOTH?

You should consider joining the ACRE DAOs community if you are interested in exploring the use of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and other blockchain-based innovations for making virtual asset investments that have a positive impact in the real world.

For membership in the Web3 Impact Investment Club, the application process is designed to maximize access and participation among a diverse set of stakeholders, while also protecting the community from trolls, spam accounts and persons looking to use the Open Call for financial speculation. JOIN US TODAY!

Wallet addresses approved through this process will receive a FREE deposit of 1,000 ACRE Impact tokens required to be held in that wallet to access the ACRE DAOs members portal and private Discord server.

You should Join the ACRE DAOs Angels community if you are interested in seeing our Web3 impact investment club model succeed, and you would like to contribute through collective governance of the Sponsorship Pool treasury. The ACRE DAOs Angels Sponsorship Pool advances an innovative future-of-work model for ACRE DAOs members whose valuable contributions can be sustained only with financial support for their time and efforts.

Pro-tip: You can do both!

We have created $ACREs for use among the ACRE Impact community, not for investment or financial speculation. To further incentivize and reward valuable contributions, ACREinvest has also established a Sponsorship Pool on JuiceboxDAO so that a decentralized community of ACRE DAOs Angels can fund and design a fair mechanism by which ACRE DAOs members redeem their ACRE Impact tokens for cryptocurrencies with monetary utility.

Further details on the mechanism for how ACRE DAOs members can redeem their $ACREs from the Sponsorship Pool will be determined by the holders of $DOER. ACREinvest has pre-mined a supply 10,000,000 DOER tokens so that it can play an initial leadership role in governance to help the ACRE DAOs Angel community form.

ACREinvest’s holdings of $DOER tokens will in all cases be reserved for use in addressing the income needs of persons actively contributing to the work of regenerative economic solutions (e.g., through grants, local currency initiatives, UBI experiments).

WAGMI

So, there you have it.

In honor of the exiles, the degens, and the apes…

The diamond hands, the memes, and the maximalists…

I love you all.

ACRE DAOs, LFGGGGGGGG!