A global group of DAO enthusiasts gathered at a historic elementary school in Denver in early September for MCON2 organized by MetaCartel.
This group wasn’t here to talk about how DAO’s will change the world.
This group was here to take a deep look into all the pieces of the DAO ecosystem, critically analyze them, break them down, figure out how to improve them and forge a plan to move forward.
2018 vs. 2023
To kick things off, the “2018 vs. 2023: Narratives in Play” session with James Young (CollabLand, MetaCartel) and pet3rpan (1kx, MetaCartel) was a great way to look back to where things started and then compare that to looking forward and figuring out what’s next?
Interoperability between many groups, what are the stacks that will emerge, identity, reputation, and scaling all these things is important.
When we started, we had small, high trust groups, but now with DAOs everywhere, how do you know who to talk to and how to work together? Things like verifiable credentials are taking flight. Check out Gitcoin Passport.
DAOhaus and Moloch v3
On opening day, DAOhaus organized two workshops for the DAO world. The first was a Community Workshop where Moloch v3 and DAOhaus v3 were introduced and then working groups split off to dive into seven different DAO ideas all at different stages in their DAO journey brought to the space by eager participants.
This session was then followed by a Technical Workshop where DAOhaus devs led a live building session into DAOhaus v3.
Overall, we had the chance to explore the possibilities that DAO frameworks and tools allow, while having the chance to put these tools to new real world use cases.
For some examples of some communities that showed up, checkout WGMI Community, Baddies in Tech DAO, and Helium Network.
Ameen’s Speech
Another big highlight was Ameen Soleimani’s speech on the school’s front lawn about privacy, values and community.
After sharing details about the origin of Tornado Cash and how MolochDAO community desired and initiated it, Ameen gave a concise historical snapshot on the cypherpunk movement to liberate the use of cryptography and encryption for the masses to give us some perspective. We are now at the beginning of the “And then they fight you” period.
Ameen then brought things back to the present:
“In my view, what we’re doing here is building hope. With our DAOs, NFTs, and zkSnarks magic, we are building towards what we believe is a better way of doing things. We are building a cultural shift towards embedding our values of privacy, sovereignty, and censorship-resistance into our running code. Together, with each and every one of our projects, we are creating narratives that other people can identify with, be inspired by, imagine themselves as part of, and ultimately join in.
I think James Young put it really well - bear markets are for iteration. Everyone who joined a DAO and went through their “DAO honeymoon period” is now a veteran DAOist. You might have thought that the OG DAO lords had everything figured out. Jokes on you. The process is product. Iterate on your governance structures, and once you make it work, share that knowledge with the community.
It’s hard to know the impact of the tools and culture we build. In 2018 imagineering MolochDAO it was a preposterous thought that there might be thousands of DAOs in just a few years. MetaCartel was formed by a bunch of broke, well-meaning crypto noobs, but somehow became the nexus for a culture of ruthless positive-sum folks to collaborate, iterate, and build meaningful tools. It took years of DAOs and NFTs to make anything useful, but this community helped make it happen, and now they are coming. The positive use cases developed by offshoots of this community serve as inspiration for the entire crypto space. Andrew Yang has a lobbying DAO. Elon's brother Kimball made a DAO to buy farmland. This community helped make this happen.
I may have been the first to call myself “summoner”, but without Peter Pan, none of this would have been possible. So I’d like to give a shoutout to Peter Pan for being the greatest DAO summoner of all time. The MetaCartel community has come far, and it has done so together. Thank you for your coordination.”
You can view Ameen’s entire speech here.
Power and DAOs Dinner
I joined a small dinner where the group discussed “power” and how this plays into DAOs. For two hours, we analyzed the positives and the negatives, and also how to leverage this asset to help DAOs succeed.
My final takeaway was that power is a delicate asset. We need people with power, DAO’s to delegate power, and powerful forces to affect change, yet, we must be careful of how much power individuals can control and whether this power can be taken away if necessary.
DAOs and Legal
There was a packed room for the “DAO Legal Entity Debate”.
A group of experts including Adam Miller, Sven Riva, Ben Huh, and others presented many of the DAO legal entity options available to wrap DAOs.
The group presented reasons why it makes sense to wrap DAOs with a single entity. However, no one presented why it doesn’t make sense to wrap DAOs with a single entity. Feels like a massive single point of failure.
What about decentralization?
Why is it better to have 800 people contribute to a single DAO legal entity, than have 800 legal entities contribute to an on-chain coordination system made of immutable code?
In order to help understand this question, the example of Uniswap DAO was raised. Over 300,000 UNI token holders own and govern the Uniswap protocol that lives on Ethereum. The question was raised “How would we go about creating a legal entity for Uniswap DAO?”
There was no answer that seemed to solve this.
I think the DAO space needs to iterate more around how DAOs and legal entities interact.
Unconquerable Product Ownership
On behalf of DXdao, I was able to able to give a talk on “Unconquerable Product Ownership”
In our Ethereum world, we often assume that we are building unconquerable products because we are building on Ethereum. However, we see many recent examples of how products, projects and DAOs are being conquered, attacked or censored.
If we want to build the system that we think we are building, we need to pay more attention to important factors from the beginning and through our processes.
The goal of this presentation at MCON2 was to share ideas about this topic, introduce some important tools and techniques that some might not be aware of and get more people building Unconquerable Products.
We dive into a Pretty Good Example (“PGE”) with Swapr.eth.
You can find all the slides and some added notes here: https://mirror.xyz/skywtf.eth/
Cool Node Infrastructure
In my talk, I mention a key ingredient that is very important to making our system unconquerable and that is more people running their own nodes. Right now, it is still not super easy and it is also not that “cool” to run nodes. What if we made it so the centerpiece of a family home was a node?
Shout out to @TheMetaFactory, @META_DREAMER, @artbyaatif and SABR STUDIOS for making it “cool” to run and showcase a node!
Pick one up here: https://opensea.io/collection/metanode
Chainlink Hosted DAO Panel
Thursday afternoon, Lauren Halstead hosted a few DAOists for a live recording of Chainlink’s “Chainlink Denver: DAOs, DApps & Digitization” show.
The group included Kevin Owocki, Yalor Mewn, Dennison Bertram and myself. We dove into what’s excited us in the DAO space, what we’d like to see more of, what we’d like to see left behind and even what we’d be doing if we weren’t in Web3!
The show should be up on Chainlink’s YouTube soon!
From Where and What’s next?
Just a small list of some of the places people came from to attend MCON2:
Boulder
Brooklyn
Pennsylvania
Vancouver
Dubai
England
Portugal
London
New York City
Canada
Panama
Costa Rica
Campbell, CA
Mexico City
Tokyo
Eastern Sierras
France
Serbia
Denver
California
Rincón de la Vieja, Costa Rica
Idaho
Seoul
Bangkok
Train in Canada
Breckenridge, CO
Inside the Grand Canyon
Omaha Zoo train
Los Angeles
Scotland
Madrid
Sierra Nevada California
Boston
Dubai
Steamboat
Silverthorne @ Gulch Trail & Salmon Lake
and more!
MCON2 was an amazing event. A DAO event like no other. The question now is “What’s next?” Will there be an MCON3 or an MCON2.5 and where and when will it be?
For now, it’s time to keep iterating!
Where DAOist’s go to iterate on fresh ideas post MCON2:
Notes:
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This was only a personal taste of some of the things that took place during an amazing 4 days at MCON2. There was so much more. Don’t miss the next one!
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Special thanks to Yalor, pet3rpan and everyone else who helped make this happen ❤️🌶]
Alpha → Hope you got to taste both of these:
