The DAO

“And originally I thought you got communities, you gotta make them kind of coordinated. Could a DAO work or a DAO of DAOs? And that's how stability started. After about a week, I realized that was not gonna work and it was incredibly difficult. So then I figure…”

“If people want to issue a token that's raising money for a company, let's regulate it as a security. If they want to issue a token that's truly on a decentralized protocol, or has some other purpose like voting in a DAO or rewards or something like that, then …”

“But I think that that type of design mechanism can be applied to more and more types of basically labor done on computers. So if your job is on a computer, I think that there's some chance that you can replace a lot of those hierarchical, centrally managed, al…”

“I think that if you can pull that off, you can get the engineers to be paid significantly more because there's basically not this middle management business layer that's extremely inefficient relative to just running it all on software.”

“So really DeFi scaling is, in my mind, a D to B to C distribution model, DAO to business To consumer. You need that kind of layer in between.”

“The big difference over the last 12 to 18 months, NFTs are the ones that caused this paradigm shift. The mentality went from trading to using. That's a really important shift that probably most people who are outside the industry haven't fully grasped. The rea…”

“I think the internet has kind of always had some version of what a DAO is. Like, I grew up in the open source world, right? And you always had this kind of, you know, BDFLs, these benevolent dictators for life, like Puedo for Python and Linux for Linux. And th…”

“It's like a nonprofit, you know, it's the closest thing to a DAO that we basically have today. In the sense that it's communally governed and it's owned by no one essentially.”

“I think everyone in five years will participate in a DAO. They won't know it necessarily. I don't think that branding is, is whack. But they won't care. Right. User experience triumphs over everything. So yeah, I think it will be pretty commonplace. Not, maybe…”

“So I pitched an idea, basically, to web three-ify the X Games, to go and acquire it, form a DAO to go and buy the X Games and then completely reimagine it, both in a web two sense with more traditional media, cultural moments creating the, like, drive to survi…”

“In a, you know, fully Dow approach, you raise fifty million dollars or a hundred million dollars, whatever the number is, and you go and just buy the entirety of the X Games. Why do I think that's challenging here? As much as I love that as a cultural moment f…”

“I really do think that web three and having a Dow or something that looks like a Dow acquiring a share of a large operating business with the potential to be a billion dollar plus IP franchise is a huge, huge step forward for the space.”

“I want to create a DAO. You read my mind. I want to create a DAO to buy the X Games. You buy all the IP of the X Games and basically completely reimagine the X Games for a Web three and crypto enabled world.”

“We do buy into the external signaling of society telling us what we should have, what you should be doing, which DAO you should be participating in, which new token launch you should have, which new game you should be participating in, which new play to earn, …”

“I think that this showed how unreliable and useless Ethereum is as a transactional layer for these things. You know, the fact that these poor people now have money stuck in a DAO that they can't get out of because it would, the gas fees would negate their cont…”

“It cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to do an equity crowdfunding. This cost nothing.”

“And I think we're going to see a lot more of that.”

“So I don't think everything has to be a DAO. There are plenty of times where a company makes a lot more sense, but what's really interesting about DAOs is there's a lot more transparency.”

“The DAO which was a large decentralized application with a couple hundred million dollars in it was found to have a software bug and basically leaked you know, let's call it a hundred and sixty-ish million dollars worth of Ethereum”

“There is a thing called the DAO, which raised almost a hundred and thirty million dollars online in a purely distributed way just with digital currency without any stock market or what have you.”

“Before the name first slide really came into life, we were operating under the project Tron in the DAO community, and we were one of the Most popular projects that are being supported. We're thinking about launching it, but then the whole bug happened.”

“Basically worked for giving everybody their money back, which we did succeed at, and yeah, that's a very short story, but there's, of course, a lot of things behind it.”

“The DAO collected a hundred fifty million dollars worth of Ether, so it was the largest crowdfunding back in its time.”

“But from a moral point of view, you did take money, which didn't belong to him. That's why I would call him a thief.”

“So we could just look and see how we did take fifty million dollars into a sub-account. But there was a rule in the smart contract which gave us about four to five weeks time to solve the problem.”

“So, I wish I would have known how to avoid the bug in the DAO.”