DAOnload Archives - NFT Plazas

DAOnload: The Cosmic Knowledge of DAOs

Jeremy Gilbertson — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 09:00:01 +0000

Staying active is not just good advice for our friends that are getting older. It’s even better advice to power the next evolution of DAOs. Many of us understand how they work, the compelling aspects, and the potential pitfalls. One of the biggest challenges is sustaining momentum after a catalyzing event.

Humans assemble pretty quickly with a proper message and shared mission, but keeping them engaged and interested becomes more of a tricky proposition. Sadly, none of this is addressed in the “autonomous” part of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

The good news is there are talented DAO builders that are exploring, learning, and sharing to help refine our approach to organizing communities in shared action.

A Thought From History

Action is motion, and motion is generated by forces. These forces can have different effects on the things in motion. I am reading a book by Walter Russell called The Universal One.

I was led to it after finding a quote from Nikola Tesla directed to Russell. Tesla said of Russell’s work, “Lock this cosmic knowledge in a safe for 1,000 years until man is ready for it”. Russell presented the concept of a universe made of one substance controlled by electrical and magnetic forces. The electrical forces are attractive and centripetal as they give the illusion of form, while the magnetic forces are repulsive and centrifugal disassembling form back into the ether.

Russell also explains that all realities we witness or appear to witness are rooted in motion generated by the action of these forces. I know, these are pretty esoteric concepts, but I reference them here to share a little bit of my most recent headspace.

Improving DAOs

The inner workings of DAOs, either the entire group or smaller teams within it, could be considered oscillations between these two forces. Without formal hierarchies, DAOs allow team members to assemble in a loose federation to complete a task, and once that task is completed, that team is uncoupled, folding back into the larger population within the DAO.

Centripetal forces bring them together and centrifugal forces recast them back into the larger pool. If we changed the length of engagement from a marathon to a few sprints, could that help overall momentum and enhance the member experience? Maybe instead of trying to hold the attention and energy of all members, the DAO could offer the potential to participate in many smaller projects without a larger administrative commitment.

The future of work has been trending toward more of an independent, freelance mindset, which could play a big role in how the concept of work is organized. More importantly, many are considering fulfillment as a prerequisite similar to insurance and PTO.

Fulfillment is nearly as esoteric as Russell’s explanation of the building blocks of the universe, but the hardest things to explain are usually the most important.

Impossible or Unstoppable?

To many, DAOs seem as impossible as Russell’s ideas, but as Tesla remarked, the majority of the world may not be ready to explore them. We are conditioned to believe that a desk is a solid piece of wood, while Russell would explain the desk as just a collection of pieces of a universal substance pulled together by a positive electrical force in slower motion offering the illusion of solidity.

Both roughly explain the concept of a desk, while the latter offers a new perspective on something we were taught to believe. It remains uncertain whether DAOs will become a universal structure to organize and activate people around a particular mission. However, they do present a compelling, albeit generally ethereal alternative.

Let’s all keep trying things until we can unlock the safe where we’ve carefully stored our cosmic knowledge.

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*All investment/financial opinions expressed by NFT Plazas are from the personal research and experience of our site moderators and are intended as educational material only. Individuals are required to fully research any product prior to making any kind of investment.

Jeremy Gilbertson

Metaverse Methodologist, Connector and Creator

www.jeremygilbertson.com

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DAOnload: Turning Your Back on the Bear – An Optimist’s View of the State of Web3

Jeremy Gilbertson — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:49:24 +0000

I wanted to take this week’s DAOnload back to a more foundational conversation about web3. After all, DAOs are the community manifestations of web3 technology.

Testing the Boundaries

The first cycle began with the technological capability to draw a border around a digital asset, automate ownership and establish permissions for its interaction with other things. What followed was some groups truly testing the boundaries of this new capability and its intersection with culture, while other groups looked to merely capitalize on the latest trend with minimal consideration for value creation or community building.

What’s more, these groups are a small segment of the overall population that is wrestling with curiosity and skepticism. Hell, even I was the victim of a phishing scam. To be clear, there were massive amounts of money made and lost in cryptocurrency markets, which on one hand, led to blindly funding projects that lacked real value, and conversely sparked a distrust of anything related to digital assets.

The next phase took a page from the Uber framework, where ventures sold their vision as the “Uber-of-X” industry. In this case, you can replace Uber with “on-chain”. Early on, I heard so many ideas presented this way, I began to ask why blockchain was required for a particular idea. In most cases, it wasn’t. I love creative thinking, and I’m living proof that you need a few bad ideas to sharpen that one really great idea.

Inside the Innovation Cycle

We are living in the messy middle of an innovation cycle. The technological capability comes first, then use cases of that technology unfold through experimentation and iteration. Like new colors for the painter or fresh sounds for a synthesizer, they require a spin cycle with other ingredients for something magical to happen.

The early go-to-market strategies focused on the technology alone rather than the innovative application of that technology. It’s like coming up with the idea for email and telling everybody how exciting it is to watch bits flow up and down the OSI model.

Guess what? The general public doesn’t care about the OSI model, but they did backflips over being able to type a message into a computer and, with one click, send it from Atlanta, GA to Reykjavik, Iceland in a millisecond.

Using Web3 to Reinvent the Human Experience

Web3 is a bit different because there are multiple technologies weaving together to reimagine the human experience. How we meet, how we transact, how we interact, and how we tell stories are all in various stages of reinvention.

At this point, it’s kind of like philosophers and physicists exploring the realm of quantum mechanics, where the subatomic world doesn’t really make sense. In fact, it’s counter to our traditional understanding of the world. It is built upon a hazy view of potential governed by probabilities of certain instances occurring within that potential.

I’m not comparing the complexity of web3 to quantum mechanics, but rather, web3 requires a similar approach of technical understanding with translation and application of that understanding. We can’t miss that step. Otherwise, it’s technology for technology’s sake. The potential to change the world lies in the murky cloud of all possibilities, and manifestation requires observation.

Beyond Bear Markets

Today, while financial pundits spend all of their energy describing bear markets and cryptocurrency dips, one thing remains clear. Bear markets are no match for pure innovation and creativity powered by genuine curiosity.

On top of that, factor in a community of thoughtful builders that have been waiting for this moment to redefine archaic systems that no longer serve their participants. We are on the cusp of something special, and, for those of us that can see it, it’s going to be one hell of a ride. Keep building, help others build, and help others learn, even if you have to turn your back on the bear.

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Jeremy Gilbertson

Metaverse Methodologist, Connector and Creator

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DAOnload: Redefining Cities with Kift

Jeremy Gilbertson — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 09:41:33 +0000

After reading A Pattern Language some years ago, I began thinking differently about our cities and the interests they were serving. Specifically, I was influenced by references to how small villages more closely match the needs of people. You walked everywhere usually together and the community created the infrastructure to support itself.

Today, we are physically more separated from each other, even before the COVID pandemic. Instead of walking with somebody, which puts you within a foot or two of the other person, we are now separated by twenty feet and encased in steel frames with engines propelling us from our homes to work.

Mind you, I am a believer in scaling big ideas, especially those that can impact our society for the better, however, some aspects of scale are detrimental. Alan Watts brought some of these ideas to light in the mere geometry of our cities. Right angles are efficient in the design of cities but don’t match the geometry of humans.

In the spirit of these thoughts, I connected with another amazing group of web3 minds aimed to change the way the world works. Kift is a geographically distributed community organized as a DAO with wildly ambitious goals.

I met with two of their founders to discuss the concept and their mission. Matai Blacklock and Cam Lindsay have rich backgrounds in technology and social good, and they are changing the way communities are organized both physically and digitally.

Tell me about Kift and how it came together.

CL: Cities are broken and building a new city is not gonna be the answer. Building a geo-distributed city that takes advantage of people’s desire for adventure, and mobility and accommodates the changing realities of the climate crisis and supply chains. It’s about shared space and shared values.

We like to live mobile. We like to be able to eat together. We like to go on adventures. We value nature. We value sustainability. We really are focusing on ensuring that equity and diversity are present inside our community.

There are all these different ways in which those values align to create this greater whole, even though we are dispersed. Some are in Discovery Bay in Seattle, some are in Lake Port in San Francisco, some are in Joshua Tree and others are going down to Baja. Our community, our city is geo-distributed via digital realms, which allows this beautiful happenstance whenever we overlap to coexist together.

It’s a shared sense of mission because we realize how much of city living is not actually made for humans or our thriving communities. It’s made for hyper-efficiency in consumption and the ability for things to be close together, which they no longer need to be.

MB: I want to emphasize the focus on community. Whether you’re onsite or offsite, the impact of people coming together to share in a collective experience is the biggest thing that resonates. We foster this culture of community through our morning virtual and on-site group check-ins, daily communal dining, fun engagement through discord, planning for special events, and all of the opportunities for connection that happen naturally within the community.

What aspects of DAOs are important to you as you build Kift?

CL: We look at it as the digitally native version of a city government. We wanted to let our members know we are serious about building a geo-distributed city that solves many problems that traditional cities no longer address. By allowing any member to create a proposal and evaluate the proposal, they can contribute in ways that feel best for them.

How will the DAO create value over time?

CL: We think about this in stages. So right now, the DAO does not own any properties. It is the container for governing and organizing our community of people. The members pay Kift, Inc, which is a corporation that received private funding and has gone a traditional route because of the upfront costs of starting a movement like this.

We sold our initial batch of NFTs that give people membership in the DAO with voting powers and the ability to create proposals. The idea would be that the DAO then creates revenue streams from our treasury. We are looking to buy a small property that we can host our members onsite and expand upon. It will be a small beta test to understand how we buy and develop properties as a community.

The DAO owns the property and Kift, Inc leases it from the DAO. Then we can set up storage units because members need to store things. Instead of going to public storage or one of the billion-dollar companies, that money would go into the DAO treasury.

As a community, we build out these resources that could be applied to food. We start a small garden and eventually look to buy a farm. As we start bringing more regenerative practices to our sites, there is this really cool evolution.

Yes, we need to be tied to society very intentionally, but we ultimately want to self-cultivate as much as possible in our community. So the goal is for the DAO to start by acquiring our first property to help our treasury gain more value.

How are you building the value exchange mechanic between your members and the DAO?

MB: When I first came to Kift, it started as an organic approach with people raising their hands and offering to help. Then we established the concept of pods with different work streams focused on governance & law, tech & design, digital & IRL community, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

We were amazed at how many people volunteered to take on lead and support roles, from building out an online booking site and member portal to planning for events, outlining the governance process for DAO decision-making, and more. DAO members are encouraged to participate to continue to cocreate and elevate the awesome experience that we are providing our community members.

Over time we will be rolling out more web3 recognition programs and funding opportunities through our Kift improvement Proposal approach that was just ratified by the DAO through an NFT holder vote.

Tell me about the Kiftable NFT and how that works with membership and the DAO treasury.

CL: We sold a little over 250 with 80% of the proceeds going into the DAO treasury. You can think of it as citizenship to our city. The thing that allows for the community to keep growing is membership fees. If you have an NFT, you can participate in governance and set proposals. You also get 50% off membership, which gives you groceries and onsite access to any of our properties.

How many locations are there for members to use?

CL: We have four right now, and the DAO is looking to acquire one more by the end of the year. We are also looking to bring on partner properties that Kift members can access.

What’s the most challenging problem you’ve had to solve for Kift?

CL: Communication. It’s unbelievable how important and it’s unbelievable how hard it is to make sure you are communicating enough. You have to put messages in so many different places at so many different times. We have to remember that for a large swath of our community, this is not their everyday life.

This is just something they’ll check in on every so often. It’s important to be realistic about expectations for members and participation. It’s a work in progress. It’s hard, but it’s the good kind of hard.

What advice would you give someone thinking about starting a DAO?

MB: I would encourage them to observe and participate in other DAOs to learn from their efforts and connect with other like-minded folks. web3 in general is super collaborative. Dive on in, learn to swim, and try to innovate and create.

CL: Focus on having a community first and knowing who that community is. There are so many other ways to have a really successful community without making it a DAO. Really make sure that you need a DAO to do that.

And you know that you need a DAO when you are organizing groups of people that are very far apart from one another that all have a certain mission that needs assets and resources to put behind that mission. Even that can be done without a DAO, it just becomes more useful and helpful.

What do you want the world to know about Kift?

CL: If you feel there’s more to this existence than living in our cardboard boxes or one-bedroom apartments without anybody else or a solid community, we’re cooking up some stuff here at Kift that might be just the medicine that you need.

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Jeremy Gilbertson

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DAOnload: Decentralized Artists – A New Music Paradigm

Jeremy Gilbertson — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 09:30:57 +0000

DAOs focused on music continue to be a growing sector for an industry eager to enable persistent, meaningful connections between artist and fan. No longer do artists have to achieve moonshot status by locking major label deals to make waves and generate sustainable income streams.

Many projects seem to be aligned with the general guidance from futurist Kevin Kelly’s pre-web3 manifesto called 1,000 True Fans, where he encourages cultivating hyperconnectivity between artists and fans. Keep in mind that he wrote this in 2008.

Kelly explains, “A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.”

Kelly’s short piece on the future of fandom can certainly apply as a foundation principle for music and web3.

A First-of-its-Kind Music DAO

omgkirby DAO is a disruptive, anonymous decentralized music artist that fully harnesses the power of Web3 to offer an innovative, artist/fan-centric solution to issues plaguing today’s music industry. Partnered with full-service Web3 studio, Notables and run collectively by the project’s DAO, omgkirby revolutionizes how music creation and distribution are approached.

The DAO introduces a first-of-its-kind, community-driven model, allowing fans to collaborate directly with the artist on tracks, vote, and select which new artists they will support and uplift, in addition to the opportunity to create new music derivatives themselves using stems from original omgkirby tracks that they own. Born in the midst of 2020 and built to thrive in the expanding Web3 world, omgkirby DAO is already operating in the future of music.

omgkirby DAO Genesis Collection

omgkirby DAO’s proof of concept was its Genesis collection — the artist’s first official drop, including 3,000 one-of-a-kind NFT music tracks in the form of automatically-generated lo-fi beats in March 2020. The project’s creator, an anonymous music executive/musician with a background in the tech and entertainment industries, set out to test a hypothesis.

omgkirby’s first drop would determine whether or not they could create incredible, and valuable, generative music that people want to own the IP and rights to. Omgkirby’s Genesis collection sold out in minutes, and as a result, the DAO was built. Each NFT purchase granted fans membership to the DAO along with ownership of each song’s stems, master, and publishing rights.

Of the 3000 sold at mint, Jaden Smith organically bought one and made a song around it, Venture capitalist firm Castle Island Ventures utilized their omgkirby Genesis song as intro and outro music for their On The Brink podcast. The second and latest access point to the omgkirby DAO is a drop of 5,000 avatars, designed and created by Singaporean digital artist ValerieHazLife. The drop was free to mint for any omgkirby DAO Genesis NFT holder, offering PFP identification for new members to join the community in a unique and expressive fashion.

I explored the project more deeply with its creator, omgkirby. They shared the overall mission of the DAO and what’s in store for the future.

Tell me about the catalyst for the idea to start the DAO.

omgkirby started as an anonymous artist. The project was always about removing individual identity around an artist and focusing it on the music. As web3 was built, we saw the opportunity to expand this idea and become a decentralized artist where holders help govern what is possible for the music, create a platform for collaboration with fans, and build a community that can support one another by being an alternative to a record label or other traditional music organizations.

What are the most fascinating aspects of web3 as they apply to music?

The ability to create a scalable solution of digital ownership is extremely disruptive to music. The music industry is built on very archaic systems that are slow and don’t support the creatives or their fans. By creating ways to expand digital IP ownership of music between artists and fans, it opens up an endless way for artists to blaze their own trail and sustainability as an artist.

What have you learned so far in starting the DAO?

It takes a dedicated team. In order to build a DAO that is impactful and sustainable, there are so many different components of running and starting one that you need to have a passionate team running and helping in all aspects.

Why did you choose Notables as a partner?

They’re a very innovative team building exciting projects in web3. They understood the vision of what we were trying to create in music and only further encouraged the exciting ideas of how we can push the boundaries of music in web3. They’ve been an amazing team helping bring to life the exciting art and music.

What does the DAO hope to achieve by the end of the year? By end of next year?
By the end of this year, we hope to achieve the DAO having their first successful grant/funding of a community member artist. This will further highlight how DAOs can become alternatives for artists looking to develop, expand, and collaborate in the music industry.

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Jeremy Gilbertson

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DAOnload: Placemaking in Web3 – Atlanta Blockchain Center

Jeremy Gilbertson — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 04:10:23 +0000

Over the last couple of years, technology has been a bridge to human connection. While the tools and experiences have improved, nothing beats being across the table from another like-minded human to explore ideas and share perspectives.

Rooted in the coffee houses of Vienna and the ramshackle tables of Lockheed’s Skunkworks, there is magic in the potential of these serendipitous IRL meetings, and that magic is not as easy to replicate in the digital realm. It’s not impossible, but it’s limited today.

In a well-appointed concrete building with a mural depicting popular NFT art, Atlanta Blockchain Center is building a community around education, incubation, and ideation. With weekly events and speakers, it’s an epicenter of web3 buzz, activation, and innovation. ABC is organized as a DAO and the holders of $BUIDL or one of the ABC NFTs can gain access to the coworking hackerspace and preferred access to the deal flow from their incubator led by Starter Labs.

Last month, I was asked to host a panel on the intersection of music and web3 with three inspiring entrepreneurs, and I connected with Atlanta Blockchain Center’s Chief Marketing Officer, Angela Brasington to learn more.

What was the catalyst to start Atlanta Blockchain Center?

At Starter Labs, Atlanta Blockchain Center’s parent company, we knew the bear market was coming and wanted to diversify what we were doing. Part of that plan was to bring our virtual incubator and launchpad to real life. We had launched 63 defi projects from all around the globe, who raised over $45M on our platform, starter.xyz. We really understand what it takes to spot a great project and how to prepare them for a smooth and successful token launch.

We realized Miami’s lead in the crypto scene but also noticed Miami’s crypto community is just that – all crypto. Our founder is a builder at heart and continues to code every day. We were more interested in creating awareness around the technology that made crypto possible while educating people on the plethora of other incredibly impactful use cases of blockchain technology.

When we visited Atlanta, we found a booming FinTech industry and the #4 tech college in the US (along with other great tech schools). We also learned that Atlanta, known as “Transaction Alley”, processes 70% of the world’s payment transactions. Yet, when we searched for blockchain groups, meetups, and events, we found just a couple of inactive groups from a few years ago.

It seemed strange because Atlanta appeared to have the perfect foundation to be a blockchain hub, if not THE blockchain hub of the United States. We quickly put that puzzle together and saw the opportunity in front of us. Then we continued doing what we do best: BUIDL! First the concept, then the planning and finally figuring out how to execute our exciting new chapter.

Tell me about Starter Labs and their affiliation with ABC.

Starter Labs is the umbrella, or parent company, over multiple DeFi, web3, and blockchain-related products and initiatives. Starter.xyz is a multichain launchpad, incubator, and investor network for businesses building on the blockchain.

We are deployed on 5 blockchains: Binance smart chain, Polygon, Ethereum, Fantom, and Avalanche. Taking our experience from Starter, we launched ABC as our first IRL initiative. Among many other things, we incubate projects and raise funds with investors, just like at Starter, but all in person! It’s been a fun shift to get off Zoom and be face-to-face with our community.

How do you see the DAO evolving over the next year?

We’re still in education mode with the DAO. Some people are brand new and learning, while others are members of multiple DAOs. We’re working hard to help everyone understand how it all works. I see the most active members getting more involved, asking great questions, and submitting proposals.

As a result, we’ll start to see some sort of organization committee forming. Once that happens, I’d love to see a timeline of events, initiatives, partnerships, and collaborations, and for them to be able to start generating funds for a well-managed treasury.

What advice would you give someone starting a DAO related to keeping the community aligned and engaged?

Remind yourself every day how important it is to keep the DAO community aligned and engaged. Then DO IT! I can’t stress it enough.

Discord is great for creating channels where you can get the community talking and find creative ways to get them involved. Separating channels allows people to engage with the content that suits them best. It’s a better way to keep them active because they’re seeing what they want to see. We have a ‘general chat’ channel for all members to openly communicate with each other.

We have a ‘introduce yourself’ channel, which is solely for new members to introduce themselves, see who’s who, and connect when synergies abound. We have a ‘rabbit hole’ channel to allow people to go down the rabbit hole on whatever topic they see fit, as it relates to the blockchain, web3, and the industry as a whole. And many more, including our DAO governance channel, where NFT-holding DAO members can vote on member-submitted proposals. It’s important to structure your channels in a way to encourage activity and provides value to members.

What are the key components of a successful web3 investor pitch?

It must be clear and concise. It should efficiently address the problem being solved and the steps being taken to solve that problem. Along with that, the business model must be properly articulated with realistic revenue projections.

Trust me, it’s not pretty to show $20M in projected revenue for year 1. Investors don’t want to see that because we know it’s unrealistic for the majority of businesses, especially those we’re working with who are primarily early stage.

The team should be listed with photos, and you should be prepared to discuss their level of involvement. A well-thought-out roadmap is key. I want to know where you are going, how you’re getting there, and if the team can feasibly execute that.

What projects are you excited about from the first incubator cohort?

I’m honestly super excited about all three projects and their founders. They are all unique and different in their own way.

Jeremiah Long created Wedge, which specializes in community outreach to educate businesses and the general public about Web3 technology. He has made tremendous strides in connecting with community groups to move his mission forward.

Keith Wilson created Helix Automotive, the world’s first metaverse automotive manufacturer. Keith’s experience working at Ford has provided a rich understanding of the auto industry, including what they don’t do well. He’s built ways to capitalize on that and bring value to both the auto giants and consumers.

Yolanda Barton created Revere XR, the future of music & immersive storytelling. She is working with Oculus to bring her experience to life using their headsets.

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DAOnload: The Seeds of Change – DeSci and Big Pharma

Jeremy Gilbertson — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 17:01:14 +0000

I am inspired by builders who apply web3 in ways that disrupt legacy systems by empowering community contributors. The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are prime candidates for reimagination with DeSci (science through web3 primitives) being the catalyst. The biggest breakthroughs in science all start with an idea that becomes so compelling that it turns into research.

When does an idea actually come to life? Maybe it’s the nanosecond after synapses fire generating a random combination of previous thoughts and new ingredients. Perhaps, it takes a little longer. Occasionally, even the best ideas are returned to their inception as rapid electrical signals leaked into the ether. More importantly, at what point does that idea generate value?

Some ideas are seeds that need energy and fuel to mature into their full potential, while a very small amount are immediately scalable all by themselves. Even the early seeds can have real value, especially if they are given access to energy and fuel. web3 is providing that access through projects like Molecule.

What is Molecule?

Molecule is a decentralized biotech protocol that connects academics and biotech companies with funding, while enabling patient, researcher, and investor communities to directly govern and own research-related IP.

Have you ever wondered about how pharmaceuticals come to market? From a very high level, it starts with a promising researcher who receives a grant from an organization like National Institute of Health (NIH) to expand on their initial research. The researcher we speak of is usually employed by a university, where the research leads to a discovery and moves toward a patent held by the Technology Transfer Office (TTO). Outside of the academic realm, pharmaceutical companies search for patents held by TTOs that meet their profitability and business targets.

A pharmaceutical company identifies the researcher’s work and secures a license for the patent with the TTO to begin development on the medicine. One of the challenges with this model is that groundbreaking research with the potential to save lives could be shelved if the addressable market is less than what is needed for the pharmaceutical company to make the investment.

Imagine finding research that could help a condition one of your family members has suffered from for years. Now, consider that same research is run through a financial model that pharmaceutical companies use to make investment decisions, and it doesn’t meet the criteria for investment due to lack of addressable market. For you and your family, the solution is there but the means to execute is not. In the existing model, the research would likely not be used to develop a drug.

Value can be subjective, and it is usually tied to someone or something assigning that value. In the realm of venture capital and public markets, ideas become compelling with patents or demonstrable sales. The potential is clearly identified, and the risk of any investment is somewhat mitigated. What if value could be captured earlier in the process? How could that captured value help reinvent the process of drug development? Could a form of distributed and decentralized innovation be applied to some of healthcare’s biggest challenges? Molecule would seem to think so.

Molecule’s Protocol Stack

Molecule’s Protocol Stack enables the pre-patent capture of value for research, while connecting it to sources of funding and communities of stakeholders.

IPNFT – It captures value of a promising idea in the gap between research and patent or product. IPNFTs incorporate a smart contract and an IP license in one toolset.

MOLECULE Discovery – A platform where researchers can create a project showcasing the details of their research, milestones and the funding required per milestone.

MOLECULE Finance – Using DAO structures and DeFi, members can choose to resource promising projects and share in the ownership of the IPNFT.

Molecule, powered by a desire for positive disruption and web3 technology, is breaking down the barriers to medical innovation that could change lives. With this model, a group of people dealing with a similar illness could come together and put their energy toward finding a cure.

In the past, all they could have done was raise money for non-profits related to their illness, while many illnesses don’t even have a non-profit to fund. In this case, patients now have access to the pharmaceutical pipeline and the ability to support solutions to specific ailments and diseases. By organizing as a DAO, this community could potentially become the vehicle that powers the cure. Their DAO could identify a research project on the Molecule platform and decide to acquire the IPNFT tied to the research.

As an example, VitaDAO (DAO focused on longevity) has a community of thousands of members including researchers and scientists. By purchasing the $VITA token, members can vote on proposals while helping fund the DAO treasury for projects related to longevity.

Now, instead of the University TTO licensing a patent to a pharmaceutical company, the DAO can participate and even streamline the development of a solution. Even more, the DAO could offer those same people the opportunity to pool their data to share with the research teams. With web3, access to that data could show actual returns to the individual provider.

Image linked to Molecule’s first IPNFT

The first project for Molecule involved “Longevity Molecule” research that was initiated by Scheibye-Knudson Lab out of the University of Copenhagen. The IPNFT for this research was purchased by VitaDAO.

Yes, these models are unconventional and quite counter to the systems that are currently in place, but that is what makes them so compelling. By capturing value early in the process, engaging a community aligned with a cause, activating that community toward a solution, and assigning value and permissions along the way, we can build viable alternatives to the existing systems that can limit innovation and solutions addressing the needs of that community.

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The post DAOnload: The Seeds of Change – DeSci and Big Pharma appeared first on NFT Plazas.

DAOnload: From Zero to DAO in One Click

Jeremy Gilbertson — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 19:27:38 +0000

Superdao is an all-in-one DAO platform that makes it easy to start and operate decentralized autonomous organizations. After working on a Y-Combinator-backed Discord alternative called Openland, CEO Yury Lifshits founded the platform in 2021, completing a $1M preseed round shortly after.

Superdao locked in a $10.5M seed round in January 2022. Lifshits is on a personal mission to help launch one million DAOs, and he backs it up by offering a free two-week bootcamp to help curious minds learn web3 by building in it. With Superdao, you can create a DAO in one-click, generate smart contracts for NFTs and tokens, create a built-in member directory, view a treasury dashboard, keep your community informed with a newsfeed, and manage contributor compensation.

Instead of starting with complex tokenomics, Superdao offers tiered Membership NFT templates (core team, contributor and member) that can be issued as a first step. Once the community is established and productive, teams can explore tokens and additional functionality. Superdao uses Polygon for smart contracts, incorporates Gnosis Safe for multisig wallets, and offers Snapshot as a voting alternative.

Lifshits shared some background and details about Superdao with the DAOnload team.

How did the vision for Superdao come together?

My previous company was building a community messenger in web2. It didn’t work out, and I was looking for the next idea to work on. I studied the NFT boom in the summer of 2021 and realized that most successful NFT collections were evolving into DAOs. The infrastructure for DAOs is a huge opportunity and directly relates to my past experiences and skills.

How many DAOs are currently on Superdao?

Over 1500. We are already a top-tier DAO creation platform by this metric.

What did you want to improve about DAO tooling?

I wanted to give users the ability to start a DAO in one-click, and support them with a rich template library. Transparent and affordable pricing was important, and I wanted to help facilitate cross-DAO collaboration.

How will Superdao enable inter-DAO collaborations?

Through the ability to create multi-organization collections with shared member benefits, DAO-to-DAO payments, a means to find other DAOs to work with, and templates that reuse the best ideas from DAO to DAO.

What are your thoughts on Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) and their applicability to DAOs?

Very bullish. Since DAOs create status in various ways (custom roles, points, levels, and achievement NFTs), members will build their on-chain reputation through their interactions with various DAOs.

On his way to helping start one million DAOs, Lifshits envisions organizations starting to interact daily through NFT rewards, community governance, and contributor program layers. “It’s a step-by-step process,” Lifshits says.

“You can’t get everything on day one. Start with a single NFT airdrop, then do a consistent NFT reward program, then add community governance and treasury, then a contributor program, then issue a token. Issuing a token before any community or utility is unlikely to work.”

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DAOs Can Have A Soul – SBTs and Value Creation

Jeremy Gilbertson — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 08:07:17 +0000

I finished reading a paper released a few weeks ago by Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Vitalik Buterin called Decentralized Society – Finding Web3’s Soul. I’m not sure if it was because they had a quote from Lao Tzu on the front page, but I found it to apply to DAOs.

Soulbound Tokens and DAOs

At the root of the thesis, the paper describes a term called DeSoc, which is “a co-determined sociality where Souls and communities convene bottom up as emergent properties of each other producing plural network goods across different scales”. Souls are the accounts or wallets and Southbound Tokens (SBTs) are publicly visible, non-transferable, and possibly revocable tokens.

The paper asks the readers to consider “a world where most participants have Souls that store SBTs corresponding to a series of affiliations, memberships, and credentials. But the true power of this mechanism emerges when SBTs held by one Soul can be issued or attested to by other Souls who are counterparties to the relationship”.

Sure, this may sound a little fluffy, but the core concept is rooted in nature. I’ve written previously on the comparison of emergent phenomena to the mycelium networks that connect trees in a forest far below what is visible above the ground. Quantum physics also presents the concept of entanglement when two particles become connected no matter the physical distance in space. Both of these concepts are quite real despite our full grasp of their inner workings.

Let’s consider an analogy. The study of holons presents most things as part of a bigger picture of wholeness, just like cells form organs, and organs are the biological framework for humans. Imagine the ocean not as a vast body of water but as a collection of water molecules flowing in coordinated and random movement. Now consider that each water molecule has relationships and interactions with other water molecules, and more abstractly, think about the exchange of information between those molecules somehow serving the connected whole of the ocean.

What if that information powered a new collective capability for the ocean? If the ocean collectively controls this new capability, it sounds pretty interesting, but if a third party controls that capability and uses it for its own benefit, it becomes less interesting. Even more, what if each water molecule could control its participation and be rewarded for it?

If you think about it, with web2 (mainly social media) we are already giving away this information. In this case, people are the water molecules and their interactions and relationships are tracked and that information is collected and used by a third party. The social context of data is one of the most powerful pieces.

Concerning personal data, convenience and privacy are inversely related, meaning that for the convenience of the frictionless connectivity to other people, you are paying for it with your privacy. The current system looks at individuals as objects.

The good news is that a new model is emerging that views those same individuals as agents. New models that challenge legacy systems often have an uphill battle especially if the majority of users favor convenience over privacy. So, the question remains, do the individual water molecules find benefit in this coordinated capability, and are they willing to share information with the other water molecules to make it happen?

So what could this mean for DAOs?

Spinning Up Project Teams What if there was a way to quickly assemble a team of proven experts with minimal investigation and vetting? The paper presents the idea of Soul Drops, which are like Air Drops with a computational element that searches for unique combinations of SBTs within and across communities.

DAOs could use this capability to power a rotational leadership dynamic that identifies and elevates members with certain superpowers that are needed to drive a specific season of leadership. DAOs could also use SBTs to control free riders or bad actors by revoking SBTs for members that aren’t fulfilling their commitments to the community.

Rewarding Collaboration Across Differences This could prove to be the most powerful use case with the largest impact on the global community. The paper references this quote from Elinor Ostrom (known for her work on the governance of commons), “ (the) problem is to help communities made up of imperfectly cooperative but socially connected individuals overcome their social differences to coordinate at scale in broader networks”.

Collaboration with people that hold our same beliefs is easy, but working productively with those that hold dissimilar beliefs is more powerful. Could this kind of collaboration foster a more understanding and connected global community? Would individuals with this validated superpower be more sought after for certain projects?

How could we test it?

A perfect microcosm of what web3 could be is cultivated within DAO ecosystems like Seed Club, Syndicate, SuperDAO, DAOHaus, and others. What if each DAO within the ecosystem issued SBTs to those that were involved, committed, and doing work to move the mission of their DAO forward. On top of that, what if each DAO ecosystem issued a similar SBT to those members that were doing the same thing across multiple DAOs.

Here is a hypothetical example:

Merritt is a member of Lacrosse DAO and applies his programming skills to help build the infrastructure to support the DAO. Lacrosse DAO is part of the Syndicate ecosystem. Lacrosse DAO distributes the SBT to Merritt validating his continuous contribution to the DAO. Merritt’s friend tells him about Cheeseburger DAO, which is also part of the Syndicate ecosystem.

Merritt is aligned with Cheeseburger DAO and applies to join. Cheeseburger DAO sees his SBT from Lacrosse DAO which shows he is a valuable contributor and accepts him as a member. Merritt jumps in and helps the new DAO with similar programming, and they reward him with the Cheeseburger DAO SBT. Syndicate immediately notices that two DAOs in their ecosystem issued SBTs to Merritt, and Syndicate issues their SBT to Merritt that validates valuable contributions in multiple DAOs in the Syndicate ecosystem.

In this case, SBTs could be used to signal value creation within and across DAOs. It could be a compelling test of cross-community functionality. Going back to the philosophical side, do the water molecules in the ocean find value in plural intelligence, and are they willing to participate to make it happen?

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DAOnload: The Lyricist Lounge DAO – A Chat with Anthony Marshall

Jeremy Gilbertson — Sat, 28 May 2022 09:02:11 +0000

DAOs are a means to organize and activate communities around a common goal, and they are launching in a number of industries. One entrepreneur with deep ties to hip hop is launching a DAO to empower and elevate the community at the core of its culture.

In the early 1990s, Anthony Marshall co-founded the groundbreaking MC showcase The Lyricist Lounge with his best friend Danny Castro. The Lounge was an open mic for up-and-coming hip hop artists who ended up becoming legends. A curious explorer and future-thinker, Marshall is bringing that foundational franchise into web3.

You launched The Lyricist Lounge over thirty years ago. What was the catalyst and what were some of your favorite moments?

We had a mentor, Charles Thompson, who was interested in getting young people into the music industry. He had a small rehearsal space on Orchard Street in New York City on the Lower East Side. He said if we wanted to invite a few friends, he would invite some music industry friends to help mentor us and we’ve basically been doing just that for thirty years.

It was amazing having Foxy Brown with us in 1992. She and a bunch of friends showed up to perform with us. We didn’t really know who she was at that time. She wasn’t Foxy Brown yet. Her name was Inga from a group called Rotten Candy. Mos Def was the host at that time, and he introduced her to the stage. She killed it. At the end of the performance, Mos jumped on stage asking her name. She was straight Brooklyn, fourteen years old and played no games. We also had Mos and Kweli’s first performance together. With the help of Lord Jamar of Brand Nubians we brought out Dead Prez for the first time to New York City.

Another really cool moment was the first time we brought Eminem to New York City in 1996. That was an amazing night. It was hosted by Fat Joe with performances by Big Pun, M.O.P. and a gang of other folks. One group, named The Outsiders while performing all of a sudden started shouting “Yo, give it up for the white boy”. This kid out of nowhere begins to destroy the stage. He had everyone shocked at how dope he was, and after that we ended up bringing him on tour with us.

During the tour, there was this one incredible night where he was performing with us at The House of Blues in LA and apparently Busta Rhymes was in the audience losing his mind watching him perform. Apparently, an intern from Interscope was watching Buss lose his shit. That same person got a demo tape from Eminem’s crew and brought it to Interscope.

From what I understand, that was the first time Jimmy Lovine first heard Eminem, and the rest is history. We’ve had some amazing events and moments. We brought Black Eyed Peas on tour in 1998 prior to their explosion. The launch party for Bad Boy in 1993 hosted by Big and Puff…that was yet another groundbreaking night. We’ve literally worked with the majority of MCs that everyone loves. We still have a few more to get to but our history has really been amazing.

How did you find your way into web3 and what sparked your curiosity?

It was an interesting internal conversation. It was like an inner voice spoke to me. I was kind of freaking out about what was going on in the world as it pertains to COVID and quarantine. I built my whole career on live events and film production, and I kind of had a freak out.

The thoughts that followed were how can I get ahead of it. How can I get ahead of what could potentially be the next pandemic. I researched and adopted a futurist mindstate. That inner voice asked how I was going to apply it to my career with everything changing. That’s what pushed me to be more of a futurist.

I had always been early, but I’ve been challenged by that because when you are too early sometimes you aren’t around to reap the benefits when the industry and markets are ready. I wanted to be more “on time” instead of too early. My inner voice pushed me to think even farther into the future, like twenty years ahead, so that you truly understand what is coming.

So you can prepare for it, and so you can prepare your community for it. After one internal meeting to discuss a potential NFT release, I realized that this should be a larger conversation with the community. We started inviting more and more people to this call, and a year and five months later we have the $BARS token and the Lyricist Lounge DAO.

What do you want to accomplish this year with LLDAO? What do the next two years look like?

This year is about finishing our Rap Sheet (whitepaper) and getting at least two collections out. A photo collection celebrating our thirty-year history and our Backpackers NFT collection as a way to bring the community in. Another important focus is getting a liquidity partner for our $BARS token so that we are going about everything the right way.

The next two years are about starting to build up our treasury and figure out what projects we want to release. We’d like to relaunch the Lyricist Lounge TV show, and we’d also like to release the Lyricist Lounge Volume III album. In the future we would love to open a Lyricist Lounge performing arts center surrounded by affordable housing for artists.

Who is the ideal community member for LLDAO? Why?

Someone who thinks about the people first. Someone who is really about the artist first. Someone who wants to make sure the entire hip-hop community is okay…from artists to managers, producers, and everyone who has helped to push this culture along. It’s not someone who is just in it for the money or for the alpha. It’s someone that wants to use the information in alpha to do good for the community.

The other way hasn’t worked. We are coming out of a predatory time period in which people in the music industry were out to make big bucks as quickly as possible. Not making sure the artist is okay. This is why it’s about attracting likeminds so we can accomplish our goals together.

DAOs can be intimidating to the non-web3 native audience. How will LLDAO solve the onboarding and access problem?

This is a challenge for all of us. Your first job as a web3 company is to onboard as many people as possible. Your second job, in a parallel path, is to do the special thing that you do.

A DAO is a co-op and it’s about a collective of friends and family all working toward the same goals. That’s the vibration that we want people to walk into so that it feels approachable and they feel they can do it.

Web3 has an opportunity to reimagine systems, processes and relationships. What will LLDAO do for hip hop culture?

My dream is that we become a self-sustainable and self-sufficient ecosystem, which means I want to design LLDAO and our treasury in a way that hip hop culture as a whole no longer needs to do “deals” with a predatory system.

They can look to us to help directly or onboard them into web3 so they can do it themselves. The idea is to no longer need these companies that have taken so much advantage of us. The bigger dream is to have the ability to do things for ourselves. We have the talent and we are the market, so what do we need again?

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The post DAOnload: The Lyricist Lounge DAO – A Chat with Anthony Marshall appeared first on NFT Plazas.

DAOnload: Find Your DAO – DAOHQ

Jeremy Gilbertson — Sat, 07 May 2022 09:06:10 +0000

As DAOs become more popular and the future of work continues to evolve, those interested in participating and contributing to DAOs will need help understanding the ecosystem. Early adopters have either created DAOs themselves or been pulled into projects through their personal connections, and those experiences have led them to test the waters with other projects. Those new to web3 will need education, navigation, and tools to manage their experience.

DAOHQ is a DAO marketplace that aims to help with the discovery, maintenance, and investment of DAOs all over the world. I’ve been following DAOHQ for a while, and I had the opportunity to connect with their Co-founder, Emmet Halm for a quick conversation.

Tell us a little background on why you started DAOHQ.

We see DAOs as decentralized joint-stock companies on-chain. Historically, the joint-stock company was one of the most powerful inventions of the last two hundred years. We’re hopeful that DAOs will enable new kinds of international collaboration and economic opportunity. Despite this, DAOs are in their early days. To start, it’s difficult to find and research DAOs and even more difficult to invest and vote. For the average person, there are still too many steps to get involved, which is why we’re building DAOHQ.

What are you working on today?

We are focused on building the product and the team. On a granular level, lots of outreach on LinkedIn & Discord to connect with full-stack & smart contract candidates. We’re building a tight-knit, mission-driven, relentless team that values speed, self-improvement, and integrity. On the product side, I’ll jump into our Figma files to provide design feedback and take user interview calls to see how people interact with our current product.

What are some exciting things on the roadmap?

Without giving too much away, we’re excited to be the first to provide a seamless mobile-first experience for DAO discovery, investing and voting. Most people spend more time on their phones than on their laptops, GenZ and Millennials live on their smartphones, and smartphones have a wider global reach. We are bringing the DAO experience directly to users where they are.

How will DAOHQ help people discover and contribute to DAOs?

Right now, you can explore over 1,000 DAOs on DAOHQ. We have a DAO-personality quiz to start your personal matching engine and give you a few DAOs that fit your goals and interests. We’ve also seen users take advantage of the sort by category feature. If you’re interested in investing in a DAO, you can trade directly from DAOHQ. If you’re looking to become a core contributor, you can follow the Discord links to connect with the core team.

Like most teams, DAOs generally follow the 80/20 rule: 20% of contributors drive 80% of results. This means eight out of 10 DAO members are investors and voters rather than developers. We’re building to make investing, voting, and joining communities easy. We’re also working with select DAOs to help them match talent to core contributor roles.

If you are curious about DAOs and want to learn more, DAOHQ provides a consolidated view of over 1,000 DAOs ranking them by token price and community growth. DAOHQ also organizes tips and market updates categorized by beginner, intermediate and advanced experience levels. If you already have a DAO, you can submit your DAO for inclusion in the marketplace.

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