The Secret Sauce of DAOs | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
We have exciting news! Folks in BanklessDAO are saying that this bear market is a time for building. And that is so true! As we talked about last week, many projects are growing, expanding, and improving. Did someone say "Bankless Africa"?! Our old mate DEGEN got an upgrade, delivering 40,000 POAPs last week, and is growing strong in 193 Discord servers.
The International Media Node is expanding, experiencing a whopping 30% monthly growth in two nodes: Sweden and Ukraine. The IMN’s #WeareDAO campaign is showcasing DAO contributor stories from around the world, giving us a chance to learn more about those with whom we work and play. IMN also translated the text into multiple languages, reaching an increasingly larger audience. Media and content teams are relentlessly shipping: Bankless Publishing and the Newsletter and Podcast teams aren't slowing down.
Gitcoin Grants Round 14 is now live, and we have three BanklessDAO projects seeking funding! These are all public goods enabling and improving the Web3 ecosystem. We hope you will consider supporting them: Bankless Academy, DEGEN, and Crypto Sapiens.
Coordinape is back! Don't forget to reward and show gratitude to community members by allocating your GIVE during Coordinape. Please take the extra time to write a note! The Epoch ends at 16:00 UTC on Monday, June 13.
We know you will love this week’s editorial by HAshBrown27. While we each have a different journey into BanklessDAO, we share a desire for harmony and connection, and this is really the secret sauce of DAOs. We hope that wherever you are in the world, you can savour the moment, stay curious, and find your way forward with bDAO in your heart ❤️🔥.
Contributors: theconfusedcoin, HAshBrown27, Yofi, d0wnlore, Trewkat, siddhearta, hirokennelly.eth, Ornella
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🗓 Weekly Recap
Community Highlights
🥊 Fight Club’s Cohort 0 Education Series Is Complete!
Cohort 0 of analysts-in-training have just completed the first Fight Club vDAO Education Series. Analysts in this cohort will receive certification via Dework as Venture DAO Capitalists and will be joining the FC Due Diligence team. The series included long-form sessions where the hosts focused on breaking down the venture capital process in TradFi and vDAOs, the due diligence process, and Web3 investment case studies. The series also included several fireside chats with experts and founders in the space. Overall, they hosted ten sessions, four of which were fireside chats, for a total of 345 attendees on Discord and Twitter Spaces.
This series was created in collaboration with the founders of the FTW DAO and bDAO contributors Liza_ch and kahuna, the lead of the Fight Club Due Diligence Team @stepX, members of the bDAO NFT Investment Club led by NFThinker and Lacri, and the Dev Guild’s Pradhumna Pancholi.
The second series will be launched in alignment with the mint of the Black Glove NFT at the beginning of next season. Applications for the second cohort will be announced at a later date. The vDAO Education Series is open to all FC and bDAO members. If you have any questions please contact Liza_ch, kahuna, or fibo.
🤖 DEGEN Is Out of Jail!
The team at DEGEN is excited to announce the release of new features. Our new distribution system is now available for server-wide and role-based distributions, allowing you to create custom POAP distributions within your communities. Our bot has grown stronger this week, distributing over 40,000 POAPs and serving 193 communities!
🏦 Support BanklessDAO Projects With Gitcoin Grants
Support your favorite projects and Gitcoin will too! Gitcoin uses Quadratic Funding, ensuring that public-goods projects enjoying broad community support receive proportionally greater funding. Click below to support these BanklessDAO projects for as little as 1 DAI.
🗣 IMN Is Growing
The International Media Node is proud of our Swedish and Ukrainian nodes, which both grew by 30% last month. The #WeAreDAO campaign has thrown more light on people working in the DAO as we broadcast these stories across the world in multiple languages.
🎧 Bankless Africa: Sats & Gwei
Bankless is shipping!! Bankless Africa has soft-launched a new podcast discussing the growth of blockchain and cryptocurrency in Africa and the world, and is looking for community feedback on the pilot episode. 🎧 Listen to it and please fill out the form to leave your thoughts on and suggestions for what we've created so far. Thanks for your help!
📹 AV Guild and BanklessDAO YouTube
The AV Guild has been collaborating with DAOlationships, Podcast Hatchery, Making Bank, Ab Initio, Legal Guild’s podcast, and more, to grow the DAO’s YouTube presence. If you a have a video that you would like to upload on the DAO’s YouTube or have a desire to create a YouTube series, please reach out to the AV Guild role holders or drop a note in the av-general channel.
🥊 Fight Club Offshore Genesis Fund Open for Investors
The Fight Club Offshore Genesis Fund is now open for investors in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Fight Club is offering the opportunity to fund the next generation of startups, communities, and DAOs. Sign up here.
📚 Bankless Academy
Bankless Academy has released a new course called Blockchain Fundamentals and is looking for feedback from the community. Please take a look at the lesson. Use the "comment this slide" button to leave feedback for improvements or fill out the form, keeping in mind that the feedback window closes at 0:00 UTC on June 13. Feedback and comments are greatly appreciated!
What’s New
🎙 BanklessDAO Podcasts
🧠 Crypto Sapiens
🌍 Bankless Africa
💰 Making Bank
🏹 Bounty Hunter
✍️ Bankless Publishing
🌍 Bankless Africa
🇨🇿 BanklessDAO Supports ETH Prague!
As the menace of Covid-19 subsides, IRL events are coming back — this time from the beautiful city of Prague! If you want to connect with people in Web3, develop new skills, and meet up with friends from bDAO, visit our stall at ETH Prague! POAPs will be given out to all those who drop by.
🇪🇸 BanklessDAO Sponsors ETH Barcelona
Despite market conditions, bDAO is continuing to build by making strategic investments for its future growth. One such investment is partnering with Spain’s first Ethereum event, ETH Barcelona. We'll be supporting this event as media partners, which will help further our goal providing the world with Web3 onramps. If you want to get started in Web3, make connections, and learn something new, go get your tickets!
Get Involved
❤️ Allocation Phase of Coordinape Is Live
Sign-ups for the June Coordinape have officially ended and the Epoch is live. The allocation phase is scheduled to run from Thursday, June 9 to Monday, June 13. Please make sure to allocate your GIVE to those you feel have gone above and beyond. Take the time to write a comment too — you could make somebody’s day with some positive words of encouragement. If you want to learn more about what Coordinape is and how it works, watch these awesome tutorials created by the AV Guild.
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The Secret Sauce of DAOs
Author: HAshBrown27
In an earlier chapter of my life, I served as a host and facilitator for a non-profit organization that curated heartfelt conversations between people from different walks of life. As host, I opened the gatherings with an invitation for attendees to speak their selves into the space. “Please introduce yourself by first name only”, I would ask, “and share whatever you would like about what brings you here tonight.” After the opening introductions, we featured three lead storytellers as catalysts for hour-long small-group conversations before returning to the community space to share insights and reflections. Most evenings, I left those conversations enlivened by my interactions and heartened by what I witnessed of the experiences of others.
It has been ten years since I ended that work and I have much to be grateful for, but I have deeply missed the heart nourishment and soul oxygen I received from those conversations.
As a new contributor to a DAO, I continue to explore the question of “what brings me here?”. Daily I am fascinated by the things I am learning and energized by the journey of finding my place in a global change movement. To my pleasant surprise, something about it echoes the inspiration found in my earlier work. Writing about it now feels like an investigation of sorts, a search for the secret sauce of DAO life that I’m finding so uplifting.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ― Howard Thurman, author, theologian, and civil rights leader.
Flipping through my monthly planner, I see that the question “what is a DAO?” first appeared on my radar in October of last year. One might fairly reason I could answer this question by reading an article or two, or looking into a few specific DAOs. Do I really need to spend months lurking on the internet to wrap my head around this thing?
Well no, probably not. But something I have come to understand, something quite essential to my exploration of this space, is that no matter how satisfied I may be with my head’s answer to the question of “what is a DAO?”, the deeper question of “what brings me here?” is an inquiry that is being worked through in my heart. Some days this work feels like frustration, insecurity, or doubt. At other times there is inspiration, gratitude, and wonder.
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.
I trust that in our own respective ways, most people who contribute to a DAO are familiar with the emotional challenges. What are your versions of the frustration, insecurity, and doubt I mention? And if you are a 50-something, like me, who had never heard of Discord, alpha, degens, or a POAP before entering the vortex that is BanklessDAO, then here’s to you, here’s to us, for hanging on.
The Alchemy of Change
Like many I have met in the DAO space, I regard my life as a journey of growing and learning. Even though I feel a little shy every time I say it, I probably should go ahead and throw the “h word”, healing, in there too. Two of the most important lessons I have learned on this path fall into the domain of alchemy, which, in the lingo of one popular metaphor, concerns itself with how to make diamonds from coal.
For me, alchemy begins with reframing experiences that at first, appear to be negative and tempt me toward falling into victim mode. Alchemy encourages me to take a tough situation that appears to be “happening to me” and flip the script to ask the question: “how is this happening for me?”. By choosing to orient the situation through this new lens, I believe we can literally change the story of the life that emerges in response.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor E. Frankl, author, psychologist and Holocaust survivor.
Another key aspect of the alchemical process is to understand how valuable my feelings are as a gateway to greater personal empowerment, creativity, and freedom — a.k.a my “sovereignty”. Referring again to the feelings of frustration, insecurity, and doubt that have been companions to my DAO explorations, I am often tempted to think that by reacting (fight) or leaving (flight) I may avoid the discomfort they bring. In recent years, however, I have come to trust that by actually allowing space for such feelings I equip myself to navigate related situations and relationships more effectively.
As an example of what I’m talking about, I’ll share that right now as I imagine the above paragraph landing in the inbox of various BanklessDAO readers, I can sense waves of doubt invading my nervous system. If I were to ascribe a voice to them it might sound something like this:
“I mean for heaven’s sake, Hashbrown, do you really expect people to be interested in this personal growth stuff. Your first editorial for the newsletter and you’re gonna hit ‘em with all this touchy-feely crap? Seriously?”
That’s the kind of stuff that was running through my mind yesterday. Having sat with the doubt for a day I still feel its residue, but some deeper part of me has emerged smiling, even chuckling, at my worry over what others will think, and trusting that I have something meaningful to share. We all do.
Critical Questions
Much of my inspiration for this article rests in my ongoing consideration of questions I sense many others are also wrestling with. Just how much of our messy humanity can we responsibly welcome into the spaces in which we work together? What skill sets, practices, and guardrails are necessary for us to realize the potential of these emerging structures we call DAOs? Honestly, I think these may prove to be among the most important questions of our time.
I believe that to realize our creative potential, to solve many of the planet’s greatest challenges, will require us to complement the gifts of our intellect by engaging our hearts, mining the vast intelligence therein, and tuning into the mystery together. And I believe that DAOs may well present unprecedented opportunities for the most dedicated contributors to unlock extraordinary value by exploring these depths. I am also convinced that the ability to bring deeper, more honest engagement to this work will require great skill, maturity, and care.
Recently I was encouraged by a conversation between two thought leaders in the space, Chase Chapman, host of the On the Other Side podcast, and her guest, Zach Anderson of Coordinape. In discussing the themes of critical conversations, personal growth, and human design in DAOs, they connected in what was, for me, one of the more meaningful riffs of the year.
Zach: “How can we create DAO tools that are really facilitating these hard conversations … there is going to be a generation of DAO tools, I hope, that really facilitates personal growth and critical conversation among team members. What are the ways we can do them skillfully so people aren’t banging into really hard conversations that they are not prepared for?
Chase: “I love the idea that you mentioned around personal growth and work…work as this vehicle for personal growth because you have the ability to trust and be vulnerable with the people you work with. I think this is so powerful and we don’t think enough about it in DAOs because we think ‘mechanism design’ instead of ‘human design’.”
Inspired as I was by Zach and Chase’s sentiments, I was also reminded of a Bankless podcast, The Divine DAO, featuring Coordinape co-founder Tracheopteryx. In his riff with pod host David Hoffman, and speaking on the themes of DAO evolution and personal growth, Trach offers:
“At the same time as these collective super organisms are developing, so too are the parts with it. Each individual also has to develop. And so that’s one of the things that is super exciting to me about it. Working in a DAO that’s really trying to push DAOness forward, each person is going to be…like their development gets amplified, I think. You get these lessons and signals that help you orient yourself to this new way. If you put yourself in a space with all these sovereign beings that are acting in all these more developed ways, you will take the traits and you will grow and become more like them. And DAOs become like a Schelling point for that type of consciousness.”
On-Trail Epiphanies
The opportunity to contribute to this work, to engage in spaces that facilitate my own and others’ growth, is a big part of what brings me to DAOs, and — in a season in which I am still more crypto curious than crypto qualified — to BanklessDAO specifically. Honestly though, where tracking the secret sauce is concerned, this realization only gets me to the edge of the trail. What is going on in my personal DAO experience that is scratching the itch of something missing in my life? For more insight here, I look again to the community conversations I helped curate years ago. What were the ingredients of those gatherings that made them so meaningful?
For starters, I loved the fact that we all introduced ourselves by first name only and made little mention of our professional lives in the small group conversations. And I particularly appreciated that on many occasions I had the experience of sharing something important about my life and feeling deeply listened to. I know too that I liked being fully present and actively listening to others’ stories and perspectives, and the experience of being trusted by a stranger.
Related very closely to these personal experiences, I picked up a few clues recently from a Brave New Work podcast featuring Adam Kahane, author of the book “Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together”. Adam, who has worked for decades as a facilitator of difficult team and community conversations, had this to share:
“In our workshops we do a lot of things. But the simplest thing we do is something we call the paired walk. The instruction is to look around the room, find the person you thought you would be least likely to talk with, and go for a walk with them outside for 30-to-45 minutes. It always interested me that this was people's favorite module. They always say, “wow, that was good. Can we do that again? That was really useful, not all this other stuff you are making us do.”
“Adam, I’ll tell you why it (the walk) is so important. There’s mechanically things that are interesting about it. You’re moving through space together. You’re encountering the world. You know, you stick to the path, you’re navigating together, facing the same direction. And you’re advancing and you’re not looking at your phone. But there’s something more than that. The thing about the walk is, first, you are encountering another human being just moving through the world together. And you are accepted as a fellow human being. And then as a result of that you might decide to change your thinking, or your relationship, or what you’re going to do. That’s why people love the walk. Because the connection as fellow human beings is first, not the ‘I have to agree with you before we can do anything’.”
Adam continues by saying about the walk, “You can call it a spiritual principle or a practical principle. I’m not too fussed about that. It does exemplify the importance of this primary activity of being humans in the world together.”
Ta da! Listening to this I believe I had an epiphany of my own. Referring back to the community conversations I hosted, it appears to me that though we did not craft our conversations to fit any formula, this principle was at work. I think some very similar principles are in play in the paired walks that Kahane describes, and in the early stages of the path toward contribution in a DAO. The similarities I see include:
a self-initiated (sovereign) step into unknown territory with strangers.
a willingness to leave established social and professional identities at the door.
opportunities to share and hear our respective ‘whys’ for being there.
heartfelt engagement with people from different backgrounds than our own.
some structure offering parameters for engagement and discovery of common ground.
By choosing to engage each other in such spaces, spaces that invite us to leave society’s trophies and disappointments behind, we are both challenged and liberated to discard all-too-familiar scripts for how our identities have been programmed to engage with one another. Something new is possible. There is a freshness in the air.
The Mystery of the Tao
All this has been getting to the heart of the matter. And yet of all the possible ingredients of the secret sauce of my DAO experience, there is one more I must mention, which to me, is the most meaningful ingredient of all. For the purpose of this exploration I will refer to it simply as “the Mystery”, and say that secreted within this mystery there is — to quote Led Zeppelin — a “whole lotta love”. I can’t explain how it works and will only make a mess of trying if I give too many words to it. I can, however, share a brief story that illustrates its significance to my journey towards the DAO.
I do not believe it is an accident that DAOs are coming to the fore after the emergence of Covid-19. The Zoom revolution that ensued whetted the appetite of millions of people who sought greater control of their work lives. My sense is that amidst all the suffering imposed by the virus, many people turned the pandemic into an opportunity to push a pause button, and to ask the alchemical question of “how is this happening for me?”.
My response to the pandemic began with a commitment to begin every morning by sitting for 30 minutes at the base of a tree in my backyard. I knew only at the time that I needed something to help me stay grounded. Abiding by this daily ritual, I believe, has given me that and more, both grounding my body and clearing my mind of the anxieties of restless nights. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Around the same time I began my tree ritual, I discovered a poem: Holding to the Constant, by the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (author of the Tao Te Ching). I felt inspired to memorize it and soon began reciting it as part of my new morning practice. The combination of the tree time and this poem, I believe, have contributed to a sense of deeper rootedness that is tough to describe. My favorite stanza in the poem reads as follows:
All things rise and flourish Then go back to their roots. Seeing this return brings true rest, Where you discover who you really are. Knowing who you are, you will find the constant. Those who lack harmony with the constant court danger But those who have it gain new vision. — Lao Tzu.
I probably have a ways to go before attaining “harmony with the constant”, but since embracing it as an aspiration, and keeping to the morning practice, I feel increasingly connected with people and nature. One morning while sitting with the tree, a bear crossed my yard 30 feet in front of me. Another morning I opened my eyes to see an 8-point buck deer looking me in the eye as he passed two feet away. My favorite animal encounter came one week after watching the movie “My Octopus Teacher”, when I pulled up a crab trap with an octopus in it. I could not have been more excited to set it free. And trees? Though still early in this new love affair, I can’t get enough of them.
So what’s all this stuff got to do with DAOs? Referring back to the ancient Chinese text, Tao Te Ching, a common definition of the Tao is “the absolute principle underlying the universe, combining within itself the principles of yin and yang and signifying the way, or code of behavior, that is in harmony with the natural order.” Similar to this, appearing long before the advent of decentralized autonomous organizations, there is also the Chinese word Dao, translated as “a way or a path”, or “the way”.
It is written in Tao Te Ching that “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”. I hold it gently, as something to point toward but not try too hard to explain. That said, I know I’m not alone in suggesting that there is a connection between this Tao, the Dao, and the DAOs that are emerging as a new coordination structure. I do not believe it is a mere coincidence that DAOs are being described by some as superorganisms playing an infinite game of thrive and survive, compared to the finite, exploit-and-extract game of many corporations.
Very personally, I ache for deeper knowledge and greater embodiment of this “harmony with the constant” that Lao Tzu spoke of. I yearn to walk personally and work with others toward a greater harmony with people and the planet.
In my short time contributing to a DAO I believe I have been connecting with many people who, irrespective of the philosophy guiding them, share the essence of this aspiration. Charting unknown territory in times of great crises. Finding a way forward. Bringing heart, mind, and soul to the work we do together. This is how we DAO it. This is what brings me alive.
🎣 Phishing School
Authors: d0wnlore and the InfoSec Team
Staying Safe During Free NFT Mint Season
This week we have tips to help you with the latest trend in crypto: new NFT collections with zero minting cost (besides gas). Many of these are released each week, often with only a few hours of notice on Twitter. Given our tendency in this space to FOMO into such opportunities, it’s important to step back and reassess how we should go about dropping into these free mint events.
Use a Secondary Wallet
In the chance that the NFT project is using a malicious contract, or the website/frontend of the project is actually some type of phishing campaign, you really should be using a secondary/burner wallet for minting these NFT projects. Audits are very rare with NFT projects, and even less likely for these free mint contracts.
Using a secondary wallet will limit the damage should the NFT project end up being malicious or a rug. Once the dust has settled after a few weeks or months and there is more community consensus on the health of the project, then you can consider transferring those NFTs to a wallet from which you’d like the display the NFTs.
Get Second Opinions
Join and start a conversation with your existing communities about these NFT projects. Many NFT-focused communities are now turning their attention to highlighting these projects and doing due diligence on the likelihood of maliciousness or a rug pull. For those who are Level 1 in BanklessDAO, you can join our #nft-club channel to get guidance on navigating free mint season.
Get Ready for Gas Wars
Many of these NFT projects are causing spikes in gas prices that we haven’t seen often during this bear market. Keep this in mind, especially if you are looking at these free mints as an opportunity to flip for profit quickly, as the gas price may end up making the zero swap cost for the NFT moot.
Also make sure that the transactions you approve are actually performing a mint, as malicious projects will use this opportunity to prompt you to make a straight ETH or other token transaction, rather than interacting with a contract.
🏛 Governance
Proposals in Discussion
🤝 Education Partnership Proposal With Mass Effect
Manuel Maccou is building a knowledge transfer protocol called Mass Effect that seeks to provide people with equal access to information and knowledge. Phase 1 of Mass Effect will build the community of educators and learners. The project is looking to partner with BanklessDAO to help create a pool of educators and subject matter experts to lead these lectures and hands-on, interactive sessions. (And please consider donating to Mass Effect through Gitcoin Grants!).
✅ Action Items
🏦 Donate to Gitcoin Grants 14: Bankless Academy, DEGEN and Crypto Sapiens.
🎙 Action: Allocate your GIVE in Coordinape.
🎧 Listen to Sats & Gwei and provide feedback.
📺 Review Bankless Academy’s latest lesson and provide feedback.
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.
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