Hi everyone! Thanks for joining! See that little trickling in here.
Hello, hello. Hello, is this a loan? Yes, it's me. My personal account is in Twitter jail. So that's the account that I'm able to join from.
Oh no, that's so sad. Did it just happen? No, it started a few days ago, so I will be out in a couple days. Oh good. Hello to everyone who's joined.
I can see some tea members in here. Hello Sam. Sam is my amazing assistant. And we also get Maddie, one of our facts checking and media literacy. What people? Beautiful. Cool. Thanks for joining everyone.
I think Kido is just on his way. I will also make your account a co-host alone right now. Awesome. And you should have gone in a... I'm in a
phone booth in a wee work and kind of just popped up right beside me and it was really surprising. It looks like he's trying to run to find a phone booth as well. How's your day going alone? What time is it from where you're calling in? It's 8 p.m. on
Ukraine right now. So yeah, I just had another work call and had to run to my friend's office because there was like a band playing out on the street. I find like a quiet, quiet place urgently.
How was your day? Good, yeah, I'm just getting started here. I'm calling in from San Francisco. I'm originally based in Vancouver, Canada, but here for a little while. And yeah, it's a beautiful day. So I'm excited to get my day started.
I'm gonna get the tweet out as well. Oh, that is a great idea. Yeah, so I joined for
for everyone in the audience. To my knees, Victoria, and I am the Product Marketing Manager and Community Lead. And I joined just about two to three months ago now. Wow, I can't believe it's been, it sounds both like a long time and not a long time. Yeah.
And I think met Kaira before in person. Oh yeah. Well, I haven't met him in person unfortunately, but I've known him for a while. Oh, hello Kaira. So actually, Ukraine now kind of owes its existence to YouTube their loves, which not many people know.
I know our co-founder Steve, his, his handle on Twitter is DeFi Hope. I met him when I was looking for a contributor payment system. So I was looking, I was running operations at the Unity 3 rows DAW. And, uh,
quite quickly this issue of how do we compensate our contributors came up and we wanted to find like a tool that would allow us to compensate people for their work and that's a very important thing because
people who contribute to Dows they still need to pay bills right and we've introduced I've already had the call with Rene and Kaita I can't remember I think that was it so that was the initial call of Kaita. Hey what's up
What's up? That's not much kaito. Yeah. I remember this. Yes, some fond memories. It's just back when we started too. So it's really cool to see where you're at now as well. So yeah, funny enough, I was actually on a call with like the free rostow folks maybe a few weeks ago where you know we just catch up and touch base and stuff. So again,
really, really excited for this chat and thanks for having us on. Awesome. Cool. Yeah. Thanks for getting into it, Lona. That was actually going to be one of the one of the main questions I wanted to ask you in terms of how you decide or how you found out about utopia and also kaito as well. But I see that we have a few people trickling in.
So I'll do a quick recap for everyone and we'll get started. This is really meant to be a free-flowing conversation. So anyone in the audience or if you, Kaito or Alona, if you have anything to say, please just pop in and say or mention anything you'd like. But yeah, hi everyone. My name is Victoria and I'm
I am the product marketing and committee lead at Utopia Labs. We host this link called Utopia Oasis every week. It's really a space for us to get together with other like-minded people or other people in the out space to get to learn about their problem, their use cases, and if they're using Utopia
how they're finding utopia, how they've been easing utopia and everything like that. So really excited to get into it. And I'll pass it off to Kaito if you want to give a quick intro as well and then Alona if you want to take it home with your introduction too. Yeah yeah I'll be real quick. Hey folks my name's Kaito.
I mean co-founder of Utopia, you know, it's kind of interesting where we're almost a year old now. So I feel kind of old and crypto specifically, but really what we've been up to is just focusing on how we can build with DAOs. I think DAOs are such an interesting word and it's also really important to understand where they're at today and what they're going to look like and hopefully
How they scale over the next three to five to ten years on that type of long-term time prize and so I think the way we think about ourselves is just a group of builders supporting a bunch of internet folks and that's kind of where we stand and that's kind of the a few of the projects that we've been able to support so I'll stop there really really excited for the team that we have as a whole group. I met my co-founders
I'm discordant on the internet so there's just a lot of really cool things in terms of parallels with a lot of the organizations that I'm gonna start so I'll just kick it off to her now. Is that my turn to speak? Yeah go ahead. So hello everyone my name is Alona I'm the co-founder
and operational lead of the Crane Dow. And as I just mentioned, I found out about Utopia Labs when I was helping with operations and community management of three roles Dow. And so we were looking for a kind of contributor payment system.
And we came across, I can't even remember who recommended you to up your laps. Maybe there was someone from Pleasidao that helped to launch both freeros down your grain down. And so that's how I met Kaito. And they don't need just, I want to be shocked by how
But by that time it wasn't that long since Kaiji got into Bap's Fee I think, right Kaiji? Yeah for sure it was pretty early. Just the entire journey hit me really fast to your toilet crept. That's awesome and I was really surprised
by using YouTube or labs for the first time. It really looked completely, it didn't come across as something that was done by something that was built by outsiders at all. It was really, really simple to use and it was amazing interface.
And it was like, if someone asked me how long did the people who build this, how long they spent in Reps 3, I would have said at least a few years. And that's also how I met Steve, Ukraine Dowsko, founder, my very, very good friend. He visited me recently in London with his
significant other Marsha and their kids and he was my customer support agent you know and it's really awesome like otherwise you brained out probably not exists without you talk your lips and so right now we've been using
You talk about labs at Freeloss Dau for paying contributors and kind of managing operations more generally. And you also use you talk about labs for your green Dau for making transactions to the NGOs.
have been supported for payments to contributors right now. The only contributor that's been compensated financially has been myself, but I really hope that we will get an operational fund up and running as soon as possible and I really hope that we'll be able to compensate other contributors
who also spend much, you know, a lot of time on Ukraine down. And so, yeah, so I was laughing. I'd love to pay some. So yeah, it's a really, really cool product you guys are building. And I wanted to kind of hear more about what you've been up to because it's something
that we could discuss on an internal call but I always try to kind of whatever is possible to turn into a public-facing call when a community can hear about all this cool stuff I always try to share it with more people. So yeah, Kaita and Victoria maybe you can tell us about what's new
features you've been building. Yeah, for sure. And it's really heartwarming. And I can't explain a feeling around what you said about how you came down. I might have not been a thing without Utopia. And that's really heartwarming to hear. And I love that you passed us a question too. We're
we're really happy to dig into some things. I'll let Kido kick us off with maybe sort of what we've been building so far and then I can talk a little bit about future product growth at things as well. So Kido if you want to kick it off I will. Yeah. For sure. I think
Maybe reflecting on the entrepreneurial journey as people who build internet products, whether it's a DAO or company, whatever it is or even software or hardware. I think the one thing we've learned is a ton of reflections actually. It's just the perfect time to reflect specifically given the fact that the markets are down.
like a macro lens but even from a crypto lens but I think for us you know like we've learned that what we've been able to do over the past six months has been building extremely fast and that's been a really really you know huge completely managed for us over the next few months what we've really decided to do is really focus on our core payments products and really perfect that experience almost think
of the process of having no bugs with a product and really having this thesis of graduating from beta. So I think maybe from a product principle standpoint, specifically over the past one to two months, it's not like a 180 pivot, but it was for us, it was just really understanding where we're at today with our product, how we can actually scale
of people, you know, we have hundreds, if not actually thousands of people that we pay on a monthly basis now through our product. I think those are some of the kind of the mentality shifts that we've had from a product standpoint, but I'll kick it back off to you, Victoria, on if there's anything specifically that you want to mention in the future, etc. there, but I think those were a kind of a few quick tools.
So what the hell are you guys building actually? I actually, I would love to ask you a question around what Adal is and I'd love to answer sort of the latter question around what Utopia does for folks who don't know. But yeah, do you want to try answering?
I'm more than happy to do it. I do it. Okay. Okay. So what you're about to hear is just my personal bias, the opinion, right? And it's not representative of a lot of stuff that you will see if you look up what a doubt is. So if you Google a doubt, it will basically
Basically, a lot of results that will come up will tell you that a Dow is an organization that is decentralized and it doesn't have a centralized governing authority. Some articles will tell you that there is no governance whatsoever, which I think is ridiculous.
And so, yeah, in my, and the concept is that's kind of being popularized is that a dollar is like it's an organization that is governed by smart contracts and not by humans. I'm not sure that's always reasonable. Ukraine,
The definition of a Dow in our case is that it's a community with a certain mission and that's probably the case for most Dow's. That mission is often financially motivated. That's the case for many Dow's
but not all of them. So there are lots of different types of doubts. Our doubts, for example, so it's a community with a mission and often more often than not there is a blockchain-based wallet. And there is also quite often there is a multi-sick to control that wallet. So multi-sick sends some multi-signature
that means that for a transaction to be executed, signatures of multiple people are required. So for example, in Ukraine-Dowes case, our multiseg kind of core is three out of five, right? So for a transaction to go through, three people need to sign that transaction out of
the five people that are not the six signers and those people in our case are myself. Dima butering Vitalik butering's dad. I excels with the highest telling NFC artist, Tima and T artist in the world. Then we have Matt Bande, he's a senior engineer, please a doubt and then we have
that I just thought you about just an ordinary human being and he is also from Pleasadow, he is managing my talent. So all kind of reputable people known in the community and so that's how the funds that's how the fund security is in short.
Okay, so that's about, um, noticing now does more generally. Uh, there is, there is a lot of, uh, it's a question that often comes up with me that is really annoying to be honest. People ask me, "Alona, when are you guys becoming a true dog?" And I'm like, "What do you
What do you mean? What a ignorant question that is. People are like, but you guys don't have a token. That's something that you creamed out. I guess stand out from many other doubts. I often have governance tokens. What does it mean? Token pays governance. There will be a token
You can issue them distributed and based on how many, what the quantity of the stockings that you have, you have kind of a larger say when there is a vote. Decision making is based on voting. There will be platforms like SnapSort.
for example, where you vote with your token, right? And the more the tokens that you have, the more your vote matters, right? From the very beginning, it didn't make sense to me to have that for Ukraine now, because it was like a recipe for disaster in our case, right?
And often those tokens can be bought in salt and then what it means is that people start speculating on them and also we would be hijacked immediately, you know, as a doubt. If we had the token that could be bought and then someone could someone anonymous liquid buy our token and have a
I mean, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm a lawyer, I'm#
to people, they didn't understand it, many people don't understand it these days. The simple solution that I came up with, no token, no problem. If you don't have a token, no one can hijack you using that token and no one can speculate on your governance token if you don't have a governance token.
But that does not mean that we are not a true dog. And I had a very, I had a nippy for any moment when one of our contributors sent me this thread that I'm also going to put up in the nest. She sent me this thread and he was like, you know, read it when you have time. And I, I read it like a day.
two later and when I did read it I just had I couldn't shut up about this thread for like for the next few days and basically this thread described was written by the co-founder of syndicate. What it describes is the concept of the original concept of a DAW right?
And so the first mention of it appeared in this book that was called, I think this pronounced, by Daniel Soraris. And so the way it was envisioned in the book was super different from how
But interestingly enough, it literally describes kind of almost the word by word. It describes what Ukraine now is like. And when I read that, I'm considering that Ukraine now develops based on kind of the team's research into organizational health and organizational structure.
and governments. It developed organically and we never read that thread or we never read that book when building Ukraine. It was fascinating to see how he still developed it pretty much in line with how the Dow was originally
What was the original idea of it? I found it really fascinating and I kept messaging all my dear friends about it and the only person who really understood what I was so excited about was actually well for all this Fred. He jumped on the call with me the same day. I was like well, well, listen.
and you need to speak to me because I'm sick inside of people not understanding my excitement. And I explained to him how crazy it was and he was the only person who really got it and I just felt so relieved. You know that I spoke to someone who understood my fascination of what I found.
And that was the only reason why I was able to sleep late night because otherwise I would just honestly keep talking to everyone. But that's how I see them so far. That's amazing. That's a fascinating story and I really respect your decision to
not tokenized right away. And I am very similar personal opinion as you in terms of I do think it obviously is important, the autonomous part of Dao's porn, but sometimes it's more important than that is accessibility and the barrier to entry.
just adapt as you go in order to make that work for your own organization. So that makes complete sense and thank you for that in-depth answer. Yeah, in extension to that sort of relaying to what you mentioned, I'll give you a give everyone a quick rundown on what utopia lapse is in a very, especially
for new two up through or anything like that. In the easiest way possible, I would just say Utopia is a payment layer for anyone that owns a wallet shared by lots of people. At its core that is what we do, but we are definitely focused on making that
experience amazing specifically for DAOAs as Alona mentioned. And so what does that look like right now? Currently you're able to contextualize and keep a database of all of your contributors. You're able to take and customize the way that you receive payments and payment requests.
and you're also able to better coordinate getting those signatures. So previously, as Alona mentioned, for a multi-safe wallet, you could basically imagine it as like a shared debit card or something. But in order to transact anything on that debit card, let's say you and your three friends own it.
and all three friends would need to sign a paper in order to make a transaction go through. And obviously that's a lot of coordination and a lot of collaboration. And so what we do is we make that process a lot easier and communicating with your other friends who owned that credit card or that
that would card as well. So yeah, that is sort of the basic description of what utopia does. I know earlier we mentioned a little bit around our roadmap. So currently while we are focused on bringing an extremely amazing experience to the payment
feature and the payment experience. In the future we're also actually working on bookkeeping, analytics, and budgeting. And so what does that actually tangibly mean? Currently you can do a lot of payments through utopia, but what we want to enable is being able to make insight.
and analytics off of those payments that you do. And so four DAOs, budgeting and keeping track of the ins and outs of your payments is extremely important. And through our sort of bookkeeping product, we're hoping that you're able to better understand and contextualize where your payments are
flowing and where you might be spending the most amount of energy or resources I guess. So yeah, you can look forward to that all in the upcoming months. But as Kaira said, right now we are very much focused on creating a better experience and more
was experience for everyone as we start to scale and support more people. Kaira, I am just going to check in with you and see if you have anything to add, especially after Alona's sort of explanation around Dows and her decision around not tokenizing it.
I think I have two thoughts. There's two running thoughts. One, the general, I don't think it's an unopened, unopened, but the general first thought that I have is that most founders in crypto probably shouldn't want to token on day one. That's the key thing.
And the key reason why I kind of come to that conclusion so far is mostly to the concept of when you do introduce a token incentives are really not aligned. I think the thing that Alona did that was really valuable was to an extent she brought in the people that really cared about the mission and vision versus anything else and the financialization of certain
things are really not like the most valuable in regards to progressing and pushing forward a project or vision or a mission, right? So that's the one thing that I thought, which is this fact that in many cases tokens kind of misaligned incentives on day one when you do a lot of the project and really really hard to kind of filter out the signal and the noise. So then we
But when you think about it like that, it's not necessarily like that's the only true situation of how founders should obviously kind of build their companies in crypto. Like there's obvious kind of examples of organizations that launch the token very, very early. And it's chapter growth. But I think the very, very interesting thing is that unless there's a specific kind of, you know, direction.
and which the token sees improves a degree of baseline value. That's the only time that I would launch one. I think there's interesting thoughts there, but totally respected and understanding the decision. I think most founders should do that. At a high level, tokens misaligned incentives specifically for even the founders
because in traditional companies, the only time that you can really get kind of this idea of exit liquidity as a co-founder or as a shareholder of a company, as if you go public or if you get acquired or if you have, you know, if you're in the larger stages or have a larger company where you're just driving actual revenue. So I think there's a ton of things regarding how tokens
to an extent are broken today, but keep in mind the tokens do democratize a lot of access, right? So, you know, there's pros and cons to everything there, but I think at the earliest stages, tokens don't... aren't probably the most optimal row. You know, again, it doesn't fit all founders, but I think that's kind of a general statement that I think rings true more than it rings false.
Yeah, I completely agree. Lona, your hand up there. Feel free to unmute anytime. First of all, there is an amazing book that I want to recommend to everyone at school, token economy. And for people who are lazy like me, there is also a version of this book that's basically, it's
kind of broken into 21 threads, summarizing the entire book. I'm going to put it up in the nest now. I really recommend to everyone to read. If not the book, then you can read the threads. And it basically explains what the hell tokens are and why we use them in WebSphere.
It was a mind blowing book when I read it in a rally girl, but it's really simple, it's really easy to read, and it's very accessible to people who are me to rap sweet. So that's about talking. Then I want to kind of build on what's quite
talking about tokens are not bad by them themselves. So they are basically used to designate the right for something. So they are probably need to make it yourself because they are
if there was one person speaking sorry about it. As I said, the community with the mission, right? And so, Ukraine, the other mission is to support and to harness the power of Web3 and the community in general to
help defend your crane in the installation invasion. So when you consider, you let that sink in and then you stop for a second and you're like, you think, does it make sense for us to create a token and to distribute it to everyone regardless or where they are and whether they actually know something about Ukraine and
at all. And whether it is smart to give them voting power, of course it's not. I'm sorry, but it's not because a person who is Ukrainian who is on the ground should be made decisions, right? Or a Ukrainian person in general, they are automatically going to
know about Ukraine and Ukraine needs more than someone who's just found Ukraine on the map. Right? It's basic logic. And so I've been very outspoken from the very beginning of Ukraine down that if you want to help someone, if you want to support someone, you need to ask them what they actually need, what kind of help
they need. So for example right now the fight that you see online or the Twitter but many numerous Twitter battles that you cramed out and myself have with some other organizations like ICRC or the UN or other charitable people is that the humanitarian aid that
We are very much involved in delivery of a 2G raise humanitarian aid. For example, it's not going to stop this work. It's just not how things work. We wish they did, but they don't. We need weapons and we need fighter jets. I've never known Kaita before.
for this started right I was not a crazy militant, a extremist person who was like you know trying to cause trouble to anyone but we unfortunately found themselves in a very desperate situation where we do need weapons and we need fighter jets and myself as a person who will never
had any kind of military background. I find myself asking for weapons everywhere. And so, considering that, we've had a large chunk of the funds that we raised were donated to Kambakalaya, which is the most loved NGO in Ukraine, the most transparent with a sports reputation.
not many, well not all the team members in the other days of Ukraine, especially the ones from Ukraine. They know it's sometimes understanding of it and it was, I guess there was no precedent, right? There was no warfare at all. There was no doubt that donated to charity supporting the armed forces.
of a certain country, right? So it was very new, but at the time I didn't even realize how new it was because it's like in that moment you are ready to do whatever saves people that you love, right? You do not think in that moment about, oh, what if the Ukrainian government doesn't support us?
like what if the regulators go after us, blah blah blah blah blah, you don't think about it, you really do not care. And so I had to kind of argue with quite a few people and to push for the interest of the Ukrainian people and other Ukrainians in their big group chat that formed in the form
very quickly in the first few days of the full-scale invasion on that side of the 24th of Poverty. All the Ukrainian people supported me, you know, and it's... it was very hard for people who were safe to push against that because it's like... I guess I'm not the nicest person to argue with, so that also helps.
But yeah, a lot of stuff that we did was very innovative and it is very innovative but again I only realized that much much later and then when we started developing Ukraine down and I kind of had to slow down Lima but they're getting bored very grateful to him decided to
I was very desperate because I really needed some advice about how to proceed with your grand hour after that first, that first, you know, wave of hype started kind of dying down and I was like crap, I actually want to make this a long-term, long image
back thing, you know, and how do I do it? And so I reached out to Dima and he became a very good friend and mentor and he was like the first thing that he asked me was like do you guys have your mission and values written up? And I was like no we don't and so one of the so the second
last treat in the nest contains our fundamental space and I would sit up after Dima said, "Alona, you need to write it down." And so you will be surprised how hard it is to write up values and it's something that should not just be
a bunch of things that you've written up, you wrote it up because you want things to be this way. It should reflect how your organization really is. And I'm happy to say that in Ukraine, that was the case. The things that I mentioned in the fundamentals, like you really live by them and our core values
Basically conviction and by the way when you write up it's a kind of unsolicited advice I'm given here if someone ever needs to write up values of a company or a doubt or anything else when you write up values me to look at key people in your organization and think about what is that makes them stand out
then also makes your organization stand out compared to others, right? Because there is lots of the three initiatives supporting Ukraine, how is Ukraine now different from them? So that's the question that I asked myself and the team asked themselves, really writing this stuff. And so the core values of Ukraine, sorry,
for playing stuff here. The core values of Ukraine now are first one is conviction and that means that we strongly believe that Ukraine has agency and it has the right to defend itself against Russia. You will be surprised that, well, not everyone believes it, unfortunately. Second is humility and this
the most important one because what it basically means and it's all written up in detail on that page. What it means is that it plays high value on the perspectives of Ukrainians themselves. So whenever you have someone who is in safety
someone who knows very little about Ukraine, whenever we see them coming in and starting to lecture Ukrainians and how they should feel what they should be able to say and so on, that doesn't go down very well in Ukraine now. The next one is open communication as part of it. Well, we try to
We don't really have to be very straightforward with each other. We address conflicts or any tension had so on. We don't try to avoid it by all means. We disagree sometimes. We don't argue very much, but we do disagree and we do debate things and that's encouraged. That's something that's very deeply engraved in the world.
Ukrainian culture, freedom of speech. And also as part of this value, Alona gets told to fuck off at least once a day normally. It's our little tradition that we have. Like, yeah, I came up with this rule.
To keep myself humble, one team member a day needs to tell me to fuck off. We've not had it by the way for the last few days. I think everyone's become really lazy. So, Mardi, maybe you want to join us? I'll invite you as a speaker because I've just realized that you guys have not been doing a very good job at this.
Or maybe someone should tell me to f*ck off, but Sam has noticed she's been a bit quiet the last few days, I know she has a good reason for it, so I will give her an opportunity as well to tell me to f*ck off if she wants to. So yeah, and then we have humor as one of our core values as well, we make a lot of memes.
We have a lot of fun with each other and it's not almost saying it in a corporate way we do actually have fun with each other. And you will still try to do the sense of ownership in our contributors. So we take on tasks with a sense of personal responsibility. So, Madden Sam, if you are
to tell me to fuck off once a day then you should be doing that YouTube you know but none of them want to join for some reason I don't know maybe I scared them off I don't know but yeah so that's pretty much how I'm doing through a new culture that's hilarious I love that okay
I feel like we should implement that in Utopia too. I always chase him for trying to get him to do stuff and sometimes he just me to f*ck off and I just I can tell he's really feeling it you know like he's like oh hello Maddie
Hello. I was smoking. Yes, sure do fuck off.
Thank you so much, my love. Thank you. You fuck off too. Yeah, I love the culture you've set there. I'm actually curious, sort of along those lines. I know that motivation in general in the Barry
market has been pretty difficult not to mention within DAOAs as well. So I'm curious within your own team, how do you sort of keep up that motivation and that energy to continue to keep on working and striving towards?
It's a question that came up before the Burmard kicked in. I had a call with Gary from DreamDowr and Aaron from Gobern. The question that we had was basically like, "You were freaking out because you wanted to get things right and
We knew that they are very knowledgeable and we wanted advice about how to make sure how to structure everything properly. And one of the questions that Gary and Aaron kept asking as early guys, how are you tracking contributions? And I was like, it wasn't one of the questions.
questions that was on the agenda that I wrote up for the call. And I was like, guys, you're not tracking the contributions. And they were like, what do you mean? And then five minutes later, they were like, but guys, how are you actually tracking the contributions? And I was like, they are not. We are not tracking them. And they were like, how are you compensating people? And I was like,
We don't. They're so confused. Basically, we have probably, across different, we have 13 working groups. We have what specific governance is. Every working group can make decisions
But then our, that I've, you know, as long as they have within our values, they can make decisions themselves. They don't, we don't have like designers voting on the devs, ports decisions. And we don't have devs voting on designer ports decisions and so on. So every little group of people makes decisions, what's on the mistake.
And he was like, how many people do you have? And I was like, I don't know, probably about 150, right? I think that's kind of the optimum maximum size of a community that's working on something. And he was like, how do
you get them to do stuff for you? And that's a question that comes up a lot and within Ukraine, even though I do believe that we need an operational fund and I want to pay people, by the way, if someone wants to sponsor that, I'll be very, very happy to organize it.
But most importantly, I think people are contributing to Ukraine that are obviously there is no financial incentive, it's just not there. But it's I think we really help people with their mental health. People who care about Ukraine, when they watch what's happening in Ukraine,
They have this deep sense of oh Sam can now tell us more about this they have this deep sense of helplessness There's it's really it's a really hurtful emotion right just watching something horrible happened and not being able to contribute in a meaningful way and so what Ukraine now allows them to do is to make a good
contribution to make to be able to make a difference for Ukraine, but they see that the results of that work immediately and they see the gratitude from Ukraine like we were thanked the other day by the Ministry of Defense on Twitter by the Inform Agency, you know, you don't often see that
And that's kind of helps people who have high empathy, who care about Ukraine, that helps them make a difference. And it's also a really fun community, but some who's just joined us, maybe she can extrapolate on this.
Hi guys, that would help you from time on mic, aren't it really? So essentially from myself, the way I came into it, really I would want to be in Ukraine like physically fighting, like ideally that's what I would love to do.
However, I'm in a wheelchair and nobody wants to drag my ass out of the mud when bullets are fired. So somehow I got involved in Ukraine down. And for me, it means I can help, like Alonam was saying, that helplessness of not being able to help in a meaningful way, this way I can.
That was not a speed up. That's amazing. Thank you for that explanation, Alona. I just see that we're a few minutes to closing and wrapping up the spaces. I want to thank you, Alona, and everyone who joined from the cream down team for joining
us today. It was really insightful to hear about your culture, your motivation, your values, and how you operate as a DAO. But yeah, before we close it off, I'm curious if anyone in the audience has any questions or even a matter of your sound if you have any questions as well. And after the Q&A, we can wrap it off here.
Okay people you don't get any questions I would love for you to interview my dear Samo because I am yeah I'm very keen to kind of give give the most spotlight and maybe they can tell us how they saw Dallas when they joined us and by the way I should
also mentioned that most of our contributors are very little exposure to crypto when they join and we don't require any knowledge of crypto whatsoever. From our contributors and most other tools are actually Web2-based and you talk about the laps is the only one that's kind of Web3-based tool and so maybe my
you and some if no one is asking any particular questions maybe they can tell us about what the experience being like. Yeah, that's a great question. I'd love to hear sort of how you how you found out about your brain down and your first exposure to dows in general. Yeah, if you want to take a
maybe one to two minutes each that be amazing yeah Maddie or Sam whoever wants to kick it off feel free to unmute do you want me to go first Maddie? All right yeah go ahead all right and so for me I had absolutely zero idea
of anything about crypto or Dow. I was speaking to a learner because the Ukrainian Institute, we're doing a course on Ukrainian literature and culture. And I wanted to join, but with me being disabled, obviously money is, you know,
type for me so I couldn't really afford to do it but Alona managed to arrange with Sasha at the U-Rate Caribbean Institute to do this course and through that me and Alona got to her and she said would you like to U-Cring Dow and I'm like sat there thinking what on earth is a Dow so I'm sat there trying to Google it
it, like, it not answering a back, because I didn't want to answer a back and sound like a nitty-pick, because I didn't know what it was. So essentially, I was like, oh no, what do I do? So I have no experience whatsoever. So really, I'm flying by the mercy of my pants and, you know, just learning from others as I go kind of thing.
I have no experience whatsoever. I'm still welcome and I feel like my work is valued, even though I'm not really doing much at the moment because I had a laptop death in the family, but yeah, that's basically, I had no idea, but it still works for me. So, Maddie, if you want to take over?
Sure, I have no background in crypto or DAOs. I knew what they were, which is not extremely interested in them, because my background is all about traditional financial instruments and everything related to fee occurrences.
I had a preconceived notion of crypto being just a not a scam, but speculative as a class that probably has no real meaning. But when the full scale invasion broke out, I realized there's a lot of information happening and some
something needs to be done about it. I was politically never an activist, kind of sitting on the sidelines, being a watcher of geopolitics, followed Russia for many years, knew a few things and decided, well, maybe I should say those things now, given there is
that is happening. I started off on various social networks, nothing ever happened. I was told to shut up on some of those by my contacts. So I went on Twitter and on Twitter for a few months,
for the first couple months I kind of went alone, didn't really go anywhere, found a few people that have the same opinions and that's how I stumbled upon Ukraine now. I just heard things that I liked, the values aligned and here I am.
Amazing. Thank you both for that quick intro and around how you found your creamed out and everything like that. It's super cool to see how you don't need a lot of knowledge around us or what three in general to be involved and as alone in
mentioned. I really hope there are a lot of sponsors out there who be willing to sponsor you and get involved in whatever fashion that might look like. But yeah, it looks like we are at the end of this phase. Thank you so much again, Alona.
and Sam for joining us and talking so authentically and so deeply about your own experience and the values that you're striving towards. And I hope you know that Utopia is here to support in whatever you're down.
functions they look like and really happy that we can help out in even the smallest way. So yeah, thank you so much, kind of, of passing off to you if you have any closing words as well. No, really appreciate this kind of small intimacy.
Thanks everyone. Bye. Cheers. Thanks everyone. It's love. Oh, greenie. Bye.