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What is a DAO? A DeSci & Governance Discussion w/Quantum Biology DAO
Recorded: April 16, 2025 Duration: 1:00:01Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion on decentralized science (DSci), co-hosts Erin McGinnis and Jeff from QuantumBioDAO explore the intersection of quantum biology and blockchain technology, highlighting innovative fundraising strategies and the evolution of DAO governance. With insights from Renee Davis, the conversation emphasizes the growing importance of emergent leadership and the potential for DAOs to transform scientific funding and collaboration.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. All right. Hello, hello everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of the DSi mic.
This is Erin McGinnis behind the account, and today we'll be co-hosting with QuantumBioDAO,
diving into a really essential foundational conversation about what is a DAO, and a broader
discussion around governance and DSi, and how all of this connects together to
really push some of these different visions forward. And we have a great lineup of questions
and discussion points today, but as you're listening, I'd love to invite you to think of
some questions of your own or any additional perspectives or points that you want to contribute into the conversation as
well. We'll have some time to open it up towards the end and can incorporate some of those comments
if you post them down below throughout the conversation too. If you are enjoying this
topic or think others should hear it as well. Definitely shout out to your network so they can come be part of this conversation today as well.
With that, we'd love to do a quick round of different introductions.
Maybe starting off with Jeff.
You kind of initiated and prompted this space to come together. So we'd love for you to introduce
yourself and maybe some of the inspo behind this space, as well as some of your work with Quantum
BioDAO and any other kind of background you think might be helpful to share. Absolutely. Thanks,
Erin. And thanks for hosting this discussion. Yeah, So I'm Jeff, co-founder of the Quantum Biology DAO. I've been in DSI for about a year now. biology before. It's just the proposition that there are important biological effects that
depend in a substantial way on the laws of quantum physics. It's essentially the field between
quantum physics and biology. We think that it's neglected. I learned about it and myself come to be a big believer.
Then also, I, in the process of learning about quantum biology and helping to support it, got involved in founding a DAO. This is the quantum biology DAO. And so I had a sort of crash course entry into DSCI
and have found the whole thing to be great so far.
Part of the inspiration just for this discussion
is that the challenge,
decentralized science or DSCI
is about bringing together people.
There are many people who have an interest in science advancing.
Many of us believe that science is and should be decentralized.
But a lot of what DSCI involves is taking science and unifying that with crypto and the blockchain. So then you have these
extremely different communities where you have the crypto community and the scientific community
who frequently have not interacted with each other at all. And so helping to covering topics that for
some people might be really basic. For other people, this is entirely
new. They're just learning about DECI. They're just learning about DAOs. All of us are learning
about quantum biology. And so I thought it would be great to have an X space on this topic.
Amazing. So glad you prompted this discussion. And and feel like quantum biology is also a great
example of bringing together different spaces with quantum physics folks and biologists
coming together to push that field forward and more connections across these different
disciplines, just as you were saying cross like crypto and
science uh is this intersection of dsci um i think really cool things will be continuing to happen
uh coming down the horizon for quantum bio so excited to be diving in uh we do have another
speaker up here today renee uh would love for for you to give an intro overview of some of your
work at Rare Compute, as well as you've been involved in so many different DSi projects
and supporting them having some of the right governance models to be successful as well. So
super excited to be exploring this convo with you today as well.
Maybe she's not able to speak right now, taking that from the emojis.
Okay, hopefully she'll... Yeah, we can get back to Renee
as soon as she manages to get her audio together.
But we can have a conversation in the meantime.
Definitely.
I feel like every good X-base has to have at least rugs.
So we got one rug, so we got ours out of the way
and are set up to have a great combougs. So we got one rug. So we got ours out of the way and are set up to have a
great combo now. Let's see. Can you hear me? Yes. Awesome. Yeah. Sorry about that. I was getting
rugged. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you, Jeff, for setting up the space. Aaron, thank you for
hosting. Hey, everybody. I am Renee Dows, also known as Renee
Davis. I have been in DSI, I guess, for about five years now. Started getting into Dows in 2020
and founded an early DSI DOW called Talent DOW back in 2021, where we were actually some of the
earliest social scientists studying DAO governance,
studying DAO leadership, and DAO health.
And I'm so excited to be here today.
I've helped a lot of different DSI projects over the years,
including projects like Poseidon DAO, Axon DAO, Bankless DSI, WaterDAO,
a number of others, worked with Gitcoin a little bit.
And yeah, it's been super fun.
I'm super excited to talk to you today and talk to everybody about DAOs.
It's actually been a while since I've talked about DAO governance at like kind of an introductory level.
So I'm super excited to kick off the conversation and hopefully the audience will have some great questions.
Amazing. And also I want to just give a shout out to Renee.
She was actually how I really got into DSI and this space.
So it's awesome being able to be on different spaces, chatting with you and continuing to kind of push this whole movement and ecosystem forward.
push this whole movement and ecosystem forward.
Renee, a lot of your work has,
especially with TalentDAO,
has been around DAOs as a whole.
Would love if you could give an overview of what is a DAO,
just kind of setting that foundation,
maybe any context as well as how that understanding
may have evolved over time or different learnings,
either through talent DAO
or other work you've done with other DAOs? Wow, I would love to. What a fun question.
So I'm going to get a little bit historical first because I think it's helpful to look at some of
the definitions of DAOs over time. So if we look back in history, I think one of the earliest mentions of DAOs was by Vitalik back in 2014.
And Vitalik sort of emphasized two components of a DAO.
One, he said it has to live on the Internet.
And another one was it exists autonomy.
But he also said that DAOs rely on individuals to perform certain tasks.
So that's sort of the first definition of a DAO
back in over 10 years ago now,
where it's sort of an internet native organization
that exists autonomously.
And when we say autonomously,
what we mean is that the organization
sort of has code at the center
and people at the edges supporting the automated code.
If we sort of zoom out a few years
and sort of come to more modern times,
we start to see definitions.
I think back in 2022,
TalentDAO came out with a definition
that was basically a new form of organization
that shares community, shared purpose with shared capital,
differentiated and enabled by blockchain technology. There's community, shared purpose with shared capital,
differentiated and enabled by blockchain technology. So I think like the new definition there
that's really important is a shared purpose
and shared capital.
You could argue that Vitalik's definition
was sort of not complete at the time
simply because the technology wasn't as
evolved. And sort of where I stand now with DAOs is I think there's another factor to consider,
which is, you know, contributors coordinating in dynamic virtual teams. So I think a lot of
traditional organizations are used to co-locating. And we're really good at coordinating on-chain, coordinating online,
and that's something that's very differentiated from DAOs. Another important concept to understand
with DAOs is this idea of a socio-technical system. And a socio-technical system is basically
any system where technology is interacting
with human beings.
So this is sort of a systems theory perspective
that looks at user-centered design,
that looks at organization design,
and sort of factors in the interaction of tech and people,
which sounds pretty intuitive,
but even 15 to 20 years ago,
these things were studied in isolation
and nobody was really thinking about the interaction.
So that's sort of, you know,
my very, very sort of long-winded way of saying like,
a DAO is basically a internet native or digital community
with shared purpose, shared capital,
differentiated by blockchain technology,
and operating in sort of a virtual environment.
Amazing. Thank you so much for that overview. Another factor that's been top of mind for me
recently is just kind of the integration of AI into more of these systems and maybe being able to
fulfill more of that autonomous component of DAOs and with those kind of blockchain-based
trust mechanisms in place to help with those coordination layers. And
Jeff, I know you've been involved with a lot of different kind of large scale or very impactful efforts which need a lot
of coordination and governance. I would love for you to kind of share how you've either come into
the DAO space or how that might compare to other types of design of coordination, whether that's
within a scientific context or just broader commentary. Sure. And I thought Renee's answer on what a DAO is is very interesting. I have been involved in
a whole bunch of different efforts to coordinate people, And this is movements and communities. The thing that I
really like about DAOs is, I mean, so the letters stand for Decentralized Autonomous Organization.
But then inside any given DAO, there's a question about how decentralized is it? How autonomous is it? The way that I have
been thinking about DAOs is really as though decentralization and autonomy are the endpoints
that the internet, it's, you know, you have an internet community and the internet it's it's you know you have an internet community and The internet community is organized in a particular way. Renee mentioned capital and being on the blockchain
But then the goal ultimately is to head towards
Decentralization and to head towards things being automatic with decentralization
So this is one, you know, having been involved in movements and
communities, there's a question about how do you balance the centralized aspects and the
decentralized aspects of any particular form of organization. I've found DAOs to be really fascinating because they seem to be a great way to enable groups to organize with a little bit more centralization at the beginning, but with everyone understanding that this is heading towards decentralization. So you have this ideal
of getting more people involved and having decision-making representing more and more
decision-makers and more and more people. And I've just, I've found that to be a great mixture
and really good. I love this. Renee, any kind of response to some of the points Jeff was hitting on?
Oh, definitely. So many things firing off my head when Jeff was talking. I think
there would be a really helpful concept to introduce here. I wrote about this back in I think what was August of 2022 but in traditional org design
there's sort of a concept around change and structure known as structural adaptation theory
and it basically is where the whole progressive decentralization thesis comes from
and it's sort of you can think about it as there's a tension
between decentralized accountability and sort of the centralization needed to move work forward.
So I think really great points by Jeff. I think most successful DAOs are very thoughtful on what
they're choosing to decentralize in terms of decision-making and responsibility. And what structural adaptation theory says
is that change is asymmetric.
So if you're moving from decentralization to centralization,
that's actually gonna be more difficult
than if you started centralized
and moved towards decentralization.
So I think the progressive decentralization thesis
that you see sort of practice a lot came from that early org design research that came out maybe, I don't know, 20 years ago.
Amazing. And I guess just tying it back to maybe different constructs people might have more familiarity with, such as nonprofits or traditional orgs.
with such as nonprofits or traditional orgs. Can you maybe give a contrast or comparison of
what overlaps or differences there might be between DAOs and traditional orgs or nonprofits
or other entity structures? I can take a stab at that one. I've worked at non-profits and I've been a founder of non-profit, you know,
startups, and now I'm working with DAOs. And I think the difference between them is really quite
striking. I'll try to highlight a few. a regular organization like a nonprofit or a startup
you know all the people who are involved everyone is involved you can have part-time and full-time
but you know by default everyone is full-time you You understand the mission. Everyone has roles and positions. And then you execute. At the beginning, startups are famously less structured. Everyone takes on different tasks. But you still have everyone. You're working with a small group of people. Everyone's all there at the same time.
people. Everyone's all there at the same time. With DAOs, and my experience now is just mostly
with the quantum biology DAO, but my experience is that this is quite different. There's a goal.
Everyone knows the goal. So for the quantum biology DAO, the goal is to advance the field
of quantum biology from basic science all the way through to industry and commercialization. So everyone knows that.
That's the goal.
But in terms of who's involved, it's possible for someone to join the DAO just by coming
and joining our Discord or participating in, you know, there's a question of where is even
the line?
Where is the edge of the community?
If someone replied enough on Twitter, I think we'd start to consider Where is the edge of the community? If someone replied enough
on Twitter, I think we'd start to consider them to be part of the community. But so you have
people who are just lurking in the Discord, who are contributing to discussions. We have working
groups. People can join those. We have community calls. We we also have token holders i'm sure we'll
talk about tokens um but in many cases you just have this huge spectrum of how involved everyone
is and the way in which they want to be involved so that's very that's a way in which DAOs are very different already from nonprofits and startups.
Another element that relates to that is that, at least in my experience with running a nonprofit
or running a startup, essentially the impetus is frequently coming from the top. You have, you know, the whoever's
in charge is, you know, essentially setting the agenda for what's going to happen. Obviously to
run an organization well, you need to be responsive and communicative with your staff. But with a
DAO, the energy is so much more coming from the bottom up.
Like we have people who reach out to us who are interested in quantum biology.
They want to learn more.
If there are enough of them, someone will suggest that we should have, you know, maybe
a reading group or maybe, you know, a series of science calls.
But you get suggestions coming from the bottom up.
And it's very much the job of people who are running a DAO to collect and help to give form
and crystallize a lot of the energy that's coming from the bottom up. And that's something that I
found is really interesting and unique and an amazing resource that DAOs make it possible to harness.
Amazing.
Renee, I saw you just shared an overview comparing some of those differences and similarities between traditional orgs and DAOs.
and similarities between traditional orgs and DAOs,
stemming from some of Jeff's like real world,
hands-on perspective with all of this
and kind of integration into a lot of these different types
of organizational structures.
Would love if you could continue expanding
from some of the research that was done too.
Yeah, sure, would love to,
and really think Jeff's take was sort of right on that,
you know, these are very different organizations
from traditional ones, and they're very exciting
in terms of their ability to coordinate people
and capital and sort of purpose.
I sort of wrote about this a few years ago,
and at the time when I was thinking about
how do I group traditional orgs versus DAOs, I sort of thought of three buckets.
And the first bucket was the task structure itself. Like how is the work being performed?
What does work look like in a traditional org versus a doubt? And I think one of the biggest difference is in traditional org work priorities are usually established.
But sort of middle line managers, you have sort of this command and control structure.
And there's really sort of not as much autonomy, whereas in sort of a decentralized task structure, you're going to be, most of your decisions are going to be made by the DAO itself.
There's going to be autonomous work structures, which are basically like, you know, coded agent based work structures.
So that's sort of the task environment.
There's also the incentive structure. So I think organizations traditionally pay for
performance, and there's not a lot of sort of team-based recognition, whereas in DAOs, I think
you're mostly paying for impact, and you're looking for not only individual rewards, but team and
community-based rewards through like different token mechanisms. And then I think the last bucket, which is probably the bucket that gets talked
about the most, is decision-making structure. And I probably don't have to talk too much about this
one because I think this is probably the most obvious of the buckets, is that traditional
organizations, most decisions are being made unilaterally.
There might be some collective decision-making,
but it's not gonna be very democratic.
It's more kind of exclusive.
And there's also a lack of transparency and proof of record.
Most decisions are made in meetings
and aren't necessarily documented.
Whereas in DAOs, these decisions are being
made jointly and they're being documented on chain.
I feel like there are so many essential pieces you touched on there just in terms of those
foundations and kind of the operational or systems that DAOs enable to just make different decisions better or coordinate
more effectively. And when we're thinking of this applied to science, we're on the DSI mic right now
within a DSI type of context. What different opportunities do DAOs then open up for advancing science or for DSI to be able to pursue? That
might have been a lot more challenging or maybe completely impossible with some of these
traditional structures. For either of you to take that one. I can take a stab at that. I actually think there are a bunch of different ways that DAOs are good and promising ways of organizing scientific activity.
cases, you have people who are able to participate in the process of science directly, where
the DAO community is just doing the research.
As far as I've been able to gather, the community favorite here is HairDAO, where you have a
bunch of people who are trying to cure baldness.
They have a particular problem.
And you have in the Discord, they're taking pictures of their scalps and trying out different interventions while discussing the science and the underlying mechanisms.
that is, that's just something that's much harder to do. You could imagine a, you know, a startup or a pharma company having a community like that, but the, the DAO structure and ethos is so much more friendly to interacting with research community, that's one thing that you can do through a DAO.
That's just something that's much harder to do.
DAOs also provide a different way to raise money.
So there's not just the doing of the science, there's the funding.
But so with the quantum biology DAO, we got started with a token auction, raised a bunch of money back in December.
This is helping to fund science.
And in particular, we had tried to raise money from essentially all of the other funding sources, at least by category.
We talked government and VC and philanthropy.
And it was really DeSci and crypto that came through in terms of funding.
crypto that came through in terms of funding.
So there's another advantage there.
Finally, there's a way in which I think DAOs
could be involved in the process of actually giving out
the money and making scientific decisions.
This is something that's yet to be tested,
but we have been discussing the quantum bio-DAO,
the idea of essentially having a more transparent and publicly oriented granting process where
scientists describe the principle, describe their hypotheses publicly, They talk to each other publicly. The DAO helps to manage the
discussions and crystallize out what are the actual disagreements, what are the key hypotheses,
what are the most efficient and effective ways to test the hypotheses. And then there's a question
of who actually decides in the end. There are all sorts of possibilities. We could have the DAO make a decision through token voting.
We could distinguish large token holders
and small token holders.
We could have the Discord.
There are so many different ways of making the decision
that we could experiment with.
This is the sort of thing that is made possible by a DAO.
You could imagine doing it in another way, but this makes it quite easy and natural.
I think what's got me most excited about DCI right now is incentivizing underfunded sort of under-researched areas.
You see that we've got Rare Compute up here. That's actually a project of mine that I co-founded.
And, you know, we're trying to incentivize rare disease research. So we have sort of a vision
of a public goods network where you are incentivized to help discover new molecules,
right? We're kind of thinking about this as like a proof of molecule algorithm. And that's just
one example. I think there's a lot of DAOs doing interesting things here to try and incentivize
sort of underfunded research. I think Jeff mentioned HairDAO as one example.
funded research. I think Jeff mentioned HairDow as one example. There's been a lot of work
on funding science, but I think there's still a lot of work on sort of incentivizing scientists
to participate in blockchain. Right now is a really interesting time for crypto because the NIH is sort of drying up in the US.
And the NIH is by far sort of the largest provider of medical research funding in the country.
And I've got a lot of scientists that are turning to me looking for different alternative methods for funding.
are turning to me looking for different alternative methods for funding. And I think it's really cool
what, you know, groups like the BioXYZ ecosystem are doing. I think Poseidon DAO is also another
really good example of a, you know, sort of a fully decentralized funding solution. So yeah,
DeSci is in an exciting time. I think we're still maturing as industry.
But overall, like we do have some capital.
Projects are funded and there's a lot of work to do.
And I think we're capable of executing.
Are there any practices that are particularly good practices,
whether it's in terms of the token design, governance,
different decision-making,
DAO structure or the rate of decentralization.
Now you both have touched on elements of this,
but just kind of distilling down some of those best practices
either that have been researched or observed
in different DSAIDAOs in particular so far.
I'd love to hear Renee's answer to this first.
Yeah, sure. Happy to. I think there's so many different practices that have come out
over the last five years that DAOs can learn from. And what's interesting is most of them are things
that traditional organizations are also worried about.
I think if I had to pick one topic
that DAOs have struggled with most,
it's probably compensation.
And I think part of the reason of that
is because a lot of the times we design tokenomics
and really only think about the governance of the token, but we don't
necessarily think about the utility of the token. And yeah, so I would say like a good best practice
is to not necessarily pay people in tokens unless there's some sort of vesting schedule or
shared understanding that there's not necessarily inherent value to the token at the
time. I would also say that there's a lot of different practices to come out of the decentralized
research we did at Talendau for leadership. So I think what's really interesting about traditional organizations is that most leadership is assigned.
But in DAOs, leadership can actually be emergent.
And what I mean by that is if you think about sort of biology, an emergent phenomenon is sort of something that results as a factor of multiple pieces in the system sort of interacting
with each other. And emergent leadership is really cool because you have people in the org that sort
of rise to power and rise to influence that not necessarily were assigned that power or influence.
And I think navigating that sort of emergent leadership and coordinating teams is definitely a best practice to come out
of the last few years of research. And then the last thing I'll probably say here is around
structure. We've talked a little bit about this, but the biggest difference in sort of traditional
organizations from a structural perspective
is gonna be the idea of functional versus divisional structure.
And most sort of DAOs are either organizing
around a functional or divisional structure.
So functional structure is gonna be based on,
you know, sort of departments, if you will,
or work activities,
whereas divisional might be based on region or sort of departments, if you will, or work activities.
Whereas divisional might be based on region
or sort of geographic area.
I know that's a lot,
but I think I'm gonna stop with those three.
Those are really great points.
I think the point, especially about emergent leadership
is a bit just different compared to what might typically be encouraged in traditional organizations,
at least from like a structural design perspective.
Are there any ways to really like actually get people to take those steps up or participate in governance in a more meaningful way?
take those steps up or participate in governance in a more meaningful way? Anything that you might
have seen or be encouraging within some of the different organizations either of you are involved
with? So I've found that it's important to have a clear and inspiring vision. If you have a clear and inspiring vision, if you have a clear and inspiring vision, then it's frequently
also important to allow essentially space for people to grow up in. The idea is that, like, let's say there's a function for your organization that it would be better if it was performing or maybe even just in the context of organizations.
Like, I know that there are cases where an organization is needed.
An organization is needed.
There's some function that society just needs.
There's some function that society just needs.
And you can sort of try to spread yourself too thin and devote resources to a function
when you don't actually have the ability to cover it.
I found that in a bunch of cases, it's better to just actually wait and just have it be
clear that this is something that's not being handled and that if someone can
handle it, then that's great. And if you have the combination of the inspiring vision and the
visible thing that's not being handled, that is frequently enough to cause people to step forward
and say, okay, well, I'll take a stab at that. You then have to, of course, see whether people are capable
of doing the relevant things, but frequently they are. And then you can reward people. It's one
thing I love about the DAO structure and the document that Renee linked seems is very, very helpful in this regard.
Having it be that rather having it be that people are rewarded for the initiative they take, this is something I find very, very natural.
And if you're communicating in an area where there is actually something really important to do, you just will find people who want to step up. I'm excited to see more and more of that encouragement and coordination kind of keep
moving forward and tying back to some of the points around compensation. I think as DSAT continues to grow as a whole sector,
or organizations get more funding,
we'll be able to see more gold standard practices within this space of
how to best do this within a scientific domain as well.
Just because there are other considerations here,
especially with some different, like, more hard costs
than other sectors of crypto have to face.
Renee, any points popping up in your mind to double click on?
I think we could talk more about compensation and incentive structures as as one direction yeah cool so i think one of the most interesting things that I've seen so far in DeFi specifically, decentralized finance, is this idea of collateralized loans, which is accessible and permissionless in DeFi, which makes it much more
approachable for non sort of one percenters, if you will, because, you know, collateralized loans
has sort of been reserved for more affluent groups. And what's interesting about collateralized
loans is that there's actually a really cool platform I've been experimenting with called Alchemy.
And Alchemy lets you do what they call self-repaying loans.
And they've been around for about five or six years now, it's my understanding.
And yeah, it's really cool.
You actually deposit ETH or wrapped ETH, and then you can borrow up to half the value,
and then it'll repay itself back. And the reason I bring this up, what does this have to do with
DAO compensation? I think that most DAOs should be very concerned with treasury preservation and maximizing their runway. And a good way to do that
could potentially be with collateralized loans. So I'm actually proposing that Dow compensation
be funded by self-repaying loans. And what's interesting about that is you get immediate liquidity to pay people without actually taking away from your original
assets. And what's really good about that is as ETH appreciates, that loan is going to pay itself
off faster. So that's just one idea I've had recently with compensation I don't think enough
people are talking about. I'd also love to see more bonding curves uh with token rewards i think bonding
curves are a pretty cool way um to go about you know sort of token sales and things like that
could you explain last please sorry could you explain bonding curves i can sure try so i think
I can sure try. So I think like, the way I think about it is, it's basically like a mathematical function that traditionally has been implemented by smart contracts.
and it's basically you define the price of a token
based on its circulating supply.
And as more tokens are bought and minted,
the price increases along the curve.
And when tokens are sold and burned, the price decreases.
So it's interesting about this
is it sort of helps with automated liquidity. It helps with the price and. So what's interesting about this is it sort of helps with automated liquidity.
It helps with the price and supply relationship. There's a few different types of linear curves.
I think the most sort of talked about is linear. This is what you see with most tokenomic plans,
but there's also exponential and logarithmic. So, you know, not to get too deep into tokenomics, but one idea I've had before is when we do emission rates of tokens, that's usually done at a linear scale and sort of an arbitrary amount is picked.
if emissions were based on the profit of the chain itself.
And you could have a ceiling and a floor
where tokens are only emitted based on how active
that chain is.
So those are all just some different concepts
to think about as it relates to DAO compensation.
One thing that I've been thinking about
with DAO compensation and the treasury of the DAO in general is how to think about management of the token.
This is something that we're planning on.
So we're planning to start having a token and treasury management working group at the quantum biology DAO.
And so we're going to end up in all of these discussions about what should we do with the
treasury. I think there are going to be so many different opinions, the will the mark you know there's a you know how how conservative
how risk seeking should one be with how the money in the treasury is being stored should you do
things like the collateralized loans I've I think it's there's just going to be so many different
perspectives I have really no idea how that's going to work out.
But I think that one of the big advantages that DAOs that have tokens have
is that for people who actually believe in the mission of the DAO
and they believe that attention will be drawn to it,
it's a fairly natural assumption then that the token price will eventually go up, even if you're
not specifically focusing on that at all. And so conceivably, the DAOs actually have a very,
something like this, this very large resource that can be capitalized on over the course of time.
So, I mean, this is one reason that I'm very in favor of especially core contributors
receiving tokens with long vesting schedules. Essentially, that means that the tokens unlock
over the course of a long period of time.
But yeah, I'm realizing that as we're talking about this,
thinking about the question of how long should you be trying to have your DAO live for?
Should it be trying to live forever?
should like that whole question i think is just gonna be really interesting to tackle
Should like that whole question, I think it's just gonna be really interesting to tackle.
i have to jump in here um jeff you mentioned like should a dow be around a decade from now
right or you know 20 years from now um there's a really interesting case study to look at with something like ConstitutionDAO,
which I would sort of say was a temporary
sort of impact driven DAO.
And another one, or let me explain ConstitutionDAO
before I give another one,
but ConstitutionDAO basically a group raised,
tens of millions of dollars in less than 24 hours and attempted to buy the Constitution with ETH.
And if you go back and you watch the recordings of when the Constitution was on sale, you can actually see one of the bids was in ETH.
And I think that's a pretty interesting example of sort of a short term DAO.
example of sort of a short-term DAO, you know, they obviously were not able to buy the constitution,
unfortunately, and ended up just giving all the money back and dissolving the DAO. And I think
that's actually pretty cool because I think some DAOs, they are not meant to be around a long time.
They're actually meant to achieve a certain purpose or function. And once that purpose is achieved, then the Dow dissolves.
Another one is look at what happened with Ukraine
and some of the work in crypto.
We had the Ukraine Dow that raised millions of dollars
in less than 24 hours.
And it's still around and still relatively active,
but it's mostly dissolved for functional purposes.
And yeah, I think we need to see more temporary DAOs
fit for purpose, focused on sort of a specific measurable goal
with no intentions of sort of long-term preservation.
That's sort of counterproductive to traditional org theory.
But if you're more
concerned with just solving problems and less concerned with establishing institutions, I think
it does start to make a little sense. This is very interesting also because I, you know, I was just at
DSI London and was continuing to learn about DSI. It's, Desai. But as I've talked to people,
it seemed to me that some DAOs, when they get low enough in their treasury, essentially
instead of coming up with what's the correct way for the DAO to end. They come up with a plan that's designed to
prolong the particular mission. That conceivably makes sense, but I think thinking about whether
the DAO is meant to be limited or unlimited, I encounter this in non-profit. Should the nonprofit continue forever? Nonprofits that continue forever,
you might worry are having perverse incentives. If you have a homelessness charity and you're
expecting it to last forever, does that mean you never expect the problem to be solved?
The way to actually solve that is you have a DAO, or sorry, you have an organization, if it's meant to last forever,
then you expect that its mission will change and update as you manage to solve problems.
But I think that there is a really important decision to make about how long a given organization
is supposed to last. And this shows up with DAOs as well. Completely agree on these points. I think the idea of things should have an end or a death
to them to allow for the next thing to be able to emerge or to actually solve the said mission or
intention of why it came to be in the first place is really essential and I hope we see more of that happening.
I'm thinking about the context of science and DSi. Are there any problems or opportunity areas where you could see this idea of some type of a DAO popping up for a period of time, addressing
that thing and then kind of having a close to it being especially effective,
maybe similar to like the Constitution now example or just other opportunities in science.
Otherwise, maybe that's a question for all of us to be asking or thinking about.
But, Renee, I saw you come off mute.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a tough question.
I'm a little biased as a former scientist and sort of, like, lover of DSAI.
I think for the most part, a lot of DSAI DAOs are probably here or should be here to stay.
And the reason I say that is because science is always evolving.
There's always new problems to solve.
There's always new discovery.
In my case, there's always going to be illnesses to cure, at least in my lifetime.
I would love to see a world where there's no rare diseases.
I think
that would be incredible. That's probably not going to happen in my lifetime, but I'm certainly
going to work towards that future. So I think for the most part, D-side DAOs are sort of intended to
be permanent. I would love to see that challenged and maybe, you know, somebody pops up a temporary DAO
and raises a bunch of money to do something specific in science.
Like, but I'm not sure.
I'm really not sure.
I think most DAOs and DSI make sense to kind of stick around.
I don't know.
Jeff, what do you think here?
I think that's right.
I think that's merging.
I've been trying to think of ones that should just go away.
I was thinking about electricity and magnetism.
Imagine you had electricity Dow and magnetism Dow,
and then you get to Maxwell discovers,
you get Orsted discovers electromagnetism.
You get to the point of Maxwell's equations.
Now we understand electricity and magnetism
as a unified phenomenon. At that point, I would say that electricity,
Dow and magnetism, Dow should do some sort of merger. So you could imagine rather than
Dow's being, D-side Dow's being defined for a particular period of time or based on a particular
goal, you could imagine that they coalesce into single organizations or split apart into
multiple organizations with sub DAOs as you make progress moving through the scientific landscape.
moving through the scientific landscape.
For sure. I think yeah there's so much opportunity that can blossom up through
some of these different directions. My brain is also going towards FROs,
focused research organizations, really with the intention of maybe existing for
about three to five years, laying this foundation,
that then all of these other startups, DAOs, whatever, might be able to blossom up from.
And like an example of what this might look like is like the Human Genome Project,
where it established this foundation, mapping out the human genome and then all of these other genomic related companies is now, they're now able to exist from there. So lots more opportunities to keep exploring.
Want to acknowledge the time and invite anyone who's been listening in to join up on stage.
Merrick, I know you left a couple of really great comments down below in the replies,
just especially around what DAOs are and meeting kind of common definitions of decentralization
and autonomous regions as well.
So I wanted to thank you for those comments.
So I wanted to thank you for those comments.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop them or request the mic and we can bring you up.
Otherwise, as we're closing out in the last couple of minutes, Renee or Jeff, any other directions you think might be useful for us to take the conversation?
useful for us to take the conversation or points maybe you wanted to make earlier that
we shifted a different direction from.
Something Jeff said that just completely jogged my memory on, and probably another favorite
talking point for me is like this idea of mergers and acquisitions in DAOs.
I've done some writing on this, but I looked at over 800 DAOs on Snapchat a couple years ago and
actually did some clustering analysis using networks. And what we identified was different
voters and how they overlapped on snapshot. And we were actually able
to cluster DAOs based on their community of voters. And what's interesting about that is
we were able to kind of find which DAOs might make sense to be combined based on like purpose
or based on community demographic overlap. And yeah, I would love to do a conversation on maybe mergers and acquisitions
in Dallas and like what that could look like at some point in the future. I think that'd be super
interesting. I've been having a bunch of conversations lately just around that from
like a data due diligence perspective within like the scientific domain, just with some of the work we're doing at Causality Network.
But the idea of, okay, this form of this entity
or this initiative or project
is no longer the right form for it.
And those mergers are actually what's needed
to take some of these different efforts forward,
to take some of these different efforts forward I think could be really interesting also from
I think could be really interesting.
connecting DAOs and some of these types of organizations into the traditional sphere too.
So yeah be on the lookout for a space on this topic sometime soon.
One thing I wanted to comment on just about DAOs and for people who are new to Desai,
one of the things that distinguishes them is this idea of launching a token. If you're
actually new to crypto, the idea of launching a token is going to seem completely crazy.
The idea of launching a token is going to seem completely crazy.
But there's something that I've found to be quite positive about having a token.
Obviously, as the token goes up, people are happy.
As the token goes down, people are sad.
But having worked in movements and having interacted with communities,
there's a way that communities and movements can become insular. Having a token, I think,
is this really quite amazing way to help prevent things from becoming too insular.
You have people who have some enormous range of motivations who end
up showing up. You have people who are paying attention to your token for reasons that have
very little to do with your original mission. But you end up with this huge spectrum. You have
some people who are there 100% for the mission and 0% care about what happens with the token. You have people who care 100% about the token
and not about the mission
and then every degree in between.
And what that does in my experience so far,
and again, I've been in this for just a year
and had a token live only
for a relatively short amount of time,
but it really makes it possible to have so many more conversations.
And there's so many more ways that people can be interested in what you're doing.
It really helps to prevent some of the downsides that can come with movements in communities that end up being too insular.
So I wanted to emphasize that because
that's in a way very counterintuitive. I would never have thought of that, I don't think.
But having experienced it, I now think that this idea of token-centric communities
is just a really interesting and powerful idea.
powerful idea.
Definitely.
I think that's one challenge that science definitely needs some help addressing is just
kind of some of that group think group coordination, that different decentralization and also opening up access for more participants that really
should be part of those conversations to participate in a representative and meaningful type of way.
This has been such a great conversation, great foundations of governance and a lot of these
other structures that all de-i organizations and DAO should really
be spending time thinking on, working on, experimenting on. And I know I'm excited to see
more different examples as DSi continues to grow of implementing some of these ideas and testing
out different routes for this. So super excited for what's to come.
Renee or Jeff, any closing thoughts?
Thanks for having us on.
Yeah, thanks, Aaron. It was a great time.
Thank you so much.
We'll be back here next week, Wednesday, same time,
