Web 3 101

Will DAOs Ever Replace Centralized Organizations

May 20, 2022

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HOST:  Hey everybody.  Welcome back to The Unstoppable Podcast.  I’m your host, Diana Chen.  And I’m here today with my co-host, Matthew Gould.  He’s a co-founder and CEO at Unstoppable Domains.  And today we’re here to talk to all about DAOs; that’s what everybody is talking about right now on Crypto, Twitter, on Reddit, everywhere.  And we’re going to talk about what DAOs are at a high level, what is all the hype about with DAOs, and then how are DAOs going to shape the future of organizations as we know it and as we interact with them in our day-to-day lives.  So thank you so much, Matt, for joining me today for this episode.

MATTHEW GOULD:  I’m excited to be here.  Obviously, Unstoppable has an opinion on DAOs.  We just launched .dao as one of the extensions.  So we’re looking to support this part of the ecosystem and bring people a little bit more awareness about the developments in blockchain space around new ways of social organizations.

HOST:  For sure.  For sure.  So to kick us off, I think a good way to set the stage would be to talk about the history of DAOs.  DAOs have been around for a little bit, so let’s go all the way back to the very first DAO.  What was that and why was it created?

MATTHEW GOULD:  So I think the first big one, and I’m sure there have been other experimental ones, was the one that was built on Ethereum and it’s just known as the DAO.  And they actually are famous because it was one of the largest created DAOs I think ever in history at that time when it got launched.  And they got hacked, they had like an exploit on the smart contract all the way back in 2016 when this happened.  So, that was the very first introduction that I had ever heard about DAOs because I wasn’t really paying attention to these new ways for organizing communities together on the blockchain until I heard about that particular incident.  And there’s a lot of people in the Ethereum community that were early on that got involved in trying to create DAOs.  And the idea behind it was; “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if people from all over the planet who may not even know each other could simply go on to the blockchain with their wallet and vote for where they want to put money behind projects to help the ecosystem grow?” and that was essentially the genesis for the idea of creating the DAO on Ethereum.  And DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, we probably should have mentioned that.  And the idea is that you can create these organizations, specifically on the blockchain, where people can express their preferences through voting, and then that can make a decision with everybody’s money together to help maybe fund projects, or make up - - the way the protocols work.  So in the very first one, it’s just called the DAO, and when you type it into Google - - actually comes up.  It was pretty famous; they had an ACC case, believe it or not.  They came up and tried to decide whether this was an investment instrument or not, the way that they had designed it, and the ACC eventually said, yes, that it was so.  There are some legal ramifications to forming DAOs, but that was the one that started it all.  Without them, we wouldn’t even really be talking about this now.

HOST:  Got it.  So when you think about DAOs, do you sort of see them as just glorified Facebook groups?  Or are they really a legitimate replacement for traditional corporations?  And if it’s the latter, why do we need this replacement?  Like, what’s wrong with the way that corporations are structured today with a CEO, you’ve got middle management, and then some junior workers, what’s wrong with this model?  Why do we have to come up with something that is drastically different from that model?  And why are people trying so hard to make this work and to make this the future of how everybody works?

MATTHEW GOULD:  So I would say that DAOs are somewhere in the middle between glorified Facebook groups and a potential replacement for corporate structures.  And they’re actually closer on that scale to Facebook groups at this point in time, just being perfectly honest, because it’s difficult to aggregate lots of people’s choices across thousands of people as an example.  But they are more than glorified Facebook groups because you are voting on a preference - - and you can create rules around this.  You can follow on-chain to see what people think over time even.  You can create different ratings for how different people’s opinions are considered.  So there’s all sorts of things that you can build on top of it.  So like, a Facebook group, it’s pretty limited, like you can like a post or not like a post, right?  But on a DAO, you can interact with it in a lot more complex ways to say I would prefer this or I think this is a good direction versus that one and then putting some resources behind it.  Now when you compare it to a corporate structure, we can get into this a little bit later, but it’s very difficult to mimic a corporate structure on the blockchain right now.  It’s possible that we’ll actually replicate corporate structures on the blockchain in their entirety.  And you can actually see this right now.  Some states like, I think, Wyoming have just now approved DAOs as legal entities as LLCs.  And so you could end up with a copy-paste of a corporate structure where they still have a CEO and board of directors and shareholders and everything inside of a DAO on-chain.  So I think that may be a wrong framing.  So if you’re asking, is it just a glorified Facebook or replacement for corporate structures, it’s a new organizational tool for people to express their preferences, and you can just apply it.  It’s a technology that you can apply to anything.  You could apply it to a Facebook group, you could apply it to a community group, you could apply it to the school board, you could apply it to voting in a country if you really wanted to.  And we just need time for that technology to get there and get better.  That doesn’t mean that we won’t have corporate DAOs or government DAOS or local community DAOs subject to external rules, in addition to the rules of the DAO itself.  They’ll just be using this technology in order to get people’s opinions faster, and hopefully cheaper and easier.

HOST:  Right.  And so right now, we’re obviously in the very early days of DAOs.  There are still a lot of questions about what we can do from a legal perspective and how to best form a DAO.  We don’t have very many great examples of that out in the space yet.  But in your view, in a perfect world, what would we be able to achieve with DAOs that we’re not able to achieve with traditional organizations today?

MATTHEW GOULD: Yeah, so the purpose of the DAO, like the problem is trying to solve is voting.  And if you want to get more specific, it’s actually about gathering preferences from everyone who is interacting with a particular decision.  And that’s like a very general thing, but we’re trying to make software basically, it makes it easier for everybody to aggregate those votes.  So when I say we, I mean like DAOs.  DAOs are trying to create software and there’s companies out there Who create DAOs and create governance structures for on-chain interaction.  There’s Aragon DAO, and they actually vote and they have a court system, which I think is very interesting.  There’s DAOs for some of the very large projects in the space, I think Uniswap has a DAO, they may have close, I mean, they have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that they want to distribute out to developers to improve the protocol.  There’s a DAO for Gitcoin, which is another pretty famous project.  We recently had him on the podcast here to try to get people’s opinions on ecosystem development for Blockchain space in general.  So the purpose of DAOs is to basically trying to build software to make it easier to aggregate preferences from everybody.  And we are still very early, but there’s already practical applications of these happening right now, and there’s a lot of experimenting going on.  And I think it’s something to keep your eye on because it’s new.

HOST:  So when we talk about voting, what are some of the different types of voting or the different ways that you can vote?  How do you wrap your mind around how voting works?  And then how do we apply this to a DAO structure?

MATTHEW GOULD:  This is really the crux of the problem.  So when you think about voting, voting has a lot of problems; one is strategic voting, and this is like voting for something that is not actually your number one choice, but you’re trying to manipulate the vote in some way.  Another one is buying votes.  You can imagine on the blockchain, and this is a serious problem. Because if there’s a DAO, like the Uniswap DAO, or the Gitcoin DAO or something, let’s say they have a million-dollar grant up for grabs, right?  Well, wouldn’t it be great if you could manipulate the votes or buy some votes?  Let’s say you can spend $100,000 to buy votes in order to get the grant awarded to you, and then you would make $900,000, right, because you get a million dollars for buying $100,000 for the votes.  So buying votes is a big problem and we have to figure out ways to make all of this, I guess more transparent on-chain and then figure out technologies to maybe mitigate some of these strategies that people use for voting. And strategic voting is particularly difficult.  There’s not a lot of straightforward answers on how to solve these problems.  It’s an area of research academically for a lot of people, but I think it’s super important that we’re trying to tackle this issue, just to understand what’s the unlock here.  If we can figure out a way to vote more effectively and cheaply on-chain, then it’s going to be a lot easier for us to get people’s opinions on different things that are happening in their communities, or with the companies that they interact with as customers, or with policy at a much higher level.  So all of these things could potentially be improved by this technology.  And blockchain is super neat for this because you have a way to verify people’s voting information using that public-private key pair where people are signing off on these transactions.  And so it gives us a way to kind of connect all this together that we didn’t really have before.

HOST:  Got it.  And so, when we look at the DAO ecosystem as it stands today, where do you see us being in that ecosystem?  Have DAOs succeeded?  Are we still trying to prove out the concept and see if this even works?  And I’m asking this because there’s a lot of, sort of like different viewpoints on Twitter, on Reddit, on all these places, between really smart people.  And one example of this is Elad Verbin, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right, but he’s an investor at Lunar VC, and he had this long Twitter thread from late last year that is basically calling DAOs; “Just a fantasy and they’re never going to actually play out.”  And one of his main points, or like the premise that he bases this entire argument off of is that organizations need executives in order to succeed.  So if you’re talking about a completely decentralized organization where every member has equal voting power, that is just not a structure where he sees can ever possibly succeed.  So what are your views on that?

MATTHEW GOULD:  Uh, I think—well, so he brings up a lot of valid points, but I think he’s being overly negative in the long run.  Now, in the short run, I actually agree.  The technology for voting and getting these votes, you know, digital voting basically is what we’re talking about here, and making sure that people are not voting tactically and uh, that we end up with good outcomes because that’s the whole point.  Any system where you’re trying to get everyone to vote, the goal is to make sure that we get the best outcome possible.  And that technology is not very good.  We just haven’t really figured out how to make it fantastic but I think that it’s a great time to experiment.  And there’s a lot of places that are less risk for experimenting on governance protocols.  And there’s a lot of projects that makes a lot of sense to try to get involvement from your users, especially at a very early stage when things are a lot smaller.  So I guess my initial counterpoint to be against this argument that gets a fantasy is, well, I think it would work very effectively for small organizations or small communities, right?  So imagine you had a DAO and it was like 20 people or something, that’s fine, right?  Like, that’s about the size of a fantasy football league or something.  People can coordinate at that scale.  And it may be just a lot easier to coordinate by voting from your phone app than trying to have a twenty-threaded e-mail chain or something like that for your neighborhood or something like that.  So I think that there’s a lot of opportunity for these on a micro level, and one of the reasons why is that it’s less people’s preferences that you’re trying to aggregate.  What happens at scale though, is when you get a lot of people’s preferences, this is where you end up with this problem that I think he’s alluding to here, where he’s saying you need to have a strong executive making decisions, and that’s because sometimes you really want a new outcome.  And that’s something that does not typically happen in voting systems where everyone has an equal vote.  What do I mean by an extreme outcome?  Well, I would say, like inventing the iPhone is an extreme outcome, or sending a rocket to Mars would be an extreme outcome, right?  These are things that are new, different, very complicated, and all the way out there in terms of complexity.  And for those things, you actually need a small, dedicated group of people working really hard and then leading very large organizations in order to make that effort possible.  If you look at the Apollo program, you look at what Elon Musk was doing with SpaceX, you look at what Steve Jobs accomplished with his iPhone launch, there is this core group of executives that were making really, really high-quality decisions and then organizing very large teams—I don’t know how many people Apple employees—to get those things shipped out the door.  So for bigger orgs, I think he’s probably right.  I would say that he’s discrediting the idea of more traditional voting structures on-chain.  So like I was saying earlier, if you replicated a corporate structure completely on-chain, then maybe you would actually have exactly the same strong executive system built into the DAO, right?  So I think that it depends on what you mean by DAO, and if you are flexible in your definition of DAO, and DAOs can evolve to have lots of different incentive structures or different–-uh, like different designs for how their votes are counted, then you could actually have any corporate structure represented inside of DAO.  So I would have to dig in more specifically with Elad to understand exactly what he’s talking about.  I think I can see some pieces of truth there.  If you have an equally voted waiting system and you have more than 1000 members, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’re always going to get the average outcome, right?  So—but if you allow DAO structures to be more complex, or maybe you elect an executive team and it works very much like a C Corp or any other traditional form of organization or even more complex and creative ones, then I think he’s probably wrong.  And short term, he’s probably right.  And long term, I think that he’s most definitely wrong on these opinions for DAOs because I just wouldn’t vote against technology innovating.

HOST:  Yeah, I think that’s an interesting point you bring up is that perhaps not everything is black or white.  Not everything is either fully centralized or fully decentralized, but that things can maybe exist on a spectrum, and that maybe when we’re talking about DAOs, there might be another type of entity that forms in the future that’s sort of a combination of a DAO and traditional organization with, you know, what you suggested, like maybe an executive team, but then the rest of the organization is structured like a DAO.  So a lot remains unseen right now and remains yet to be discovered.  And so I’ll be really interested to see that.  So when we talk about the logistics of a DAO to another question is, how do we structure the voting for the members?  So is it every member gets an equal vote?  Or is it that depending on your buy-in, you get the number of votes proportional to your buy-in?  So if we’re thinking about a DAO that is a collector DAO, so let’s take PleasrDAO, for instance, they were formed to collect NFT artwork.  And so somebody that joins the DAO and has a $1,000 buy-in versus someone who joins the DAO and has a $100,000 buy-in, I’m sure the person that paid $100,000 buy-in is not going to be happy to have the same number of votes as the person that only put in $1,000.  But then if you go down that route, then it’s like, how is this different from a traditional organization or a centralized entity where you can basically buy your votes?  Or it’s like, the more money you have, the more power you have, that sort of goes against the ethos of the DAO.  So how do you think about that?

MATTHEW GOULD:  Well, I think the ethos of DAOs is going to change, and what I mean by that is people are going to use this on-chain governance structure, which is called DAO, in order to build all sorts of complex and different varieties of voting systems.  And I think the most interesting thing to look at is going to be, as the number of people increases, how DAOs make decisions.  And if you look at some of the most successful DAOs that exist right now inside the crypto space, they’re usually smaller.  And then when you look at the much larger DAOs, like the original DAO that got hacked or some of these ones that have multibillion or multi-hundred-million dollar funds to distribute funds, they have voting problems or not enough people are participating.  And I think what I’m trying to say is, as the number of people inside of a group gets larger, they’re going to have to put—will have to invent new rules in order to collect input in a way that’s going to make decisions faster or more effectively than the current structure.  And at the smaller level, I think it’s working fine.  Like in the sub 100 category for the DAOs that actually have less than 100 people in them, they seem to be able to coordinate because, at that size, people seem to be able to talk to each other on Telegram or whatever and make decisions.  As far as waiting, I think you’re going to see all different models of waiting.  Gitcoin, I think is one of the most interesting right now.  They’re experimenting on this system where they have the amount of money that gets donated, for instance, to a certain project has this decay function where like if you donate $1, it gets matched 10 to 1, and then if you donate $10, it only gets matched 2 to 1.  And you donate $100, it maybe gets matched 1 to 1.  And they have this like, a decay function which I think is quite interesting.  There’s a great book called Radical Markets and I would suggest that for people who want to go deep on different types of system design for making decisions and Gitcoin, I’m sure they’ve read that book because it looks like that’s exactly where they got some of their structures for how to allocate funds outside of the Gitcoin Grant System.  So I think there’s going to be a lot.  You’re going to see a lot of different ways that these are done and it’s going to range the gambit from really crazy ideas to very small organizations with only a few people, to extremely normal setups.  You can incorporate an LLC in Wyoming and then you can have the rules for that LLC actually written on the blockchain.  There are a few companies who have done that already and then it’s a complete legal entity which kind of function just like any other cooperation or small company that you might interact with.  So DAOs, I would like to generalize and to choose this idea of being able to do governance on-chain.  So there’s a lot of people who have preferences on the way the DAO should be structured.  But the good news is you can build your DAO a hundred different ways if you would like to, and I’m excited about seeing what people can experiment with their own DAO design.

HOST:  Yeah.  And another interesting thing about DAOs that has really drawn in a lot of people is the participation and contribution element, where DAOs have done a really great job at forming strong communities within the DAOs.  And it’s also given, you know, ordinary people an opportunity to contribute to projects within the DAO in whichever way they are most passionate about and that they have the skills for.  And that’s something that we haven’t really seen in traditional organizations.  In a traditional organization, if you want to contribute to a company, you have to apply for a job there, get hired, and be an employee, and then you’re sort of just bound to that company working for them all the time.  Whereas with the DAO, you can sort of participate here and there, have side gigs, do more of like a freelance sort of contribution.  What do you think about this contribution or participation element and how it should be structured within a DAO?

MATTHEW GOULD:  So this is actually a very interesting question.  So a lot of companies these days will have online communities that are really strong advocates for their products.  And this has been a thing, you know, for the past several decades, but what’s different now is you have an ability to give those people a chance to vote.  And what a lot of projects are doing is giving those people tokens directly.  So Gitcoin did this as a very good example.  Uniswap did this as well.  This is super interesting.  And then allowing those people to allocate those tokens as a form of resource for having more tools developed for that community, is also very interesting.  This comes down to the fact that there are parties external to a lot of organizations who have really great input on how to run that organization.  This is more common in places like Germany, for instance.  And when you’re in Germany, like on the board or whatever, they’ll have someone who represents the labor unions and then we’ll have somebody who represents the consumers.  In America, you don’t have that, like just it’s not the way that we’re designed.  But what these DAOs potentially—these community DAOs allow you to do is get input from your customers and then maybe people who would like to contribute to your project but advocate for you in a way that you couldn’t do before.  And I think that letting customers and ordinary people have a vote in what you’re building is potentially very empowering for companies.  I do not think it’s going to replace companies except in very special cases.  And I’m not actually sure where those special cases are going to come into play.  If you look at it in the crypto space, the only projects that have really been successful in replacing an organizational structure with a DAO would likely be the foundations themselves for the different blockchains.  If you look at like the Ethereum Foundation, or the Bitcoin Foundation, or some of these—I guess EOS Foundation is maybe a better example than Bitcoin because Bitcoin was really mined from the very beginning, so they didn’t really have a foundation to start with.  But you’ll see like Tezos—you know, all of these blockchains have foundations and they’re using those to allocate resources to kind of help build these communities.  These DAOs are probably the most—I’m sorry, these organizations, because they weren’t all started as DAOs, are probably some of the most advanced in having the ability to incentivize the communities to participate without directly paying them.  And the reason they do, the way that works is, as the value of the network goes up—like the value of Ethereum went up, right, and then there’s a lot of people who want to participate in making the theory of network much more successful.  So these early successes of having some sort of community token, in the case of Ethereum is the Ether token, and then that token went up in value and now a lot of people want to work on helping make that thing successful, have encouraged people to try this out at different levels and at smaller scale.  But I think one of the differentiating factors is these base-level protocols like Ethereum or Tezos, anything like this, they are acting as a money layer.  And it is not certain that projects that are not acting as—if you’re not a money layer, it’s not proven that you’ll be able to have this really strong community behind your token project.  Now, a lot of people are trying this right now.  There’s all sorts of community tokens that are evolving.  And some types of communities basically focus as a currency, I mean, sorry, they function as a currency, right?  And so, if you’re like a really avid fan of this, like, baseball or particular music artist, then your collectibles about that person or items of interest, like concert tickets that you have that, or Stubbs, right, or baseball playing cards or something like this, this acts like a currency for you.  And so in those cases where there’s a community that actually can create a form of social currency, I think they’re more likely to have successful DAOs, versus maybe some of these other organizations, it makes a little bit less sense.  I’m not going to name any names here, but I will say that if your primary purpose is commercial, then I think and you’re—it’s a little bit less about—you have a less of a chance of building some sort of underlying currency-type thing.  I think it’s going to be a little bit difficult, more difficult for you to have like maybe a very strong community DAO-like project, as opposed to one that’s going to have some more governing structures, like maybe an executive body.

HOST:  Interesting.  So, you know, you mentioned that when you’re thinking about the future of DAOs, you don’t really see DAOs ever fully replacing traditional organizations.  So how do you see DAOs and traditional organizations interacting in the long term?  Do you see them interacting and parallel working together?  Do you see them just being totally separate things that have nothing in common?  Or how do you see those two playing out, like, in terms of the relationship between each other?

MATTHEW GOULD:  Well, I’m going to have to be a little careful here because it’s still very early in the DAO space.  So I’m going to put a caveat here.  I’m probably going to be wrong, right, on any prediction that I make because it’s just too soon to kind of see how this is going to kind of sort out over the next few years.  I think that we will see a lot of innovation in DAOs, online, which is just online digital loading, right, which is what DAOs are meant to do, is collect these preferences and then resource allocation.  And I think we’re going to see a lot of that.  I think the most successful ones are going to be the very smaller organizations right now, at this stage.  I think some of the big ones are going to have trouble moving fast enough to keep up with their industries.  I think there’s a really funny little project, let me see if I can find it real quick.  I think it’s called DAOchess.  And I have to see if I can find it.  Yes, I can.  I found it on GitHub.  And it’s kind of a joke where you can pit two DAOs against each other.  So you can imagine like the Uniswap DAO versus the Gitcoin DAO in a game of chess.  And the whole idea is like, how quickly can they play a game of chess, right, and like who wins?  And I would just bet if they did it on Uniswap versus Gitcoin, it may take them like a day and that’s how they organize the whole community to play one game of chess.  And that just shows you how slow the decision-making can be with these really large DAOs.  Now from the smaller DAOs, if you had a FlamingoDAO or PleasrDAO and you had them play chess versus each other, they’d probably get a game of chess done in an hour, right then?  And you know, that’s an order of magnitude quicker in decision making.  And that’s the whole point of DAOs is to build structures to get community decision-making faster.  So directing me to make predictions, I think that we will see.  I think that small DAOs make a lot more sense right now given their current state of technology, and weighing on these voting decisions, I think that there are a lot of people working on DAOs longer term.  I know that there are definitely people in this industry who think that it’s a super important long-term objective to be able to get people’s voting on-chain.  And for some voting systems, we may have voting on-chain, but I think the execution will still be off-chain for those larger organizations.  And then, specifically the companies, you’re already having companies incorporate as LLC in places like Wyoming and then forming a DAO and then having their governance structures 100% on-chain.  So it’s possible to just use DAOs with a traditional corporate structure as well.  I don’t know how successful that’s going to be, but it’s possible.  So we’re going to see a lot of innovation in DAOs. I don’t know—I think they’re going to be an add-on to what people are currently doing.  I’m hoping that they can replace some of our voting systems because they’re very inefficient.  And it would be great if we had a faster way to collect people’s preferences so we can make decisions better as a group, but we’ll see.

HOST:  Yeah, for sure.  And then finally, I know this is something that I think about a lot and I think you think about this a lot too, is how do we bring the masses on to Crypto and get them educated about this?  Do you see DAOs as being a way to onboard the masses on a Crypto?  Sort of like how we saw with NFTs in the last, you know, half-year or so, get out into the mainstream a lot and introduce the mainstream to NFTs and thus Crypto, do you see DAOs serving that same purpose and then maybe the next six months or next year or so?

MATTHEW GOULD:  So this, I do think is a good thing to bring up.  So the reason why I like NFT so much is they were like a non-financial use case for blockchain.  And then I would say DAOs is another non-financial use case for blockchain for people to get together and then express their preferences.  So I like this from getting people used to working with Crypto and blockchains.  I think that the airdrops that we’ve seen—and for those who don’t know, airdrops in Crypto refer to when some of these projects will actually give you free items on their project.  And sometimes these items are like tokens that you use for voting.  Sometimes there are different NFTs with pictures and things like that.  It’s all different things, but they just drop you like little digital things to your wallet account for free.  So because it’s free to participate in DAOs, I think a lot of people are playing around with DAOs that wouldn’t otherwise.  I have friends who got free tokens and I myself got some as well, for some of these projects, like, Gitcoin, I was actually talking about that with somebody earlier today.  Uniswap DAO is another one.  And they got tokens for free, right?  And well, what a great way for me to participate in blockchain without any risks to myself, right?  Because no chance I can lose money here.  I can just play around with these things.  And if the projects fail, maybe that’s not great for the project, right?  But those projects will iterate.  Maybe they’ll launch another DAO.  These things are not fixed.  Everyone’s like these things are permanent.  Well, no, not really, they’ll change if they need to.  And I think it’s awesome.  And there was another one today, which I thought was pretty crazy, was Sam Altman was on Twitter talking about how he wanted to do airdrop everyone on the world free token if they just scan their eyeball.  I was like, no, thank you.  I’m not scanning my eyeballs like that.  You can scan somebody else’s eyeball.  But imagine if you got dropped a token and you could, you know, express your preferences, vote on something or just vote who you think is going to win the Superbowl, it could be something goofy like that.  But the fact that you could potentially just see that all on-chain, feel pretty confident, there’s going to be manipulation and everything until the technology gets a little bit better, but it’s still better than nothing, right?  Like right now, I have no information about—you have no information about what people want to do with your products, like for Gitcoin and even for Uuniswap.  And now they at least have a chance where they have 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 people who got airdrop these tokens, and now they can vote and so they start collecting that information.  And so each of those are examples of tens of thousands of people who get to be more active in these things.  And Sam Altman, although I think he’s crazy for wanting to scan your eyeball to drop you some cryptocurrency, I wish him good fortune because if you airdropped cryptocurrency tokens to everyone on the planet, and then we had all, you know, 3 billion internet users with a token in their pocket and they can vote on stuff to tell us what they think even if the votes don’t have a blinding impact, we could start collecting that information as a group to figure out what people want.  So and again, it’s a non-financial use case.  A lot of times people look down on the Crypto industry because of the financial speculation.  Your number go up and all the memes which is a lot of fun and it’s exciting, and it is what drives investment in this space, but I like DAOs because they’re kind of—they’re going out like a different problem.  Like, how can we actually improve the way that we make decisions as people?  And that’s what DAOs are doing, is they’re trying to make it so that we can make better decisions as a society, and that’s the theoretical level.  I think it can be used for a lot of things, but I’m just saying that’s the whole purpose of the technology.  And so I’m excited about seeing that kind of rollout.

HOST:  Awesome, awesome.  All right.  Any final thoughts about DAOs?  Anything we haven’t covered at a high level that you think is important for people to know?

MATTHEW GOULD:  So I would say then, lookout for ways to participate in DAOs.  And I think it’s a good chance to go check them out.  I’ll just drop my favorite, it’s got to be Gitcoin and we just had them on here.  And if you want to learn more about the crypto space, please go check them out.  There’s a lot of people who create lists of projects that they’re supporting on Gitcoin.  And I think it’s a very interesting DAO because you can go and read about all the different things that people are looking to support.  You can see how people are voting.  You can create your own lists for what they think you should vote for.  It’s kind of like if Oprah Winfrey has her list of like, you must have this for 2021 or whatever.  And you can see all these people on Twitter and they have their must-have Gitcoin projects.  So I think that that’s a good one to go check out and participate.  And we want your input because this is going to—the whole point of this technology is to use it and show people that we can make better decisions together by using things like DAOs.

HOST:  For sure, for sure.  Awesome.  Well, thank you, Matt, for joining me on this episode.  Thanks, everybody for listening.  If you are a part of a DAO or you’re thinking about starting a DAO or you just love DAOs and you want to be part of the community, make sure you grab a .dao blockchain domain.  Get it now, early while you can.  And then you’ll be set up for the web three world of DAOs when all of this blows up and we start seeing this everywhere.  So thanks again, Matt, for being here.  And thank you everybody for tuning in.  And we will be back again soon with another episode of The Unstoppable Podcast.