DAO and the disruption of the Chinese world
The following is what I have learned after a few months of participating in BanklessDAO.
I. Conclusion
DAO will be very likely to write an important story in the future. I have no doubt about this.
The Chinese world will face the biggest disruption because of DAO. I also have no doubt about it.
II. What is DAO?
1) Origins
I organized a startup team in August 2021. We are previous colleagues from first-tier large firms in China. The objective at the beginning was SaaS. Many things were difficult to reach a consensus. After more than 3 long months of discussion, we were still in the original place. So I had this motivation to find a way to organize a group of people who will be able to march spontaneously and effectively towards a same goal.
As you may already know, KPIs or OKRs are tools that are played in big IT companies, and everyone is lightly familiar with a hundred ways to mess around.
For this reason, I researched dynamic stake allocation, referencing The Dynamic Equity Allocation Mechanism for Startups - Cai Cong. However, because of tax law, there is no way to reach perfection. I can only rely on some workarounds to simulate with partnerships.
With deeper research, I discovered DAO as an organizational framework. I came to DAOSquare at the end of November and joined BanklessDAO in mid-December.
2) What I thought DAO was before
At first, I thought everyone in a DAO hold a share on blockchain and voted on it. It seems to be very fair.
During this period, I also tried to use DAOHaus and registered a DAO in it. https://app.daohaus.club/dao/0x64/0xd131bc6306f1a3ed3b255e5ddb608e867374d66d/settings
However, this is useless. It is just like you find the recipe for making gunpowder, but it is still very far from making a gun, to say nothing of shooting at the target.
3) What I now think of DAO
DAO is a very western style framework for thinking of collaboration, which formats all the possible points of contention to keep things running in a reasonable mechanism that doesn’t appear to be idling for months like I mentioned above.
This is what I am going to talk about next, i.e. the biggest disruption which the Chinese world is going to face.
III. The people in BanklessDAO I met (all the following records have checked with the permission from the people)
1) Steff from Dev Guild
BanklessDAO has a robot project called DEGEN, which is very famous and is considered a product of the deep cooperation between Web3 World and the discord platform. Usually we send POAP or something through this robot.
Steff joined bDAO in July 2021. She is good at writing (everyone who joins will introduce themselves) and is good at marketing with experience in customer support and client management. She participated in the DEGEN workgroup, and soon reached L1. Then she started to assist in setting up the bDAO product support center, and thus quickly moved into a full-time DAO role.
As of now, she is planning proposal revisions with several other partners to prepare for future DEGEN wins. https://forum.bankless.community/t/bdao-product-support-center-season-3-proposal-revision/3106
2) IMN’s GPe
IMN is a project of bDAO and is currently in subDAO status. GPe is a Bulgarian mother who just moved from one country to another. She worked for Coca-Cola while in her old country and is a certified yoga teacher. Twice a week you can find her in bDAO offering free yoga classes that are open to everyone.
The middle section of this interview is GPe herself talking about her experience. https://banklessdao.podbean.com/e/making-bank-episode-3-featuring-bankless-africa-gpe-and-governator-proposal/
She did yoga while raising a baby, then participated in meetings and organized events. She arrived at bDAO around October and reached L2 in 6 months.
3) Grendel who used to be the lead of TG
TG stands for Translators Guild and Grendel was the first founder. He is the owner of an IT company in Italy, and his company itself is in the blockchain business.
He was previously the coordinator of TG, but resigned from the job to the community last month for time reasons. Then the other guys stopped electing the coordinator with a month to go in the season and took charge of the direct multiplayer decentralization (and also diverted the rest of his salary for other purposes).
He basically responded to requests and came out at key moments to write proposals, such as when the money originally used for bounties in TG’s treasury was to be used for projects and other decisive matters.
His current focus has shifted to the bDAO NFT fine arts newsletter, Decentralized Arts, as well as his role in Polygon.
IV. The Chinese world’s disruption
1) Left or right?
These people mentioned above have different languages and cultures, and come from different countries and regions. It is already a miracle that complete strangers can work together, coordinate together. And besides we have to meet together to bicker and argue over remuneration or proposal details.
I myself have actually never been able to distinguish between the left and the right in terms of political stance. This is because the Chinese culture is more likely in the middle. Most people in the world are left on one thing and right on another, and that is perfectly normal.
DAO is the codified embodiment of the political system. The current DAOs are dominated by the English-speaking world populations, which lead to its composition being the expression of liberalism. That is because liberalism is more popular in these areas.
2) Disruption
For the past 100 years, the mainstream Chinese world has been vigorously developing socialism and considering most of the rest of the world to be capitalist. On the other hand, Europe and the US have long evolved to liberalism.
In DAO, people in the English-speaking world have been writing proposals, launching campaigns, and electing champions, all of which are things that people in the English-speaking world have been experiencing since birth. Only now they are written in code and available to everyone. In addition, the goal is not politics, but business.
The disruption to the mainstream Chinese world is that we haven’t seen a proposal from a council member since we were born, and we almost never have to vote. Most people, for the most part, need to learn in the process.
V. Liberalism and DAO
Rationality and individuality are the cornerstones of liberalism, and tolerance and pluralism are the environment that liberalism brings. The development of liberalism has positive freedom and negative freedom. The current popular positive liberalism is mainly limited to not affecting the freedom of others.
So it sounds like our socialism has been influenced by liberalism to some extent. Yes, it is impossible that the trend of more than 100 years of thinking has not affected the East at all.
Back to DAO, all that is currently experienced is liberalism in blockchain code and discord under the organization of business goals.