Episode 3 A Primer on DAOs

Episode 3: A Primer on DAOs

Episode 3

A Primer on DAOs

Aaron Wright is a law professor at Cardozo School of Law and founder of Tribute Labs. We cover the hive-mind that makes a DAO special, the mechanics of decision making within a DAO, and other possibilities DAOs could unlock.

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[00:01:39] - [First question] - How a lawyer ends up in crypto and early thoughts of what a DAO could achieve

[00:05:09] - Why the first DAO failed and what convinced him to push forward anyway

[00:08:28] - Forming the LAO several years after Ethereum and why it was his starting point

[00:11:46] - The original state of LAO and the goals it set out to achieve

[00:14:21] - What it is about Silicon Valley that led to having such a blindspot

[00:16:03] - Launching Flamingo and achieving such high multiples on returns

[00:18:05] - Defining the hive-mind that makes a DAO so special and powerful

[00:20:51] - Their investment process, making decisions, and monitoring investments

[00:22:47] - Comparing the speed of decision making to traditional VC funds

[00:24:18] - Why they own 242 crypto punks and 22 bored apes 

[00:26:31] - Internal voting on how to decide which NFTs to buy and how many

[00:29:15] - Whether or not they sell their NFTs to rebalance the portfolio or raise liquidity

[00:30:56] - How Rage Quitting a DAO works and the implications of leaving 

[00:32:12] - Encoding incentives and course-correcting negative behavior

[00:34:11] - Varying levels of dedication and freeloading within a DAO 

[00:36:36] - A maximum amount of people that could function efficiently in a DAO

[00:37:52] - How many DAOs should one person be a part of?

[00:38:45] - Thoughts on DeFi DAOs like Compound and Uniswap

[00:41:41] - Differences between a DAO and a Wrapped DAO

[00:44:02] - Is it possible to achieve this level of organization with fiat currencies?

[00:45:34] - Where we are in regards to securities laws and regulations with DAOs

[00:47:48] - How far we are from buying tokenized shared of DAOs

[00:49:07] - Where to start when building your own DAO

[00:51:03] - Other possibilities DAOs could unlock

[00:52:30] - The best way to get involved yourself 

[00:53:41] - What he’s most focused on building over the next 6 months and 10 years 

A Primer on DAOs

Introduction

Eric
I'm happy to be speaking with Aaron Wright, a law professor at Cardozo School of Law, founder of Tribute Labs, who literally wrote the book on Blockchain and the Law. There is no better person than Aaron to help explain the purpose and power of decentralized autonomous organizations, also known as DAOs. Aaron, thank you for joining me today.

Aaron
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Being Involved in the Earliest DAOs

Eric
So Aaron, in preparing for our interview, I went back and read Dan Larimer and Vitalik Buterin's early writing from 2013. Now, this is two years before Ethereum was launched. And what struck me was the idea of using smart contracts to organize people and capital were there from the very beginning. Aaron, as someone who was part of founding of Ethereum, I think a great place to start would be first, how does a lawyer end up in this frontier breakthrough technology? And second, what was the conversation like in those early days about what a DAO could possibly achieve?

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