Messari encryption Report 2022: About DAO

原文标题：《 Crypto Theses for 2022 》

Messari

原文编译： DAOrayaki，DoraFactory

While most technologies tend to automate boring tasks for marginalized workers, blockchains automate decentralization. Instead of putting taxi drivers out of work, this puts centralized Uber out of work while allowing taxi drivers to work directly with customers. - Vitalik Buterin

Ahead of us in the discussion of the regulatory part decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), but there is no focus on attention to them, we need to use an entire chapter to explain them, DAO is one of the most important structure in the encryption currency, it will change all aspects of the economic, political, or even likely to change in the next few years of your life. If 2020 is the year of DeFi and 2021 is the year of NFT, 2022 will be the year of DAO.

So maybe we should start by answering, what is DAO?

Someone once asked me a question at dinner, and I blurted it out as "a governance structure for community finances." That doesn't sound too bad.

More specifically, the DAO is a mobile online community whose assets are managed by the contributors to the community. The DAO's organizational primitive is code submitted to a public ledger rather than articles submitted by the state of Delaware, and the blockchain guarantees users accessibility, transparency, and the right to exit (via forks). The DAO's tokens determine voting rights, allocate funds based on group priorities, incentivise participation, and punish antisocial behavior. I also like this simple definition: "a digital native community centered on shared tasks." Communities are bottom-up, flexible and loosely organized. They share a common mission and protocol (on the blockchain), internal capital and enforceable social norms, and they can be used to manage anything including: open source libraries, NFT collections, social clubs, news feeds, joint workforces, etc.

Orca * Julia Rosenberg and Maria Gomez also tried to generalize and formalize this definition. DAO is 1) open source and blockchain-based, 2) open membership, 3) independent groups, 4) uses tokens to manage protocols and 5) allocates internal capital, with the goal of 6) automating markets or functions, 7) preventing collusion, and 8) encouraging bottom-up community participation, they wrote.

As you can see, we are still groping and vocalizing! The way we talk about them will change in the coming years. But no matter how they are defined, they will grow.

1. Enable tools: wallet and mortgage

What if the past 18 months were really just a necessary precursor and installation phase of a truly larger trend, the social restructuring around token-managed communities?

If this is the case, you may need tools to help you safely manage tokens and exchange them point-to-point (DeFi), you need better ways to build and selectively share your personal identity (NFT), and ensure that you can move smoothly between communities, Regardless of which technology stack they use (L1-L2 bridging).

Your personal wallet is the backbone of the Web3 economy and the wild world of daOs, like your personal data vault. Whether it's Metamask or Coinbase on Ethereum, Phantom on Solana, TerraStation on Terra or others, these tokens in the Treasury can unlock your access to the cryptocurrency space and will only become more important in the coming years. Five years from now, people may look at the current wallet landscape and laugh at us, but some solutions (Zapper, Zerion) show that we are getting closer to a time when wallets can double as universal identifiers and data managers.

Joining a new social app? Point to and click the avatar you want to wear in your new club. Bet on a game? Use real money or your friend's "social credit" score. (Opt in without CCP). Applying for a new job? Selectively share badges and accumulated reputations that match your skills. All of this requires a front end, and the encrypted wallet built today will be like your phone, which is an integral part of your living operating system.

(Required reading: Packy elaborates on this in his article "The Interface Phase.")

2. Get into Rabbithole: Learn and earn

Rabbithole* is one of the most exciting trends on the frontier of the cryptocurrency space: "Learn to make money."

The crypto economy is booming and users' minds are melting from the pace of development. One of the scarcest resources is attention and real user engagement. Rabbithole offers tasks to help users, test new products and earn Token rewards. This is a win-win for all. The Token team uses their funds (which are designed to allocate working capital resources for growth) to fund the client's acquisition costs, Rabbithole gains from helping the client, and the user wins as well.

The company's estimate that its users made an incredible $175 million from the task of signing up for an ENS Domain caught people's attention.

Large airdrops may not be sustainable in scale, but they are likely to be in their infancy in practice, and daOs have a lot of money and want users. And we know how lucrative the market can be for those willing to exploit it: Coinbase Earn has arguably the highest annual revenue of more than $60 million, while other parts of the business are underutilized.

"Learn to earn" gameplay will be easily integrated into Web3 wallets and hosted wallets. They are user education schemes that pay for themselves in the form of more encrypted natives, and therefore have more long-term holders. A blockchain may also have a Rabbithole. The world is too big (and the community too religious?). Because this is winner-takes-all, I hope that "mission developer" will eventually become a lucrative career within the DAO community.

If you're in college, I encourage you to spend the spring semester (perhaps redeploying your book budget to ETH fees) learning and testing different encryption protocols on Earn, Rabbithole, and elsewhere. In the best case, you win the lottery on more airdrops. Worst-case scenario? You fail, and once you show them your FAILING grade and NFT merit badge library, you'll be hired on the spot by a cryptocurrency firm. (Seriously: We got a failing grade on the app and we love it.)

Much like twitter & gt; Linkedin is for networking. Learning to earn will slowly replace certificates and will largely gamify and upend the education funding model.

3. Work in Web3

After you've learned something about a project, you might want to dig in and make some contributions. Piecework can be spread across projects or a precursor to one of the full-time jobs at DAO or its related companies. Part-time responsibilities include & NBSP; DevOps, research, governance, data science, etc. Centralized and decentralized communities are also rapidly hiring full-time roles. And most importantly, DAOs can be one of the most profitable ways to build a lasting reputation across projects. Chris Dixon compares DAO membership to other historical analogies:

"Just as Venice did for early modern Europe, Web3 is redefining how global talent pools their knowledge and works together. Much like Homebrew computer Clubs in the 1970s, communities of smart, passionate, "hobbyists" came together on forums to tinker with a new set of ecosystems to build breakthrough products and experiences. These communities are organized today through DAO, the Web3 group coordination primitive."

The crazy thing about the web3 ecosystem, however, is its global accessibility. You don't need to have been born in a particular city or have been admitted to a top computer science program. The bottom-up model and the DAO's opt-in membership subvert the talent model. You can join the Discord server with one click. You can earn rewards and demonstrate proof of your work to earn reputation points through the community's decentralized human resources and community credentials. You can apply directly to DAO members for grants or submit proposals for full-time work.

It is rare for people to work on multiple DAOs at the same time, unless it has a very narrow expert role (such as creating data dashboards or other research reports) or back office functions. For most DAOs, Hollywood is the model. The DAO Production company provided funding, project guidance, and team building. These groups show their ability and sincerity during the performance, then disperse and move on to the next one. Large DAOs will be sticky employers, but most DAOs (from smaller daOs to larger DAOs!) It will be more fluid. The main difference with the Web3 "Hollywood" model is that each contributor - no matter how small - gets to keep royalties associated with the continued success of the product.

The challenge we face in the West is to understand whether this will accelerate the outsourcing of white-collar jobs to the lowest-cost bidder. Will DAO exacerbate the poor labor dynamics in the gig economy that are already plaguing other market providers?

What is clear is that the advantages will significantly outweigh the disadvantages, and early contributors will at least share the benefits of the platforms they help guide, even if those platforms drive variable labor costs. Web3 Token incentives cannot be invented anyway.

You will work for daOs someday, so start alpha is highest right now.

(Must read: Manual,& NBSP; Notes on DAOs, The Future of Work, How to DAO, Full-Time DAOs, DAO Reading List, DAO Landscape  | watch: & have spent What it's like to Work for a DAOs)

Hierarchies, Pods, and fluid organisms

If you join a DAO, the first thing you'll notice is that there's a new "CEO," the organization that connects most DAOs -- the chief Community officer. These are the people who capture memes and command (hopefully) the decentralized army of web promoters. In the formative stages of a project, they can direct newcomers to the right resources, set up the language and culture of the Discord server, and help manage early internal and external messaging.

This raises several questions. How do we strike a balance between choosing new benevolent dictators and maintaining decentralized decisions? Mario has some ideas... His research on Token governance guidelines is a must read.) How do we address "Token voting" and voter apathy or collusion? (Vitalik has something to say about that.)

The crypto community quickly embraced the fact that decisions in daOs were very similar to traditional companies and required layering. Governance accountability, community "HR", user and contributor engagement and communication are important but surmountable challenges. Jai from Rari Capital has a good theory. He suggests splitting roles into "bubbles," which allow for the existence of child DAOs and discrete, fluid teams. Yearyearn pioneered and is currently in use. I think this is the right framework, and it also allows organizations to scale through written documentation.

We need to see a 100-fold improvement in information flow and decision support tools. You can manage a global DAO or sub-DAO with NFT or social currency more easily than you can manage a global company (anyone who is foreign and international knows how incredible it is to build this infrastructure), but that doesn't change the fact that without delegation, when every micro-decision becomes a proxy vote, The fact that the DAO's progress may stall.

  (Credit: FWB.org)

Orca protocol * is working on one of the cooler schemes I've seen. They leverage NFT as an access Token, giving members a "Pod" -- some discrete responsibilities and DAO fiscal rights. It's as simple as electing subcommittees and being held accountable for the results on a regular basis. However, the responsibility for monitoring falls on the collective, and in this model the only difference between good and bad governance is good information (performance analysis) and voter motivation (overcoming apathy).

But our early DAOs weren't really that diverse -- by design, they rewarded early adopters and "crowds" first. They formalize what we already know about governance: those with money make the rules. These are all fair, but they are short-term worries. Moving from today's status as the world's richest to today's, DAO contributors and users have access to mobile political capital and empowerment at an astonishing rate, and they can do so under pseudonyms. But it is also about collecting taxes, providing benefits and enforcing compliance. I'm not surprised to see some jurisdictions make it illegal to work for unregistered DAOs. However, other jurisdictions may also invite DAO workers with unique tax laws, which explains the difficulty of collecting taxes without employer and bank oversight.

This was so early in this token-controlled world experiment that it almost made my head explode. This is where Messiari will spend most of its resources in the future.    

5. Management department of DAO's Finance Department

The current bull market is one of the biggest wealth-creation events in the short history of cryptocurrencies. Any institution or individual with reasonable exposure to the sector thinks their net asset/balance sheet has soared 5-50 times or more in the last 18 months. Some of the top DeFi protocols themselves are now worth hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, mostly in their local tokens. Two of the most active DAO, Uniswap ($4 billion) and Compound ($1 billion), have particularly large foreign exchange reserves.

You might look at the numbers and think DeFi is financially lifetime, but dig into the makeup of each Treasury and the opposite is true. The vast majority of the "value" in these Token Treasuries comes from a reflexive belief that the market will always absorb new supply. This can happen in bull markets, but when volume subsides, conditions can loosen considerably. In fact, that's exactly what happened when the stock market crashed in May.

There isn't much diversification, though:

During the Black Swan, Token prices were at the mercy of the market. Some of the best projects that relied on these reserves also struggled to survive in the 2018-19 bear market. And that's before you consider the particular risks of each particular asset: smart contract failures, hacks, Oracle bugs, and code errors can affect Token prices before even the DAO considers remedies that might affect the entire affected user. If the Treasury is not managed properly, this can create a vicious circle.

Other investors have taken note, but despite widespread talk of the need to provide better financial diversification in top projects, most DAOs have yet to act. There are several reasons for this (overconfidence of developers, desire to avoid giving the community the impression that large Token holders are "dumping" assets, regulatory challenges, etc.) but in many cases it just boils down to a lack of visibility and decision-making tools.

Data sources like DeepDAO do a good job of tracking project finances, but don't provide the complete context that basic portfolio management tools can. Giving communities better financial analysis can greatly improve their governance decision-making process.

It is not only the best practices of Token management, but also the lack of professional financial managers. The inclusion of real financial managers offers a huge market opportunity and will help agreements diversify intelligently to ensure they are well capitalised in a variety of market environments. Unfortunately, you won't like the first piece of advice most Treasury managers offer today: start selling. If assets hit 90% after only a few months, the first-quarter surge does nothing for the DAO.

There is a huge market opportunity for real financial managers to enter the DAO, which will help protocols diversify intelligently to ensure they are adequately capitalized in all market environments. But you won't like the first piece of advice most finance managers offer today: start selling. If assets blow up to 90% only a few months later, a Q1 blowout does nothing for the DAO.

(Must read:   A Crisis in Protocol Treasury Management, A Mental Model for Treasuries)

  6.  DAO Investor Relations

I started writing in the last chapter about how crazy it is that * anyone * could make something that looks like a Q3 "10-Q" for ETH. Investor relations are an important part of healthy financial markets. In encryption currency, the importance of high quality information as much as 11 (up to 11 is a popular culture, representing the maximum or significantly more than the limit) for community relations will affect the DAO and liquidity partners, investors, technology counterparties, core contributors, users, and other means of communication network enabler. Strong, transparent financial disclosure is a pillar of good corporate governance, but it is constrained by the quarterly accounting cycle, limiting the flow of information to just a few times a year.

Blockchains and DAOs provide nearly unlimited improvements to quarterly reporting, as information is always available for review and processing speed is limited only by the time a block travels. The open and permissionless nature of blockchain has led to a dramatic shift, redefining the relationship between protocols and their investors. In this world, financial data is transparent, widely available and readily accessible. Protocol stakeholders can track the financial health of the assets they hold in real time, and information managers (such as Messari) can manage updates on an arbitrary timescale through a decentralized community of developers, researchers, and data scientists.

Token Terminal (basic data), The Graph (on-chain data), Nansen (money flow), Dune Analytics (aggregation metrics), DeFiLlama (TVL), and Messari (Market Data and Off-chain events) is now an essential tool to help users fully understand performance at the protocol level. The combination of these data sources provides remarkable results in the global decentralized analytics community. Take Compound, for example.

Our quarterly reports provide a glimpse into the future of financial reporting. An analyst and data scientist were able to work together to produce a summary of COMP's protocol-level lending activity during the previous quarter, both macro and micro, as well as off-chain events related to community governance and the project's technology roadmap. Such reporting may continue to follow the familiar quarterly, monthly or weekly rhythm, but the data is live and anyone can explore and combine.

Although much remained to be done, the building blocks needed to establish the basis for a new and improved financial reporting system had finally arrived. When executed properly, encrypted financial statements can be very different from traditional financial statements. Rather than waiting impatiently for quarterly earnings reports, protocol declarations are dynamic documents powered by real-time data streams directly from the blockchain. With all the pieces ready for assembly, it's time to build.

  7. Messari: Bundle everything together

What happens when you combine learning with access to onboarding incentives (marketing), a vibrant contributor market (HR), improved money management and delegation tools (finance and operations), and project reporting/community relations (management)? You have the full set of solutions you need to build existing governance structures in social structures that replace politics, companies, and society itself.

I am excited to share our vision for Messari in 2022: we are building a Redacted.

8. Legal framework of DAO

A regulator typically does three things to persuade you not to do what it doesn't want you to do: levy taxes, fine you (or expose you to huge personal liabilities) or cut off your banking services. One thing that really needs to be clarified is how DAO actually works in the real world from a tax, contract law, and compliance perspective.

In theory, the DAO is actually very good at eliminating the "banking service" problem because it is itself a shared bank account. They are also good at addressing personal responsibility... If you work anonymously, and you have confidence that your fellow citizens in the DAO will do the same, and are willing to accept the group's liability risk if anything goes wrong. However, if you think you can join as a member, report your taxes from the DAO, and somehow not report to administrators that you are partnering with an unincorporated entity, then that would be really bad.

It's a roll of the dice, isn't it?

It will be important for most ordinary people to address the issue of contributor responsibility and to bring DAOs and its community into the global and local areas of taxation, banking and employment compliance. The A16Z has some good suggestions on how to create legal DAO entities as unincorporated non-profit associations with potentially flexible, independent substructures (LexNode echoes some of the same ideas), and Wyoming already leads the nation in this area because it recognizes the DAO as a type of limited liability corporation. (Interesting fact! Wyoming was the first state to recognize de facto L.L.C. s, in 1977. It took 11 years for the IRS to recognize the status.) This will also become a requirement for most DAo-to-DAO or DAo-to-business contract work as well.

Given the current administration's enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies so far, I hope they take a similarly tough line on illegal DAOs. Thus, registering in the US not only requires meeting reporting requirements, paying personal taxes and submitting disclosure information, but also makes individual developers who hold core tokens liable in case the authorities decide these are general partnerships that issue unregistered securities. I don't blame the team for moving outside the US.

9.  New allocators of capital

I spent some time discussing creator DAOs and social clubs in the NFT section, so I'll skip them here and focus on two particularly transformative DAOs in the last two parts of this report: the Venture DAO, and the Curation DAO.

On the Venture DAO, the only limit to growth will be natural legal and regulatory. The original sentence "This Token is definitely a security" referred to "The DAO" itself. The initial demand for a COMMUNITY investment vehicle demonstrated (even later) how much demand there was for a community investment vehicle for access outside the gated communities of accredited investor territory. Since then, efforts have been made to iterate on the Venture DAO model and make it legal. Metacartel socializes the Token investment process and provides a tool that paves the way for fluid GP incentives (more work = more reward). The organization can invest in anything that can be tokenized: cryptocurrencies, companies, NFT, other DAOs, virtual real estate licenses, and so on. This is the kind of flexibility in speculation that simply doesn't exist in the "real world," and may not exist in the United States without upgrading our century-old securities laws. If you look at how isolated the crypto community is, it's almost certain that the future will be as well. Founders invest in other founders for strategic reasons: good faith, a shared interest in their partners, keeping up with emerging trends, and keeping an eye on other emerging projects.

Today, VCS are investing in the DAO. Or DAO of DAO. Or register as an investment adviser to remove the SEC shackles that prevent VC from fully encrypting. Late stage investors are moving into series A. Early investors are turning to permanent capital instruments. It's almost like smart money knows that capital markets are dynamic and moving fast. The Venture DAO is already hot, and barring a global regulatory setback, I bet that by 2025 one of the most active and largest AUM VCS will be the DAO. We're already starting to see DAO mergers pick up. The next frontier is the acquisition of a Web2 company into a Web3 company.

10.  New information curators

If you've been following Messari and me for a while, you know I'm bullish on token-driven information management. The registry primitives for V1 Token management have some flaws, but overall, managed marketplaces can replace centralized, ad-driven algorithms, improve credentials and social signals, reduce low-value redundant work, and crowdfund high-value unique information work services.

Let's start with the most important premise: curatorial markets can create crowdsourced quality incentives for mission-aligned communities. "Quality is very subjective!" It's true, you say -- people really seem to like the dopamine (or cortisol?) they get from their current media consumption habits. That's why we're one step ahead of having these sugary, low-nutrient sources of information. But web3 does a few different things to change that in three ways.

1. It creates incentives for portable, open user-generated data. Breaking the data silos of Web 2.0 companies opens up endless possibilities.

2. It allows you to reflect on what you want to curate at any given time: "Hey Facebook, make me happy, make me nostalgic, motivate me, inform me, show me the conspiracy theory and all the facts of this case."

3.DAO will allow you to ally yourself with tribal or personal signal enhancers and build a curated information marketplace around that object.

This opens up the possibility of alternatives to Google search that look less like page rankings and more like custom feeds. Or switch information filters depending on your mood. Or get paid to be a crap caller in a post-truth media organization. Substack has monetised long-form content on the intelligence dark Web. What's next?

Some of the content creation projects I'm excited about are PubDAO, which aims to build a decentralized AP. (You don't need 100 versions of the same basic news story!) There are Messari's Hub and Analyst DAO for decentralized Token research. BanklessDAO is doing some pioneering work, crowdsourcing various channels and vertically extending encryption coverage across its community (art, DeFi, DAO). As we mentioned earlier, we're starting to see more experiments with how long content is funded through Mirror.

When it comes to quantifiable data sources, the outlook is equally exciting. The Graph has turned a Token management model into a multi-billion dollar decentralized blockchain data indexing platform. For Token metrics, there's Flipside's MetricsDAO, and I'm sure we'll see DuneDAO soon. Projects such as IndexCoop enable curators and information providers to leverage their therapeutic strengths and communities to come up with low-lift discretionary indices in support of new synthetic tools. These are simply not possible in regulated financial markets, or would take years and millions of dollars to produce efficiently, if feasible. Beyond encryption, Balaji has also been thinking about rewards for content creation beyond encryption, proposing a competition to create crowdsourced inflation dashboards.

When I launched Messari to the world in 2017, I wrote that the "encrypted Bloomberg" was not a company, but a network. As an industry, we finally have the tools to make it happen.

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