Episode 53: Tony Hererra | Paisano DAO - DAOs for Diversity
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Status
TimeStamp:
3:19 - Tony Introduces himself
14:10 - Onboarding People into ETH and web3
16:29 - Tools to use in onboarding
21:23 - PaisanoDAO’s start
26:05 - PaisanoDAO’s diversity in action
Paisano DAO
Humpty Calderon: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative web3 builders to help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Defi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice. Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with BanklessDAO, A movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system. BanklessDAO will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Before we get started, I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor for this episode, OtterSpace who are busy making web3 less financialized. Their protocol on app lets communities build and issue badges to members to represent things like levels, roles, achievements, membership and skills badges are earned, not bought. They are non-tradable coordination primitives for communities. You can use badges for governance and snapshot token gating with guild, and you can build your own custom extensions with their composable tools. If you've been thinking about how to run non-financial governance, represent roles and permissions on chain, or recognize contributions via social recognition, check out otterspace at otterspace_xyz on Twitter or @otterspace.xyz.
Welcome back to Crypto Sapiens, and today we are talking with Tony Herrera, founder of Paisano DAO and member of NeonDAO, ReadyPlayerDAO, and WAGMI United. Tony talks about his background as an immigrant activist and how working in that field led him to discover Bitcoin and eventually Ethereum. He also shares his early interest in DAOs as an ICO investor and Aragon.
Anyone that knows Tony knows that he has for a long time been onboarding new people to Web3, and that ENS domains have long played a big part in it. He often gives ENS domains as a way to make crypto more fun and accessible. Furthermore, he shares other tools he uses for onboarding MetaMask and Ethereum.
While these probably are not what most people would think of first, he sees the importance of helping people understand how these work, so they have a good foundation from which to continue learning. Tony found it by PaisanoDAO to engage underrepresented communities, in particular women and people of color.
He classifies it as an impactDAO. PaisanoDAO often hosts workshops and other educational events, including two regular series on Twitter spaces, NFTs and Espanol. Frequencia Paisana. It was important to Tony that the DAO It did not grow dependent on him, so he stepped away early. Now the DAO is in the hands of core contributors that continue to nurture the values and mission that were developed with Tony.
He says we must build DAOs whose mission and message resonate with its community. There is lots to unpack in this episode, so let's get started.
Tony Herrera: Yeah, I'm involved in a number of DAOs that are, I'm a passive, passively involved with the DAOs those DAOs some of them, I'll mention them by name NeonDAO which is a Metaverse DAO relates the Metaverse and then there's Ready Payer DAO which is really a play to earn turn anything in the Space in a crypto space, any space that is related to watched earn page, earn, learn to earn read ReadyPlayerDAO in. There's a couple other DAOs WAGMI United, which famously bought a soccer team, football team in crawl town in England and a few other ones but those are the ones that come to mind right now. And they're like DAOs I like to mention when people ask me about 'em, I say they're DAOs and they are decentralized, autonomous organizations, but they're really more investment arms where they invest in different assets and in the case of WAGMI United invested in a football team. And then there's the DAO that I'm spending a lot of time with, which is by PaisanoDAO and for those that are unfamiliar with the word Paisano is basically just a term, normally a term of endearment, which is like a term of a countrymen. I know that sometimes people use it bisa. The bisa term can be both a endearing term, or it could be like a way to slander somebody or, demean them. But we like to think of paisano as a favorable term that basically denotes that you're from a specific country, you're a Paisano whether you're from Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Mexico, then you're my Paisano. And as I started exploring DAOs I love the concept of DAOs it truly decentralized, autonomous organization that would have like where everybody's, like an organization that's leaderless, but at the same time everybody's a leader and it organically grows as more people are interested in the DAO and so when I thought of by PaisanoDAO, I started reaching out to community members. And the space and hey, they have this idea about this DAO, and I think those were actually some of the early conversations that you and I had. It was around that, around the aspect that the web3 space predominantly, like the internet space is still very much a digital divide. There there's obviously a disconnect between some of their minority communities and their access to some of the tools that we take prevention on the internet, especially Web3 And I set out to create PaisanoDAO with the mission of fostering and promoting inclusivity and diversity in the web3 ecosystem. When we talk about web3 we wanna have some of those tools that are blockchain tools and crypto tools, and now NFTs be available to some of our Latino brothers and sisters that, because I fundamentally believe in the technology Long term and, it's hard right now with bear market that we are in, where everybody's like worried about the fact that they bought some entities and they're now long, they're no longer as valuable as they thought they were when they bought 'em could tend to create a people coming into the market but then leaving. But yeah. But I think that gives you a little bit of a background as to, Why PaisanoDAO was created and the intent behind Paisano.
Humpty Calderon: Let's, before again, we get too far into the weeds of things as we do just maybe rewind a little bit and just tell us, how you discovered this space like what were you looking for when you first heard of crypto? What were the conversations then? I know we started talking about AOL and instant messenger, so we really kinda turned back the clock a lot. But like when you were looking at crypto and maybe some of the noise, what was that signal in that noise that to you was like, oh, you know what, that makes sense and I wanna learn about that and I just wanna start maybe exploring that community or ecosystem or project.
Tony Herrera: Sure. So for me, I think I can credit my journey and crypto to a couple things. One, I've always been a technology kind of buff, always like software and, the fact that you could do so many things with different pieces of code and software, right?
And so, I was enamored with, technology as a whole and then when I come from an immigrant activist background, so most of my work in Southern California has revolved around the immigrant community mostly in a space, in a little niche of a space, which is still a $25 billion industry here in California, which is workers conversation. So, I worked in the workers conversation field a lot with the under-committed workers, helping them return to work after their injuries, mostly as a, what they call a vocational counselor, helping people decide what areas to go into, what fields are trending, so obviously you have data, right? So I've always been like a data guy okay, why does one job pay more than the other if you have some similar skill sets, right? There's a lot of jobs that a lot of. Young people don't realize nowadays that, you can go into these really like jobs that require only six months to a year's training and you can make really good money, right?
Like electrician's one of 'em, right? Electrician's one of 'em. But, so anyways, I was always involved with data and As I worked in the field that I worked in one of the things that I en encountered a lot was the fact that a lot of my clients would send Mentis back to either Mexico or Central America and then and sometimes they'd even leave and then they would have some resources that any be sent and so I would use a lot of times the services of my, of wire transfers of money transfers, Western Union and other services and I remember being struck by the fact that, could send a hundred bucks and it would charge you like 10, 20 bucks and it was like an astronomical fee for, from, wait, I'm sending a hundred bucks and it's cost me 10% to send it and all you're doing is this and just transferring it from one place to another as a wire transfer and so then that led me down to it actually resolved around a particular client that I had, a client that received a large settlement from a case was with excess a hundred thousand dollars and he tells me Tony, I'm gonna be leaving back to Mexico and I can't carry this amount of money with me, Is there a way that I can take it? What do you think I could do? And I don't wanna leave the bank account open because if I leave the bank account open and then I lose my debit card or something like that, I won't have access to it. Plus, the debit card will eventually expire, and then I'll be, I won't have a way of gaining access to my funds. So, this is always, obviously before the advent of online banking and everything else. And so, then that this particular client I said, lemme do some research. So then I was doing some research and I had already heard of Bitcoin and one of the premises of Bitcoin was that you could use it for rein borderless, permissionless transfer of funds and that certainly works for Bitcoin, and it works for Ethereum. The issue is that you can't really convert it to the local currency that's the problem. It's I know that. Right now, we have the El Salvador who famously the person who is buying Bitcoin, and he is also made a legal tender, Declared a legal tender in . But the issue is still that at the local level, people still deal dollars and for most people don't realize for SLO has actually been on the dollar for quite some decades. They don't use vessels or any other, currency. They, their legal tender is actually dollars. But if you look at it from a local level even though cryptocurrency has made legal tender in n. It's still not rarely available to the local community in terms of conversion to the local currency.
And that was one of the problems that I had with this particular client that I was dealing with. But that sort of led me down the rabbit hole of crypto and so when I discovered Bitcoin and then later on discovered Ethereum I was I knew about Ethereum in 2015, 2016, Didn't really buy it, didn't really understand it, and then around 20, around the beginning of 2017 when the ICOs came about I really started digging into it further. I ended up buying Bitcoin bought some Ethereum and then, I had, I was holding Ethereum and, it started going up and once again, you started at Ethereum at $10 in 2017, and then it started going up and then I then ICOs started coming about, right? So, they had all these ICOs. And actually when we're talking about DAOs, Humpty one of the interesting things about DAOs, what set me about like down the rabbit hole of Ethereum was DAOs and the very first ICO that I participated was actually a DAO token that was Aragon, and I don't know if you've ever heard of Aragon. Aragon was a token that was premised on a token that allowed for building and of decentralized times organizations and a kind of open-source infrastructure.
And so basically, Aragon was a DAO or essentially a token that was gonna power DAOs and I remember just falling, just kinda like just reading about it and thinking, oh, this is gonna be cool. So, then I sent, that was the very first ICU that participated. I actually participated in that DAO token, Argon DAO token via a mist wallet which is, Deprecated wallet no longer available, but it was made available back then by the Ethereum Foundation and because I started reading about the Ethereum Foundation, that sort of led me to Aragon and then it also led me to ENS and ENS which is the Ethereum name service was also a project funded out of the Ethereum Foundation. So that kinda led me around the whole idea of DAOs and what identity would be within the blockchain, So i kinda said, oh, if you par part of a DAO, then you have this sort of wallet that you can connect to the DAO and do some on-chain voting and you had all those kinds of discussion. But then I was really enamored by ENS because I thought, Oh, this is really cool because now, so for those who aren't familiar with ens, ENS provides you the name service provides you for a human-readable name, a human, so you could have Humpty.eth right? So Humpty.eth can resolve to a specific address or anybody that has a Eth address like mine is Tonyherrera.eth You can just send tokens and crypto to my Tonyherrera.eth address without you having to remember hexadecimal string of address. And so that was what led me down the rabbit hole of DAOs and ENS and I was so enamored with ENS when I first learned about it that I was actually gifting people, ENS names wherever I run into an artist, I would say Hey, or anybody who was interested in space, I say, do you have any domain? And they say No. I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna gift you one. What you choose a name, and I would just gift it to them. I would buy it and then just send it to the wallet. Set it up with a meta mask, wallet and say, Here's how you control it. And, I was, for me it was like a way of building community. If Dows are about community, then I figured, okay, I can help build DAOs by investing in a platform like Aragon that is part of an ecosystem to help establish DAOs and then with ENS, you can have these human-readable addresses that you can engage in discussions and voting and everything else. And I think it was funny because I remember having a conversation with some of the Aragon team and one of the things that they did, they were early on, they actually made it to whether smart contract, when you participate in the ACO, It was actually argon.eth You could actually participate in the sending of your ETH to the smart contract, so you wouldn't get fished and you wouldn't send it to the wrong address, and you wouldn't get scammed. They actually registered aragon.eth and made that the contract
Humpty Calderon: address. Yeah. That's interesting. What I'm hearing right now is your role in onboarding people and, I do, I would say that one of my first interactions with you, I think was through a Twitter space where you were talking about ENS i Definitely consider you one of the probably more active ENS ambassadors, though you were not part of that team, I don't think. You were always talking about ENS and you were using that as an onboarding tool. I remember this and I was like that's an interesting way of making this easy to understand for people cuz I do agree, I think ENS is a wonderful tool for making this very complex space a little bit more accessible. Instead of looking at this really long string of like numbers and letters and saying, Hi, that's your identity.
You actually can say it's like what's your name? What is something that is maybe what is your brand? And then registering that as a domain on ENS and then using that to identify yourself, on the blockchain. I remember that and I, I think that's such a powerful thing to do is to find something that you find that’s Interesting, That's novel, right? It's using the technology, but it's like super user-friendly. It doesn't really require like a high level of understanding. Sure You can dive deep into the weeds of ENS and start looking at the reverse registration and all that stuff that, makes the ENS domains work. But really just saying, Look, here's an identity for you, Let's register this to your wallet and then from there, you can start participating in the ecosystem in ways that appear more familiar to you. Maybe we can pull on that thread a little bit more because, you were also talking about some of your work outside of the crypto space as someone who helps people that maybe underrepresented as an activist as well, so what are some of the tools outside of ENS that you have found that have been really helpful to onboarding people firstly and secondly, that are super user-friendly, accessible, and empowering to maybe people that otherwise would be underrepresented.
Tony Herrera: I think the primary tool that I use is, believe it or not, MetaMask. I use 2 main tools that I like to use when I onboard somebody, and that's Meta Mask and etherscan and the way I use it is very just like simple, it's if I meet somebody that doesn't know anything about Ethereum or blockchain and is in, wants to learn I'll say grab your phone, It's easy, right? Because they both, meta masks available for both Android and iOS and, it's Apple. It's really easy. And I'll say, Okay, Download this wallet, and then. And then what I do is I, after I have 'em, download the wallet and save the seed phrase, on a piece of paper and it, I'll say, look, it's gonna take you five minutes don't worry. It's five, 10 minutes of your time. And then what we do is what I usually do is I walk 'em through like the wallet and then I'll say, Okay text me, send me your e address and they'll send me address, and then I, turn around and I'll give 'em 10, $20 worth of ETH right?
And I go, okay, look, check this out. And then I usually point them to the text hash, right? The text, the transaction hash, right? I say, Check this out, Go and then, what Transcriptions hash did with the transaction hash gives you is it gives you these transaction details, right? So, it's, so often times it's almost like in an analog world it would be like finding the word Aardvark in the encyclopedia and just walking that person through the definition, right? And that's what I use. I just use meta mask, help somebody download a meta mask, and then I say, all right let's go see your transaction and I'll go to the transaction, and I'll explain, Okay, look, this, here's the details of your transaction, there's a status, for all blockchain transactions, they can only have one of two outcomes, right? They can either fail or they succeed. Both, most of them will succeed and so then basically you have the status, the block number, and then you have the timestamp, and then you have the transaction details and then you have who that transaction came from, who it went to, how much eth was used in the transaction in terms for gas, what was the value of the transaction. So, all that is like really this sort of like rabbit hole of information. And generally, that's enough, If the person's really interested in like just the whole ecosystem that's like your red, that's like your pill, right? That's like your, the moment that people like fall and I almost everybody, once they learn how to use Etherscan, it's pretty it's totally a rabbit hole because then you say, oh, you know that, see this long string of Hexa decimal address? That could be an in estimate and that could resolve Like whatever you want to, you want it to be, big guppy daddy.eth you could have that point to that at this, all you need to do is register a domain. And so usually for me, that's like the easiest onboarding and I remember doing that with artists early on, and the argument I would use for artists is say, hey, Humpty, you're an artist If you wanna have providence and authenticity to your art, start up by claiming your identity on the blockchain so then when you create your NFTs, you sign those NFTs with your identity. So now I know that the art, the sales pitches that I would often, you know, the pitch that I would make to artists oftentimes would like, Hey Humpty, you're an artist, go ahead and just start signing all your art, all your piece of work via Humpty.eth, right? And then now, whenever there's any question as to whether the art is yours, it's provable on the blockchain. There's a providence and authenticity that is on the blockchain, and I think that despite all this Humpty we're still pretty early in this whole scheme of DAOs and identity and everything that has to do with what it will come about with the Ethereum, with the Ethereum Blockchain
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. , I think you I was expecting maybe like some easier tool, but you went straight to 11. You're like meta mask and etherscan. I think for most, those are really scary. Even for someone like myself who's been interacting with these tools for some time, there's still a lot that I don't know about 'em, and there's a lot that I would like to learn about 'em. So it's really interesting to hear that for you that is the way you choose to introduce them. And I guess it's actually really interesting to hear that those are the tools you choose to use as an onboarding mechanism because at the end of the day, I think if someone gets started really understanding that, type of interaction with the blockchain. They're much further ahead than most people. But in addition to that, I think a lot of the scans tend to revolve around Metamask and maybe even Etherscan so if you let people know how to use them and have good practices, you're probably also setting them up to be able to learn what not to interact with. So I guess my next question here would be in regards to Paisano DAO. So as an individual, I know this right? And I think our community is getting to learn this about you, is that you are an ambassador for this technology, as someone who is, was an early adopter, as someone who is fascinated by technology, you have adopted this technology, this is your life but now, PaisanoDAO, tell us what is your kind of place in it your role in it, What is it that makes PaisanoDAO important and really how can people join and actually help move the mission of PaisanoDAO forward?
Tony Herrera: So PaisanoDAO was really we spoke a little bit earlier about DAOs and how they can become, like most DAOs are DAOs and name only because they're very centralized organizations and they're not really that decentralized and when I thought about PaisanoDAO, I actually started place do and started with a small group of other, Individuals that were early people that had reached out and said, Hey, we're gonna create this DAO and got a little bit of attention and then, a few people joined the Discord. We set up a Discord and a few people joined and then I just left it and I thought, Okay, I'm gonna let the DAO organically grow. It's like this DAO can't really, if it's truly a decentralized DAO, it should grow organically, right? It's, you should have enough attention from people in the community that the message and the mission resonate with them and then they'll join like they’ll build it and they'll come aspect. And so, I started the DAO every now and then somebody would say, hey, what are we doing next? And I'd be like, oh what do you guys wanna do? It's like you're, this is a DAO You guys can do anything you want to. And it took a little while and then it started getting traction and every now and then I'd have a conversation, and some of the early conversations that I had were with individuals such as rocks which who you're familiar with
I think she goes by rox but her Twitter handle is Icanoclast I believe it's Lemme bring it up. Sorry, just so I'm, I don't butcher her. Yeah. So Econoclasticon is her Twitter handle. And she asked me, what is this DAO right? And so, we had the conversation, and it was always like, I would have these conversations offline with a number of individuals that were asking about the DAO and so the mission of the DAO has always been the same. The mission is basically, to provide. Education and onboarding of a more diverse web3 ecosystem, right? Bringing specifically more Spanish speakers into the web three ecosystems. Be it more women, more people of color more minorities into the space. And that's always been the. The mission of PaisanoDAO so we label it as a social impact DAO it's a DAO dedicated to inclusion diversity of the web3 ecosystem, and it remains that. And so for a while now I've been a little bit more offhand in terms of the daily decisions that there's a discord that you can join. There's obviously a Twitter that you can follow, and there's a couple of things that have happened with my absence, which I, which is really great because it shows that the DAO is organically growing and that's that Rox Antonio, Mariano Flipper Gato, these are all individuals that are heavily invested in the DAO that have been doing a ton of work behind the scenes and growing the community and now they have, we started off with you, I think you participated. I, a few of them, we started off with and it Espanola and Omar Robles would help us, and we would do 'em and then PaisanoDAO the Mantle and now they do NS in esp and they also do for Quincy Est, the Paisana which is like akin to a radio show where they have on different personalities, and they've bought on they recently did an interview with Edzipcode from Super Chief Gallery. They've done interview with Kagani from EBIT DAO, They've done different interviews and do, they do a lot of behind the scenes doing workshops to for solidity devs, for artists that wanna create their own smart contract for anybody from the community that wants to come in and it's really helpful in different projects. So by sending now I like to give credit to Rocks and Antonio and a lot of other people who have really poured their heart into the DAO and are really doing the mission of the social impact and so I'm really grateful to them. But yeah, for me, I wanted to create a DAO but I also wanted to create a DAO that was outgrow me. I didn't wanna create a DAO that everything was tied to, Oh it's Tony Herrera's DAO it's like I wanted PaisanoDAO to Bigger than Tony Herra if that makes any sense.
Humpty Calderon: No, that makes 100% sense. And I really like something that you said early here or at the beginning of this was, you wanna create a DAO. Whose message and mission resonate with the community? I think that's such a powerful statement, and I think maybe one that we easily forget or don't pay enough attention to when we're starting a DAO because maybe this is something that is more aligned to who we are as individuals maybe the initial founders of a DAO, we may have certain ideas of how we'd like this ecosystem to grow, but at the end of the day, I think one of the most important things in a DAO is obviously it's mission and you wanna make sure this is a mission that is broadly speaking to a number of people who are going to be able to come together and build together. And in terms of messaging, I think obviously a lot of this is drive from the mission of the DAO but this language, this vocabulary that is part of the DAO needs to be consistent with that mission and and the reason for that consistency is you can alienate potentially people if you are not right, because you may seem to be waffling on what it is that you seek to do in this space. So, I really like that statement and I really like, what you've talked about here with PaisanoDAO and the people that are driving it forward. Obviously, yeah, I'm familiar with rocks as well because early even before PaisanoDAO existed, I was jumping onto these Twitter spaces with you and with rocks and, just hopefully being able to add some value with some of my own personal experiences too.
What really to me was probably what differentiated a lot of these conversations and the reason why I was consistently showing up was that these conversations were happening in Spanish, right? And I thought, Wow. First of all, how often do I get to speak Spanish in this space? Rarely because a lot of the groups of people that I interact with are English speaking and I get it. English seems to be the common language that [00:28:00] holds the web three space together because it is an international space and for the most part English tends to be spoken by a lot of these communities. But that's also could be exclusionary, it could be excluding people and so creating these spaces that allow for them to comfortably join and talk in their native tongues, I think that's so powerful. So I just wanna say, firstly, as someone who is participating in those calls, thank you for helping to organize those, but also thank you to the people that are caring for that mission as well.
Tony Herrera: Thank you for that. Yeah and I think one of the things you mentioned, that was one of the fun facts about when we started off, said, there was like a lot of Twitter, like Twitter spaces. First we started with Clubhouse, right? And then we did Twitter spaces. And as Twitter spaces started to become more commonplace, you have a ton of tourist spaces and they're primarily in English and most of the. The spoken language is obviously English, right? That's like the worldwide language. But we forget that, there are 500 million speakers that speak Spanish worldwide. That's a half a million people that speak Spanish, right? It's we're barely scratching the surface when we talk about Spanish speakers around the globe. And so for me, I think the other thing for PaisanoDAO was really personal to me is it's like I wanted to have a space that artists could come in and anybody new to crypto could come in and it was kind like a welcoming space, right? It like, it wasn't it can be intimidating to go into some of these Twitter spaces with and if you're like a Latino and don't necessarily have a good command of the language it can be intimidating. So I thought, you know what? Let's create these comfortable spaces where Latinos can come in and get education and a lot of it Is that it takes a lot of work. Hey, I don't have to tell you, how hard it is to create these spaces and record these conversations and create these, these two particular contents, it's a lot of work, It's more work than people realize. And so when when PaisanoDAO started organically, having the spaces and having all these different voices come in, both into the discord and it was, for me it's very for me it's very rewarding to see that it was pleasantly, for me, I get to enjoy.
Oftentimes I get to enjoy when I go in and sometimes, I'll lurk in the Discord or I'll look at the Twitter stuff going on with PaisanoDAO and it's just it warms my heart because I'm like, Okay, this is cool, this is growing without Tony having to come in and now, it's obviously gotten the attention of you which is great and it's gotten the attention of other people and I think that it's just the start, right? PaisanoDAO has a lot of really cool things planned in the next few months, and it'll become even more mainstream and it'll have its own, with that growth, it'll have its own challenges and issues, right? It's like at the end of the day, it also needs to come and bring in resources and the reality is that it, the talent pool within PaisanoDAO is actually really tremendous. It's got a lot of solidity devs, its got a lot of it's got a lot of really great creatives In Latin America individuals who are frontend devs, backend devs, a lot of graphic artists, a lot of designers that are in there, that are, just itching to contribute to the web through ecosystem. And a lot of it is also about what we can incubate via PaisanoDAO right? It's not only about having the conversations, but it's also about what can we do to empower different creatives in the community to break into the Web3 ecosystem and really apply their trade. And I think that's one of the things that's interesting to me about the web3 ecosystem is that for the first time you have people who can get paid in ETH right? People can, you can establish, say, Okay, I can do the design for you, and it's half an Eth, Its Okay, cool. You could pay somebody half an ETH and we don't realize that half an Eth in the United States is right now, what? $800? You think? Okay, that's not a lot but in a developing country like say Cuba or Argentina, Venezuela, that's a sizeable amount of money. So now you have designers that for the first time can get paid an equitable fee for their work because it's denominated in need.
Humpty Calderon: Oh that's incredible man. Obviously, I am excited to continue to see the development of PaisanoDAO I think it's super important everything you've said I think it's super important that we build the rails for diverse communities to feel welcome, To be able to safely enter the space because absolutely there's a ton of potential risks, There's people who are going to wanna be taking advantage of like new joiners into this ecosystem. And I think it's our role, as veterans in this space, right? As much as we can be veterans in this space to be able to anyone who's coming in answering questions sharing best practices introducing them to like-minded individuals, right? Just what PaisanoDAO would be in terms of the people who make it up, in terms of it being an inclusive community. I think this is super amazing. I am just, I'm here for it and I'm excited to just play a small role as wherever I can in helping to support that mission because, it is 100% something that is near and dear to my heart as well In terms of building out a globally diverse ecosystem, because I, we hear this thing all the time. We're onboarding the next billion people, We're onboarding the next billion people, I was like, hey, honestly, you realize that the next billion people don't all look and sound maybe from like the status quo of today, like they're going to be from different parts of the world. What are we doing as a, ecosystem to encourage those people to come in to speak to them in ways that make sense to them. Like you said, the financial aspect of things is night and day between what is accessible to us and what might be accessible somewhere else in the world in terms of, Oh, it's gonna cost you this much to buy our token to be a part of our DAO, is that really the gate, Is that really the barrier we wanna set up when someone chooses to join our our organizations? So yeah, this is, this has been wonderful. Before we get to before we close out, one thing that I've been asking our guests more recently as a final question is, if there was one person or thing that has been really influential for you in your crypto journey, It could be someone that speaks on Twitter, it could be a book that you read, It could be a platform that you use often as a resource. What would that one thing be in your crypto journey that has really helped you go from, maybe a novice crypto user to a crypto native?
Tony Herrera: I don't know that there's one, I don't know that there's one thing I, there, there's so many people. There's a ton of people in the room now that I've met throughout my journey in crypto that have really made it to where, to me it's really an area that I wanna be. It's a space that I wanna be, I find the, a ethereum space particularly. Full of dreamers and visionaries and people that want to change the world. There's like a, I see in the audience, I see, ZuSu and Mitsu and Cynthia and Gaston all these individuals are like individuals that I've met through my journey that are, that have been really, people that I've met and there, there are people that I want to be on the journey with crypto, but I think that for me, an anti-space in DAOs but I think for me, one of the people that I think I want to credit with like the whole dream of what crypto can be. And so I'm really, I have this aspirational thing about DAOs right? What I love DAOs not for what they are now, but for what they can be and that's to me is like what really keeps In the DAO sort of ecosystem. And I think at the end of the day there's been a lot of builders and a lot of people that I really like credit. But I think more and more the more I think about it and the more I interact with Ethereum, the one person that I want to say thanks and admire is actually Vitalik Buterin and I'll tell you the reason why I admire Vitalik Buterin here's an individual who could long ago. Have just sold whatever stakes he had in in Ethereum and walked away. But he doesn't.Here's a guy that will go on stage and wear a uniform Outfit to as a meme aspect of the space that is fun and a dreamer type of space, right?
It's and here's an individual that if you read his blog, has all these things about how he wants to use Ethereum to make us a better society, to foster a better society and that's what DAOs do, right? The premise of DAOs is that we could essentially create better societies for ourselves.
And so for me, I think if you ask me the question of who in this space do I wanna think of credit, it would be Vitalk it would be Vitalik because every time I look, I turn around, Vitalik is trying to do something right? Whether he is trying to do something good and here's individual that didn't cash out and basically continues to dream about how to make how to use blockchain, to better our society.
Humpty Calderon: That's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Tony. If you'd like to connect with Tony, you can find him on Twitter at tony Herrera and to learn more about PaisanoDAO, go to PaisanoDAO.xyz and on Twitter at PaisanoDAO. As a final note, I wanted to share that this episode is the final recording from our live events hosted on Twitter spaces.
Future episodes will include video and released on YouTube and other social channels I hope you will continue to listen and enjoy the thoughtful discussions.