Episode 2: Yalor | Metacartel - Becoming a DAO contributor and making money doing it
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Yalor Episode Information
A discussion and Q&A session with Yalor, core contributor at Meta Cartel and Raid Guild. Premieres on August 31, 2021.
Timestamps:
01:54 - Yalor’s Introduction
03:38 - Yalor Working in Barcelona - beginnings in crypto
05:49 - Founding MetaCartel
07:00 - Metagame, more metacartel beginnings
10:19 - ETH Denver - the beginnings of Raid Guild
11:23 - Meta Cartel’s Mission, Raid Guilds Mission, relationships between the two
12:25 - MetaCartel’s grant giving
15:20 - What is DAO Haus?
19:46 - How Raid Guild was built
26:54 - Finding opportunities in DAOs and communities.
Yalor - Metacartel
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.
Hi everyone. I'm your host Humpty Calderon, and today we are speaking to Yalor. He is a core contributor at Medi Cartel and Raid Guild among many other projects. With the resurgence of DAOs, people are asking me how they can join one and actively contribute to them. Yalor and I will explore his journey into crypto and how he became a core contributor at several DAOs we'll discuss what is a core contributor, the process to becoming one, and how you can do the same. So let's get started. Are you doing, man?
Yalor: What's up? Man? Feels like a big day for some reason. There's lots of things launching. Yeah, I guess it just is a really big day, so I'm stoked to be here on the show and to share whatever I might be able to help other people understand, and from my experience to you.
Humpty Calderon: Excellent. So, let's get started and really just try to get an instruction to who you are and maybe we can do this briefly. Walk us through your crypto journey, How did you get started and then how did that lead to metacartel and to Raid guild?
Yalor: All right. I was living in Seattle and I was working in like marketing or trying to work in marketing, like imagining that I could make money being an Instagram influencer, which just turned out not to be true and got connected with a good crew of people but one of my roommates was a crypto trader, like a day trader, and she was connected with someone named Griff Green, who is kind of a crypto OG. He was part of the DAO the original DAO with locket, and he came to visit. She is always this funny actually, like back in early 2017 she was always trying to pay me in crypto for things, She said Hey can I send you back that money in Ethereum? And I'm like, Eth what?? And I was like, I don't know anything about this. I actually didn't, I actually didn't, wasn't raised on computers or anything like that I wasn't really interested in that. And I, so I didn't own a computer until I was 25 years old.
Humpty Calderon: Wow.
Yalor: But she yeah it's really funny actually, cuz like now people ask me how to do things on computers and I'm like, I only just learned how to do this like a couple years ago you should be able to figure it out too. But so she was always trying to pay me in crypto and I was not interested at all until everything started to explode in like late 2017 where it was like, okay, this like stuff is becoming very interesting. So, I met Griff, we ended up living together in a house in Barcelona that he calls Hacker House and I met a whole crew of amazing people from different projects, different DAOs, and ended up working for a couple of different projects, Giveth, Dapp Node, and running some hackathons. So that was the kind of starting point for me was I am not a computer developer, I'm not a programmer, I don't even know the difference between a line of solidity and a line of JavaScript, don't get it twisted but I love people, I love connecting with people, helping people find their way and find meaningful and fulfilling experiences to them and so through working with these projects, I was able to connect with individuals, hear about what they're building, what they're up to, and help them find opportunities to collaborate with the projects. Whether that's resources getting developers, explaining the outcome of their project in a more compelling way. And that was my beginning, that was back in 2017. I mean i definitely jumped in like in the deep end where I was like, All right. I'll just move to Spain and jump into a hacker house. At that time, like I was living in Seattle for four or five years and I was looking for something new and something different so when the opportunity to surface itself, I was like, how often does that come along? Someone says, hey, you can move into our house in Spain, and I was like, I should probably do that. So, I jumped in and spent six months just deep diving and being part of so many conversations where people were using words I had no idea what the words were, but I love the energy and I was like this, the crypto stuff seems something that's not ever been done before and something that has the potential to, to impact and to change a lot of lives. Yeah. And so that was it. I was red-pilled through that process.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah.
Yalor: And just became a believer and want to really wanted to learn more and so four years later here I am, I know a lot of the big words myself, still not all of them but it's been amazing. Like community that exists around this technology is just unbelievable, They're the best people that hang out.
Humpty Calderon: You were talking about your own role and how that it is has evolved and really you're just taking your what, what's really good about you and what you know how to do, Like taking that skill set and then contributing that to these projects to see them succeed. So how did you connect with me Metacartel then?
Yalor: I found MetaCartel in well, in Hawaii actually I was living in Hawaii on the island of Kauai, taking a breather from like having a burnout, working too many different projects, traveling around the world like, like we do, and doing all this kind of stuff where I got to a point where I was like, Oh my gosh I don't really know what I'm doing, what I'm focusing on right now. And I ended up moving to Hawaii, just decompressing, getting off the grid and I heard about a, I don't know, I think I saw it on Twitter. It was a blog post from a guy named Peeth who is had this crazy idea for something called Meta Game and I thought it was interesting and so I started to communicate with this guy. I went into Discord and I was jamming. I met Peeth and meta dreamer who is the founder of metafactory, one of the founders of Metafactory and I ended up just having great conversations with these guys. I love what they were about I thought they were super interesting guys and I really appreciated just getting to spend time with them and learn from them. And so through that process because Meta Game, there's lots of metas in our ecosystem.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah I noticed that
Yalor: it's kinda funny too. It's almost an homage to meta cartel. It's people name their thing meta, but it's associated with the meta cartel. But Meta game was the project, It was mapping the member journey and the ecosystem. They were like, we can map the meta cartel ecosystem. All the projects, all the people we can build, little dashboard for the individuals. Like what are your DAO badges? All this kind of stuff. And they're still working on that right now. I think it's called my meta profiles. You can find it. So it's all linked in with Rebox. It's really neat. You can have your player status, what DAOs you're a part of, you, your skill sets and stuff like this. And that goal, I think is for them to create an ecosystem where individuals can like communicate with each other through these profiles where it's a decentralized LinkedIn of sorts.
humpty: I'm familiar with three Box and what they're doing. In fact, I've chatted with Danny Zuckerman over there. And because I on my day job and working in the space of decentralized identity too, and I'm really loving what they're doing and all of the different technology that they're developing there runs in parallel along with some of the stuff that I work with as well, so that's really interesting. The whole portable resume decentralized LinkedIn, Persistent identity, I think that's all meta and I think we'll definitely help the entire ecosystem evolve and mature into the future.
Yalor: Absolutely. Yeah. No, I think that's all part of the process. So like I met the guys that started to come to, I was invited to come to Meta Cartel Town Hall, which is how a lot of people start to get drawn into the community where it's yeah, just come to some town halls and check it out Like we don't do community calls, we just do like member town halls cuz metacartel is a permissioned DAO, not like some other DAO are not permissionless or just token-based. But you have to actually request membership shares in the DAO. And there's two ways of doing that, you can Pledge straight up, it's 10Eth or you can work your way into the DAO. And so of course I didn't have 10Eth back then, I was like broke, living on a farm, but I was like, all right, what's a way I can add value to this community? So after just kinda hanging around and like seeing Peter Pan, what kind of helpful tasks I can do, he thought it would be great for the community to do a hackathon. And I was like, oh, I've done some of these hackathons before and this is me like not knowing anything about computers or like computer development. Just can we make it a party? Can we make it like fun? And this was actually in 2019 where things were starting to like Corona Fever was starting to crop up and so everything went virtual really quickly. So we did the Dragon Quest Virtual Hackathon, which was really well received by the community, and people really loved. We got a few sponsors in there as well to coincide with us, and people just banged out some really awesome projects. It was our first virtual hackathon. The community really enjoyed it, and they, we were able to fund a bunch of the projects that came through in the submission window, which is what Meta Cartel is all about, funding the ecosystem through the grant program. But I learned and realized that oh, hackathons are actually super fun and they're pretty easy to organize. So, I went on and did hackathons for other projects. I was able to use that as a steppingstone of I can do a hackathon for you, or your project or your community and so when I went to ETH Denver in 2020, I connected with the earliest members of RAID Guild, of which I had no idea what it was, but it was being spun up, right? Very, at that very moment. And they were like, you should join the raid Guild. What am I gonna do for the RAID Guild, like developer DAO, Like I'm sure you can find something useful to do. And so, through the process of just kind of hanging around, coming to some of the calls and being part of the early planning, I was able to help a lot of individuals get into the Raid Guild and help them forumlate what the DAO is all about, what it what its mission is how we grow, how we expand, how we do our onboarding process and since then, it's grown exponentially, right? And the community itself has participated so much in making the RAID Guild what it is today. But at the end of the day, it's like Raid Guild is very DAO, it's like much less company, much less Structure. It's all led by members and it's all, they're very very flat kind of hierarchy at Raid Guild.
Humpty Calderon: So maybe this is a good time to introduce Meta Cartel and really its own mission and then Raid Guild and its mission and then how they what the relationship between the two is, if there's any at all.
Yalor: Yeah, So the way we look at it is like the Meta Cartel is the umbrella under which all these projects fall, right? There's no equity, there's no ownership, it's just like we of the Meta Cartel, which is a grant-giving DAO, basically was created by Peter Penn and Friends in 2018, 17 maybe, I don't know when it was actually founded, but it's to empower the creators and operators building Dapps so it was all about finding Dapps and different explorations and experiments inside the ecosystem. And their model is to move fast and break shit.
Humpty Calderon: Nice
Yalor: So, they're like, we give micro grants to teams that show, extraordinary potential the past and who are delivering on really like really interesting proposals so like we've funded so many different projects at different stages. They were just ideas, right? And we don't make people go through this whole burdensome grant process of review and feedback and timeline. It's let's just start with a couple of thousand dollars grants. Let's see what you can do with that, right? You have a cool mission; you have a cool idea. You have a team put together. Alright, take some money and see what you can do with that, and I think even the members of Meta Cartel, sometimes They're like betting on an individual. So, I don't know if Alex Mish the creator of TryShowtime?
Humpty Calderon: Oh yeah. He is also the person who launched the Alex Social Token.
Yalor: Yep. He's the famous Alex, everything. Anyway, so Peter Pan discovered this guy, I don't know, on TikTok or something like that, and sent him a thousand dollars grant and was like come to this conference, I think it was maybe ETH CC. But basically, just bet on this guy that he was like, you're gonna do stuff in this space. You have the right energy to be here. And of course, like he took to the meta cartel, he was a great staple of the community and then spun out and started to create his own projects and stuff like that. But like from nothing, Like he wasn't in the space before, he wasn't into crypto before, I think he was like an Instagram TikTok dance influencer. If you've ever seen him dance, if you've ever been to an event, he has like insane moves with his feet. So that's something gonna look forward to.
Humpty Calderon: I plan on hosting him at some point in the future. I've reached out to him so you know that’s coming up.
Yalor: That's. Yeah, absolutely. Ask him about his dance episodes, and if we're lucky I think he's coming to MCON, there may be a NFT dance-off happening at MCON in Denver, so this all could go down in real-time.
Humpty Calderon: So a bit of history not that anyone's asking. I used to be a break dancer in my high school years, Which was a long time ago but hey, I don't mind showing what I may still have.
Yalor: I think that's amazing. Especially if you're gonna if we're gonna get some dope NFTs tossed into the pot, who knows? There may be even like a way to tokenize the actual dance that happens at the event.
Humpty Calderon: Sweet. Great. So you were talking about in terms of how Peter Pan was incentivizing some folks and then really the overall Meta cartel strategy for delivering these grants and really betting on people to move these ideas forward and grow this ecosystem
from within. There's a large number of projects that I saw or at least that I, several of the articles that I was reading that have been either spun up or born from Meta Cartel and one personally for me, obviously Rate Guild. I do want to go into that, but one that I find interesting because I think it's just relevant right now with the explosion of DAOs is DAOHaus can you just touch on that and what that is?
Yalor: Yeah, So DAOHaus is a home for DAOs, right? Very simply. they have basically adopted; I don't know how to say it Like they have taken Moloch, the DAO Framework not the DAO, So it's always confusing It's like Bitcoin versus Bitcoin, right? Like what's the difference? But it's Moloch, Moloch the framework which is the contract of DAOs that was created by Amin Soleimani and friends to fund ETH to kind of stuff. Anyway, they've adopted that, they've made a version two, they're even getting ready to release version three and they want to make Moloch Daos the easiest and most usable DAOs in the world, and they want to create this ecosystem of individuals who actually are using DAOs to coordinate all of their efforts, whether it's their clubs, their chess clubs, their communities, their projects, or their venture firms. And so, you've seen all kinds of different DAOs that have been spun up through DAOhaus because it's one of the easiest ways to actually understand how a DAO works and they're either UX is amazing, like clicking around DAO Haus helps you see how you could use a DAO for your community or anything that you wanted to do. So DAOhaus is the home for DAOs, DAOHaus is a DAO right? They run as a DAO they're not a company like some other projects that were like, we're a company making DAOs so like we are a DAO making DAOs it's oh, that seems very fitting, right? So it's not always easy when you do that path, but you, I applaud DAOHaus and the crew, I work with them in on a bunch of. Bunch of different elements throughout the process, and I've been a, like a, I wouldn't say core contributor to DAOHaus. I'm like a core fan and I'm always like popping into the discord and I just guess I spend a lot of time with people who work on DAOHaus because DAOHaus and Raid Guild are very, there's a ton of overlap there between the members. So they are two different projects they're two different DAOs but I think that DAOHaus was first basically and they wanted to hire something like Raid Guild. So we created Raid Guild to serve as a function of helping DAO Haus become more sustainable and build a bigger community and through that process, DAOHaus and Raid Guild have become really popular and they've encountered a lot of community attention, they've done a massive token launch which was all bear launch community contribution opportunity through their platform, dog fooding all their tools and to this day, DAOHaus is the only thing I use to spin up DAOs you may DAOs know, but MCON the event is a DAO on DAO Haus
Humpty Calderon: I did read something about it, but I didn't know the relationship between DAOHaus so that's a nice piece of information and I actually, I guess I still don't know how members or participants are part of that, which I think that's a fun exercise to look into and we should get there a little later in the conversation but I think that is really interesting use, because it shows that DAOs it really is just a framework for organizing people, right? Or these, like DAOHaus a framework for organizing people, and so that is a fantastic example of how it can be just about anything, even a conference.
Yalor: DAO yeah, absolutely. For sure. Like I, you can use a DAO for literally anything.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. Really, I forget who says this, but they say it often and I either, I am getting red-pilled into believing that or there is some truth to that but really DAOs are just a collective of people with a common goal and a shared piggy bank. So, they're able to This mission forward. I guess one of the, one of the things if that is true to take away is you need to have a pretty damn clear mission of what you are trying to achieve, otherwise, you may not necessarily be all moving toward to the same direction and so if a DAO is really a collection of people, collaborating towards a common goal, if that is not a shared goal, then are you even moving at all right?
Yalor: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a very valid point.
Humpty Calderon: So actually one of the things about Raid Guild that I wanted to learn more about so if you are familiar with the BanklessDAO and how it's organized it has several guilds that comprise or make up the DAO and these guilds all operate in unique spaces with people that either finds themselves just gravitating to that idea or have skill sets and they want to contribute. And so they then behave almost independently, they have their own treasury as well where they can pay for initiatives to move that forward of course all moving in the same direction, or at least that's the goal. When I heard Raid Guild. Only because I'm familiar with how the BanklessDAO is set up, I thought, oh, that is a guild within the MetaCartel that then through its own, efforts and pop game popularity and almost became a unique entity while still connected to Meta cartel. can operate as this independent entity that now has visibility through its own branding and social media. Is that, am I close there or it worked the other way around where raid guilt was in this independent thing that more closely identified with metacartel and then through that kind of synergy became almost more closely aligned and associated to the cartel, to the DAOs Excuse me.
Yalor: I think it's the latter if I'm understanding what your perception correctly. The MetaCartel was like the members of the MetaCartel saw this opportunity to create something, like a decentralized dev agency, and they were actually working, I think three of the members, Deacon then and Sam were already working on something called Odyssey Automatation and that's still a company based in Colorado, I think where they were doing dev work for different projects and they were like, What if we could do this as a DAO? And people were like getting excited and this was like, actually, I think early DAO days, right? Where it's what can we actually do with DAOs yet? So, they were like, what if we coordinated as a DAO and I think it was honestly the branding of Raid guild that was like super interesting, this black and red with slang bolic all about the theme that people got excited about, it's very dark, it's got a lot of that energy of D and D, like game playing, role playing, like all the roles inside, and the group. But those people, the ones that kind of thought it would be really cool to build this and play with it. So, it started as an idea and then it crystallized at ETH Denver in 2020 with most of many of the metacartel members there. And then it just spun on from there. But I don't, I'm trying to think. Raid Guild actually never even needed a grant from MetaCartel So like we didn't, they office, obviously Meta Cartel is like, Things Raid Guild involved with, but it was more like can Raid Guild? Does it have the blessing of meta cartel to go forth and to be, to exist on its own and has started to stand in its own two legs? Because Raid Guild is its own thing, It has its own members, it has its own process, has its own literal DAO so all of those kinds of things are Separate from MetaCartel specifically. Like you don't even, you don't have to know any, There's a lot of people in Raid Guild that know nothing about MetaCartel. Just like to tell you that, which I always think is interesting. Oh yeah, It's funny. Like people don't actually know about MetaCartel.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. Which goes to reinforce that idea that, they operate as separate entities, so there may be some alignment there that brings them together from time to time to coordinate on efforts that considered to be important and that they can add value to.
Yalor: Yeah, absolutely. And that's the key is like this intergroup coordination, right? Where, because MetaCartel has I don't know, 50, 75 ecosystem projects. And like the goal for us is it's actually this like slogan that is everywhere on our website. It's if you want to go far, go alone. If you want to go fast, go together and so we are like all about going together, right? Yeah. We want to collaborate, we want to cooperate, we wanna grow, we wanna bounce ideas back and forth and we're not here to own anything, right? Or to take pieces of things.
We're here to empower the ecosystem to support the builders and to see where they can go with it. And all we do is basically adopt these projects into the ecosystem and people are like what does that mean? And it's it's just like becoming part of a brotherhood of creators.
Sisterhood, brotherhood, you just join the community and once you start to jam with us and you start to hear the ideas and see the support, from being a part of the community, you're just sold. You're like, Wow, like this is the most like supportive, interesting, like helpful group of individuals I could possibly find, and that's why the membership of Meta Cartel is like highly respected. We have so many creative and like really dedicated people who just show up, and to know not cuz they're making a ton of money by doing it, but because they wanna see these things exist and they wanna help other projects so we actually, I just got off the MetaCartel town hall this morning and it's like the new members who are joining are now trying to champion people who are still trying to join. So it's if you just joined, like you're gonna help someone else through this process, get into the funnel, get a grant or something like that. So, paying it forward or paying it back, in that sense which that spirit, that ethos aligns personally with my values and the rest of the community's values as well.
Humpty Calderon: So I think you're bridging over to that next step of this conversation, which it really is about individual contribution. What is the role of people that are already part of the DAO and how can they support the growth of that ecosystem? How can they educate your members? Let's identify the two personas here. There's the one persona who has just arrived into the ecosystem. They heard about it somewhere, They heard about Bitcoin, somewhere they heard about NFTs somewhere they've heard about Ethereum, Defi, whatever, wherever the reason they're here and now they want to not just hold a token, but they actually want to contribute to moving a project forward. Then there's the other persona, the persona that's been around for some time, the Peter Pan, the Yalors of the world who have navigated their way through their crypto journey and have gained valuable lessons along the way and are now here in a position to be able to help those that are coming in. Let's talk about the Yalors of the world. What is the role of those people who have been around for some time not just in terms of what they contribute to the project, but how can they contribute, or do they even is there any role for them? Should they be expected to help move this project along also through its community development?
Yalor: Great. Great question. I think that our responsibility as, I don't know, leaders or I hate the word thought leader, but like influential people in this space is to help guide people along the way through the process, to find their way into something that's meaningful to them, to find their way into a place and to expose the opportunities that would that seem like a good fit. So like for me it's always, how can I help you do what you want to do? And then sussing that out what is interesting to you? What do you wanna work on? What are your ideas? And for a lot of people, they're still at such an early phase that it's like they will benefit from just connecting with a community, hearing the ideas that other people come up with, and then being part of a project. So that's why RAID Guild I think is so great because Raid Guild gives people who can you come from any realm, you can have been an Ethereum og, or launched your own project, or you have no clue about anything and just be like, Oh, I really like this style of working right? And you can find a way to add value to a project that's ongoing. We have a ton of client projects, but we also have a ton of internal projects that we work on, We call 'em rips, Radial Improvement Proposals. And so you can work on those things autonomously or with a team and by working with a group on a raid, you will learn the DAO way, right?
You will learn how we cooperate, how we coordinate, and how to actually like, how to communicate better with people because DAOs are this space where if you don't, if you're not really good with your communication, things can fall apart really fast. So it's like communicating really clearly and having people understand like what their roles are throughout the process Is key and it improves your skills as an individual. Like even in your life, like I've learned to become a better communicator at home because I communicate with people at work all the time. I'm learning these processes and this way of like, all right, I'm gonna slow down, right? I'm gonna be patient, I'm gonna listen, understand, like all this kind of stuff that I think is really useful and helpful. You learn through this process. So to circle all the way back to what you were saying is it's our responsibility to pay it back, right? For those of us who have made it into the DAO ecosystem and really understand this stuff to keep. Helping individuals get on board, right? To help people find their way into whatever community, right?
Like you, you may have a great idea for a project, but I always say start with a community, right? , don't give me a pitch of what you're gonna build. Tell me why you, why the people are gonna care about this, and how you're gonna rally the community around this idea and then everything can spin from there basically.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, that's good. I like the idea of that kind of accountability, right? Because I think crypto is all about accountability, starting from the fact that you need to be accountable for the security of your assets, Understanding how digital wallets work, all the way down to being accountable for the maturity of this ecosystem and and helping promote that adoption and that goes down to being a part of that education, being a part of that community engagement, setting the rails for that type of engagement. So yeah, I think that's really wonderful and thank you for sharing that. Now on, on the other side, someone new coming in, you talked, touched on it a little bit in terms of again, I think it just goes back to that accountability. It's yeah, there may be some good documentation available, there may be a ton of videos out there on YouTube or on podcasts on Spotify on the subject but it is such a vast universe of technology of different projects and what they're seeking to do that maybe that first step that you need to take is just to becoming an active member of that community and listen, participate, and then contributing, right? Identify what makes you unique and valuable, and the things that speak to you,
Yalor: absolutely. Yeah. Just showing up accounts for a lot, showing up, hearing about what other people are interested in, participating in discussions like, that's why I think community calls are really great, starting point where people can find out about one another. They can find out about what things people are interested in, and then they can form like little friendships, working groups, all this stuff from there. But it starts with show up and ask how you can add value to this community. Not how you can like extract value, which I think is kind of an old way of thinking about things and a lot of people who come in looking for a job find that there's nothing for them. But if you come in with an open mind and you're like, Oh, this is a community, like this is something different. What's been done before our project had worked out before, and looking at that, taking it into consideration, you'll see that you'll find it a lot more collaborators by looking at it as a friendship situation, some way that you can connect with people.
Humpty Calderon: That's it. I hope you took away some of the examples that Yalor shared to becoming a core contributor in DAOs and learned about the MetaCartel ecosystem. If you want to learn more about MetaCartel, please go to MetaCartel.org or on Twitter at meta underscore cartel. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens, and if you enjoyed this discussion, please give us a follow, like, and a five-star review wherever you enjoyed your podcast and stay tuned for our next discussion.