Episode 14: Frogmonkee | Bankless DAO - From Zero to Bankless
A discussion and Q&A session with Frogmonkee, core contributor at Bankless DAO. Recorded on November 16, 2021.
Time Stamps
1:16 - 3:52 - Frogmonkee Introduction
3:52 - 7:51 - Early Days of BanklessDAO
7:51 - 11:46 - Some thoughts on the BanklessDAO Mission
11:46 - 13:52 - An Explanation of what BanklessDAO is
13:52 - 19:54 - Scaling out in Bankless DAO, Projects that spun out of Bankless DAO
19:54 - 23:08 - Clearly Defining the Mission of BanklessDAO
23:08 - 25:04 - Bankless DAO Governance, what it is vs. what it could be
25:04 - 30:21 - Biggest Challenges Facing Bankless DAO from frog’s perspective
30:21 - End - What the future Holds for Bankless DAO
Transcriptions
frogmonkee
Humpty Calderon: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts slight 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.
Cryptos Sapiens is presented in partnership with Bankless DAO, a movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the financial system. Bankless DAO will help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Hi everyone. I'm your host, Humpty Calderon and today we are talking to Frogmonkee, a core contributor at Bankless DAO. We start our discussion with a brief look back at the genesis of the DAO, and then explore how the mission of the DAO has led to wonderful experimentation that has facilitated tremendous growth over the past few months.
We wrapped a conversation by observing both challenges and opportunities on the horizon for DAOs and how BanklessDAO is preparing to deal with them. Let's get started.
frogmonkee: A little bit about myself. I am pseudonymous and so some of my backstory will be obfuscated. But I learned about crypto for the first time in 2016.
I started reading up about Bitcoin, didn't know that Ethereum was a thing. I got to the point where I was just having so much fun thinking about what a peer to peer money technology could look like that. I started like invented auger in my mind, that was like the first use case that kinda came to me.
And I used to have just diagrams and paper just pinned up on my wall and I would just think about this stuff nonstop, but I was in college at the time, Life got in the way dropped off my radar up until late 2017 before the ICO bull market. And I had a friend who was doing some sort of freelance work in the crypto space over the summer and was disillusioned with school and wanted to turn his sort of part-time gig into a full-time company. I had already had a job lined up in college, another one of my friends was a high school dropout and he was running a company. And so we put our heads together and I thought it would be like a pretty fun sort of thought experiment for or like a fun way to pass the time while I finished up college and then the money started rolling in and I got really invested into the space and got pulled down the rabbit hole and I made this decision to, okay, I'm gonna not accept this job and I'm just going to fully dive down the crypto rabbit hole. we did, so I did that for about a year and a half first time running a company, I was the oldest person on the team at 21, 22. We made a lot of mistakes and about a year and a half in, we had to shut the company. I just got burned out from crypto, It got burned out from being in the space. I ended up heading over to a Bay Area SaaS company for about a year and a half. I worked there as a writer but as with most things in cryptos, once you get into this space, it's really hard to get out.
And so about a year and a half into this company, I just got bored of the work that I was doing, even though it was like super technical and super interesting and on the cutting edge of cloud technology. It wasn't the same as crypto. And so I was basically getting up or gearing up to quit my job and just do some freelance technical writing for projects like Uniswap and parody and hardhat. But just around, when I was about to make that switch, BanklessDAO launched and I spent about a week in the Discord and just the amount of enthusiasm, energy that was a signal for me. I spent a week in the Discord, and May 11th a week after Bankless launched, I basically just quit my job. I was like, Hey, my boss knew that this was coming down the road. I took a leap of faith and my life has really not been the same since.
humpty: That's incredible. Thank you for sharing all that. I think it gives us a good framing both to, how people can look at work differently, whether they're heading into college or just graduating college and making decisions that maybe weren't available to them before and work that's more fulfilling to because it's either more closely aligned to what they're interested in or more challenging. It sounds like you took on a little bit of all of this both in starting your new business and in diving into the crypto rabbit hole. So you mentioned Being early. So May is definitely early In terms of Bankless DAO, what did the DAO look like back then, because it may not seem like a long time ago, but even for myself coming in, I believe late June, I feel like I missed out on a lot of what was going on early here on Discord and in terms of the way that the DAO was getting built out. So can you give us maybe a peek into the past, a history lesson about what was going on in the DAO in the early days.
frogmonkee: Yeah, definitely. And again, this is just my perspective back in May, but I'd say the number one thing that stood out to me was the energy, the enthusiasm, and the really blue sky thinking. Now looks very different than what it did six months ago.
We have a lot more infrastructure in place. We have processes and procedures and governance frameworks and coordination units. We have projects and guilds and committees and, all this stuff didn't exist, and it was just a bunch of people that aligned with the Bankless mission.
And were enthusiastic about being a part of the DAO, some were part of their first DAO or many were part of their first DAO. Others had been on the periphery. and even fewer had actually been involved with DAOs. So this was like just a grand experiment for coordinating this sort of digital organisations build around tokens and blockchain.
And those first few weeks, those first sort of month and a half was just a lot of fun. It didn't feel like we were working, It felt like we were trying to build something new and innovative. We had a lot of important discussions around how are we going to coordinate, How are we going to organize, how are we going to govern ourselves, what are our priorities, what is our mission and vision, what do we align around and asking those sort of like fundamental questions and foundational questions, which is really exciting because we knew that we were going to build on top of those answers and we were going to build something big.
And so I think there was just a lot of excitement, enthusiasm and aligned movement towards what we all thought and wanted Bankless DAO to turn into. We definitely see the results of that in what BanklessDAO looks like now, The fact that we have guilds the fact that we have a grants committee, that we have this sort of proposal framework, the fact that we try to align around education, media, and culture as a way to spread the Bankless message. All of that happened in just the first month and a half. I'd say summing up my answer here the energy and enthusiasm was just off the charts. Those of us who were present in those early weeks, I think we've moved past the honeymoon stage and realized that, in those weeks, we've truly built something that has legitimacy and that has wheels. And now we're in this sort of building phase, we've figured out our foundational building blocks.
How do we maintain those building blocks and how do we grow on top of them? And I think that's where we are now.
humpty: Thank you. That is incredible. And thanks so much for the history lesson. I took away three words from your description there. The first one is mission, the other one is experimentation, and the third one is fun. And I think a lot of times, at least in my personal experience, there is a lot of fun because people are really playing with ideas and seeing really what works. They're maybe collaborating in this way for the very first time. They're trying to build something that is maybe innovative, but doesn't have to be. But they're experimenting also with how things could work differently. But the one thing that seen not be necessarily emphasized early, which I think is hugely important for the reasons that you described too, is developing a mission. And I think personally, the reason why I believe that, and the reason why I think that's just generally true is if you don't have a clear mission, people don't necessarily know what you're about and they don't know if that's necessarily something that aligns with them. But when you have a very clear values and missions to drive the organization, I think it could help with organizing people and really working towards common goals.
So can you describe that moment when those discussions were happening to create that mission and was there an inspiration from somewhere else to inform that mission?
frogmonkee: Let me talk about why missions are so powerful in the web 3 ecosystem and how they differ for missions in sort of the web 2 traditional sort of off chain companies. So there's two things here.
One is in web 3, your core coordination unit is a community, These projects, Banless DAO, Uniswap, Synthetix like PleaserDAO. They're all built around communities and these communities, they're not companies, they're not jobs, they don't have like traditional sort of hiring pipelines and consistently staffed and paid positions. So in order to grow your community, you need to have people that are there for the right reasons. And if you don't have that, then your community is just destined to fail because you won't be moving towards a shared vision and that's why having your mission and vision in place has to be your North Star because if people don't like that, they have no incentive too, they don't have a salary position with benefits, with time off, that type of incentive is rare in the doubt ecosystem. And and that's why it's so incredibly important to make sure you have a clear mission and vision and attract and retain the people that align with those things.
As for where we got our mission and vision from, I think a lot of that was helped by the fact that, Bankless DAO was a spinoff of Bankless HQ and they've been very cognisant and have placed a lot of emphasis around shared values. It's very easy to have this discussion of, here are what we think the shared values having, like being Bankless subscribers, what does our mission and vision look like when we talk about their shared values. And so we basically just borrowed heavily from our perception of Bankless HQ , the podcast and the newsletter and that's what we built our mission and vision around.
humpty: That's good, so let's pretend I'm new and I don't know what Bankless DAO is. What is the relationship or what was the relationship initially between Bankless HQ and then spinning up of Bankless DAO.
frogmonkee: Yeah, that’s great question, to clarify, Bankless HQ, Bankless LC, whatever you want to call it, that is the newsletter in podcast that is run by Ron Ryan, Sean Adams and David Hoffman.
Bankless DAO is the steward of the Bankless brand, is how I like to view it. We as a DAO sort of encompass Bankless HQ, but they just exist as a node within our ecosystem. Granted, they are a very large node that has a lot of influence and a lot of sway. But they are still like under the umbrella of Bankless DAO and they operate independently. They run their own shop. Over time, they've been plugging into the DAO more and more. But one of the things that they were very cognisant of when they launched the DAO is that, we as the founders of BanklessHQ definitely have a lot of influence in the types of decisions that the DAO will make and so they made a very conscious effort to step back and say, Hey, we're not gonna be involved with this, we started this thing, we've built this brand, we've built this community. Now we want you to decide where it goes next and so they started the DAO and they just back off and did their own thing.
They continued with the newsletter, they continued with the podcasts and they let us thrive and grow without much direction or leadership, which I think was the right way to do it because that is true decentralization, and they are very much sort of decentralization max. They didn't try to influence the way the DAO was going to grow, they let us build ourselves up to where we are now and the ultimate goal is we want to be bigger than Bankless HQ. We want our media network, our ecosystem our suite of products and services and tools and all the things that we've been building to dwarf Bankless HQ. And I don't think that's out of the question.
humpty: I think that's interesting for several reasons. The first thing I'll talk about is in terms of growing and scaling, there's definitely a lot more opportunities if you choose to do it as a DAO. The reason for it is, people want to participate, they wanna contribute to something that is bigger than themselves, something that's going to make an impact and going back to something you mentioned just moments ago, there's a brand that already existed, the Bankless brand, and there's a lot of weight to that brand based on the number of either projects or, like podcasts and newsletters and blogs that have been produced and distributed over x amount of years, however many years. But people associate, education, learning in terms of Bitcoin and Ethereum and Defi to bankless, like a lot of people's like first foray into, learning about this ecosystem, it's probably through them. So it's interesting that, they chose to I guess bring that weight, that value to the DAO, but then allow the DAO to roll along and develop systems and processes on their own in a decentralized way. But going back to my point in terms of some of the things that you can gain by extending that brand as a DAO is the ability to grow and scale, but probably more importantly is the ability to diversify the perspectives Because I think, If you have a small team, let's assume that it's only Ryan, Sean Adams and David Hoffman that are directing the vision of that project. That's a pretty narrow perspective. Regardless of their world experience, there's only so much of it that can inform the project. But as a DAO you have a global community that can impact the way that we choose to educate people. So that's one of the things that's most interesting to me, and I do see that here in the DAO I should clarify here at the Bankless DAO, in terms of the type of contributions or contributors more specifically and the diversity of the projects that people are taking on. So can you talk maybe informed by about some of the cool projects that are being developed within the DAO today.
frogmonkee: Yeah, definitely. I will try to highlight projects that I think stretch the idea of what Bankless really is into like varying directions because there are a lot of cool projects but just going back to what you were talking about, like diversity of thought. I want to sort of hone in on projects that I think stretch our conception of what it means to truly be bankless. The one that sort of immediately comes to mind is DAO Punks. DAO Punks is an NFT project started by crypto Bushi, from my understanding, he didn't intend to create this like DAO punk series or NFT community. He was just an artist whose art resonated with people within the DAO and he eventually built a sort of following and community within the DAO to the point where he wanted to take that enthusiasm and turn it into a very dedicated NFT community. What he focused on was this idea of going from a corporate rat to DAO Punk, that's the framing. It's like going from your traditional off chain, 9 to 5 boring life sucking unenthusiastic world to transitioning into this sort of beautiful world of DAOs where it's owned by the people, there's a healthy culture, healthy community where you truly feel empowered to do the best work by your peers and not by leaders, your bosses. And that resonated with so many people to the point where now it exists as its own project, It has its own community. Many of those members receded by BanklessDAO, but many of them aren't. I think that's one project that and just to show the success of that is they did a they did a NFT sale of 1,111 DAO Punks and they is a whitelist and a public list and it sold out on the presale. Just kinda goes to show like how enthusiastic people were about that message and that's also reflected in the way that they want to grow their community. They like are not just taking the proceeds of that and distributing it to the artist but they're taking a large chunk of that and using it to fund a treasury where they can do this, a grant program, but the idea is subsidize people to go from this corporate off chain world into the world of DAOs.
So I think that is like a really strong example of people carving out their own specific vision of what it means to go bankless and building these sort of sub-communities around it and galvanizing activity. The other project that comes to mind is international media nodes, one thing that I think all of us are fairly aware of is that the crypto community is fairly sort of US centric and more broadly than that, it's very western, and so this whole like international media node project is let's take the content and the teachings and the lessons and the values of bankless and let's build, let's seed our own community in India, in China, in Brazil, in Iceland or wherever, and try to build our own sort of regional geographic communities. And that's not a novel idea, but it's really hard to do when you don't have a community backing you, If you're just as one person that is I'm going to translate all this stuff and I try to start my own community, that is really hard to do unless you have a broader community that you can plug into for resources, for labor, for funding, for support. And so really excited to see that take off. So those are sort like two. Do you want me to keep going on?
humpty: No I don't think you necessarily need to talk about all of them. I think really just to paint a picture in terms of like how we are engaging the community to participate and to contribute into this ecosystem really informed by a diverse perspective and I think you, you really pointed out to interesting projects there, and I think both of them actually are talking about similar things, and that is culture. So maybe we can explore that a little bit in terms of culture as I guess as part of the mission of Bankless DAO and how some of these projects, like the ones you've mentioned with DAO punks trying to go help people go from corporate rats to DAO punks, and that being an element of culture in terms of bringing or sharing the perspective of peoples across the world into what did it means to be bankless, let's define more clearly the mission of Bankless DAO and then explore culture in the DAO.
frogmonkee: Yeah, definitely. I think in order to understand culture, you need to understand the mission and the vision, The mission of Bankless DAO is to help the world go bankless by creating user friendly, onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture. That is our mission. Or I read that off a page unless in case it wasn't obvious. Our vision for what it means to be bankless is to live in a world where anyone with an internet connection has access to the financial tools they need to achieve financial independence. That is fairly boost and flexible, It's not a clear definition of this is exactly what it means to go bankless, What is financial independence mean? What are financial tools or NFTs financial tools? Maybe, maybe not, but that's the beauty of having a loosely defined north star is that you will eventually have people break up into these smaller sub-communities or how they interpret that mission and vision and what Bankless India looks might be different than what Bankless France looks like. And that's fine because we still have a somewhat organized North Star for the mission vision, but how that breaks down into either regional communities or sub-communities around NFTs, sub-communities, around DeFi sub-communities, around DAOs.
That's totally fine. And I think that informs culture as well, because we have this strong, unifying culture of wanting to help people go bankless. But again, as that breaks down into separate communities or these separate subsections that will create their own type of unique culture and I think we as a DAO have done our best to create a very sort of inclusive and friendly, and opening and helpful rising tide lifts all boats culture. But how that breaks down into individual guild culture or within projects that's flexible and that will grow and change with time.
humpty: So I wonder based on just that last bit that you shared, in terms of, being flexible and, in terms of I guess the framework or the direction that you provide to the DAO in general and then to the guilds and so on and so forth, as you start diving deeper into the architecture of the DAO, what are your thoughts in terms of like flexibility and rigidity in terms of these north stars, but also maybe in terms of governance within DAOs, how does it need to be rigid, does it need to be flexible? Like from your experience, have you found that there are places where that one works better than the other? Or are we too early to be too rigid in terms of how we support or develop these projects?
frogmonkee: I don't think we're too early because we're talking about like governing structures, and it's not like DAOs are new governing structures. It's not the concept of governance has not existed. And so if we take a look at previous instantiations of governance, what you want is a combination of rigidity and flexibility. You want to embed values in a rigid way, but the way those values manifest locally should be flexible. For example, let's take the way that the sort of United States government is organized, there's rigidity in the sense that we have very clear balanced powers. We have a judicial branch, we have an executive branch, and we have a legislative branch, and there's rigidity there because all of those branches keep each other in check, They have very defined powers over who can really do what but if you look within those organizations, there's quite a bit of flexibility around what is the current priority of those individual branches. So right now, we have a very fairly conservative judicial branch because our Supreme Court is staffed by people on the conservative the spectrum. And the sort of culture and values is flexible within that organization, but they are part of a larger organization that has a more rigid structure. It's not a great answer, but I think the answer is both. You need to have rigidity and flexibility. It's just that you need to embed rigidity into the processes, but I think you could have flexibility in the execution.
humpty: I guess looking at a more broader perspective, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges going on now with DAOs? and do you see some emerging tools or thought processes for solving some of those challenges?
frogmonkee: We are definitely early in the sort of like DAO phenomenon, I think if you take a look at broad use cases for crypto. You have defi as definitely the most evolved, NFTs they had their moment in the spotlight earlier this year. And we're seeing sort of evolution along the NFT space and I think DAOs are sitting there at the bottom not really explored, but we're starting to see something sort of bubble underneath the surface. And so some of the core problems we are noticing are, one is that tooling is very sort of immature, There's not a lot of like automation around what DAOs specifically need to accomplish.
And a lot of that stuff still happens at the social level, By social level, I mean decisions and payments and governance still happens through sort of conversation and individual people enacting the will of the DAO. We're starting to see some tools built around making that stuff automated so some of the things that come to mind are Orca Protocol, DAOHaus, we're definitely seeing a an a minor explosion around DAO tooling because there's a need for that. The other aspect so there's two more things that kind of come to mind, One is compensation. I think that is one of the most challenging questions in DAOs because in a traditional organization, your compensation is very clear, You get paid a salary you have your roles and responsibilities, and some weeks, it's busier, some weeks, it's less. You have your benefits and you go and do your job, and then that's, you have this steady stream of income.
But that is a very small minority of DAO contributors that have that steady of an income. And the reason is because like DAOs are open to all, some DAOs have some type of barriers. They might be like token gated, but DAOs are trying to capture the enthusiasm and activity of an entire community, so you need to have varying stratified layers of how people can get remunerated for the work that they're putting in based on the amount of effort, time they're able to commit. DAOs is kinda breakdown into two different categories.
One is compensation valuation, which is how do we actually value the work, for example do we have a base salary? Or like a base like hourly rate that we pay people. Do we modify that based on levels of expertise? Do we modify that based on location, So someone in India get paid the same as someone in New York City.
And so that's like the valuation part and the other part is compensation distribution, and I think here, there's a lot more innovation than interesting stuff happening of how do we actually get those tokens, get that value out to the contributors, so in the traditional model, it's very top down. It's like your boss says, here's your salary. They might say, Here's your bonus for the year. But that type of stuff doesn't really work in a decentralized organization because that hierarchy doesn't really exist, we're seeing like sort of these peer to peer ways of distributing value whether that's something like coordinape or, I've been parts of certain circles where we have a pool of capital and we all decide amongst ourselves how do we wanna split that up, and basically like we're setting our own compensation, which is really like abnormal if you haven't really been part of the web3 ecosystem and the final category, I think is like one of the bigger problems is like onboarding, how do you capture people's attention and retain their attention and plug them into the right places where they can provide the most amount of value and more importantly that, how do you communicate the shared set of values and the shared story of all the people in the DAO because one of the things that you'll inevitably have come across is as your do grows and scales, the people that are coming in are missing a lot of context that has shaped the DAO to what it is today. So trying to communicate that shared story, that shared secret, if you want to call it I think is like an incredibly important primitive that I think DAOs are not struggling, but definitely need to pay closer attention to.
humpty: Yeah. I think to that last point, I think having strong mission to guide the DAO anybody who's joining it based on any type of alignment speaks or brings a lot of value to that in terms of anybody new to that point who's coming in and is missing that context i think.
If you have a very clear mission, which missions don't change often, so they should be able to at least, I believe, get a good sense of what the DAO stands for and the work that they're trying to accomplish. But I agree, I think that there's a few things that are missing in terms of like how we can best activate people who are interested and take them from just maybe a spectator role to a contributor role. And then to a core contributor role, which I think is what a lot of people would like to do, is to have an impact in that organization that continues to grow over time based on their contributions and their reputation.
And I think this speaks to something that you tweeted about recently, I believe it was a retweet of someone else's post in terms of took it weight versus reputation and how we can better leverage people's participation as part of that voice and governance of DAOs. My last question is, what does the future hold for bankless DAO?
frogmonkee: That's a good question. I think a lot of people have their own version and vision of what Bankless style looks like. Some will say that Bankless DAO looks like a media empire, or a media DAO where our core competency is using media as a way to educate people and onboard people into. Some people may say that bankless DAO is a social DAO, it's a place where you can come to learn and hang out and be a part of a community that has a shared enthusiasm around crypto. I think bankless DAO is the future of work, which encompasses, in my opinion both of those definitions and scope of Bankless DAO and more.
I really think that the funnel of Bankless HQ as an incredible newsletter and podcast that just continues to grow at a mind blowing rate, will funnel talent into the Bankless DAO and what excites me the most is how can we capture that talent and create avenues for people to slowly either quit their job or reduce commitment so that they can work within this DAO and have a steady flow of income. So I think that's why one of the things that personally I've been focusing on and this is an evolving discussion, is I think we should focus on projects that bring in revenue because after you achieve a certain degree of growth, then those projects can sustain themselves to the point where they can manage their own treasury and they can grow their own team and they can hire people full time if they need to or they can invest into new ideas and new projects and manage their sort of local their local scope of work and having more instances of that and having a diversity of like interesting projects that people can plug into will allow people to that join the DAO to find their own niche. And so I don't know if that really like answers your question, but I really see Bankless DAO as the future of work where you set your own hours, you work at the pace that you want to, you can choose projects you want to participate in.
Once you complete one assignment, you can move to another, you can take time off. It's global, right? So it's not restricted to just one location or another. I think it would be great, you can find a way to provide benefits or have a sort of shared compensation like strategy.
But it's gonna take a lot of work to get there and I think we're still at a point where we have a lot of growing pains and we have a lot of essential coordination failures. But once we get out of this sort of phase of growth, I think there's really no stopping BanklessDAO for what I can do. We just need to build the right rails to enable people to join the DAO plug into the right place and feel comfortable making that leap into crypto.
humpty: And that's, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you'd like to learn more about Bankless DAO, please go to bankless.community and on Twitter @banklessDAO.
Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. Please give us a follow like and a five star review wherever you enjoy your podcast. And stay tuned for our next discussion.