Episode 36: Spencer Graham | DAO Haus - DAO Tooling as a DAO
Newsletter Copy?
Status
DAOHaus
Timestamps
00:00 - 00:44 - Intro
00:44 - 01:51 - Guest Introduction
01:51 - 03:30 - Spencer Graham’s Journey into web3
03:30 - 05:33 - What was Eth Denver to you?
05:33 - 10:57 - The importance of local Crypto Events12:14 - 15:26 - Spencer’s experience from KB zero
15:26 - 20:01 - DAOHaus
20:01 - 25:17 - What is Moloch
25:56 - 29:08 - How shares work
29:40 - 36:13 - How tokens are used as Incentives and shares in a DAO
41:21 - 44:17 - Who inspires you?
44:17 - 45:18 - conclusion
45:18 - 44:17 - Outro
TRANSCRIPT
Humpty Calderon: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative web3 builders to help you learn about decentralised 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 decentralised financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Gm everyone and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens. Today we are talking with Spencer Graham, AKA Spengrah. He is an early builder of DAOHaus, the no code platform for creating and managing a DAO.
We kick off our conversation with him sharing his crypto journey, starting in late 2016, ramping up in 2017, and in 2018, cohosting the Chicago Ethereum meetup. In 2020, he attended Eth Denver, which as he says was an inflection point in his career, leading him to join Raid Guild. He describes joining DAOHaus or pokemol, short for pocket Moloch as it was called at the time, a mobile first Moloch DAO app that provided a no code way for people to discover and create proposals, view treasuries, and summon a DAO.
Eventually, a handful of people, including himself, developed the app into DAOHaus V2, which is the app we can all use today. We continue our chat by reviewing the DAOHaus platform and the many features that provide a rich and nuanced experience for DAO operators and members. There's a lot to unpack in this episode, so without further ado, let's get started.
Spencer Graham: So, I got involved originally in Web3 stuff. I guess there's a couple different phases, sort of phase one was kind of like a hobby, consume everything around me, get really, really excited about all the stuff, but not yet do anything about it. And that phase started maybe in 20, probably late 2016, and then throughout 2017 it was sort of a big ramp up in that where more and more of my free time I was spending, reading and consuming and learning and getting excited and enthusiastic. But it was really shortly after that in maybe 2018, where I started to attend and then host or be one of the co-hosts of a meetup here in Chicago- the Chicago Ethereum meetup ,where I started putting some of those things that I'd been super enthusiastic for or about, into practice a little bit. And then I continued to ramp up. And then 2020 Eth-Denver was actually a big inflection point for me where I actually started to build things and get involved in a few projects and then that led me through a couple different forks in the Road to Raid Guild, which is the first DAO I ever joined. And I can talk about that experience and how it was sort of eye opening for me. But that really put me on the path towards focusing pretty much all my energies now on DAOs. So I came from this like kind of tech product management sort of place. And end-up quitting my day job in that area in fall of 2020 because I was so excited about DAOs and there's so much opportunity to work on DAO stuff in particular. At that time it was starting to work more and more on DAOHaus.
Humptycalderon:Yeah, I'd be curious to hear about your personal experience at Eth-Denver 2020 and your decision to join Raid Guild as your first DAO because here on Crypto Sapiens, we've hosted a few folks who have said something similar that Eth-Denver 2020 was a pivotal event for them in their crypto journey, where they went from maybe being crypto curious to taking the dive into a deep dive into the space of Web3 and generally, into DAOs. So what was Eth-Denver 2020 to you, and what was it that you took away from that event that was that crucial push that you needed to explore the space a little bit further?
Spencer Graham:Yeah, it's hard to even pick apart what happened at Eth-Denver 2020 but I guess I can just sort of describe my experience there. I went there basically knowing only a few people, mostly people from, that I had met in Chicago as part of that Ethereum meetup that I had been going to for a while. And I'd started hosting a little bit before.
So I knew a few people and I had like been introduced to like a couple other people that I had not met in person. But out of the, like several thousand or 5,000 or whatever it was of people that were at Eth- Denver 2020, I only knew a handful. But there was something about the energy in that building, in the sports castle, up and down the spiral of people hacking that was just like incredibly motivating and like fulfilling to be a part of. And I remember feeling like I was like finally doing it, like this thing that I've been sort of observing and participating a little bit as a, like, as a hobbyist, as like talking about it. I remember having this feeling of, Oh, I'm finally doing this, I'm finally part of a team that's building something. And that was an incredibly cool feeling. And I don't think, I don't think at that point after that it was possible for me to not continue doing that, even even more.
Humpty Calderon: You know, I find it interesting that there were these in-person events that, at least to me it sounds like were very influential to your journey Starting with the Eth meetups in Chicago and then leading to Eth Denver in 2020. I personally really vibe with this because meetups, to me were instrumental to taking that next step in my own personal crypto journey. So, while I kind of came into this space purely as a speculator in 2016, seeing Bitcoin as a new you know asset class, it wasn't until I started attending my local meetups that I began to understand the impact of, you know, cryptocurrencies and what eventually became Web3 and my the role that I could potentially play in it. I think that there's something really important about these types of events and the people that you meet there. Would you agree?
Spencer Graham: Yeah, a 100% There's, at least currently, there is still no replacement for in person stuff or IRL for the high dimensionality of an in person conversation or encounter or hang out. And, also the serendipity of being able to just kind of run into people that might have shared interest with you based on some random thing that you could never predict or some random thing that you see on somebody's hat or a sweatshirt or whatever. Maybe we'll get there at some point in the metaverse. Actually, I'm kind of hopeful that we can, but as of right now, there's nothing that replaces the breadth and the richness of in person, of IRL. So I think it's, no accident, it's no surprise that so much of the energy in this space comes from or sort of shortly after people make connections in the real world.
Humpty Calderon: I agree with you, and I think that Eth-Denver has been pivotal in kind of helping people change the way they think about this space. I found it very interesting being, first of all that this was my first Eth Denver in 2022. That a, I mean, obviously a lot has changed the number of people just generally that have, that attended the event. It sounds like there was an explosion in interest, in attendance to the event, but I think the programming was, you know, really comprehensive. I really appreciated that the effort that went into developing that event. Also bringing in so many different contributors to the space, you know in terms of the different I think it was a second and third floor, all the booths. If you wanted to learn about like, the different builders that were building, maybe you didn't hear some of them speak but then you were able to connect with them and kind of learn about their products. I thought that was all, you know, really interesting and super motivating. It was also interesting to kind of hear the types of people that attended this event and maybe surprised a little bit at the level of expertise or maybe lack of expertise in the people that were attendance, which I think goes to further the point that this probably was going to be something that was going to influence them to take that leap and become a more active contributor in the space beyond just maybe speculating on what a DAO is or maybe buying and selling NFTs.
Spencer Graham: Yeah, it was. Eth-Denver 20 22 was a wild experience. It was like simultaneously amazing to see all of the new people and all the people who were as you're suggesting, showing up and being excited even if they hadn't been deeply involved in the space previously. And that showed like great promise for where we're going and how many people are excited about what we're doing and want to get involved. And then on the other hand some of the operational or sort of like experiential challenges that created with all of the long lines and, well, the bufficron effect and all of that. But I think for me, what was really striking for me Eth-Denver '22 was observing in myself the difference in the experience. In, like I said, in 2020 I didn't really know anybody. I wasn't really involved very deeply. I had, I knew a lot, but I was sort of just basically in like consuming everything mode. And so I went to a lot of the talks and I tried to absorb as much information as possible. And it was really great. In '22 it was equally great, maybe even more so, but for very different reasons. That experience forced me to recognize how many people in this space I do know now and do feel strongly connected to and how I've become pretty plugged into a lot of the stuff that's going on. So I find myself going to fewer talks because I felt like I already had a feel for what a lot of those talks were going to be about and choosing instead to optimise for in person connections with people that I already knew or had just talked to a little bit briefly on Twitter or in Discord or what have you.
I felt very privileged to have had like to be in the place that I find myself in. And I kind of continue to be to feel that way. And I think a lot of it is, I have a ton of that to the just existence of DAOs and all of the people who are trying to build DAOs and trying to make this stuff work. The quality and openness and friendliness of all of these people is really astounding and I owe a ton to a ton of my recent experience to the presence of that.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. That's wonderful. And I like kind of what you're describing here, where in the course of 2years, you went from someone who was, you know, maybe considered a novice in the space. Not so, not necessarily driven by what you knew, but who you knew and the quality of interactions that you could make with the people that were in attendance to 2022 right being this person who, I mean, and I'll say this for you, like is influential in the space both through the work that you do, but also through the thought leadership that you share with us.
So I think that, that's really interesting and would definitely, I think would be inspiring, should be inspiring for anyone who's listening and thinks well, you know, I don't know if I could ever reach a level of contribution where it's meaningful where I can make the connections that I need to make to be able to build richer experiences together with other contributors in the space. You know, I mean, if you're committed, I think, and if you're really interested in this space and if you're doing it for the right reasons, I think certainly there's going to be individuals that gravitate to your ideas or maybe even challenge them, but they do so in a way that can be productive and help create a much better ecosystem together.
Spencer Graham: Totally, totally.
Humpty Calderon: So I wonder if you could describe to me your experience from Gitcoin Kernel Genesis Block, Right? KB zero. So I've been really interested to learn more about this program. And being that you're one of the Genesis members of the Gitcoin kernel group, could you describe a little bit of what that is and you know, what impact that made to you? And just looking at, I think now they're in the seventh cohort, how far it's come and maybe the impact that you think it could make to anyone who may be interested in applying
Spencer Graham: KB zero was super cool. It was very clearly at that point like pretty experimental and it was pretty loosey goosey. And I actually really have no clue what the more recent blocks have been like, I haven't been as plugged in to what's going on. But it was pretty clearly experimental, pretty loosey goosey in the sense that we're just gonna throw a bunch of people into this. At the time it was a slack space to suggest how early this was . We're gonna throw a bunch of people into a slack space and kind of just see what happens, and we're gonna provide some programming that anchors the whole thing. And then we're gonna have like a little bit of like a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of structure. But otherwise, it was very open, very kind of choose your own adventure, get out of it what you put in. In a sense, it was almost like a Hackathon. Where there's like people you could meet and people you could talk to, or you could also spend time building and kind of focusing just with the few people that you were working on something with. So I think it was almost like an extended hackathon where you have an opportunity to build like a more than just one off relationships with potentially a whole bunch of people who have been kind of curated and like preselected for their interests and abilities and focus on various things in this space.
The ability to be introduced to some mentors and kind of some other people who have been around the block, so to speak. That's also that’s also pretty cool. I have not kept up with exactly what's happening within the kernel stuff recently, so I should get back into that 'cause I do think there's a lot of power to what they're doing.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, that's great. I personally have recently taken an interest and so I need to do a little bit more research, but I was curious to hear from someone who was a Genesis member what their experience was what their takeaway was. Maybe I should also reach out to maybe some of the more recent members that have completed that program to also understand what that means. Because I think that Gitcoin like DAOHaus have grown to become these really mature ecosystems that provide a lot of value, not just to anyone who uses the platform, but certainly I think to the people who are, who can relate to maybe some of the ideas that are shared within each of those groups. I think, you know, Gitcoin kind of championing this idea of public goods and Web3, brings people together in interesting ways. And so, yeah. That's good to hear and glad to hear that, you know, you were a member of that and that you were able to take something away that you know, hopefully influenced you in positive ways to continue to build in Web3. So let's kind of move forward into DAOHaus. So when did you come into DAOHaus? What was it when you first came in?
Spencer Graham: Yeah, so I first came into and started contributing to DAOHaus in maybe August or so, of 2020. Shortly thereafter was when I felt like I could quit my old day job and focus full time on all of this stuff. And DAOHaus was pretty instrumental and enabling that. When I first started contributing, I had just been at Raid Guild for a handful of months and had had this experience of this incredible experience of like not really knowing, again, not really knowing many people, but within kind of the safe space that the DAO structure created where I had the basically felt safe to take risks and build things and connect and experiment all by myself, but also all by all with other people and build connections that way was really a magical experience. I definitely did not have the words to be able to articulate why back then, but I still felt like there was something really special going on and when DAOHaus kind of came along, and again, I think this was less conscious than sort of a vague feeling, but looking back, I definitely felt like that was an opportunity for me, maybe the highest leverage opportunity for me to help build something that would enable other people to have a similar kind of experience or feeling that I had started to have within Raid Guild at first. And I pretty much still feel that way. There's something really special about being in a DAO, especially in MolochDAO, and we can talk about all the ways that that's the case. There's something really special about that and, and I think what we are doing and what I am helping to do within DAOHaus is really important. At the time, DAOHaus was just actually pretty immature. It was pokemol, which stands for pocket Moloch, which is almost like a mobile first MolochDAO app or user interface, kind of no code way to look at your DAO, to see the proposals, to make proposals, vote on them, see the treasury, et cetera.And at that point, DAOHaus was just a way, kind of a separate app. Just a way to summon," summon" is our word for launch at new DAO without interacting with code or directly with smart contracts. And at that point, the DAOHaus team had been like very much, this is like a side project, et cetera, et cetera. But at that point, they were starting to come together and realise that DAOHaus itself was going to be a really valuable thing to work on and turn into more of a substantial and ultimately sustainable project. So there was a kind of a team of a handful to maybe 10 ish people who were starting to build up some of those ideas. And I got pulled into that by Deacon, one of the original DAOHaus developers. And at that point we were kind of ramping up into a place where we were going to do some fundraising from our community. And at that point then we started building what became DAOHaus V2. DAOHaus V2 is what you see today if you go to the DAOHaus app @app.daohaus.club and it's a fairly like, it's like a pretty good comprehensive user interface for doing a lot of what you would need to do with a DAO. Certainly not everything, but it's got an ability to find other DAO. It's got an ability to see your DAO and the, your membership in that DAO, the governance power you have in that DAO to see all the proposals to make different types of proposals and vote on existing proposals to switch between DAO that you might be in with our kind of hub interface. And it has a number of different, what we call boosts, which are sort of like add-ons or plug-ins that you can turn on or turn off depending on what you need for your DAO or what your DAO needs. And that's kind of been the basis for what DAOHaus is and has become over the last year plus. Right now we're going through a very extensive process to like almost entirely rebuild and rewrite the entire application, which we can get into at some point here. But my role became kind of a mix of a number of things. One was like product management ish stuff, which is what my background was before getting into crypto. Some tokenomics stuff. I started doing a little bit of writing and then communicating things and then eventually started doing some like internal operations in the, like a, what we call the pallets group, which is internal operations, internal processes. And that kind of led me into some of the compensation stuff that I've been doing recently.
Humpty Calderon: That's great. I mean, first of all, I think you've defined Moloch in you know, in your writings and in previous episodes, but briefly, Could you just describe what is Moloch and then we can jump into like maybe Moloch V0 and then through V2, where it's at today.
Spencer Graham: Okay. So I guess we could start with what is Moloch
Moloch is sort of the demon or anti-God of human coordination failure. And it kind of, it comes from a couple different places, but at a certain point in I think it was early 2019, there had been a bit of a DAO Winter after the DAO kind of crashed and burned after its hack and the Ethereum to Ethereum classic split. Not a ton of people were working in the DAO space, but there came a point where a few developers recognized the need to fade away for people to come together and coordinate and pool their resources to give grants to, at the time I think it was Eth 2 projects. And so they created what became the MolochDAO framework. And that was the first MolochDAO. Shortly thereafter, maybe a year or so later, MolochDAO V2 framework was introduced and I'll kind of start there 'cause most of what you need to know is wrapped up in v2. But the analogy that I've been giving recently is that a MolochDAO is kind of similar to a multisig But with a lot of extra power and a lot of extra flexibility, that is really important. And the reason I like to make the analogy to a multisig is that in a MolochDAO, governance power, voting weight, that kind of thing is non-transferrable. So unlike a lot of the TokenDAOs today, which are defined by a transferable, essentially financial asset, where governance power is a financial asset that can be bought and sold and traded and leveraged, etc. In a MolochDAO, your governance power, your membership in the DAO is non-transferrable. What that also means is that the DAO is permissioned. So the DAO is a, represents or is a container. The DAO has a membrane around it that can only be penetrated, that you can only kind of move through the membrane with the permission of the DAO as a whole. So just like a multisig, if you wanna become a signer on the multisig, you have to propose a transaction that adds you as as a signer. In a MolochDAO, you have to propose, make a proposal that gives you shares to as a member in the DAO. The big difference between a MolochDAO and a multisig DAO, is that instead of a one person, one vote set up, in a MolochDAO, any individual can have any number of shares, a variable number of shares. So that means voting weight, and governance. Power can vary with whatever the DAO wants it to vary with, it could vary based on how much funds each person has put into the public pool into the treasury. It could vary with reputation or the duration and the value that you've created for that DAO over time. Or it could vary with any number of things. The important thing is that not everybody necessarily has the same governance power, which hopefully is more reflective of the use case or the purpose for that DAO. The other big, really big important thing is that in addition to voting power or voting weight, your shares, your membership in a MolochDAO also gives you economic exit rights or a claim on a proportion of a fair portion of the assets that are in the DAO Treasury. So this is what we call rage Quit. And Rage quit underpins a a ton of things and it's really, really important and really, really powerful because it means that you can put your own money into a DAO and make it available for kind of shared purposes, for spending alongside other people's money all towards a common goal or common objectives or different projects. But at the same time as it's a shared resource, it's also still yours. You still have custody over it because at any time you can redeem or burn your shares and receive your fair portion back of what's in the treasury. And that's really, really powerful and it creates a ton of other flexibility that allows MolochDAO to do a lot of really interesting things that is not really possible in other DAOs. One of those is that all MolochDAO proposals are actually consent based decision making or consent based action. So instead of having to have the whole DAO reach a threshold, the quorum threshold to be able to pass or, or make decisions pass a vote or make decisions or take actions together instead, each proposal can pass with just one yes vote and no, no votes. Which means that any individual from the DAO can create a proposal and nobody else has to necessarily react to it. As long as they're comfortable with what's going on and as long as they consent to what's going on, that proposal will pass. So there's very, very little voter fatigue, for example, in a MolochDAO. Lots of actions, lots of coordination can occur safely because even if you don't you don’t like the result of a proposal, say somebody kind of tried to pull a fast one on you and they passed a proposal that you don't like. Before that proposal actually gets executed before the funding that proposal would spend gets spent, you can rage quit and safely take out your portion of those funds. Lots more to talk about with MolochDAO, but I'll stop there.
Humpty Calderon: No, that's incredible. You know, I think that there's a lot obviously here to unpack, especially as to how MolochDAOs are differentiated from maybe these multisig DAOs as you were proposing earlier. You know, I think one of the things that I personally would be interested in exploring, and maybe just briefly, because it certainly can get into a very deep and complex topic, but that's the idea of like non-transferrable power, governance power. As as you, I think described in a MolochDAO, it is not necessarily driven by a token economy, but maybe like shares in the project. Can you describe like the difference between how shares work to maybe tokens earned of a MolochDAO and how someone can unlock these shares, and since they're non-transferable, what happens if they do rage-quit?
Spencer Graham: Yeah, so let's start with the last thing first, 'cause that's actually the simplest. If you rage quit, what's happening is you're essentially burning your shares. So they disappear. They no longer exist. The only way shares can be created is by approval from the DAO. So in order to get new shares, i, you would have to create a proposal asking or requesting some number of new shares, but that proposal can, you can create a proposal at any time to do so. And so a DAO can have sort of a social agreement that if you do some amount of work, you're actually eligible to receive new shares as a reflection of the work that you did. Almost as like a reputation kind of system based on sort of an evolving, a growing and adapting reputation system. And if your proposal meets the conditions of that agreement that the DAOHaus made socially, then other people would vote yes on your proposal or maybe more in reality, they wouldn't vote no on it. They would consent to it, and then you would get those shares. That is not terribly different from receiving tokens, some other DAOs tokens in exchange for work that you do. But instead of being able to sell those tokens to somebody else, you cannot sell your shares to somebody else. And there's tons of positive things about tokens and about having transferable tokens. They are incredible. They created incredible like mechanism substrates for new incentives. And, new incentive mechanisms, but they are also quite dangerous. And, there's a lot that can go wrong if, if your DAO is using tokens as the way to make decisions and take actions collectively.
A lot of DAOs right now are just pure plutocracies where the richest people or the people who have the most tokens can just push around everybody else. And in some cases that's okay. And in a lot of the early DAOs that we have today, people are pretty altruistic, so that there's not really an issue. But there have already been examples of some things that don't look really great and as this space starts to expand and more people come in, the level of altruism certainly will go down to approach more of the overall level of altruism in humanity, which as we all know is not super high. So if we don't include protections against plutocracy in our DAOs, we're gonna run into a lot of trouble. And that's where MolochDAO has a lot to offer because in particular, a token can work great alongside or inside of a MolochDAO. A number of DAOs that are using the DAOHaus platform today use MolochDAO to kind of manage their governance and governance power, but as part of that, they have a liquid token that is transferable, that has a market price, et cetera, et cetera. It's just that there's not a direct connection between owning the token and having governance power, there's an extra step where you have to earn or be given the governance power by the rest of the DAO.
Humpty Calderon: You know, as you were describing kind of how this works one thing that I think could help maybe solidify the idea of the process of the shares and how a member or contributor can unlock that or get rewarded with that versus tokens, because I think that's the most familiar way in DAOs today to earn either your membership to a DAO or to earn equity in a DAO. Although I don't think it's necessarily equity, but you know, just liquidity in a DAO. Can you maybe give us an example of how a DAO could use both tokens as an incentive, but also shares as equity in say in a way that is remunerated regularly, maybe at the completion of bounties and how maybe they individuals can unlock that. Maybe not as frequently as maybe tokens, but certainly with some frequency so that they have an incentive who also gain some equity in that DAO.
Spencer Graham: Totally. And so I think what I can describe is a really powerful combination of a couple different tools, or I guess you could call it three tools. One is, a token, liquid token, transferable token. Another is a MolochDAO. And then the third is coordinape, or it doesn't have to be coordinape exactly, but something akin to coordinape.
And this is a pattern that a number of DAOs that use DAOHaus take advantage of, including our own, our own DAO, the DAO of DAOHus for our contributors. For example, what we do is every month we have a certain amount of, a certain number of our Haus tokens. It's 600 currently, that are made available for distribution to contributors based on the results of a coordinape epoch. So contributors may give token allocations to each other for like, for a given epoch for the past month of work and contributions that people have made. And the result is kind of a measure of intersubjective valuation of everybody. And that proportion then gets reflected in the Haus tokens that get distributed to contributors. And we have an agreement inside of our, inside of our DAO that says the number of Haus tokens that you receive from a coordinape epoch, you are eligible to, you know, stake those into the DAO itself, into the treasury in return for a proportional number of shares in the DAO. So it's almost like a staking mechanism, but we're using a MolochDAO to do it and we're using the sort of social contractor or social agreement to govern that. So it's relatively easy. It's very easy to change if we all collectively decide that we want to take a different approach. So that the flow basically is you contribute, you do good things, you receive Haus tokens, which if you wanted to, you could sell or do whatever you wanted to with, but you also have the option to use them to get more governance power within our DAO, to have more influence over the way we make decisions, to have more influence and more power when it comes to deciding how we spend and how we allocate our fund. So those are the kind of the combination of a liquid token and a MolochDAO and MolochDAO shares as a pretty high quality adaptable reputation system that is reflected in governance power.
Humpty Calderon: That is quite amazing, and I'm still trying to digest that a little bit here, but it almost sounds like the ability to unlock governance power in a DAO is almost provided equally to the amount that you can earn in a DAO. But the unlock is at the commitment level in terms of how much are you willing to commit of what you're earning here to earn more governance power over time.
Spencer Graham: Totally.
Humpty Calderon: That's, that's really cool. Cause I think that commitment is definitely really hard to measure in a DAO. And I think I wanna explore this a little bit with you too, because I've heard you have this conversation recently, especially as remuneration has been recently updated at DAOHaus as well in terms of someone's commitment to a project or to a DAO, excuse me. And then having a certain amount of guaranteed remuneration per season or epoch.
Spencer Graham: Yeah, so this is our, I think we're in our 7th month of this relatively new compensation program that introduced a new way to, you know, engage with the DAO and as a contributor and get compensated. So previously we were essentially saying, all right, here's the work I did for this given month. Here's how much I think it was worth. I'm gonna create a proposal and request that amount of DAI from the treasury. And we were actually doing that at the sub DAO level, or the circle or pod, or however you want to describe it. We say circles at that level, where there was kind of funding coming from our main DAO into each of those circles that then would get distributed based on this monthly proposal process, this retroactive proposal process, what we did about 7 months ago is we introduced a new track. So you could keep on that retroactive track or you could, you could join the commitment track, which involves making a commitment as a percentage. So zero to, or I guess really in practice, 1-100% of your capacity or time or effort or energy. However, you would want to define it, you would make a commitment for the next two months. Roughly akin to a season, we call them compensation cycles. You'd make a commitment to, to DAOHaus and to our DAO and as a result, you would, there would be a commitment coming back the other way that the DAO would compensate you, would pay you a base compensation of some amount of DAI per month. It's actually a mix of DAI and Haus tokens, that you can decide on the percentages for. But it's basically a dollar value that you would get back from the each month that you were committed to the DAO and that dollar amount varies based on the percentage of your commitment, obviously higher for higher percentages, as well as some measure of experience or scale, or maybe almost like a prediction of the value that you would create over the course of those two months. That second thing is something we're actually going through. We're having a lot of conversations inside of the DAO right now to try to figure out how we can do a better job of creating feedback loops for how that second dimension gets measured and updated over time. We have a pretty flimsy process for that right now. For that right now, that needs to become a lot more robust. So we're likely gonna be making some sizable changes to the way our program works. But on the whole, it's been pretty successful in enabling contributors to engage with the work and with the DAO and with DAOHaus in the way that makes most sense for them in the context that they currently live in.
Some people like the flexibility of just kind of doing whatever they can and then getting compensated for that. Some people psychologically like being able to commit and prioritise their work accordingly based on that, I fall in the second camp. But lots of people have been really, really thankful for having that option, and it's a big thing for us creating optionality basically all the way down for contributors in lots of different areas.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, I mean, I think that just reinforces some of what you described earlier in terms of, you know, commitment. Both in terms of, you know, the unlock here, the potential of unlocking more governance power within the DAO based on the amount that they choose to stake back into the DAO's treasury. But also if you are more committed to one project's mission, because it maybe align with you a lot more closely, then maybe some of the other things that you've been contributing to recently. I can see why someone would prefer to have that optionality to be able to earn more, and then stake more and then have a stronger governance presence that project. That's really interesting and I think also, I think that speaks to the ability for new members to maybe earn more governance power, even if they're coming in at a later stage in the life of a DAO compared to of course, maybe who someone who's been contributing for many, many years and has earned a substantial amount of governance power to a project, but may have done so while splitting their attention across maybe like 10 or 15 DAOs, which certainly happens.
I think it's such an interesting space. It's sometimes easy to get distracted. I love the idea of rewarding commitment personally as a contributor to many DAOs and even to this project, Crypto Sapien which isn't necessarily a DAO yet. It functions, tries to function along the rails of DAO membership and incentives because we work so closely with DAOs like BanklessDAO, who have helped through the grants to promote the development of this type of content. It's really interesting to me and just kind of really sparks a lot of ideas and a lot of what I want, I wanna keep exploring, and certainly a lot of what excites me about what DAOHaus is doing.
Spencer Graham: Yeah. I think there's this interplay between flexibility and commitment, that is, that is really fascinating. And I guess, you know, zooming out even further, something I've been thinking about a lot is, this distinction between different types of resources that are involved in DAOs. And when I say resources, I mean anything that a DAO uses to do something or achieve some outcomes. So money in its treasury, other tokens, smart contract protocols, coordination mechanisms. Those are actually all examples of DAO owned resources or what we can call shared resources, but then also DAOs are made up of all these other resources that are actually controlled by the individual members or contributors to those DAO. And we can call those, those resources like private resources, not as in privacy, but private as in like only a single person controls them. And commitment is a really fascinating concept. So basically like you are saying, I'm gonna, as a contributor, I'm going to commit some portion of my private resources, my time, or my capacity, or my energy or my knowledge, commit that to the DAO in the spirit or with the goal of increasing or improving or growing the shared resources that I as a member of the DAO share with everybody else. And I think that interplay is really, really interesting. Because a DAO is more than any other type of organisation, There is respect for and support for the sovereignty of the individual contributor, which means respect for and support for their control over their own resources. In a traditional company, you may not have a lot of control over your own time and you've kind of delegated decisions about how to, how to spend your time to somebody else. In a DAO you don't, It's still yours, and you still have full control of what you do with your time and your knowledge and everything. But there is a lot of benefit to focus and to having some degree of legibility over who is actually working on what and when. So this idea of commitment I think is a nice compromise that allows individual contributors, individual members to be sovereign while also joining collective.
And I think that's a common theme within MolochDAO as well. Is interplay or is like simultaneous or what I think is fun to talk about as a superposition of individualism and collective collectivism or a superposition between private resources and public resources. And I think if we want to get into like what is a DAO and why are DAO special, it's that that is literally not possible anywhere else outside of DAOs. You like literally, physically, literally you cannot do it without smart contracts and that is what makes DAOs special in my opinion.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, that's amazing. I feel like there is just so much left to kind of unpack obviously some of your more recent writings. I was reading the anti-capture blog that you recently published, and certainly your recent tweets on, you know, the collective and then individualism. I think all of these really present some ideas that can either challenge or support some of the ways that we currently are thinking about DAO and building in DAOs. I heard Chase in her podcast call you an underrated follow and I agree. I feel like anyone who is interested in kind of exploring the space of DAO and kind of doing so from the lens of someone who's actually building the tooling to, you know, improve the DAO ecosystem, I think should definitely be following you. Because I think that you really present some really high level ideas, really some, meta ideas, and you break them down so beautifully in written form on your blogs, or as Tweet threads. So I would want to ask you if there's anyone that you follow on Twitter or you know who you read their writing and blogs or some other format as a podcast, who inspires you to kind of maybe either challenging some of your ideas or helps you see things some of the ways that you think in a different perspective, who you would recommend to anyone who is listening to also give a follow Aside from you. Of course.
Spencer Graham: Yeah. It's kind of , there's so many. There's so many people. One of the things I think I might be weirdly proudest of is my ability to like curate a good Twitter timeline for myself. As a side note, if you feel like you're struggling with that, the best thing you can do is turn off the algorithmic feed and just turn. I think it's called the latest tweets option. If you do that, then you don't see tweets that people like or other random insertions or like, maybe even you could say, interruptions of your attention or trespasses of your attention. And it's just the people that you follow and just what they're retweeting and tweeting. So that, I guess, is a side tip. Highly recommend doing that. The person that I have, it's actually a little bit outside of the DAO space, but the person that I have really gotten a lot out of following is Dystopia Breaker on Twitter. She's always coming in both like hot, but also like super legitimately with excellent perspective on like cryptography and privacy and security and all of the fundamentals that are really important to this phase. I think a lot of times we, it's easy to get distracted by or to get sort of carried away with all of the higher level stuff that's super awesome. And at the end of the day, that's what's important. The applications, the things we can do, the changes we can make to technology, to society, to ourselves. But none of that is possible if we don't give due credit and do attention to the fundamentals that make it all happen. As a follower of Dystopia Breaker on Twitter, I feel much more grounded in those fundamentals. So that's a high recommendation for me.
Humpty Calderon: Well, that's great. I mean, I just gave them a follow, so thank you for that. Anything you'd like to add here before we cut?
Spencer Graham: Probably, I could go on forever about this stuff, so it's always challenging to pick the one or two things. But I think, maybe I'll do two things. One, invitation to to anybody who is interested in talking about any of this stuff, to reach out to me and chat. I'd really enjoy all of this content and hearing different perspectives on it and or even just the opportunity to explain something or clarify something is, well one, if that's helpful to you, to anybody, that's great. It's also helpful to me. It's not a zero sum or not a one directional kind of value flow. I get better and get a better understanding of things when I explain them, even when they're my own ideas. And then maybe second, just a plug for for DAOHaus and for MolochDAOs . They're incredible tools that I think many more people, many more DAOs should be seriously considering. And I would love to talk about how your DAO or your community, whoever you are out there, can use MolochDAO to improve and use DAOHaus to level your community up.
Humpty Calderon: And that's a wrap. I truly enjoyed my chat with Spencer, and I hope you did too. If you'd like to connect with Spencer, you can find him on Twitter @Spengrah. To learn more about DAOHaus, follow them on Twitter @nowdaoit or go to their website, daohaus.club. 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.