Something big has changed
Something big has changed, right? And if they don’t pay attention to what is happening here, at some point they’ll be out the window. They’re not connecting to this next generation of the internet any longer because, for me, if you think Web2 was big, the Googles, the Amazons, the big players, wait until you see Web3. It’s going to be a much, much bigger space than Web2. And that’s simply because you can now invite everybody else, right? Everybody who got stranded or who didn’t have the right financial means or other reasons why they couldn’t participate. This Web3 thing is a participatory space. It’s inclusive enough to invite everybody else to say, “You have a voice, you have an idea. Welcome. Try it out. Join, join it, and see what you can do with this.”
DAO: decentralized autonomous organization
And that led me to the thing that I’m building now called Hypha DAO. So again, it’s a container. It’s a space where you can build these environments that are meant for trust. It’s designed from trust. It’s a space where you invite people to solve problems together. And that is the fascinating aspect and the theme I see for me across all those years, come together, realize your potential. Look at the humanity here. Look at the relationships you’re building in these spaces and see if we have a better vehicle now, a vessel really to move us all forward to a better future.
The end of the username and password era
Web2, everybody knows you need your username and password. You set up an account, you don’t own that account. It’s the company that owns it, right? Web3 is entirely different, right? This is where you have your own what’s called a wallet here. See, we have our creator Hypha wallet, where you actually have a way to now participate and make decisions through your own personal device, much more secure because your private key is stored on this phone. It doesn’t exist anywhere else. So it’s kind of the end of the username and password era. Now you have a new era where only this thing called private key matters, and it gives you the right to participate. It gives you the right to transact. So if you have the same wallet and you can download it for free and install it and create your account for free. So if you have that account, now I can actually transact with you. I can say, “I have a couple of tokens. Let me send that over to you,” and then you can send it to another person. And you immediately set some circular thing in motion.
DAOS are agreement machines
Coming back to the DAO itself, what we do there is setting up proposals. So meaning DAOs are sometimes I call them agreement machines. So we want to come to agreements because now the fertility is there to create the space of trust. Now, what do we do with this trust? Well, we make decisions. So we make proposals and see if everybody’s aligned with that proposal. And once you’ve done this proposal, you post it on the DAO, but everybody sees it. It’s a transparent space. It’s highly visible. And then I can say, “I support that proposal. Yes, I use my wallet again here,” go in there and support it. And others do that too. So you can see how democratic that gets to say, new proposals are floating up to the surface. We’re deciding on these together, and then move forward from there.
DAOs are organizations for purpose, not profit
In the past, there’s like a founding team, a couple of people coming together with the initial ideas. So they make up what we call the core team space. So the core team comes together, sets up maybe the first proposals to say, “This is how we define how we work together. This is the purpose of our organization.” For me, the DAO is like the ideal place to create more purpose oriented organization.
Yes.
Decision-making in a DAO
Not for profit. They’re for purpose really, right? That’s a yes, no, abstain thing. And you can then say, okay, what it means to say yes for the organization, you decide that. And there’s a thing called Unity in Quorum where you can say, we need an alignment of 60%, 70% of members need to say yes. The rest can say, no, it’s okay. Or we need to say we need at least 20% of people present for making this decision.
So the Unity in Quorum is then a parameter that says, “Let’s tune that in a way that says how far do you want to go with this.” Is it full consensus? Does it mean, yes, 100% people need to be here to decide and they all need to say yes? Fine. So be it. You can try that. If it’s majority voting, you say, “Okay, it’s 51% of people saying yes, and 51% at least need to show up here.” So suddenly you have majority vote. But then you get into all kinds of combinations that are really interesting to explore inside this binary decision space.
At Hypha, we’re using something called 80/20, almost like a Pareto principle. It’s like magic setting, as you said at the beginning. Something magic of hotels where you say 80% need to agree to that and 20% need to show up. And that has worked for over a thousand proposals for us, where we get to a point, yes, sometimes there’s disagreement and it does not pass, but then you always come back to, “Oh, we didn’t actually do enough sense making.” So there’s always this distinction of sense-making before decision-making.
Rendanheyi from Haier in China has DAOs
If you’re familiar with Rendanheyi, something that has developed in China with Haier, a large appliances manufacturer in China.
Oh, of course. Of course, yes.
You’ve been there. So you know this story. So they create these what’s called micro enterprises inside the organization. And interestingly, they look very much like little DAOs inside an organization because they get the autonomy, they get the do your own thing, and the connectivity too towards directly connected to customers. And they give the feedback and then they work on that. They became their own centers and their own DAOs, really. And for me, this is an interface now into a large organization.
Education can be revolutionized with DAOs
Education is a big piece. Working with the groups, a couple of groups to say, what happens if you do DAOs for schools? So what if you suddenly open up this participatory space for all of the stakeholders in the school environment? So administrative people, yes, they have to run the school, but they’re the parents, they’re the teachers, they’re the students. Why not giving them some kind of voice to say, “Look, education is changing. Let’s adjust our curriculum. Do something about it.” And then you can come into a DAO space to say, “Let’s propose something new. Let’s go through the sense-making process and the decision-making process. Once we come to an agreement, we can get this thing off the table and move on to the next question that’s opening up there.”
Roles inside a DAO
Certain archetypes you see are sort of prevalent in organizations, and you can define a template for them. So Jane, you come in and as say an architect or a catalyst. Catalyst will be a good role for you. So I’m creating a role archetype for the Imaginize DAO to say, there’s a catalyst role. You are the catalyst, and the only thing you do is you apply for that role, right? And based on your say expertise, we can also break it down into different levels of roles.
Advice on how to start a DAO
What would you advise people? If someone wants to start a DAO, what advice would you give to them?
First point is recognizing to see this as a sort of expanding space, as an open space, as an invitation for others to contribute, that you are a contributor to something that’s anchored in a purpose, in a mission, right? So see if you can align with that kind of vision, right?
See if you can align with the people, sense the trust that is already present in this space. That’s the first thing. If we have new people coming to join Hypha, the Hypha DAO is they sense it immediately that something is different from a traditional organization. The way we talk, the way we meet, the way we make these agreements is different. And that’s a hard thing for a lot of people to let go of the baggage they brought in from the traditional thing. Where are my employees? Who do I report to? Well, nobody, right? There is no boss here.
Humans making decisions on which path we take
Even though another big topic is AI is coming. So generative AI is now finding its way into organizations. What do we do with that suddenly? But in the end, there’s still humans. There’s still humans who make the decisions. We have to decide which path are we taking. We’re not handing this over to the AI, but there’s the strong aspect of, “I need to trust you Jane. I need to make sure that the decisions we’re making together are fully aligned. It resonates with the purpose we are having here for our Imaginize DAO. And let’s do that.”
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