Media DAOs: Come Join the Collective
Last week I became a co-owner (one of ~ 3000) of the Bankless DAO - a decentralized, autonomous media organization or the world's first media DAO for short.
The Bankless DAO is:
A decentralized community driving adoption and awareness of bankless money systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin and DeFi through media, culture, and education.
It has its own Substack and Discord community where coordination is facilitated by the BANK governance token (you need at least 35,000 $BANK tokens to participate).
A DAO is leaderless: it's run 100% by its community where no single person has overall control.
As Jarrod Dicker states in his awesome publication on Mirror:
DAOs present an alternative organizational structure that tries to align incentives for the long-term among a variety of stakeholders. The relationship changes from creator and consumer to everyone as co-creators.
All revenue across advertising, subscriptions, events and other means is then pooled to a treasury where all cash inflows and outflows are recorded publicly. There is a universal share in the ownership.
Indeed, within the Bankless DAO mission it states:
Internet communities align with digital tokens and use them as tools to focus capital and labor into productive outputs in pursuit of a shared vision. Under community consensus, the private skills and resources of an individual can coalesce into public collective power and impart change upon the world.
And the announcement post on Medium says:
The Bankless DAO will act as a coordination mechanism for a collection of participating media nodes.
This gives creators a new option.
Rather than creating your own independent publication in this decentralized crypto space, writers can now connect with an existing media network managed by a DAO.
You can apply to become a media node of the network, either individually or as an entity (company):
What does a DAO-managed media outlet look like?
This is all brand new and organically growing, but right now I get to vote on proposals with my BANK tokens at Snapshot (have been three so far), as well as vote in the proposals forums.
And I'm currently helping to form the Writers Guild where I'll be contributing to the development of the Substack and other mediums.
As the Bankless DAO treasury takes off, it will be interesting to see how far its balance sheet can grow in terms of existing DAOs shown at open-orgs.info (created by David Mihal).
The Ownership Economy
I've been trying to find my niche with this Revue publication.
It started off with me trying to figure out what to do next after exiting from the investing.io community. I thought I'd go into the poker niche but that never happened ha.
It then moved into talking about the creator economy, how independent creators (e.g. writers on Substack or builders on Indiehackers) are making a living independent of traditional media and software companies. This term really picked up pace over the last 12 months, a trend accelerated by Covid, and is used by Forbes and the Economist etc. This is also known as the Passion Economy, a phrase coined by Li Jin from A16Z.
But I recently discovered a new term (thanks to Antonio Gary Jr. in his awesome Creator Crew publication) that really resonated with me, especially with my attention moving back to crypto (not happened since 2017) with the rise of creator coins and token badges.
Jesse Walden from Variant Fund has an incredible article on the ownership economy where he states that:
Ownership is a powerful motivator for users to contribute to products in deeper ways, be it with ideas, computing resources, code, or community building. This more cooperative economic model helps ensure better alignment with users over time, resulting in platforms that can be larger, more resilient, and more innovative.
Rather than a platform’s inner circle of founders and investors taking home the value, users are able to earn the majority of value generated from their collective contributions.
Jesse lists some great examples, such as the DeFi exchange Uniswap who distributes the crypto swap fee to its users who provide liquidity.
Jarrod Dicker states that the ownership economy:
...by way of decentralized autonomous organizations aka DAOs + non-fungible tokens aka NFTs-- builds a business on top of the creator economy that encourages creators, operators and the community to collaborate together under a new, interdependent ownership mechanism that combines the best of both (legacy + creator economy) worlds and then some.
He goes on to say:
This new media structure will be wholly owned by the creators, operators and consumers themselves. It will be a product of both the public and its producers and will not limit participants to a single company. These media companies can be looked at as collectives, with their own identities, where creators and consumers are encouraged to flow interdependently throughout various collectives.
Going forward, this newsletter will be at the intersection of the creator economy and ownership economy.
This Week in Twitter
Over the last week, Twitter announced the acquisition of Scroll, a distraction-free reading service that will become part of its forthcoming subscription product super follows.
As Ben Thompson from Stratechery stated:
Twitter, though, because of its outsized role in driving traffic to sites across the web, is uniquely positioned to bundle everything else together.
Twitter also announced a new tip jar feature where creators will soon be able to put links to a payment service where their followers can support them.
The current list of services include Patreon, PayPal and Venmo - I'm hoping they will be able to add Ethereum Name Service domains too such as my patey.eth (feel free to tip me some ETH!).
Cheers!
Richard