On the heels of a $40 million experiment that caught mainstream media attention, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are taking another s
On the heels of a $40 million experiment that caught mainstream media attention, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are taking another step into mass consciousness today as Kimbal Musk – the billionaire Tesla board member and brother of fellow entrepreneur Elon Musk – is announcing the opening of membership applications for Big Green DAO, a Web 3 charity focusing on food justice.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Musk said that one of the goals of the charity is to overhaul the philanthropy industry with the use of blockchain-based tooling – a sector he believes is plagued by inefficiencies.
Big Green is also launching at a time when DAOs appear poised to follow non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as the next blockchain tech-based acronym to enter the public conversation. Search engine interest in the organizations, nominally leaderless online investment collectives that are jokingly referred to as “group chats with a bank account,” is at a multiyear high following the capers of ConstitutionDAO, a collective of 17,000 donors who raised millions to purchase a rare print of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Read more: After Being Foiled by a Billionaire, ConstitutionDAO Faces Lingering Questions
In light of the sudden scrutiny, Musk’s experiment is a daring step from a public figure risking personal and professional reputation to embrace an often sneered-upon technology, and a validation for the many developers and builders who have advanced DAO tooling in recent years.
First steps
Musk’s venture into blockchain began in earnest “a year ago,” spurred on by other billionaires – including his sibling, who was recently and perhaps incorrectly crowned richest man in the world – getting involved in Bitcoin.
“There was Michael Saylor’s loud-and-proud investment, followed by my brother’s decision to participate at Tesla, and I’m on the board at Tesla – just as a responsible board member I had to spend more time on it,” he said in an interview.
Quickly he determined that crypto can be divided into two camps: what he calls the “speculators” and “the religious.”
“The religious are awesome,” he told CoinDesk. “They are total believers that this will decentralize the world, change governance, bring power back to the masses. It’s a beautiful conversation when you’re connected to someone religious about it.”
Nonetheless, the speculative noise – what the DAO scholar Paul Dylan-Ennis refers to as “the moat of trash” – nearly turned him off on the sector. Musk emphasized that he largely doesn’t even like investing his money in the stock market, and it was only the true believers that “kept him digging.”
“When someone is religious about something, I need to find out why. There’s some bad religions out there, but for the most part, there’s usually something underneath it all tying people together,” he said.
The thing tying people together in Web 3, according to Musk, is primarily community creation.
“It’s community like I’ve never seen it before. I’m a restaurant guy in my non-tech life, and I love that it brings people together, so that kept me interested. And the fact that it decentralizes power – that’s interesting to me. I’ve always had a healthy disrespect for the authorities,” he said.
Crypto influence
Once Musk decided to start a Web 3 community of his own, he sought to surround himself with advisors both from the cryptosphere and from traditional finance.
While early conversations with crypto-natives (including members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible token (NFT) community, who he speaks fondly of) steered him toward projects that would create speculative assets – using a NFT drop to raise funds for charity, for instance – Musk’s initial focus for his Big Green DAO venture is on pure philanthropy.
His right-hand man in the effort is Matthew Markman, a Ph.D. candidate and a “DAO facilitator” for metaverse gaming community Decentraland, as well as a project manager and community moderator for two other projects – one of Web 3′s many prolific, assiduous polymaths.
Markman and Musk were connected via a mutual friend, Bear Kittay, a Web 3 investor and former Burning Man spokesperson. From there, the project’s network of crypto advisors grew to include Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, venture capital maven Vinny Lingham, frequent DAO contributor Priyanka Desai and ConsenSys executive Mike Kriak, among others.
Musk reports being “overwhelmed” with the “positive energy” he’s received from the crypto community.
“It’s not normal for me to have that degree of a warm welcome. The amount of people who would spend 20 hours on a whitepaper, just so my reputation wouldn’t be hurt – it’s my reputation! I thought that was very cool,” he said.
Architecture
So far, the public response to Big Green DAO, whose white paper was released last week, has been overwhelmingly positive.
“In the past few days when we…
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