GM!

We’re back with an inside scoop from our executive insights blog, Bears Are for Building.

In today’s post, Head of Flipside Governance Avi Myers explores how crypto rises from the ashes, and introduces our new report about a new meta in DAO building that could re-energize the space and accelerate DAO growth drastically.

Ready for a dose of hope? Here we go!

Stuffed between bad jokes and a Meow Wolf! YouTube video, in a random corner of our Slack, was the most important conversation our company has had in 6 months. 

It didn’t last long, maybe a dozen messages, but it was honest and vulnerable and exactly what we all needed. 

Truth be told, I recoiled at first. What is this, human emotions in a company setting?

But it was real, it was poignant, and it made us all stop and think.

The last year has been wild. Like Game of Thrones sh*t. Savage and violent, unraveling our brightest stars and revealing our most despicable villains. 

It’s hard to point to one moment exactly where the delirium set in. But, for sure, $LUNA was the set-up and SBF the knockout punch. We all kinda just stumbled our way through the intervening period. 

Events like this can send you into autopilot. Drowning in copium, tweeting out “bears are for builders” every other day, and waiting for things to calm the F down.

Then, one day, they do. 

One day it all feels normal again. Too normal? Yes. Definitely, maybe, and that's when the convo in our Slack channel kicked off. Colleagues lifted their heads up, asked what was really happening? What do we believe in? Who can we trust? Is this for me?

A healthy existential exploration after a crazy run of events; the results of which are often polarizing. You either find your why, or – bye.

I reflected on mine. Made sure it was still there, blew some of the dust off the top of it maybe, and flicked it with my finger a couple times. But it was still there, still humming. 

Revolution, Baby

Humans are inherently social creatures. Our entire existence unfolds through interweaving social coordination systems and the quest for love, recognition, wealth, power, and what we hope is progress. 

Some of these coordination systems create a net good for society, some disenfranchise & manipulate. Knowing the difference is the key, and working on the right ones can be the noblest of pursuits. 

The revolution in our industry is not just permissionless digital currency existing outside the rails of Westphalian nation-states. 

It is a revolution of how humans connect. How they organize themselves and make decisions collectively. It’s an opportunity defined not by centuries but by “Ages”.

World-changing financial products have been created before our eyes. Like…they’re here and they’re working. They are protocols written in fancy software languages and, get this, nobody owns them. They’re public goods. Yup, and people with aligned incentives form organizations to manage these protocols.  

The organizations, my friends, are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, DAOs, and they’re the future. 

Well actually, what I described is just one type of DAO, and a ton of folks will be super snobby and tell you your DAO is not actually a DAO, and prescribe the exact amount of automated infrastructure you should have in order to be called a DAO, but I digress.

The most critical issue facing DAOs right now is how they organize themselves, how to make decisions, how to decentralize. It’s like a ton of tiny villages with amnesia coming together, trying to establish societal norms, write a constitution, govern themselves, and create a community. It’s a beautiful thing. A melding of political science, economics, and philosophy, into a vague & chaotic acronym that is incredibly easy to use in a pun. 

Meeting Alice

When I first fell DAOwn (see?) the rabbit hole a couple years ago, it was over, I was hooked. Three months later we launched Flipside Governance. 

Govy, as we affectionately call it, was a discovery expedition into the land of DAOs, working to understand how they operate, what makes them thrive, and how we can help them grow into an unstoppable force of their own. 

Two years later, Flipside Governance has grown into a professional delegate and DAO services organization, contributing to 11 partners across three blockchains. Our partners include Aave, MakerDAO, Optimism, and Osmosis. created this report on the Aave & Balancer DAO-to-DAO partnership

Some DAOs have matured quickly, while others are still in their infancy. None have fully figured it out, but a few have started to hit polaroid-worthy milestones. 

*Flash* Wuddup Aave & Balancer. From the beginning, these protocols laid the foundation for a thriving partnership. Over the last two years, they’ve started to create even deeper connections on the backs of amazing contributors who understand how essential the interconnectivity between these emerging organizations is, and how fundamental that is to the tech they’re helping proliferate. 

That’s why our team at Flipside Governance created this research report on the Aave x Balancer partnership.

It is a data-driven analysis of how these two ecosystems fit together, what they’ve created, and where they’re going. 

And, as luck would have it, knowing where they’re going helps me know where I’m going too…

Give it a read for free to see how we can leverage DAO-to-DAO partnerships to accelerate growth in the space, and…

LFB. 

— Avi Myers, Head of Flipside Governance

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