Musings While Sleep Deprived
Introduction
Hey folks. Got a doozy of a post for yall. This is basically a brain dump of everything I’ve been thinking about the past few days. My hope is this will spark some meta-level conversations that we will need to be ready for Season 1 in June.
The gist of it is:
- Theories around organizing and executing
- Musings on things we can accomplish
- The bullish case for $BANK
Organization and Execution
DAOs demand degrees of coordination that makes an ant colony look like a mess. Different DAOs will have different organizational models depending on their mandates. BanklessDAO is not a protocol (yet). There is no on-chain component to what we do. We are an ecosystem of like-minded individuals, collectively taking part in an experiment of creating sustainable economics, commerce, and community. Our unique flavor just happens to be media.
So… how do we do this?
The DAO-Talent Stack
DAOs are in the business of sourcing talent. People naturally gravitate towards mutual interests. Conversations → brainstorming → proposals → consensus → execution. That’s the general flow of a DAO. But when we take a bird’s eye view, each of those individual working groups have patterns as well. This is what I refer to as the DAO-Talent Stack.
Resource Layer
At the bottom layer is sourcing skillsets. These are the specialists. Groups of writers, creators, translators, developers, designers, and dozens more that make their services known to the broader DAO ecosystem. You may have heard the term “Guild” thrown around the Discord. Guilds, it seems, is BanklessDAO jargon for members of the the resource layer. The end goal of the the bottom layer is a fluid marketplace that matches the DAO’s demand for talent to its community pool.
For now, members of this layer operate mostly on bounty boards - Public places for specialists to take on paid work on directed tasks. See more in the Writers Guild forum post for details.
(Sample bounty board for 1Hive)
Orchestration Layer
The middle level concerns itself with coordination. It orchestrates DAO resources in efficient and precise ways, like an assembly line robot. It’s includes the business functions we see in the traditional corporate structure, bizdev, growth, marketing, development, finance, security, etc. Members of the orchestration layer are community leaders that operate in their specialized working groups. DAO members that have demonstrated long-term commitment, have strong a voice in the community, and have made their way to the front by way of merit. (We don’t have a name for this, like we do with Guilds. Working group suffices, but I like pods better. Anyone else?)
Governance Layer
The top of the stack is the governance layer. It’s where BanklessDAO votes with $BANK and signals its preferences as a collective whole. It’s the ultimate decision maker on how the Treasury spends its assets. The goal of the governance layer is to make sure that the orchestration layer is executing on the will of the DAO.
Soft Consensus and Hard Consensus
Together, the DAO-Talent Stack form a mechanism for maintaining fluidity decision making in the form of soft and hard consensus. Hard consensus are snapshots. The exciting window of time when everyone in the DAO knows that something will change, big or small. In this model, the governance layer is the hard consensus.
Soft consensus occurs within the orchestration layer. These are the day to day, week to week decisions. Decisions that a busy working mom doesn’t need to know about. Soft consensus is ubiquitous. It’s the number of 
that decides what’s the meme of the week. It’s the yes/no ratio on a forum post that creates a new Guild. Soft consensus is the culmination of nonstop conversations on discord, forums, community calls, tweet storms, etc. It’s a fluid state, meant to adapt to the speed of progress within BanklessDAO.
The Core Team
The third and final subsection has to do with the idea of a “core team.” A core team draws a salary from the Treasury. They are very much responsible to the success of BanklessDAO as per its mandate, mission, and vision. The core team consists of full time workers – People that are likelier to work 80 hours a week than 40 for the DAO. Their presence extends to all three layers of the Talent Stack. They are voices in the community. They vote on everything. They are efficient and precise in their work, and are prone to getting their hands dirty with some hardcore Resource Layer contributions.
I have a personal request to make here. I’m clearly very interested in DAO-ist theory. We’re just getting started as a DAO, but DAOs have been kicking for years now. We’re done with the minimum-viable-DAO stage where coordination was clunky and awkward. In 2021, there are best practices. There are DAOs that have figured out the things we haven’t even thought of yet.
I want to spend time on researching this topic. That’s why I submitted my bid in the weekly mirror.xyz competition. Mirror.xyz is a blog made using smart contracts. If you or any of your friends own $WRITE, please vote for me here (click here). Voting opens next Wednesday.
Still with me? Great, let’s keep going. 
What BanklessDAO can Accomplish
That’s not the right question. The right question is what should BanklessDAO do first. What excites me the most are the unknown unknowns. The unexplored territory we don’t even know exist. But to start, there are a few things we are uniquely positions to do.
Media Network
BanklessDAO has its roots in media. The genesis team built the youtube channel, podcast, and newsletter. They built a media node in the churning crypto ecosystem. We inherit that mantle. We could collectively choose to yeet everything we have into $DOGE, but I’m not too worried about that outcome.
The collective wisdom of media tells us that Content is King. Indeed, we are here because we were drawn in by the quality, consistency, and energy behind everything Ryan, David, and co. have done. Now imagine all of their work scaled to the Bankless movement. We can create the largest media network in all of DeFi. Guides on every topic, from getting started to complex trading strategies. We can have a blog specific to tokenomics with another on culture. One dedicated newsletter tracking DeFi product releases and another on the latest research. There is a ravenous hunger for knowledge that we can curate with quality content.
The degree of reach Bankless has and the network effects achieved by word of mouth puts BanklessDAO in a very advantageous position. The diversity of topics mentioned in the previous paragraphs means sponsored articles, ads, affiliate programs, referral bonuses, partnerships, and every other devious money-making tactic that the marketing industry has conjured.
DeFi Products
Naturally, a bunch of DeFi degens like us need to have wicked schemes compiled with money legos. Ryan and David have been pushing to get the BED index on Index Coop - an investment vehicle made of $DPI, $ETH, and $BTC.
Earlier today, I was schooled by @AboveAverageJoe on some 11th-dimesions-im-playing-chess-while-you’re-playing-checkers DeFi magic. I have no doubt that with our collective DeFi expertise, entrepreneurial spirit, and developer resources, BanklessDAO can create a suite of products that leverages our size and treasury.
Merch
Who doesn’t love merch? Shirts, stickers, SOCKS! A Shopify store would be great, but what’s even cooler is all the things we can do with NFTs. Consider this: We have a proposal out that will kick off a meme competition. Winners of this competition will have their memes minted as NFTs and put in the DAO’s museum. Now, when we have 1 Billion bankless, how much would that first place meme prize be worth? There’s also this conversation I had with Leemers about an NFT redeemable for a physical art. In this case, metalwork.
Bullish on $BANK
Media income, financial products, and merch provide diversified recurring revenue streams. (I’m pretty sure some VC out there just heard a cha-ching.) DAOs are designed to function around an asset that supports the entire ecosystem. By continually innovating on ways to make capital use more efficient, on-chain revenue streams, and investment into our future, $BANK will feel immense upwards pressure. Honestly? I think our first big milestone will be when $BANK breaks 1 USD. My conservative bet is end of 2021, assuming the market continues as is.
Right now, $BANK has no value. It shouldn’t. We haven’t done anything yet. A few days, some forum posts, and chatting in discord doesn’t justify even a penny of valuation. We’ll get there. Probably exponentially.
Conclusion
- Organizing is the hardest part. I theorized about the existence of a Talent Stack. A hierarchy of responsibilities that rely on hard and soft consensus to make fluid decisions in line with the will of the DAO.
- There’s a lot BanklessDAO can accomplish. A few apparent ideas includes (1) Promoting our media network, (2) Financial products, and (3) Merch/NFTs
- There’s a strong case for why $BANK has value. It’s still much too theoretical, but with tactful decision making, $BANK may be worth more than we think in just a few short weeks.
