Ben Hoelzl - DAO Ecosystem in Switzerland

Transcript

thank you very much good morning everybody really cool to see you all here also D SP is already there some other folks uh who I know from the launch pad so little bit about myself so yes I'm a founding member of Da Swiss also a founder of FTW da uh before being in blockchain I was a traditional Banker working for UBS and DOA bank and since four years I'm basically have a new life and today I want to introduce you to the Dow Raider Switzerland which is an ecosystem report focusing on D Dow solely not working sorry for that but anyway I can um the da Raider Switzerland so basically the idea was born actually last year during

ethereum Zurich because there um there was a workshop about Dows also um um prepared by Dow Swiss and after the workshop there were a lot of questions about Dow and the questions were always the same so do I need a legal rapper where should I go who is a Tax Advisor who could help me with that who is a legal adviser on that which text stack should I use which tools do I need do I need a telegram Channel a Discord Channel and a Discord server and based on that we thought it would maybe make sense to create a report about the Dows here in Switzerland and that's the Dow radar Switzerland the idea is really looking into Dows which have a strong connection to Switzerland and also then looking at the entire ecosystem holistically um looking at service

providers Layer Two blockchains and also communities which are here active in Switzerland and I hope with that the tech technical issues are solved quickly and we are very sorry we have a slight technical hiccup now it should work good so for the presentation for the next 10 to 12 minutes I want to give you a short recap what is a DA because so many people are talking about Dows and then there is no consistent definition of that um I want to go into the Dow ecosystem here Switzerland and then I want to give you a short sneak peek into our report which is going to

be published in May or June of this year and then specifically I want to go into the insights which we found in legal and Taxation Tech and tooling the challenges and also the trends so I gave already the introduction about dow r Switzerland um the idea is that it will be a publication with around 20 to 30 pages going into the ecosystem here in Switzerland and we look at different aspects of the ecosystem legal taxation all the other things what I mentioned there before what is really important it's an ecosystem report so we also have ecosystem Partners cvbs T and also Dows are driving that forward so but first what is a da um in the report we conducted around 40 interviews with Dow

operators but also like service providers and our first question was always what is a DA and based on these 40 interviews we got around 60 or 70 different definitions because everybody has like multiple definitions for me that's like just like some sample definitions or the responses for me the most favorite one is like a DA is a community or a group with a shared bank account which work towards a joint Vision or Mission and I think the big takeaway from all of these different quotes and also the definition there is not actually a common understanding of a DA what a DA is if you take a academic definition of a da um that it has to be decentralized it has to be autom if you

look into aspects what people say it has to have off onchain voting then probably there's almost no real Dow so I think what we have here in the ecosystem is there are Dows which call themselves Dows and there are different VAR uh on different levels of of the definition and that's just like a uh short um Insight on that so maybe that's then bringing us to the ecosystem here in Switzerland so there on the right side you see how we see the ecosystem here in Switzerland at the core there are these Dows of course Dows are Global but for us really the the starting point was to look at Dows which have a strong connection to Switzerland could be they have a legal rapper here like a

foundational Association or the team like they have a strong presence here in Switzerland um Beyond these Dows we also extended our view and looked at other aspects of the ecosystem at service providers communities um universities and Layer Two and lay layer one and layer two blockchains and that's for us actually the ecosystem what makes Switzerland really unique for other countries in the world when it comes to daos is um it has this legal Clarity because you have two proven legal reers here so a foundation and Association and if you are of the opinion that a DA needs a legal rapper then there are only like a small hand of countries where you could incorporate a

DA so typically when you think about jurisdictions to incorporate a DA you think about Marshall Islands Cayman Islands BVI and Switzerland and what makes Switzerland really different is that you have this amazing ecosystem here you have legal and tax advisers who are specialized into Dow you have communities which are focusing in Dows also other aspects you have universities which are doing research here so you have the strong EOS system and that makes Switzerland really unique when we conducted these interviews as I said before we looked at different dimensions of the Dao ecosystem and from there we tried to look into challenges what Dows face

right now and when we look at the legal and Taxation aspects there's like the biggest I think the biggest question in the Dow space is does a dow actually need a legal repper and I think there you could say it's split 5050 50% of the people saying no a doubt doesn't need a legal rapper because it's an internet native organization it doesn't need and others say yeah it definitely needs a legal repper and our opinion was or also like the the conclusion of that is if a DA doesn't have a legal rapper it makes it really difficult to interface with the rest of the world it's extremely difficult to get a bank account for example to enter into contractual relationships so Dows really struggle if they don't have a legal repper um if

they don't have a legal repper it also makes it difficult for the contributors because suddenly you have liability for all the contributors and members of the Dow so legal rapper is really like an important piece of the entire puzzle when you look at taxation um taxation is also like a big big problem for DS um as soon as you have onchain voting as soon as you have a token um it becomes really messy from a taxation point of view so you really have to keep um track of that and you have to focus on that one challenge what we surfaced in these interviews when it comes to Dows is right now there is no good software actually to track these transactions so there's a a lot of manual work involved if you have a DA which has a token so that's also like a concern what these

different Dows have um if we go to Tech and tooling um the first question what Founders always ask or people who want to start a dow in which blockchain ecosystem should I start it um most um Dows which we observed there are somewhere in the ethereum ecosystem of course there are others in Solana in po but the majority of all the Dows what we interviewed and also what you see in deep Dow they in ethereum but that's like the first question Dow Founders always ask which blockchain should I build my D my Dow upon um when you look at the tooling stack um it's really interesting that you see some commonalities across all the Dows so

almost every Dow we talk to and also like we know they have a telegram Channel they have a Discord server they have a Twitter account which you could say that's required for community building and marketing um most of them often use notion as a vehicle to do Knowledge Management to drive project forward but then you have other other tools which are not so often used for example some Dows use dwor to do project management um also to hand out bounties so that's really interesting so the takea away from our work in the Dow radar is that there is no common Tech stack or tooling stack when it comes to Dows because there's like still a lot of tools evolving and there's not a clear opinion from the different Dows we talk

to which which tools you normally should use as a dow um when I would go to the challenges there are different kind of challenges what these Dows face um some of them are already touched base but um what because a DA is a community ultimately and most Dows start from scratch it's a huge challenge for these Dow operators and Founders how do I build a community how do I engage um this community also the the the longer this Dow exists how can you incentivize contributors to continuously contribute to the Dow and then also how do you coordinate how can you help the people to coordinate themselves to work towards a common goal

for example when it comes to finances it's also a big challenge for these Dow Founders and DOW operators how can they keep the operations sustainable in terms of finances um some Dows have a token for example which they sold and created a treasury with that but how can they generate revenues and that comes back to the discussion of a DA needs a business model in order to generate revenue sustainably and then also like to set up itself to sustainably operate so that's a big challenge the legal and compliance topics I already touch Bas um a little bit and the tech and tooling I already mentioned also before it's it's really like the challenge around and which blockchain should I um um build my Dow upon and which tool should I use in

order to stay oppressed and also like um stay up to dat um when we look at the trends and we as ask all of our interview Partners also what what kind of Trends do you see in the Dow space right now and there are like five different themes what we saw one topic which is really like um came often up was the topic of forking with communities for example splitting because there was like a uh different um um understanding of where the Dow should evolve um sub Dows or guilds for example that's a really pressing topic for a lot of dows which goes back then how can you coordinate an orchestrate work um does it really make sense that that the entire community in the da is deciding

upon everything or is it possible to delegate um for example task and activities and decisions to a smaller subgroup um is that subgroup then a guild or should it be a saow and that's an entire topic which is involving um one interesting aspect what also saw which is really like um um going up a lot is when it comes to Dow is decentralized science so we saw that there are more and more DS focusing on focusing on decentralized science where communities are brought together and basically focusing on doing research for for example for big pharmaceutical companies in a decentralized way or also like other research so that's also like a um uh a trend what we see here and when it comes to governance it's also

again the the system how Dows set up the governance is not yet really established there are different approaches from different Dows how they do it um I think all the Dows what they share when it comes to governance is that there are a lot of challenges right now you have a lot of voter fatigue if you look at Dows and they're voting um what you often see is that only like a small group of the entire da is voting upon all the decisions so that's um I think a pressing issue where a lot of people in the Dow space are focusing their efforts on how can we set up a governance which is also engaging the people sufficiently so that we can really materialize this Democratic approach about decisions and lastly now with the current bull run again it's a topic treasury management

how can a DA manage the treasury effectively in efficiently how can they set it up also that it's transparent some Dows what you see for example um out there they have processes when it comes to treasury management which is which are cumbersome which are not really transparent so treasury is always also a topic because as soon as you have people for example stepping up uh to become a a member of a multii these people take over responsibility and also liability You could argue so there needs to be established processes and policies to focus on and that was also like what we got from our interviews just to conclude that and sum this up um the Dow Rader report will be published in May or June we really Tred

to create a Dao ecosystem report looking into da the entire ecosystem here getting bringing together Trends and challenges and also then out of that we want to create like Hands-On action plans for Founders who want to start a dow and that's for example one outcome also of the Dow report was the da launch pad so we had set up a Launchpad for people who wanted to start a DA and tried to give him some advice on how to set up a DA think about topics like legal toomics operations because we really wanted to hand over our knowledge what we generated in this St report also to Founders to make it more easy so this report should be really like an actionable report which people can use um beyond that Dow Swiss what we do is

we offer or we organize conferences so every year we host the dowo Symposium which is a big conference here in Switzerland focusing on Dows um we have monthly meetups so um the next Meetup is in beginning of May focusing on the legal aspects it's in cooporation with mme and we also have work groups so if you want to join us as a member we have working groups on legal and Taxation operations governance and Tech and tooling so we are here the organization or the association which is really focusing on Dows and to drive forward because our vision ultimately is to make Switzerland the go-to place for DS globally and with that I would open it up for

questions thank you so much ben uh are there any questions in the audience sorry I missed the beginning of this I really wanted to be here but have you ever looked into associations connected with Dows I'm creating an association in Switzerland right now and was advised not to do the Dow because it was you know sort of the same thing except for not decentralized I'm doing an e-commerce site so that's the difficulty in the legals so I wasn't sure if you had looked into that at all which again can you into Association as a legal rapper us it's going to be a registered Swiss Association so so basically what we saw from our interviews is that there

are two legal entity or rappers which are currently used one is a foundation and the other one is an association what we saw is that the Dows which are a little bit older they used the foundation setup because this was the initial idea and the newer projects they're using an association as a legal rapper um there were different opinions on the benefits and the disadvantages of that what I personally think is that a found a foundation makes sense if you have a long-term vision and project and you want to basically set up guard rails to achieve that if your project can do that then maybe a foundation is better it's a little bit more expensive and more rigit if you need more flexibility and also like lower cost than an ass

Association is a better way also when we talk to different lawyers here in Switzerland um we always ask this question do you actually see a need for new legal entity because for example in in Colorado I think they set up this digital Cooperative some month ago and the the people we talk to they are not yet sure I think that's a little bit more of explorative work which is required whether here in Switzerland you need a new legal entity but for now I think most of the projects they are really happy with the association um setup what they have uh thank you really awesome talk like the E ecosystem what problems you see

being Sol yeah so you know when when I got into Dows which was on when I got into Dow in 2021 it felt a little bit like everybody wanted to start a DA for every problem in the world and I think I was one of these people um since then I think my opinion changed a lot so that goes back to the question around the business model so when you're a founder or person who want to start a Dao I think you have to think is the problem I want to solve better solved with a traditional organization like a startup or da and for me personally which is a little bit the guideline is if you think about your problem and you think 10 people spending 10 hours is doing the job instead of

like 100 people doing one hour then maybe a traditional setup is better so as soon as you can as you as you are convinced that your problem can be solved better by a swarm of people contributing some time then a dow might might make sense but also like as a dow founder I have to say um Dows are really tricky because on the one side you want to build a product often and you have to build a community which is also a product in some way so and the question is like do you really want to make your life really hard in building a product and a community because a community is based on humans so um I would say not that it's scientifically proven but I would say only 10% of the problems business models in the world can be better solved by a DA than a um a

traditional organization but that's my my opinion I think there are different opinions all around does it does it go in the right direction thank you so much ben thank you uh to the audience uh any last questions we still have a few minutes so if there any any pressing questions or not so pressing yeah just one quick questions because I also worked with a lot of dows and a lot of the Dows are not in my opinion real Dows because they always controlled by a few token holders so did you do any researches that actually showed that any da out there is really decentralized in the sense of not being

unwrapped or stateless but in the sense of actually having a really big Community we have a very variet token holder voting so I didn't do the academic research on that but my feeling would be there's maybe one or two from the 10,000 hours which you see on deep da so from our sample size I would say there's not one Dow which you could consider close to this aspirational definition of a DA and even if you look at Deep Dow with the 10,000 Dows I think they are not many um it's also like due to the um the nature how Dows evolve so often or most of the time you have a core team which is driving the community forward and they

try to decentralize but most of the Dows they get stuck at a certain point in time they they are no longer decentralizing it further and then it stops and I personally for example a really cool example of a different approach is bankless Dow which was in some way conceived by token airdrop for subscribers and that was maybe like more true to a DA how a DA should look like but yeah from our research I would say of the Dows here in Switzerland um there's a lot of work to do but I think it's also this trial and error because there are all this common challenges and problems when it comes to governance when it comes to Tech and tooling um I think there needs to be more groundwork to solve these issues in order to basically focus on this problem how

can you set up this perfect di thank you so much ben I think we have one last question uh thank you Ben for for the presentation and also for the D launch pad by the way um yeah my question is uh in your research uh what's the percentage of dows um using one token for governance and tokenomics and what the percentage was multi tokens to to separate so in the Dow report specifically we didn't look at that um so again coming back to the previous question um many Dows also right now they don't have a token for example um when you look at these um because they want to launch it in the future they

don't want to launch it so that goes back to the question what do you define as a da um what you are talking about is I think a highly sophisticated Da Model and you wouldn't find so many many ds who have that presently thank you very much