From Gitcoin to Allo: The Case for Onchain Capital Coordination

Transcript

We think that with web 3 coming down and changing the way people are spending money that we're going to completely rewrite the capital allocation layer of the internet to be tokenized. And this just happens to be a time in which uh we're seeing billions if not trillions of dollars becoming tokenized. That's all sorts of things like stocks and currencies and you know things from the old world. I think that similar to how the internet rewrote how information is routed in society, we're going to be changing the way humanity allocates capital, now that we have programmable money, we can program our values into our money. And so, you know, what does that mean? That's a very broad design space.

[Music] I am here with Kevin Awoki and Ray O'Brien. Welcome to the pod, guys. Thanks for having us. Glad to be here. It's great to great to have you. So, we're going to be talking about better ways of allocating capital. And this is something you've both thought about and built around extensively, but maybe just to motivate the topic a little bit when we think about improving the ways of allocating capital, why should we care about this? And especially in the context of doing that on chain and Kevin, maybe we'll start with you. Yeah.

Um, so, uh, capital allocation is just anytime you're spending money in order to achieve a result. That result can be having an impact in your community. It can also be something that's a more selfish motive. And every time you buy a coffee, in order to get a buzz going, to get your day going, that's allocating capital. Anytime you're allocating grants to your community in web 3, that's allocating capital. And so basically, we think that with web 3 coming down and changing the way people are spending money that we're going to completely rewrite the capital allocation layer of the internet to be tokenized. And this this just happens to be a time in which uh we're seeing billions if not trillions of dollars becoming tokenized. And that's that's

all sorts of things like stocks and currencies and you know things from the old world. And then there's new asset classes like DAO governance tokens and memecoins. And so there's just like a huge increase in the amount of tokenized assets in the world. And you know, I think that similar to how the internet rewrote how information is routed in society, we're going to be changing the way humanity allocates capital now that we have programmable money. We can program our values into our money. And so, you know, what does that mean? That's a very broad uh design space. And I think that what we're talking about here is the future of collective action because resources being allocated with without mission uh I think is is misdirected. Uh but having only a mission but not resources to back it is

like having no wood behind the arrow. We have to find a synthesis of collective action that's that's missionoriented and has resource allocation behind it in order to back these movements and give them longevity. So I guess like a a long long story short, Reena and I have just uh launched Alo. capital, which is a spin out from Gitcoin. And our northstar is to summon the capital allocation layer of the tokenized internet. And we've got a handful of builds in which we're actually putting this theory into practice and building a movement of people who are building small utilities to help networks of people allocate capital to missions. And yeah, it just feels like we're at the precipice of something that's going to be huge and and monumental. And Alo Capital is sort of the epicenter, the network that we're

building in order to in order to facilitate that movement. Yeah. Reena, what's what's exciting to you about this or any other thoughts on that? Bronx. Yeah. Yeah. You had asked like why it's important and so it is actually what's exciting to me and and some of the reasons as to why it's important. Um what exploring this frontier of mechanisms means is finding new ways to increase accountability, increase trust, making sure that um the resources are going to where they need to be for I'm sure yourself and myself in Milwaukee and anyone who's ever run a DAO, even from that aspect, no matter how decentralized democratic and transparent we want to be, capital

allocation is actually kind of tricky. the shadow cabals which I've I heard a lot of in East Denver which I just love that I like saying shadow cabal. So, with some of the work that we're doing um with these builds that Awaukee mentioned and some of the hallucinations and ideations that we're doing within capital allocation, we're finding new ways to be able to hold ourselves our communities, governments, whatever it might be, more accountable in terms of where those resources are going and figuring out how we can actually and accurately um assess the the data that we get back from that to make sure that the funding or whatever resource we are talking about goes to the right And so what's really interesting is that the conversation when we say the words

capital, most people think in dollars and tokens and bills. However, there's resource, there's there's social proof, there's all these different ways that we can actually allocate to other people and verify where the work is going to. from the work that you've done at Edge City and the amount of admin overhead that I know is involved with keeping the organization running and keeping everybody within the community happy. The capital allocation mechanisms allow us to find better ways to distribute those resources and then review and improve upon them afterwards. So, that's something that I'm pretty pumped about just because some of the the ideas that come up are so far out there that we wouldn't even have thought of it beforehand before even saying the word capital allocation mechanism. Yeah, I think there's a really interesting

definitional thing here regarding capital. Like I've I've seen you guys write on the forum about the eight forms of capital allocation, which looks like a a thing that has been studied. I wasn't aware of that concept before, but it feels intuitively like bringing things on chain allows us to make those other forms legible in ways that currently only the financial capital side of things is. Would that be fair to say? I think so. Maybe I'll start with just a quick definitional thing. So we are a big fan of Gregory Landua of the regen network and he basically has been behind this idea of there being eight forms of capital and as you noted people are traditionally familiar with

financial capital which is like money and stocks and stuff like that. But Gregory goes on to expand capital from being financial capital to being living capital, cultural capital, experiential capital, intellectual capital, spiritual capital, social capital, and material capital. So basically um those are arguably different forms of capital uh assets to use financial terms resources and uh and so basically I I I think that one of the things that I see as as the beautiful things about web 3 is is finding ways to build bridges between financial capital and all these different types of capital capital. Um you know for example like the Greenpill podcast I would uh which which I'm the

host of you can subscribe at greenpill.network network I would say is is like a form of intellectual capital and we've gone in and we've tokenized that uh podcast so that you can support us and patronize it uh by purchasing an NFT for every episode that we do that we do and like that's an example of building a bridge between intellectual capital and financial capital and I think the key thing here is to have it be a birectional bridge where the financial capital is in service of the intellectual capital and vice versa as opposed to just like being extractive of all of these different types of of capital. I think that we're using capitalism like terms here and trying to form everything as capital. It's kind of like using the master's tools to disable the master's house a little bit. But the key point here is that is that we're

building a bridge between the eight different types of capital and hopefully building new ways to support all the things that are good in life, the the diversity and the plurality of different types of capital by using the by building the capital allocation layer of the tokenized internet. So, I know that's an extremely broad aperture for the design space, but I think it does capture how much upside there is to create more human thriving and a better life for all of the broad swath of humanity in this design space. So, I'm very excited about the design space and there's just so much richness as you learn to think in these ways. Totally.

Anything to add there, Reena? Every time Aaki says capital, we should do a shot of of wheat grass because we're regenerating, right? Of bone broth. I've hung out with team human flourishing podcast. Have Yeah, we have crates of bone broth downstairs because your old colleague, my co-founder Janine, I'm actually in Janine's house, by the way. She says hi. Her small world. Her husband is, as you might know, like a bone broth entrepreneur. So yeah, let me let me cook some of that up for our shots. I'll I'll just be housing tea, which is, you know, my advice.

But yes, hi to Janine. Uh, so Janine, who's one of your co-conspirators at Edge City, I worked at Gitcoin, I think for about a year, uh, as Gitcoin was going through its Dow nuculation. And then before that, I was actually pitching Janine at her previous job. I was pitching her Gitcoin. Um, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about what her job was before Edge City, but it's funny to have crisscrossed with many people in the space as they've gone through multiple different roles through multiple different cycles. I've mostly just been at Gitcoin for the last eight years, so it's but it's fun to see friends hop around and to work to work with them in new configurations. Gitcoin and UK are very much kind of central hubs in the space that a lot of people gravitate around. Shelling points, right? Yeah. And also the podcast,

right? Like green pill explicitly and also probably implicitly affects a lot of people because they listen to it, they get incepted with some of the ideas and then a year later they might find themselves working on a regenerative project and might not attribute it exactly to that experience 12 months earlier but it planted something that allows for that. Yeah, the best stuff in this space I think ripples outwards. Uh and we've not been very good at capturing value with Gitcoin and Green Bill. Uh, but I think that we've created a lot of value. At least I'd like to think so. So, yeah, it's a it's a really a really fun design space and I'm just so thankful that people have rallied around a lot of these visions that we've been putting out and becomes a dance when when when many of your people are

there and I think that we're sort of co-creating and co-exploring a lot of these things together. So, one thing before we get into Alo Reena, maybe I'll pose this to you first to make this specific for people in their minds. What is actually broken about the way you know capital allocation funding works today and in government and markets etc that we can just very explicitly point to and say okay moving things onchain could actually have a go at fixing this like where do these legacy systems fail that's a question team this is actually one that we are actively working to solve I'm not going to give you a completely vague answer but the capital allocation friction points There

are so many problems to solve that one of our biggest and best challenges is figuring out where we go to first from both a product market fit for what we're doing for Alo Capital and of course ways that we can also make sure that our contributors are getting paid to be able to continue building. But if we were to start from, you know, a web 2.0 you know, a traditional Tradfi lens, we we've seen what's happened from the Doge from the not and not to be as a non-American, not to be too Americanentric here, it's very apparent in terms of uh what's happening and at that government level and not knowing who is getting what, who's signing for what and what those cuts are going to do. That's part one of it. The second thing that often comes to mind for me is is exactly who hurts from some of these

cuts. um and the ways that people are are able to position certain decisions that make it seem beneficial to the greater good when in reality it's actually marginalizing certain communities worldwide. Let's say for example one thing and we've had some really great conversations with some of our partners as well as uh other governments in other countries is the speed and um efficacy in which capital allocation works. We do see a lot of adoption in South America which is super exciting and having some really really interesting conversations there and Southeast Asia in terms of that government overhead for um the admin stuff that that just kind of comes along with what you need to do for whether that be in a traditional sense or in my brain grants which is what everyone

equates us with with Gitcoin but from an allocation perspective for ALO and how we can get hands into the um the people on the ground with uh with more speed and efficacy again. And then in terms of getting into like the web 3, there's a ton of different things and it it does all actually come down to what you define allocation and uh capital allocation as. I think this group especially can appreciate some of the feedback that we've gotten when asked what a capital allocation friction is. A lot of people say it's the time and the money that is needed to go in for admin overhead and grants administration and how we can do that without having three like it's the biggest time suck for for most of our partners and the people that

we're talking to. And so figuring out ways where there's both an operational mechanism as well as that capital allocation is is definitely um a huge value for us um and for for the people that we're building some of these things for. And then it's kind of everywhere in between. Um, we do tend to have myself and a throw the spaghetti at the fridge conversations where we're just kind of looking through some of the conversations he's had or the podcast that he's talked about and just seeing what we can build from there and see if it's got teeth for lack of a better term. Is there anything else that I've missed in terms of actually like specific capital allocation mechanisms that we're really excited about solving?

So what I'm hearing is in terms of the actual problems that uh you know moving capital allocation on chain could solve the the sol the things that would improve would be something around clarity. So we're seeing this in you know US politics right now but it's probably endemic in many bureaucracies around the world where it's not clear where money is going, who's paying for it, who's getting it and you know if now there are cuts those cuts are also not very clear. So there's clarity and openness is one thing. Then you spoke about speed which makes a lot of sense.

It takes time and effort to do this quickly and well. And then the third thing I'm getting is just the sense of efficiency. Like it's it's difficult for grant operators. It's difficult for bureaucracies to allocate it efficiently. And that's what moving things on chain could also improve. Is there anything else Kevin? Yeah. So I mean I think that like basically what we're doing is that bringing capital allocation on chain and that means that capital allocation is going to inherit the properties of blockchains. And so basically blockchains are global programmable forkable transparent and incorruptible ledgers. And so basically we're going to build capital allocation schemes that inherit the transparency of blockchains. The programmability which

means that you can build state machines into them. the forkable nature which means that we can design in public together. And so I mean I think that like I would basically summarize it as we're going to build uh more effective transparent democratic capital allocation machines than ever had existed before. And um I'll just take this opportunity to show uh that I wrote a book which you can download at alo.c capital about onchain capital allocation. And basically what we've done is charted out a practical journey from present mechanisms to future possibilities. And so basically there's this whole design space that we see in front of us of onchain capital allocation and uh you can check out the book at alo.c capital. If you don't read books you can chat with an LLM that's

read the book. So that's been kind of fun to put it out there in that form factor. Um yeah there's a whole design space but uh TLDDR effective transparent democratic and incorruptible and uh and and um you know less admin overhead I think is like the TLDDR of of the category of things that we're excited about. love the JPT bot that you created for the book. It was extremely helpful in prepping for this podcast. I did also read as much of the book as I could, but the bot was very very nice and very speedy and efficient. So, this is interesting because one thing that this is helping me realize is that it seems very timely what you guys are doing.

It's kind of becoming more and more relevant each week. It seems like just with everything going on. So, let's let's actually talk about Alo Capital and what it is. So, what is it? What is Alo Capital and how does it work? Yeah. So, um first off, like we're studying onchain capital allocation and I got the domain Alo. Capital. Awesome. I'm so excited that we're just like we're building this category of onchain capital allocation and you can kind of think of us as an epicenter where different builders and funders and researchers are coming to to figure out different capital allocation schemes.

You know, I think in its most reductionist form, we want to be the place where the next forms of onchain capital allocation are invented and funded and spun out to be their own new thing. Like in in a way, you can kind of think of what we're doing as like from starting and building uh Gitcoin to building the next dozen Gitcoins. Gitcoin is known for quadratic funding. It's now going multi-mechanisms, now doing retrofunding and grants and all these things. But we envision a world in which we've invented a lot of important capital allocation mechanisms or gadgets and then given the teams behind them distribution and funding and the resources they need to accelerate their journey and then spun them up to be independent uh businesses. So a world in which Alo Capital is maximally successful will be a world in which

we've got the first 12 apps on the app store of of of capital allocation. And so we're already starting to ship different uh capital allocation gadgets. And I'd love to talk next at the like object level about the actual you know uh like gadgets that we've built but uh TLDDR we're a place where if you're a builder you can get accelerated in in building within this design space. Yeah, Reena, maybe would love would love your takes there. And also, I guess a good question for you would be, you know, why spin this out? You know, what relationship does this now have to Bitcoin? What are your thoughts on, you know, Gitcoin moving forward? Because as I understand it, you will be directing on the Gitcoin side. Is that right?

Cool. Yeah. Um, I mean, plus one to everything that Awoki said. We're we're still in the early stages and and feeling through some of the challenges that come along with creating a community as well as a category as well as a DAO as well as the funding all the things. But the idea being that there's a place for somebody to come with their problems in terms of what they need for capital allocation and access the resources, the research, the builds, and the tools to create those builds should they need them to to find their own path forward as well. and then making that, for lack of a better term, a regenerative community, we'll say the the fun words, the flywheel and the network effects of what that means with

with upside as these um as these products gain traction. And so from the Gitcoin perspective, the conversation itself as Gitcoin has evolved over the last couple of years is the efficacy to market, the speed to market for some of these features and what our products, our partners were looking for um and what could really be done in terms of the capital allocation side of things and creating these mechanisms. And what we were finding is that while Aloe and Gitcoin or let's say Grant Stack to be more more specific in terms of the app itself, while they're complimentary for some of the things that they do, they were a little bit oppositional in terms of what they were trying to achieve in the market. And especially with what

we're doing with Gitcoin right now, which is focusing on our larger rounds with these partners that wanted specific feature sets, we were unable to actually really ship a whole bunch of different things and test out the market while still maintaining that integrity of the product for these clients that we now have traction with. And so myself and Kevin and then the leader of the grants lab unit, Meg, sat down and tried to figure out what that could look like. where was the playground in which Gitcoin would be able to to take a look at some of these mechanisms. And ultimately what it came down to is that our grants program is the playground.

We're we're showing versus telling. We're going multi-mechanism for the next round. We've actually got other feature sets that we're hoping to launch in time for that while still maintaining the integrity of our client partnerships. And to spin out ALO AI and I were like that sounds like a great idea. we can co-ound this work in terms of the the capital allocation category without messing up anything with Bitcoin. And now we've got that relationship as like a binary star system where some of these testings and MVPs and betas and research that we're doing can actually be brought back into Gitcoin and Grants Lab in order to be used and build upon again without messing up the very strong path that we've got set forward for us in

2025. Yeah, that makes sense. To me, I almost see it like Alo, it feels like you're starting it's like a it's like a research development laboratory, but it's also a movement with its requisite memes and ideas and and excitement around it. And then as those things start to get developed, they can, you know, integrate back into Gitcoin or wherever else it makes sense. So, I think that's Yeah, I think that's really, really cool. Let's talk about some of the gadgets that you've already built and that you've been playing around with. So, there's a couple that uh popped out to me on the website. One is called Alo IRL. That seems extremely relevant to what we do with pop-up cities and you know and beyond. I'm curious if one of you could outline how

that works. Yeah, happy to. So, basically, Alo IRL is about IRL capital allocation. at an event two weeks ago uh around ETH Denver. What we did was we gave everyone who joined the event a QR code in which they could go to a URL and they got aundred votes that they could spend on different projects and basically those projects were all things that were good for the Boulder Colorado local community. the event that we were doing the context of the event was about Ethereum localism which is all about the design space of how can we use Ethereum native tools in order to activate locally and fund what matters locally.

So, um, the different projects that they could, uh, they could allocate to were Food Not Bombs or the Cabin Neighborhood Accelerator Program or Tinker Mill, which is kind of like a maker space in Boulder, Colorado. And they were the the participants in this Ethereum localism event were all were asked to allocate their votes to these different projects and their votes mapped to a matching pool of 500K, which we had raised as part of sponsorships of the event. And so basically the experience was that they got to see the pitches or meet the people behind all these amazing projects and then they could vote right on their phone for those projects. And the key thing is that it felt like a slick mobile app. There was no private key to download and to back up. You didn't even

know you were using blockchain infrastructure. But uh the key point was that you saw as you allocated to these projects the leaderboard change. We had a leaderboard TV screen where you could see all of the different votes and you could see how your vote changed the capital allocation on screen. And because there was a $5,000 round and basically each vote came in and could move $50 or $100 around, you got to really get a sense that I'm funding what matters in my local community. So basically TLDDR lol is a a way to allocate IRL in your local community. and we uh just made a slick mobile app that allows people to vote for for what matters in their community and um successfully distributed $5,000

at the Ethereum Localism event. But then what was really interesting was that we had other people who were participating in other events at ETH Denver and they kept on asking us, hey, can we bring Alo IRL to our event that we're running in like 3 days? And I think the developers were kind of like, oh like I think we could do that. We'll have to wipe the database and redeploy it. But yes, and and I think that the key thing is like when you when you allocate your votes and then you see, you know, like your votes pop up on screen and you see that $50 was changed from one project to another, you start to trust that like, oh, I can have an impact, which creates this sort of like snowball of hope um and momentum in your community. So, um yeah, you can check out all.xyz XYZ if

you're interested in running a pilot and would love to get one going at an edge city sometime soon to fund whatever matters to your constituency in the edge city community. Uh Reena, is there anything I missed there about AloRl? No, I think I think you kind of nailed it. It was really great to watch. We we demoed it at the summoning ceremony as well and all of the Aloe projects that we had were were on the dashboard. And I think just touching upon what Aoki said in terms of the community, like there's that trust and transparency that we talked about, but it also does allow for for a bit of that community effort like people were, you know, watching the the emojis pop up on the screen when things changed as well. And it was just, you know, participation in that in that sense of things that I thought was

really great. I think this point about participation is key. I was just talking to Audrey Tang about this yesterday where the process of going through like a something like a polish p.is uh collective intelligence process where you see your input having an effect on policy changes down the road or in this case you see your input having an effect on funding will get will start to train people to think oh wow I can have impact on my local community on these various policies that I'm a part of and then they'll start asking wait a second well why can't I have an impact in this other area right like why can't I give my input on state policy or my city policy or things like So, I love this and I think you guys are

doing incredible work in in training people on that. I could easily imagine someone, you know, like a local neighborhood collective using Alo IRL to get input about where some of their funding should go or even like I mean even like county level government, right? Or town city governments. That would be awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think the key thing that like exists at all these different levels, whether it's the event or the city or the state or the federal level, people need to see that their vote matters and to be able to trace through the impact that it's having. And I mean, it's it's one of the things that we did a lot with AloRl is like we we made uh I have this

philosophy of like rewarding the user with a dopamine hit whenever they do a a key action. And so like we made a big point that when you when you vote you can allocate a number of votes and then you can select an emoji and then when you press send within a half second on the screen there's this like confetti uh thing where if you selected frogs like the frogs just like show up and then you see the the leaderboard move. And we kind of made like a big deal of just like showing how your vote changes on screen what happens. And and the reason for that is is that we want people to see that their vote actually matters and their opinion matters. This is about participatory budgeting and if you want participation, you need to to show people that it's worth their time to

open up their phone and to do these things. And you know, I think that somewhere along the way the last hundred years, we've kind of lost that feeling in democracy that an individual can have a choice and have an impact on on where the collective is going. And and I think that as we rebuild democracy for the 21st century, it's super important to to make people feel like they have a voice and uh they can direct where impact happens. So yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's been a fun experience. Check it out at Alo Alo. Yeah, it's cool and and this is why I'm so excited about the ideas in plurality the book and plurality as a broader movement of how in some ways technology or technological progress has had some causal effect on the fact that people feel you know less engaged in their in their politics and feel like

they have less agency over what's happening around them. But now maybe actually there is a chance where the the new set of frontier technologies like blockchains, like AI agents can actually get us even more involved than perhaps way before. So that's exciting. All right. What else do you have to pitch me? I was particularly drawn to grant ships because I'm that looks cool, but is there anything else that's more like Edge City related that we could integrate? Yeah, there's a couple a couple of different things that I think might be relevant to the Edge City community. I I'll just rattle off a couple and then you can pinch and zoom on the ones that you think are interesting. So basically grant ships is a tool built on Aloe protocol that basically it's it's a pluralistic grants

framework. So basically what you could do is you could set out a pool of funds that are for edge city builders and leave it unopinionated about how those funds are deployed. Do you want to use retrofunding? Do you want to use quadratic funding? Do you want to use direct grants? you can set out that pool of funding and then basically what what uh different grant ships can do is they can can basically pitch back to the grant the the the committee that that set up the funds. Oh, I want to do a quadratic funding round for local infrastructure or or I want to do a retrofunding round for digital infrastructure or I want to do kickbacks to attendees. And and so basically what grant ships allows you to do is manage multiple ships or different subprograms of a of a grant ecosystem. And then you

get a couple of things from that. You get a plurality of different ways of allocating capital in your community that's delegated down to each ship. And then you get like non-capturability of the edge city treasury because people have to apply and go through this democratic governance process to come up with a grants program. So yeah, pluralistic grants management framework that allows different builders to come up with their own bottomup way of deploying capital. That's grant ships. I can go on to other builds, but we could we could drill in on grant ships a little bit more. I think Reena, do you want to say something? Go ahead, Reena.

Well, I want to team, did you have any questions on grand ships? And then I've got one. No, no, no. I I think that's wonderful. I think that's wonderful and that makes intuitive sense to me. I think my one my initial reaction is like, wow, that sounds really cool and at the same time maybe introduces a level of complexity that people would most people would not be able to kind of get involved in except for the few who really understand this and who would be excited about it, which we do have a lot of those folks in the community. So maybe that's fine.

Yeah, I think that there's a spectrum of like simple tools to complex tools for larger ecosystems and like AloRl is a great thing for like a 20 person event whereas Grant Ships is like once you have a multi,000 person ecosystem it makes sense to do that. Um cool what were you going to say? Nothing relevant I like something completely random. No um one of the other ones that we've been working on um and we have launched and have used is the cookie jar. And so the cookie jar is a deployed contract in which whitelisted addresses can take a certain amount a pre um designated amount each day and lead a note leave a note in terms of what they were working on. And while it's been really great for say some of the DAO

design contest submissions and we've used it for some other dev related things, it also opens up that opportunity. Um and I think you guys did something similar or somebody had on the ground it did it last year. everyone can take a certain amount of ETH on once a week or once a day to go have lunch with somebody else or buy somebody else a coffee and leave that note in terms of the connections that they've made. And the idea behind it being that there is a little bit of permissions needed in order to pull from this cookie jar, but it allows for the it's it's the onchain version of have a penny, leave a penny.

I did some work and I think that I should be compensated for it and I know I can get a little bit back to go take myself or somebody else out for coffee or to pay for my internet for the day. So, that's one that I'm excited to make some more improvements on because from the people that have used it or the people that we've launched it for, they've really enjoyed just being able to leave a note and say, "This is what I'm using my I think we were doing 069 ETH or whatever, I can't remember now to be able to go do some things or buy themselves some pizza or whatever it might be." Um, and I do think it's got a ton of implications of how we connect in real life in a little bit of a fun way.

Um, and being able to do that. So, I I think that like how would you apply this at Edge City? Um, when someone comes to an Edge City, uh, if you have their ETH address, you could just add them to a white list and say, "Hey, anyone who wants to make Edge City better, you have access to this cookie jar, you can withdraw up to x number of dollars per week. uh and just like leave a note saying what you did with it and you're making Edge City better, you know? So, it kind of creates this optimistic governance where basically everyday citizens can step up and have access to a pool of capital that's large enough to have a small impact but not large enough that they can capture the entire treasury if they just want to like, you know, rug the treasury. And, you know,

we've also set up in in our ecosystem basically like if you take money out of the cookie jar and you don't leave a good note about what you used it for, you get blacklisted and you no longer have access to the cookie jar. So, there's kind of like a uh trust but verify aspect to the way that it creates culture because it it lets people just pull money to do what they think is right without having to go through the overhead of a bunch of proposals and getting a bunch of votes and everything. Yeah, I love that. I I can think of several ways this would make our lives easier as organizers and also, you know, create the kinds of interactions that we like to see. One example is we do this thing called decentralized dinners which is awaiting a better name but essentially it's what

it sounds like. We get one person to organize like a sixperson dinner and all they have to do is just show up and and make sure that you know five other people show up who they don't know. Um so that happens through telegram but often it's easier to just give them like a hundred bucks so that they feel safe that you know they can go ahead and do this. And that's something that could just happen permissionlessly and all we would need is just a photo afterwards of, you know, everyone having a good time and smiling and and that's great because then we can just like verify that it happened. We don't have to get too involved. It can just be happening by itself. And small things like that bring so much value to an IRL experience. It's actually hard to overstate how important those little

moments are. So yeah, I love that. Okay, so cookie jars sounds awesome. One last thing before we move on to the DAO design context. I want to talk about this idea of Ethereum localism. I love this concept just by name and the very little that I know about it. I'm generally seeing a lot of the world now through this lens of cosmolocism where hyperfocus on the local IRL the people that you can be in space with and then the cosmic global experience and kind of barbelling you know on either side of that spectrum and caring less about the middle of like legacy bureaucracies nation states etc.

Um so Ethereum localism feels like it really aligns with that vision. I know you guys did an event on that a few weeks ago. I'm curious what was the impetus for that? How did it go? Any thoughts that came out of it? Yeah, the event was the general forum for Ethereum localism and um basically uh this was a movement and an event that was started in Portland uh that I went to and uh I went to actually two of them in Portland and I kind of said to them, listen, we got to bring this to Boulder. Uh, Boulder's got sort of like, you know, a lot of activism and and local action that happens. And I think that Ethereum localism can serve the needs of the Boulder community. And so before ETH Denver, we did have a Ethereum localism

event in Boulder, Colorado at the Riverside. And there was about 50 people that kind of gathered and talked about uh a bunch of different things from the object level, you know, how do we organize for food security in Boulder, how do we organize uh around maker spaces in Boulder, and then to like the meta level, which is like, you know, what's the future of how Ethereum can allocate capital locally. And so basically building building out the a practice of Ethereum localism in in different cities is going to allow us to sort of study what different people on the ground actually need and then build infrastructure that that helps support them. And so Ethereum localism again I just want to give credit to the Portland organizers for coming up with the idea

and starting to build that idea. And I think that we're just kind of like franchising it and accelerating it. We're going to actually, if I'm if I'm not wrong, we're going to have an Ethereum Localism series on the Greenpill podcast soon. So, people can check that out at greenpill.network and learn more about that movement. But in the meantime, you can download the Ethereum localism book, which is something that we released at the event and start to practice it practice it locally. There's a guide to how to do that locally. So, yeah, it's it's quite a a fun movement to to try to figure out how to make Ethereum in service of the local. And I think that we're just starting to scratch the surface of the design space now. Yeah. Reena, what were your takeaways from that event if were you there? I was. I was. I wasn't as

involved in it as as Kevin was and um candidly have a little bit of a different ideological stance um just given my skill set uh I would say and and just former life as a web 2 normie. Um I think it's all great. I love to see people on the ground figuring out ways for evolution and adoption. Um, and one thing I had given feedback to to a few of of the people that participated or were parts of organizing is just considering that evolution, not just in what they're doing in these smaller groups at some of these events, but how adoption can be more widely spread.

Taking taking the lessons that they've learned from some of these and applying them practically to ensure that it's not just another event next year where everyone's talking and discussing what their projects were. We tend to be fairly insular in Web 3 and this is like I mean I know that you've probably seen it as well even with like attendees for Edge City like everyone bring a friend that's never heard of Edge City each year would be great and continuing to grow that um I think is is really really important because we can definitely go to events where we know all the people that we're talking to and with and for and at. However, if we don't continue to make those steps and those strides to figure out how we grow that circle, we'll end up just continuing on with the

same the same events each year, the same the same knowledge while trying to flounder in a in a bull market or a bare market rather. So, this is extremely relevant to Edge City. I think we align on the core idea of there are so many incredible ideas happening in the blockchain space and we need to get them out to other fields, other frontier tech fields, other folks just living their lives in neighborhoods around the world. And so we very much see Edge City as a kind of a a project in that vein. I actually imagine some of the folks listening right now, potentially even more than 50% of the folks will be new to some of the concepts we're talking about. So that's exciting. And with that in mind, I would love to touch on the DAO design contest. But before we do, we

we might have to do something that you guys haven't done in a while, which is define what is a DAO and why are we actually interested in this topic? Because so this is, you know, this is what got me into the space in the first place. I, you know, it's near and dear to my heart. I would say in the last couple of years there's been some uh drop off in in excitement or it goes in waves, ups and downs, lefts and rights. There are there's a core group of folks who have you know uh maintained excitement and a I see you as kind of a standard bearer in that legion. Um you've written books you know uh the dowo of dows like excellent essays etc.

So maybe you could take a stab at this of like 2025. What are we most excited about here and why is this something we should be paying attention to? Yeah, thanks. Well, allow me to take this opportunity to plug my new book, How to Dow, which is your guide to mastering the future of internet coordination. Um, you can get it at how todow.xyz. And you know, I'm really excited. I I'll answer broad, but then I'll answer specifically. I'm excited about how people can organize and collaborate online. And I think that Dows are a really interesting vehicle for allowing people across the world to contribute to shared social movements together and to actually have credible

commitments with each other where they have a shared bank account and they've cryptographically agreed to do things with each other, cryptographic agreements. You know, I I I think that there's this whole generation that's digitally native that um that is going to be starting businesses and is going to be starting social movements over the next 20 years and they're going to need a vehicle to coordinate. And I think that Dows, the broad design space is the design space of how do we coordinate online in the 21st century. And I I think that, you know, as you noted, people are bearish on Dows in pockets right now. And I think it's fair to say that they've not lived up to their promise yet, but it's not fair to expect them in 5 years to have done to to be that mature yet. I

mean, look at the the corporate form. We've had 300 years of the corporate forums evolution. Only recently did we discover the LLC 50 years ago. And so Dows have been around for 5 years. Let them evolve. Let them cook. And you know, I think that we've already seen so much potential in, you know, when we when you think about the DAO, you know, around 2018 and how it just imploded in spectacular form and then the renaissance of Dows that happened with Mulik Dows and compound style Dows and Aragon over the subsequent several years, you see a lot of traction and a lot of evolution in them actually starting to work and not perfectly, but start to work. And so, you know, think think iteratively and evolutionarily. I think that there's going to be a lot of different opportunities to organize social movements in DAO like structures

and you know I'm not I'm not like DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization. I'm not a maximalist on how decentralized and autonomous it has to be. These things are a spectrum. There's going to be a spectrum of aut autonomy. I should learn to say this word if I wrote this book autonomy and decentralization that these things exist on. But the point is that we're building networks that can in the 21st century be the the wood behind the arrow on a social social movement and collective action. And so that's why the the design space is exciting for me. Specific to the Alo Dow, we basically wanted to figure out a structure that builders that are building capital allocation software can leverage in order to accelerate their journey. So you know the design space is how do we summon the capital allocation layer of the

tokenized internet? And you know, in designing that structure, Reena and I uh didn't want to do it as an insider group. We wanted to invert the insider game of designing a DAO and make it an open thing that the community could participate in. And so we had a Dowo design contest uh in which we invited the community to say, "Hey, do you have a mechanism that the Aloe Dow should should use in order to organize itself?" And we were expecting three to five proposals. We got 30 which holy cow, we were just so excited to see so much momentum from mechanism designers that were excited about Alo's vision and wanted to contribute to it. And so now we're kind of sifting through what the proposals are and how we might start to

build some muscle memory around using them in order to organize. And I'd say that we're in like a protodow phase. Uh, if you've been following the Dowo design space, there's basically this thing called a protodo, which is like the thing that exists before the DAO where you're just kind of like with a group of people that are aligned and are trying to resonate with each other and harmonize and figure out what the final form should be. And so, we're in this protodo phase where we're kind of considering all these different proposals, building muscle memory with 50 of our closest friends, and trying to design something that works for all of our different constituencies. So, TLDDR dowels are an exciting design space.

current Dows have not yet lived up to their potential. And so that's why you're seeing more and more people go into this protodo phase where they're trying to invent the future together. And um you know, all it's going to take is one person to crack it. And I think that everyone else will copy what they did. I mean, look at what happened with Mullik Dal, how that was like a spark that ignited the the revolution of dowels. And so, you know, just someone has to invent something that really works and then it'll it'll propagate to a bunch of different dowo design spaces. So, keep on studying the space and pick up my book how to dial.xyz if you want to if you want to learn more. Yeah. No, you're an excellent writer. By the way, brief intro, you've written like seven books in the last two years, right? How

how is that been? How how is the author life? I mean, it's easier than shipping software, right? Because the book is the form factor that someone that people understand. Um, no. I mean, I guess like I'd say that like, you know, the books are just the vehicle for I I feel like I'm on the frontier of this revolution and, you know, I just kind of have been really blessed to have been one of the founders of Gitcoin and Gitcoin's not gone perfectly, but at least we've been at the frontier and um, you know, I have access to people like Vitalic Gruter and Juan Benet and, you know, Sam from Ian Layer and I think that I really just want to democratize what I see, the knowledge and the access I have to people out there and I wouldn't be writing these books. And by the way,

giving me giving me credit for writing them is like too much because like in many cases like I'm just coordinating the work and helping to promote the work. I think like half of them I've actually been the the primary author on. But yeah, I mean I view like you know writing these books as as a vehicle for democratizing access to the knowledge that I have and that's really empowering for me, but it's also kind of a fool's errand because it assumes people are going to want to read these days which uh people don't have the attention span for. But at least we've gotten the the knowledge out there and it can be recombined into YouTube shorts or Twitterers or or whatever depending on what people's attention spans are. But oh my god, it's such an exciting frontier and I I'm just I just feel so

alive and excited by by how we're building new institutions on chain and online and uh I I hope that other people feel that from consuming my work. Yeah. No, we are all I can say personally I'm very deeply grateful for that because it's upstream of so much that happens, right? Like there is the core theory, the academic theory and then there is you are like you are there and you're also the one step removed towards us nor lordmeies that helps us actually understand what we're around and finding out. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to hear maybe the good, bad, and the ugly from your experience in Bitcoin becoming a Dow. Maybe Kevin, you start.

What I feel like that would just give a really clear example of like the potential and the the the dream of what this could be because it's so so exciting and then the reality. Yeah. Nothing I say is financial advice and you know like I hold GTC and ETH and all that stuff. So um you know this is informative purposes only but I'm not giving financial advice. Uh you know Gitcoin is a tokenized Dow now. Um but uh yeah, basically um you know, Gitcoin uh we we became a DAO in 2021 when there was a lot of exuberance around Dows. And the primary reason that I felt that it had to be a DAO um and not a company was that uh we're trying to fund the world's public goods and you can't do that if

you're a company and you have to always worry about, you know, like fiduciary duty to your shareholders kind of thing. And so I felt that a DAO was a way to create more democracy for the constituents of Bitcoin and then also more credible neutrality in the products that we created where you knew that like you know like someone wasn't behind the scenes like flipping your votes towards like specific projects. And so you know drank the Kool-Aid on Dows and we took the the leap by the nose and and made Gitcoin into a DAO. And I think that what we learned was that uh we decentralized too much too fast in 2021.

And uh all of a sudden we were burning a million dollars a month and not building any software products cuz it's hard to build product already. But doing it as a Dow while you're figuring out your governance is extra super hard. And I think it was two years of wandering the wilderness trying to figure out how to get product market fit and be a DAO. Um, and as the market started dropping, you saw Gitcoin start to consolidate around this unit called Grant Lab, uh, which Meg Listister, uh, is is the GM of, the general manager of, and, and now they're shipping, uh, really good software. Um, and so I think that like there's this the thing that we didn't notice in 2021 was like we wanted to decentralize, but we also had to make things that were competitive in market that were

competing with centralized companies. And I think that now we're we're we're figuring out how to decentralize and have product market fit and have the network be successful financially in addition to being decentralized. And so it's been a learning journey. Uh everyone else in the 2021 era of Dows has had their own journey with learning how Dows could and should work. And I think that there's a lot of lessons that have come out of that. Uh voter fatigue is definitely one. Nathan Schneider recently has been writing a lot about attention economies and governance where basically like you know if you're a steward of a Dow like Bitcoin how much time do you have to pay attention to the forum and actually provide a check to the people who are in power and you know there's a lot of other lessons from 2021 era Dows and Arena got here 18 months

ago just in time to clean up after everything that we created in 2021. So I'll hand it off to Reena at this point. Thanks again. Plus one to to everything that Aoki um in terms of decentralizing too quickly. I I I think I would just add that ultimately Gitcoin didn't decentralize at all. We did tend to have a large number of inside people that were working on some great things and pushing that out into the community. And so over the last 18 months of being at Gitcoin, we've paired that back down in a way that the program can thrive, our community that is relying on the program can thrive, and our technology stack is servicing our our clients and our paying

partners, which I think is really important. Having a large group of people trying to make some of those decisions is really tricky, especially with, as we know, in any community, you're going to have some very loud voices and people that need to rotate things in their own way. So, we we stumbled upon having passport, for example, because technically that wasn't funding what matters. And while it's very easy to to do some mental gymnastics to say we fund and protect what matters, we found that spinning out passport was ultimately better for everyone to be able to laser focus. So those are the the kind of the two things like over the last few months which has made it a lot easier. Lots of internal design being pushed out to the community and then basically having a whole

community saying we don't care. There's obviously the tension that lies between having a governance token and what we're doing with that or what we should be doing with that. And so this leads me to and I can pause here t- more but it can lead into the Dow design. I can tell you why I think Dows are dumb. Um I always have before even joining Gitcoin. They're broken and and we're round peg square holding holding things. But how some of these lessons and some of these changes led to part of the reason of the Dow Design contest and of course some of the challenges that that also poses. Yeah, let's hear about it. Like what what have you learned? Has anything started to emerge? Oh, this could be the LC moment of this space or the proto semblance of that. All the words, right?

It's always all the words. And so, one of the things that I've always often soapboxed a bit about, and this happened with the data side contest, is that those that are designing how governance governments work are often not seeing what their constituents need and want and making it more efficient. I love that we've got maxis in the space in various different skill sets. I think that's fantastic. But when you overindicate on one side, you're not going to get that community, that balanced community that that you're looking for. Do I think that there needs to be frameworks in place in order to make a resilient community and operating system? Um I actually answered this in a dinner in Hildsburg last year. You know, like how do you police who comes in and

out of your community? And the reality is is that you shouldn't have to. Um, but you should have a set of standards in which those people can come in, participate however they see fit, and then exit should they want to. And so as we got into the DAO design contest, there's been so many great submissions. And one of the trickiest parts is pulling out those threads and figuring out what a minimal viable governance looks like, what a minimal viable Dow looks like in order to facilitate builds and research in capital allocation methods and making those trustless making everyone accountable because that's like people want people love governance. So, they are going to come up freeways till Sunday. Something really tricky that's

going to take months to roll out and it's got an onboarding plan and it's got mathematical equations. I'm all for that. However, does that suit what we're looking to do right now? Yes or no? And while while not ostracizing them for their ideas, we've got some great proposals in terms of AI treasury management. That's not something that I necessarily think is a great idea coming out of the gate, but I do think it's something that we could build up towards. And then the last thing from all of it is the benevolent dictator stuff. If you put a bunch of people in a room and just yell capital allocation mechanisms at them, they're not necessarily going to output what we need them to output. And so there's been that tension and that support of giving up

control, which is totally fine, and helping pull some of these things to push them in the right direction for coming like coalescing around these phases because all the big brains have different ways of looking at it. If I'm holding up a crayon drawing and somebody else has like a full uler scale thing happening, we're not necessarily going to get anywhere in an efficient manner anyway. And so does that it begs the question is it easier for myself and agents to say yes no we're doing this now and if everyone's cool with that we'll keep on going but then automatically we are defying what the rule or definition of a DAO is. So those have been some of the challenges like really really cool stuff coming out of

it and just figuring out how we can push that push and pull that group forward without putting our fingers on the scale. I am very excited for you to figure it out. We've had very similar things at Edge City where we've been thinking through what are the elements of governance organization or or input that we can surface to the community whilst maintaining you know essentially the ability to execute. One thing we found just to give an example back when you know we were doing Zuzaloo stuff. We had a collective decision that we surfaced two people around where we should do the next event. And what happened was basically a week-long deliberation process by the end of which people were just so exasperated and they were like just please decide for us because this

is going nowhere you know and so even something like that which you would think oh we could get input on this right something about the fact that the decision the final decision was given to the community made it very difficult. So we realize okay maybe we get input but then someone is is the final decision maker and so yeah things like this we're also thinking through. Cool. Well, I would love to end on the relevance to what I think of as like network societies and the topics that we, you know, care about at Edge City, which range from, you know, just broadly creating uh more human flourishing in the world to the actual tangible reality of creating these pop-up cities that

eventually will become permanent hubs, etc. You've both been to at least one or two events like this. I'm curious if there are any links that you can find between the work that you're doing and the kinds of things that we're creating with Edge City, whether it's just like using it as a implementation layer for some of the the applied research that you're doing or yeah, perhaps anything else. Yeah, I'd love to forgive me. It's the podcast toast to me. I have to ask you a question now. Where would you say you're going with Edge? like what's what's the ultimate vision that that you want to have realized with with Edge City and and then maybe sort of like our work can be in service of that in addition to that being in service of deployments for for our work. So like what's what's sort of like the northstar

for Edge City? What what is like the highest articulation that you and Janine have of where it's going? Yeah. So I'll give you two answers to that. One is just the broader idea is that we want to create a layer for experimentation with what society should and and could look like and feel like. So, how should people live together? How do we create healthy communities? How do we create spaces where people can flourish but also actually incubate the technology that they need in their community and things like this, right? So, you know, new education systems, new ways of living together, new ways of structuring communities. And the the way that we've, you know, discovered, the format that we've essentially incubated for this is what we call a pop-up village. So we

bring about a thousand people to live together for a month and it's just a place you know perfectly created for experimentation. So people teach each other what they're experts in. They learn from each other. They are constantly building things, iterating, getting feedback, etc. There's kids running around. It's a default healthy environment because we want to prefigure what a healthy community actually could look like by just creating a microcosm of it for a month. And the idea is that we we don't want people to fully exit society and go off on an island somewhere. We want we call these microexits. So it's a chance to really try something new and and live in a different way and then go back to where

you're from and integrate those learnings into where you live. And the the longerterm vision is to create a global network of these villages. Some of them will stay permanent and they will pop up and pop down and some of them will start to become permanent hubs. For example, Esmeralda is a new town that we're working with closely in California and create a network of people that value this kind of experimentation and agency in their communities and want to use those experiences to increase human flourishing in the world. So we think of it as a network city that we're building. But you know that's kind of the the 10 plus year time horizon vision. Yeah. I think that that's a beautiful vision and um I hope to just

come as a participant and enjoy that with the people that I love. And and I also like as you were talking about your vision, I couldn't help but think about how much it sort of es and flows with this vision of Ethereum localism which thus far has been about taking Ethereum and sort of like the global commons that it represents and reinvigorating cities like Buler and Portland and hopefully more cities soon. Whereas, you know, kind of what you all are doing is is a little bit more creating pop-up cities and villages that are built around first principles and new communities that are designed to experiment with these things. I think that they're those two approaches are complimentary ways of viewing Ethereum localism in that one's taking what it already exists and iterating towards a more protopian

future and the other is sort of starting with um a little bit more of a clean canvas in some ways uh but also is like protopian and is iterating towards that global maximum that vision and we should get too plugged into Ethereum localism I guess is a is a long way of saying that I would and vice versa yeah and then the other thing that comes to mind for me is that um you know as you're creating this experimentation of new ways to live together. You know, what are the localist ways of doing participatory budgeting or you know, new institutions that these cities should have? I mean, should each edge city have its own IRL experience where people who just by virtue of being there have a vote in, you know, where the community is going?

I think that there's a lot of upside there. And then also I think that as you build this global network of these villages, how do they relate to each other and how does capital get allocated between them between the global and and the local like I think that you know we know that we don't want to reinvent the sort of like you know corporate franchise model that existed in the 21st century but we also don't know exactly what we're inventing and sort of feeling into that space to create a a flywheel where each city makes the network stronger and the network becoming stronger makes the city stronger. Maybe we can build some some stuff for you all there. But a TLDDR onchain capital allocation for edge cities and Ethereum localism as a movement adding to edge city I think are the are the two ways

that our our visions intersect. And then we should you know what we should do? We should make it a Dow and then hand it over to Reena. What do you think Reena? More no more doubts. No more. Not enough. Uh anything to add Reena? Yeah, I mean plus one I was actually from more of a of a tactical like that eb and flow between the cities and figuring out what a version of UBI and everything could be in a way that's equitable across some of these cities is really interesting and I think might help with the admin stuff. And one thing that I talked about actually when I was at the last at Esmeralda, which I'm I'm making some jumps here, but what I find really interesting is like those micro exits that you were talking about tear, like how we can recreate that I'm not on

vacation feeling that people get when they spend a month, you know, they could they leave and they just like, oh, I'm not here anymore now. I'm back to not eating as healthy or I'm a little bit more internal in terms of my conversations. And to me that is an allocation, right? Like you're it's a version of severance where you're trying to balance out who you were at this one event and then bringing that back into your everyday life. I think that there's some interesting things there for sure. Um and then of course like bridging the gap between the local governments, the federal governments that we're working with for their allocation and recreating some of those things within the pop-up cities or finding ways that we can even test with the people and like have them participate in some of these conversations I think could be really

compelling. Yeah, beautiful. I really think that we I would love Edge City to be a place where some of these ideas can be integrated in, you know, IRL contexts and then seeded with people who maybe don't think about crypto in their day-to-day, but would think about like, oh, it was actually really cool to live somewhere for two, three weeks where I feel like I had input on what was happening and I had some agency in the direction of this group as it's going or in the experience as it happens. and then you know when they head back to wherever they live and start to think about like oh what are ways I could have that here as well you know and and thereby spreading these ideas so I think

that's a beautiful place to end it thank you both so so much for joining me thank you