Chatting DAOs with Aaron Wright, Pt. 1
Chatting DAOs with Aaron Wright, Pt. 1
The history and early pitfalls of DAOs
Aaron Wright (@awrigh01) recently joined SZNS on Twitter Spaces to talk about his experience in DAOs. Aaron is the co-founder and CEO of Tribute Labs (formerly OpenLaw) and built the largest and most successful DAOs, including Flamingo DAO, The LAO, and countless others.
His insights into DAOs are so many that we created a series of three posts:
The history and early pitfalls of DAOs
Frameworks and innovation in DAOs
Keys to success in DAOs
Today, we dive into the first: the history and early pitfalls of DAOs.
From legal advisor to spearheading the most successful DAOs
Before crypto, Aaron worked on the Wikipedia ecosystem and successfully sold a user-generated sports content site. This is when he first explored the value of user-generated content.
In 2011, he fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and collaborated on the launch of Ethereum while collaborating with early teams at Consensus Gnosis and ChainLink.
Aaron has also been a Professor of Law. As an academic, Aaron was always thinking about crypto policy and legal issues. He co-authored a book on blockchain law and policy and worked on policies in the US related to token offerings. From his legal experiences, he started OpenLaw.
OpenLaw was initially an R&D lab focused on bridging digital assets and the “real world” using smart contracts. OpenLaw was one of the first groups to show that you can fractionalize an NFT and explore real-time payments and exotic financial instruments. But they really found their footing with DAOs.
A brief history of DAOs
One of the earliest, most notable DAO experiments was The DAO. In 2016, The DAO held around $150 million worth of ETH. The idea was to fund great projects in the crypto space with a strong community that knows which projects are most exciting.
Ultimately, The DAO ran into technical and legal challenges, and the community started to lose interest. But another experiment, called Moloch DAO, revived interest in the space. The idea behind Moloch DAO was to pool capital for grants on work around Ethereum. The success of Moloch Dao inspired builders and thinkers to focus on DAOs again, especially coming out of the bottom of the last crypto bear market around 2019.
The LAO was Aaron’s attempt at reviving the original The DAO experiment but in a way that aligned with US law. Since its launch two and a half years ago, the LAO has backed about 250 projects. In its early days, the crypto community was mainly interested in DeFi. But inside the chambers of the LAO, there was a lot of excitement around NFTs. This early move put the LAO in the perfect position to back projects like Super Rare and Art Blocks and start building the picks and axes for NFTs and collecting NFTs themselves.
After a while, it became clear that this NFT collection did not fit into the theme of the LAO. And so began Flamingo DAO. The thesis around Flamingo was to build a substantive collection of NFTs to support the creators trying to build platforms and projects around NFTs. So far, Flamingo has been incredible at spotting great projects early on, including:
Art Blocks
Crypto Punks (top 5 holders)
Bored Apes (top 10 holders)
Some of the rarest Autoglyphs
Even with such an impressive collection, Aaron feels most fortunate to have supported artists along the way. While Flamingo has focused on backing NFT projects, the LAO is still active and managed by some incredibly engaged and active members in DAOs and the crypto space as a whole.
Stay tuned for our next article where Aaron breaks down the frameworks he uses and how those have enabled successful DAOs.
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