DAO Philosophy and Business: My Experience With the Joystream DAO

If you’d have googled dao only like 5 years ago, the majority of search results would have been about taoism (also known as daoism). It is an ancient philosophy and religion, that arose in the 6th century BCE in China. According to the Wikipedia, “The Tao can be roughly thought of as the flow of the Universe or as some essence or pattern behind the natural world that keeps the Universe balanced and ordered”. If you google it now, the results are mostly about “member-owned communities without centralized leadership”.

Nowadays, things change very rapidly not only in Google search, which just reflects these changes. People create new forms of organization, invent new technologies and improve different spheres of life. But what we want to achieve is balance, we want to live in harmony with self, others, and nature. In the rapidly changing world it is getting more and more difficult to gain balance, and traditional organizations, which lack flexibility and can’t quickly adapt to changes, are beginning to be replaced by more flexible forms.

That’s how the waterfall model was replaced by agile frameworks in software development. That’s how traditional business models are starting to be replaced by DAOs, a new experimental form of making business, which appeared due to the invention of blockchain.

Balance in your life and the DAO

In taoism the balance is summarised in Yin and Yang principles, which see the world with complementary forces, such as light and dark, active and inert, or hot and cold. They are everywhere in our lives. When we notice somebody goes to extremes, we want to go to the opposite extreme in an unconscious attempt to restore the balance. Here we need to remember that restoring the balance does not mean rejecting the opposite point of view, which only makes things worse. It is just adding color. If everything is getting too black, add white. If it’s all white, add black. The truth is always somewhere in between, and when you see the world in all its colors, you feel so alive and inspired…

That’s what DAOs do. It’s not only about business and making money. What they try to do is to create a well-balanced organization that is like a self-evolving organism, and thus to get maximum efficiency and inspiration for all its members. In this ideal world, nothing should be imposed. Everyone should be heard, everyone’s opinion matters. Very much unlike boring centralized organizations, whose important decisions are driven by one person or a group of people, who often care only about money.

DAOs still have a long way to go. Many of them are still insufficiently decentralized and have inconvenient tools for operating and decision-making. But it’s very interesting to see how they appear and evolve, the speed with which they gain devotees is impressive.

My DAO experience

It’s been a year since I participate in Joystream DAO. Joystream is trying to build a decentralized video platform owned, controlled, and operated by its users. To involve people in its building and governance, it announced a Founding Members Program and is planning to allocate 20% of mainnet tokens to its participants. The program is very generous, but requires quite a lot of time and diving deep into things. For me, this experience started with pure curiosity, but gradually I became more and more devoted to the idea and philosophy of a DAO in general (I didn’t even know anything about DAOs before).

It’s like a job but gives you far more opportunities for self-expression and far more freedom. You can participate in working groups (devoting as much time as you want), choose Council members and even become a consul yourself, make proposals and suggest your ideas, create Bounties, and participate in them. For all these activities you get reputation and thus influence, testnet tokens, and if you achieve a Founding Member status, which usually takes several months of work, you will also get an allocation of mainnet tokens. The more you contribute, the more you’ll get!

During my year’s involvement, I participated in several working groups, worked as a consul, did some translation tasks, made research and videos, and suggested different ideas. We had a lot of discussions and sometimes even quarrels, we formed political parties and debated with each other, we lost some participants during the stagnation phase and then acquired even more interesting contributors. But what was always the most important is the joy (that’s why it is Joystream, needless to say). You participate because you like it and you can always leave if you lose your joy. It’s not only about Joystream, it is about every DAO. Of course, some part of the motivation is always money, but it’s never the most important thing if you got involved in the DAO. The mission of the company, the way, and then just the process itself are becoming a real driving force.

Joystream currently has a little more than 100 Founding Members, but they aim for something like 200, which still gives a lot of time and opportunities to contribute, so you can try yourself. Since the beginning, they tested two different models of the program and are still making a lot of improvements and experiments with everything. The goal is to create an effective and viable DAO by the time of mainnet, which is planned for December 2022. And in the mainnet, things are going to be even more exciting, because the budgets will explode, so a lot of money will be at stake — the total fundraise is roughly $13m at a $60m valuation. Imagine this sum will be governed entirely by token holders!

Your money, your rules

Joystream DAO has raised some money. It is not such a big sum compared to some other DAOs.

If you open the “Top DAO Tokens by Market Capitalization” page on Coinmarketcap, you’ll see that the biggest DAO project, Uniswap, has a 5 billion market cap. Almost the same as McDonald’s Japan, which currently has a $5.28 billion capitalization. For May 2022, the top 5 DAO projects have already reached a 1 billion market cap.

New DAOs are being formed as you read this article. A lot of money is in the hands of DAO participants. Let’s see what they’ll do with them!