Mariano Conti, the head of smart contracts for MakerDAO and creator of SelloutDAO, and Peter Pan, the summoner for Metacartel DAO, discuss all things DAOs, including how Peter started Metacartel DAO after being rejected from MolochDAO, and why Mariano initially voted against Peter joining. (Peter eventually joined.) They also discuss how they came to form YangDAO, why Mariano almost rage quit MolochDAO after the YangDAO formed, and how other MolochDAO members felt about SelloutDAO, which Mariano describes as an experiment in “on-chain corruption.” We discuss how DAOs are actually heavily built on trust and why they require a lot of social coordination off-chain. They also discuss funding for LAOs, which have a legal entity such as an LLC affiliated with them, why Metacartel is launching a LAO, and which types of projects should be funded by DAOs vs traditional corporate structures. We also cover governance issues at MakerDAO, why it has a CEO, and what role leadership in general plays in a DAO.
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Episode links:
Mariano Conti: https://twitter.com/
Peter Pan: https://twitter.com/
MakerDAO: https://makerdao.
Metacartel DAO: https://www.metacartel.
SelloutDAO: https://
Unchained interview with Ameen Soleimani of MolochDAO: https://unchainedpodcast.com/
Unchained interview with Santiago Siri: https://
DAO Revival: https://www.coindesk.com/in-
Andy Milenius’s account of MakerDAO’s change from a decentralized to a centralized project: https://www.scribd.com/
CoinDesk story on the rift: https://www.coindesk.com/
Two most recent MakerDAO votes: https://vote.makerdao.
Unchained interviews with Rune Christensen of MakerDAO:
Part 1: https://unchainedpodcast.
Part 2: https://unchainedpodcast.
MakerDAO vulnerabilities:
ETH could have been stolen: https://hackerone.com/reports/
Critique of the LAO: https://prestonbyrne.com/2019/
MakerDAO launching multi-collateral Dai: https://www.coindesk.com/
Are DAO’s legal? https://www.coindesk.
Unconfirmed interview with Uniswap: https://
Unconfirmed episode with Ryan Zurrer about resurrecting the DAO: https://unchainedpodcast.com/
Unchained interview with Aragon: https://unchainedpodcast.com/
Transcript:
Laura Shin:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin.
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Laura Shin:
The topic for today’s show is DAOs. Here with me in Osaka, Japan at Devcon to discuss are Mariano Conti, head of smart contracts at MakerDAO, and Peter Pan, summoner of MetaCartel. Welcome, Mariano and Peter.
Mariano Conti:
Hi. Happy to be here.
Peter Pan:
Thanks.
Laura Shin:
Let’s start with introductions. Why don’t you each talk about what you do in this space. Mariano, why don’t we start with you?
Mariano Conti:
Yeah. Sure. So I’m the head of smart contracts at MakerDAO. I’ve been at the foundation for three years now, and I’m in charge of making sure that the Maker platform’s smart contracts work correctly. So lately it’s mostly been taking care of audits and formal verification ahead of Multi-Collateral Dai.
Laura Shin:
Great, and Peter. Oh, actually, you know what I wanted also to ask you? Could you just describe SelloutDAO? Because that was something fun that you did that’s related to our topic.
Mariano Conti:
Yeah. That’s a hobby of mine. So I am also a member of MolochDAO, and at a hackathon I decided it would be fun to try to do on-chain corruption, and this involved…SelloutDAO was just a smart contract that I can use as my delegate key in Moloch, so anybody can use my voting power to create proposals and vote on them on the Moloch DAO, and it actually works on any Moloch-like DAO.
Laura Shin:
Wow. Interesting. So we’ll dive a little bit more into that later. So Peter, why don’t you tell us about MetaCartel, and I think it’s separate, MetaCartelDAO, maybe not, I’m not sure.
Peter Pan:
Right. So hi, I’m Peter, and I guess I’m one of the people running the MetaCartel community, right, and the MetaCartel, I guess, is a community focused around DApp experimentation and DApp development, right, and currently one of the projects we’ve been working on for the last, like, half year, right, is our MetaCartelDAO, right? So the MetaCartelDAO is the community’s DAO, at least the MetaCartel community’s DAO that’s focused on funding, right, DApp experimentation, specifically new business models and new use cases.
Laura Shin:
Great, and can you give us a little bit of the backstory of how you started that? Because I think it started with you being rejected from MolochDAO, right?
Peter Pan:
Right. So, yes. So, the MetaCartelDAO was kind of born from I guess the path to redeeming myself, right? So while the MetaCartel community have existed for a while now, like, ever since…it was created around last September, nearly a year ago, right, or it’s now…yeah, nearly created a year ago, but like, during April, I believe this year, MolochDAO was really taking off and I really wanted to be part of that governance experiment, right? And you know, well, Ameen picked me to kind of join it because I was doing a lot of stuff around DApps, right, and they wanted a new perspective within MolochDAO, except I don’t have that much money, so I pledged 10 ETH as opposed to the standard 100 ETH, right? And you know, I didn’t have a lot of friends in Moloch, so I was rejected, and basically…
Mariano Conti:
Can I say something publicly? I voted against Peter.
Laura Shin:
Oh, really?
Mariano Conti:
That first time. Yes.
Laura Shin:
Wait. Oh. Why?
Mariano Conti:
It was mostly a social contract. Like Peter said, the initial members mostly pledged 100 ETH, and some of us said that we just by principle wouldn’t let anybody with less than 100 for the first few months. So, this is so public on the blockchain, you can see, I would vote down for the first couple of months people joining with 50 and 10, but I think something good came out of it. This is by penance. Sorry.
Peter Pan:
No.
Laura Shin:
Wait, so are you saying that you would accept him now?
Mariano Conti:
No. The second time around…well, you tell the story.
Peter Pan:
Right. So I mean, I accept the apology, Mariano. It’s all good. I understand where it came from, but yeah, interestingly, you know, so I’ll get to how I got in later on, even that was very contentious by itself, but I was rejected, and then I was like, you know what? Why don’t we create our own DAO?
So for more context, for the last couple of months, right before April, right, the MetaCartelDAO kind of finished up a lot of its work around meta transactions, right? Basically it’s a solution that allows you to abstract gas fees, right, from the user experience, and as we finished up this work we were looking for new things to kind of work on. Like, we have a great community, we have a funny meme, a dancing chili, what should we work on?
And it was like, and we realized no one was building DApps. It wasn’t a headline title in the space, right? Everyone was still focused on the infrastructure, and been working close to the infrastructure layer, right, we realized that we should be getting into building DApps, and we were like, okay, let’s create a DApp incubator, or let’s create a pot of money to fund DApps, right? And as I was rejected, this was a perfect, I guess, like fun little I guess stunt to kind of get back at it. It started off as a meme, right, but then people were like, hey, sure, I’ll put ETH in the pot, and I’m like, oh, really? Cool. Yeah.
And I am also a member of a few other DAOs, including Moloch, and so how I got into Moloch, right, was I was working on this other DAO with Ameen, right, and James Young and a few other people, Ken Yang and Darren Mills, right, on this thing called YangDAO, right? So basically, one day I was thrown into a chat by Ameen, and it was this thing called YangDAO. I was like, what the hell is YangDAO? And he was like, oh, let’s credit DAO to push Andrew Yang, right? And then apparently it became a thing, and worked on that, and I guess Ameen kind of pushed for a funding proposal to fund the work of YangDAO, right, and I was a part of that. And even then, it was very contentious by itself. Even how the votes kind of fell through, it was also contentious, but yeah.
Laura Shin:
Wait. Why?
Mariano Conti:
Because if I remember correctly, a lot of us voted no on YangDAO, but this was YangDAO proper, Moloch funding YangDAO, not Peter specifically, and then Ameen, since he had his votes and he had, I believe, 500 shares of onchain voting, aside from his own. He’s going to vote in his favor, and I actually considered rage quitting then because I thought that YangDAO, it was too US-centric, too political, but I came around after watching the memes. I believe everything is better with memes, and it’s a way that people can communicate and understand, and in the end I accepted it.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Well, that was actually my very first thought. Like, you’re Argentine and Peter is Australian, so I was like, why would you guys care about doing the YangDAO, but now you’re saying that you’re glad that you guys did that?
Mariano Conti:
I am from Argentina, but I do follow US politics quite a bit, because anything that happens in the US creates ripples, and in places like third world countries like Argentina, we feel like anything that happens in the US or Europe, we feel it bad. So if you get a cold, we get pneumonia, and I was following the elections, and I realized that this was actually a good way to proceed.
Laura Shin:
That’s interesting. It’s also interesting to me because I feel like Andrew Yang has a much more domestic-focused platform, but now we’re like, getting really far afield. Oh, so just to go back, I wanted to ask about MetaCartel. How much money now do you have in it and what are the requirements for people to participate?
Peter Pan:
Right. So I guess, like, we recently dipped back under 1,000 ETH because we keep spending our ETH, right?
Laura Shin:
Oh. Cool.
Peter Pan:
But you know, we hover up around 1,000 to 900 ETH nowadays, right, and the requirement is really, like, so you can actually join the DAO through two means. You can either pledge funds, and the minimum is 10 ETH right now, right, which is about 2,000 dollars USD, and like, you can also join the DAO by providing work that we want to get done in the space, right? And it’s really, like, it’s easy to see work, and I guess pledge funds as a minimum barrier to filter people through, and it’s really about…we just want to actually get…I guess what we really care about is getting the right people in versus how much they bring monetarily, right?
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, depending on the demographic, like, for some people, two thousand dollars is a lot for a hobby type thing, but if they can work their way into it and not…
Peter Pan:
Correct.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, but then, is there like a max? Because like, otherwise, are you guys then subject to people just sort of dominating that DAO?
Peter Pan:
Yeah. We do have a max, as in whenever there’s a new member that wants to join, right. You know, there’s a social max of 100 ETH at the moment, right, but you know, whenever a new proposal comes we all discuss it as a DAO, right, to whether we’re comfortable with them joining, firstly, and them comfortable joining with that many shares or that much power. Yeah. There’s some cases where we’ve actually not let certain people come in with as much, interestingly enough.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Well, so before we go on, I actually also want to go back to SelloutDAO. So what was the reaction from the other MolochDAO members to that? Did they like it? Did they dislike it? Did they feel like you were hijacking the process? Do they agree that it is on-chain corruption?
Mariano Conti:
Internally, a lot of people did like it, and as you can see, it is not very powerful yet. Somebody can hijack my account and vote with my 100 shares, that’s about it. So even though we do have some kind of voter apathy, if somebody puts a proposal through, it’s very easy to get shut down. It only needs two other members maybe to vote it down. So as a social experiment, it was really, really amazing. Pretty much everybody liked it, and it gave way for other types of discussions, like do we need shielded transactions, anonymity? A lot of people do want to vote yes or no to proposals, but they don’t want to make it be public, make it known what they voted on. So no, I think it was a really good experiment, and when I wanted to join MetaCartel, this was after SelloutDAO, I got a little bit of a pushback because they said, are you going to try to corrupt this one as well?
Laura Shin:
That’s funny.
Mariano Conti:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
So did they let you join?
Mariano Conti:
Yes. I believe one member voted no to my proposal, but…
Laura Shin:
Was it Peter?
Peter Pan:
No. I wanted Mariano to join. I welcomed him in. So, the member that I guess raised a concern against his crimes, right, with MolochDAO, was Makoto.
Mariano Conti:
Makoto from Kickback and ENS?
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and he does another DAO.
Peter Pan:
Orochi.
Mariano Conti:
Orochi.
Laura Shin:
Right. Right.
Mariano Conti:
Yeah. So I joined that one as well.
Laura Shin:
What does that one do?
Mariano Conti:
It’s an event-style…it was made specifically for Devcon as a way to fund and sponsor events, and it may go on after Devcon, we’re still not sure.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Cool. Well, wait, I just want to make sure I understand SelloutDAO again. So like, in any given moment, when is it that somebody can take your…
Mariano Conti:
Right now the way I wrote it, because this was just during a weekend, it only works one time. So when I did it a couple of months ago at ETHBerlin, I managed to sell my vote once, and the member who bought it, Santi Siri from Democracy Earth, he ended up getting voted in because people loved the experiment.
And the second time I activated it, again just for one other bribe, let’s call it, and I was giving a presentation on Sellout, and the first slide had a QR code saying, whoever sends one Ether will be the briber, and before I turned to the second slide, somebody shouted from the audience, sold.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Wow.
Mariano Conti:
So somebody sent one Ether in like 30 seconds to an unknown smart contract.
Laura Shin:
And do you know who it was?
Mariano Conti:
I think I do know, but this person has not actually used it. They are reselling this bribe OTC.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Wow.
Mariano Conti:
Yes.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So, I guess you, in a way, almost have anonymous transactions.
Mariano Conti:
It is a way to kind of do that, yeah, and I think it was a great continuation of the experiment. I thought whoever sent the ETH would just come to me and say, hey, I want this to happen, I want to try to get some money for this proposal, or I want to join as a member, but no. They want to resell it.
Laura Shin:
Well, but one thing is, I guess I thought with like MolochDAO that part of the voting and stuff is like, people sort of knowing who is proposing what, you know what I mean? So…
Mariano Conti:
For a member to join, somebody has to sponsor them. So you cannot create a proposal, not anybody can do it, only existing members.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Wait. So for Sellout, they can only vote, they can’t also propose?
Mariano Conti:
For Sellout, yeah. If they do it via Sellout then they can create proposals without my intervention. So, they run through me as a proxy, that’s it.
Laura Shin:
Right. So did people kind of dislike the fact that then they don’t know who is behind any given proposal?
Mariano Conti:
No, not really, because it was still a controlled experiment. As I told you, I only activated it twice, and for this second time, yeah, it is…we don’t know what’s going to happen, what proposal is going to go through, and even if it is going to go through at all, because I give the limit of one week, and after one week I will just revert to my original key and shut down the SelloutDAO.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Why are you putting a time limit on it?
Mariano Conti:
Because the way Moloch works, SelloutDAO is a smart contract that acts as my delegate key, so as long as I have a delegate key, if it is SelloutDAO then I cannot do anything else on the system. I cannot vote on anything. I cannot create my own proposals.
Laura Shin:
Oh. I see.
Mariano Conti:
And if I want to keep participating then I need to revert back to my original key.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Okay. So, when Santi had it, what did he do with it?
Mariano Conti:
He put himself up as a member. So he proposed himself as a member. I was going to propose him anyway because I think he’s a good candidate for Moloch, but when he found out what I was doing he said, no, no, I want to go the SelloutDAO way. It’s like, there’s an Argentinian created on-chain corruption and another Argentinian actually using it. We thought it was hilarious.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. That is great. I did a great episode with him and Glen Weyl.
All right. So, why don’t you just…can you guys each describe how you handle the governance of, well, so MetaCartel we can talk about, but then I was also thinking maybe MakerDAO? So whoever wants to start, just in general describe the governance of your DAO.
Peter Pan:
Right. So one of the interesting things is while most people assume that because the governance, I guess the hard governance on chain, right, aspect of the DAO, of MetaCartelDAO is distributed amongst, you know, its members, that governance is conducted in a distributed manner, if that makes sense, right? Like, you know, governance in MetaCartelDAO is done and conducted in a very soft manner, right? It’s mostly soft governance, actually.
Laura Shin:
And how do you define soft governance?
Peter Pan:
I guess it’s like, you know, before really any decisions are made on chain membership proposals or funding proposals, it goes through, you know, the internal forum, right, our internal discord chats, and we have weekly calls as well around new proposals. I guess there’s like, due diligence that’s done, right, and we trust people to conduct due diligence. We basically…it’s actually heavily built on trust, ironically, right, and it seems that we can’t get away from, like, I guess, you know, human leadership, as it is. I think that’s something that we realized, that we’re going to actually further invest into, that social scalability, if you will.
Laura Shin:
And what do you mean by that?
Peter Pan:
I guess it’s like MetaCartelDAO right now has bottlenecked quite a bit governance-wise because you know, I guess it’s like, basically when you have one person doing a lot, that person tends to have a lot of information asymmetry, right, and because of that, they basically, I guess, like if people trust that asymmetry, right, and trust that person’s knowhow, then it’s fairly lopsided, and you end up with just people following one person, right, and that’s quite inefficient just simply due to input, output, right, or decisions that can be made and proposals that can be processed.
Laura Shin:
Right. Like, it’s not delegated.
Peter Pan:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
So then, what are you saying, that now you need, what, more people or…
Peter Pan:
So one of the things we’re looking to solve, I guess solve the social scalability problem of DAOs, right, and how we govern this DAO is by, we’re at 40 people right now, right, and soon it’s going to be 60, 80.
Laura Shin:
Wait, you said 40? Oh. Okay.
Peter Pan:
Yeah. There’s 40 people right now and soon there’s going to be 60, 80, 100, and that’s very unmanageable. So we’re looking to actually set up working groups, right, and delegate trust and autonomy to each one. So it’s likely going to be a working group that’s going to basically be focused on taking care of due diligence, right? There’s one that’s going to be focused on outreach, one that’s going to be fundraising, right? And what we’re starting to…and for example, right now we’re spinning out our first, I guess, like, group called the Raid Guild within our DAO.
Laura Shin:
The Raid Guild?
Peter Pan:
Yes.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So what’s that?
Peter Pan:
Well, the Raid Guild is really focused on design and development of everything we need in the DAO, and you know, like, we’ve been funding work basically to service the DAO internally, right, but we realized that even the teams who are running that need to scale socially, right? And so we’re almost just starting to spin out working groups, and each one will likely have its own leader, right?
Laura Shin:
So, I don’t know if I totally follow, but like if one of the projects needs marketing or something, then there’s like an in-house marketing, is that what you’re saying?
Peter Pan:
Correct. There’s likely going to be a Shill DAO, right, where the shillers go there. So, just like we have a Raid Guild, there’s going to be a Shill Guild or a DAO, et cetera, internally within it.
And we kind of think about MetaCartel and the community and the DAO not as just one organization. We think of it as a system, like a kingdom, if you will. If you think of it as a kingdom were, it creates economic value, but it doesn’t optimize for just money, right? It optimizes for also our wellbeing, you know, it invests resources into culture, right, you know, and we even have a visual map, right, internally on a figure board of like MetaCartel as a kingdom. So we have a forgery where it kind of maps out all the pieces of software that we have shipped, right, and exist out there. We have an alchemy lab where it’s like ideas, right, it’s almost like a visual CRM to map out the, I guess to map out the virtual reality of the MetaCartel kingdom, right, and it really helps us frame how we should think about things, right.
And on this map we have one city right now, imagine you have different…literal, a map, with like, images representing buildings, right, and all of the components of the DAO from our discord chat to our forum to our DAO bank, right? It’s all visually represented by images of kingdom, houses, townhalls, right? And we have a forge, it’s literally a picture of a forge in the part of the city, and then like, the logos of the software projects around it, right, in a fence, and you know, we’re actually, as we’re spinning out our working group, visually on the map, which is actually quite big, on the other side of it, maybe a few kilometers, if you will, away from the city, we’re likely going to set up visually the Raid Guild and that working group, right? And that’s like helping us frame a lot of how we think about how to socially scale it out.
Laura Shin:
Okay, and when you say that, you mean the DApps that you’re funding.
Peter Pan:
Yes. I mean, like, the DApps that we’re funding and supporting, right, we almost see them as, I guess, you know, another piece of the pie or the kingdom, right, and they may start out very small, but they may have their own town and city eventually, later on, right?
Laura Shin:
Right. There’s something about this that reminds me of, like, ConsenSys, but like, maybe with the incentives a little bit better aligned or something.
Peter Pan:
We don’t have a lot of money.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Okay, but yeah, I don’t know if having a lot of money has worked out super well for some of the teams in ConsenSys.
All right. So, why don’t we then now talk about how governance is handled in MakerDAO.
Mariano Conti:
Yes. So, Maker is one of the oldest projects in Ethereum. So we’ve been doing governance for a while, and it is not unlike what Peter mentioned. We now have reached a sort of cadence where everything starts at the forums. We used to do it just on our chat and on Reddit and on Twitter, but finally we created a forum, and everything starts there, and the community now, even though we have, and this was also voted in, we have an interim governance facilitator, which is somebody who works at the Maker Foundation, to organize all the weekly votes, because there are many and many more are coming.
The community is now organizing, and they create their own issues that they want to talk about and eventually vote on, but I will say that one of the main ones is of course raising or lowering the stability fee.
Laura Shin:
Which is basically like the interest rate?
Mariano Conti:
Yes. The interest rate of the DAI loans, and that, it went through many iterations. First everything was called an executive vote, so people would vote directly with their MKR on whether a smart contract would, we call it casting a spell, whether it would actually raise it or not, but then we realized not a lot of people voted on that, so we created something called signaling votes, which are much lighter. They still require in on-chain transaction, but they are much lighter and they don’t require you to move your MKR from accounts.
So that, it started gaining a lot of traction, and then people got a little bored with it, because nobody wants to vote once a week, and this is something that at least I personally want to see fixed by the community itself. I would like for them to…there’s a lot of great communities that talk about decentralized finance, talk about Maker, talk about other projects, and they should get together and via smart contracts delegate some of their voting power to elected members.
We can learn something from traditional politics or whatever you want to call it, but the good thing is, since this is on chain, you can as easily give power and take it away. So you could say, let me call out a name for example, Ryan Sean Adams. He talks about DeFi a lot. He has a great community with his newsletter. So maybe that community can delegate voting power to him and he can vote on behalf of them, and then if somebody doesn’t like what he’s voting on, they can remove it.
So as you can see, it’s very similar stuff. It’s like signaling via forum, then signaling on the blockchain, and then finally voting with the tokens on the blockchain as well.
Laura Shin:
And then how would that work technically if you delegate? Because presumably, you wouldn’t want to give all your tokens to Ryan Sean Adams. Like…
Mariano Conti:
No. Of course. There are several ways to do it, and the simplest one would be just a smart contract. It receives tokens and people vote on one account, and all that account can do with that balance, it can vote on this or that spell, as we call them, but they wouldn’t be able to extract any money, any of the MKR. Just the person that put that in, they would be able to take it out. In fact, I’m thinking about it, it’s probably a 40-line smart contract. It’s just, I would like people to do it.
Laura Shin:
So, does that literally not exist? Because it does sound like it would be so easy to do, and it sounds like it should already exist.
Mariano Conti:
It’s very easy on the technical side, but it’s not easy on the community and social side.
Laura Shin:
Oh, like, getting people to actually use the smart contract?
Mariano Conti:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Mariano Conti:
That’s why I’m guessing that it’s not there yet.
Laura Shin:
Okay. All right. So in a moment we’re going to discuss more about how the governance works and also things like user experience, security, and some other issues, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
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Laura Shin:
Back to my conversation with Mariano and Peter. And then so actually, just before we kind of move on a little bit more into the governance, I just wanted to make sure, so how do you guys fund both of these DAOs? So, I’m sorry, you said that there is a minimum of 10 Ether for MetaCartel, but what about MakerDAO? Oh, it’s MKR.
Mariano Conti:
Well, MakerDAO, it sold MRK tokens way back during the day, this was even before my time, so…
Laura Shin:
To like, Polychain and Andreessen?
Mariano Conti:
Yeah, but even before that to people on a forum. Whoever wanted to, read the white paper and wanted to participate, that was the initial…people say Maker never actually did an ICO, and I think that’s true, because not even the term existed.
Laura Shin:
Oh, right. I think Rune said on my show, he gave it to, like, just community members who were really dedicated to…
Mariano Conti:
Exactly, and initially, and again, this was before my time, just somebody would come in and design a logo, for example, and they would get MKR, or they would do something for the community and they would get MKR, and then it was just after the fact, a lot of people hired themselves just from community work, and then they started working more and more for the project, so that was initially, and then of course, yeah, selling it to investors. That was pretty much the way it was funded.
Laura Shin:
And right now MKR token holders basically just get kind of rewarded for their work literally by the value of the tokens going up, is that it?
Mariano Conti:
So, MKR holders, when the debt is paid for the CDPs they invest in the current version, single collateral DAI, the stability fee, that is paid in MKR, and that MKR is then burned. So, that is one advantage of holding MKR. In multi-collateral DAI it works a little bit different. When somebody pays off their debt, they pay it in DAI, and that DAI is accumulated and an auction is created, and that DAI is used to buy MKR in the open market and then burn it as well.
Laura Shin:
Okay, but you’re not actually being paid, it’s simply that the value of the tokens that you have goes up.
Mariano Conti:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
And you were saying that for MetaCartel you’re kind of trying to figure out revenue.
Peter Pan:
Right.
Laura Shin:
Yeah.
Peter Pan:
So right now, all the members of MetaCartelDAO who have pledged, right, have really pledged out of good will and the want to see all of the work that we’re funding happen, right? But the truth is, there’s no real incentive, if you think about it, aside from the belief that we’re going to do something great. And you know, MetaCartel right now is at a point where we either go beg for more money, right, or we actually try to take, basically take charge of our destiny, right, and actually try to be sustainable and create an incentive for people to actually, you know, be part of the DAO and also fund the work that we want to get to see done, right?
So, very soon, you know, in about a month’s time, right, we’re going to be deploying a new DAO, right? We haven’t called it anything, but we’re working with OpenLaw, right, to deploy a legal DAO, a LAO, if you will, right?
Laura Shin:
Oh, wow.
Peter Pan:
That is actually a registered entity which we actually, have an LLC, right, which actually, we got a confirmation back a couple of days ago, and that will actually serve as, I guess, the representation of this DAO, right, and it will be actually to legally now generate revenue and take in funds, right, pledges from accredited and nonaccredited investors, right? As opposed to right now, we don’t have a legal entity, well, operating fairly in the grey zone, even though we’re…so, we haven’t really been able to capture any value because it’d be illegal, and it’d be technically classified as securities, right? But now with this next, I guess, like, stage, right, we’re looking to create a second DAO, right, that will enable this possibility to occur, and I guess incentive, right, for the community to be part of it.
Laura Shin:
That’s super interesting, because yeah, I was going to ask you guys about this OpenLawDAO and LAOs in general, but so, yeah, I have a gazillion questions for you, but before we get into kind of some of these other topics, I just want to talk about the DAO itself, because like, I think to me, I’m a little bit like, oh, if I were to sort of judge where DAOs are right now, I would sort of say they’re maybe where stablecoins were like 18 months to two years ago, but like, that’s kind of amazing, because obviously three years ago was The DAO. So I just wanted to know, from your perspective, like, what do you guys feel were the main lessons from The DAO, or what do you think people in general think about what happened with The DAO?
Mariano Conti:
I would say that people are kind of, I don’t want to say forgetting about it, but they are moving past it. We are at a phase…I participated in The DAO, and I remember it, I wasn’t that big into…I was a holder, but that was it, I didn’t know too much about the ecosystem as a whole. I thought it was fine that the hard fork was created, I’m okay with how history went, right, and The DAO was…I think if it hadn’t had happened, then DAOs would be much bigger right now. We’re like, picking up the pieces of what happened and getting past the trauma of it, and saying, hey, we can do…the idea was okay, but we’re going to learn from it and do it a little bit differently.
Laura Shin:
And what do you feel people have learned from it, or like, how do you feel like the trend is different now because that happened?
Mariano Conti:
It was just…The DAO was a product of its time. I don’t see almost anything else getting that much money that quickly now. We’re past that craze. So first, people know not to trust random smart contracts now. There is a lot of…
Laura Shin:
Peter is laughing. Like, laughing laughing.
Mariano Conti:
No, because there is a lot of social stigma if you don’t have an audit now or you centralize certain things, and this reminds me, I mean, through Moloch he talked to this guy from Compound and asked him about the audits for…
Peter Pan:
Do you have an admin function?
Mariano Conti:
Do you have an admin function? No. No, and then he said, okay, do you want us to fund some kind of thing to review the contracts? And it’s like, no. No. We do have an audit. I’ll show it to you. And that created a whole feedback loop.
So I don’t think anybody would be able to create something like The DAO right now. There is just…we know better, but other than that, the ideas are not that different. We’re exploring something new, and with the profit sharing capabilities of maybe new DAOs wrapped up under some kind of legal…what do you call it?
Peter Pan:
I guess a LAO, a legal…
Mariano Conti:
A LAO. A DAO wrapped in a LAO?
Peter Pan:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Well, so actually, let’s talk about LAOs now. I had that question for later, but like, this is an interesting topic. So, actually, before we get there, I just wanted to know, when do you think something should be governed by a DAO versus, like, when should it be governed by, like, a traditional corporation or a conventional nonprofit or any other kind of legacy structure? And I guess in your case, you’re doing both, so…
Peter Pan:
I guess. So I guess the interesting thing about DAOs is that, you know…first of all, I really don’t like using the word DAO for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is, you know, there’s nothing too special about DAOs. We’ve had groups of people for a long time, right, and groups of people have been coordinating using different mediums, right, and different governance structures, and maybe now we just are able to coordinate the same groups of people, but with on chain value in a distributed manner, right? I think that’s a real difference. I guess when we’re talking about DAOs, right, it’s really like groups of people with distributed governance, right?
Laura Shin:
And by that you just mean, like, disparate people on the internet, where they can be anywhere. They don’t have to be physically near each other.
Peter Pan:
Correct. That’s kind of the interesting thing, actually, right? Technically, you know, yes, it can be anyone, and it can happen anywhere, and very easily with very little friction.
Laura Shin:
What if it were just like a Facebook group where, you know, there’s people in the group and then they can just put comments on a thread in Facebook and be like, you know, I vote this way or that way? Then is that a DAO?
Peter Pan:
I guess a DAO…we’re getting into definitions, but you know, I’d say my definitions of a DAO is groups of people coordinating value together, right, and in our case, in our context, on chain value.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Okay. So that’s where the blockchain aspect comes in.
Mariano Conti:
I would add that, yeah, groups of people coordinating, but bound by the rules of, in this case, a smart contract, so bound by the code that is in the blockchain.
And to your point, if you said, do we need DAOs for everything or not, I would say if your project is called something DAO then yeah, because you’re signaling that you want to decentralize, that you want people to make choices, but I don’t subscribe to the fact that everything, every single thing has to be decentralized. We’re working off of a decentralized platform that is Ethereum, but then, if the rules are clear and the code is clear, then I don’t mind using something that somebody tells me, hey, I have the master key, if that is told to me upfront, then I have the choice to use it or not to use it. If a project says that they’re decentralized or they’re striving for as much decentralization as they can possibly be or get, then I do expect a little bit more from them, but…maybe I won’t use it, but I won’t say this project, just because it does have an owner or a multisig behind, I will not use it, if that is told to me up front.
Laura Shin:
So it’s more about transparency.
Mariano Conti:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. So actually, I want to actually dive into this a little bit more because this has come up in a serious way with MakerDAO where there has been this governance turmoil. So both the CTO, Andy Milenius and then Ashleigh Schap who I guess did business development or whatever, they left, and I guess a bunch of other people left also after MakerDAO CEO Rune Christensen kind of presented this choice between a red pill, which was about, like, making MakerDAO compliant with regulatory regimes and work with the existing financial system, and then the blue pill was basically, like, if you don’t agree then you’ve got to go. So like, Andy wrote this very long document kind of detailing that who history, and you know, the way he tells it, he really believes that Rune kind of commandeered the project instead of allowing it to be this group effort, this decentralized effort.
So, you know, to my mind it also just kind of made me wonder, you know, so MakerDAO is this decentralized, autonomous organization, and yet there’s also this CEO, that’s literally his title. So like, yeah, how do those things fit together?
Mariano Conti:
For a long time we used the term MakerDAO interchangeably with the Maker Foundation. So I think it’s good to separate both. MakerDAO is the protocol, it’s the layer on the blockchain, and the Maker Foundation is in charge of bootstrapping that, getting it running autonomously with as many actors as possible, and then taking a step back. So one thing is the Maker Foundation and the other thing is the MakerDAO, and there’s only so much that I can say.
I will say that I always tell my friends, I’m 38, but I say crypto is high school. It feels like high school with higher stakes.
I don’t want to minimize what happened, but I do agree that in order for us, and us in Argentina, I see this a lot with finance, we try to take ourselves away from the system, and that is a bit more like cypherpunk, pure blockchain kind of thing, but then once you try to do things at scale, then you’re going to find out, and every project is finding out that you do need to play by the books and talk to regulators, and if you want to interface with the real world and tokenized assets or securities into a project, you’re going to have to open yourself up for the regular financial system, and change it maybe from within.
Peter Pan:
So I’d say for MetaCartel, I feel like we have a very pragmatic stance, right, where we’re not chasing this mirror image of oh, this mirage of what we should be or what things could be. You know, from the very start, from the DAO, right, from the MetaCartelDAO we coordinated to collect funds to fund work that needs to be done, right, and this was the easiest way to do so. There was no red tape, we just launched a smart contract, basically went on asking people, and it was then that we started coordinating, right? Similar to Moloch, we would have never existing with a traditional organization, with this many tiny sums of money, right?
And continually, I guess, to continue it on we’re looking to create incentives and basically we want to serve more people in our community, right? We want to basically help more projects get funded, great projects that may be great profitable and sustainable businesses, right? So we kind of see this as the next step that enables us to create more value for the people that we are looking to help, right? We’re not trying to be some random, like, you know, DAO, right, this pure utopian DAO for the sake of it. No. We want to help build people and we want to leverage, right, DAOs and Web3 technologies, right, to kind of, like, leverage and go as far as we can, right, rather than, like, spend a whole year designing new incentive mechanisms. We want to move fast and create as much real value, right?
Laura Shin:
So you’re both taking this pragmatic approach. Well, but one thing I wanted to know was, like, so when it comes to something like the MakerDAO Foundation, or the Maker Foundation, that kind of creates a centralization point where, like, if the authorities decide to come after the Maker Foundation, then what? What happens to MakerDAO?
Mariano Conti:
That’s a great question, and I’m on the engineering side, so I want to say I have no idea, but I should maybe give my opinion. The protocol continues on the blockchain. That’s unstoppable. I would say I don’t know if we…the idea is to try to open ourselves up and talk to regulators, and that’s what we’ve been doing. So I can’t imagine a world where it would just be, like, okay, shut it down and like, cannot work on this anymore. It’s like, everything that’s already on the blockchain would probably continue.
Peter Pan:
That’s kind of the ceiling, right? Like, until we have DAOs that can coordinate military forces, right, to basically fight governments, right, we’re really playing under the constitutions’ roof, right?
Laura Shin:
I’m pretty sure no government would allow, anyway, a DAO that funded some kind of militia, but anyway, I’m just surmising.
Peter Pan:
Well, yeah. I mean, most governments operate through violence and ability to operate in the physical, right?
Laura Shin:
Yeah. So, why don’t we now go, I know we keep saying we’re going to talk about the LAO thing, but why don’t we just do this right now, actually, because this is really interesting to me. So, you guys have described this, but I’ll just define it a little bit more for the listener. So OpenLaw created basically a legal wrapper for a DAO, which essentially is a separate legal entity that could be responsible for certain things, like, if there’s violations of law that occur with the DAO or in this case, accepting funds from accredited investors or whatever. So do you guys feel like this is eventually the way that all of the DAOs will have to go, that they’re going to have to have some kind of legal entity associated with them?
Mariano Conti:
I’m switching from DAO to DAO, but in the case of Moloch, for example, the members did talk a lot about it, and I forget what the exact conclusion was. Some were in favor of trying this out, of doing, like, wrapping the DAO with, like, a legal framework. Others were against it that say, this is too early, we don’t need it yet, we’re working on, I believe Moloch has about a million-dollar budget, maybe 1.2. Some members are anonymous, they said, we’re not there yet, and then others just wanted to see, hey, this is a good experiment, and if somebody is going to push it forward, why not let it be us? But in the case of Moloch, I believe it didn’t reach any conclusion yet.
Laura Shin:
And like, if there’s some kind of disagreement or like, yeah, just something where I guess different parties cannot agree, is it literally just the rage quit function there, or is there some way that, you know, you guys think that these DAOs should intersect with real laws?
Peter Pan:
So interestingly, we had a very similar conversation within MetaCartel DAO. We’re in a position where we either, again, beg for money or become sustainable and generate revenue, right, and deal with securities, essentially, right? And you know, Mariano is right, there’s a lot of tradeoffs with becoming compliant. A lot of tradeoffs, advantages, disadvantages of being, you know, completely, I guess, unregulated and in the dark, right? And we realized that we didn’t know…I guess, like, yes, we didn’t know which one was the right move, right, but we needed to make one, and that’s when we realized, why not set up a second DAO rather than make it bad decision with the first one, and you realized that, why not? There’s no real reason we couldn’t. We had a community, right, we could operate two, and working with OpenLaw we decided that was a very clear next step, right, that we think no one has really taken, and we want to see what happens, right, and go headfirst.
Laura Shin:
This is really interesting. So it’s like basically use a LAO in the limited instances when, like, you absolutely need a LAO, and then like, for everything else just make it decentralized, something like that. Is that what you’re…
Peter Pan:
I mean, yes and no, right? I mean, that was comes from a different conversation where we were, let’s set up a normal company, right, to deal with I guess the matters that had to deal with the real world, right? But I guess how we’re looking to structure it is the revenue-generating DAO will be focused on profits, right, while the MetaCartel…
Laura Shin:
Oh. Oh. Like the DAO, it would be like the original DAO.
Peter Pan:
Similar, yes.
Laura Shin:
But not like the original DAO, let’s hope. But anyway…
Peter Pan:
And the MetaCartelDAO would be focused on pure ecosystem value on the application layer, similar to how Moloch is focused on pure value in the core development layer, right?
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Peter Pan:
And you know, ideally we actually have this revenue generating DAO, right, that provides value back to the ecosystem as well, right, a percentage that goes back to MetaCartelDAO and the Moloch example, right? Because while grant funding isn’t everything, and it can’t be everything, they have their place in the ecosystem, right? But yeah.
Laura Shin:
I also wanted to ask about the votes in MakerDAO. Kind of, they don’t seem super decentralized. I noticed for some of their recent votes that like, one of the them, the top voter accounted for 40 percent of one vote, there was another one where the top voter accounted for 84 percent of one vote, and then also, these were just really small numbers of voters. It’s like, 20 voters, 30 voters. So how decentralized is that, if really one person can sway things so much, and it’s not even that many people?
Mariano Conti:
Yeah. That is a problem that we’re trying to fix, and it’s voter apathy, as I said. It’s just the fact that those were, I believe, some of the later votes. If you look at initially, we had a lot more people voting, and they were happy to do so, and it was, oh, finally, once everybody started voting with their MKRs, okay, the system is now working, we’re making decisions together, and then next week it’s like, okay, maybe we’ll need to raise the stability fee a little bit more, okay, I’ll do another vote, and then the next week, we need to have a new one, and then people just stopped voting. So now we only have, like you said, a number of people voting with it.
One of the things also is there are certain institutions that have MKR and are not voting because they have their tokens under custody.
Laura Shin:
Oh.
Mariano Conti:
And I know Coinbase, for example, is working, they have the Coinbase Custody where they’re going to allow people with certain tokens to, for example, in the case of MKR, vote on governance, but until that is there, then I think we’re going to stay with somewhat lower voter turnout until those kind of things are in place, or we institute what I mentioned earlier.
Laura Shin:
The delegated…
Mariano Conti:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
So we kind of referred to rage quit a little bit briefly, this is the function where basically if people kind of disagree with what’s going on in MolochDAO they can literally just leave with their tokens. I’ve heard people saying that they, you know, view this as a really smart and important feature. Do you guys agree with that, and if so, why do you think it was such a great idea to implement it?
Mariano Conti:
Yeah. Rage quit was…and now talking in the grand style, Moloch-like things, it was one of the reasons that made me join with almost no second thoughts, thinking okay, I can put my money towards…initially MolochDAO was going to fund Ethereum 2.0 initiatives. That was the spiel, and the first grant actually was the state of Ethereum 2.0 by Keoken that, I mean, and somebody else there required. I said, this is incredible. It was a really big amount of money for me, 100 ETH, it’s significant, but just the idea that I could remove it if I wanted to, I think that also gave a lot of people the chance to say, okay, yes, I’m going to do this, and in any case, I don’t think anybody has rage quit, at least from Moloch yet. The closest we were was probably the YangDAO.
But also, rage quit is very simple because it’s the only way for grantees to receive their money. When Ameen built that, initially he said, I want the code to be as simple as possible, because it is not audited proper. No. It had one audit. Yeah. I’m sorry. Yeah. It did have an audit, and a lot of eyes looking at the code, but I don’t think anybody expected it would get that amount of money. So one of the things is, if I can take it out any time.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and I saw somebody else saying they thought it was a really smart idea, because otherwise you would get people that weren’t aligned that would be stuck in an organization together, and you would end up with factions, but I guess now, like, people can go off and create their own.
Peter Pan:
So, yes. It’s a great escape hatch which anyone can dip out under, right, at any time. It’s beautiful, but the thing on factions, you know, that’s an interesting thing about large social groups. You know, people, there’s social asymmetry where people know each other and they tend to not know others, and this creates natural, you know, I guess cliques, even within the large social community, right? Like, Moloch is 80-something members, right? MetaCartel is 40. As you get larger and larger, right, there’s different factions, and politics comes into play quite heavily at this stage, especially with, say Moloch, where it’s transitioning from a single… leadership structure to, you know, more of a collective council structure, right? We’re going to see politics come into play a lot more as the grounds become more even.
Laura Shin:
Oh, wow. So yeah, this goes back to how so much of the governance for both of your DAOs really depends on the phone calls and the discord groups and whatever. So, we’re kind of running out of time, but because you mentioned security and the audits and stuff, I definitely want to, you know, discuss this. You know, obviously we talked about The DAO where, you know, a third of the value of that contract was drained, and that cased the hard fork in Ethereum and everything. In MakerDAO this year alone there were two vulnerabilities, one found in the live contract and then one in the upcoming multi-collateral DAI system that’s going to be launched later.
Mariano Conti:
Yes.
Laura Shin:
So in general, like, you know, and I know you’re head of this, so what do you guys do to mitigate the risks and how do you think about security in general for DAOs?
Mariano Conti:
Oh, the code for multi-collateral DAI has been almost at a code freeze for a long time now, I would say a few months, and the last vulnerability that you mentioned, it was disclosed recently, but it was found like, a month and a half ago, and it was found during the actual proper process of software development. You write code, you test it as much as you can, and then in this case you have different audits running at the same time, and also bug bounty. In this case, with the bug bounty, the hacker actually found the vulnerability through the bug bounty one day before one of the auditors found it.
Laura Shin:
Oh, wow.
Mariano Conti:
So, this is an incredibly talented individual. If they had found it one day later, then it wouldn’t have been too much news because we would have patched it before and the bounty would not have been…and then a second audit also discovered the vulnerability as well. So in this case, I think because the article first mentioned that it was on the live system and then they had to retract, I think it got a lot more attention than maybe it should have, because it was really a part of the natural process of building software. It’s like, building it, testing it, and then releasing, which we haven’t done yet.
And yeah, in the case of the other vulnerability that you mentioned, that was in one of the libraries that we use for governance, and yeah, that was…it could have been…the collateral was always safe for individuals, so that wasn’t initially a problem there, but no, we were lucky that it was found via Zeppelin during audit for Coinbase Custody.
Laura Shin:
Well, wait. So what was at risk? Because I thought it was actually the collateral that was at risk.
Mariano Conti:
On the first version?
Laura Shin:
On the live, yeah, contract.
Mariano Conti:
No. If I remember correctly, what you could do was freeze people’s MKR in the voting contract. So not the ETH collateral for the DAI system, the MKR that’s locked in the voting contract to signal voting for governance.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Okay.
Mariano Conti:
So yeah, that could have been…
Laura Shin:
Which is more, like, about power rather than…
Mariano Conti:
Yeah, and that could have been briefed, and luckily it wasn’t, and it was a stressful weekend, but we upgraded the system and…
Laura Shin:
And what about for the multi-collateral DAI, what was the amount for that bounty?
Mariano Conti:
I think we paid 50,000 dollars.
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Mariano Conti:
In any bug bounty you establish different criteria, and then as you go from, like, the highest to the lowest, and so in this case we did manage to pay out one of the highest that we set out for.
Laura Shin:
Okay, and so I wanted to also ask one other thing about the multi-collateral DAI launch, because it’s going to depend on oracles, as far as I understand.
Mariano Conti:
Just like the current version. Yes.
Laura Shin:
But you know, now there’s a lot more oracles. So how do you select oracles and how do you, you know, ensure that they’re trustworthy and can’t be game to, you know, allow people to take advantage of the system?
Mariano Conti:
Well, we have the oracle’s V2 proposal that is also going to have to be voted in via governance, but what we’re going to do is we’re moving away from the oracle’s V1 architecture that was built around two and a half years ago. So oracle’s V2, they are a lot cheaper to run, they depend a lot on off-chain message signing and on-chain aggregation, and we are going to have the community vote on additional feed providers to the oracles. We are still going to have certain number of those feed providers be anonymous, let’s call it pseudonymous, because there are a couple of people who know who they are, but for safety, their identity is not disclosed, but now we’re going to have other projects become feed providers, and I think we announced this already, it was 0x, Gnosis, I’m going to forget one, sorry, but Maker was one, and maybe one more, and we’re going to be adding more of those, because these projects, they already used Maker oracles version one, and so we’re going to bring more and more projects in there.
One of the criticisms that I get a lot is, why don’t we use on-chain, purely on-chain sources? I don’t think we’re there yet. There’s not liquidity on order books or Uniswap can keep the, I don’t want to say game, but with not too much money you can move the market, but I am always on the lookout. I’m talking to…I’ve talked to people from tBTC, to Matt Luongo, I’ve talked to Hart from UMA. I don’t remember who else, but I know that Haden from Uniswap, they’re building oracles into Uniswap V2, Balance finance is going to come out with some sort of price sensor, they call it. So we are getting there, but we’re not quite there yet. So we’re still going to do…we have a blog post about our oracle strategy.
And I just want to say that in the current version of DAI, we use it for two or three things, to of course check if your collateral is safe, if your ratio is safe. In multi-collateral DAI, we only use it for that, for like…we don’t use it when we liquidate because it’s auction-based, so we’re trying to rely less and less on it, but we still have one point where of course we need to read from an oracle.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So we’re really running out of time, but I do want to know, before we leave, what are you most excited about with DAOs going forward? Like, what are you looking forward to either doing or seeing in the DAO space?
Peter Pan:
I’m really excited about how DAOs, right, which are really, if you think about it, internet native, I’m really excited about how they’re bringing people into the physical world, actually, because the MetaCartelDAO has somehow incited and established these things called MCON actually soon after Devcon, right, we’re actually going to Denver in person to be doing a short, in-person sprint on how to launch…? And it’s just funny that, you know, even though no one is being paid to do this, thought it would be a good idea to do so, right, to travel from all these different countries and places to kind of, like, meet in real life and work on this.
And it’s interesting because like, for example, there’s several members of the DAO, right, which have worked heavily, they’ve worked quite a bit in the MetaCartelDAO, right, and I haven’t even met them in real life yet, right?
Laura Shin:
But you will.
Peter Pan:
But I will, and it’s strange to see us being brought together into the physical, from the outside in, right, by this community that can coordinate value, time, and effort.
Laura Shin:
Cool, and Mariano?
Mariano Conti:
In my case, just really on a social level, I want to see what decentralized finance can do for emerging economies like Argentina and other countries. On a technical level, there’s so much that I couldn’t just say one thing, but social level, I really want this to tackle problems in countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and others.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. I urge people to watch Mariano’s talk from Devcon, because it was great. I wanted to ask you a few questions about that, but I knew I had way too many questions about DAOs, so I was like, oh, I need to lay off those questions, but I watched it and yeah, it was awesome.
Mariano Conti:
Thank you.
Laura Shin:
All right. Well, so where can people learn more about you and MakerDAO/SelloutDAO and MetaCartel?
Mariano Conti:
So, MakerDAO, you can go to makerdao.com or chat.makerdao.com, and me, Mariano, personally, I’m at @nanexcool on Twitter and you can follow me there to learn about my wacky experiments like the SelloutDAO and other stuff.
Peter Pan:
You can always find me on Twitter @pet3rpan_, so I mean, you can also search MetaCartel, and I’m always online everywhere.
Laura Shin:
Great. All right. Well, thanks for coming on Unchained.
Mariano Conti:
Thank you.
Peter Pan:
Thank you.
Laura Shin:
Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Mariano, Peter, MakerDAO, and MetaCartel, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you’re not yet subscribed to my other podcast, Unconfirmed, which is shorter, a bit newsier, and now features a short news recap, be sure to check that out. Also, find out what I think are the top crypto stories each week by signing up for my email newsletter at unchainedpodcast.com.
Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from with help from Fractal Recording, Anthony Yoon, Daniel Nuss, and Josh Durham. Thanks for listening.
