‘I Think We’re Doing This’: Inside One DAO’s $20M Plot to Purchase the US Constitution
Read the full article by Andrew Thurman here
What started as 10 internet friends is now an 8,000-strong Discord channel. Is this the new face of participatory democracy?
Key Points
Cryptocurrency has become a great way to build communities on the web. Things like discord and twitter spaces have grown rapidly in popularity. The result of this has played out wonderfully for DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous communities.
DAOs work in similarities to how the common stock voting does. Every member of the DAO is allocated a certain amount of governance tokens that equal how much of a say in community votes the member actually has. So for instance if you were to own 3 shares of a $100 DAO pool, you’d have the equivalent to $3 or 3 votes with each vote being worth $1. The nice part of this is that the community has the benefit of seeing exactly where the funds of the pool are going or being used for.
What most thought was a complete pipe dream last Thursday to form a DAO to bid on a copy of the Constitution has since become a full-on movement that’s attracted nearly $4 million in donations. “ConstitutionDAO” insiders now believe they have a real chance at actually winning the forthcoming auction at Sotheby’s.
The individuals leading the charge hail from a variety of backgrounds, but tend to skew young, wildly ambitious and entrepreneurial – the type of folks you either were delighted to have on your group project or the ones you were giving swirlies to, depending on high school proclivities.
Across an increasingly chaotic Discord channel, these Web 3 upstarts are marshaling the expertise necessary to architect a legal entity capable of placing a bid, preparing to purchase insurance for the document in case of an auction win and identifying museum partners with the facilities to temporarily and securely house the prize – one of just 21 original copies in the world.
DAO forefathers helped pave the way for this caper, but none have been this ambitious.
PleasrDAO, a group that formed for the purpose of purchasing work from prolific NFT rising star pplpleasr, purchased a rare one-of-one Wu-Tang Clan album and a $5 million charity NFT from noted CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the fourth most expensive NFT at the time of the sale.
Read more: Martin Shkreli’s Wu-Tang Clan Album Now Belongs to a DAO
In an interview with CoinDesk, DAO member and founder of talent incubator On Deck Julian Weisser said that the time crunch has paradoxically increased the group’s odds for success.
“If we had 90 days, there just wouldn’t be this energy and momentum because there wouldn’t need to be. And you need those things to make people move – it’s intense, but it’s necessary,” Weisser said.
Memementum
“A lot of people were like, ‘This is very funny’ or ‘This is very interesting,’ but then they said, ‘Oh, wow, this is really coming together,’ and they started lending their skills to the project,” said Ma.
“We went through this process Thursday night of being 10 people in a group chat, to now having a 6,000-person Discord server – in four days. It’s condensing a year of startup growth in four days – and with our internet friends,” she added.
Roles and responsibilities
Perhaps surprisingly, the leaderless nature of a DAO is so far working among a group heavily populated with business founders.
“It’s crazy because people keep coming to the Discord, and saying, ‘Who’s in charge? Who’s in charge?’ Literally, this is coming together in four days – there is no one person in charge,” Ma joked.
“This is way different than hyper-growth at a company. At a company, people know each other before hitting this stage – there are institutional norms, personal relationships. We’re essentially inventing this as we go – using the best community-sourced knowledge and information that’s out there, but so much of this is new,” said Weisser.
Ma noted that PleasrDAO “paved the way” to help ConstitutionDAO register with Sotheby’s, as the group has already undergone the auction house’s know-your-customer (KYC) process.
Ma said she’s made “a bunch of new friends” over the past half week, and a large portion of the success can be attributed to a mission-first mindset permeating the group.
“We’ve all put our egos aside and are prioritizing the benefit of the organization in a very chaotic, fast-growing environment. It takes a lot of mutual trust, acting in good faith, and I imagine that the energy of this feels similar to what the Constitutional Convention might have been like back in the day,” she said.
Aggressive bidders
With many of the legal and technical issues squared away, it now comes down to whether or not the DAO will be able to raise enough funds to put in a competitive bid. So far, the response has been promising.
According to a Dune Analytics data dashboard, at the time of writing over 2,350 ETH addresses have donated $3.7 million to the crowdfund, with the top donator pitching 53 ETH – worth nearly a quarter-million dollars.
Weisser said that it will be up to the community to determine the outcome of the auction – and beyond.
“I think that everybody is very excited about what we can do once we acquire the Constitution,” Weisser said. “It’s participatory democracy in what happens next – does it go on a tour? To small towns in different parts of America, around the world? We’re leaving that up to democracy – something we really care about.”