ETH Denver Recap

[Powers]

A great time in warm and sunny Colorado - and of course, snowy.

Some broad thoughts:

• DXdao presence throughout the week - there were a lot of activities and opportunities for DXdao brand to shine. At DAODenver, I led a panel discussion and then Augusto, Ross and myself gave a presentation on Governance 2.0. Then, on Wednesday, there was the DXdao happy hour, which was very well attended and a great opportunity for different community members to interact. I had great conversations with Henry from Double, Ross from YAM, Jelle from Omega, John M, Cantillion, amongst others. On Friday at ETH Denver, Sky was on an awesome panel discussion talking about reputation-based governance and the ways of DXdao. And then John, Augusto and company were present with the hackers themselves.
• The swag and the booth - nothing defined DXdao presence at ETH Denver like the awesome swag and party atmosphere at our sponsor booth. So many great conversations at the booth and so awesome to see (random) people wearing DXdao swag.

The “DXdao Pitch”

Being at the booth and getting the question “What is DXdao?” a hundred times, most everyone adopted a script to try and explain DXdao in as concise of a manner as possible. This was mine:

• “At DXdao, we consider ourselves ‘Decentralization Maximalists’. We’ve been around for almost three years, which is an awful long time in DAO years.
• We have a couple of DeFi products. Swapr is an multi-chain AMM, Omen is a prediction markets app, Carrot is a conditional token incentive platform and then we also have our own governance product/stack that we use for ourselves, but we also think other DAOs will adopt.
• We are a bit different than other DAOs out there because we use reputation-based governance, which is non-transferable, as opposed to token governance. So proposals pass/fail based not on how many tokens someone has but how much reputation, which can’t be bought or sold.
• We’re all on-chain. We have an $80m treasury and pay almost 20 full-time contributors monthly through on-chain proposals. We have bases on Ethereum mainnet, Gnosis Chain and Arbitrum”

And then they might have questions (or be bored!), but you can go into an example of DXdao decentralization, like the ENS proposal process, the origin/founding of DXdao, Governance 2.0, etc.

Products and opportunities

Carrot was a very intuitive product and often caught their attention as I would rattle off my speech. I struggled to come up with a quick 4-5 word description, but it was definitely something that interests people and they could intuitively understand how it could be used. Then when compared to UMA, I said that Carrot is really focused on distribution, hence farming it on Swapr to distribute to your community.

For Swapr, the big takeaway is that being an established DEX on several chains puts you in a good position to build on. There’s lots of things to be done with Swapr, but a DEX is actually kinda unique now. Then, of course, the opportunity is on the front-end. I kept saying that “DXdao is the only DAO that actually owns their front-ends”, and see how Swapr can capitalize on that, maybe with Cowswapr?

Omen! People still interested in prediction markets and it’s really cool to feature it in DXdao’s product suite. No one knew how to solve prediction markets, but they wanted to talk about them.

And then, of course governance. This has been the big takeaway from others, and maybe I didn’t fully appreciate until ETH Denver how much money/resources has just started being thrown at DAO tooling. Not only is DXdao already building every part of the DAO stack, we also have unique insight into what DAOs need because we are doing that ourselves!

I think there’s a huge opportunity for DXgov products to be used by other DAOs, as well as an opportunity for different communities to interact and share governance insight.

Awesome time in Denver. Thanks to all who helped organize and produced the swag!

[ross]

Not sure my thoughts around EthDenver requires a new thread so I’ll hop on Chris’s since most of what I will say likely relate.

Overall it was an awesome event and certainly an important one for DXdao as I feel we were able to get our name out there more than we have ever before. The swag attracted a lot of eyes and got all the contributors very good at saying their pitch.

As all the reflections on EthDenver have already pointed out, the overwhelming take away is that “DAO tooling” is the new hot thing. To the point that I am not sure DAO tooling is the best term to describe what we are doing with DXgov.
The large majority of follow up questions to the pitch were generally around our governance and the applications we are building there. The only unfortunate part was not being able to point the interested people directly to a resource for them to be able to start replicating what we have for ourselves.
This just gives more priority to the work we are doing at DXgov and it was good to hear that people are so interested in everything we are doing.
Hopefully this year our interactions at events like these will look far different with people coming out of the conversations actually ready to launch their own DAO or to pitch our framework to DAOs they are a part of.

Sky’s talk/panel on governance was also awesome and great to see what we are building in the context of others, especially large players in the space. Really though it emphasises what a great position we are in to take full advantage of the growing importance that DAOs and governance will have both in and out of the space.

Getting to do my first public speaking event was also a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to doing more and getting more comfortable with speaking in public more.

I think this was also one of our first successful hackathons as we got a number of submissions and actual quality projects making good use of our existing technology and building on top of it.