In this interview for ituber, Matan talks about his background, DAOs, BackFeed, DAOstack and more.
Transcriptions provided below.
I. ON MATAN’S BACKGROUND
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 00:01 | Hello, and welcome to ituber, my name is Luna. Today we have DAOstack on our channel. The speaker is the CEO of the project, Matan Field. Hello, and welcome. |
| Matan: | 00:13 | Hi Luna, how are you doing? Good to be here. |
| Luna: | 00:16 | Mayan, thank you so much for finding time to talk to us. Before I let you introduce yourself, I’ll tell that Matan has bachelors in physics and math. He also has master of science and PhD. in theoretical mathematical physics around string theory. I know nothing about it. All I know is from Big Bang Theory tv shows. I’m very thrilled, and at the same time, very nervous to talk to you because you seem to be a very, very smart person. Please Matan, tell me about yourself and how could you switch from science to blockchain. |
| Matan: | 00:52 | Thanks Luna. I was mostly focused on science for about a dozen years, but then prior to doing science I was really pretty interested, for about two decades, about authoritative corporative structure, how companies will become more efficient and more corporative. I’ve also practiced that more as a hobby by building a food corporative in my neighborhood and mostly to test how corporation can be effective or maybe how it cannot be effective and was mostly interested in solving the question how you can scale corporations to match greater scale, the global scale. |
| Matan: | 01:44 | During the postdoctoral research, I came across the blockchain. It was just the same as when Ethereum and it was given birth, the white paper came out. Basically, different things got connected and I saw the potential in there to build cooperative structure scale what we call today the DAO. That pretty much drove me to quit the academy and focus full time in the past four years on building DAO protocols and DAO platform. Actually, that passion won the other passion of doing the science. |
II. ON WHAT DAOs, THEIR VALUES TO SOCIETY, AND DAOSTACK
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 02:30 | During the preparation for this interview, I’ve watched every available video on YouTube where you speak. I noticed that very often you speak in very difficult terms. I would want to warn you before we go into details with this interview to speak in more simple words, because our audience are mostly ordinary people like myself and do not have really tech backgrounds. Please explain us first what is DAO. |
| Matan: | 03:04 | There are many ways to describe what a DAO is, but the end of the day, I think the best analogy is to think about the internet. Think about before the internet. If I would ask you, how an organization that distributes information looks like, you’d think about … There were these legacy organizations that their job was to distribute information, media organizations. Then I would try and describe you the internet, so how the internet would look like. |
| Matan: | 03:36 | It’s kind of like an organization. It’s kind of like having this role for distributing information, but then it’s organized spontaneously by many, many people that are just connected over a open protocol. There’s peer-to-peer connection. There is no legacy institution in making that connection. It just happens peer-to- peer. The DAO is the same analogous thing, but for general organizations, for the notion of the company. |
| Matan: | 04:10 | Right now, you know what the company is. It has a structure. It has maybe a CEO, board of directors, and there are rules and bylaws that organize them. Then a DAO is something like that with a purpose. Just a company, it has a purpose. It has a business model. It has an economy. It can manage resources, but then the connection between people in that DAO is pretty spontaneous, so people can organize spontaneously. |
| Matan: | 04:35 | The way that they’re organized spontaneously is via, on one hand, rules that are coded on the blockchain. That’s what you don’t need regulation or legalities, but on the other hand, it’s also organized by incentives. Through those rules you are … It’s organized by economic incentives that align the interests of different people in order to create a larger joint action. |
| Matan: | 05:04 | There’s no rigid structure. There is no rigid management structure. It’s kind of indirect coordination, and because of the nature of it’s indirect coordination, the corporation can scale up in much, much larger numbers just as the internet can scale up in much larger numbers than previous legacy organizations. It can be one million people cooperating on a shared goal to do something. |
| Luna: | 05:30 | How old is the concept of DAO and do we have any existing example that would be a good example for decentralized autonomous organizations? |
| Matan: | 05:42 | That’s a really good question. The answers to both of your question are very hard, because it’s not well defined. It’s not the black and white thing, not the zero and one. The movement from centralization to decentralization is a gradual movement. There are some picks on the way, but it’s not really zero and one, so I’ll try to answer that to my best capacity. |
| Matan: | 06:11 | When you ask how old the concept is, it really depends on what you mean. I would say that it got really acknowledged around four years ago, roughly the same time that Vitalik put his white paper, but slightly earlier. I think the first guy that really made that popular was Daniel Larimer, but then it was called DAC, decentralized autonomous corporation. |
| Matan: | 06:39 | It was about four years ago, maybe five years ago. I think people have described those kind of structures many, many even decades before, but it was completely vague. Once people in the blockchain space realized the power of smart contract I think suddenly that the concept of the DAO of an organization that is indirectly managed by code, I think was suddenly became real, tangible. That’s one hand. |
| Matan: | 07:13 | On the other hand, it still doesn’t exist yet fully. I argue that what’s missing is exactly that rules, the decentralized coordination rules of those people. That’s exactly what we’re trying to produce here. In terms of examples … Again, there is no full example of that. We are gradually moving to that direction, but there are some precautions. |
| Matan: | 07:36 | For example, the blockchain itself is, to some extent, a DAO. It’s a large number of people. In this case, mostly their machines rather than themselves, that are coordinated very well, in very large numbers moving and moved by crypto economic incentives and the miners incentives. |
| Matan: | 07:57 | The difference is that the thing about blockchains and DAO is just the DAO that does very, very narrow things, agree about block, but it cannot agree about how much funds to allocate to which startup investing or how much reward to allocate to which task and so on and so forth. That’s like a prototype if you want. |
| Matan: | 08:20 | Since the blockchain itself, we’ve seen several other more advanced prototypes, for example, Dash is maybe the state of the art of that, but it’s still not very decentralized. Usually, in those organization, DAO needs to be decentralized. It needs to be scalable so it can scale up the number of agents it has, and it needs to be resilient. It need to be resilient against attacks and malbehaviour. |
| Matan: | 08:47 | I would say that Dash is not very much centralized, not very much resilient and not very much scalable, but yet, it’s the best we have right now. That’s exactly our purpose, is to form the technology, the infrastructure with which you can build fully decentralized, and fully scalable and fully resilient decentralized organizations that can really facilitate million open source developers to write code together and co-own that production. |
| Luna: | 09:18 | As blockchain goes more into mainstream and the values with decentralization will be again mainstream and appreciated among ordinary people, it seems like DAO will be the core of our society. What exactly are you building with DAOstack? |
| Matan: | 09:46 | Firstly, I have to agree. I think that the point is that … Let me tell you what is the big, big difference between DAO and regular organizations. Again, it’s the same analogy for the internet itself. All organizations today, they have one thing, which is really common to all of them, which is that they become less effective when they grow. When you have a very large organization it becomes less and less effective. The value per person is going down every person you’re adding to the organization. That’s clear it’s because of coordination cost and decision making capacity. |
| Matan: | 10:27 | The difference between a DAO and a regular organization is that DOAs behave more like network effects. Not only they don’t become less effective when they grow, they actually become more effective as they grow. When this creature is born, it’s growing exponentially fast, just like the internet. It’s swallowing its domain and replacing previous structures because of that fact. I call it super scalability. It scales up better than previous structures. |
| Matan: | 10:54 | I do agree with you. I do think that once we have DAO then we’ll have blockchain adoption … By the way, I actually think that DAO will bring blockchain adoption. Once we have that, I think it will definitely replace the existing structures and will be touching every topic domain of life. What we are building for that or what do we need to have that new structure? |
| Matan: | 11:27 | The main challenge there, the main mixing element is these kind of rules, the governance rules, if you want. Maybe you can call it the coordination rules that are encoded in blockchain that allow those millions of people to co-create, to co-own to co-share something effectively. By saying effectively, I mean that again, their ability to grow and grow and grow but then keep similar thing, keep decentralization so no power is focused into a small number of people, keep scalability, so as they grow they can still grow the number of decision they can facilitate in the amount of time and keep resilience, which means be protected against bad behavior or just mistakes, having the smart crowd intelligence rather than the non-smart crowd intelligence. |
| Matan: | 12:21 | These are the three features and it’s found out to be very hard to build this kind of governing system, so that’s it. We have built the technology that enables this will bring those kind of protocol, but more so I would say that we develop a technology that allows those governance protocols to self improve themselves evolutionary, and by that, become better and better. That’s really important. The evolution part of that is really important. How is it so far? Is it simple enough or is it too complicated? |
III. ON UNDERLYING BLOCKCHAIN
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 13:01 | Yes. It is. Thank you. DAOstack is a protocol layer on Ethereum. Can it be used on any other blockchains or it should be … I don’t know. You cannot just layer it on other blockchain, but or rather do something else, create a new DAOstack and a new blockchain. |
| Matan: | 13:22 | Yeah. That’s a really good question. Before that, let me tell you something, because you say that DAOstack is a protocol layer on top of Ethereum. Let me slightly amend that. It’s also a protocol layer on top of Ethereum. That’s definitely the case. It’s the governance protocol layer on top of Ethereum, but more so, that’s why it’s called the DAOstack. It’s actually a stack of layers. |
| Matan: | 13:43 | The first layer is actually the protocol layer on top of Ethereum. Actually, the first layer is the framework layer on top of Ethereum, so it’s not a specific protocol. It’s a framework with which you can build any governance protocol. Then there is the specific protocol layer and then we’ve built the JAVA script there, which makes it very easy to integrate. If you are building applications, you can get governance very easily without even knowing anything about blockchain and eventually it’s the application layer. We’ve built one application to show how it works. It’s a full stack of layers kind of like just the internet. In that regard … Can you remind me the other question? |
| Luna: | 14:26 | Yeah. The question was if I want to use DAOstack or I want to create a DAO on other blockchain, let’s say EOS or Cortana, do I have to implement the same protocol as DAOstack or do I have to create a new one. |
| Matan: | 14:42 | Right. Right. Right. You will need to replicate so the protocol layer, so the framework layer will need to replicate that layer onto different blockchains and then also have interoperability between different blockchain. Right now, we’re estimating that they only truly mature blockchain technology, I would say programmable blockchain technology is that of Ethereum, but once you have other blockchains, programmable blockchains different in Ethereum, then we are definitely intending on being blockchain agnostic and having that framework and protocol layer replicated on a different blockchain and also the interoperability between them. |
IV. ON USE CASES
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 15:26 | Let’s talk about use cases in real life. Can you give me an example? Which industries or maybe what organizations would be affected most and replaced by DAO? |
| Matan: | 15:45 | That’s a really good question. There are several very interesting use cases. Generally, all the use cases that I’m aware of can fall to four category. One category is the domain of working, collaborating. It’s kind of like the analogous of producing company. Jess’ company produces product. The ability of thousands of open source developers, for example, to produce code to work together on open application. |
| Matan: | 16:16 | For example, Ethereum itself, and I think, by the way, the most immediately interesting use case. Think about the project Ethereum itself. There is a very interesting thing happening there. The Ethereum foundation has probably billions of dollars in capital. By no mean, it’s not limited in any … It’s growth … |
| Matan: | 16:44 | For example, let’s take the biggest problem of Ethereum right now. The biggest problem is the scalability problem of the blockchain. It’s a problem. It has a solution, and we need to get from here to there. What’s the limiting factor, why it’s not happening right now? Why take so much time? Usually, in a startup scene one of the main inhibiting factor is lack of capital. In Ethereum case, that’s definitely not the case. You have billions of dollars, so it’s not lack of capital. |
| Matan: | 17:12 | Second limiting factor could be a lack of human resources. Again, the Ethereum project has around it, hundreds of thousands of developers so the problem is not lack of human resources. I think for the first time in history, the actual limiting factor is management capacity, so decision making capacity. |
| Matan: | 17:32 | There’s billions of dollars. There’s hundreds of thousands of people. If you could just effectively take that plus that and make it a product, you would resolve anything. Your true limit to innovation is decision making capacity. That’s exactly what we are providing, the ability to take billions of dollars and deploy them quickly and effectively for thousands of developers and producing something that it could never produce before. |
| Matan: | 17:57 | Beautifully, that’s exactly the limiting factor in many other blockchain products today. Ethereum foundation, of course, is the flagship, but Gnosis, EOS is all of them have the same problem. In fact, that’s the first application we’ve developed at DAOstack. We call it Alchemy and it’s the application for the centralized crowd management of resources. I think that’s the best use case, but then there are other categories that mention the second category is crowd management of assets. For example, the centralized investment fund, which is one use case that a lot of people are speaking about. |
| Matan: | 18:38 | In the blockchain space you have hundreds of thousands, probably millions of investors. All of them are trying to become more and more powerful by making pools, syndicates. That’s so trendy right now. What will happen if you have this technology that allow million investors to be a pool in a very coherent, cohesive way? That will be incredible power, much more powerful than any other venture capital. That’s exactly the technology it allows us. That’s the second use case. |
| Matan: | 19:06 | A third kind of use case is curation, the ability of large networks to curate, enforce their lists of something. For example, by the way, this something can the curation of websites on the internet, but can even be curation if you go back to investment, curation of ICOs. Right now, there’s such a ICO hype and there is a lack of well coherent sound information like what is a good ICO. But what if you had a network of 100,000 influencers that together decided about what is a good or not good ICO. This would be giving you incredible power and you can do the same for restaurants or any other objects. Curation is the third use case. |
| Matan: | 19:50 | Finally, the fourth use case is slightly less interesting from our perspective, because it doesn’t have to have collective decision making, but it can have. That fourth category is marketplaces. Basically, any DAO can fall under collaboration producing work or asset management or curation or marketplaces. I think, however, that because of this timely moment of decision making capacity being the actual limiting factor for innovation in the space, I think that this is actually the most interesting use case right now. |
V. ON MALICIOUS USES OF DAOS
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 20:26 | Basically, any person or any organization can start using them. Right? But is there any filter who can actually register and how do you prevent, let’s say, illegal actions, illegal organizations on the platform? |
| Matan: | 20:47 | That’s a good point. Let’s say you need to distinguish different elements. The protocol, as it is, is completely open. There is no way to filter anything. Just like you would ask me how the internet filters terrorists. The answer is the internet does not. That’s the whole point. It’s an open protocol. |
| Matan: | 21:09 | On top of this open protocol society builds more and more layers. Then the filtration will happen somewhere along those layers. There is a notion of filtration. For example, you can have open protocol, but then you can have interfaces and the interface can decide the filter. You can also have a societal filter. For example, you can have trust factors between different people, between different organizations and then if an organization becomes untrusted by other organization, it’s not that it’s closed, but it’s just become invisible for all other organizations. If it’s invisible it’s invisible. |
| Matan: | 21:49 | Of course, there is a good question, like just is DAO is a good technology for organization of collaborator of producers. It will be a good technology for collaboration of terror acts, for sure. But then you just need to invent new ways and new filters along the stack. The technology, by itself, is neutral. I think it’s very good and very important and also our responsibility to design it in a way that make it biased for good act rather than bad acts. That’s definitely our agenda. |
VI. ON THE DAO HACK
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 22:26 | I think you noted it very well, that the technology is actually neutral and it depends on us how we are going to use it. Another question, in one of the chats, there is a person whom I respect and whose opinion I value. We have a small discussion, a debate about your project. He said that if DAOstack was around when The DAO got hacked, it would not have happened. The author is actually referring to the infamous DAO hack of 2016 when a hacker drained 3.6 million US dollars … No, no. 3.6 million Ether. How do you view this claim? |
| Matan: | 23:12 | Firstly, it’s easy to blame retroactively. By the way, I’d been working on this back then and actually much earlier than the DAO. When DAO came along, we weren’t aware in the beginning about the code hack, but we were totally aware of the problems that it had gained theoretically. The governance protocol itself was completely broken, I would say. That was obvious to many people in the community. We’ve been working on resolving those problems. |
| Matan: | 23:47 | That said, it’s easy to criticize retrospectively. Back then, it was all so fresh, so new, so experimental. Yes. Today, the way that we are constructing it is much more mature, much more secure, much anything that you can think of two years later. But it’s two years later, so that’s not fair. But yes, basically, DAOstack is … Again, it’s a really hard comparison so much different. But basically, whereas the infamous The DAO was a protocol, DAOstack is not protocol. |
| Matan: | 24:32 | It’s a framework from which you can build an infinite number of protocols. It’s completely modular, so you are building small building blocks which are easier to add. More so, once a modular object was bio tested in certain use cases, you already know that it works properly and you can use it safely in other use cases. |
| Matan: | 24:50 | We’re also still very hesitant to put any large funds on the contract. We’re making it a very gradual process. We’re putting small funds on the contract. We’re securing the rest of the funds in traditional multi sync wallets, and then gradually dripping funds into the contracts to bio test them and we can go on and on. DAO didn’t have interface. We have interface. There’s a JavaScript layer. The protocols are completely different. They are designed to support collaboration of thousands and millions of people. DAO cannot support even single transact decision, if you remember. It just didn’t work. It’s many different ways, but again it’s just the result of research and development. Retrospectively, it’s very easy to criticize. I don’t have a real critics to the DAO. It was very interesting and exciting experiment. |
VII. ON BACKFEED
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 25:51 | I think the author of the answer was not criticizing retrospectively, but more saying how good DAOstack is actually. Then my next question, BackFeed was your previous company, which was very much like DAOstack. Why did you leave it and why not move on with this existing and want to start a new company? |
| Matan: | 26:20 | That’s a good question. Thank you. Firstly, when I done my postdoctoral research, the way that I discovered blockchain was by working on … I started with some friends working on a decentralized ride-sharing application. It was called La’Zooz back then. It was 2013, 2014. It was one of the first applications of the blockchain. It was actually on the Bitcoin blockchain, if you can believe it. It was really a lot of fun, but then we discovered the idea of Ethereum and the idea of DAO. |
| Matan: | 27:02 | I was so much passionate about it that at some point I quit the La’Zooz project and founded Backfeed to just focus on DAOs and DAO protocols and DAO interfaces. That was January 2015 and that was after I founded Backfeed together with a few friends, including Primavera De Filippi. She’s pretty known researcher in the space. |
| Matan: | 27:23 | We’ve been working on Backfeed for 18 months. We’ve raised money for equity. We didn’t want to do any token sale back then. We’ve done a lot of research and development on the DAO space. We’ve developed about five different products. Very early on, it was not clear what a DAO looks like, not protocol wise, not product interface wise and not coding conditions, not contract wise. We’ve went along with that and pivoted several times. |
| Matan: | 27:57 | Exactly that time that the infamous DAO happened we pivoted in order to fix the DAO actually. We’ve been working on that, on fixing a DAO before it was hacked, fixing the game theoretical protocol. Then, when it was hacked it was not … It left a dead desert around it. That was exactly the time that we also ran out of our funds and needed to either raise more funds or shut down the operation. Back then, it was just too chaotic. It was not clear what way we want to move forward in many dimensions, including the team itself. Back then, I did not have a technological partner, so I had a very strong theoretical background, but not a technical engineering background. I realize that I cannot really move forward without finding that one technological partner. |
| Matan: | 28:53 | What I decided to do back then, I just decided that either I will not be able to raise funds effectively at this point, or even if I would I would do it without being a consciously, a well with that because I feel like I have too much unclarity about the move forward, so I preferred to self fund myself, self sustain myself. I invested myself in the Ethereum crowd sale, so I had some funds by that. |
| Matan: | 29:26 | I took six months to really sharpen the product that I’m going to develop, exact architecture. I took another six months to find the technological partner. That’s exactly what happened. By January 2017, I joined forces with Adam Levi, who is our CTO. He’s also a PhD in physics, but he also has 20 plus years versed in code and stelar technology, is also following the blockchain tightly for 2015. We joined forces in January 2017. |
| Matan: | 29:55 | By that time, I also had the full architecture. MVP architecture for the DAOstack platform. Then we started basically from scratch. At that point, it was already six months after the stopping of the operation of Backfeed. It was a real question. Do we want to continue as Backfeed or do we want to have it a new venture? Eventually, it was inevitable. |
| Matan: | 30:16 | Of course, I would prefer to continue as Backfeed. The problem was that it seemed that it was too much time passing by that no investor would invest in new project with completely new team, new code everything. It was easier to start from scratch the new company. Then, of course, we are also compensating although we’re not obliged in any legal way, but we’re obliged in the moral way where we’re compensating our investors from Backfeed. That was part of my agreement with Adam when we joined forces from the first day. We’re compensating, from the founder token actually. We’re giving some tokens to the Backfeed investors. |
| Matan: | 31:02 | It’s kind of like was inevitable. Retrospectively, I’m not sure, maybe we could have hacked a way to continue it under the name of Backfeed, but I’m not sure what’s better. Eventually, that’s just for history. Eventually, we made DAOstack and it had a new life to it, which turned out to be very, very healthy and good successful. Nothing to cry about. |
| Luna: | 31:28 | That’s another reason for haters to poke you with that question, but I’m not a hater. I’m just pulling out these questions that I find very interesting and then try to attract different audiences. I’m pretty sure there are some people who want to know the answer for this question. |
| Matan: | 31:48 | Of course. We are very transparent about it. Every time we’re asked, we give a full answer. |
VIII. ON FUNDRAISING
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 31:52 | My next question is regarding the ICO, the public sale will start in eight days. The white list is open right now. People can go to the website and register. |
| Matan: | 32:07 | Just more correction. The presale starts in eight day and the public sale one week after. |
| Luna: | 32:12 | Yes, sorry. The public pre-sale, yes. |
| Matan: | 32:15 | It’s called the pre-sale. |
| Luna: | 32:16 | Total amount of tokens is 100 billion for the public sale. |
| Matan: | 32:23 | 100 million. |
| Luna: | 32:26 | Exactly, yes. I’m so sorry. Yes. Yes. 100 million. |
| Matan: | 32:30 | But only 60 is used right now, so 40 million tokens are offered for sales and then … |
| Luna: | 32:39 | For public sale |
| Matan: | 32:39 | All sales together, private, pre, public. All together, we are offering 40 million tokens. Then 20 million tokens are allocated to the non-profit companies, so we operate non-profit company. Out of those 20 million, 10 million, that’s a half, is allocated to existing team, so everyone. We have a very wide team. Then the other half is kept for future contributors to go, but will be managed by the non-profit. These 60, so everything that will be in circulation right now. |
| Matan: | 33:10 | The whole team allocation is locked for two years anyway, but then in addition, on the platform itself, we’re going to fund to establish a DAO. We call it the Genesis DAO. Once it’s established this DAO, we’ll have the opportunity to mint or allocate an additional 40 million tokens for contributors of value as investment in supporting projects that build the ecosystem and so on and so forth. |
| Matan: | 33:39 | It will be sort of like incubation fund. That incubation fund that will be managed as a DAO on top of the platform, the genesis DAO, will manage the extra additional 40 million gen tokens in addition to the majority of the funds raised right now at the sale. |
| Luna: | 33:59 | My question, is you are aiming to raise 30 million dollars, and you are almost done with everything you need. Mainnet has already launched, if I’m not mistaken. It was scheduled for the week or the first and second week of April. |
| Matan: | 34:19 | It was indeed scheduled for the mid-April and it’s ready for launch right now. We are holding it just for operational reasons because we are so busy with the sale we realized that we were supposed to launch a pilot, but the pilot is on ourselves and we don’t have that attension to do it properly, so we decided to hold the pilot for another three weeks until we finish with the presale. But yeah, it’s ready for launch. |
| Matan: | 34:46 | We also almost closing our private sale our private token sale this week, this coming week. Then we have the presale and then the public sale. All together, 30 million dollars, correct. |
| Luna: | 34:59 | My question is, why do you need 30 million dollars when you have everything ready already and when the work is largely based on the work done at Backfeed? |
| Matan: | 35:12 | Let’s start from the second one. Actually, that’s not correct. The DAOstack started completely from scratch. Of course, a lot of the lessons came from Backfeed, but we built a whole new product, whole new philosophy, code from scratch, everything. Nothing that is there today is directly related with Backfeed. Of course a lot lessons are … That’s one thing. |
| Matan: | 35:36 | In terms of why do we need 30 million dollars, the idea is very simple. 10 million dollars from the raise will go directly to the non-profit company. That should suffice for another four years of development of the stack. When you say everything is done, it’s far from being the case. It’s just as you say for your Ethereum that everything was done when they released their first main blockchain. Of course, that was just the beginning. It was the first version. Infinite amount of development needs to take place after in order to improve it or scale it and so on and so forth. The same thing like here. |
| Matan: | 36:12 | We have the first working version. I think it’s very impressive and very ambition, but it’s very, very far from anything that you would call complete. We estimated we needed an additional four years of development to bring DAOstack to full production and that’s exactly the reason for 10 million dollars. Then the rest, probably a little bit less than 20 million dollars. |
| Matan: | 36:38 | The rest will go to the Genesis DAO. The aim of that is to use as incubation fund. This is exactly our thesis. Our thesis is saying that we have a way to take large amount of capital, large number of people and to deploy it very effectively so we can run an ecosystem much faster than the usual pace it would take to build the entire ecosystem of the DAOstack. |
| Matan: | 37:02 | That fund will be investing in projects that build components of the stack, like ourselves, projects that build interfaces, applications integrated with stack, also like ourselves, but many others in different domains and then finally. Projects will build DAOs on top of the stack. It’s an incubation fund to scale up the pace of building that ecosystem. That’s exactly our thesis and we want to prove it on ourselves. |
| Luna: | 37:31 | I love how you are answering all these not very comfortable questions and how detailed you are in your answers. |
IX. ON POOLS
| Speaker | Timestamp | Speech |
|---|---|---|
| Luna: | 37:43 | I usually give 45 seconds to address our audience in the end, but today, I’d like to ask another not very comfortable question, because you are so great at it. The question is this one. Some people in different chats, in Korean chats, Russian and English, the ones I can read, are showing signs of concern because of a relatively big amount of pools admitted to the pre-sale. Do you have anything to say to them? |
| Matan: | 38:12 | That’s a really good question. Let’s put it on the table. Those who are concerned, it just means that they think about the value of token in the next two months, because it’s only have an impact on that. That’s firstly saying something about their motivations, and that’s fine. I’m not against it, but when you think about it long terms, it has completely no meaning. |
| Matan: | 38:40 | It’s true that we did work with some pools and the reason there were many pools is something witnessing about the success of the projects. The fact is that the stream of buyers is just growing over time. Whether it’s a problem or not, I think it’s through the interpretation of the buyer, and that’s fine. If people think that it’s a problem, they should not participate in the sale. We’re not encouraging anyone to participate in the sale. We’re encouraging people to take very cautious acts. |
| Matan: | 39:14 | I think generally, it’s a result of both a successful popularity that the project gained very quickly. We went from completely stealth mode to very highly popular in almost months. That’s part of the result of that. To admit and take full responsibility, we did not predict that and we did not … We maybe did not do all of the homework to prepared with that and understand the after effect of working with too many pools. |
| Matan: | 39:46 | We did realize that in like two weeks down the road, but then it was too late. That’s fine. I think it’s actually pretty aligned with our purpose of being decentralized community project. I’m not concerned with it at all, like zero concern. Definitely not in the long term, it’s completely meaningless. In the short term, I think it has small, non-negligible but very small meaning. |
| Matan: | 40:12 | I think that anyone that is interested to look at as a long term investor … Sorry, it’s not investment, a long term purchase. Thank you. It’s not investment. Anyone that wants to support the project or be part of it and use the tokens should not have any concern of this kind. |
| Luna: | 40:33 | Well, we’re done with the questions. Matan, thank you so much for answering all these questions and being so honest and interactive and using simple in your words. I think our audience will appreciate this interview. To your audience, thank you very much for watching. I would recommend you to check out their website. There is an amazing five, almost six minute video on YouTube as well for you to check out. I was a bit selfish in this interview asking all the questions that I thought were very interesting. I missed lots of questions regarding the token economics, regarding how organization … how actually everything gonna work on the platform and the technical parts as well, but there are so many videos available on YouTube. Just go and try to find them and watch them. |
| Luna: | 41:26 | One thing that I really like is that the teams tokens are rested for two years, which is unheard of in crypto field these days. It only shows how much the team is dedicated to the project and believes that actually the project will work very well. I think this is it. If you have any questions, leave them in the comment section below this video and we’ll come back to you with the answers. Thank you so much and see you next time. Bye-bye. |
| Matan: | 41:53 | Thank you Luna. |