Interview with OpenDAO: How to be born in 6 days? Not to be an OpenSea competitor hoping to break NFT in-roll to introduce newcomers
Author | Liu Quan Kai Editor | Colin Wu
On December 24, OpenDAO went live, announcing an airdrop of SOS for all users who had traded NFT on OpenSea. In a flash, OpenDAO attracted thousands of followers and discussions on Twitter, and inspired a large number of subsequent similar projects.
While its fervor has now diminished, how exactly did it happen as an iconic event? What is the future direction? It is worth leaving more information for crypto history and those who come after. With this in mind, we spoke with Dyno, a core member of OpenDAO.
In the interview, OpenDAO's vision seems to have changed from being an OpenSea challenger in the early days (a new challenger, LooksRare, has also emerged) to returning to a more realistic community level.
Declaration of Interest: Neither the author nor the editor of this article holds an SOS or has an interest in OpenDAO, and the views and comments of the interviewees do not represent the views of Wu Blockchain.
"It took about six days to get OpenDAO made."
1.
It's been a while since OpenDAO was born, so let's start with Dyno's review of how OpenDAO came to be.
Dyno: OpenSea is the largest NFT trading marketplace, and it's been going very well. Last year, there were many protocols that distribute airdrops to users and also set off a wave of air drops, such as ENS, etc. OpenSea's transaction users and community also hoped that OpenSea would give back to the community by giving airdrops, but there was a delay.
It wasn't until around November that OpenSea hired a new CFO, the Chief Financial Officer. At that time, he revealed his IPO plan in an interview, just as outsiders thought that such a big company with such a good cash flow would be a fool not to go public.
Because of this interview, the whole community was immediately ignited, and users and the community expressed strong dissatisfaction with OpenSea. Many users complained on Twitter and in the community, but no one really acted. Then we had the idea to replace OpenSea with an airdrop for NFT players to give them the rewards they deserve, since the users' transaction data is recorded on the chain.
From the idea to the actual delivery of the airdrop, the thing was built in about six days, just in time to be airdropped to all players on Christmas Eve. OpenDAO's airdrop is very fair. First of all, we didn't have any public or private placement, no financing, all money was advanced by the team; secondly, the team didn't set aside any passes, all passes in the team's hands were bought from the market, not at the beginning, but after the tenfold increase; thirdly, the money in the OpenDAO treasury was jointly held by 8 multi-signature candidates.
From the beginning to now, SOS has more than 500,000 coin-holding addresses and almost 300,000 data on the chain, among which there are some exchanges. SOS was number one on the volume chart in the first week of 2022 and now has a total cumulative volume of over $2.6 billion.
Not to be an OpenSea competitor.
2.
What is the future direction of OpenDAO? And how will the 20% of SOS Token be used by the community vault?
Dyno: The positioning of OpenDAO is actually very simple, many people say we are going to be a competitor of OpenSea, but actually it is not. We are actually more of an autonomous organization that focuses on ecological infrastructure, so we can actually work with anyone. Our team does not need any benefits, all the benefits will be given back to the community to ensure the healthy development of the community is ecologically oriented.
The remaining 20% is given to OpenDAO, which is mainly controlled by 9 multi-signers. The use of this part is actually very clear, and the official website also has a detailed description. The main purpose is to support some NFT communities, NFT artists, new artists or to protect some historically important sites. There will also be a portion of the funds used to compensate users who have been scammed. This kind of problem is very serious on OpenSea, for example, if a user's account is stolen, who has the right to freeze all the assets in the chain of transactions, and should the community enjoy a greater voice. So we will go for some compensation in this regard. In addition, we also want to give some support to more developers. We have Developer Grant, for example, we will give financial support to community members who want to build some products on our ecosystem or solve existing problems.
It's interesting to see that we have 4-5 sub-DAOs, which are developed by themselves and we have not given any support for now. One sub-DAO said it wanted to be one of the top 10 in our treasury, and then slowly developed itself with this initial intention. There is a sub-DAO that does NFT and has bought more than two hundred ETH SOS.
3.
It is obvious that the OpenDAO community is still very active, can you talk more about the sub-DAOs in the community? What kind of things are they doing and what is their direction?
Dyno: Now we have several sub-DAOs, half of them are doing NFT, whether it's music, graphic art or art collection, these projects are all self-organized, not really related to our team. In fact, our role is very neutral. If it is ecological infrastructure, we can support and cooperate with you. However, for a separate NFT project, it is risky, so we will pay more attention to its sincerity.
The other half is mainly doing tools about DAO, and we still want to have some automated tools in the long run. As the DAO grows larger and more complex, we want to have less and less human intervention and more and more automation in the DAO. Some of our sub-DAs are working on some solutions for DAO automation tools, such as reward tipping, proposal voting execution, payroll, etc.
The NFT community is becoming more and more involute.
4. At the beginning, everyone compared OpenDAO to Sushiswap in DeFi (forcing Uniswap to issue passes), but in fact, it seems that OpenDAO's vision and actions are still very different. It looks like LooksRare has taken on a sushiswap-like "responsibility" to force OpenSea to issue tokens in the future. What do you think about that?
Dyno: Actually for us, we don't want to educate the market. Our idea is very simple. We want to make a voice for the community, and then we want to do some ecology, and some infrastructure products. The infrastructure category is actually so several types, such as better security wallet, like MetaMask small fox. Little Fox wallet has more than twenty million users, but there are still many people who are easily cheated, probably because individuals are prone to mistakenly click on fraudulent links, and the warning of the wallet is not strong enough, which of course also involves a lot of investor education and understanding.
Such higher-security wallets would be one category, and so would the marketplaces owned by decentralized communities. It's not that hard for us to create an NFT trading market, and we can do it, but once we do, we can't work with other platforms or communities, it becomes competitive. We might as well support other really thoughtful, community-centric trading platforms, like the one we're working on with Xdotxyz (a community-owned cross-chain NFT marketplace).
In addition, we are also a cross-chain bridge. The future will be a multi-chain ecology, and if this multi-chain ecology does not combine Layer1 and Layer2 downwards, the friction cost of this multi-chain ecology is still relatively high. Regarding the cross-chain bridge products, we have been promoting them.
Whether it is Polygon or Wormhole, we are gradually opening up the channels and different chains, and our plan outline has been done very mature. We have also launched a feature that is still in beta, which allows you to tip in the forum at any time and in real time, without frictional costs, for example, if you think the DAO member is doing a great job, you can tip the member in real time without any frictional costs. Because this product is in Layer2, there are no gas fees.
Dyno: From the beginning to now, eleven or twelve years ago, there are almost 300 million players in cryptocurrency now, but NFT actually took a very short time to get many users. After all, people are visual animals, and NFT is relatively more penetrating and attractive. But we also found that the NFT community is increasingly inward-looking, which is not what we want to see. Our current thinking is also still committed to expanding the entertainment of the NFT community, expand the security of NFT, widen the barriers to entry for newcomers, to cultivate new users, expand the incremental volume, and do incremental market.
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