“Increasing numbers of employees are quitting 9–5 corporate jobs to work for DAOs. While the money’s great, DAOs fall into a legal gray area, and it can be tricky to get your foot in the door.
One in 5 workers reported an intent to quit their jobs in 2022. At the same time, the peak number of members of decentralized autonomous organizations at the start of August 2022 was 3.4 million, with over 140,000 new members joining in July 2022 alone.
DAOs are a new form of organizational structure offering an alternative to corporations. For workers, the critical difference is the horizontal structure, where there is little formal hierarchy and no bosses.
DAOs offer a revolutionary new type of employment: a hybrid of ownership, traditional employment, freelancing and volunteering. Every member is a boss and a worker (both paid and unpaid) and is free to contribute when and where they see fit. Each member is free to choose how much time they want to spend working, voting and participating in discussions. Moreover, one can be a member of multiple DAOs and choose how much time and effort they devote to each. In other words, employment in a DAO is flexible, discretionary, overlapping and deregulated.
Today, it is possible to earn a living working for a DAO or across multiple DAOs, with some earning as much as $300,000 a year in 2021. A survey of 422 DAO members conducted by Gitcoin and Bankless showed that half of the respondents were able to earn a living from working in one or more DAOs.
However, the remuneration rarely comes as a traditional salary and is commonly paid in tokens. Furthermore, the moment one starts working for a DAO and the moment they get paid can be two entirely different points in time.
Here is how the evolution of working for a DAO typically looks. The moment one joins a DAO (usually by purchasing a token), they can start contributing by participating in a community forum (often on Discord) and voting (using Snapshot or something similar). At this point, however, there is a slim chance of getting paid. As one’s reputation grows, the DAO community may reward them based on discussion and participation KPIs (usually via airdrops).
Once a member has familiarised themself with the DAO and proved their reputation, they might start contributing to the core DAO project. At this stage, this usually happens in the form of completing a bounty: a small, disconnected task. Bounties are paid and lead to further accumulation of reputation and DAO-specific skills.
The next step is to secure a part-time or full-time position within a DAO. While relatively rare and hard to get, these jobs are very well-paid. Longer-term or ongoing positions such as these are usually associated with the core operations of the DAO project: for example, a software developer role in a protocol DAO or a graphic designer role in an NFT art production DAO. If one does not want to have a fixed arrangement, they can continue contributing when convenient, and the peer review process will decide how to remunerate the value they add to the DAO.
Despite earning big bucks in their prior role, money didn’t come up in the Tracer DAO chat, and it rarely comes up as the main motivation for joining a DAO. Most say the appeal is in no longer working for a boss. The absence of a hierarchical structure promotes teamwork and the feeling of being part of a community. DAO contributors often mention the fairness and transparency of the organization.
The collaboration-maxi nature was a welcome breath of fresh air.
It is interesting in that you are connecting and collaborating with people that are also passionate about similar ideas and ideals. However, the challenge is creating coordination mechanisms and incentives so that everyone is working together in tandem to help solve these goals.”
See Also: Urbit Courts DAOs, Crypto Teams in Quest to Make Internet P2P Again
“The DeFi sector’s largest decentralized exchange is embarking on a major expansion.
For context, Uniswap’s 24-hour trading volume over the past 24 hours was $1.12 billion just on the Ethereum mainnet (i.e., excluding Polygon and Arbitrum integrations). The next runner-up for DEX volume was PancakeSwap, with roughly $194 million. Of all volumes across all DEX platforms, Uniswap currently commands 60% of the market.
The game looks very different when compared to their centralized counterparts. Binance and Coinbase, for example, played host to $24 billion and $2.9 billion over the past 24 hours, respectively.
Thus, as Mary-Catherine Lader explained, siphoning off some of that money away from the centralized giants is a top priority for the Uniswap team. One way it has identified to help do so: NFTs. In June, Uniswap Labs bought NFT aggregator Genie.
Starting later this fall—I don’t want to say exactly when—you’ll be able to buy and sell NFTs on Uniswap from a number of different marketplaces. Our hope is that that brings your digital asset experience into one place, one stop.
Another notable update has been the vote and subsequent launch of the Uniswap Foundation, a project that funds open-source development in and around the Uniswap protocol. On Wednesday, the foundation executed its first wave of grants.
The lion’s share of this money went to one project in particular: Uniswap Diamond. Akin to Coinbase Pro, Uniswap Diamond will be built with pro traders and liquidity providers in mind, offering this demographic some of ‘the features and comforts of a more traditional centralized exchange.’
Between the Diamond project and the Genie acquisition, the vision becomes all the clearer: Uniswap is ready to take on the industry’s giants.”
“Bitpanda CEO, Eric Demuth, noted that the bear market had had no major impact on investor demand. He claims that more people are now looking for solutions that can bring the world of TradFi and decentralized finance (DeFi) together.
For example, while TradFi platforms can improve their accessibility and transparency mechanisms, DeFi ecosystems can learn a lot about risk mitigation from traditional finance entities. Furthermore, with statistical data showing that more than 300 million individuals now own some cryptocurrency, more and more players from the two worlds are beginning to arrive at a middle ground.
According to Victor Tran, CEO of Kyber Network, it is only logical that traditional finance players are turning toward crypto since they want to increase their market share within an exponentially growing industry. By the same token, he highlighted that DeFi, too, is experimenting with more use cases, those that can maximize market participation as well as help boost transaction volumes.
It’s all about giving users benefits. We believe that TradFi and DeFi can co-exist synergistically and provide users unparalleled access, control and choice. Greater institutional participation, security measures and use cases will create choice, excitement and confidence for users. Sustainable overall liquidity in the market with institutional participation will also help with the challenges of volatile liquidity during downturns.
The protective mechanisms of corporate governance can be combined with the populist, fast-paced, communal benefits of decentralized autonomous organizations to create a holistic finance system, one that is fair, transparent and inclusive in nature.
We’ll see market efficiencies increased as trad-fi systems are reimagined to import crypto values, and those market efficiencies can then generate additional societal value.
Stochyk said that for mass crypto adoption to happen in the near-to-mid-term, the two spaces need to coexist with one another. He also believes that regulation is right around the corner, with companies now needing to act accordingly to help introduce more confidence within this space.
As the world continues to gravitate toward an economic landscape that favors the ethos of decentralization/transparency, it will be interesting to see how players from the crypto and conventional finance ecosystems continue to synthesize their goals and create a new paradigm that allows users to enjoy the best of both worlds.”
“The MiCA framework limits the volume for stablecoin payments to $200 million per day. This is too low of a cap to gauge its success and is ultimately only helpful in stifling innovation and hindering what these assets can offer. Take the perspective from Belgium, where, as of July 1, 2022, all merchants must offer at least one digital payment solution. But, here’s the catch — cryptocurrency and stablecoins are not accepted as valid forms of digital payment under this provision.
MiCA’s limitations stand to hold back the potential of [Circle’s] EUROC and other digital assets. And, unless this barrier is overcome, the EU may not see the type of adoption required to lead crypto innovation on an international scale. And, it risks seeing the role of the Euro as an international currency severely diminished.
Ultimately, MiCA is likely a net positive and significant step forward for crypto asset regulation in the EU. However, it’s essential to ensure that regulation remains innovation-friendly and tech neutral. This must include eliminating the cap on stablecoin volumes and making provisions for digital currencies, especially stablecoins, to be recognized and encouraged as a form of payment in the EU. Anything less and issuers and innovators will seek other, more forward-thinking jurisdictions.”
“The Salvadoran government touted BTC as a tool to attract foreign investment, create new jobs and cut reliance on the United States dollar in the country’s economy at the time of adoption. Many BTC proponents and the libertarian community rallied behind the small nation despite mounting pressure from global organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to remove BTC as a legal tender. A lot has changed over the past year since El Salvador became the first “Bitcoin nation.”
Bukele has previously mentioned that the primary focus of recognizing BTC was to offer banking services to more than 80% of unbanked Salvodrans. Within six months of the law passing, the country’s national Bitcoin wallet managed to onboard four million users, ensuring that 70% of the unbanked population got access to payment and remittance services without having to go to a bank.
‘We should accept that the digital currency has helped the Central American nation of El Salvador rebuild its tourism industry.’ A near doubling of tourism is a significant boon for the country. Apart from tourism and offering financial services to the unbanked, BTC adoption has also proven beneficial in terms of cross-border remittances, cutting transaction costs significantly.
[However], El Salvador’s Bitcoin Volcanic bond, a project meant to raise $1 billion from investors to build a Bitcoin city, has already been delayed on numerous occasions now and skepticism is growing not just around the project but on the overall BTC adoption itself.
The country’s move toward Bitcoin has limited the country’s access to traditional financial markets, causing Bukele some real problems in financing the repayment of its bond obligations. Moody’s, earlier this year, credited disagreements about Bitcoin as a reason El Salvador was having difficulty coming to terms with the IMF.
Maybe in five years, Bukele’s decision won’t look that bad, but currently, it’s controversial.
For a country like El Salvador, access to funding through organizations like the IMF is vital. That makes Bukele’s Bitcoin gambit difficult to defend.”
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“Newsom (D) vetoed a crypto licensing and regulation bill seen as a possible West Coast version of New York’s “BitLicense” on Friday.
A more flexible approach is needed to ensure regulatory oversight can keep up with rapidly evolving technology and use cases, and is tailored with the proper tools to address trends and mitigate consumer harm.”
The Disrupt 