October 1 marks my seventh anniversary of having quit smoking cigarettes. Formerly a pack-a-day smoker, I never thought I would actually quit. And when I was done, I was done — cold turkey. How? With a bit of self-manipulation: I told everyone that I was running a 15K race within 10 weeks of quitting. I hadn’t run 1K in 10 years.
Shout out to my former business partner and law school roommate, Matt Breen, for signing me up for that race (kinda-sorta-totally against my will).
If you have a competitive and/or bashful composition, it’s amazing what a zero-sum construct can do to you. I couldn’t possibly finish a 15K race while still on the smoke, and the thought of failing to achieve this goal because of those little cancer sticks was absolutely crushing.
“Trunz! How was the race? Last time we met you were training for that 15K…”
“Oh, yeah…well, the allure of filling my lungs with carcinogens and nicotine was too great, so I decided to just…not do it.”
I guess what I’m saying is that when I publicly broadcast something I tend to have a good track record of bringing that task to completion. And that’s what I’m doing today: broadcasting that I am launching a DAO with a ragtag group of friends.
vroomDAO: Who wants to go fast? 🏎️💨
What started as a group text to discuss the ins and outs of yield farming on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, vroomDAO has become a community of crypto-curious creatives, VCs, lawyers, finance bros, strategists, gamblers, gamers, wrestling fans and futurists. Our goal is to share information, educate each other, find alpha investment opportunities, move fast and break things. We are champions of "progressive decentralization” — while "DAO" is in our name, we're not there yet. It's our hope that we reach this status within a few short months. For the time being, we are a token-gated invite-only Discord group with a multisig wallet that is funded to invest in interesting projects that align with our value system (Ethereum Semi-Maximalists who believe in a some kind of Eth-dominant multi-chain future).
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the acronym “DAO,” it stands for “decentralized autonomous organization.” It is a super-legal structure that mirrors a headless, non-hierarchical LLC whereby its members are not required to actually…“work.” Instead, any contribution is compelled by a shared desire to bring value to the group. This can be in the form of research, graphic design, community management, partnerships, business development, making memes(!) etc. The more value a member brings to the DAO, the more tokens s/he earns. This can either be coded into the DAO’s tokenomics (e.g., tokens are emitted to member wallet addresses after completing discrete tasks or bounties), voted upon (through proposals formally submitted to the DAO) or informally through tipping (whereby an individual member recognizes another’s contribution and tips him/her out of the kindness of his/her heart).
You can learn more about DAOs here.
Why am I writing about this? Because we have reached a milestone in the DAO’s creation, and to be frank: I feel like I need to tell y’all about this 15K so I don’t start rippin’ bogies again. As I mentioned, currently, we are a glorified Discord group with a worthless token ($VROOM) and plans of progressively decentralizing. Here is our roadmap:
Create and deploy $VROOM token.
Airdrop tokens to founding members.
Acquire vroomDAO.eth from ENS.domains.
Integrate ENS name with Snapshot.org.
Launch Discord and move group from SMS.
Token-gate the Discord server.
Set up multisig wallet to hold DAO’s treasury funds.
Invite second batch of members into the Discord. 👈 We are here.
Airdrop tokens to second batch.
Further refine Discord and vroomDAO’s purpose.
Open applications for membership — target: 50 - 100 new members (vroomDAO members will soft-vote on this proposal via Snapshot).
Formally launch DAO on-chain (DAOhaus) or integrate with SafeSnap.
Add token liquidity to Uniswap.
Open membership to the public (if you hold 1000 $VROOM tokens, you gain access to the private Discord and can more actively participate in the DAO).
If you’ve made it this far, I assume that you may be interested in the “open applications” part of this whole thing. Hopefully, in a few short months, you find an application sitting in your inbox. Until then, I gotta stay hydrated and get these miles in (but I welcome distractions, so feel free to hit me over email if you want to rap a little about DAOs generally or vroomDAO more specifically). I need to stay on top of my game to figure out which JPGs are worth a vroomDAO investment.
As always, thanks for reading.