A reference to the Lox and Ethereum in a single subject line? Normal people don’t act like this!
What is “normal” these days? Indeed, if the goal line represents “the mainstream” and the ball “niche subcultures,” we’ve done Forrest Gump’d it to the locker room by now.
Alrighty then! I’m sure many of you have heard the theory of 1000 True Fans — maybe you are a Gary Vaynerchuk or Scott Galloway disciple, or maybe you even read the original source material. If you haven’t, to level-set, the theory generally states that all a creator needs to make a living is 1000 true fans. With creator tools like Patreon, Discord and social selling (seriously, how is “strea-com” not a thing?), the 1000 True Fans theory is having a moment.
What if I told you: we ain’t even started yet…?
As the term “NFT” settles into our lexicon, and as the Winklevi second guess whether the term “Nifty” would ever stick, another three-letter acronym is beginning to captivate early adopters: DAOs. Now, for my crypto-savvy readers, you know all about DAOs. That said, it is my hope that you can still glean a thing or two from the below (especially with respect to how brands can leverage DAOs to gain extreme loyalty).
Short for “decentralized autonomous organizations,” DAOs are institutions owned and managed by its members and governed by computer code. They are a virtual place where complete strangers can collaborate over the internet trustlessly, whereby a treasury of funds over which no one person or group of people have control without approval of the group can be spent for specific purposes. Each action is voted upon and memorialized on-chain, and the smart contract that governs any specific DAO will act accordingly once any such vote is finalized as the rules around spending are baked into the DAO’s code.
We are having a DAO moment. With tools like Aragon, Colony and Moloch, anyone can spin up a DAO in less than fifteen minutes, for any purpose. We’ve seen DAOs that empower marauding groups of art loving memelords to acquire rare and expensive pieces of internet culture; DAOs that seek to propagate crypto media and culture with the ultimate goal of educating its members on how to “go bankless.” And perhaps most nobly, DAOs that govern the issuance and monetary policy of stable coins.
What we haven’t seen are DAOs that replace antiquated and clunky loyalty programs for brands and service providers. But we will see them soon enough.
With the proliferation of DAOs, we are entering a new epoch as sapiens. An epoch whereby social coordination will reach unfathomable levels, whereby any group of fans (groups way less than 1000 and perhaps even more impressively, groups way more than that number) can extend a brand into uncharted territory. By giving fans a sense of equity—through token distribution and therefore governance of its DAO—brands up the ante in terms of loyalty. Those 1000 true fans (or 10, or 100 or 100 million) can now feel a sense of ownership that far exceeds any stock certificate or Macy’s credit card. By holding the DAO’s native token, they can vote to give themselves rights: access to exclusive drops, access to covetable events and unlockable content. They can develop gamified tokenomics: stake certain assets to receive yields on other assets (great way for another brand to collaborate and tap into another brand’s following), forge/craft new assets (whereby these covetable tokens are “burned” in exchange of other crypto-assets) and receive limited edition NFTs as airdrops for having held the native asset for a specified period of time, for instance.
In a sense, DAOs are limited only to their creator’s imaginations and whats computationally possible via Web3 tools. Early participants (the brands who launch and the first brave fans who join these DAOs and contribute to their growth) stand to gain the most (d’uh), and templates will emerge as “best practices” over the course of the next few years. Thinking about starting one? Let’s talk.
With that, this feels like a good stopping point. Indeed, having started this newsletter exclusively to express my thoughts on fashion and consumer trends, I never know just how far down the crypto rabbit hole y’all want to go. So I ask you: please, let me know what you think!
Til next time,
Trunz :)
P.S. - If you’re wondering: the subject line of this week’s missive has no nexus to the content thereunder. I just thought it sounded sick. Sometimes you just have to do what feels right, even if it’s really stupid.