Are DAOs a new way for companies to go public? (ft. Erik Voorhees)

Word on the Block | Forkast.News

Highlights

• Separating money from the government: “A good way to frame this is like, as most people understand, that back in the 1500s, 1600s, this concept of separating church and state. It was a struggle — a fight. Ultimately, I think people realized that it was important that something as crucial and personal to people’s lives as religion is not controlled by the government. Money is even more personal and important to people’s lives. In that regard, trying to separate money and state is really the entire ethos of what cryptocurrency is.”
• Is Voorhees putting himself out of a job? “I want to be clear that I won’t be out of a job. I won’t have a W-2 paycheck anymore, but my job, my passion, the project I work on when I wake up remains — and will remain — ShapeShift. But there’s just no pay stub from an employer. It’s just a different model. The vision here really is to build a multi-chain, self-custody crypto platform that the whole world can use. There’s not really any of that today. It’s kind of a niche that doesn’t exist. It’s hard engineering because we’re working with multiple blockchains, whereas most DeFi projects exist only on one, primarily Ethereum.”
• How decentralized decisions get made: “There are forums and ideas get discussed, and so in that situation, there’s lots of noise. If there’s an idea that people start taking seriously in which there seems to be support for it, and there’s a formal governance process in which a proposal is ultimately made, which details what’s going to be done, what money is going where and those kind of things. Ultimately, a vote happens. The vote is a smart contract that looks at the FOX balance of each person voting at a certain block height in Ethereum and you can vote yay or nay on a proposal. And ultimately, based on the rules that we’ve set up, a simple majority will win that. And then if that occurs, funds will actually move on chains from the DAO to the address specified in the proposal.”
• Who gets the last laugh: “When we were at that conference, Money 20/20 in Vegas in 2012, yeah, we were right next to this huge PayPal booth. I remember the sneers and snickers of the people manning that booth. A couple of them had maybe heard of Bitcoin and they thought it was a joke. We’re just sitting in there. No one was coming up to talk to us. There was no one at that conference interested in Bitcoin or in BitInstant. We just stood there looking silly while all the professional money people of the world gathered and made their deals. And it’s just amazing to see that none of those companies are relevant in the future of decentralized finance. All of them will have to adapt to crypto or they will go the way of Polaroid. And I think a lot of the banks are going to get really caught off guard by this. The fintech companies move a little faster and I think a lot of them will adapt. PayPal accepts Bitcoin now and cryptocurrency, but the banks are too entrenched.”