MetaMind Thursdays — Libertas Dao
Meet Libertas Dao
We are now into week four of our Oasis Accelerate Blockchain Accelerator which launched on the 2/2/22. We have a fantastic mix of 15 of the most ambitious and talented devs and entrepreneurs who are building on the Oasis blockchain!
Oasis is the leading decentralised, privacy-enabled, layer-1 blockchain network. Combined with its high throughput, low gas fees and secure architecture, the Oasis Network is able to power scalable DeFi, revolutionising Open Finance and expanding it beyond traders and early adopters to a mass market. Oasis has many key backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Binance Labs, and several projects already building on its network & partners such as the CryptoSafe Alliance with Binance, The BMW Group, Chainlink, Balancer, and others.
Every Thursday MetaMind Labs will be hosting a Twitter Space which will focus on one of the teams who are participating in the Oasis Accelerate Blockchain Accelerator. We will be interviewing one project each week to discuss their venture, it’s current stage and what their vision is.
This week we heard from Libertas DAO, a fully doxxed treasury-backed investment protocol and Rose Validator driven by the Oasis community.
MetaMind Labs: Welcome Libertas Dao, tell us a bit about what you are up to!
Abdullah Lawendy (Co-founder)
What we’re trying to do is become the first fully doxxed treasury backed investment protocol operating as a VC fund. We will be investing in early stage projects on the Oasis blockchain. So in essence our goal is basically to democratise the venture capital markets and remove the barriers of entry for retail investors.
MetaMind Labs: Amazing, and can you explain a bit more about what it means to be fully doxxed, so we can cater to everyone in the audience?
Vinod Vijay (Co founder)
Yes, so fully doxxed meaning that we want to showcase to people who we are so there is a real trust between the community and the team. The problem with other DAOs is that there has been a lot of rug pulls in recent projects where some of them have been exploiting people’s funds. We want to create a DAO with a fully doxxed team that operates as a VC fund. Number one this will be able to solve the trust problem, number two we want to onboard retail investors who are currently not part of the early project investment scenarios. Our solution will allow the average investor the opportunity to get in on the ground level of great projects with a level of security that they did not have before. So that’s the idea of having a fully doxxed team.
Metamind Labs: Great! And in this fully doxxed team it’s you and Abdullah if you guys could introduce a bit more of your background and your roles within the start up itself that would be great.
Abdullah Lawendy (Co-founder)
Yeah, so I can answer that question or start off by answering that question. So for myself, I’ve been in crypto from the investment side, probably since 2016. I’ve got extensive experience in entrepreneurship and I’ve run many successful companies for almost 2 decades now.
Currently I’m completing my MBA and I’m in the final stages of that journey. I’m working on my dissertation and my research is defi focussed. My dissertation is a systematic review of defi and its effects and impact on central banking and monetary policy in the West. So that’s just a bit of background about me. We have two Co founders, me and Vinod. I’m the CEO, Vinod manages the tech, he’s the CTO. We also have three amazing developers that are part of the team and we’re expanding the team as time passes, as we get closer to Demo day.
Metamind Labs: How did you agree to collaborate? You know what was the catalyst for this idea?
Abdullah Lawendy (Co-founder)
So Vinod and I have known each other for about a year now. We met when we were investing in Olympus DAO, which was really our entry into DAOs in general. We met on discord, we communicated, we connected over LinkedIn and then started conversations over WhatsApp. Vinod is based out of Belgium, I’m based out of Canada. So there is, you know, an ocean between us but because of technology, we’re still very connected and actually the team itself is all abroad.
We had been involved as early investors in Olympus and we saw the rise and fall of DAOs in 2021 and the reserve currency protocol and all of the forks that came off in the spin offs that came off of Olympus. We felt that there was one issue, which Vinod touched on, that there was a lack of transparency when it came to teams launching anonymously and investors, investing money and really shady protocols.
We felt that there could be a solid team, a credible team that could actually do this correctly and build a DAO. We believe that in 2022 it will be the year of the DAOs and it will really redefine and change the way people invest as a group and how they move money together. We toyed with a lot of different ideas and what we decided on was, version one of this investment protocol would be to build a treasury backed protocol that operates as a VC fund.
We want to be the hub for early projects to find investment through our platform and build on Oasis.
MetaMind Labs: Out of interest — why Oasis?
Vinod Vijay (Co founder)
So we believe that Oasis is the next big thing. There are privacy enabled features which is a big plus for a blockchain protocol like Oasis. It gives an edge over its competitors and it’s very secure. It is also decentralised by a bunch of validated nodes. There’s so much potential for the growth in Oasis and also having a fund on Oasis blockchain would mean that we would have an advantage of investing in the next Gen projects which includes a lot of interesting Web 3 protocols.
MetaMind Labs: What are the big challenges you guys have met so far?
Abdullah Lawendy (Co-founder) I think the biggest challenge so far has been bootstrapping the project. When Vinod said to me we should apply to the Oasis MetaMind Blockchain Accelerator, we saw it as an opportunity to accelerate our growth but also get validation from a wider community. We know that others believe it is a good idea and we have the right team who is credible enough to do it. But the real question for us is, is the market ready for this?
MetaMind Labs: Amazing, thanks guys — anything else you’d like to tell our community?
Abdullah Lawendy (Co-founder) Just that we’re an honest, credible team and that we’re here to, really, you know, make sure that everybody succeeds. We don’t want this just for us. This is for the community ,and that’s why we decided whole heartedly to be fully doxxed. We just want everybody to realise that that’s our real main focus is that everybody succeeds!
MetaMind Labs: Fantastic, thanks for joining us! It’s been great hearing about Libertas Dao. You can find them on Twitter where there DMs are open: https://twitter.com/LibertasDao
For the full Twitter Space recording you can find it here: https://twitter.com/LibertasDao/status/1496879800606154760
