Membership to join The LAO opens today, April 28, 2020 at 12 PM EST/ 9 AM PST / 6:00p CEST.
Ethereum was started, in part, to rebuild the commercial world. In the wake of the Great Recession, it became apparent to many in the technology community that the world’s financial systems were broken. Wall Street ran amok and the governmental response was lackluster, if not criminal.
Even before protesters occupied Wall Street, cypherpunks aimed to change the orbit of the financial world using something more powerful: math and technology. Bitcoin launched on the eve of bank bailout as a universal, Internet-native currency that had no single owner. Ethereum followed in Bitcoin’s footsteps, generalizing Bitcoin to create critical commercial infrastructure that enables anyone from anywhere around the globe to create, program, and pool assets.
From the beginning, the broad vision of Ethereum has not only been about money. It’s also been about re-orienting how people work together. Blockchains serve as a common reference point for people to vote, coordinate, and take action together.
These facts sit at the core of DAOs. These decentralized organizations aim to re-orient the way we work together by stripping away hierarchy in favor of rigid smart contracts and radical transparency — thus creating trust among the untrustworthy.
Ethereum’s hope and promise has been intimately linked to DAOs. Ethereum broke out, in part, due to the interest and excitement about The DAO. The DAO showed the raw power of Ethereum to facilitate capital formation in ways that before the launch of the blockchain were simply unfeasible.
The DAO experiment ended spectacularly, but the raw power of Ethereum as a capital formation tool is too strong to dull. The Internet has several core use cases, including rapid messaging and e-commerce. One of Ethereum’s core use cases is capital formation. It’s dramatically more efficient than the current aging and often corrupt systems we rely on today.
That’s why the vision and hope of DAOs has not been forgotten. Ethereum developers around the globe have continued to plow forward to build this future: DAO by DAO. They have worked to develop standard smart contracts to build DAOs. They have toiled to make those smart contracts more secure and robust and they have developed novel crypto-economic systems to create new ways to fund projects and innovation.
Today, we throw another model for a DAO into the growing and increasingly powerful Ethereum ecosystem: The LAO. The LAO aims to push Ethereum forward by making it possible for people to pool ether into a common fund and invest that ether in hopes of making a profit. With The LAO we’re taking the first steps to enable people from around the globe to support projects that they love using the power of capitalism as an incentive.
The LAO is just the beginning. We’re aiming to build an ecosystem of DAOs to rebuild Silicon Valley in the sky, one DAO at a time. In the end, we hope to have a permissionless ecosystem that directs funding to entrepreneurs regardless of their location, background, or creed.
Entrepreneurs can spend time building their product and focus on team culture, as opposed to traveling to a few choice locations several times (SF, NY) a year — better using time and energy instead. Founders and companies can turn to their community (their tribe) to spread their message and signal to the LAO or other DAOs for funding.
As the network around The LAO grows, we intend to fight to expand access to DAOs so that anyone can participate and join DAOs on equal footing. We believe the future holds out a financial world supported by a constellation of loosely connected DAOs that rely on the same common core: Ethereum, OpenLaw, and oracle providers like ChainLink (what we’ve previously described as the OLE stack).
Eventually, the goal is to have different types of DAOs funding projects in different ways, some for protocol development, a few that are adjacent to a given protocol, and (hopefully) eventually the ability to create a DAO with investors that are non-accredited, opening the world of venture financing to everyone.
Join us in reviving DAOs. Today, at 12 PM EST, you can join as a member and contribute to The LAO. With this, the future of decentralized finance is taking a step forward.
Joining The LAO
As we’ve described previously, membership in The LAO will be provided on a first-come-first-serve basis. Each member will have the opportunity to contribute 120 ether to receive a 1% interest in the LAO, which entitles a holder to 1% of the LAOs voting rights and profits. purchase 1% blocks of LAO units for 120 Ether starting today. Membership is limited to 9% or for 1,080 ether.
After contributing your ether, then there is a 14 day processing period to finish the approval of the application and fully execute the transaction. This is due to the nature of the Moloch v2 smart contracts, which have a default seven day voting period and grace period to allow existing members to “rage quit” if they disagree with your membership. Over this period, the members, coming on a first-come, first-serve basis will be onboarded to a members-only slack and Telegram channel and there will be calls to and call to begin organizing governance around The LAO.
If you’re interested in becoming a member of The LAO, join now. Once approved, you will have an opportunity to contribute to The LAO and become a member.
For further information, check out our docs, which cover questions about The LAO’s structure and operation, or hit us up via email or telegram.
