Meet the FounDAOrs -Jesse Johnson, Co-founder of Bullionix
Meet Jesse Johnson, Co-founder at Mintable.app, Director at ZB Exchange and the Creator of Bullionix. We caught up with Jesse to learn what was the motivation behind kickstarting Bullionix through DigixDAO
Q1. Hi Jesse, would you be able to share with us more about Bullionix and yourself?
The inspiration came out of a conversation my wife, Mandy, and I had about DGX. She pointed out that, as great as DGX is, it differed from physical gold holdings in one major way: holding physical gold coins has an additional aspect of fun to it. What I mean is, a coin’s value is not only derived by measuring the grams of gold in it. Each coin has a story behind how it was acquired, its rarity, what the coin memorializes, and its unique design. Bullionix brings this kind of experience to DGX holders.
That’s why our community has the opportunity to participate in each step of the NFT minting process. Mirroring real-life production, we partner with artists who create awesome moulds. Those are the designs waiting to be bonded with DGX. Then users can choose which moulds to acquire and stake their DGX to. Once the gold cools (in Metamask) the NFT is ready to be enjoyed inside the Bullionix Display Case. From there users can pick their coin up, zoom in, flip it over and read about each coin’s unique story. Built for mobile-first, Bullionix is all about being able to enjoy one’s coin collection in an intuitive way.
Q2. How did you know about DigixDAO?
My journey into blockchain started in 2014 through my studies at law school. Somewhere while developing my law degree’s thesis paper, “Research on Bitcoin Regulations in China and Globally” I came across the promise of smart contracts, virtual machines, and Ethereum. It wasn’t long before I was reading all I could about each of Ethereum’s earliest projects.
DigixDAO stood out as the most interesting for two reasons. First, the implementation of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization was and is a very exciting concept. DAOs have the potential to breakdown so many barriers by aligning incentives between users and producers. Secondly, was the product, DGX. This was the coin I wanted more than any other stable coin like Tether.
Q3. Why did you decide to onboard with DigixDAO and be part of the project?
After deep-diving into the ideas behind Bullionix, Mandy and I agreed it was definitely worth pursuing and would make for a strong proposal on DigixDAO. From there, we divided up responsibilities and Mandy led the onboarding efforts joining DigixDAO.
Q4. Since the inception of DigixDAO, what are the major positive and negative impacts?
DigixDAO has pioneered a lot in terms of the technical aspects behind making a DAO that can work successfully. There’s a lot of moving parts under the hood and it all works. Whenever there’s been snags or bugs, they’ve been small and quickly responded to by the Digix engineers.
There’s been a number of ambitious projects that have been a joy to support including the Digix information aggregator DGX.gold and community-led efforts targeting specific markets in Asia and South America.
With perfect hindsight, I would say that I’ve changed my opinion on the sort of “DAOs are leaderless” mantra. I mean, it may technically be true in that it’s decentralized, but it's more clear than ever that a community still benefits from having a more proactive voice of authority that can provide guidance on what most needs to be accomplished. Without micromanaging, every organization benefits from having some boundaries and priorities laid out.
Q5. What do you think can be improved on DigixDAO which can help to better shape your business and DGX?
Without damaging the creative freedom of what the DAO is, I see room for a Discord channel where Digix issues fairly general requests or suggestions to the community (i.e. we would love to see DGX themed hackathons). Basically reversing the way the conversation flows now, and gamifying it a bit by framing these requests as “challenges” that individual DAO members can step up and volunteer to solve.
There are signs that this is organically happening anyways, especially on the new brainstorming channel. In fact, organizing DGX themed hackathons is something that I am surprised hasn’t happened yet and I have said as much in the brainstorming channel.
I have this hunch that too many DigixDAO proposals are limited to what the individual proposer is capable of delivering. I couldn’t have built Bullionix with that mindset because I’m not a coder. We need more proposers who are comfortable planning for scales that go beyond them as individuals. I want to vote for proposals that require hiring and managing small elite teams to execute. In most cases, only the project manager would need to be reporting back to DigixDAO, but his team should be people from outside our immediate sphere who are the best at whatever it is they do be it development, marketing, etc.
Q6. Why do you think others should get onboard DigixDAO?
At the most basic level, people find satisfaction in working together toward a shared vision. That thrill is doubled when those efforts involve pioneering completely new approaches to organizing. DigixDAO is great for anyone with an appreciation for, both, precious metals and cryptocurrencies. As someone who wants to use DGX, why wouldn’t I also want to have a way to directly participate in its adoption and use cases?
Q7. Did any particular solutions stand out to you when you chose DigixDAO?
I don’t think it was any one thing. I simply saw DigixDAO as an open invitation for anyone to contribute their energy and best ideas.
Q8. How navigable is the proposal submission and process on the DigixDAO platform?
It is a very straight forward interface. Once you arrive at community.digix.dao you can view all the different proposals according to their various stages. Just get your DGD governance tokens and load the wallet.
Q9. Have you experienced any positive benefits as a result of the DigixDAO network? What additions to the network do you believe would benefit the broader Digix ecosystem?
The financial support DigixDAO has allocated toward Bullionix.io has made its development possible. Additionally, the community’s feedback regarding Bullionix features have also been very beneficial. As for additions to the Digix ecosystem, I only hope we see more proposals that go outside of the immediate community and seek to engage with the best talents.
DigixDAO has the funding available to really go big and afford the absolute best. Going a step further, it’d be really exciting to see DigixDAO collaborate with another DAO for some co-developed projects!
Q10. Thank you Jesse. One last question. What do you believe are the benefits of decentralised decision making compared to traditional centralised business leadership?
Reducing barriers to entry is probably my favourite characteristic of DAOs and the wider crypto space in general. There’s no licensing required and all are given an equal chance to deliver value. Familiarizing one’s self with the DigixDAO platform is all that’s needed to get started. It's actually even easier than that: the best place to start is by joining the DigixDAO Discord chat.
Having such a dynamic community keeps things interesting. You never know when the next great idea is going to be put forward. It could be from someone who has been participating from day one or someone who had a light bulb moment and just sought out DigixDAO today.
What is Bullionix?
Bullionix is a decentralised platform where anyone with DGX token can participate in a creative process to create a gold-backed non-fungible token (NFT) from start to finish.
These gold-backed NFTs offer a fun new way for us to interact with blockchain technology while also growing one’s gold holdings.
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