States DAO April 2022 Report
States DAO has come a long way in the last month, with some amazing Open Sessions, some great progress from our Fellows with some work being showcased on our Project Presentation, an online Networking Day, and even a meetup in S.F.
Grants
States DAO has received grants from both the Terra Protocol and the NEAR Protocol. States DAO will be rewarding Fellows and possibly others with a Terra Grant if they choose to build a project on the Terra ecosystem. States DAO is collaborating with NEAR to do 2 Hacker Houses that our fellows will be able to apply for. One for Graph Day in SF and one for Consensus Austin!
Open Sessions
We hosted a handful of amazing Open Sessions this past month, discussing DAOs, NFTs, The Metaverse, and more.
Jinwoo Park, the CEO of OFF, which is a Metaverse company talked about the Metaverse and how he thinks people will use the metaverse in the future. He believes that the metaverse will be a place for people to express themselves however they would like to, which can be difficult in real life as people may see you as weird or different. In the metaverse, you can customize your looks and outfit as much as you want. He explained how important NFTs are going to be and how value is attributed to them. For example, if Elon Musk used to hold an NFT it may have a higher resale value. Park also discussed people’s online persona and how many people have started using NFTs as profile pictures. For now, most PFP NFTs are simply static images and cannot be interacted with. His company called MYTY is working to allow CryptoPunk holders to let their Punks come to life by tracking the user’s facial mesh and animating the Punk in real-time.
Ingi Kim discusses many different DAOs, how they work, and the tools they use to achieve their many goals. He discussed many tools for example; Commonwealth is a sort of all in one DAO tool that allows people to discuss, vote, and fund projects together. He discussed rabbithole.gg which is a popular app that allows people to do small tasks and earn crypto for doing so. A similar project called Layer3 allows people to do more important or higher level tasks for larger incentives like finding bugs or building out apps for currently existing DAOs/Protocols. One of the most important tools that Ingi discussed is called Gnosis Safe. Gnosis Safe is a tool that is extremely popular among DAOs and investment groups as it allows you to create a very secure multi sig wallet that needs a certain majority of the multi-sig-signers to sign transactions before the DAO can do anything. This allows for DAOs with very large treasuries to keep their funds safe and decentralized.
Will Papper, the Co-Founder of Syndicate Protocol discussed investing in cryptocurrency as a group of people which is what his product Syndicate Protocol does. There are many legal issues that he ran into when developing this app but he learned that if all people have some control over what the group does then the investment group is treated differently in a legal sense. Start your own investment DAO today at https://syndicate.io/.
Project Presentation Day + StatesDAO PFP NFT
On our Project Presentation Day! (4/7), our fellows showcased what they have been working on so far. Some fellows have been researching the infamous OHM Protocol, others have been looking into Uniswap, a building block for trustless Defi protocols, and some other groups showed the project they have been working on.
SPLYT
Sangho, Won, and Shawn presented their company’s project “SPLYT.” SPLYT or the Split Pay protocol is a way to purchase NFTs in 2 payments, 50% upfront and 50% a month later, using the NFT itself as collateral. They have 5 different phases that they hope to accomplish, starting with simply building a “buy now, pay later” model with two installments, working up to multiple payments, and eventually fractional NFT ownership.
The Button DAO
Jaehoon Shim and their fellows have been working on something called the ButtonDAO, the idea originated on reddit.com where people pay a small amount of money to press a button, and over time the pot accumulates to a larger and larger amount. The last person to press the button receives the pot, so if nobody remembers to click the button then the game ends. Their demo website can be found at https://buttondao.xyz/
StatesDAO Avatar
For mentors and fellows who attended the Demo Day, our developer Hanseong and our designer Aeri created a StatesDAO Avatar. The instructions to claim the NFT were emailed to the recipients. Once the email was sent out recipients could go to the website to claim their NFT. There were multiple options to select from, Male or Female, Different hairstyles, and Backgrounds. Once you select your NFT it is sent to your address not long after.
States DAO x Dropout DAO
Ingi Kim met up with Dropout DAO members in San Francisco on April 22nd. States DAO will be hosting many events in the future for Web3 developers, enthusiasts, and students.
https://twitter.com/dropout_dao/status/1515026165131472896
https://twitter.com/kogim/status/1518606406861131784
Online Networking Day on Gather.town
On April 28th, States DAO hosted an amazing Networking Day for our fellows and community members. Using the social app gather.town we created a mini virtual world where attendees could talk to one another and walk around in the space that our team designed. Many people introduced themselves and chatted about the Web3 projects that they are interested in or working on. Below are some screenshots from the event.
