The Year Of The DAO

On June 19th, Unlawcked and SBCA hosted Gnosis, Aragon, DAOstack and MetaCartel representatives in the capital city of Slovenia, Ljubljana. Below is a recap of the event and everything in-between.

1. I feel sLOVEnia

Companies like Bitstamp and Cashila were established in Slovenia and brought massive attention to blockchain space early on. Many fell in love with the anarchistic ideology, others were looking for a new type of investments and income. The vibrant scene with multiple projects has had an impressive impact on the local community, and although small on the map, Slovenia has a great heart and even bigger crypto savvy community. Being the only country in the world with the word ‘LOVE’ in its name, we wanted to bring an esteemed group of foreign projects to Ljubljana to present updates form the most prominent DAOs and share some love for the newfangled DAO topic.

We gathered some panelists in one of the city cafés a day before the event and went through the meetup program, reassuring everyone is one the same page and well prepared for the D day. We had enough time to walk through the streets of Ljubljana and see the wonders of this green city dragons.

2. Kicking-Off The Event

The event took place in Sputnik, a world café. After a short introduction and set up of live-streaming service, Felipe Duarte has given a presentation on how Agency comes of Age: A holographic vision for a DAO future. He talked about DAOstack latest updates. He provided the attendees with an answer to why we need to enlighten and expand our understanding of the promise and potential of DAOs. Felipe also explained and visually presented how decentralized technology brings about radically new forms of value creation and interaction between humans, machines and their environments.

Our second speaker was Anne George from Gnosis. Anne provided us with a detailed explanation of Gnosis and introduced us to dxDAO. Her talk triggered numerous questions and inspired many to think about complex systems from a new angle. Not only have we gained a better understanding of what Gnosis does, but have also seen a hands-on experience from Anna, showing us how the platform works on the spot.

At around 7 pm Daniel Shavit from Aragon Black walked us through a Set up of an Aragon company. We learned about advanced permissions and tools one can use on Aragon platform. Having Daniel presenting to us the core was extremely enlightening and allowed us to better understand what one can do with a DAO.

We continued with Peter Yuan Pan from MetaCartel who spoke about How MetaCartel used memes to bootstrap a DAO. Peter shared the journey of the community and how he ended up building a DAO. He dived into the strategies and future milestones. He’s a man of action and does many interesting things, amongst many, he was the one establishing Libra Community Chat on Telegram just a day after the public release of Libra’s project.

Before we continued, we heard a short lightning talk from Grace Rachmany, author of the book So, you’ve got a DAO. Grace told us more about her work, consultancy and governance challenges corporations are facing in day-to-day operational work. She has provided us with plentiful insightful experiences and wisdom of thought leaders in this space.

Since all projects presenting their latest work are leading the decentralized revolution within the Ethereum community, we couldn’t let this unique opportunity go without a panel discussion led by Gregor Žavcer from Datafund project.

We wanted to learn from the pioneers of decentralized autonomous organizations and hear more about their still untouched potential. We discussed many challenges they face, from a legal, technological and organizational point of view and answered quite some interesting questions from the crowd.

→The event was live-streamed, video is available here. ←

3. Follow-up event with Ljubljana Legal Hackers

Additionally to the Year of the DAO event, Unlawcked and Ljubljana Legal Hackers organized an evening event with a smaller community of developers and lawyers in Hekovnik. The objective of this informal meetup was to hear the story of Felipe’s journey from pollinator to direct collaborator.

Felipe has designed a DAOstack canvas and has also presented DAOstack features and it’s existing “toolkit”. He did not only stick to his own story, but shared the one of dOrg: The first decentralized organization to open a BBLLC (Blockchain based limited liability company), and how it all started in Genesis Alpha. As he is a great facilitator, he took time and ask everyone to present themselves and see why their expectations were. We’re proud to have lawyers previously working in the notary office with us, legal experts such as Aljaž Jadek, who is, in addition, a coordinator of Regulatory Working Group at the Blockchain Think Tank Slovenia and Nena Dokuzov, Head of Project Group for New Economy and Blockchain Technologies at Ministry of Economic Development and Technology.

4. Event organizers

The Slovene Blockchain Association (SBCA) began emerging with a small group of crypto enthusiasts and friends in early 2016, sharing trading and project ideas, while there was no hype on the horizon yet. Later on the community started growing rapidly organically, through the main virtual channel Slack. In the past years SBCA expanded their activities into organization of exclusive monthly events for their members and adding value by cooperating with most known projects and experts in the area, a crypto friendly coworking space and a general advocacy & research of blockchain technologies. SBCA is a professional organization with a trusted community of 400+ crypto enthusiasts, covering topics from the philosophical, technical, product and marketing aspects.

Anja Blaj and Marina Markežič from Unlawcked have been active in the DAO space for some time now (members of the DAO Incubator, Anja co-founded Dgov, both of them are actively contributing to the COALA organisation) and have been giving workshops about DAOs in the past: Block Split Conference, Computational Law and Blockchain Festival Berlin, Trinidad & Tobago, Blockchain, Crypto and DAO and Block and Wine meetup).

Thank you for reading it through! We appreciate all the feedbacks, comments, and claps!

Contact us on Telegram: Klemen Rupnik (@klejmen), Anja Blaj (@anjablaj) and Marina Markežič (@marinam00).