Key takeaways
- PrimeDAO views DAOs as networked islands that should collaborate rather than compete, drawing inspiration from historical trade and cultural exchange between island nations.
- The DAO-to-DAO initiative enables cooperation through co-ownership structures similar to how legacy financial institutions coordinate, but implemented in a crypto-native way.
- PrimeDAO's organizational philosophy contrasts centralized command-and-control hierarchies with decentralized systems thinking that sense and respond rather than predict and control.
- Prime Launch, PrimeDAO's first product, is launching as a launchpad platform where PrimeDAO's own token will be launched on their own platform.
- PrimeDAO spent one and a half years conducting user interviews and market research to understand DAO pain points before building products to improve ecosystem coordination.
DAOs as networked islands
Ashton Addison: What is PrimeDAO, what is the DAO-to-DAO initiative, and what is the platform about?▶ 00:21
Renç Korzay: Let me take you back to 2018, when Genesis DAO was set up as the first functioning DAO on Ethereum. It had a vision of a new type of organization: autonomous, playful, experimental, simple and fluid in coordination. One idea for getting there was DAO fractionalization. Instead of one meta-DAO governing everything, there would be smaller DAOs, which gives the system more flexibility, composability and collaboration. In 2018, because of the lack of tooling and the immaturity of the market, the idea never came to life. But the vision was spot on. It was about seeing DAOs not as remote or isolated nodes but as networked islands, which, despite their isolated contexts, are catalysts of trade and cultural exchange. That's how we view DAOs at PrimeDAO, and we want to be the Schelling point of those networked islands. Many protocols look at the DAO ecosystem and ask what's best for themselves. I think we're one of the few that asks how we can uplift the ecosystem as a whole.
Ashton: Why is now the right time for this, and for taking DAOs to the next stage?▶ 02:42
Renç: I think this is the perfect moment. We claim to be the future of organizations, but for that to happen we first need to outperform the legacy versions. Patrick, co-founder of Curve Labs and one of the leads at PrimeDAO, wrote a great article on this. His research shows that the world as we know it is largely owned by banking organizations that have ownership in each other. This isn't a rant about all corporations being evil, but there is something to learn. We need to notice that the people and corporations that own the world tend to cooperate rather than compete with each other. That coordination game, having co-ownership in each other, has led to financial institutions owning a big chunk of the world and being too big to fail. So we have to ask how we facilitate cooperation over competition and implement this co-ownership relationship in a crypto-native way.
We need to notice that the people and corporations that own the world tend to cooperate rather than compete with each other.
Culture before architecture
Ashton: Is the idea that DAOs collaborate the way the world's largest companies do, so they can reach the next level?▶ 04:34
Renç: Absolutely. I see two main aspects to that collaboration: culture, and the architecture of an organization. Culture comes first, because how we approach it will define the output of the system. Centralized institutions are inspired by the industrial era and the machine. They are command-and-control hierarchies, they think linearly in terms of cause and effect, they feed off predictions, and they are more fragile to systemic shocks. The culture in our ecosystem is inspired by what I'd call the regenerative era and life itself. These institutions should be more responsive and more adaptive. They are living systems. They should not control and predict, they should sense and respond, with the agility and flexibility to absorb shocks. The main challenge we're trying to resolve with PrimeDAO is how to take what has worked for centralized institutions and ground it in open-source values like community, self-sovereignty, transparency and open financial access. That is the opposite of the extremely permissioned environment the global banking system is in.
Prime Launch
Ashton: How long has the team been working on this, and where is the platform at right now?▶ 07:26
Renç: PrimeDAO was formed almost a year and a half ago, when not many DAOs or much tooling were around. We committed to the DAO ecosystem anyway. Since then we've done a lot of user interviews and market research to understand the pain points of the DAO system and how we can uplift it as a whole. We've been building products based on that work, to help make the ecosystem more productive, with efficient communication and efficient coordination.
Ashton: What are your main focuses right now?▶ 08:32
Renç: We're launching our first product on Monday: Prime Launch, a decentralized, permissionless launchpad. First, it's a zero-fee platform at the moment. Anyone who wants to launch a token or a project on it, we won't take any fee. We could easily charge one, but we want to commit to uplifting the ecosystem. There are two modules. Seed Launch offers a clean interface for fixed seed offerings that project owners can customize. You can add a whitelist, geoblocking or your own legal disclaimer. The second is Liquid Launch, which uses Balancer v2 contracts and their liquidity bootstrapping pool mechanism. It helps eliminate price swings targeted by automated trading bots, and it supports fair token pricing. Participants also don't have to wait for external exchange listings to access liquidity, unlike traditional ICOs. We built the smart contracts to be as safe as possible for project owners and contributors alike. They avoid rug-pull situations. You can only provide liquidity to your project at the beginning, you can only set the initial weights once, and you can't intervene in how the weights progress. You can only withdraw liquidity once the project ends and everybody is signed off.
Ashton: Do people need anything to get involved on Monday?▶ 11:31
Renç: On Monday the Prime Launch application goes out. On Tuesday we'll have our own token launch, with the ticker D2D, in keeping with our DAO-to-DAO commitment. There will be no whitelist and no permissions. You can just go to the Prime Launch application, where we'll run our token launch on our own platform, which I think not many projects can say. That's another thing I like about PrimeDAO: we really are builders, and we consider ourselves part of the system.
They should not control and predict, they should sense and respond, with the agility and flexibility to absorb shocks.
What comes after launch
Ashton: Looking five to ten years ahead, how do you see the future of DAOs and where PrimeDAO fits in?▶ 12:14
Renç: After Prime Launch, the next product is Prime Deals. I think it will revolutionize the DAO ecosystem by making coordination and collaboration between DAOs much more fluid and easier. The platform won't only help with negotiation, it will also support on-chain execution of things like token swaps, joint ventures, liquidity provisions and co-farming. There's also a concept I'd like to touch on called squad wealth, which was brilliantly presented by our friends in the ecosystem. It builds on self-recognition. It's not about me or about you, it's about us. In the DAO ecosystem distance is no longer a barrier and communication barriers can be torn down easily. Squad wealth comes from continuously producing the squad itself, through processes, interfaces and products that turn creative labor into units a global network of participants can pass on. It means working together, not through individualism but through collective maintenance and care for one another. This wealth isn't only monetary or economic. It's the satisfaction you get from life and from the ecosystem.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Recorded December 2021.
