This week in DAOs - Aug 4, 2022
A roundup of the most exciting developments in the DAO space.
🎙 In the latest episode of DAO or Never we are joined by James Young, whose nearly two-decade Silicon Valley career stretches across both web2 and web3. James is the co-founder and CEO of Abridged (creator of Collab.Land) and is a founding member of Moloch and MetaCartel DAOs. James shares his experience launching Farmville, his interest in coordination reduction, and his focus on the DAO contributor experience. According to James, whether we know it or not, when we build mechanisms, we’re advocating for inherent and implicit human values. If you are a DAO contributor, or want to be, tune in. Also available on Apple and Spotify.
Hack(s) of the Week
🪓 Crypto skeptics are feeling smug. Here’s what happened.
Nomad is a bridge that relays messages between different blockchains. Bridges are required when you want to move funds from one blockchain to another. This might be done to take advantage of lower transaction fees on other chains, or to access other applications. When bridges move funds from one chain to another, they store them in escrow on the first chain, and mint new assets on the second chain. These large escrows are frequent targets for hackers. The system is only supposed to release funds from escrow when there is an authorization from the holder of funds on the receiving chain. Unfortunately, Nomad overlooked a bug which caused all authorizations to be valid, including fraudulent ones. This allowed attackers, as well as individuals trying to rescue funds for safekeeping, to drain 190M in funds.
It was a learning moment, and then a day later, $7 million was taken from over 7,000 wallets on Solana in a completely differently type of compromise. We’re looking forward to the day when trustless actually means trustful, and when one doesn’t need to be literate in computer science to safely pay for an NFT of a melted monkey.
⏰ Perfect timing. Our vote for DAO tool of the week goes to Swype, which enables DAOs to connect Gnosis Safe wallets to FDIC insured bank accounts. A little safety, soundness, and consumer protection never hurt anyone.
💸 Meanwhile, the embrace of web3 by traditional players continues (and we couldn’t feel more seen). VC3 DAO - dubbing itself the future of venture capital - is bringing the principles of decentralization to traditional venture capital, and vice versa. Read their story in VentureBeat.
🧪 In the running for the highest and best use cases for NFTs, here’s one that’s pretty exciting. VitaDAO operates as a community-governed, decentralized intellectual property collective, funding and commissioning research into human longevity and therapeutics. Congratulations to UW’s Dr. Jonathan An on your recent grant. Decentralized science and democratized longevity for the win.
🎶 Did that smart contract take your breath away? Get an insider’s perspective from Songcamps’ Matthew Chaim and Logos’ Isaac Patka on Friday, August 5th as they discuss the Camp Chaos NFT pack mechanic at Zora’s Metabolism hackathon.
⚖️ So much for web3’s utopian values? Hidden Hand is a marketplace for governance incentives, otherwise known as “bribes”. I guess we should give them credit for their transparency?
Coming Up
🏕 August 24-28: DWeb Camp, Navarro, CA.
🌉 August 26-27: hack.summit San Francisco.
🧠 September 1: 2022 Stanford DAO Workshop. Apply now.
🌶 September 6-9: MCON – for DAO purists. Denver, CO. Apply now.
🇨🇴 October 11 - 14: Devcon Bogota. Tickets available now.
🌏 All Over, Often: ETHGlobal
Tweet of the Week
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