Exclusive interview with OpenDAO: How did it come into being in 6 days? It does not compete with OpenSea and hopes to break the internal circulation of NFT and introduce newcomers

On December 24, OpenDAO went online and announced an airdrop of SOS for all users who had traded NFTs on OpenSea. In a short period of time, OpenDAO attracted thousands of attention and discussions on Twitter, and also inspired a large number of subsequent similar projects.

Although its popularity has decreased, as a landmark event, how did it happen? What is the future direction? It is worth leaving more information for crypto history and later generations. Based on this, we interviewed Dyno, a core member of OpenDAO.

During the interview, OpenDAO's vision seemed to have changed. It is no longer an OpenSea challenger as in the early days (a new challenger LooksRare has also emerged), but is returning to a more realistic community level.

Disclaimer: The author and editor of this article do not hold SOS and have no interest in OpenDAO. The views and comments of the interviewees do not represent the views of Wu Shuo.

“It took about six days to make this thing.”

1. OpenDAO has been around for a while. Let Dyno review how OpenDAO was born.

Dyno: OpenSea is the largest NFT trading market, and its development process has been very smooth. Last year, many protocols issued airdrops to users, and there was a craze for airdrops, such as ENS. OpenSea's trading users and community also hope that OpenSea can give back to the community and provide airdrops, but there has been no follow-up.

Until around November, OpenSea hired a new CFO. He revealed his plan for an IPO during an interview. As outsiders saw it, a company this big and with such good cash flow would be a fool not to go public.

Because of this interview, the entire community was ignited, and users and the community expressed strong dissatisfaction with OpenSea. Many users complained on Twitter and social networks, but no one really took action. Then we had an idea, because the user's transaction data is recorded on the chain, we came up with the idea of ​​airdropping the rewards that NFT players deserve on behalf of OpenSea.

It took about 6 days from the idea to the actual distribution of airdrops to users, and it was just in time for the airdrop to all players on Christmas Eve. OpenDAO's airdrop is very fair. First of all, we have no public or private offerings, no financing, and all the money is paid by the team; second, the team did not reserve any tokens, and the tokens in the hands of the team were bought from the market, not at the beginning, but after the increase of ten times; third, the funds in the OpenDAO treasury are jointly held by 8 multi-signature candidates.

From the beginning to now, the number of SOS currency holding addresses has exceeded 500,000, and the on-chain data is about 300,000, including some exchanges. If retail investors are included in the exchange, there may be more people. SOS logged in to ten exchanges within a week of listing. The last one to achieve such a result was Dogecoin. SOS ranked first in the trading volume ranking in the first week of 2022, and now the total cumulative trading volume has exceeded 2.6 billion US dollars.

We are not trying to be a competitor to OpenSea

2. What is the future development direction of OpenDAO? And how will the 20% SOS Token and community treasury be used?

Dyno: The positioning of OpenDAO is actually very simple. Many people say that we want to be a competitor of OpenSea, but that is not the case. We are actually more of an autonomous organization focusing on ecological infrastructure, so we can actually cooperate with anyone. Our team does not need any benefits, and all benefits will be returned to the community to ensure that the healthy development of the community is based on the ecosystem.

The remaining 20% ​​is handed over to OpenDAO, which is mainly controlled by 8 multi-signers. The purpose of this part is actually very clear, and there are detailed instructions on the official website. It is mainly to support some NFT communities, NFT artists, new artists, or to protect some historical sites of great significance. There will also be a part of the funds used to compensate users who have been defrauded. This kind of problem is very serious on OpenSea. For example, if a user's account is stolen, who has the right to freeze all the assets on his transaction chain? Should the community have a greater voice? So we will make some compensation in this regard. In addition, we also want to give more support to more developers. We have Developer Grant. For example, if a community member wants to make some products in our ecosystem or solve existing problems, we will provide financial support.

This is still very interesting from the beginning to now. We now have 4-5 sub-DAOs. These sub-DAOs are developed by themselves, and we have not given any support for the time being. One sub-DAO said that it wanted to become one of the top ten in our treasury, and then slowly developed itself with this original intention. There is a sub-DAO that does NFT, and has purchased more than 200 Ethereum SOS.

3. It is obvious that the atmosphere of the OpenDAO community is still very active. Can you talk more about the sub-DAOs in the community? What are they doing and what is their direction?

Dyno: Half of our sub-DAOs are working on NFTs, whether it is music, graphic arts or art collections, these projects are spontaneously organized by them and have little to do with our team. Our role is actually very neutral. If it is about ecological infrastructure, we can support and cooperate, but for individual NFT projects, the risks are relatively high, so we will pay more attention to their sincerity first, such as buying SOS with real money, so that some of our community members can become your community members.

The other half is mainly about tools for DAOs. In the long run, we still hope to have some automated tools. As DAOs grow larger and the organizational levels become more complex, we all hope that in this DAO, the factors of human intervention will become less and less, and the degree of automation will become higher and higher. Some of our sub-DAOs are working on solutions for automated tools for DAOs, such as tipping, proposal voting, and salary payment.

The NFT community is becoming more and more inward-looking

4. At the beginning, everyone compared OpenDAO to Sushiswap in DeFi (forcing Uniswap to issue tokens), but now it seems that OpenDAO’s vision and actions are still very different. From this point of view, LooksRare is more like taking on the same "responsibility" as Sushiswap to force OpenSea to issue tokens in the future. What do you think?

Dyno: Actually, for us, we don’t want to do anything in the education market. Our idea is actually very simple, that is, to speak for the community, and then to build some ecosystems and some infrastructure products. There are actually only a few types of infrastructure, such as wallets with better security, like MetaMask. The MetaMask wallet has more than 20 million users, but many of them are still easily deceived. It may be that individuals are prone to accidentally click on fraudulent links, and the wallet’s warning is not strong enough. Of course, it also involves many issues of investor education and understanding.

Such wallets with higher security risks will be one of the major categories, and then the trading markets owned by decentralized communities will also be one category. It is not difficult for us to create an NFT trading market, and we can also complete it, but after it is done, we can’t cooperate with other platforms or communities, and it will become a competitive relationship. We might as well support other community-centric trading platforms that really have ideas, such as we are now cooperating with Xdotxyz (a cross-chain NFT trading market owned by the community).

In addition, we are also a cross-chain bridge. In the future, there will be a multi-chain ecosystem. If this multi-chain ecosystem does not combine Layer 1 and Layer 2 well, the friction cost of the combination of this multi-chain ecosystem will still be relatively high. We have also been promoting the cross-chain bridge product.

Whether it is Polygon or Wormhole, we are gradually opening up channels and different chains, and our plan outline is already very mature. We have also launched a function that is still in internal testing, which allows you to send tips in the forum at any time and in real time without friction costs. For example, if you think that the contribution of a member of this DAO is very good, you can give this member a tip in real time without any friction costs. Because this product is on Layer2, there is no gas fee.

Dyno: From the beginning to now, eleven or twelve years, there are now nearly 300 million cryptocurrency players, but NFT actually took a very short time to gain a lot of users. After all, people are visual animals, and NFT is relatively more penetrating and attractive. But we also found that the NFT community is becoming more and more inward-looking, which is not what we want to see. Our current thinking is still committed to expanding the entertainment of the NFT community, expanding the security of NFT, broadening the barriers for newcomers to enter, cultivating new users, expanding the increment, and creating an incremental market.