How To Start a DAO and Why You Should with Alex Taub of Upstream App

All right, welcome back to the show. This is Brad Costanzo. And today we are going to take a very interesting and innovative turn on the topics. Oftentimes, if you're a subscriber to the show, you understand that I talk about business, marketing, growth tactics, whether it is, you know, how to raise money and capital or, you know, acquire a competitor or to generate tons of leads and sales using social media or ads. We cover a wide range of topics. And if you've been paying close attention in the past really few years, you've noticed that I started to get into talking about topics in the crypto space, whether It's Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and a wide range. And if you're interested at all in this space, I think you're going to really like this topic today. It's one that I haven't covered before. I've been very interested in. I've been spending some time researching, but I've never really gotten to speak to even an expert in the way these work. And we're just talking about daos, decentralized autonomous organizations. It has a tremendous ability to revolutionize the way that we are all doing business. And I am along for the ride. I've invited Alex Taub on the show, and he is the co founder of Upstream, which is a upstreamapp.com, which is an amazing way to help create and manage a dao. Now, if you do not know what a dao is or how or why you might want to use it or how people are using them out there right now in the real world, pay close attention because we're going to learn together. Alex, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Did I, did I encapsulate some of that correctly? Did I?

Yeah. No, you're good. You're good.

Cool. So let's start off for folks who have no idea what the hell is a dao. Is this ancient Chinese religion?

Yeah, no, it's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, out of all the complicated crypto concepts, you know, I think daos are. Even though the word might scare people, conceptually, they're pretty easy to understand, really. It's just pooling money together. So, you know, let's say 10 friends put 100 bucks in a bank account, and then they made proposals on how to use that money, and then they voted on what to use that money for.

That's really like an investment club, maybe, right?

Exactly. Investment club is a really popular use case for a dao right now. You know, friends wanted to pull some money together, buy some JPEGs or some collectibles. Under 100 people. That's a big dao use case. But yeah, so it's really like a lot of ways to think about it, but it's. Could it be the future llc? Sure, possibly. But it's just a really great way to coordinate and, and have like. Instead of like, like investing in a community. Not. Maybe not investing is not the right word. Instead of like, you know, in your community you get like an admin money right to run it. So like instead of paying into an admin, you're paying into the community itself and you're getting sort of ownership, upside, decision making power of that community. Really daos are like community 3.0.

Okay, so how would it. Let's. Whenever we're talking about something new, it's always, always helpful to kind of compare it as close to apples to apples. It's like this, but with these features or without these features. So you mentioned like maybe like an llc like right now or before, prior to daos, what are the ways that people would pull their money together to go collectively in on things like this?

So I mean, you know, daos aren't legally really anything. So you know, you sort of have to wrap it in something that already exists. So if you don't make an entity, it's going to be looked at as like a general partnership. So the thing is like there's three things you need to think about. One is liability, the second is like operating agreement and third is like taxation. So in terms of like liability, if you and five friends buy an NFT for a hundred thousand dollars collectively, like.

We each put 20,000 in.

Yeah, yeah, you know, me and five friends, we put each 20k and we buy a board ape for 100k and it turns into a million dollars and we all, and we, you know, cash out, we all get our, now our 200k each, we all pay our taxes, we all go our separate ways. There's no problem with that. You just pay your taxes, you're good, you create entities in the case of conflict, you know what I mean? When you pull money together, you buy the thing for 100k, four of you vote to do it, one of you vote against it and then it goes to zero. And then the one person against it is litigious and he sues the four people saying that, you know, it's because of them he lost his money. Now that person might not be able to make. Maybe he gets his 20k back. Maybe he doesn't. But you know, all these people lost their money as well. So it's, it's, you know, you wrap it in like an LLC to protect from something like that where they can't go after you personally, they can only go after whatever in the entity. So that's like that part then. Operating agreement, you usually want one. Just so you are on the same page. Hey, okay, we're, we're putting together this dao. Everyone's vote is proportional to what they're put in and that's it. And you want that operating agreement to match the actual dao?

Yeah.

And then taxation, you can obviously tax on a corporate level from the entity or you tax on the individual, like a pass through, really up to, it's up to the people to decide what to do. So that's like at least, at least on the legal side, like how you need to think about things. Then those are for profit investment clubs. Then there's obviously not for profits. There's also people trying to figure out how to go bigger for profits. There's a lot of different ways to play it.

Okay, okay. So most daos right now, would you say that especially, you know, if they're putting this DAO together in order to make investments of any type, that you start an LLC first and then you do do the dao kind of inside it?

Would you? Yeah, yeah, you could probably start the, you could probably start the Dow first and then make the llc. Once you realize that this is something you need, I don't think, I think the order is fine. Because making a dow is not illegal. It's not like, you know, it's just, it's, it's the, it's the protection that you want from it. Now if you go above 100 people, there's obviously other things you need to worry about. Um, because like if you're over a hundred people, it's not an investment club anymore, it's an investment company. There's a lot of things you need to do if you're an investment company. So there's all this stuff. I'm not a lawyer, so. Yeah, talk to your own lawyer about that.

Do sub 99 or sub 100 people in that. Do they need to be accredited investors or is that the point where they don't necessarily have to.

Yeah, it depends, you know, what you're doing. It depends on what you're doing. It depends on what you're buying. I would say, you know, you should talk to a lawyer before you set it up just to make sure what you're doing. There's also ways to go over 99. You have to obviously stay. You don't want to violate in the spirit of the law. But like in theory, you take something like Flamingo Dow, there's 99 people in it, but there are some companies in it. There's investment funds like Union Square Ventures, the churning group Collab Fund, and there's obviously people in those groups. So you can have subgroups to the dao, or like entities that invest in the dao, they just need to do more than one thing. Meaning they can't just invest in the dao. That can't be the reason why they exist. They need to do more. So there are ways to go above 99 individual people by using sort of subdaos, but you only can do that if the dao is actually doing something else as well. Or it gets looked at as just like a pass through and it doesn't really count.

Okay, great. What are some of the. Are there any other uses for a DAO besides a investment club, for instance?

Yeah, so we're seeing a few different interesting ones. One of the ones that I'm focused on right now is NFT projects. So imagine you sell a million dollars worth of crazy koalas and you're like, all right, 10% of the mint is going to go into the dao and then the community is going to be able to control what that's used for. That's a really easy one, easy community engagement tool where the community can decide what to do and own ownership in that dao, I think is a really fun thing to do, a fun way to sort of approach it. So yeah, that's, there's definitely, there's definitely other use cases. I think the NFT one's going to be a really big one and really popular.

Okay. Yeah. So when you're launching your own NFT and managing your community through it, does a dao typically have its own tokens?

Yes, each dao typically has a token. There's a few ways to go about it. One is you can give voting power to people who own specific NFTs. Another is you can give them a specific DAO token that they can use. There's a few ways to approach it.

Okay. And when governance comes in and people are voting, let's say there's 50 people in this dao. I've created a Dao. We got 50 people in there. 150 doesn't really matter. Are the governance requirements set from like the Dow founders? So for instance, you could Say that something requires 100%, an anonymous voting or something. Could be 51%. Does it. Is it really however you decide to.

Make it, it's however the group decides to make it. So everything in the Dow is like a vote, really, if you want to change things. So you could set it up a certain way, but maybe nobody's going to join because it's not a fair way. Yeah. So, you know, if you say every, you know, I don't know, every. Everything needs a, you know, like 30 quorum, 50. 50.1% vote. Sure. In the positive. There's a few ways to approach it, but you know, if you did like no quorum, all ownership and you own 98% of it, like, is anyone going to really agree to it? I don't know exactly.

But, but like you said, it's not. These are not.

It's not a democracy necessarily. It's not everyone gets an equal vote and holds a hand together. Some people could have more than others. It could be proportional. It could be that everyone has the same vote, but it doesn't need to be.

Yeah. On investment clubs, I, I've got particular interest in the investment club concept, but on investment clubs, do you typically see it as being. That requires like, let's say I'm the manager of the Dow and I have an investment club And I'm buying NFTs or coins or something of that nature. And there's 30 people in there. Have you seen it where that requires like 100%, like everybody, we're going to buy this board.

A.

Does everybody agree? Or if anybody doesn't agree, like, have.

You seen any, haven't seen one. Where you need every single person to vote yes to do something, but you could totally do that if you wanted to. Okay.

Okay, cool. That's good to know. So let's go into. Right. Before we dive into like one of the ways that you're helping to make this easier, I just want to make sure that I'm grabbing all of the attention, hook points for all of my audience. So if you're, if you're starting an ft, if you want to do an investment club, are there any other use cases that people are starting to use daos that are kind of innovative, thought provoking, like, oh, that's interesting that.

Yeah, there's two, there's two of them that I'm looking into right now. One is what I've been calling like a vault dao, where it's basically instead of using a hardware wallet or like, you know, you could basically use the multi sig wallet, multiple signature wallet inside the dao to house your nft. So like you have a bored ape, you don't want to put it in a hardware wallet. You could put it in the dao, you know, call it ajtdao, you know, that's my Twitter handle. And, and then you could house it there and you can basically spread around the tokens for the community in a bunch of wallets you have access to. Okay, what you, what you could do in that scenario is like imagine you click a bad link, they can't steal your ape. You know, it's basically, you'd have to hack multiple accounts, coordinate extra layers of protection. Exactly. So it adds extra layers of protection. That's one other use case. We call this the vault dao internally. And then the fourth, which I'm most interested right now, and I'm digging in, is the concept of Participate to earn. So there's concepts like play to earn, which is like video games. There's step, you know, move to earn, which is there's a company called Stepn right now that's really blowing up. And then I think that for community, participate in the community to earn could be a really interesting model, figuring out exactly the nuts and bolts to it. But I think participate to earn, if we can figure out the tokenomics around it, that could be a big monster of an opportunity.

Could you give maybe a little bit more tangible example of what participation means participate in?

Yeah. So you want to figure out what are the really good behavior someone does in a community, being helpful, being active, you know, other things, figure out what those things, those, those like good actions in the community are, and figure out, all right, if you do those good things, how much could you theoretically earn of a token? And if that token, if you could figure out a way to make that token something that people want, they can use and has value, then you will have a very big business.

I love it. Okay, so let me give you actually a potential hypothetical on this with a very real entity that, because I've thought about this, this is a, this is a group that started right in the beginning, give you some context, right in the, like almost precisely two years ago, 2020, May of 2020, right when people started to feel like, okay, lockdown is still there, but it's okay to go see your neighbor without killing them.

Right? Yeah.

So my friend Alina, she is a amazing, like house music dj, invited several of her friends over these, these amazing cliffs to overlook the sunset and to play some beautiful music. And there was like 20 of us sitting out there and every single weekend we were like, this is great. We got to gather outside, listen to good music. And this thing grew like a virus during the pandemic. And we are about to celebrate two years later, she's, every single weekend she does a little mini music festival for free. It's all operates on donations here in San Diego. Sometimes gets up to, you know, between one and 2,000 people showing up to these parks and just participating. And then if to raise money, she just asks for Venmo requests. Right. So this is. And she's also created a nonprofit organization, a legitimate religious organization called the Church of Music. There's a lot of reasons she did that, such as back when it was illegal to gather, it wasn't illegal to have a religious event. So she created the Church of Music so she could get by with gathering during a period. It was brilliant. There's about 15,000 or so Instagram followers, big email list, there's a big social following and they're doing good things.

Right.

So we've talked about this like at a high level of, you know, my level of understanding of this is still tip of the iceberg stuff. But we started thinking, well, what if the church and music had its own token? What if it was organized as a dao? What if the people who showed up, like every time you showed up or every time you went on one of the volunteer trips, like about once a month we volunteer at an orphanage or you stick around and you do cleanup. And this is a very localized community.

Right.

But, but it's, it's becoming worldwide known because of the publicity. But we started to think about this. This is a group of like minded people organizing together, coming together like trying to, trying to reward participation and reward doing good things. So that's kind of the backstory, this Church of Music is something like this an appropriate thing. Like what you're talking about is this totally dissipate to earn.

Totally.

Okay, cool.

You can figure out what you want to reward people for, figure out how they get the reward, how much they can actually earn and not like. And that there can be an economy in a marketplace for it. 100% could do that.

Yeah. No, I love that because she also does these other private special events where she normally charges money for it. Like, okay, this is a small group. Let's say we're going to charge $50 a ticket. And we started thinking, well, what if you could get rewarded every time you showed up to one of the weekly events? What if you could get rewarded every time you showed up to, you know, volunteered your time to help. What if you could get tokens? And then what if you could redeem those tokens for other experiences that might not be available to everybody else? What if you could tip the DJs in the church of Music tokens? What if, like, so given a lot of thought to this. So this is, this is a great, just hypothetical thread that we can maybe use as a reference point because for selfish reasons, it might turn into something, but.

With this person after also just walking through what they can do.

Fantastic. I love that. Okay, so now let's talk about what you have been doing with Upstream in order to help really facilitate people to create their own dowels and to get their feet wet and try to figure this out. Like, try it out. That's all a crypto, you know, you just got to get in and start playing with it because it's all new to everybody. So tell us about what Upstream is.

Yeah, so we basically realized this past summer that, like, Web3 is going to take over. And what I mean by that is web3 is just like the ownership economy. So, like, instead of, instead of not being an owner, you're now an owner. And ownership can manifest itself in many ways, whether it's digital assets or whatever. And we started to think, what's the Web3 community play? Like, what is it? And we realized pretty quickly it's the concept of a dao. And we just said, okay, let's try to start and join as many daos as we can, see what the landscape looks like. And we realized pretty quickly that starting a dao was like starting like a website in the 1990s. It's like either you knew how to code websites or you paid someone a bunch of money and they did it for you. Right. It wasn't a Shopify, there wasn't a Squarespace, there wasn't a wix, there wasn't a Tumblr, there wasn't a blog spot, there wasn't a.

You know, I remember the day as well. Started my first online stuff back in 97 or 98. And yeah, it was, it was rough.

Yeah. And it was costly and it was. So that's where Dazzler right now it's like either you know how to launch a smart contract, a solidity contract and interact with it, or you pay someone a bunch of money and they do it for you.

Gotcha.

That's fine. But that's where it sort of is. Then on top of that, we try, once we got joining to some daos, we realized all the tools to actually run the dow just really fragmented. So it was just like, you know, token, like the sort of governance was on Aragon and the voting was on Snapshot and the treasury was on Juice Box and, you know, sort of on and on and on. And we're like, all right, there's a massive opportunity here to build like sort of a no code or low code sort of full stack, where everything's in one place, sort of dao in a box that you could spin up really easily. So we launched it mid November, and since then we've just been growing it really fast, like basically like 20% week over week. And we ended up going out and raising our series A raised 12 and a half million bucks. And things are going really well. The team's 15 right now, and we're just growing.

Oh, fantastic. So there is. And by the way, if you. At any point, because we're, you know, we do this both on audio only, but also video, this will be on my YouTube channel. If there's any time you want to share a screen and give us like a little tour of how it works, that might be useful. It's up to you. But just letting you know, you can do that.

Thanks, man.

But okay, so upstream app.com. so if I want to, like, I'm on there right now, I'm going to share screen just as I poke around, because I like to poke around and you can kind of tell me what's up.

Yeah, okay.

So can you see my screen?

Yeah, totally. So you can launch your dao today. So you click launch your collective. We call it. We call the daos collected.

Perfect. And by the way, if you're only listening to this, there will be a link in the. In the show notes to click over to the YouTube channel and I'll put a timestamp of where I start to share my screen so you can take a look at this. Don't want to leave you guys out, but okay, so I launch. First of all, I'm going to just scroll down. I'm going to see. It's the simplest way to start and manage a dao. No code, which is great. Full stack down in a box. Okay, this is awesome. So I'm going to click launch my collective.

So then you connect your. Usually connect your Ethereum wallet, which.

So one of the things I noticed is you have collectives and communities. What's the difference?

Collective is a dao community. You don't necessarily need a dao to have a community. They're sort of merging into one, to be honest.

Okay, gotcha. Because I looked at here this join a community.

So these communities are still active and really popular, but I would say that collectives are like where we're spending most of our time these days. Perfect.

Okay, gotcha. All right, so we're going to go here, you connect to. You go to connect a wallet, which.

You don't need to do now, but you can if you want. Yeah.

I actually went to the demo and I. And I did that and I played around with it and I went through the steps. That's one of the things that I'll encourage anybody to do is check out if you're watching this. If we're back here, you have explored the demo and you can even connect a fake wallet like the demo and kind of go through this. So I started to get a feel for like, wow, this really is very intuitive.

Yeah.

Easy to understand.

Yeah. It's pretty basic. And then if you click like the little circles. Yeah. You could see the things you like. You either want to start from scratch or use an existing token.

Okay.

And then you set up your collective, you give us the name.

Okay. So if I start from scratch, I will end up launching a new token for governance. I'll mint them. So for instance, using that example I used of Church of Music, if we were setting one up for this, we would be starting from scratch. Once we're all done with this, we'd have a dao, we'd have a Church of Music token that could be used for governance, etc. And obviously token, church token. Set up the client and then you.

Give it a name, give it a symbol, and then you agree to the terms of service, and then it gets. Gives us a note and then we reach out, we try to understand who you are, what you want to do, and then we help you launch it.

Okay, perfect. Now does this part here, if I were to go through this and do this right this minute, does this cost any like eth. Gas fees or anything?

Doesn't cost anything. Setting it up doesn't cost anything. We, we. We cover that cost and we walk you through it.

Love it. Is this built on Ethereum or is it.

It is Ethereum. Yep. Love it.

And then so. And then one of the things like you talked about how things are cobbled together. So. Or have been until one of the things you're trying to do, so I'm familiar with, for instance, like roll trirolle.com you know, if I want to create. But that's just create social tokens. So that's one thing to do. I don't think they have DAO management unless they've changed. But would something like this potentially replace the need to go elsewhere to create your tokens?

Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't need to do it really anywhere else, because we're doing all this stuff in one place for you.

Beautiful.

You don't need to start the DAO somewhere, but if you have, you could just bring it over.

Beautiful. And that's where it said, set up your collective. And it was like, well, do you want to. Or about. Yeah, I want to bring an existing token right now.

It'll probably give you. You have to drop in the contract address.

Okay, cool. All right. So I would go through all this and then you guys would reach out.

And then we walk you through the process, give you a demo, get you started, and handhold you and bring on the people you want to bring on.

Okay. And then help. Do you guys also help just a little strategically for people who are brand new at this, really think through this is what I'm trying to accomplish. What are some of the best ways to go about.

We do all. We do all that because obviously that's a big part of it. People don't, you know, they know a little bit of what they want to do, but maybe not everything they want to do.

Brilliant. Okay. And then ongoing maintenance costs, etc. Is there. Is it.

We take 2% on all deposits into the, into the. The treasury.

Okay.

Anytime you contribute into the treasury, every hundred dollars you put in, we take $2. Okay. And that's our model. It's like we're taking 2% on all deposits, which is pretty cheap compared to everyone else out there. Even like juice box takes 5% and other DAOs take usually 5%. We felt like 2% was good and fair and. Yeah, so that's why we. We're doing that. But also like in. In the. In the near term, we're trying to, like, support as many Dows as we can. So we are basically, you know, like, waiving or at least discounting the percentage for the fees.

Oh, beautiful. Now, do you have, like, do you have a list of Mark. Like, I don't know, marketplace of collectives that people have used on yours that people can go join or.

We haven't done it.

Private white label.

Yeah, they're sort of private right now. They're sort of private. Like group chats that want a wallet. Eventually we're going to have some public stuff. I like to call it, like, the single purpose daos. So if it's like, okay, this dao does one thing and like it's not closed off to just a few people and anyone can really join, I think that's really interesting and I think that there will eventually be discovery for these daos inside of Upstream where there's like, oh, this is like the Kobe Bryant memorabilia jersey dao. And that's all we did. We bought a bunch, you know, so that's, that's sort of how I see it. But we'll see. But right now there's no discovery for daos at least. Right.

Are there any daos you can think of right now that ideally ones that have launched on Upstream and had some really impressive success, and I'm not just necessarily talking about financial success, but just success in community building, et cetera, that you can maybe walk us through. Almost like a case study of what, you know, who they are, what they did, what are some of the.

Yeah, totally. We had this past weekend. There was the Yuga Labs 40 land drop. Big, big, big spectacle. Yeah. But also like, if you knew what you were doing, you did, you could do really well. There's 50, there's 29 guys. We pulled together about 100k and we bought 15 plots of land.

Okay, so that was about what, two point is that 2.9 million race?

No, no, no, 15. 15 plots each about 3 eth. Okay. So we, we, we was like, you know, 40, 50 eth.

Oh, I got you, I got you. So about 100.

I got you, you know, 150k.

Okay. I thought you were saying each person.

Oh, no, no, Total, total. And then, you know, we got, we went 15 for 15. We got all of our, the plots of land that we wanted to and essentially we, we ended up, you know, it's worth like 3x now from where we bought it. So I mean, that was pretty popular. That was this past weekend. That was a pretty big success so far.

Okay. Okay. I love that. So that is getting people together who want to contribute some capital to say, look, like, I don't know if it was you leading this or somebody else who probably has a lot more knowledge of like how to get into the NFT space and get these projects. Some people are just like, I want to be a part of it, but I don't know what the hell I'm doing. This is the way somebody who knows what they're doing can take the lead on this kind of like a syndicated deal and say, look, I'm going to go take care of this. You guys throw your money and we're all going to raise together.

Yeah. It's also like, you know, some of these people couldn't afford the land of the plot of land by themselves, but like a collective could do it together. So you may not have been able to get your land, but because a bunch of people chipped in, now you basically got your, you got your land and now it's worth, you know, a bunch more. So instead of being able to, you couldn't put in the $8,000 needed, but you got, you put in $5,000, but now you're $5,000 worth. $15,000.

Sure. Yeah, exactly. Now daos can also invest in off like non chain, off chain assets. Right.

If yeah.

Can put together and buy real estate or buy business. Is that accurate? Yeah, probably has to be. I mean, legal entity, but yeah, if.

There'S any type of legal entity you need, you just need to do that. But yeah, I mean there's no reason why a DOW can invest in other things.

Okay.

There's a bunch of different structures they could use.

I love that. You know, one of my favorite case studies that I came across back in January. Are you familiar at all with Lynx Dao, what they did?

Yeah, of course.

Cool. Yeah, I thought that was fascinating. I know how they, from what I understand, they launched the NFT to raise, if those of you don't understand, their concept was let's raise a bunch of capital to go through selling NFTs, to go find like in essence a search fund to go find a golf course to potentially buy and turn it into a golf club. And they'd raise, I don't know, it's like 10 or 12 million dollars in 48 hours. It was called Lynx Dao. And then the next step was, well, let's now form a dao, because I know that they didn't even have a DAO ready to go until they had the sales of the nft. And I've been following in there. I didn't buy an nft, but I've been following along in their discord group.

About what I'm good friends with the guys there.

Beautiful. I've just found it endlessly fascinating on what can be done, especially for say, look, if you have the right vision for what you, your community to do, to be able to fund, right in this case, golf courses and you know, and whatnot. What can you give any other insights to how things are going there?

Yeah, no. So I mean, you know, it's sort of like a single purpose dao, which I think is something interesting. Which is like this dao is going to buy a golf course. That's the goal. Whereas like we've been more focused on like evergreen daos where people are just continuing to do different things in the group. I think single purpose daos are really interesting. I think I want to explore them more and I want to support them. But right, like right now we're not. We're not really supporting single purpose daos platform. No.

What do you mean by that? Not supporting it? Meaning that if somebody has a single.

We just. We just don't have the tools that you'd like. There's other tools you'd use for a single like one pop thing. Ours is more for ongoing and it's mainly because we're just not. There's no like public page you can see. You have to join it first. It's just not set up to support like anyone can come and join this thing.

Okay, so in this case, let's say I were to set up a dao on upstream. How then would I direct somebody to join it? Like what would be.

You could share. You could share the link to that page, but it would be like it's just more private than it is public and discovery at this point.

Okay, perfect.

So we haven't prioritized that but we will. It's something on our roadmap. Like. Oh like a big nice gallery of different dows you can join. I love it.

What else? Curious. What else is on the roadmap? Anything that you're able to. At least on the public roadmap.

You know, other stuff that we're. I mean we're thinking a lot of the participate to earn is the thing top of mind for me right now. Like we can figure that out. We are in a really, really good spot.

Right.

So that's what I'm spending a lot of my mental cycles on.

Okay, that's great. Yeah, I know. Back to that example I gave of the. Of that church of music because I was starting to think exactly about this. Like okay, how can you incentivize people to do certain things now in role so once more my audience doesn't know what role is. It just creates social tokens. So you can create 10 million Brad tokens or whatever tokens. To my knowledge that's mainly all they do. But one of the things that I thought was really fascinating especially for participating in real life stuff is that you can create an earn code where it's like a little. You're probably familiar with this but a QR code or a link that you can send somebody, if they click that they can claim certain tokens. So one of the things we were talking about is if somebody shows up in real life, they have to be there physically to scan a QR code and that automatically drops tokens as a reward for, hey, you showed up, you participated. Boom, here you go, here's 100 tokens. That's about as far as I got in. What could be done under participate to earn?

Yeah, those all make a lot of sense. And it just really depends, like, hey, I want people to show up and I want people not to just show up, but stay and engage and be involved. And like, hey, if you show up you get X coin, but if you actually stay involved and you match, you get Y. And if you, you know, like there's all these, there's an interesting model here, but you got to figure that out. You got to get like 70% of the way there and then let the community customize the other 30%. Right.

And also for my crypto naive folks, one of the. Correct me if I get any of this wrong, but one of the other benefits to this is because you do get tokens based on, from the community. As the value of the community grows and as you add value to it, you're getting rewarded in there because the value of those tokens increases.

It should.

Yeah, that's one of the theory.

That's a theory.

As opposed to just joining a group. Because anybody can just join a community or a group, but they don't have the, you know, the only person that really gets the upside is the person who owns it necessarily. And that's what the promise of Web3 is really all about, right?

100%.

Yeah. So that the value creators actually get to capture the value. Unlike everybody posts, user generated content on social media. Who gets the value from that? Well, Mark. Exactly, exactly. Okay, so it is free to go to Upstream. You can follow those steps. You can actually create a dao. It does not actually cost you any money to get it up, but if you start to get some real traction and people start to contribute and join the dao? And am I right in saying that if, if you just, if, if I created a DAO on your site and you wanted to join it, do I set a price for joining the dao?

You can say a minimum that you need to contribute to be able to join it? Yeah. Okay.

And so would somebody be contributing eth or something else? Okay, could, can you. Is it possible to make it so if somebody has something else, you can accept that or Is it right now it's just Ethan.

Eventually. Just eventually, sure. But right now it's just E. Okay.

So that's the price of admission. What if somebody has an NFT that I want to say, okay, you bought my nft, you get to join my dao. That unlocks access to it. Is that a capability or no?

Yes. So you can use DAO, you can use an NFT, whether it's an ERC 721 or an ERC 1155. You can use that as your voting power.

Okay, so you can get in with.

Those are, those are from like existing NFTs.

Gotcha.

Sorry. Existing tokens. You can use an existing token and that, that's, that's that use case. Okay.

And that token would be nft. So if I like for instance, had I already a month ago launched the Brad NFT, 10,000 pictures of my face and I said, this gets you access to the BRAD dao. Now that I just set up, that can be, that can be integrated.

Yep, perfect.

Love it. And then if somebody does pay, let's say I say it's one eth to join, somebody joins that upstream, takes 2% of that, but otherwise that just goes into the treasury.

Right. Say that again, sir.

Does the money go, the money that people put in, that goes into a treasury which is managed by the dow?

Yes, if you're contributing eth. Yeah.

Okay. And then now that Treasury, I'm just trying to sum up everything. Now that treasury, let's say it's got a million dollars in the treasury now. Right. So when we are going to vote, when we're going to deploy that wherever, let's say it's an investment dao, we set up governance rules that might say, I don't know, 75% of people have to agree on this and then we're going to buy or 100%, it just depends. And then the manager is it right, like a manager of the dao, we go do that transaction.

No, you know, so that's how it works. The way it works is you say, okay, we have a threshold. We need to get 75% of the vote. And then, then it goes to vote and then let's say it passes. Then you have the signatures of the multi sig wallet sign and then execute on chain because the voting is done off chain, but the executing is on on chain. And then it unlocks whatever the thing is. So if it's money that needs to use, it would unlock that money and that would be sent to a specific wallet to go and make that purchase perfect.

And then that would be who's ever designated as the.

Yes.

Is there a title for that? Is it a manager? Is it a signator?

We call it a designator. Designator or a signator.

Right. So in. In the case of what you guys did, that, that would be the person who goes out and acquires the land from the bored ape drop that they just did. Perfect. Well, this is really fascinating. I love. I love the concept. It's super exciting to see where this is going to go. And we are in the right. We're in the absolute infancy of Dallas.

We are in the embryonic warmups. We're in the warmups. We're not even the first inning yet.

Yeah, well, and I think that you jumping ahead like this is. This usually takes a long time for the user experience to catch up. It's usually just code, code, code, code, code. But now with all of the no code tools and things, I think that's making it easy for the average person because those of us who've done crypto for a while, we're always. We're always going, man, we are so early because this is so confusing to do X, Y and Z. Like, I can't imagine my parents doing this stuff.

Totally.

But I do think that what you're trying to do is bring a better user experience and user interface to something that could potentially be complex and is totally new, is much needed in the space. Any other kind of nuts you're trying to crack obviously participate to earn getting more exposure?

No, I'm trying to focus. I'm trying to focus on just like one or two really good use cases and just really crack that nut.

Are there any use cases out there that you'd like to have done, but you just don't have the right community.

Organizing non profits, like proper nonprofits, like real non profits being daos could be really interesting. I don't really have the bandwidth. I think that could be really cool if done right.

Yeah, I do too. I think that's. I think nonprofits go in the dao model especially because you get the transparency on the chain. And charities especially, the bigger the charity is, I mean, they're notorious for having mismanagement of money. And, you know, you donate, you know, $1,000, maybe, I don't know, $100 goes to the actual charity. The rest gets lost in administrative expenses, et cetera. So that's super cool. Well, I love it, Alex. I mean, this is a fantastic platform. I definitely am looking forward to taking it for a test drive. I may even do it with the example that I gave you, assuming that.

Yeah.

Is interested in doing this. But I love it when people are bringing innovation to it. Any, Any other things you'd like to tell the audience before?

No. I mean, if people are interested in trying a, you know, a dao, there's something called an NFT project that I'm involved in called Illuminati NFT. You could buy a DAO token on OpenSea and then you can join the DAO and vote on stuff. It's pretty cool. It's a lot of people's first experience of like an NFT project, the dow.

So tell me about, like, where would somebody go if they wanted to do.

That OpenSea and go and just search Illuminati NFT or Illuminati DOW Token and you'd be able to buy. Buy the token.

Okay, I'm doing that right now here. While we, while we're on screen, let's just let people see what I'm doing here. So opensea, if you are Brit.

Ill. Yep. Illuminati Dao. One word or no, no, two words.

So here's nft.

Well, you want the DAO token because that's what we're.

Okay.

Yeah, that one right there.

Cool. Okay, so you would go here, you would buy this. For those of you brand spanking new to this watching this is a longer conversation, but you have to get a little guy called Metamask up here. Hit me up at Ask Brad@baconratbusiness.com if you're not familiar with this at all. Okay, so you would buy this. It's $120 plus gas fees. And then buying this would allow me to join the Illuminati dao.

Yep.

And what would, what would the benefit of that be?

You know, right now it's like a community. And that community, there's obviously going to be benefits to being in that community, but it's turning into a foundation. So think about like the Gates foundation, right? You know, how much would you pay to be part of the, you know, invited to the gala of the Gates foundation, rub shoulders with all those people you probably want to be there. Just going is worth the price of admission. You know what I mean? Like, so it's sort of like that we're trying to make like a Web3 community that helps Web2 artists come into Web3, but then also just like has all of us meeting and being in a community together.

Yep. I love it. Very cool.

Yeah.

All right, well, I am definitely looking forward to jumping in here, playing around and seeing what I can do as well. So that brings us to the end of the show. If folks are interested in checking this out, the link will be in the show notes, but it's upstreamapp.com and you can go check it out, play with it. And it is definitely something to put some time into learning about because I think we're only going to see more and more exponential growth in what DAOs are and can be because they're able to solve a lot of problems potentially especially I think once some regulatory clarity gets going and everything else. I think we're going to see a lot of action on that. Well, Alex, thanks a lot for stopping.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, appreciate it. For everybody else, if you have any questions about the daos crypto space. Absolutely anything, especially in the crypto space. I'm doing a lot more in this area. For instance, if you are interested, I created a free resource that you can get@brad costanzo.com crypto it is simply living 20 page document in Google Docs where I just created initially to tell my friends about the basics of what is crypto, what is bitcoin, how do I get started, what do I need to know? And it's a living document. So I will probably add some stuff about daos based upon my new knowledge here from Alex. But just go to Brad Costanzo.com crypto and give me your email address and I'll send it to you for free. Alex, thanks a lot again for coming to the show.