Stop Calling Me by Your Name
Sorry for all of the acronyms but you asked for them
Ever since I saw this excerpt from a CIA manual on how to interfere with organizations and operations, I’ve been continually frustrated by semantics surrounding on-chain organizations.
I particularly appreciate the highlighting on item 5.
Generally, I am in favor of highly semantic and explicit communication and code. I liked hard typed language like C++ in university and I try to never group by 1 in SQL.
Semantic names become tiresome, however, when names take on forms of their own. As a descriptive name, NFT is great; Non-Fungible Tokens are exactly that — tokens that cannot be broken up or traded in kind. We see “NFT” all over, but I don’t see many people talking about SFTs despite the prevalence of ERC-1155 tokens.
Even more frustratingly, most people think of NFTs as pfps or art.
Avatar based NFT projects are the general public’s conception of what an “NFT” is. They also understand that you could sell an NFT of a piece of art (but that it’s dumb cause you can’t actually touch it). Ironically, many of them probably don’t know the art generally isn’t even on-chain or what that means.
Is the general public thinking about Nouns DAO forks and NFT based governance? Are they thinking about about access badges or POAPs?
What about semi-fungible tokens? Is anyone outside of crypto gaming or organizational management really talking or thinking about those in a meaningful way?
Strangely, crypto initiated people have also failed to evolve their language around NFTs. When a peer asks me if I like NFTs, I don’t even know what they mean! Are they asking about pfps, art, rwa, sfts???
When people on ct talk about NFT DAOs are they talking about on-chain organizations that were bootstrapped through the sale of a pfp like Bastard DAO did with BGANs? Are they talking about NFT based voting badges that are distributed to a governing committee? Or maybe they mean on-chain automated auctions that are controlled by the NFTs minted like Nouns DAO and its forks?
It gets even worse when people start talking about DAOs.
DAOs have received an incredible amount of hate from ct personalities over the past 12 months. Big personalities on twitter tend to err towards traders and my personal interpretation is that their mental models are stuck in the governance token systems of defi summer.
Most of these traders went from farming and dumping fungible tokens to minting and dumping non-fungible tokens. They are in it for the money and I would not expect them to understand the value of an on-chain organization.
Traders generally work as individuals and competitively, they struggle to understand collaborative cooperation, so why would new forms of human coordination be of any interest to them?
We’ve had two years since defi summer wherein many new individuals have entered the orbit of tokenized systems and become users of whatever we mean when we say Web3.
Among these new entrants are a new crop of people who want to organize and operate together. On-chain organizations allow these networks to move their operations into a more composable and transparent system.
Traders hate DAOs because they can’t extract value.
Investors hate DAOs because they don’t understand them.
Most people seem to hate DAOs because they sound like the new wagmi hopium that is more talk than anything else.
Instead of trying to categorize various type of on-chain organizations and token networks that have “DAO” in their name I’ll simply suggest more general naming…
Why aren’t we talking more about on-chain organizations?
Organizations that looks like this may…
- record team members and their contributions on-chain
- use smart contracts to manage token flows
- enjoy access to composable aspects of crypto
- benefit from automation offered by technology
Aren’t you tired of haggling over precise wordings?
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