Hello everyone,
Please let me offer my personal perspective regarding the relationship between previous projects and DAOstack, as I had the privilege to be, to some extent, involved in most of them.
About 4 years ago, Oren Sokolowski (who I’d known for a decade beforehand) asked whether I was interested in a project in the blockchain space. Oren, Matan Field, and several other very capable people had thought up a ride-sharing application that would use a cryptocurrency as the compensation medium between driver and rider. To remind everyone, that was before Ethereum. It was revolutionary for the time, one of the first applications to try and use the blockchain for new purposes. Eventually, that project, called Lazooz, did not proceed. The team members had different views as to where the focus should be. That was early 2015. I was a (very) small investor at Lazooz, and I still see that as a worthy effort, and I’m also grateful for the fact that it brought me into the blockchain space.
The Lazooz project’s ancient website was abandoned and is now, unfortunately, in unknown hands. Please take special care in that respect, as none of the founders of that project has had any control of or involvement in that website for years. Any mention of a token sale or app release related to Lazooz is false.
Most of the leading team members of that project, seeing the huge potential of the blockchain, have stayed in the sector.
Matan’s next project was Backfeed. As Matan was principally interested in governance, Backfeed was formed along with several amazingly capable people, including Primavera de Filippi. The organization raised funds from private investors only, and never did a Token Sale.
Backfeed focused on solving the governance protocol problem to perfection, and the team crafted a quite strong solution from an analytic standpoint. But due to a variety of factors, including the fact that the blockchain was still very young, Backfeed did not achieve meaningful results. Nevertheless, I do believe that through that experience, Matan and Primavera learned a lot, including about what is and isn’t possible in today’s blockchain. And in many ways the entirety of the Backfeed experience is reflected in DAOstack, and helps make it what it is today.
Backfeed quietly stopped its operation sometime in mid-2016. At that point, Matan began collaborating with a few very reputable developers to initiate a new code base, this time for a decentralized organization using smart contracts. When Matan discussed this with Adam Levi (who was not involved in the previously mentioned projects), they decided to jointly proceed down that path, namely by coding in Solidity a fully functional platform for DAOs, decoupled from the question of the protocol that would govern the organization. They started coding together sometime early 2017, calling the project DAOstack, and adding the Alchemy UI and the Arc.js interface layer during the second half of 2017 and early 2018.
Although I was interested in decentralized governance for many years (and even considered a PhD in Behavioural Economics), my occupations led me elsewhere. Around June of 2017 I got the opportunity to join this extraordinary group of people, this time as part of the team. We formed a legal entity, DAOstack Limited in Gibraltar, during the second half of 2017, and the first private investors in DAOstack joined then.
Matan, out of his incorruptible morals, insisted that the Backfeed investors would receive a small but significant part of DAOstack’s tokens, to be taken from the (locked-up for two years) allocation reserved for the founding team. That was agreed upon, even though it was not insisted on by any investor.
DAOstack is an exceptional project in many ways.
First and foremost, working with the DAOstack team is simply an amazing experience. It’s a group of people working harmoniously worldwide, building something we believe might make a major impact.
DAOstack is also exciting philosophically, as we now share a common belief that we cannot design an “optimal” governance system. Though we offer our best approaches to decentralized governance (including the Holographic Consensus methodology, an amazing breakthrough in my view), DAOstack also invites every user to evolve their own governance system. We believe that through experimentation, the best governance systems will become apparent.
All in all, as an investor in Lazooz and Backfeed, and a member of the DAOstack team, I’m grateful for each entity. Lazooz and Backfeed didn’t come to fruition as intended at the time, but each endeavor has led to the next, and what is emerging — DAOstack — carries the potential to be truly game-changing with respect to the varieties and scale of collaboration possible on this planet.
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