Here's Why DAOs Fail; Former SushiSwap CTO Reflects on Decentralized Orgs

Section 1: 00:00

Joseph is heavily involved in building and managing DAOs. He recently wrote a twitter thread satirizing how it would be to run a lemonade stand through a DAO. With the recent controversial proposals surfacing on MakerDAO and Lido, we are once again reminded of the importance of DAO governance. We begin by talking about Joseph’s lemonade stand DAO and reflect on some of the DAO experiments that occurred over the last couple of years.

Section 2: 10:37

The Tyranny of Structurelessness explains how leadership and power can be seized when left in a void. We go on to speak about the different factors involved in forming hierarchies within DAOs and how individuals assume leadership roles. Joseph also shares insights into his experience at SushiSwap and the difficulties he had encountered as the CTO.

Section 3: 27:20

One of the biggest challenges DeFi projects face is onboarding users. Typically, users were incentivised through liquidity mines and yield farms. However, in the long term, these mechanisms damaged projects as costs of liquidity incentives were far greater compared to their revenue. Joseph goes on to share his thoughts on reward models across different DeFi projects.

Section 4: 50:20

A major discussion in DAO governance has revolved around token holder concentration. What we see now in Web 3 is reminiscent of traditional models where VCs owned IPO pipeline and private equity. The majority of tokens in Web 3 are held by VCs. Joseph discusses the current 1 token = 1 vote model and shares alternative governance systems.