Doing Good with Crypto- A Conversation about Impact DAOs with Deepa Chaudhary
Doing Good with Crypto- Conversations with Web3 and Nonprofit Leaders is a series of Twitter Spaces co-hosted by The Life You Can Save and Crypto for Charity. In this conversation, Deepa Chaudhary visited to discuss what she’s learned from interviewing a dozen “Impact DAOs” (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) on how they’re using the DAO structure to achieve social impact.
Speakers:
- Jon Behar from The Life You Can Save (host). Jon is a Strategic Advisor at The Life You Can Save and leads their efforts to build out the crypto-philanthropy program. Jon’s work has spanned both for and nonprofits and he’s passionate about making it easier for donors to maximize the social impact of their gifts. The Life You Can Save accepts crypto donations to support its operations or to support its recommended charities, and The Life You Can Save Australia accepts crypto donations from Australian donors who want to claim any eligible tax relief. The Life You Can Save also offers a variety of crypto philanthropy resources for those who want to learn more about this quickly growing field.
- Omar Antila from Crypto for Charity (co-host). Omar is the Product Lead at Crypto for Charity. He’s been working in tech for 20 years in various roles and has been involved in crypto since 2017. Omar is a web3 enthusiast passionate about harnessing emerging technologies for social good. Crypto for Charity enables thousands of US nonprofits, including The Life You Can Save, to accept zero-fee donations in over 100 cryptocurrencies.
- Deepa Chaudhary (guest). Deepa literally wrote the book on Impact DAOs and is part of the Impact DAO Media team that won a Gitcoin grant so support their work. She also publishes the Crypto Good newsletter on Substack. Prior to getting involved in Web3, Deepa worked in the traditional nonprofit sector as the Deputy Executive Director for United Way Mumbai and a role at the Salesforce Foundation.
Jon Behar
Why don’t we go ahead and get started? Hey, everybody. I’m Jon Behar Strategic Advisor at The Life You Can Save. Thanks for joining the latest edition of Doing Good with Crypto. I’m really excited to be joined here today with Omar Antilla from Crypto for Charity and Deepa Chaudhary who is an expert on impact DAOs. And we’re going to be learning a lot more about what that means. To just give you a background on The Life You Can Save, we are a nonprofit that fights global poverty and we do so by trying to make “smart giving simplified”. And we do that by raising awareness and funds for and identifying outstanding nonprofits that help the global poor and have extremely cost-effective and evidence-backed programs. And so we curate this list of charities to make it easy for donors to know that they’re really making a difference for people living below the international poverty line. Omar, do you want to start off by giving a brief intro yourself and Crypto for Charity?
Omar
Yeah. Hey everyone, I’m Omar. I’m the product lead at Crypto for Charity. If you go to CryptoForCharity.io, you can donate Cryptocurrencies and NFTs to support any US based nonprofit in various causes. And this is all with zero fees. We also have a tool for NFT creators to automatically allocate NFT drop proceeds to charities and causes. And Crypto for Charity is part of a larger public benefit corporation called FreeWill with a mission to raise $1 trillion for nonprofits by creating technology to make impactful giving easy. And over to you, Deepa, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah, so I’m a social impact entrepreneur. I’ve been in this space for over ten years, started at grassroots levels and moved up to doing philanthropy for Salesforce Foundation. And before I launched into Web3 with my publication Tracking Social Impact, I had a personal publication before that which got mentioned in Forbes a couple of times for being the best for social entrepreneurs. It was primarily focused at preparing social entrepreneurs that are using technology to do good. So it was mostly at that period using platforms to reach people over the internet rather than the traditional way of doing things. For instance, Kiva.org, which is like a microfinance platform. And Web3 takes us to a totally new level, like a totally next thing to basically accelerate impact on a cheap scale. And so I’ve been writing about this space for almost over a year now and I started out in May 2021 and I’ve been profiling social impact use cases of crypto, potential trends, things that need to be built into space that do not exist yet, just views, opinions, ideas have been doing all of that on my crypto journey. And recently I launched a DAO, it’s called Impact DAO Media and we started in June this year.
Deepa Chaudhary
And the idea is to elevate the stories of impact builders and impact DAOs in the space and take these stories outside the Web3 space to nonprofits and social entrepreneurs around the world and get them to know what’s happening in the space and get them excited about building their stories.
Jon Behar
Great. Well, Deepa, I really look forward to learning more from you about impact DAOs. But let’s start with the basics. What is a DAO? And as part of that question, I’ve seen you tweet a bit about how the name Decentralized Autonomous Organization can actually be misleading to some people in explaining what a DAO is. Could you explain both the basics but also how people might be interpreting the Decentralized Autonomous Organization term?
Deepa Chaudhary
Yes. So DAOs are relatively very new. I think 2022 has been the year of the DAOs. Before that, it was primarily very NFT focused. DAOs are Internet based communities. They come around a shared purpose, they have a shared bank account on the blockchain, and they believe in collective decision making. So the way they function is radically different from centralized organizations. And it goes with the ethos of Web3 and blockchain, which is being decentralized, like just coordination among large numbers of people in a more collective fashion. So it just aligns with that entire philosophy. And so DAOs have a very distinct way of doing things and they’re radically different from traditional organizations. But just to spell out the acronym, d stands for Distributed Team. So because they are based on the Internet, people from all around the world collaborate. And so it’s not very specific to a city. It’s basically team members or they don’t call them team members or anything, they call them contributors. There’s specific terminology in the space, so the contributors are from all over the world. And D also stands for decentralized. So the power is not centralized, it’s not in the hands of one or two people or board members for that matter, or the executive team.
Deepa Chaudhary
It is decentralized. So the community collectively decides and there are various methodologies they employ to come to collective decision making. It could be either voting or discussions or different ways of doing things, but it’s very core to their existence. And A stands for autonomous. And the way right now autonomous is defined in the mainstream is incorrect because the definition comes the way the mainstream is defining it is from the very first type of DAOs that came into space, which were around Defi [decentralized finance]. The protocol is very automatic, right? Like it’s smart contract powered. And so people have just taken that definition and applied it to DAOs. But DAOs are very different from protocols. So all the Defo protocols have, most of them have DAOs, not all of them, most of them have DAOs that manage the protocol. But DAOs are made up of people and you can automate certain functions, for instance, but you cannot automate the entire running of the organization. You cannot make it like smart contract enabled. And so this is the popular definition that exists outside of Defi. And so with our research, we’ve discovered a lot of things.
Deepa Chaudhary
And one thing that we discovered is that they are definitely not auto governed, automatically doing things. It is very human coordinated and there are certain things for instance, the blockchain wallet is smart contract enabled. So that’s one. But processes can be automated, which happens anyways in traditional organizations. But it is very much human coordinated. So A does not stand for autonomous in that sense, but A stands for autonomous in the sense that it’s Sovereign. The DAO. The Organization is sovereign. It’s Independent. They can have the economics and generate their own funding and not have to rely on donors and VC for funding. They also solve it in the sense that nobody can shut them down. They operate on a public blockchain, which, by its feature, it’s decentralized. Right. So it’s independent. You cannot shut it down. It’s not one server that you can say, hey, off. So it’s pretty decentralized. And sovereign also means sovereign individuals. So all the contributors, they are independent and they are empowered and they can work in multiple DAOs or they can enter a DAO and leave the DAO if they don’t like it and move on with the next one.
Deepa Chaudhary
So it’s basically autonomous. Stands for the sovereign and independence and being autonomous in that way, but not automatic. Organization basically means people. Organization is the traditional definition of organization. People just coming together around a purpose, a shared purpose or a goal to get things done.
Omar
And what makes that impact DAO different from, let’s say, any other regular DAO?
Deepa Chaudhary
So there are different kinds of DAOs. For instance, there are Defi DAOs based on the nature of the activity in the Web3 space, like what your project is. A lot of them are governed by DAOs because they want to live the full Web3 ethos. So for instance, you can have 10,000 profile pictures like BAYC could be like they’ve sold this many. They could be governed by a DAO. I don’t know how they run as a community, but a lot of NFT projects have DAOs attached to it. They are very democratic and community based.
There are service ones that are consulting at the DAOs to enable DAO ways of doing things. So there are service DAOs, there are Defi DAOs, there are NFT DAOs there are microDAOs. This is the concept that Vitalik Buterin is very bullish on. And he talked about it at Toronto where microDAOs could be at the neighborhood level just neighbors coming together to do street cleanup and they can start a crypto wallet just to pull in funds and manage funds or friends coming together to do something. And so these are microDAOs that haven’t yet taken it’s. Not yet there. But the future. It’s the future. They will be there in the future. And so Impact DAOs are like a subset of DAOs and Impact DAOs are focused on doing good. They think of them as your nonprofits or foundations, philanthropic foundations or, you know, B corps which are like social impact organizations with profit and purpose and built and so they are them, but on the Internet and they’re using Web3 tools to enable Impact.
Omar
Awesome. Thanks for that explanation. There was actually some, even though I’m no expert in DAOs, I know a little bit about the space, but there were some tidbits I wasn’t even aware of, like the microDAOs. That was a cool concept. The service DAO, I haven’t heard of that either.
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of DAO events. Like I’ve been attending a lot of DAO events. I was in Bagota and there was a one whole day all about DAOs. So I’m getting a lot of deep insights into this whole DAO landscape. Service DAO is something that I learned there because there were a lot of the service tower people means you can consider even the tooling ones, the ones who are building the tooling for the Dow ecosystem. A lot of them operate as a DAO themselves and then the consulting types, I think there’s a consulting arm of Bankless that helps out with tokenomics and stuff like that. So that’s like a consulting DAO but they call themselves Service DAO. So yeah, that’s the category I got exposed to recently.
OmarVery cool. Can you tell us a little bit about the benefits of an Impact DAO versus a traditional nonprofit organization?
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah, there are numerous benefits. Firstly, a lot of nonprofits, like we recently did research on twelve Impact DAOs and there are many of them that transition from being a nonprofit to being a DAO. And Kimbal Musk who runs a nonprofit called Big Green; I think he’s been operating that nonprofit since 2011. He, in September last year launched a DAO to manage the grant making part of the nonprofit just one function of the nonprofit, which is grant making because he wanted to experiment with this DAO idea. And they’ve seen such great benefits in the whole grant making process of things that they have formalized the DAO. Now, it ran as an experiment for one year, but because of all the plus plus plus, they love it so much that it’s now full-on DAO. They formalized it. And so some of the benefits that he cited from grant making point of view was actually having the Grassroot people, the front line workers engaged in the grant making process. So what generally happens in a nonprofit is that especially a nonprofit that’s making grants, for instance, United Way or World Vision, like everybody has to fundraise and then they make grants right to smaller grant organizations.
Deepa Chaudhary
And a lot of time the grant making decisions are made by the executive team and then the executive team presents those ideas to the board of Directors. The Board of Directors most of the time are the heads of different big organizations, say Citibank or Chase or Unilever or whatever. They’re big people and a lot of the time they don’t really have expertise in that area where the grants are being deployed and also they lack time and sometimes they don’t read and they just go with the decision of the executive team and that’s how decisions are made around fundraisers, around run making. But here Kimbal Musk actually uses tokens and voting mechanisms to engage the frontline workers, you know, the people who are actually planting gardens and community gardens or setting up school gardens all across the US. So he picked, I think six of them gave them votes, one vote each and asked them to vote on grant proposals that they invited out of say they received 200 grant proposals. The six decided where the grant should go because these are front line workers they understand the problem better than the board members and they know best how to allocate those resources.
Deepa Chaudhary
So they played a very key role in grant allocation. And now also donors who donated over like $1,000 to Kimbal Musk’s DAO also get a vote. One vote in terms of deciding how the next batch of funds, the next run making round, who should receive, they can vote on those proposals and also the grantees get a vote. So the first set of grantees who got money from the DAO, they also get a vote. They are entitled to a vote and they can also decide in the next round where the money should be going. So it’s the front line workers, the grantees and the donors that have donated over $1,000. These stakeholders come together to collectively decide where the money should be allocated. So this is obviously a very decentralized way of doing things and giving them back to the community, to the people who actually understand the ground reality.
Omar
So let’s say I’m a traditional nonprofit and I was just listening to you and you pique my interest. I kind of want to first decide if I sort of want to become a DAO and if yes, how would I go about it? What would be the next steps for me to become a DAO?
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah. So right now I think nonprofits have amazing community with the kind of followers they have on Twitter or Instagram, whatever platform, social media platform they are using to communicate their stories. For instance, take a look at Charity Water or just some of the big ones and for instance The Life You Can Save itself. There’s an amazing number, they have a lot of influence because their communities are big but sometimes the communication is mostly one way they are communicating. But then this opens if you actually start treating your community like a community in the sense that you start engaging them in your processes then it’s a more collaborative approach. So one of the easiest way to basically start DAOing is to start with your community and maybe just open a discord channel. Discord is like a place where most of the DAOs collaborate and get work done. And there are different ways that they’ve structured the discord. There are different permissions that they’ve set. So if you are just there to just observe how work gets done and stuff, then you’re exposed to only certain level of things and the core team members are exposed to more deeper level of content or internal knowledge base.
Deepa Chaudhary
So there are permissions that you can set. But I think Discord is a great way of opening up, inviting your community to your space. So think of Discord as your virtual office. So The Life You Can Save can have a discord or Charity Water can have a discord and they can just announce it on their social media platforms or through emails or whatever that you are now invited into our space. That’s a virtual office. Come say hi to us, come say hello to us. And start calling them there and then start engaging them rather than just treating them as mostly one way communication, right? It can be both ways now. And so you invite them over and you start engaging them in processes and then you can set levels. For instance, if you are a donor who’s donated more than $5,000 or something like that, based on anyways, donations are always tiered. Like there’s donate a hundred dollars and you know, it’s always like there’s a system in place already with traditional nonprofits, but they can now use that to invite some of the donors. And high net worth individuals or just, you know, if they want it to be more democratic, maybe people who donated over $100 are now invited into the space and they can participate in decision making or just the direction of the nonprofit.
Deepa Chaudhary
You start sharing your plans with them, basically you open up as an organization. Right now, the nonprofits are opaque. You don’t know what’s going on, how they’re deciding. A lot of the time things happen inside the four walls and the outside community does not have those kind of insights. But you can start opening up. You can start sharing how decisions are made, how things are done, what are your thought processes, basically just inviting them into your space and then wherever you feel necessary that you would benefit from their inputs or they would want to share those inputs, you can start giving them extra permissions in the governance of your organization.
Omar
Is there any, like I don’t even know how it would work. So is there any legal stuff that needs to happen, like paperwork involved when you become a DAO transitioning from a traditional organization?
Deepa Chaudhary
Not really, because you are anyways registered as a 501c3. I think Kimbal Musk’s story is an excellent case study right there, because he wants to know all his donors. He wants to have proper KYC, you know, who are the donors. Because when you’re operating as a nonprofit, especially in countries like the US where it’s important to stay legal, like you want to stay within the boundaries, and you’ve already established those boundaries through your 501c3 registration, it’s just a new way of engaging your community, so you’re not really doing anything illegal. They are engaging your community anyways, using social media platforms to engage with them, but this is now on discord. And also you can say, like, you can put down rules around knowing all your donors. You want to do a KYC on them, who they are, because these are the requirements to stay legal, then do all of that. But those are just different, it’s just rethinking reimagining ways of doing things in a fashion, in a way that’s more transparent, more decentralized, and more where you engage with your stakeholders. And so we have, as I said in our twelve DAOs that we researched, we have a couple of them who transitioned in the sense that they are 501c3 registered nonprofits in the US.
But they have launched either a part of their nonprofit as a DAO, like a certain aspect of it, or they have completely transitioned into a DAO. So, for instance, Pact DAO in New York City, they started in 2020 when COVID was hard in New York and they wanted to provide mutual aid to people, and they started out as a 501c3 nonprofit in the US. But now in 2021, they transition completely into being a DAO. And so they still operate under their nonprofit framework, but the way of doing things in the way of thinking and the tool utilization is very different from a traditional nonprofit. They also recently got the bylaws amended to make it more DAO friendly, because currently the nonprofit by laws say that your board of directors is the final authority on things. And so they’ve got that amended and it’s the very first case, and a lot of nonprofits will follow that, is to even make your core community on par with the board members in decision making. If they, for instance, vote on a certain thing, the board of directors can’t say that hey, you know, I have the ultimate power and this vote is overruled.
No, they can’t say that because now they’ve amended the bylaws. So if they use anything on-chain to vote and stuff, it will be respected. The community vote will be respected.
Jon Behar
That sounds like a really kind of interesting and deep way of doing a transition. And for nonprofits to really take a kind of significant leap much further than kind of the initial model of just opening up to more two way conversation, which is kind of how you are suggesting nonprofits get started.
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah.
Jon Behar
So can you talk a little bit about how it might go the other way? Instead of a nonprofit deciding to become a DAO entirely or having some functions be a DAO. What if you’re starting a new social venture?
Deepa Chaudhary
I think a lot of new ones would launch a DAO first as the knowledge especially becomes more mainstream and people start looking at it or start seeing beyond the crypto the mainstream narrative which is that it’s a scam and stuff. That’s how the mainstream mostly talks about Web3. But once they start looking beyond that and it becomes more mainstream and more prevalent, then a lot of them will launch as DAOs first because it just makes more sense. There is speed instantly. You start off with your mission. You don’t have to bother about the setting up the infrastructure first. And this is what change makers want. They don’t want to wait. The problems are urgent. It requires urgent solutions, it requires urgent action. So why wait? The model is amazing and you can galvanize people on the internet. It’s far more effective, far more efficient than doing it in real life. And you can tap into the global knowledge base. Like you don’t have to hire somebody locally or you never know who comes and collaborates with you. And I’ve experienced this personally because we launched as a DAO to study Impact DAOs, like doing in depth research on Impact DAOs and to write a book which would be the definitive guidebook on Impact DAOs.
So any nonprofit or any peacemaker who’s curious to read that and get a sense of how they operate. And so to do this, I initiated a DAO from day one because I wanted to live it myself and experience what it is to build a DAO. And it is so powerful because I’ve had such amazing talents collaborate from places like Argentina, South Korea, America, London, so many of them from the UK. And it would have been impossible otherwise to get these kind of people. Internet is borderless right? It’s just one world, it’s just one big community. So it’s just amazing the kind of expertise you get online.
Omar
Yeah, that’s awesome. When do you think your book is coming out?
Deepa Chaudhary
It’s coming out in the next ten to twelve days.
Omar
Cool.
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah. We started the project in June. We’ve spoken to 30 contributors and founders of Impact DAOs across twelve Impact DAO in the space that are the most experienced, like the ones that started out in 2021 and have a lot of knowledge around building Impact DAOs. So we’ve included those organizations so we can unpack a lot of learning from them. We’re just putting together a book for people who are new, who are new and who are curious about the space so they can learn and build stories.
Omar
So we talked a lot about the benefits of being a DAO. What about challenges? What kind of challenges are Impact DAOs facing?
Deepa Chaudhary
Right now I think figuring out the legalities of stuff is one of the challenges because a lot of them as I said they are mission first. So they start off, they don’t wait for permission, they just get started and they have the community then they do a bit of fundraising and then they have the money and then they have a bank on the blockchain. So just figuring out they work backwards and it’s a challenge right now but solutions are coming up so it won’t stay as a challenge anymore. But as I said they go mission first and then they backwards figure out the infrastructure part of things like just getting the legal stuff in place. So that’s number one. I think the whole space, the way Web3 people do things is very experimental so there is no definite way of doing anything. It’s basically just get started with your mission and figure it out sometime. And the reason why we’re writing this book is because we also want to list the best practices, the learnings that we’ve had so that people don’t make those mistakes again and at least start to have a baseline to start from.
Deepa Chaudhary
You don’t have to start from zero, you at least have ten to start from and then you can make mistakes more and figure it out if you have to. And so a lot of DAOs have made a lot of mistakes and they’re learning from it and we are highlighting those mistakes and the learnings that they’ve had so that others don’t have to repeat those mistakes.
Omar
Yeah, that’s great. It sounds like it’s going to be a really good resource.
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah like one of the things that we figured was that those are very obsessed with collective decision making to the extent that they want to vote on everything and that actually is not very effective because how can you have somebody vote on logo design who does not have an eye for design for instance?
Omar
Yeah, I’ve seen that too.
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah or you can just have a token and that token gives you the right to vote and you come and vote on matters that you haven’t read up on and then that can take the DAO in a totally different direction. There are a lot of mistakes that have been made and they recognize those mistakes and there’s a strong intent to correct those mistakes which is great that they don’t want to keep making. It’s very experimental and it’s always like iterating and which is another great part about that because it’s so adaptive and flexible which unlike nonprofits which most of them are stuck in their ways of doing things and do not have the experience.
Omar
Yeah, I come from the software development, software product management background so I have less experience with nonprofits and I’m all about iterative lean development. So the idea of DAOs is also very appealing to me because of that because it’s like very similar, it’s following the same philosophy. Basically you start small. You start where you can do the most impact with the least amount of work and you see what happens from that and then you iterate from that based on your learning. So it’s very similar.
Deepa Chaudhary
That’s right. And the entire organization structure changes too, like from time to time. So if first they needed the organization to be structured in a certain fashion because they were doing a certain kind of activity, they were that. And now as the needs change, they change the whole structure. So it’s so fluid and it’s a different mindset that you operate in a dial. Like it’s very self driven, entrepreneurial, being independent, taking initiatives, very different. And so they are turning out to be far more effective in the way they go about things than a lot of traditional orgs.
Omar
Yeah, it’s really interesting seeing all the parallels with lean product development and like agile software development and all that same.
Jon Behar
Yeah. To me that raises the question of how DAOs work as they start to grow and mature and maybe starting to move out of that start up phase a little bit. Do you see those, for instance, pursuing 501c3 registrations as an attempt to get like tax deductible donations?
Deepa Chaudhary
They do, they do feel the need. They do because right now the fundraising infrastructure does not exist for them. If they are not registered as a 501c3, or if they’re not registered legally in their country wherever, like say the founding member is from, or wherever they want to fund raise, then they are eliminated from a lot of funding sources like philanthropic organizations or corporate philanthropy. They want to only give it because you want to stay legal and you want to stay within the bounds like they only would always give to nonprofits or the ones that have a legal status. So right now, for Impact DAOs, this is one of the biggest challenges, I would say, because there aren’t many fundraising sources for them. One of them is through their own DAO economics or either they rely on, say, a fundraising platform like Gitcoin where they don’t ask for your status, but you can just like a crowdfunding platform, you just list a project and fundraise for the project. So I think there are just very few. Like Falcon Foundation is another one that does not ask for your legal status and they have come up with a really innovative way to fund projects.
Extremely innovative. They are a bundle and it’s very innovative. There are exceptions. Like there are few, very few right now. And so, in fact, our space is growing, but the funds for them is not growing equally. And so a lot of them feel compelled to get themselves registered in the US. And so two of the DAOs in our study, like Impact Market is registered in Portugal, but they want to get registered in the US as a 501c3, so they can fundraise. And so does Good Dollar, another organization for emerging markets. They’re registered somewhere, but they want to get registered in the US. Just to access funds.
Jon Behar
Got you. Would you have advice for someone starting a new DAO about when to take that leap? Like when to graduate and try and form an official nonprofit?
Deepa Chaudhary
Get yeah, that’s a great question. It depends upon the mission of your DAO. If you’re building, like, a technical product and you don’t want too many people giving you inputs at that point of time, then maybe just start building the minimum viable product and then launches the DAO and starting aging the community. But if your purpose of your DAO is to do good and do grassroots work or do any kind of purpose driven work that requires global coordination, then just go DAO first. Just launch as a DAO from day one. Like the way we did it. And it’s been a great journey. It’s been so good. As I said, they are very different, the way they organize. The contributors who came in first are the ones who are going to stay through the lifecycle of the DAO. There’ll be new contributors that come in and which is great, because they bring new energies and new thinking. And so I would suggest that anybody who is doing any kind of impact work should just go DAO first. And one that are building our products, like platforms and stuff could probably wait for till the time they have that in place before launching one.
Jon Behar
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. So you’ve told us a lot about where impact DAOs are today. And I know it’s a very new space and moving extremely quickly, but let’s take a step back and say, where do you think this space is going to be ten years from now?
Deepa Chaudhary
It would be the way of doing things. It is going to be mainstream. So everybody who’s in the impact DAO space is actually living the future right now. And they’re defining the future because this is going to be the default way of doing things in ten years time. Because it’s just the convenience, the ease of doing things. And also there are lots of advantages. It’s all internet based. It’s distributed, it’s remote, it’s flexible. Work timings. You don’t have to do nine to five. You can work in multiple DAOs and be in multiple experiences and have different multiple ways to make impact, not just one way to make an impact. And it is beautiful because you start engaging your donors or volunteers in the process. Right now, they are. On the upside, we use them, we use our donors, we use our volunteers, but we don’t engage with them. We do not invite them over to our place. It’s just thank you for your services. That’s great. Here’s the annual report. Read it. But this is a different way of starting to engage them and make them feel included because they have actually invested in your calls and they’ve given money or they’ve given their time or they’ve given the skills.
Deepa Chaudhary
So they’ve invested in your cause so you make them feel important by bringing them into your space.
Jon Behar
That’s a great answer and a very exciting vision for how this could look in the future. Do you have any closing thoughts on impact DAOs now or in the future?
Deepa Chaudhary
I think we have excellent models for every kind of impact DAO going into the future. For instance, we have Ukraine DAO, which is a great model for disaster relief and disasters, whether it be a manmade disaster or a natural disaster, just galvanizing online and using web key technology like instant bank account, instant fundraising. Through NFTs doing it in a highly transparent way because unlocked and everything can be viewable it’s public information. And so making the whole process extremely transparent. I think that’s one model of doing good and Ukraine DAO shows that and they actually recently helped two disaster relief DAOs come around. One is humanitarian. I could say that because they’ve helped set up the Iran DAO right now with the uprising that’s taking place there and Puerto Rico DAO recently, they helped with I think there was some kind of a natural disaster in Puerto Rico recently. So they helped them set up. So that’s one we’ll see a lot of city based out in the future, just providing more just strengthening neighborhoods and neighborhood level support. Hyper local support in Pact DAO in New York City is a great example for that. And there’s another one that’s coming up in Oakland, in California where they want to launch their own Token Oak Token and have a circular parallel economy going on.
So a lot of city based DAOs I think is the future because people are just looking for community and just mutually so that’s another model, a protocol based algebra amazing because they can gain the speed and the scale and insights like just transparency. And we have many in our study like for instance Impact Market that distributes UBI and conditional basic income to the world for us to pour in many hard to reach places. Like they’re working with One World program because they were having trouble distributing UBI to people in Afghanistan. So they’re using their protocol. It’s basically just powered by smart contracts. The person just downloads the wallet on their phone and they become their own bank and they can start accepting UBI. They don’t need to go anywhere or no human being needs to interact with them. It’s all done over the internet through smartphones so that’s another use case and good dollars. Another one proof of humanity is another one which is going unconditional basic income. Focus on emerging markets though anybody can start taking income from them. Unconditional basic income but the focus is emerging markets. So there are seriously great interesting models already that exist.
There’ll be so many more new ones that are coming, especially around Unbanking. There are so many unbanked people, like 2.6 billion people that do not have bank accounts. And so just how do you transform their lives instantly? And they all have cell phones, they all have Internet. They don’t have computers, but they have cell phones. And so you how do you basically include them in the global financial system and that’s one way of doing it, just plugging them into the crypto economy.
Omar
Yeah, that was actually our previous Twitter spaces topic, banking the unbanked.
Deepa Chaudhary
Oh, great. Yeah, that’s my favorite topic too because I truly understand the on-the-ground realities. I work with a lot of them, like the women’s saving groups and stuff. And I understand the problems around microfinance and loans and all that stuff.
Omar
There’s a lot of exciting things happening on the surface, like most people right now to see the drama that’s currently happening in the space. But really it will take a while to recover, but it’s really just going to be a blip and there’s just so much good stuff going on in the background that eventually will bubble to the surface.
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah. I’m so grateful that you organize the space and that you’re going to take this message to nonprofits because I think it’s very important that we get this message out since the drama is so strong right now. But we can start getting the message out parallel with all the great stuff that’s happening. So I’m so grateful that you organize this.
Omar
Yeah. And I’m really going to keep an eye out for the book. I’m definitely interested. It sounds like a great resource.
Deepa Chaudhary
Yeah, so we have a website, ImpactDAOs.xyz, and all the 30 conversations that we’ve had with the builders, we’ve recorded those conversations and they’re available as podcasts. You can start listening to those conversations immediately and get like a DAO 101 introduction to DAOs. And then the book is going to be out and it will be hosted on that website. So it will be absolutely free and people can read the book online or can they download a digital copy and read it later, but it’ll be hosted on the website.
Omar
Amazing. That’s awesome.
Jon Behar
That’s going to be an amazing resource. Do you also share your substack if people can follow you there?
Deepa Chaudhary
Great. So Crypto Good. So it’s CryptoGood.substack.com. I use the Substack publishing platform, so it’s hosted on Substack. And I know Jon has been my reader for a very long time and we’ve spoken many times before about crypto, fundraising and the space. So nice to have that connection.
Jon Behar
Yeah, and I’ll vouch for that, it is just like a really great resource if you’re trying to keep track of everything going on in the space. Everything is moving so fast and Deepa does a really good job of pushing some important projects to the forefront.
Omar
All right, I just subscribed.
Deepa Chaudhary
Thank you so much.
Jon Behar
Yeah. Thank you both for being part of this conversation. I encourage everyone to check out Deepa’s book, and join her substack. Check out Crypto for Charity where you can donate crypto to The Life You Can Save or any other US nonprofit. [Australian donors who care about tax-deductibility can donate crypto to The Life You Can Save Australia.] You can donate crypto with zero fees. It’s just a really impressive platform that they put together, and we’re really excited to have that as a way for people to support The Life You Can Save’s work and support the work of our recommended charities.
Deepa Chaudhary
Thank you.
Omar
Thank you.
Jon Behar
Take care.
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Want to read more? Check out the rest of our Doing Good with Crypto: Conversations with Web3 and Nonprofit Leaders series.
