The DAO, which is in the limelight, has indeed attracted many investors recently. But it is very rare to be selected by big capital. So what kind of DAO can be favored by capital?
Pleasr DAO (Participated by A16z)
The Pleasr DAO is a collective of DeFi leaders, early NFT collectors and digital artists. They have built a strong reputation for charitably acquiring works of cultural significance.
Launched in March 2021, the Pleasr DAO has continued to advance and enhance its mission of collecting digital art that represents and funds major ideas, movements, and causes since the DAO purchased its genesis work, the Uniswap V3 NFT. It is now recorded on-chain via NFT. Pleasr DAO has thus created a precedent for bidding for unique works, among which Pleasr DAO has many well-known NFT works, including:
- Stay Free: One of the most important whistleblowers in American history. Edward Snowden released NFT, the acquisition will directly support his non-profit foundation Freedom of the Press to fund and protect freedom of speech around the world.
- Dreaming at Dusk: A historic and artistic take on the Tor Project’s first onion service. This artwork purchase will support the nonprofit’s efforts to protect online privacy and anonymity for all.
- Doge: An NFT made from the Dogecoin prototype, recording an iconic piece of internet history and one of the most popular memes of the decade.
While the NFT portfolio accumulated by the Pleasr DAO is impressive, one of the most distinctive features of the Pleasr DAO is that it brings together some of the most influential individuals in a single DAO, resulting in pure collective mind sharing. Although most of the members have never met in person, and some of them remain anonymous, the Pleasr DAO has its own philosophy and feels that the DAO is keen to decentralize and use the DAO for the benefit of society, not just for profit.
The value of Pleasr DAOs
Known as a decentralized art investment empire, Pleasr DAO is experimenting with new concepts in digital and community art ownership. In addition to sharing ownership of these works, the team also plans to apply innovation in DeFi to add and disseminate value, in a way it is a platform for collective experimentation between community ownership, DeFi and digital art.
The Pleasr DAO distributes the ownership of the DAO in the form of tokens, which gives each member a fraction of their assets—two NFTs and any funds in the vault, and each member can participate in the governance of the DAO through group chat. The DAO feels that the value of NFTs is distributed through social consensus and needs to be given value by influential people. As the acceptance of NFTs increases, so does the value of the NFTs held by the Pleasr DAO.
And as Pleasr DAO further establishes itself as a curator of works of cultural significance, its brand and track record reflexively enhance the value of the work they buy, and every NFT that interacts with Pleasr DAO, through more than one way increases its value. Given the extensive experience and network of its members across art, traditional finance, and technology, this DAO creates more avenues for the DAO to acquire important works and add value to its collections.
On December 15, 2021, Ali Yahya, general partner of a16z, announced on social media that A16z is investing in PleasrDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. The specific amount has not been disclosed. According to Ali Yahya, DAOs like PleasrDAO are the foundation of Web3. They are a new form of economic organization native to the Internet that enables people to collaborate and achieve goals at scale. Today the Pleasr DAO is one of the most prominent organizations in the crypto space. It has changed the NFT collection blueprint. The organization is a typical collector DAO, whose purpose is to collect NFTs. The role of the curator group is to implicitly glue together specific artists, platforms, and series of works to create long-term value of NFTs. In the future, the organization should continue to expand its influence on art and culture, far beyond the scope of the cryptosphere.
Mean DAO (Three Arrows Capital, SoftBank participated)
Mean DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) with only one purpose, and that is to build decentralized products and blockchain infrastructure to bring Crypto and DeFi to everyday banking, as a financial equalizer for individuals and businesses worldwide . To achieve this ultimate goal, the DAO funds and operates the Mean Protocol and MeanFi web3 decentralized applications.
Mean DAO hopes to bridge the gap in the banking industry and make DeFi the new standard of finance, so they start from cost, exchange professional-level access, risk and uncertainty, liquidity and other aspects to find out the problem. To address these gaps in the current DeFi landscape, Mean DAO is building an average protocol on the Solana network to enable Web3 developers to join the next 100 million users through their applications. The Mean DAO pioneered many forms of innovation such as speed and cost-effectiveness, liquidity markets, SPL streaming, and more, and is currently in BETA on the Solana mainnet.
MeanFi is powered by the Mean protocol, which provides the foundation for developers to bring TradFi workflows to their DeFi applications. Average Protocol Money Flow allows for fully liquid, capital efficient, streamable TVL across protocols and acts as an interoperability layer for the entire Solana ecosystem.
With Money Flow, smaller payments can be made in less time, instead of receiving a benefit every two weeks or even a fraction of a second. Users can then use a fixed percentage of their capital flow for mortgage agreements or exchange for other crypto tokens, all through an automated process. The flow of funds can also be used to process subscription services, an untapped market in the cryptoeconomy.
The Mean DAO has been community-led from its inception, so any decisions are made through a regulated vote, including what, how, and when Mean DAO products are created. The community around the Mean DAO has the following strategic pillars to ensure the functioning of the Mean DAO:
- Dedicated Mean DAO community management team.
- Fair initial distribution of MEAN governance tokens.
- Open Mean DAO funding to fund community projects and products.
- New products and priorities from community-led voting.
- All mean protocol code is open source.
On November 29, 2021, Mean DAO raised $3.5 million in funding, led by SoftBank, Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital, with participation from Skyvision Capital and Solar Eco Fund. To facilitate Solana’s decentralized finance ecosystem through a money flow protocol, the service automates payment and banking workflows and allows for flexible payment schedules. The Mean DAO currently consists of over 19,000 members serving 31,000 users on its platform. Mean DAO is also preparing to launch its own banking app “MeanFi” which is built on the Mean protocol.
Earlier, funding streaming protocol Zebec raised $6 million to offer a similar service on Solana. As more traditional financial investors dabble in DeFi, venture capital firms have been quick to back companies like the Mean DAO that attract users through accessible and permissionless applications that never existed in traditional environments.
