Addressing BanklessDAO Drama

How do we start this, David?

I don't know, man. God, what a weekend.

I I think there is there I I'm okay. Uh how about you?

Pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean Okay, so we were gonna enter this conversation, and the biggest question that I have is that we're about to talk about a bunch of Twitter stuff that happened on Twitter this weekend for Twitter people. And that I have no idea how what percentage of our YouTube and RSS FOD podcast listeners are like, oh yes, I totally know what was going on and I'm interested in this, versus I'm not on Twitter.

And even if I was, I didn't see what you're talking about. And so I don't know what the drama is you're talking about. I have no idea what percentage of our like podcast listeners are on Twitter w and inside of that same arena,

exposed to the same things that you and I are exposed to.

A b a bunch of people probably have no idea what you're talking about. You're just talking about Twitter. Okay, so the first topic is uh David and I accidentally became main characters this weekend on Twitter. There was massive backlash against Bengals.

Yes, there were stories about it. It was uh intense, and we were in the middle of it. So we're gonna talk about what happened. We're gonna talk about did we deserve it? We're gonna talk about like what do we do? And then I think there's one common theme of this episode, uh, David, which is the next topic. Why are we here? I feel like I had uh another glimpse of that existential crypto crisis of like, what am I even doing here?

What are we

And like, what are the rest of us doing here? And also, where are the apps? That that's I mean, all it's all under that theme. So, uh, bankless listener, I I hope you you will uh give us some grace if we are a little self indulgent uh today, maybe a little more um nihilistic than usual. Uh I hope I hope not, but I'm a little feeling a little down in the dumps as we go into this uh episode, David. I don't know about you.

Yeah, uh existential is a word that comes to mind. So

Existential was this an existential crisis? All right, we're gonna get into all of it, but before we do, our friends and let's talk about the first, and this is where we get a little self indulgent. So

uh I don't know how your Thanksgiving was, David, but mine was just fantastic. And then Black Friday came around, and it was very black, it was very uh dark for me.

my Thanksgiving was Friday because we did it a day late because half the family was out watching football.

We're dealing with this drama,

It was on Thanksgiving for me.

dude. I'm sorry, man.

See,

I mean I was I was able to put my phone down. I was like, okay, there's a mess going on over there, but I'm gonna the m this turkey is delicious.

well, you were putting your phone down. I was fighting on Twitter. Okay, yeah, okay, you're arguing with people. Um let's talk about what happened. So, this was one of the first tweets I saw. Another day, another attempt to drain Arbitrum Dow Treasury. And here's a picture of me. It looks like uh playing a reverse unit card.

Um, and what am I doing? This is a picture of me attempting, it looks like, to drain the Arbitrum Treasury for one point eight million dollars. Hey, we are

It paid me a modest amount. You're trying to train the arbitrum Dow for two million dollars. What are you doing, bro?

Okay, so there is this proposal uh proposed by the Bankless Dow for a global education onboarding campaign. Here's the link to the proposal. It's a few a full abstract, basically a uh marketing education proposal put together by the Bankless Dow. Could you give some context in like what we're talking about, what this proposal is, what this particular um Twitter account is complaining about, why they're they are charging you and I with trying to drain the Arbitrum Treasury, David.

Sure. So the Bankless DAO is a collection of sub-DAOs, each kind of specializing in different arenas, if you will. So there's translations, and then every single like translation, also like there's people that will translate stuff into Spanish and people that will translate stuff into like German. And so each one of those its own like organization. And then there's like the marketing department. And then there's like onboarding and educational docs. There's many different departments that come together. And this all of this amalgamated into this package that Bankless Dow proposed to Arbitrum for 1.8 million ARB tokens, $2 million,

uh, to do all of these things if the Arbitrum DAO accepts. So Bankless DAO amalgamates all these services. Like here, here's what we will do. Here's all of the services. Uh

You know, trade trade offer. You know, we have all this package for you. We will we receive $2 million and ARP uh $2 million of ARP tokens.

1.8 million ARB tokens precisely, which is valued at about a dollar a dollar each or so. So like 1.8 to 2 million dollars.

Yeah.

Okay. Another tweet. So bankless literally raiding treasuries and grants begging for money because they apparently generate no revenue, in this space for years, doing content education interviews and market recaps, but still somehow poor, launched a token that went to zero. Okay, what's the context of this tweet? How is this related to uh Bankless and our media organization?

So this Twitter account is tagging banklessHQ, which is our mine and Ryan's bankless LLC, that our Twitter account. And so they say, hey, bankless HQ is literally raiding treasuries and begging for grants.

And they are what they are doing is they are thinking that this bankless Dow proposal to Arbitrum is us, is bankless HQ, not bankless Dow.

Uh, and the so the overlap, like bankless DAO and all those services provided, are provided by a bunch of workers in the DAO.

And then there's bankless HQ, which is what we are, and we are not asking Arbitrum for the $2 million of tokens, and we would not be receiving the $2 million of tokens, only the Dow would.

And people are confused about the lines that separate HQ and DAO. And as I say these words, I'm like, yeah, okay, I kind of get it.

You kind of get why they're confused.

Kind of get why they're confused. Yeah. Uh huh.

Yeah. Well, so we were on the receiving end of this attack. Like you should change your name from bankless to shameless. There is just a lot of um charges that David and I and Bankless is just a company that likes to grift people and rip people off. I've heard many similar stories from you guys, industry insiders who dealt with you. Uh you have to own up to this and accept or or change your ways. Stop being a grifter, David and Ryan, was the basic charge. And then there were just like other straight up mean tweets like this. Like this guy goes, Ryan, you're getting old. Your job as a man was to leave behind a legacy something of value for future generations. The time is ticking, but it's already too late. They will remember you for living a half ass life, grifting to make ends meet, a faceless man, half man, half meme. And

Well half man is correct.

But it's actually half robot.

So tweets like this were absolutely like just pouring in my time everywhere.

Deafening. It was overwhelming. It was the n I didn't know that there were that many people left in crypto. So it's

it was it was seemingly all of them.

And it was very difficult. A lot of these are anonymous accounts, or a lot of these are accounts I don't really know. Some of them aren't, though, David. And some of them were jumping on this train and just being like, yeah, like what's up? Uh, what what what's Bankless doing over there? Why does it need this money? And it was so inundated that every time we tried to explain in a thread, you'd just be drowned out by all of these other things.

If you've never experienced like a social media mob attack, um it's very painful, it's very intense. It's like a massive, like a crowd.

Like throwing rocks at you,

It's it's it's like it's like a Twitter DDoS of hate. It's like a it's a hate hate DDoS.

basically. And so um I tried an effort to actually clarify this. And this was a little defensive, I would say, but but I was I was seeking a bit more to clarify. So the reality is a few things. Bankless DAO is actually a completely separate entity from bankless media. The podcast that you're listening to, the LLC that David and I run. So the DAO is actually a community that neither David nor myself or any in our media company control. And that's actually how DAOs are supposed to work. So maybe you could explain the genesis of the DAO itself and how it's kind of separate.

Yeah, so the the in 2021, uh you know, the rise of bankless from being kind of a niche media organization catering to just like the people that were left in the bear market of 2019. Uh

Bankless kind of rose in popularity as Ethereum did, as the bull market did, as the crypto markets did uh in 2021. And by the time mid the mid of 2021 came around, like crypto was on like a lot of people's radar. That's where we had got like Mark Cuban on. And that's where we got just like we popularized Ethereum to YouTube in ways that most people didn't, and we're explaining it. So bankless was having a very great moment of success after grinding it out in the bear market for a while.

Simultaneously, while we were having just a lot of new listeners uh kind of onboarding people onto the mission, this idea of DAOs comes about. And me and Ryan, your DMs, my DMs on Twitter are just flooded with support of people saying, Hey,

I just love what you guys are doing. I love the content that you guys have. How can I help?

And it would come, it would be from people from all walks of life. Like, I am like literally like, I don't know how to help. I'm a dentist, but I would just love to help out. And I'm like, I that I really appreciate the support. I don't know how to have a dentist uh paid, like part of the HQ company. I really appreciate that you want to go like build in the movement, but we'd like I don't we don't know how ro have room for you.

Uh, and 'cause like especially w there were like hundreds, hundreds. Uh and simultaneously this DAOs as an ideology, as a movement, as a th alternative way of organizing people,

that whole thing is is blossoming throughout twenty twenty one.

So, what do we do? We just smash these particles together. Oh, there's so much support for like the bankless idea, the bankless mission, the bankless ideology, and we don't have enough room at bankless HQ, bankless LLC to fit all of this.

Smash those things together, you make a DAO. Bankless DAO was incepted in May 4th, 2021. We mint this token. We find all of the on chain footprints that we can for bankless aligned people, and we just airdrop the token to them and say, boom, we've made bankless DAO. We had a Discord setup, like go into the Discord. And from then on, it started to auto organize.

And so one of the first proposals uh we put forward to the DAO. So again, we had no uh tokens at inception. One of the first proposals was a Genesis proposal. So David and I don't write smart contracts. Uh, we couldn't spin up the website. There's a group of people who helped us kind of incept this thing and launch it. And uh we we called that kind of the the bankless Genesis team. And so

Genesis team, yeah.

We submitted a uh a vote to the DAO with their existing tokens to allocate to the Genesis, bankless Genesis team and bankless LLC 25% of the total bank supply. And that would give these entities kind of like governance moving forward and some potential uh level of control. And that would be

People in the Genesis team, including you, some developers, website developers, designers, et cetera.