34: A Parliment of DAOs & Network States // Ankit Bhatia

Ankit and Rob are Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Sapien Nation. Ankit has a passion for understanding the status quo and shaping social systems to be more aligned with nature, culture, and human-centered technology. He graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and quickly fell in love with the ethos, design, and potential of decentralized technologies to revolutionize the way we connect with each other. As an Indian immigrant and a believer in equal opportunity, he seeks the truth in order to create and live a mindful life that harmonizes his story with the story of his tribes.

Rob graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Mathematics and is a lifelong student of many disciplines who understands the vital importance of seeing the world through many different perspectives. Never content to let the status quo remain unchallenged, Rob seeks to apply his knowledge of Mathematics, Technology, Culture and History to build tools to empower people and their tribes to achieve their full potential.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

• 2:40 Eric: shares his own background story on becoming a digital nomad and getting involved with CityDAO.
• 4:54 Ankit: talks about how Sapien Nation was founded.
• 5:29 Rob: the vision and main idea of Sapien Nation is to create a democratized autonomous platform or a social network governed autonomously by the users.
• 6:55 Ankit: they were the team behind Harambe on Wall Street in 2021.
• 10:55 Ankit: most DAOs are built in isolation and what we need right now is to have a sense of togetherness.
• 14:14 Eric: defines what a network state is according to Balaji.
• 15:39 Ankit: explains how Sapien Nation is considered a network state.
• 17:01 Rob: positioning Sapien Nation as the Republic of DAOs.
• 20:05 Ankit: the goal of Sapien Nation in the future.
• 22:45 Rob: the emergence of more DAOs will continue to ramp up and explode.
• 23:45 Ankit: discusses their Sapien Nation NFT passport and soul-bound tokens.
• 25:45 Rob: encourages everyone to check out the Decentralized Society Paper. He also continues to talk about their NFT passport and badges.
• 30:31 Ankit: for people who want to have a Sapien Nation NFT passport, they can visit their website – Sapien.Network.
• 31:59 Ankit: currently, they have 10 full-time people working in Sapien Nation and they are in the process of transitioning into a DAO.
• 33:40 Rob: shares their 12-month roadmap plans and incoming projects.
• 34:49 Ankit: regulators, government agencies, and compliance issues are the hot topics that are going on in the crypto scene.
• 36:56 Eric: a stablecoin is anti-crypto.
• 37:37 Ankit: agrees with Eric that stablecoin is anti-crypto.
• 40:38 Rob: had this idea of bringing a gorilla statue to wall street.

Key Points from the Interview:

1. Robert: “We came up with this concept of a democratized autonomous platform, which we put in our original white paper back in 2017. It’s sort of been the north star for guiding us on what we really wanted to build, which is like a social media platform, a social network that was governed autonomously by its userbase.”
2. Ankit: “These DAOs, many of them right now are being built in isolation. And what we need to do is actually start helping DAOs leverage network effects such that they can share a shared substrate for their informational, social, and economic layers. And that’s the thing we’re not seeing right now, we’re seeing like token swaps, we’re seeing DAOs popping up on Discord, everyone’s sort of building in isolation, but for this thing to really take off, people need to have a sense of togetherness.”

Resources Mentioned: