38: Empowered Communities, a DAO Ecosystem Conversation // AstroDAO

Our guest for today is Jordan Gray, the ideator of AstroDAO. AstroDAO gives everyday users access to advanced tooling through a simple interface. AstroDAO is also flexible enough to give crypto native power users unlimited possibilities. The AstroDAO community is a vibrant ecosystem with hundreds of active organizations. They are building a new economy and defining the future of work as a fluid collective. Their partners include NEAR, Sender, Pagoda, Halborn, and Magic Powered.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

• 1:39 Eric talks about how he found Jordan and where you can find him online.
• 3:18 Jordan wants to clarify that he is an ideator and not a founder.
• 4:01 As of today, Jordan and Astro DAO have launched more than 800 DAOs. He is also happy with the retention numbers that they currently have.
• 6:21 There is over $270 million locked into DAOs that launched in Astro DAO. Jordan also says they were almost at the billionth mark when the market was doing great.
• 7:00 Aurora DAO is one of the exciting DAOs that they’ve already launched in Astro DAO.
• 8:46 Eric provides a challenge to the listeners, and you can ping him on Twitter with the answer. He might pick a winner for this challenge.
• 9:34 Jordan tries to explain what Astro DAO is in only ten words or less.
• 12:41 In the Astro DAO platform, there are some heated conversations and discussions between people who are too passionate about what they do.
• 14:00 Jordan discusses what he wants to emphasize as far as enabling DAOs in the future.
• 17:22 Being a big proponent of Decentralized Web, Jordan describes this community as truly amazing.
• 18:04 Jordan offers his own thoughts about achieving leadership without having a designated leader.
• 19:57 Using meetings as a source of truth is what Jordan uses to organize the direction and excitement around a DAO.
• 23:51 Before his involvement in DAOs, Jordan was into organizing music events. However, when he and his friend organized a tech event, Jordan was amazed by its different vibe and energy.
• 24:50 Jordan continues to talk about accountability, the concept of spirit, and value capture within the DAO platform.
• 28:04 In 5 to 10 years from now, DAOs are going to be much more specialized and more generalized in other ways, according to Jordan.
• 29:34 Jordan shares his story of how he started Astro DAO.
• 33:50 There are factors that could lead to the tipping point or the flippening that Jordan is looking for.

Key Points from this Interview:

1. “Your DAO needs to be as simple as a meme, like if your DAO can be a meme, people can get it instantly.”
2. “If we look at a post-work world and a post-work economy, what’s going to be valuable to people is connecting with other people. Whether that’s through literature, art, business, games, anything. It’s connecting with other people, that’s the valuable thing in life. So, I think DAOs are a healthy step in that direction and there’s still lot of room to explore, and how values are being captured and how it becomes liquid, and how DAOs work with their sovereign token because not a lot of people have experience printing money and there’s a lot of things that can go wrong when you’re printing money, but there’s a lot of amazing beautiful things that it enables. And the more experiments we run and the more we learn, the better and better it’s going to get.”

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