02: CityDAO Ideator; From First Tweet to Successful Launch // Scott Fitsimones

Background:

Scott Fitsimones is the Founder of CityDAO and the Co-Founder and CTO of AirGarage. His previous working experiences include being a Production Engineering Intern at Facebook, Software Engineering Intern at CERN, and iOS Engineer at MobilBytes. Today, he is putting land on-chain at CityDAO and building better cities at AirGarage. Usually, Scott writes about cities, crypto, and mechanism design. He also believes in building things you want to exist and writes about the things you want to change.

CityDAO is building a network of assets on-chain, starting with a single parcel of land in Wyoming. Each parcel of land is an NFT that can be owned collectively by the DAO or by individuals. It is a DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, meaning it is managed by the community. It is also a DAO for decentralized asset ownership.

 

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

  • 1:58 Scott describes the basics and core of CityDAO.
  • 3:43 Decentralized ownership of things can be the future, according to Scott. CityDAO is in its early experimentation phase.
  • 5:01 One of the things that CityDAO is trying to solve is the issue of the allocation of wealth and assets.
  • 8:02 Owning assets and making governance decisions collectively are the first few steps within CityDAO.
  • 10:37 Scott thinks a city on blockchain will have a great deal of cost savings compared to a city that is not on the blockchain.
  • 13:27 The evolution of the Wyoming DAO Law can become the key to owning assets on-chain.
  • 14:50 Scott clarifies that CityDAO is not an investment organization.
  • 16:55 The CityDAO NFT is your ticket or access to future CityDAO projects.
  • 18:44 For people looking for projects that make money, Scott recommends Real T, which experiments on tokenized properties.
  • 20:39 The Wyoming DAO Law sparked Scott’s interest in reimagining how people interface with land and come together as a DAO.
  • 22:38 Scott is a software engineer, worked at Facebook, and founded a company called AirGarage.
  • 23:57 CityDAO is a project that has grown beyond Scott’s wildest imagination.
  • 25:30 The land zoning law turned out to be one of the biggest challenges of Scott and CityDAO.
  • 28:19 Scott mentions another major challenge within CityDAO that he wants to address.
  • 30:29 One of the issues that Scott is currently trying to work out is the actual ownership of assets by CityDAO members.
  • 32:07 In terms of security, Scott is confident that they are using the best tools to prevent hacking.
  • 33:41 Scott answers the question of why they chose Ethereum and not Solana or any other blockchains.
  • 37:35 Some of CityDAOs top priorities for the coming months include land conservation projects and income-generating assets.
  • 38:13 Scott is extremely excited to build a CityDAO metaverse app and games.
  • 39:55 Vitalik, Brian Armstrong, Mark Cuban, and other great people were some of the highlights of the progress of CityDAO.

 

Key Points from the Interview:

  1. “CityDAO is aiming to decentralize ownership of land and assets, and so I think there’s a trend here, which is, these assets formerly only accessible to the wealthiest Americans, and now they’re being democratized through these DAOs that are coming together to own them collectively.”
  2. “One of my core motivating beliefs is that mechanism design can make the world better.”

 

Resources Mentioned: