Author: Wang Chao, Empower Labs
In August 2019, an organization called YangDAO was announced with the goal of helping Chinese-American presidential candidate Andrew Yang participate in the campaign.
DAO was once one of the most attractive innovations in the crypto space, but the first large-scale DAO in history suffered a catastrophic security vulnerability in 2016. The community was hit hard, and the DAO concept fell silent for several years until Valentine's Day 2019, when a guy named Ameen Soleimani announced the return of DAO with a 144-line core code at the Ethereum Denver Conference.
This simple and practical code is named Moloch Protocol, which allows people to create a DAO-style donation fund on Ethereum. According to legend, people in the ancient Canaan region had to sacrifice their eldest sons to the gods in exchange for the safety of the entire tribe. The evil god who accepted the sacrifice was called Moloch. In 2014, scholar Scott Alexander published a famous article "Meditations of Moloch", which explained how humans fell into the tragedy of the commons. Since then, Moloch has implicitly meant the failure of the public system.
Moloch was like a thunderclap, once again touching people’s yearning for DAO. By August of that year, more than 80 DAOs built on the Moloch protocol had been born, and YangDAO was one of them.
Andrew Yang's two major campaign platforms - supporting cryptocurrency and promoting universal basic income - have attracted crypto enthusiasts. YangDAO hopes to become a super PAC (an independent political committee that can accept unlimited donations) supporting Andrew Yang. YangDAO claims to be a 21st century solution to 21st century problems, with a special focus on issues such as unemployment caused by AI. However, due to poor publicity and the lack of popularization of the DAO concept, YangDAO has only raised tens of thousands of dollars.
With Andrew Yang’s withdrawal from the party primary, YangDAO also came to an end. Although YangDAO’s history was short, it was the first time in the history of the crypto community that it publicly and collectively attempted to participate in American politics.
PACDAO
On August 20, 2021, PACDAO was established with the aim of influencing members of Congress’ attitudes towards cryptocurrencies through political lobbying, and even hopes to push a pro-crypto congressman into Congress.
PACDAO demonstrates the rapid evolution of the DAO field. Compared with YangDAO two years ago, it has made significant progress in community organization, talent recruitment, fundraising and project execution. The first fund-raising adopts the NFT sales method, and also invites the famous political artist Rebecca Hendin to design.
The most eye-catching innovation of PACDAO is the establishment of an on-chain congressional scorecard. Community members can rate the crypto-friendliness of members of Congress, and the results will guide the direction of political support in the crypto community. They also created animated avatars for each politician based on the scores that can be minted as NFTs.
However, politics is still a niche topic in the crypto space. I have been observing PACDAO for a long time. Although PACDAO is very creative, its community activity is not as good as other DAOs. After the mid-term elections, PACDAO gradually stopped operating. Nevertheless, this attempt is still another important experiment for the crypto community to participate in politics.
Constitution DAO
In October 2021, Sotheby's announced the auction of the only circulated copy of the 13 original copies of the U.S. Constitution. Less than 10 days before the auction, a group of crypto enthusiasts came up with a bold idea on Twitter: to form a DAO to raise funds to buy the Constitution.
This idea spread like wildfire and quickly ignited the entire crypto community. In just one week, they completed the seemingly impossible task: obtaining Sotheby's bidding qualifications, negotiating the use of cryptocurrency as collateral, establishing a compliant DAO structure, and handling various auction details. This initiative also attracted a lot of attention from ordinary people and triggered reports from many well-known media.
In the end, Constitution DAO raised more than $40 million in less than 10 days, creating a miracle. Although it failed to successfully bid for a copy of the Constitution, this action planted a seed in the hearts of tens of millions of American people. These seeds will eventually germinate, bloom, and bear fruit, gathering into a force that will subtly change the political ecology of the United States.
Lobby3
Back to Andrew Yang. Although YangDAO has no direct connection with Andrew Yang himself, this experience made him realize the power of the community and the potential of the DAO organizational form.
At the 2022 Ethereum Denver Conference, Andrew Yang announced the creation of the Lobby3 project. The "Lobby" in the name means "lobbying", reflecting the political nature of the project. Lobby3 aims to integrate traditional political lobbying with the decentralized governance of DAO, explore new models for citizen participation in policy making, and is expected to provide ordinary people with a channel to directly influence politics.
However, Lobby3 was a bit of a hype. Although it was very lively when it was launched, the subsequent operation was weak. Andrew Yang obviously only devoted a small part of his energy to Lobby3, and the work was mainly carried out by several enthusiastic people from the community. After organizing several lobbying activities in Washington, Lobby3 released its last proposal, the Sunset Plan, on August 20, 2023, marking the end of this political experiment.
Although this attempt did not last, it once again demonstrated the crypto community’s continued exploration of political participation and provided valuable experience for similar projects in the future.
Standing with Crypto
DAO is not the only group in the crypto community that is involved in politics. In recent years, major U.S. crypto institutions have invested heavily in political lobbying, and these decentralized forces have eventually coalesced into greater influence.
In 2023, an organization called Fairshake was born. It is a super PAC officially registered with the Federal Election Commission, and the giants of the US crypto industry are behind it. Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and A16z alone donated $45.5 million, $45 million, and $44 million, respectively. Fairshake's mission is clear: to support political candidates who are committed to making the United States a future Internet innovation center to enter Congress. They believe that the key to fully unleashing the potential of the open blockchain economy in the United States is to create a clear and friendly regulatory and legal environment for innovators.
At the same time, another organization called Standing with Crypto was born in 2023. If Fairshake is a high-end stage for crypto giants, then Standing with Crypto is an attempt to unite the power of a wider community. Its main initiator is still Coinbase, but its goal is to unite a wider range of practitioners and ordinary people in the industry, and it has also attracted DAO organizations with clear political positions such as Devils DAO to join.
The strategy of Standing with Crypto is quite creative. They almost copied the practice of PACDAO and established a detailed crypto-stance scorecard for politicians. The database contains more than a thousand politicians, and people can understand at a glance the attitude of each congressman towards cryptocurrency.
Each congressman’s data card also includes past votes on crypto-related proposals.
Furthermore, they carefully selected 24 crypto-friendly candidates and actively guided community members to endorse or donate to these candidates. This direct and powerful way of support will undoubtedly have an important impact on the election of these candidates.
The selected candidates
With the strong support of industry giants, the power gathered by Standing with Crypto far exceeds any previous political participation of the crypto community.
Looking ahead to the 2024 congressional elections, we are likely to see multiple candidates supported by the crypto community successfully win seats. This new wave of political participation may become an important driving force for cryptocurrency to enter mainstream society.
Trump and J.D. Vance
Four years ago, YangDAO’s efforts in the presidential election ended in the party primary, but in this election, the crypto community has already entered the finals.
According to a survey conducted in the first half of this year, 19% of registered American voters already hold cryptocurrencies, and another 16% plan to buy them. This large group has attracted great attention from candidates. Trump expressed his pro-crypto stance early on, and Biden, who had previously opposed cryptocurrencies, had to soften his attitude and start to smooth things over.
In June this year, Silicon Valley investor David Sacks organized a fundraising dinner for Trump under the auspices of Senator J.D. Vance. Many crypto industry figures attended the event and expressed their appeal to Trump to relax regulations and encourage innovation. The dinner eventually raised $12 million for Trump.
According to Axios, Elon Musk, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and David Sacks have been secretly lobbying Trump to recommend J.D. Vance as a vice presidential candidate, and the lobbying lasted until Monday morning. In the end, Trump did choose J.D. Vance as his running mate. This choice may be directly related to the crypto fundraising dinner organized by J.D. Vance.
Compared to Trump, J.D. Vance is a more radical crypto supporter. Since being elected as a senator in 2022, he has been one of the most active voices in Congress in favor of crypto. His 2022 financial declaration shows that he holds between $100,000 and $250,000 in Bitcoin through Coinbase and holds it to this day. In 2023, Vance also proposed a bill to protect crypto companies and exchanges from traditional bank blockades.
Vance once said: "Our technology industry, once characterized by innovative startups, is now dominated by boring monopolists. The crypto community stands in stark contrast to this transformation."
Against this background, this November the world may witness the birth of a U.S. President/Vice President combination who clearly supports cryptocurrencies. This potential outcome not only marks a significant increase in the political influence of the crypto community, but is also likely to have a profound impact on cryptocurrency policy in the United States and around the world.
Looking back on these past events, it seems like a lifetime ago. However, if you think about it carefully, the earliest buds only started from the last presidential election, and most of them happened in the past two or three years. In just a few years, the American political arena has changed dramatically. I am afraid that even the pioneers in the DAO field did not expect such a speed of change.
Looking back, their efforts have made some contributions to opening the door to Capitol Hill for cryptocurrencies, but greater credit should be attributed to the concept and growing influence of cryptocurrencies themselves. These ideas have quietly changed public perceptions after more than a decade of sedimentation, and the public's widespread acceptance has finally pried open the nerves of Washington politicians.
Cryptocurrency, which was once considered a fringe topic, has now become an issue that presidential candidates and congressmen have to take seriously. The utopian vision of the past is now becoming a reality before our eyes. This change is reshaping the public's perception of finance, technology, and governance. This is not only about the economy, but also about the organization and value distribution of future society. The political participation of the crypto community has become a force for change that cannot be ignored, quietly shaping the future of the world.