Co-ops, DAOs, and the way forward for collectives

Members work together to create, distribute and capture value relative to a shared mission. Ownership shares economic, social and political components, creating best practices for digital coordination.

By contrast, in the crypto space, some of the most famous examples of collective economic organization have formed for the memes, or as exercises in commodification and speculation. Examples like PleasrDAO fractionalizing the Doge meme, or ConstitutionDAO raising upwards of $40 million to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution, have value in that they... See more

A strong social fabric and the right tech stack will unleash a new wave of bottom-up economic experiments: interest-free P2P borrowing, anonymous lending pools, collective insurance, socialized ETFs, DAO-based freelancer unions, rotating savings schemes, revshare guilds, meme venture syndicates, crypto ponzis, exit scams, in-browser miners, upstate... See more

Collective ownership can take a number of forms: unions, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), and stock options are all related. But the most important means of collective ownership will be the resurgence of an old model: the co-op.