DAOSaka: The facts and figures

From funding the DAO, to commissioning the art, selling the digital assets, and returning a shareholder profit! 😍

Andy Gray
Andy Gray
Co-Founder of BlockRocket
Nov 7, 2019 3 min read

From funding the DAO, to commissioning the art, selling the digital assets, and returning a shareholder profit! 😍

After Berlin Blockchain week we had seen the power of community through DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) with the MetaCartel demo day and DAO. Read more about their efforts to promote dApps here.

The MetaCartel! (can you spot us in the picture 👀)The MetaCartel! (can you spot us in the picture 👀)

After we got back to Manchester and arranged a call with Peter ‘pet3rpan’ to discuss an experiment. Most DAOs act more like a funding charity (money in, grants out) but we wanted to try and run a DAICO to coincide with DevCon V in Osaka that would attempt to turn a profit for the share-holders by selling tokens (in this case digital art assets).

Digital assets that are great example of creativity creating *value *through tokenisation. KnownOrigin’s platform had the tooling and artists community to test this idea out.

We forked and deployed Moloch DAO, the standard lightweight proven DAO right now, and let the world know we were open for business:

Thankfully, via DAOHaus, we started to receive pledges. We then started to process these approvals to funds, in our case DAI (a USD stable coin), into the DAO.

incoming!incoming!

Total funds pledged: 881 DAI

In parallel to setting up the DAO we started a creative challenge on the KnownOrigin platform that invited artists to create artwork for a commissioned fee of 150 DAI (in DAI & DAO shares) where the DAO would receive 95% of future revenue of the asset sales, the remaining 5% to the artists themselves.

In true DAO style we voted, announced the winners, and priced & minted the artwork ready for the conference 👊

[https://knownorigin.io/dao-osaka](https://knownorigin.io/dao-osaka)https://knownorigin.io/dao-osaka

We are grateful for pledges to enable this experiment, and again we were excited to see the assets sell once available on the platform.

Art commissions: 800 DAI + 400 shares

We paid 100 DAI to each artist direct from sales and awarded 50 shares per artist.

Total asset sales to date: 1370 DAI

Once we have processed all the proposals that attributed shares for pledges, awarded artist shares, and fed back in revenue we discovered the share price to be greater than 1 DAI we started with per share!

Currently each share is worth 1.061 DAI

the dashboard we built to help manage the DAO process!the dashboard we built to help manage the DAO process!

Realising a profit for share holders of > 6%

Proposals are still in play and calculations right now are pushing this past 8% with the potential to raise this to >10% once all artwork is sold. **the-dogs-molochs: DAO Dashboard ** *thedogsmolochs.blockrocket.tech*

Check out the facts and figure via the dogs molochs dashboard 😜

Note: You can *rage-quit *anytime you want and turn shares back to DAI.

Conclusion

It worked. 😏

The DAO funded 8 artists to create 8 themed digital artworks where sales of the tokens re-funded the underlying on-chain DAO increasing share-price (to greater than the initial commitment). 📈

But we had to do a bit of manual hand-cranking and pushing transactions around and assets about. DAOs ideally should be self-governing and autonomous. 🏃‍♀

We are working on designing and new DAO which can fulfil all the pain points we came across, watch this space 🚀

There are a couple of assets left, be a part of history! KnownOrigin.io *A digital arts marketplace powered by Ethereum and IPFS*knownorigin.io

https://twitter.com/DAO_saka << contains the whole journey from start to finish. KnownOrigin + DAOSaka *Can a DAO fund the creation of NFT-based cryptoart which can be used as a vehicle for making profit?*medium.com

Thanks for all that took part as pledgers, artists, and buyers. 🙏