Building the future of the Web3 physically-digitally with DAOs
ATHDAOx, an event in Solana Hacker House culture, discussed Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) of all things December 9th and 10th in Athens, Greece.
From governance and legality to community building and security, the event brought together the local DAO-focused community in Greece and abroad.
Cointelegraph was on the ground for the event and one of the event's founders, Dimitris – aka Takisol – spoke about his experience building a physical space to discuss digital communities.
The Athens DAO was first held in 2010. It was in 2022, during which Takisol hosted around 150 attendees and most of them came from outside Greece. In its second year, he told Cointelegraph, attendance will be four times the first event, and a large turnout from the local Greek community is expected.
One of the many other things we want to achieve is to bring an outdoor conference like Breakpoint to Greece and scale.
“We're trying to be the glue between the devs and the community,” he said. Takisol, on this scale, physical meetings are “opportunities” for beginners and “blockchain curiosity” to meet people at the forefront of construction projects in the space.
The event had support and participation from famous developers like Solana, Bankless DAO, ApeCoin, GrapeDAO and more.
Why DAOs?
Asked why it is important to educate and activate the local community, DAOs, Takisoul said non-Web3 natives often have a “top-down mindset” and spatial awareness.
“Many are unaware of the incredible ways Web3 and DAOs are unlocking human coordination. They are changing the way we collaborate as a team and increasing our sense of ownership.
A good outcome after Athens DAO is to see more Ethereum virtual machine communities looking at the Solana DAO tool for their applications and infrastructure for Solana DAO at some point, he said.
Related: The future of DAOs lacks a regulatory framework Limited: ECB Occasional Paper
“Another part that we are very excited about is that in the next hackathon on Solana or Ethereum, we will see many groups based in Greece participating in the hackathon,” he said.
Manolis Nikiforakis, CEO of Athens-based Web3 startup WeatherXM, which indexes locally sourced weather data on the blockchain, told Cointelegraph that the company is launching its own DAO next month. “The timing of the two-day DAO-based event next door could not have been better,” he said
Democracy and governance
One of the key principles in the DAO community is to change the ways of managing and structuring community-driven projects.
At one of the panel discussions regarding legal structures and policies related to DAOs at the event, a speaker pointed out that “Athens is the city that founded democracy” and that ATHDAOx could be “at the forefront of negotiating policy for DAOs at the legal level.” He said.
The same panel discussed the biggest challenges facing DAOs today, including governance frameworks, transparency with donations, and decentralization. One of the panelists advised, “Never stop looking for management techniques.”
“Find what suits your needs; don't copy and paste what always works for another DAO.
Regarding decentralization, the same panel concluded that “perfection is an illusion” when looking for a fully decentralized DAO, but transparency is the key to achieving it. “Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized DAO,” said one forum host.
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