Credit: Dippudo
Back in June 2021, I had no idea what it was going to be about, but was curious enough to buy the 35K BANK tokens required to become a BanklessDAO member with full access to the Discord server. I knew that if I didn’t like it, I could just sell my tokens and likely break even, minus gas fees. Spoiler alert: I still hold the tokens and haven’t ever really questioned this from an investment perspective. I’m biased, but BanklessDAO’s future has me quite excited.
Social tokens and their fundamentals are hard to evaluate, but looking at how cool this community is, how passionate the members are in driving all sorts of projects, and how the whole thing evolved into an ever-growing hive of activity over its first 10 months — the gravity of all these moving pieces makes it easy to hold on to my BANK.
BanklessDAO (or bDAO, for short) inspires confidence because it was built from nothing but the sweat of volunteer members; no one is forced to do anything. If there is a topic that interests you, just raise your hand and get involved. It’s this acting on the stuff that we really love doing that has made the DAO, and the community behind it, successful. BanklessDAO’s hirokennelly.eth calls it our ‘secret heart’, and I think it’s the secret sauce of DAOs.
Going for a role or position or stepping up to do work is not about who else wants it or has it. It’s about what you want. It’s about acting on your desires. DAOs are different from TradCorps for many reasons. For me, one of the most important distinctions is that DAOs facilitate us acting on our deepest wishes, our hidden desires. What I call our secret heart.
Acting out our secret heart, however, will only get us so far. The BANK token is a tool for the alignment of incentives; it’s a reward for acting out our secret heart towards a common goal. In this Twitter thread, Lucas, one of the founding members, breaks down the DAO’s Season 2 achievements and attributes these wins to incentives and ownership.
Lucas’ recap of season 2
Social tokens can allow us to capture the value that has been created by the community. I’ve explored tokenomics of various different protocols in previous articles and have even written about DAOs, but it took a nudge from the DAO (thanks Sam) to actually dive into the obvious topic hiding in plain sight. BanklessDAO and other social tokens.
EthHunter has introduced bDAO tokenomics in a recent Weekly Rollup newsletter, and I want to take a deeper look here going into how BANK is used to fuel this great community.
Founded and initiated by Bankless HQ, the goal is simple (emphasis added):
BanklessDAO is a decentralized community to coordinate and propagate bankless media, culture, and education. Its goal is to drive adoption and awareness of truly bankless money systems like Ethereum, DeFi, and Bitcoin.
With this purpose in mind a token was created, a fair launch initiated, and the community took over, shaping the way BanklessDAO looks today.
The mission is to help one billion people go bankless; inspired by this goal, the token has a total supply of 1 billion BANK. As a fair launch token, it was distributed to the early contributors to the ecosystem, and has since been established as a reward mechanism within the DAO, incentivizing members to collaborate on revenue-generating projects and education programs that serve the common goal. The diagram below shows how the token is used in the DAO and how it helps to capture value (a zoomable, interactive version can be found here).
Tokenomics of BanklessDAO