TL;DR

• Wyoming just became a legal safe haven for DAOs (aka ‘communities as businesses') — which means we may well be seeing a DAO boom in the coming years.

Full Story

Let’s say you’re part of an online community…

Let’s make it something normal like, idk, a closed community for fans of singer-songwriter Natalie Imbruglia.

No? Ok. Fine. Let’s pretend its a hiking club (normal enough?).

Say this hiking club starts getting requests from brands wanting to promote their goods to members…the community collectively decides:

“Sure, why not, we’ll take some discount codes and a bit of cash…but on that last bit — how do we disperse the funds fairly?”

One option would to be create a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), aka an automated piggy bank for the community — with set rules, eg:

• You become a moderator → you get rewarded with DAO tokens.

• You share new trails/routes → you get rewarded with DAO tokens.

• You give helpful responses in the share forum → DAO tokens.

The idea being that these tokens reward active members, and can be converted into fiat cash, or held / used to vote on how to spend the community funds (the more tokens you hold, the more votes you get).

Sounds awesome right? Only problem is…

Legal frameworks for DAOs are rickety at best.

Some jurisdictions might even try and take your sweet lil’ hiking community (or Natalie Imbruglia fan club) to court for selling unregistered securities (aka unregistered public shares in a company).

Here’s the cool part of this story:

Wyoming's Gov. Mark Gordon just signed a bill into state law that adds to growing codes for DAOs, which have already been cleared to establish themselves as limited-liability corporations there.

Translation: Wyoming just became a safe haven (or ‘oasis’ as a16z have put it) for DAOs.

We LOVE to see it.