MCON is one of the few crypto conferences I make it a point to attend every year. It’s large enough that there are new people to meet each time and small enough that you’ll actually get to spend meaningful time with the new people you meet. And the quality of people and conversations is always top notch, especially if you’re someone interested in DAOs, organizing, governance, or something along those lines.
I was stoked for this year’s location in Detroit largely because I grew up in the area, but I do also think Detroit has seen significant growth over the past couple of decades since I left and is well positioned for even more growth. It’s also a severely underrated hub for culture, arts, and food.
Main takeaways from MCON III
First, I have to caveat this by saying that unfortunately I was not able to attend most of the talks at MCON this year, but I was able to spend a lot of time in conversation with many of the speakers and attendees.
And second, these are my observations from the conversations I had the pleasure to be part of or observe and do not necessarily represent the overall sentiment of the space or any individual person I spoke to.
With those disclaimers out of the way, here are my main takeaways from MCON III in Detroit:
People are no longer only thinking about decentralized leadership, democratic governance, transparency, and reputation in the context of a single organization but are instead thinking about how these core principles of DAOs could apply to our civilization at large. As such, the tools they’re building aren’t designed to only address the problems that DAOs as we’ve experienced them to date face but rather the problems that all organizations and societies will face in the future.
If we can design and build an ethical and effective system of decentralized reputation over the next 10, 20, or more years, we can potentially flip the Matthew effect of “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” and create more wealth redistribution and equality. However, one wrong step and we can easily find ourselves in a Black Mirror episode. We’re living in an exciting yet scary time.
Most of us exist (to some degree) in an echo chamber of our own thoughts because we naturally gravitate toward people we can relate to. For example, MCON attendees tend to be OG DAO participants who were early to crypto, have high risk profiles, fall on the maxi end of the decentralization spectrum, and are men. We simply need to be cognizant of this and intentionally redesign some of the spaces we exist in if we want to gain broader perspectives than those we currently hold.
Rehash Live: Beyond DAOs (aka Day 3 of MCON)
MCON festivities concluded on Friday, and on Saturday, Rehash hosted a live podcast show and social activations, which essentially turned into Day 3 of MCON.
This was only the second in person Rehash event I’d hosted and was much larger than the previous one in scope, attendance, and planning.
We recorded four short (~30 min) live podcast shows, including a DAO “Hot Ones” show with real time onchain voting for the spiciest take on DAOs. You can watch the full livestream below:
Some spicy takes from our show:
DAOs are neither dead nor alive - they’re zombies
DAOs aren’t dead because they were never alive to begin with
We need governance subsidies
Web3 apps today are terrible because they’re all being built by infra builders
If you need to retroactively fund builders and creators, you’ve already failed
To sponsor more conversations, hot takes, and onchain activations with Rehash at Devcon 7 in Bangkok, email rehashweb3@gmail.com.