I've yet to see a DAO structure that's really intrigued me. The autonomous part is a whole issue in itself, but I'm particularly suspicious of the "decentralized" part. As presumably the point of decentralization is egalitarian rule. To the point where I feel like I need to wrap the initials in quotation marks whenever I use it. That suspicious.
With most DAOs, usually it's $1=1vote. Not always $1, but you can basically buy as many votes as you want, and the more money the more votes in a linear fashion. Which is nice in that theoretically anyone can join. But not nice because well the rich have the most power, which is how it always is, so not exciting.
(Side note, today there was news about a "governance attack" with Comp, where people were buying up tokens to push their own agenda--which strikes me odd that Working As Intended is considered an attack. Comp was a payment/reward for using the protocol, but payment that was never soul-bound, not that it really could be in those days. Comp was always sellable, and buying more could always get you more power, so that's what the "attackers" are doing. Short selling needs to exist, in my mind, and this might just be shorting a governance method.)
Or, it's $1=1vote, but a ridiculous number of tokens/votes are already stuck/locked with the founders and maybe some VCs. Locking tokens and reserving them for the founders makes a lot of sense from creating a financial incentive for the founders to work on and care about a project. But then the doors are closed all that much more on others who might want to join, and frankly really takes out the "decentralized" part as the amount for a founder is almost always more than any one else's. (And then founders and VCs often hide behind the DAO to avoid culpability, usually the legal kind. Can someone commit 15% of a crime? If that 15% is the largest percentage, are they liable for 100%? Murky.)
Then you have "DAOs" like PleasrDAO. Which have zero transparency on how they operate or how people join. Their website is just NFTs they've purchased and a link to their Twitter presence. A "collective" is probably a much better name. Can I buy tokens or even NFTs to join? Can I provide liquidity to a pool? Maybe I need to be ranked somewhere on my NFT sales? Or maybe I need to win some art awards? Or maybe... Just maybe... You gotta know someone. Someone important in the "organization."
That's my guess.
Needing to know someone sounds /very/ centralized. Where there is smoke there's fire. Where there is shrouds of mystery... There is usually hanky panky. Though sometimes it is just plain disorganization/ineptitude. Sometimes it's simply fear when not everyone agrees what's hanky panky and what's honky dorey. But as the money increases, the more likely hanky panky, in my mind. Not necessarily illegal hanky panky, as wash trading NFTs, for example, is not currently illegal as far as I know. And again, some consider it honky dorey.
As someone who's met flesh in the NFT scene, I've heard "artists" admit it's a world of "you scratch my back / buy my NFT; I'll scratch/buy yours" until there is enough volume to get someone unknowing of this arrangement to buy. Some call it "supporting each other." I think there was a recent court case about a similar arrangement though, and it involved someone who would really like the idea of $1=1vote. And the prosecutors had a different term for it: "quid pro quo." (And this scenario went very much went against laws that currently exist.) When is quid pro quo okay? Dunno, but I suspect it's more okay when it's more transparent.
I think a mix of soulbound with verifiable accounts makes a lot of sense (verifiable that the accounts are not sybil and very unlikely to be sold as essentially wrappers for the voting rights). Along with that, the entry should be open and/or meritorious, e.g. winning some award that is not blatantly related to having privilege, but more related to skill. That's for an art DAO, but what about a more traditional DeFi DAO? If there was a protocol, where the founders foreplan that any planned airdrop will be one that can't be sold (soulbound/verified), and a timeline for airdrop is locked into place well in advance, and nobody including them will have anything earmarked, that might make for an interesting governance model. (That said: Markets always find a way, but it could theoretically be made prohibitively difficult. And if the markets want to even after it's become prohibitively difficult, well that's a bit of a good problem to have.)
Regardless, this does not sound like PleasrDAO. If DZM is associated in some way to PleasrDAO, I'd be very interested in reading one of his Substacks on the topic.
PleasrDAO is not easy to research. Mostly it's articles like this, that talk about what they buy: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/wu-tang-nft-album-once-upon-time-shaolin-1244859/ . What is not brought up ever, is how they operate.
I've yet to see a DAO structure that's really intrigued me. The autonomous part is a whole issue in itself, but I'm particularly suspicious of the "decentralized" part. As presumably the point of decentralization is egalitarian rule. To the point where I feel like I need to wrap the initials in quotation marks whenever I use it. That suspicious.
With most DAOs, usually it's $1=1vote. Not always $1, but you can basically buy as many votes as you want, and the more money the more votes in a linear fashion. Which is nice in that theoretically anyone can join. But not nice because well the rich have the most power, which is how it always is, so not exciting.
(Side note, today there was news about a "governance attack" with Comp, where people were buying up tokens to push their own agenda--which strikes me odd that Working As Intended is considered an attack. Comp was a payment/reward for using the protocol, but payment that was never soul-bound, not that it really could be in those days. Comp was always sellable, and buying more could always get you more power, so that's what the "attackers" are doing. Short selling needs to exist, in my mind, and this might just be shorting a governance method.)
Or, it's $1=1vote, but a ridiculous number of tokens/votes are already stuck/locked with the founders and maybe some VCs. Locking tokens and reserving them for the founders makes a lot of sense from creating a financial incentive for the founders to work on and care about a project. But then the doors are closed all that much more on others who might want to join, and frankly really takes out the "decentralized" part as the amount for a founder is almost always more than any one else's. (And then founders and VCs often hide behind the DAO to avoid culpability, usually the legal kind. Can someone commit 15% of a crime? If that 15% is the largest percentage, are they liable for 100%? Murky.)
Then you have "DAOs" like PleasrDAO. Which have zero transparency on how they operate or how people join. Their website is just NFTs they've purchased and a link to their Twitter presence. A "collective" is probably a much better name. Can I buy tokens or even NFTs to join? Can I provide liquidity to a pool? Maybe I need to be ranked somewhere on my NFT sales? Or maybe I need to win some art awards? Or maybe... Just maybe... You gotta know someone. Someone important in the "organization."
That's my guess.
Needing to know someone sounds /very/ centralized. Where there is smoke there's fire. Where there is shrouds of mystery... There is usually hanky panky. Though sometimes it is just plain disorganization/ineptitude. Sometimes it's simply fear when not everyone agrees what's hanky panky and what's honky dorey. But as the money increases, the more likely hanky panky, in my mind. Not necessarily illegal hanky panky, as wash trading NFTs, for example, is not currently illegal as far as I know. And again, some consider it honky dorey.
As someone who's met flesh in the NFT scene, I've heard "artists" admit it's a world of "you scratch my back / buy my NFT; I'll scratch/buy yours" until there is enough volume to get someone unknowing of this arrangement to buy. Some call it "supporting each other." I think there was a recent court case about a similar arrangement though, and it involved someone who would really like the idea of $1=1vote. And the prosecutors had a different term for it: "quid pro quo." (And this scenario went very much went against laws that currently exist.) When is quid pro quo okay? Dunno, but I suspect it's more okay when it's more transparent.
So, yeah, I'm skeptical.
I like reading Vitalik Buterin's essays on the topic. You can see he thinks about it a lot. See the ones on quadratic voting and Soul-bound tokens. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/09/26/limits.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/09/11/coordination.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2019/04/03/collusion.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2018/03/28/plutocracy.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html
I think a mix of soulbound with verifiable accounts makes a lot of sense (verifiable that the accounts are not sybil and very unlikely to be sold as essentially wrappers for the voting rights). Along with that, the entry should be open and/or meritorious, e.g. winning some award that is not blatantly related to having privilege, but more related to skill. That's for an art DAO, but what about a more traditional DeFi DAO? If there was a protocol, where the founders foreplan that any planned airdrop will be one that can't be sold (soulbound/verified), and a timeline for airdrop is locked into place well in advance, and nobody including them will have anything earmarked, that might make for an interesting governance model. (That said: Markets always find a way, but it could theoretically be made prohibitively difficult. And if the markets want to even after it's become prohibitively difficult, well that's a bit of a good problem to have.)
Regardless, this does not sound like PleasrDAO. If DZM is associated in some way to PleasrDAO, I'd be very interested in reading one of his Substacks on the topic.