I have felt that there's a lot of sort of like inequality in
the sort of standard corporate system and how corporations work
and how, you know, borders prevent, you know, sort of human
capital from crossing them. I really thought that we could
basically incorporate organizations in the Internet
rather than in legal jurisdictions, and that we could
use software to incorporate them.
And this software could define the relationships and mechanisms
by which organizations came to consensus.
If you create an organization and software, it can actually
scale to billions of people, billions of dollars, and it
might exist for 15 minutes, something that's not possible in
the traditional world. And it brings incredible amounts
of scale to creating organizations.
Welcome to Epicentre, the show which talks about the
technologies, projects and people driving decentralisation
and the blockchain revolution. I'm Federica Ants and I'm
speaking with Dennison Bertram today, who is the CEO and Co
founder of Tally, which is a decentralised governance
platform. But before we get into all of
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Good Dennison, it's super nice to have you on the show.
Excellent. Thank you so much for having me.
I'm really excited to be here. Yeah, and you have been in Web 3
for a very, very long time. Tell us about yourself and kind
of like your provenance and what brought you into this space.
Yeah, so I've been in Web 3 almost since the start.
I really got in involved in Ernest in 2011 when I had read
the Bitcoin white paper and really like clicked for me at
the time. It was just this thing that I
read it and it's made total sense, right?
Like, you know, having gone through like 2008 and sort of
seeing what, you know, happened in terms of like, you know,
Financial Policy, fiscal policy, and you know, what happened to a
lot of my friends in terms of just like what happened to their
careers and jobs and opportunities, Bitcoin really
just like stood out to me. It's like, oh, this makes sense.
This is a narrative for the future.
And it was pretty interesting at the time because there wasn't
really, I felt like anything else that was really competing
for ownership of the future, right?
And Bitcoin was the sort of like very revolutionary paper, but
more revolutionary than I think people give it credit for.
It was the, it was really a statement about using like the
power of like math and mathematics to upend, you know,
the control of the state over over money, right?
And it really leaned into this idea that, like, money is
imaginary in the 1st place. And that means that, you know,
anyone can create it. But to be successful at creating
it and not have the power of the state to sort of like, you know,
enforce it, you had to use something that would be
universally secure. Everyone of course, that that
was math. And, you know, that just struck
me the sort of elegance of it. And, you know, it was, it was
something that I just immediately got into.
So I, you know, started mining and got really involved in a lot
of the early altcoins. And that was really my start.
Since then, I've done a really large number of things.
I started one of the first Bitcoin exchange of the Czech
Republic a year later in 2012. That was a very scarring
experience, but is very educational.
For a little while I was working like a Bitcoin hardware wallet.
I at the time I had a other career.
I was actually a very, really well known fashion photographer
in Europe and I started a creative technology business.
So I had actually started doing a lot of like creative
technology implementations around a lot of stuff just in
general as like the sort of fashion industry came online,
but also around like the application of things like
Bitcoin and supply chain tracking and how we could use it
for Providence of like art. You know, I was an early
employee at Opens Upland and I first met Manu, one of the Co
founders of Opens Upland in 2013 when he was working on a project
called Proof of Existence. And that was like a time
stamping service built on Bitcoin in 2013.
And I had been really interested in using that to like do early
NF TS like using it as like the provenance for for art.
So you know, I've been in this space for a really long time
that that's that's at this point ancient history.
Sometimes people talk about, you know, now on crypto Twitter,
like how many cycles they've been and it stretches back all
the way to like 2017. And you know, it's funny because
even in 2017, we had already done everything in a really
strange way. You know, this sort of came up
recently for me. I was at an event and people
were talking about like decentralized AI.
And they were like really talking about like there's all
this unused GPU power out there of like, you know, teams that,
you know, like people who've got extra GPUs so we can put them as
decentralized network and decentralized processing.
I was like, wow, you know, like crypto people were working on
that in like 2013 you. Know like you know.
Did you remember Golem? Oh, yeah, yeah.
But even before Golem right there was made safe.
And what was the other one there?
There was another one as well that they were trying to do
these like decentralized, you know, processing networks.
And so it's funny to see, you know, to have been in the space
so long to sort of see everything come around again and
again and again. You know, we're sort of like
back of that phase of like a bear market where we're, we're
all talking about like mass adoption.
And it's just like, oh man, I've been like listening to the mass
adoption, like it's almost here and people are like, we're still
early. I'm like really, because I feel
like I'm, I've lost hair, I've gone grey, you know, like I've,
I've been through this like countless times and like we're
still out there, yet it's still early, right?
So, you know, the journey's been very long.
I think though kind of interestingly, maybe finally,
it's not that it's coming to an end, but like, maybe finally,
like crypto will move on, right? Like, you know, it's, it's it's
pretty amazing that block chain Bitcoin started as this really
like political statement like we can, we can affect political
change through code, through sort of like the speech, free
speech of like encryption. And you know, that power has has
won, right? Like, you know, I, I used to say
this thing which, you know, now sounds probably really
controversial, but you know, now it's sort of like a little bit
of anachronism. It's kind of funny.
But I used to say that like, you know, Bitcoin was an example of
being like a revolutionary without violence, right?
You could use technology to, to affect this political revolution
without violence. And it was really fascinating
the past 10 years watching that sort of like really culminate in
how the Biden administration treated, you know, us shadowy
super coders and, you know, and use and use language like, you
know, Elizabeth Warren, you know, she's going to create a
anti crypto army, right? To, to go to war against the
shadowy super coders just hacking away, doing open source,
giving away their like time, energy and lifeblood for free to
the Internet. And, and, and now it's one
right. And and the, you know, the we
used to say like, you know, first they mock you, then they
fight you, then you win. And and, and it's, it seems like
now, now we win. What?
What's the metric by which you
would say we've won? Well, I think the obvious metric
is the president of the United States is all in, owns tons of
crypto, has promised a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which funny
enough, I actually suggested. I think it's probably.
Something that it's a bailout for crypto.
It's like 2008 all over again. It was very funny, I think to
like, you know, there's that whole, there's, you know,
there's all these these sort of like adages that sort of like
become so fun to use, but you know, you either you would die a
hero or live long enough to be the villain, you know?
So it's like Satoshi, Satoshi or Bitcoin live long enough to be
the villain in some really weird way, right?
But I mean, if you if you kind of think about kind of the
reasons for which I assume you and definitely me kind of get
got into the space for what it was kind of like this idea that
you could build things on this new form of the Internet that
previously you couldn't build. So kind of like you could have
these shared ownership structures, you could have
individual agency, kind of, you would have the ultimately
resilient and deficient, efficient kind of substrate kind
of build stuff on top of you would have that formification
and, and, and with that kind of a radically better user
experience for, for, for your users and so on.
And while I do agree that kind of like, yes, the president of
the United States has launched more than one shit coin.
I, I, I would very much say that this was not kind of what, what
got us here in the 1st place, right?
So kind of like in, in, in the process of kind of like winning
kind of that version of crypto that kind of we, we, we came
here for it was marginalized. Would you?
So, so This is why I'm kind of pushing back on the kind of like
we've wanted. I think kind of like, yes,
someone's won, but it's not, it's not kind of like who I
meant used to be. So I I have a little bit of a
take that's probably going to come across like a bummer, but
it's like it's it's a little bit of a multi part take.
One of it, and this is something I was talking about for years
now, is, is that crypto actually never had a plan for winning,
which is actually pretty common in revolutions, right?
Like revolutionaries, they're like driven by this desire for
the revolution, for this change, but they don't actually plan
what winning looks like, right? And and often times the best,
most successful strategies for revolutionaries are just somehow
to like implement like a perpetual revolution.
And crypto had very much this problem where it didn't plan for
success and like most revolutions, he got Co opted
along the way by the powers that be, right.
And I think that this has happened with crypto in many
ways, but the world also changed at the same time.
You know, one of the the things I always used to like to say,
there's a lot of things I used to like to say.
I don't know, I like to say these days, but one of the
things I used to like to say is that, you know, sort of like the
end of like the cypherpunk manifesto.
It talks about how, like, you know, Cypher phones have the
like, root access to the future, right?
And that's like part of the power of it.
You've root access to the future.
And my sort of response to that is like, yeah, but what if that
future was already a long time ago, you know, and when we.
Started crypto. Yes, yes, because when we
started crypto right, I remember think about it, 2011 crypto
start. You know, I, you know, I was
dating my my now wife and her father had a video camera on his
doorbell. He built it himself.
His video got camera on his doorbell and the sort of like
running joke in her friend group was how creepy that was.
Oh my God, he has like video camera on his doorbell and there
was like video cameras around the house and it was like creepy
because it's like, OK, every time I go over.
And so I'm like wave, OK, you know, dad and my girlfriend, I
guess you're like watching me, right?
And privacy was something that, you know, had already been
eroded substantially post September 11th, right?
I was, you know, I was in College in September 11th and I,
you know, people today don't remember a world where you flew
without security checks and you flew where you could go visit
the pilot up front, where people trusted one another in society,
right? Like people don't remember
America and American freedom and global freedom before September
11th. It was a big difference, right?
Like September 11th really chilled the nature of freedom.
You know, freedom went from the freedom to to the freedom from
which is very, very powerful and very sort of like autocratic
switch, right? But, but you know, I, I can
always get off track here. But, but so when we think about
when Bitcoin and you know, and web 3 and all that started, we
talked about privacy and self sovereignty, right?
And you Fast forward to today and everyone has a door as a
video camera on the doorbell, right?
And people have video cameras in their homes.
Nobody thinks it's creepy. Nobody thinks it's weird.
I know people with video cameras in their bedroom, right?
Their security camera system has video cameras in their bedroom,
and everything that happens to the bedroom is streamed live to
Google or Amazon, right? And they're fine with it, right?
So a lot of the values that we had when we came into the space
actually are no longer values that society really hold, right?
Like privacy. What is privacy today?
You know, before people would be like, well, I don't want the
government looking at naked pictures of me.
Today there's a million people making naked pictures of us
using AI every minute, right? Like nothing is real anymore.
We don't take anything to be real.
Any information you might particularly give us, we, you
know, before there's a sense of like you need your privacy
because information somehow had truth and that truth is like
very scary if it was like something private.
But today nothing is true, right?
Like it doesn't even matter if it actually happened and people
saw it with their own eyes. Like you know, nothing is true
anymore. So a lot of the values that we
started web three with society no longer actually holds, right?
Like young people, even even not young people, everyone streams
their life all the time. Everyone talks about, I mean, if
you go on TikTok or Instagram, people talk about the most
intimate experiences of their life, most humiliating, the most
degrading, the most uncomfortable experiences of
their life. And they they share it to
millions of followers. There's no more privacy, right?
And people don't care about privacy, right?
Like we gave it all to Zuckerberg years ago and, and
and we're fine. But do you think that's
irreversible? Because kind of like I, the kind
of the optimist in me hopes that kind of this is this is a, a
switch that we can kind of, you know, push back on and kind of
revert to this state of privacy by default.
So, and I think kind of like, I honestly, I don't object to kind
of like people streaming their intimate lives on whatever
service. I don't care about that.
But I think kind of like you should be able to kind of live a
privacy a, a pretty private life if you choose to do so.
So to me, it's kind of about the choice and kind of like just
because a lot of people don't value that doesn't mean that
kind of like the choice itself doesn't matter.
So I agree with you, the choice does matter.
But I kind of think two things. First, I think it's
generational. So and I actually think
everything is like generational and like cohort based
generationally. So I don't think that actually
we can like teach new generations things that they
don't sort of like naturally come to on their own.
But also I think there is this interesting trade off.
Like I'm not sure we're if you spent time in the Americas in
the 1990s, you were able to feel the moment in the 1990s and
early 2000s. You could feel the moment when
you were losing your privacy. And that's because we converted
to the society that had credit cards and cell phones.
And what happened was very slowly, you couldn't access
society without tools that innately spied on you.
I remember going to like Blockbuster and trying to like,
rent videos when I first was going to get my own Blockbuster
card. You had to have a credit card,
right? Like you couldn't participate
in, you know, renting a hotel room.
You couldn't participate in renting, you know, you know,
hotels existed before credit cards, but you can't book a
hotel today without a credit card, right?
So you can't, you can't use a hotel today without giving up
your private information, your privacy to the payment
processors and all the different entities that exist and that
sort of like data pipeline. So society slowly moves in a
direction that actually forces you to give up your privacy or
it sort of forces you out of society, right?
Where it's just like, well, you know, if you don't have a credit
card, you can't use Uber and you can't fly and you can't have a
hotel. So yes, you're, you're welcome
to have privacy, but you know, you're also not no longer able
to like participate in society in general, certainly in in many
parts, you know, in America and a lot of like, you know, Western
cities is sort of become Acto, right?
It'd be very difficult to like exist without it.
Certainly you can, but the sort of like amount of personal
effort that's really high. So eventually, like I remember
when September 11th happened and I would just opt out of those
full body scanners, right? I would just be like, this is
no, you're not going to like irradiate me to like, you know,
just you just pat me down, right?
Like, why are you, you know, today I just walked through the
scanners, right? Like, you know, it was a decade
of like, hands up, the big worrying machine going around
you. You know, it's like how much
effort eventually society kind of wears you down because you
also want to live, right? You want to raise kids, you want
to like go to birthday parties, you want to like, you know, rent
a movie, you know, you want to go on vacation somewhere.
So eventually it wears you down. I do hope that it's.
Reversible, but I think it's probably going to have to look
different than how we came at privacy, you know, 10 years ago
where maybe it looks more like your real data is, is
indecipherable from like the noise of your data, right.
Like if you think about like, you know the, the value of like
encryption, like you know, when you, you know, back of the day,
at least when you like encrypt your hard drive, you just filled
it up with noise and your actual data was indistinguishable from
noise, right. Maybe privacy of the future is
some version of that where your actual information is in is just
just it's impossible to like, you know, from the outside of
you distinguish it from the the the data about you.
That's not real, right? Maybe that's actually.
This is this is, this is strangely not very not not very
comforting. It's like, well, you know, the
the privacy you now get is you don't know which of these 5000
nudes of you is the real 1 and which one's just the AI
generated one. This is just a yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I know it's, it's bizarre, right?
And maybe I am become a little bit pessimist, but it feels hard
to do it any other way now because, you know, like for me
and my life, like what it would take to unwind the, you know,
the doctor office, privacy documents that I've signed and
like, you know, raising kids and, you know, like the the
level of effort it would take would require me sort of like
leaving society. I think kind of like, I think
kind of maybe it's on us to kind of build alternatives that kind
of are usable for regular people, but are still privacy
preserving and ideally things like self custodial and so on.
Maybe maybe let's talk about that a little bit later, because
kind of like we went on a very interesting tangent, but
nevertheless a tangent. Maybe that's kind of talk about
kind of like the, I mean, you, you've, you were in Web 3 for a
pretty long time before you actually started Tally, the
project we're here to talk about today.
So in a nutshell, what was the set of problems that you were
looking to tackle in starting Tally?
Yeah. So Tally was the sort of genesis
of Tally was, you know, a lot of the optimism that we're talking
about. I had felt that there's a lot of
sort of like inequality in the sort of standard corporate
system and how corporations work and how, you know, borders
prevent, you know, sort of human capital from crossing them.
And I really thought that we could basically incorporate
organizations on the Internet rather than in legal
jurisdictions, and that we could use software to incorporate
them. And this software could define
the relationships and mechanisms by which organizations came to
consensus, right? You know, blockchain comes to
consensus through a very programmatic way.
Well, humans also have to come to consensus.
And the way we do it in the sort of traditional world is very
unreliable, right? You have to rely on like legal
system, you have to rely upon force.
And there was this idea, of course, for like the Dow, you
know, Dow was like decentralized autonomous organizations where
have always been like a big part of especially the sort of like
Ethereum lore and the the Ethereum sort of of history.
And the idea behind Tally was like, OK, let's say you could
incorporate in software. What would that look like?
What sort of tooling would you need?
Like, how would that be done? And it's pretty clear that
actually be extremely complicated, right?
Especially when you thought of like, OK, if you create an
organization in software, it can actually scale to billions of
people, billions of dollars, and it might exist for 15 minutes,
right? Something that's not possible in
the traditional world. And it brings incredible amounts
of scale to to creating organizations, incredible
amounts of scale, right? Like you can just go today and
create an organization on Tally and it can scale to billions of
people and billions of dollars and it costs nothing, you know,
maybe a few dollars in gas fees, right?
So this is sort of like real origin and root of Tally.
And at the time a lot of people were thinking about Dows.
You know, me and my Co founder, we used to like talk about them.
We were really interested in them.
But the early incarnation of like Dows, you know, with with
an exception for the DAO, was really kind of like these, these
cooperatives on the blockchain. They're sort of like very
utopian ideas of like social society structures built on the
blockchain. And for us, it didn't really
seem particularly useful. I was like, OK, that's nice, but
I'm not going to live in a smart contract and I don't need to
like, you know, use all the sort of like obtuse tools to sort of
like negotiate these things. But then we saw the sort of like
start of Defy, right, particularly compound finance
and they launched a Dow to operate compound finance.
And it became really clear what the opportunity was, which is
there are not only going to be Dow's, these decentralized
organizations, but first they're going to be protocols.
They're going to be software things, protocols that are very
valuable. They have a lot of money.
They generate money, they generate revenue.
They control very important smart contract parameters.
And they really do need some sort of mechanism, some sort of
tooling to intermediate political disputes and to come
to consensus on things like changing the parameters and, you
know, sending money and like updating things.
So from there, it was very clear that like, oh, you know, when we
looked at how people were doing it, they're using things like
Google Docs and like Excel sheets and, you know, just sort
of like hodgepodge of different things.
It was like, OK, really actually we need we need to start
building the tooling and infrastructure to manage this.
So that's where Tally started. It started as a Tao Dao tool.
Today it's really grown into the infrastructure for tokenized
organizations, right? So you know, in the beginning is
like primarily around like, oh, you create proposals and vote
today. Tally actually does the, you
know, entire, you know, nearly the entire flow of operating a
tokenized organization from identifying the political
stakeholders to launching the actual token, to distributing
the token into, to people's hands, to the governance and
operation of protocols. The, you know, administration of
roles and permissions to staking and, and, and value accrual
mechanism so that the protocols that generate revenue have
trustless modular structures for returning revenue to the
participants. So it's really become this, this
a complete platform for operating these, these tokenized
infrastructure, these protocols at really massive scale.
You know, we just the other week we passed our big milestone
where now over a billion dollars has been been transferred
through our tools, which is which is an incredible milestone
and sort of a statement to how real that initial idea that we
can you know, make organizations and software really is.
If you look at Daos today, I mean, I think kind of Daos for
the past eight years or so, every year has been here kind of
like the the year of the DAO and so on.
And kind of if you look at the state of Daos on chain, by and
large, they're pretty dysfunctional.
So kind of like what's what's where are we going wrong?
Sure, So you're not wrong, but I think it is useful to to compare
it to the alternative, right? There is a corporate entity
structure in every jurisdiction on the planet, and by and large,
the vast, vast majority of companies are dysfunctional,
poorly run entities that eventually fail, right?
The vast, vast majority of them, right, None of them live, you
know, almost none of them live for hundreds of years or even
decades. You know.
So it is useful to say to, to like put into comparison that
with Dows, there's a level of transparency that's currently
part of the sort of like ethos of a doubt.
Maybe the transparency doesn't actually have to be there.
That that's sort of like another question which might solve some
of these problems. But corporations don't have that
level of transparency. So because we don't see what's
happening in regular corporations, we don't see how
dysfunctional they are. They only when they, you know,
you know, Enron is a great example.
It's only when they like spectacularly collapse, you
know, or Lehman Brothers that we sort of realized like, oh, it
was a shit show all along, right?
But that isn't to justify the fact that there is a lot of
dysfunction in in Dows today. I think there's a, there's a
number of different reasons for this.
The structure is still new, still pretty, pretty early.
I think there have been. So yeah, yeah, it's still early.
It's still early. Yeah, Look at that.
Look at that. Maybe it's so early it's just an
excuse for not doing a good job, you know?
Oh, well, we don't have mass adoption yet because it's so
early or we're doing a bad job. Yeah, there's been a lot of
dysfunction and it, it has been disappointing, I'll admit it.
It's, it's been disappointing. I, I think that there's a lot of
folks now looking at ways to improve this.
And I cast a lot of blame actually on the previous
administration on on the Biden administration.
And, you know, the the Gensler SEC where a lot of the a lot of
the ways that dows in the past, you know, four or five years
have been structured, have been deliberately structured to just
play this kind of like acrobatic yoga, twisty thing around
regulations to make it possible. Right.
Like when you think about how, you know, you build something in
America and then you make a foundation in the Caymans.
And then you, I have a agency in the British Virgin Islands that
like contracts an anonymous dude in like Chile to like launch a
token that's transferred to the BVI that goes to the foundation,
which goes back to the company and then AirDrop.
It's really kind of like many of these structures were set up
deliberately to make it not work right?
You know, you see this with meme coins, right?
Like the industry has been hurt so much by this sort of by this
not it's not it's not even legislation right by these like
rulings that make us contour into deliberately non successful
structures. And the great example is the the
sort of like foundation set up and design.
You're supposed to your founder, you create this idea and now to
make the idea work, you have to really protocolize and have a
token. But to do that, you have to have
another entity that does the token and that entity has to be
totally separate from you. So you now have to give over
control over what you're building and what you're trying
to do to another entity that deliberately has to not be
connected in any way. And you instantly create an
opportunity for there to be divergent and goals, right?
And you, this has been kind of like a route of if you talk to
like a lot of the lawyers in the space, especially in a lot of
the, the, the people, you know, had to build these Dows, the
this sort of like regulatory acrobatics has made it very
difficult for these organizations to be successful,
right? They're set up deliberately to
have to fight really hard to make it work, and then a lot of
the energy and effort goes into kind of making it work rather
than working on the thing that the the the project is about in
the first place. 100% agreed. But don't, wouldn't you expect
if that is kind of like the main course of this functionality in
Dow is to kind of have a number of grassroots Dow is kind of
that are not incorporated anywhere that kind of just kind
of chug along kind of in there a non kind of universe and kind of
create value. So kind of because in principle,
I mean because because what you're describing very much
arises from the fact that there is this duality in systems,
right? So kind of we say kind of like,
OK, the organization should live on chain, but kind of like
obviously things also things that kind of live on chain are
constrained technically at least kind of by, by legacy legal
systems, right. So by, by kind of saying, OK, we
will bow to that ahead of time before anyone even come comes to
us. I, I understand and that creates
a lot of overhead and destruction and destruction and
so on. But why aren't there more
functional grass roots Taos without any legal set up?
So I think there's a couple reasons there and the first one
is, is that I don't think that situation that you describe
actually can ever exist. And the RE, I think compound is
a great example, right? The compound DAO is not, there's
no legal entity behind the compound now currently, right?
And the result of that is that you have these sort of shark
private plaintiff lawyers who buy a dollar worth of compound
and then it goes down to $0.90. And then they file a lawsuit and
they go after anyone they can find, right?
So if you hold tokens, if you're a delegate, if your name is on
it, they go after you, they name you in the complaint.
You know, this is this is what happened to Pool Together,
right? Pool Together was a Dow, a
really cool organization. And they ended up spending all
their money and all their time and resources fighting these
private plaintiff lawsuits where they were, you know, people in
the Dow were named personally liable for this sort of like
general partnership. So unfortunately you can't
unless you have like complete anonymity, which you know, goes
back I think to your earlier point around privacy.
It's very difficult to actually have that state of a truly, you
know, decentralized org that doesn't have any of this because
of the regulatory setup allows these private plaintiffs, you
know, legal folks to actually should go after any person they
can find, right? And this has happened.
This is, you know, there's this these groups of law firms that
go around, they raise money and they just, you know, pick off
these projects 1 by 1. So I think that is majorly a big
blocker into making that sort of set up that you describe
actually work, you know, a room with maker for a long time, you
know, was trying to require everyone to be private, to be
anonymous because this risk is very real, right?
Like if they go after you and they say that's a general
partnership, they go after you for your dog and you know, your
children's school fund and your house, right?
So I think that again, it goes back to regulations where you
actually can't have that because there are these opportunistic
entities who will just find any individual and hold them liable.
I think that's kind of the root of it because if.
They have AUS if they have AUS angle, right.
So kind of like if if you're just someone on the other side
of the world, say kind of like you're, you're someone in, in
the Philippines, what would stop them from starting an
organization like this? Well, I think it wouldn't.
But what it does mean though, is many actors who might be high
quality participants won't participate.
Your access to things like on ramps and off ramps or trading
locales is very limited. All these things in aggregate
work against your success, right?
And if you do deal with US persons in any way, shape or
form, those people become exposed.
So, yeah, you can certainly have an organization completely
firewalled from the US. Maybe part of that is I don't
really know about them, right? I'm in the US.
They deal with me more with like US entities.
But it definitely limits your ability to have success.
But this isn't the only 'cause this is just like one of many
things that I think probably what you're getting at is, is
that like, people are messy and kind of like shit on the
Internet and they're very difficult to like, you know,
coordinate to do useful things together.
No, and this is not what I'm getting at at all.
So I think kind of like in, in principle, I think kind of like
humans are the same off chain and on chain to a large extent.
I think, I wonder whether to some extent it's a question of
culture, right? Because kind of like in in Daos,
kind of like we have, we have started Daos with this idea that
they're kind of like this egalitarian place and kind of
like you, you vote on everything and so on.
And I think kind of not everything should be voted on.
Maybe this is my controversial take for today, but kind of like
if you're running an organization, kind of like kind
of decisions are not mix and match, right?
Kind of like they, they kind of you have to commit to a strategy
and kind of you have someone has to wear the hat otherwise
doesn't work. And I think in principle,
there's no, there's this is not impossible.
Kind of. You could have very hierarchical
DAO, but somehow that's not in our cultural understanding of
Dows. So Dows don't have ACEO, and
maybe they should. Yeah.
So I think you will see most Dows have ACEO going forward for
the reasons you describe. I it, it disappoints me a little
bit, but I do think it's inevitable and it's actually
probably good, especially in this period that sort of feels
very inter intermediary, like it's sort of like a in between
time for some reason, especially right now, I think going back to
like our principles, there was a time when maybe we're looking
towards more decentralization and actually much of the world
is kind of gone more centralized, right?
Like there's, there's a very strong authority streak right
now in the world globally. Even the idea of founder mode is
very much, you know, top down as, as an idea that sort of like
permeated the space organizationally.
Also, I think that these Dows have had problems and how they
initially distribute their membership, right?
Membership is a big determinant of like success, right?
Like if you give the wrong, you can't really say wrong.
But an organization has to have a culture.
And if you don't have an aligned culture, it's very difficult to
make decisions collectively, especially when.
Actually, everyone in organization has different
cultures. I think a great example of this
is salaries in these organizations.
You know, some of these organizations are extremely
valuable. And you look at like Uniswap
Foundation, Uniswap Dow, you know, this multibillion dollar
organization and, you know, people really complain about the
foundation's proposal and how much they're going to pay
people. And you have these sort of like
participants in the space who are like, yeah, well, I got this
cousin. He like, you know, he's in like,
you know, some plays and he would do it for cheaper.
And it's just like, this is one of the most competitive
financial organizations in the world based in New York City.
They need to hire the most competitive, highly sought after
talent that exists. That's expensive, and you have a
natural divide between participants of what like a lot
of money is and what a little bit of money is and what's worth
something, what's not worth something.
I think this comes up a lot between the sort of like,
programming community of Europe and the programming community
of, like, San Francisco always on Twitter.
Like, you know, European programs are like, why does this
person earn $300,000 a year when I earn, you know, $80,000 a
year? And these sorts of like,
geographical issues filter into organizations, too, along with
cultural ones. And it makes it very difficult
for people to come to, like, a common alignment, right?
These organizations end up bickering about how much the dog
gets paid instead of like what they need the dog for, right?
And, and that really drives these organizations to like do a
bad job or like, you know, they sort of like descend and sort of
the, the, there's a, what was it?
Someone, someone put it really well recently where
decentralized organizations end up mostly talking about
themselves and their organization rather than getting
anything done, which it's kind of a truism now that we need to
think about it. But not to get too far off the
topic, I think you were right that we will see more CEO of
Dows right? Where, you know, if you read
Miles Jennings how you know, A16Z and he are kind of thinking
about what decentralization means, right?
Like we kind of came into this years ago with decentralization
being like everyone in their grandma participates in voting
on everything. And, you know, that has turned
out to be a bad idea for a lot of different reasons.
And now it's like, well, we have to redefine or sort of think,
what does decentralization mean, right?
Like who is involved in decentralization?
Is it everyone on everything? Is it just the experts?
Who determines what an expert is?
What's the oversight? All of these are very
complicated questions which, you know, corporations have sort of
figured out by just saying like, he's the boss and these are the
board members that oversee the boss, and these are the
shareholders that oversee the board members.
But I mean, that's also a structure that's grown over
time, right? I mean, it's not like kind of
like someone, I mean, we, we've, we've had corporations for
hundreds of years and kind of I'm, I'm sure we've tried out
many different things that didn't work.
Sure. And I mean, even now we kind of
have different Modi for operations, right?
Kind of like you, you can have, you can have a cooperative, you
can have a foundation, you can have a company limited by
shares, you can have a public company and so on.
And I think all of these kind of I mean to some extent kind of
you can, you can transition between them, but kind of they
are kind of have found product market fit in a way, right?
Yes, yeah. I we are I think in search of
our product market fit for decentralized organizations, but
I think we have some form of it right.
Like protocols have to be decentralized.
You know, I think a great example is Arbitrome, which is
on like kind of like the grandest experiment of them all
at the moment where they fundamentally are operated by
their token holders and the token holders have an extreme
level of power, right? Like they, they can
fundamentally alter the the way the network works.
And you see this characteristic leading to their success, right?
Their success being, you know, you look at like Tether having
chosen them as being like they're one of their new home
bases. You look at the different
organizations that build directly on top of them.
And a big piece of that is because they have this certainty
that they are building on top of infrastructure in which they
have a tangible say in how it's governed and operated.
So I do think that we've found that nugget of product market
fit, right, like you wouldn't trust, you know, like a Chinese
company wouldn't necessarily build directly on an American
company because they're always exposed to like geopolitical
issues, right. But you know, a truly
decentralized network where you have a credible share, you know,
the the platform itself is credibly neutral and you have a
credible participation level on it.
That is very valuable, right? Like that is something that you
can trust that you can build on as, as infrastructure.
Something I like to say is like, you know, if you're building on
Facebook, you're the next Zynga. And I think that idea of like
being able to trust the infrastructure that you build on
is super important, right? Because we've seen that in, you
know, the Web 2 space. You know, whether it's Twitter
and the Twitter API, Reddit and the Reddit API, Facebook and
Facebook API. If you build something that's
large enough and valuable enough, the underlying layer
will steal it from you. Do do you think that's borne out
by the state of which networks currently see developer
adoption? Because to me it seems that
there's kind of the the networks that are currently very
successful. They are not the most
decentralized, they are not the most credibly neutral.
They they are the ones that somehow managed to hire the
right marketing people. That's a spicy, spicy hint
there. Yeah, You know, that's a tricky
1 and it's tricky for a lot of reasons because you know, who
are the developers today versus the developers 10 years ago or
five years ago and, you know, two years ago.
And I think that they look very different, right?
Like when crypto, when I found crypto, it was very much about
self sovereign everything, right and, and, and privacy and all
this stuff. I think people who find crypto
today find it through very different mediums, right?
Like it's not coming to them through some, you know,
cryptography newsletter or you know, group chat.
It's coming to them through, you know, meme coin prices and
payments and stable coins and stuff like that.
So I think we're also maybe catering to a different type of
developer. If you want to use like
developer sort of like metrics, like there's a different kind of
contributor who is joining the ecosystem.
And I think this is, you know, I think a great example of this
was NFTS and video games or like a big, big, big selling idea
behind NFTS was like, wow, you know, video game.
If you, if you participate in a video game, you could own your
loot and it would be portable between games.
And this is actually genuinely a really awesome, amazing idea.
But the larger video game developer ecosystem came to NFTS
through like board apes and like $1,000,000 jpegs and they hated
the idea, right? And then we could never get them
off of that, right? Like they're like, oh, no,
Ethereum, it burns the rainforest and it's for dumb
jpegs. It's just like, no, no, no, no,
we built this thing to like make it better for everyone.
And they're like only heard the scam and they entirely rejected
it, right? So we we sort of like missed out
on our entire like premise because they came to it in the
wrong way. So I think today's developer
base doesn't really come to crypto through the cypher funk
values or the web three values, right?
In fact, you know, I think, you know, a lot of criticism are
going around is that we don't do a very good job of even like
expressing those, right? For a long time, you know, the
words World Computer just stopped being used in the
Ethereum space, right? It went from like world computer
and like all this stuff does, you know, effectively just
money, money, money, money, which is good for the price.
And, you know, I wouldn't mind some aspect of that coming back,
but that changes who comes in and builds.
And the centralization component, it's efficient,
right? The centralization is efficient
in these organizations. It means that, you know, someone
is tasked with the responsibility of making each
one of these developers who come in the door feel good and feel
recognized and feel unique and feel special.
And that drives participation, right?
You want to be somewhere where people are excited.
You know, I've, I, I go to both Ethereum conferences and I go to
both and Solana conferences. And you know, one of the things
that struck me about the last few Solana conferences I went to
is that everyone's really excited about making money, but
really excited, right? They're like, wow, we are all
here, we're going to make money. What are you building?
I'm building money, money, money.
Oh, I'm building money. Plus, I'm building money, money,
money. And plus I'm building money with
J bags. And everyone's like really
psyched. And that sort of real clarity of
purpose. I think was is, is extremely
powerful for, for that community, right.
But you definitely don't have people saying like, oh, actually
we need to start decentralized, right?
Like you don't have that. You have a very different ethos
and that's totally fine, right? Like this is not in any way dig.
This is totally fine. Like there are so many more
ecosystems in crypto today than there were in 2011, right?
In 2011, there was just one, right?
There's actually a couple really soon after that.
But but today there's just there's just thousands of the
communities. So, you know, some days it's
like you wish it were a bit more decentralized, but some days you
recognize that there's going to have to be some like path in the
middle to make sure you get to that product market fit, to make
sure you build something that works.
That people need to make sure that like, you're focused on the
task at hand rather than sort of like this real owneristic, just
like it's about how we organize all the time, you know?
Yeah, I, I think kind of I'd make the point that kind of like
decentralization in itself is not a value.
It's not kind of it's not something that people should pay
to have. It depends on the use case,
right. So kind of like there's many
things for which it's totally fine kind of build on a
proprietary network somewhere just like kind of like I, I have
stuff running on AWS. But yeah, there's other things
like, I don't know, for instance, if I, if I had my
identity on chain, I would be very worried about having it on
a poorly decentralized chain. So we've we've talked about kind
of like the general Dow space for pretty long time.
Tell us about kind of the things that are currently on your plate
at Tally. So kind of what are you guys
working on? What are you excited about?
What do you think is going to meet move the needle on on how
Daos operate in the future? Yeah.
So at Tally, we are really excited about this new political
landscape. We can now build organizations
or it looks like we can now build organizations that are
more functional, that have more focus on success early on, that
allow founders to have higher agency, that allow teams to
build more transparently with a lot of like the sort of like
shackles and limitations taken off.
So we, I actually think that we are probably closer to the
original vision of like being able to, you know, incorporate
organizations and software than we've ever been, which is
incredibly, you know, exciting. Obviously the whole global
economy is going through a little bit of a weird rough
patch right now. And you know, I guess we kind of
all have to see how that shakes out.
But at its core, the idea now that you can just build an
organization, you can or incorporate it on chain.
You can have high agency decision making, but you can
have a large community. And by community, it could be
just people who have an opinion or it could be actually like
people who have power, right? And who have operative power is
really exciting for us. There's actually some pieces
here that are still missing. You know, very early on we
recognize the need to have tokens that actually accrue
value, right? The problem with governance
tokens, and this is another big thing thing historically, the
problems with governance tokens has been that we've had to
specifically say they don't have any value.
And that negatively selects for the participants of your
ecosystem, right? Because most savvy participants
aren't interested in like the, the opportunity cost of like
holding something that cost money but should be valueless,
right? Like that's, that's a horrible
relationship. And that's actually been a big
contributor to, you know, the, the success or failure failure
of different organizations. So now we're building a lot of
great modular tooling around value accrual for for tokens.
You know, we've been working closely with teams around the
idea of staking, using staking as this core primitive to drive
the sort of like productive behavior necessary to operate
protocols, which we think is really critical for their long
term success. We also I've been working really
closely with teams to help launch their protocols, right,
help launch their tokens. So really today it's about
serving these teams in their whole journey and like getting
them out there. Because if you look at kind of
like the history of like where the stock market has been in
terms of like, you know, IP OS as sort of stats here, right in
2024, there was around 220 like IP OS, you know, in 2022,
there's like 175. When you look at how many
organizations are actually launching on software today,
it's really pretty incredible. And when you look at how many of
them are doing it on top of tally, right?
Like just the number that like we've passed a billion dollars
in payments, like money moves on the platform really shows that
like we have this really exciting opportunity to really
compete with the wider ecosystem of like how do companies sort of
like chart their path forward, right?
You know, maybe we're going to even get to the point where
companies are going to realistically, you know, look at
tally and say, hey, we would like to go token instead of even
going IPO, right? Like this is kind of like this
idea that really, really has gotten us very excited where we
could actually be an alternate way for this new kind of
organization to really go public in a sense, but in a very
different way, you know, and, and obviously within, you know,
a now a clear regulatory framework.
Yeah, that's very, I mean this kind of very much Rings of 2017
and I think kind of like this the the kind of ICO era in some
way, kind of it's been maligned needlessly over the past couple
of years. I mean, yes, there were pretty
bad IC OS out there, but there were also a bunch of really good
IC OS out there. And yeah, so I think kind of
like having having this way of doing a crowd sale without and
kind of having an investor base that's not necessarily kind of
accredited investors only. And that's not that that doesn't
kind of require you kind of have prospectors and, and, and
whatever. I think, yeah, I think that is
tremendously worthwhile. And it very much goes back to
kind of like this vision of shared ownership, right, Kind of
that we talked about in in the beginning as kind of like one of
the core tenets of Web 3. Yeah, I agree with you.
You know, people love to speak negatively about the ICO boom,
but a lot of very good stuff came out of that.
A lot of infrastructure got built.
You know SAFE was an I ICO project originally, you know.
There's a lot of great. Yeah, yes, exactly.
Full disclosure is yours. You, you know, like there's a
lot of actual great infrastructure that was built
during this and there's a lot of magic around the capital
formation primarily using an asset that was created from its
own ICO, right? Ethereum itself was an ICO which
I did not participate in because of, you know, sorry, but poor
choices, poor life choices. So, so yeah, in in many ways
like, you know, going back to the sort of like certainly our
original vision and I think a lot of people's original vision,
we can do incorporation vastly cheaper, faster, more efficient,
greater scale by using software as our jurisdiction then we can
using, you know, you know, Delaware and the state
registrar's office. So what we, what we would like,
of course we don't want a world coming back where, you know, I
think, you know, people love to knock like Dentacoin, you know,
the, the ICO like for, for dentists, like that's like the,
the, the running sort of like punching bag.
Although I will note that they might even still be around.
But yeah, most businesses aren't a success anyway.
So, you know, it's hard to hold that again.
And we've seen the same with IPOs, right?
I mean kind of like, yes, we have Google, we have Google, but
we also have, we also had pets.com, right?
And kind of like that, that went exactly the way that Dentacoin
went. So it's.
Exactly, exactly. And you know, I hope that
actually we get really clear regulation around this because
the efficiencies and opportunities here for builders
and you know, I would be remiss if I didn't mention for the Made
in America builders is incredible, right?
Like that's sort of like efficiency that opportunity is.
You can't really ignore that, especially today when, you know,
we we are finally even contending with the idea that
maybe even like AI and machines are going to start companies and
build software and stuff like that.
So, yeah, I would very much like to see.
We are very much positioning ourselves for World War.
Regulatory clarity allows us to build many more exciting things
where founders can, you know, maintain control over their
vision for a lot longer so that they can get to, you know, PMF,
you know, I, I, I think this is just, you know, extremely
exciting. You know, we just have to get
through this little rough patch that we're in right now.
But, you know, ideally, you know, the, the president has
promised legislation in the, in the summer.
So I think by fall we may actually know what the future is
going to look like. Yeah, absolutely.
So, Dennison, where can we send people to kind of find out more
about Tally? So the most obvious place is
tally or the website itself, Tally dot XYZ.
You know, we also have a newsletter, a podcast, a Twitter
as well. These are probably the best
places to check, check out. You can also follow me as well
on on Twitter at Dennison Bertram.
If you are building a project. If you're thinking about
building a project. If you're thinking about
building a token or launching a token.
We are probably your best partners for that in the
industry. If you're thinking about value
accrual mechanisms, thinking about modular secure governance
that, you know, secures 10s of billions of dollars across the
ecosystem, we are your, you know, your best partner that you
could have. So if you are in a founder of
any of this sort of sort or builder, you know, even the
legal right, we have great, great recommendations and
experience helping team set up even the legal sides of things.
We're not lawyers, but you know, we can give you a lot of great
recommendations to wonderful, wonderful teams as well, You
know, reach outreach out. We can be your partner in this
in this process and help, you know, help you succeed the way
we've, you know, helped hundreds of other organizations succeed.
Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on
Dennison. Thank you, it's a real, real
pleasure. I loved having this
conversation.