Civic DAOs

A recurring theme in my work with DAOs was how they could help grassroots communities pool resources and coordinate around shared goals.

bkDAO

Across 2018 and 2019, I helped run the Bushwick Generator, a warehouse space in Brooklyn that became a gathering place for the local Ethereum community. I organized events and workshops there, including a monthly Decentralized Bushwick meetup exploring how decentralized technologies could support local communities.

Through these meetups, we developed bkDAO: a shared fund that would allow the Brooklyn community to collectively support the civic organizations and public goods it relied on. The proposal used DAOstack to pool funding and let community members decide together where it should go.

MediumbkDAO: Self-Funding Civic OrgsA blockchain-based benefit society for Brooklyn's civic organizations, pooling their fundraising while spreading decision-making across the participants.Read →

Amnesty International

I was later approached by Amnesty International to explore using a DAO to help activists operating in hostile environments coordinate decisions and manage shared funds. I led a team at dOrg to build a privacy-first DAO that generated anonymous, unlinked wallets for participants and routed communications through a dedicated VPN and isolated infrastructure. We hardened the rest of the stack around the same threat model, including private voting and treasury activity, and censorship-resistant access, while keeping the application usable on a mobile phone by people who weren't crypto-native.