At this year's ETH Denver conference, decentralized autonomous organizations were the talk of the town—and Decent Labs CEO Parker McCurley was talking about using a DAO as his new business model.
"The benefits to becoming a DAO are, once we take care of our initial team members at scale, then we can add contributors from all over the world, with a variety of skill sets, creating more opportunities," McCurley tells Decrypt.
Decent Labs has been dedicated to helping Web3 builders launch, fund, and scale open source communities. As Decent DAO, a venture studio to fund and build other protocols, it can do even more, McCurley said.
McCurley said he launched Miami-based Decent Labs in 2017 because he saw Ethereum projects getting funding but lacking the requisite technical resources to follow through. So Decent Labs began building decentralized apps for other projects, including BRD—acquired by Coinbase in November—Rawrshak, FrostByte, Portis, Celsius, and Sarcophagus.
Parker McCurley of Decent Labs at ETHDenver 2022
Parker McCurley of Decent Labs speaks with Decrypt's Jason Nelson at ETHDenver to discuss the story behind Sarcophagus DAO and what it takes to transition Decent Labs from a centralized company into a DAO.
Sarcophagus is a deadman switch for crypto and digital assets built on Ethereum and Arweave, the decentralized storage solution. Sarcophagus users designate who will receive their digital assets in the event of death or incapacitation.
"Sarcophagus is a use-case that people understand," McCurley said. "What happens to our crypto when we die is not something we want to think about, but it's something that we need to be thinking about."
Crypto Dead Man’s Switch Sarcophagus Raises $5.47M From VCs via DAO
Where do you want your crypto sent after you die? Have you thought about the fact that if you are the only one who knows your keys, the coins will be lost once you’re gone? Sarcophagus is a decentralized “dead man’s switch” allowing users to set instructions to be carried out by a smart contract if the user is incapacitated. And it just raised $5.47 million in a unique fashion: by selling DAO tokens to VCs, a clever combination of traditional VC fundraising and the bleeding-edge DAO approach tha...
Last month, Sarcophagus announced a raise of $5.47 million from VC firms and angel investors, including Greenfield One, Placeholder, Inflection, Lattice, Infinite, LD Capital, Hinge Capital, Blockchange, Coral DeFi Investments, Blockchain.com Ventures, Lo Enterprises, Compound VC, and Arweave.
"Sarcophagus was part of our venture studio and accelerator program where we would partner with early-stage protocols and build out their technology," McCurley said. "We designed the application and architected the software and implemented it. And now it's deployed on Ethereum."
With BRD, previously BreadWallet, McCurley says Decent Labs worked on their B2B product, Blockset, and the associated websites.
The Hardest Part of Building a DAO Isn't What You Think
So you want to start a DAO? Why not? All the cool kids are doing it. Like "blockchain" and "DeFi" before it, DAOs have become a buzzword in the crypto industry. And they're raising money at a feverish clip. ConstitutionDAO raised just over $45 million in an attempt to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. More recently, FreeRossDAO raised $12 million to win the Ross Ulbricht NFT collection auction. The technical process of starting a DAO is not incredibly difficult: Draft a mission statement. S...
Transitioning into a DAO could prove a bit more time-consuming, McCurley told Decrypt. "We needed to terminate our employees in the process of dissolving the company, and they then become individual self-directed contributors to the DAO," he said. "But It's pretty shocking when an employee gets a phone call that they're fired, and they haven't done anything wrong."
And there are other benefits of becoming a DAO: having access to blockchain innovation; earning income from DeFi protocols; partnering with other DAOs; being able to pay global contributors; and automating all of those things by using smart contracts.
McCurley explained that Decent Labs, in becoming Decent DAO, is attempting to utilize Web3 talent on a global scale.
"Our mission is to leverage human intelligence in the most efficient way to accelerate decentralization," McCurley added. "Our goal is to contribute to the ethical adoption of blockchain technology throughout our society, versus one particular problem."
