The leaderless investing collectives known as decentralized autonomous organizations are generating a lot of eyerolls. Thanks to high flexibility and low regulation, they’ll also soon generate a lot of profits.

«This is an incredibly risky move. I don’t know if I agree with this.’’ Erick Calderon, the founder of a company named Art Blocks in a risk-oblivious field, nonfungible tokens, was nonetheless concerned. It was February 2021, and Calderon was one of 59 investors who had banded together to potentially buy a rare set of 150 popular NFTs, CryptoPunks, directly from their producer, Larva Labs.

The group, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Flamingo, had pooled $10 million and met weekly via Zoom (audio-only to protect those wanting anonymity) to figure out what to do with it. The CryptoPunk opportunity, at about four ether ($7,200 at the time) per punk, would eat 10% of that, which is partly why Calderon aired his concerns on the group’s Discord channel.

The tension got thicker when members discovered one of their own—someone going by the pseudonym “Pranksy”—had tried to front-run the deal, opening a back channel with Larva Labs to buy 150 punks for himself. In the end, Flamingo members voted to spring for the punks, which were recently valued at $30 million. As for Pranksy, he left the DAO “by mutual agreement,” telling Forbes he was “somewhat naïve [about] the DAO process.”

Keep Reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2022/02/03/daos-arent-a-fad-theyre-a-platform/?sh=14cd5e2519d0

0:00 Start
0:07 What is a DAO?
0:17 How DAOs are similar to old school investment clubs
0:55 Brief history of The DAO
1:07 Growth of DAOs
1:15 How DAOs bounced back after The DAO hack
1:17 Aaron Wright + Tribute Labs
3:13 Flamingo DAO
4:00 Neon DAO
4:28 Noise DAO
4:34 Red DAO
4:49 Risks of DAOs
5:49 Tips on investing in DAOs

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What Are DAOs? (And How One DAO Turned $10M into $1B) | Forbes