From YangDAO to Trump: The crypto community’s surprising political comeback

Source: Empower Labs

In August 2019, an organization called YangDAO was established, with the goal of helping Chinese-American presidential candidate Andrew Yang to participate in the campaign.

(DAO is a new form of organization that is organized and coordinated through a cryptographic network, and the operation and governance rules are determined by code. However, the definition of DAO has never been unified. Today, many organizations do not rely entirely on code to operate, but as long as they have decentralized collaboration and governance mechanisms, they are also considered DAOs.)

DAO was once one of the most attractive innovations in the crypto field, but in 2016, the first large-scale DAO in history suffered a catastrophic security vulnerability. The community was hit hard, and the DAO concept was silent for several years. Until Valentine's Day in 2019, at the Ethereum Denver Conference, a guy named Ameen Soleimani announced the return of DAO with a 144-line core code.

This simple and practical code is named the Moloch protocol, which allows people to create a DAO-style donation fund on Ethereum. According to legend, people in ancient Canaan had to sacrifice their eldest sons to the gods in exchange for the safety of the entire tribe. The evil god who accepted the sacrifice was called Moloch. In 2014, scholar Scott Alexander published a famous article "Meditations of Moloch", which explained how humans fell into the tragedy of the commons. Since then, Moloch has implicitly meant the failure of the public system.

Moloch was like a thunderclap, once again touching people's yearning for DAO. By August of that year, more than 80 DAOs built on the Moloch protocol had been born, and YangDAO was one of them.

Andrew Yang's two major campaign platforms - supporting cryptocurrency and promoting universal basic income - attracted crypto enthusiasts. YangDAO hopes to become a super PAC (an independent political committee that can accept unlimited donations) supporting Andrew Yang. YangDAO claims to be a 21st century solution to 21st century problems, with a particular focus on issues such as unemployment caused by AI. However, due to poor publicity and the lack of popularization of the DAO concept, YangDAO only raised tens of thousands of dollars.

With Andrew Yang's withdrawal from the party primary, YangDAO also came to an end. Although YangDAO's history is short, it is the first time in the history of the crypto community that it has publicly and collectively attempted to participate in American politics.

PACDAO

On August 20, 2021, PACDAO was established with the aim of influencing congressmen's attitudes towards cryptocurrencies through political lobbying, and even hopes to push a pro-crypto congressman into Congress.

PACDAO demonstrates the rapid evolution of the DAO field. Compared with YangDAO two years ago, it has made significant progress in community organization, talent recruitment, fundraising, and project execution. The first fundraising adopted the NFT sales method, and also invited Rebecca Hendin, a famous political artist, to design it.

PACDAO’s most notable innovation is the creation of an on-chain congressional scorecard. Community members can rate the crypto-friendliness of legislators, and the results will guide the direction of political support in the crypto community. They also created animated avatars for each politician based on the scores that can be cast as NFTs.

However, politics is still a niche topic in the crypto space. I have been observing PACDAO for a long time, and although PACDAO is very creative, the community is not as active as other DAOs. After the midterm elections, PACDAO gradually ceased operations. Despite this, this attempt is still another important experiment for the crypto community to participate in politics.

Constitution DAO

In October 2021, Sotheby's announced the auction of the only circulated copy of the 13 original copies of the U.S. Constitution. Less than 10 days before the auction, a group of crypto enthusiasts came up with a bold idea on Twitter: to form a DAO to raise funds to buy the Constitution.

This idea quickly ignited the entire crypto community like a prairie fire. In just one week, they completed the seemingly impossible task: obtaining Sotheby's auction qualifications, negotiating the use of cryptocurrency as a deposit, establishing a compliant DAO structure, and handling various auction details. This initiative also attracted a lot of attention from ordinary people and triggered reports from many well-known media.

In the end, Constitution DAO raised more than 40 million US dollars in less than 10 days, creating a miracle. Although it failed to successfully bid for a copy of the Constitution, this action sowed a seed in the hearts of tens of millions of Americans. These seeds will eventually germinate, bloom, and bear fruit, and gather into a force that will subtly change the political ecology of the United States.

Lobby3

Back to Andrew Yang. Although YangDAO has no direct connection with Andrew Yang himself, this experience made him realize the power of the community and the potential of the DAO organizational form.

At the 2022 Ethereum Denver Conference, Andrew Yang announced the creation of the Lobby3 project. The "Lobby" in the name means "lobbying", which reflects the political nature of the project. Lobby3 aims to integrate traditional political lobbying with the decentralized governance of DAO, explore new models of citizen participation in policy making, and is expected to provide ordinary people with a channel to directly influence politics.

However, Lobby3 is a bit of a big thunder and little rain. Although it was very lively at the launch, the subsequent operation was weak. Andrew Yang obviously only gave a small part of his energy to Lobby3, and the work was mainly handled by several enthusiastic people from the community. After organizing several Washington lobbying events, Lobby3 released its last proposal, the Sunset Plan, on August 20, 2023, marking the end of this political experiment.

Although this attempt failed to last, it once again demonstrated the crypto community's continued exploration of political participation and provided valuable experience for similar projects in the future.

Standing with Crypto

DAO is not the only group in the crypto community that participates in politics. In recent years, major U.S. crypto institutions have invested heavily in political lobbying, and these decentralized forces have eventually condensed into greater influence.

In 2023, an organization called Fairshake was born. It is a super PAC officially registered with the Federal Election Commission, with giants in the U.S. crypto industry standing behind it. Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and A16z alone donated $45.5 million, $45 million, and $44 million, respectively. Fairshake's mission is clear: to support political candidates who are committed to making the United States a future Internet innovation center to enter Congress. They believe that the key to fully unleashing the potential of an open blockchain economy in the United States is to create a clear and friendly regulatory and legal environment for innovators.

At the same time, another organization called Standing with Crypto was born in 2023. If Fairshake is the high-end stage for crypto giants, then Standing with Crypto is an attempt to unite the power of a wider community. Its main initiator is still Coinbase, but the goal is to unite a wider range of practitioners and ordinary people in the industry, and it has also attracted DAO organizations with clear political positions such as Devils DAO to join.

Standing with Crypto's strategy is quite creative. They almost copied the approach of PACDAO and established a detailed crypto-stance scorecard for politicians. The database contains more than a thousand politicians, and people can understand at a glance the attitude of each congressman towards cryptocurrency.

Each congressman's data card also includes what votes they have cast on crypto-related proposals in the past.

Furthermore, they carefully selected 24 crypto-friendly candidates and actively guided community members to endorse or donate to these candidates. This direct and powerful way of support will undoubtedly have an important impact on the election of these candidates.

Selected candidates

With the strong support of industry giants, the power of Standing with Crypto far exceeds any previous political participation of the crypto community.

Looking forward to the 2024 congressional elections, we are likely to see a number of candidates supported by the crypto community successfully win seats. This new wave of political participation may become an important driving force for cryptocurrency to enter mainstream society.

Trump and J.D. Vance

Four years ago, YangDAO's efforts in the presidential campaign stopped at the party primary, but in this election, the crypto community has already entered the finals.

According to a survey in the first half of this year, 19% of registered American voters already hold cryptocurrencies, and another 16% plan to buy them. This huge group has attracted great attention from the candidates. Trump expressed his pro-crypto stance early on, and Biden, who had previously opposed encryption, had to soften his attitude and start to smooth things over.

In June of this year, under the matchmaking of Senator J.D. Vance, Silicon Valley investor David Sacks organized a fundraising dinner for Trump. Many people in the crypto community attended and expressed to Trump their demands for loosening regulations and encouraging innovation. The dinner eventually raised $12 million for Trump.

According to Axios, Elon Musk, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and David Sacks recently secretly lobbied Trump to recommend J.D. Vance as a vice presidential candidate, and the lobbying continued until Monday morning this week. In the end, Trump did choose J.D. Vance as his running mate. This choice may be directly related to the crypto fundraising dinner organized by J.D. Vance.

Compared to Trump, J.D. Vance is a more radical crypto supporter. Since being elected as a senator in 2022, he has been one of the most active voices in Congress in support of crypto. According to the 2022 financial declaration, he holds between $100,000 and $250,000 in Bitcoin through Coinbase and holds it to this day. In 2023, Vance also proposed a bill to protect crypto companies and exchanges from traditional bank blockades.

Vance once said: "Our technology industry, once characterized by innovative start-ups, is now dominated by boring monopolists. The crypto community stands in stark contrast to this transformation."

Against this backdrop, the world may witness the birth of a US President/Vice President combination that clearly supports cryptocurrencies in November this year. This potential outcome not only marks a significant increase in the political influence of the crypto community, but is also likely to have a far-reaching impact on cryptocurrency policies in the United States and around the world.

Looking back on these past events, it seems like a lifetime ago. However, if you think about it carefully, the earliest sprouts only began in the last presidential election, and most of them happened in the past two or three years. In just a few years, the American political arena has changed dramatically. I am afraid that even the pioneers in the DAO field did not expect such a speed of change.

Looking back, their efforts have made certain contributions to opening the door to Capitol Hill for cryptocurrencies, but greater credit should be attributed to the concept and growing influence of cryptocurrencies themselves. After more than a decade of precipitation, these ideas have quietly changed public perception, and the public's large-scale acceptance has finally pried the nerves of Washington politicians.

Cryptocurrency, which was once regarded as a marginal topic, has now become an issue that presidential candidates and congressmen have to take seriously. The utopian concept of the past is now becoming a reality before our eyes. This change is reshaping the public's perception of finance, technology and governance. This is not only about the economy, but also about the organization and value distribution of future society. The political participation of the crypto community has become an undeniable force for change, quietly shaping the future of the world.