Some personal news! I am taking up the role of Head of Governance for @jito_sol. Yes, I am coming to @solana. A bit of background on why I am making this move. I have been obsessed with DAOs since ‘The DAO’ in 2016. At that time I was actually running a decentralised organisation, which I had built as a parallel organisation inside a higher education institution. I had landed on decentralised organisation as the way to harness the collective intelligence of academics across all their various disciplines to get better at being teachers and practitioners in the academic context. It worked, the university went up 70 places the league tables to become top 4 in the country at teaching and learning. I had seen the power of self organisation and expert driven collaboration and coordination. I was decentralisation pilled. And then the DAO happened. This got me hooked (no, obsessed) on crypto and I have been down the rabbit hole ever since. I had actually come across Bitcoin before, whilst I was teaching mathematics and cryptography in 2010, but it was DAOs and Ethereum that got me really excited. This was how we could decentralise the world, by taking decentralised organisations onto the open internet. 4 years later, I was an Associate Dean at the London College of Fashion. At this point, I left a (very) good job to go crypto full-time in 2020. Whilst the world was on lockdown I jumped into the fastest paced, most chaotic industry on the planet. In the last 5 years I have lived DAOs, both as a DAO builder and leader, but also as the CEO of a company aiming to build the future of DAOs. I have experienced the ups and some very brutal downs. Building and working with DAOs is a trial by fire. This is the very emerging end, of emerging technology and I still firmly believe that this is the frontier of how humans will work, live and organise with technology in the future. I will say though, this industry is difficult to work in. It’s messy, unprofessional, cut throat and fickle. I have had 5 of the most challenging years of my career here, trying to push the frontier of the DAO paradigm, in an environment where DAOs are often derided, or even just flat out resented. It’s been hard. I have dedicated a decent chunk of my life trying to build the Ethereum vision. I built quadratic voting technologies, decentralised governance systems, approaches to reputation based governance, Harberger tax based economic systems, futarchy mechanisms, and much more. I’ve had a crack at building pretty much everything that was dreamed about in the ‘radical markets’ vision for the Ethereum future. Sadly though, this ‘infinite garden’ future of mechanism driven idealism, doesn’t really translate into reality. The market as it is currently structured does not (yet) value these things. To make ends meet, at the start of this year, I started doing some advisory work with Jito. @Blockanalia approached me to help out with a few JIP’s for Jito DAO. Over the course of a few months, I met more of the Jito team and got introduced to more of the key Solana stakeholders, and honestly, I was beyond impressed. They’re a super professional, super smart and an incredibly driven team, operating one of the most impressive projects in crypto. Jito DAO itself is actually an extremely high-functioning DAO. It has material control over the Jito network. It is valued and seen as an important crucial component to decentralising both the Jito network and supporting the wider Solana protocol. It generates huge REV and will materially drive the token economy. This is in fact the tip of the spear of DAO practice and it is quite frankly a huge opportunity. I couldn’t say no. So, I am stepping down as CEO of Factory Labs. My co-founder and true friend Matt aka @ExUnico is stepping up as CEO, who I trust more than anyone to realise and take to market all of the amazing cool stuff we have built together over the last 5 years. There is more than enough to keep us going there for a long time. I will keep one foot in the EVM world and I will be retaining an advisory “Chief Scientist” role at Factory Labs, where I aim to apply a bit of DAO theory here and there to hopefully influence the Ethereum DAO world in the right direction. But now is the time for a new frontier and everything I’ve seen about Jito and Solana tells me that this is where the action is going to be in the next few years. Accelerate.