Chase Chapman on DAOs and Professional Polyamory

Chapman plans to stick with DAO work to help keep Web3 human. “There is a level of humility among people that work in DAOs who are building that type of culture correctly, which is that anyone can come up with a great idea and anyone can execute on it”

Fiat wealth still translates to power, and that’s a problem in an ecosystem meant to move beyond fiat.

Chapman’s driving question in Web3 has always been, “How do we make this stuff human?” For DAOs, one of those ways would be to rethink governance tokens as compensation for DAO members, which she believes fosters inequity.

For Chapman, a human approach to decentralization means honoring people’s specialties – not creating a flat structure where everyone’s work and ideas are weighted equally, but delegating appropriately based on skillsets.

“We’re doing this thing where once a week, two random people from our community are picked to just chat with each other,” she says. This helps the team get closer, even though some members remain anonymous. “If you create space for vulnerability, that often doesn't require knowing everything about where someone lives, if they're married, and all th... See more

Some DAOs have already gone IRL. In New York, for example, Chapman points out how EmpireDAO rented “a bunch of offices where the Supreme building is…and I know a few other projects that are also thinking a lot about IRL.”

“I think more DAOs should be doing retreats in general,” she says, stressing the importance of sharing physical space with colleagues who operate primarily in virtual arenas.

“There's a lot of value in talent that doesn't want to be held down by one organization,” she says, describing some friends in Web3 who feel that committing to one company “limits what they can do in the space.” DAOs and the modern way of work let Chapman and her colleagues explore and “play around” in ways that wouldn’t be possible if they were ti... See more

“We used to think that our jobs were these things that should give us fulfillment professionally and completely,” Chapman says. “That’s very much the monogamy model.” For members of Gen Z like Chapman, that model’s grown outdated, particularly in the flexible world of online work and within the fluid organizational structure of decentralized autono... See more