About Me
I found CityDAO last August and was immediately taken by the vision. A few years back I looked at a startup that was securitizing real estate and saw all of the hassle involved with that. Tokenizing ownership of physical goods seems like an obvious next step. I bought one of the last Founding Citizen NFTs at auction (wanted to buy in the original sale but was stuck without my laptop), and bought one of the first 10 Citizen NFTs. I’ve been an active participant in CityDAO governance since then, often to the Core Team’s dismay 
My professional background is in product engineering. I’ve worked in enterprise software, consumer software, and also spent time working at Sidewalk Labs (Alphabet’s city building division). For the last year I’ve worked full-time in crypto.
I accept the Candidate Agreement.
My vision for the future of CityDAO
CityDAO has done a lot of good work to date. We’ve raised a substantial treasury, generated hype around the project, purchased a piece of land under CityDAO LLC, and built a solid community. However, lots remains to be done.
CityDAO needs to define and focus on a core mission.
“We are putting land on the blockchain” is a great rallying cry but it means different things to different people. We have limited resources and cannot execute on everyone’s vision at the same time. Buying land with CityDAO’s Wyoming DAO LLC was a great first step but since then execution has been fragmented and slow. Parcel NFTs that don’t represent ownership (double-spend cash grab), NFT slush fund investing, yield farming, saving the rainforest, etc. are all distractions from putting a city on the blockchain and tokenizing ownership of physical assets.
CityDAO needs to either embrace decentralized governance, or accept that it is not a DAO.
Those who’ve been around here for awhile know I have lots of concerns with CityDAO’s governance.
- CityDAO promotes itself as a DAO, but the treasury is controlled by a multi-sig
- Today, CityDAO Snapshot proposals:
a. are put up arbitrarily by core team members, with no clear path for non-core team members to put up a proposal
b. are put up with little to no discussion
c. are non-binding - CityDAO’s DAO LLC may not be in compliance with the Wyoming DAO LLC legislation, as it was registered with “algorithmically managed” governance yet we currently have Core Team dictatorship governance (full control over treasury and decision making). I am not a lawyer!
The good news is these are easily fixable, with minimal effort (using governance tools built by others), without sacrificing pace. All we need binding governance that owns the treasury, and a delegate system for Citizens who can’t take the time to read and vote on every proposal.
The Council is a great first step towards decentralized governance, as it is a path towards binding representative voting.
CityDAO Citizens need more visibility into the day-to-day operations of the Core Team.
The Core Team has done a good job executing to date. However, there is a general lack of transparency that is common in many DAOs with a core team. General decision making and treasury management are opaque. It is unclear what obligations Core Team members have both inside and outside CityDAO, and what conflicts of interest might exist. This is not acceptable in the context of paying Core Team members as full-time employees.
Official CityDAO on-chain operations are somewhat difficult to track, in part because wallets are not labeled (CityDAO treasury, CityDAO NFT contract deployer, etc.).
My opinion on what a good Council member is
Council members, both Core and non-Core, should:
- be high integrity
- be willing to go against consensus
- attempt to represent the interests of all Citizens
- be active participants in governance, both in the past and in the future