DAOrayaki Reserach |PleasrDAO: Distribute the ownership of the DAO in the form of tokens.

8 min readSep 17, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount： 200 USD

Category: (PleasrDAO, the DAO, DeFi, NFTs, digital art, pplpleasr’s genesis NFT, Edward Snowden’s Stay Free NFT, art collection, angel investment, and incubation, Foundation.app)

Contributor：Jones，Julie @Daorayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/pleasrdao/

Brief Overview About PleasrDAO

PleasrDAO is a collective of DeFi leaders, early NFT collectors and digital artists who have built a formidable yet benevolent reputation for acquiring culturally significant pieces with a charitable twist. Since the DAO purchased its genesis piece, pplpleasr’s Uniswap V3 NFT, the DAO has evolved and elevated its mission to collect digital art that represents and funds important ideas, movements and causes that have been memorialized on-chain as NFTs. PleasrDAO has set a precedent for bidding on unique pieces, many of which have powerful messages that transcend crypto.

Project Summary

PleasrDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that rapidly organized on Twitter in order to purchase pplpleasr’s genesis NFT. The animation, titled x*y=k, was created to celebrate the Uniswap V3 launch, and all proceeds from the auction aimed to benefit Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, among other minority groups — and PleasrDAO made it clear they wanted it in their collection.

More additionally, PleasrDAO’s thesis is starting to take form. It stands for community, freedom, and decentralization. It’s a collective built by the community, for the community. While its early stages have been collecting iconic works, PleasrDAO looks forward to democratizing ownership of the DAO and the pieces within it.

The forty members of PleasrDAO didn’t disband after collecting their first NFT, though. Instead, they doubled down on their vision and strategy, and soon turned heads again by collecting Edward Snowden’s Stay Free NFT on April 16th for 2,224 ETH (~$5.5M USD). Beyond making news for its hefty sale price, PleasrDAO’s purchase also points towards the potential for DAOs to come together and pool funds in order to own high-value NFTs as a collective. Harnessing the power of smart contracts, PleasrDAO is one of many emergent DAOs that are forming to distribute digital ownership, allocating each member a fraction of its assets. And, as a collective entity, they want to support good causes, noting that they aim to collect NFTs that should “belong to the people.”

Even though most of its members have never met, and some of them remain anonymous, PleasrDAo has a philosophy. PleasrDAO distributes the ownership of the DAO in the form of tokens. That gives every member a fraction of its assets — the two NFTs and funds in the treasury. Each member participates in the DAO’s governance through a group chat. And if someone were to exit the DAO, their token would be up for grabs internally. “A lot of members would be thrilled to buy it”, Jamis Johnson, the chief pleasing officer of PleasrDAO. He coordinates and manages the strategy of PleasrDAO; his tongue-in-cheek title is “pretty much the CEO role, but more fun.”

After buying the Snowden NFT, PleasrDAO’s future direction is still amorphous. But the three spokes of the wheel will be art collection, angel investment, and incubation.

Foundation and PleasrDAO

In April 27th, 2021 Foundation.app interviewed the PleasrDAO’s Chief Pleasing Officer “Jamis Johnson” on how the group came together to purchase the fourth highest-selling NFT of all time.

According to the Chief Pleasing Officier, the pplpleasr’s piece was selected because she is the original DeFi artist, and everyone in the crypto space knows her impact. It was simple for PleasrDAO to rally around her work because she has that long-term reputation in the space and took DeFi from memes to really beautiful art. She also donated all the proceeds from her sale to AAPI organizations, which was an incentive. Everyone in PleasrDAO has benefited greatly from crypto, so they want to support good causes.

Since most members of PleasrDAO have backgrounds in programming, all of them recognize and appreciate what Snowden contributes to the field. The auction combined a donation to the Freedom of the Press Foundation alongside the freedom of individuals, which really spoke to us. If you are programming for long enough, you start to see how much the government has affected individual freedom online — which also made this an important cause for PleasrDAO.

PleasrDAO and NFTs

PleasrDAO is a DeFi native. There are enough art collectors out there, and PleasrDAO is not trying to compete with them. It has a token distributed internally, and will distribute more with each round — and, eventually, PleasrDAO would like to include the public as well. Taking fractionalizing into consideration so that everybody gets a share of ownership, and using some pricing mechanism to circulate it in public.

In addition, PleasrDAO plans to define industry standards that will move the entire system forward, and show what’s possible with DAOs from a technical perspective. Eventually, the team will do things like display the art, but they want to start by going more in the direction of integrating a smart contract. You are getting a DAO and a DAO’s collection, and it’s DAOs all the way down. The DAO shares the collective assets, whether that’s an investment or an art portfolio, but then all of a sudden you can fractionalize your art and that fractional part makes it a governing DAO in itself, so there are voting shares. There so many possibilities

PleasrDAO Vision

There are few things PleasrDAo wants to do, including collecting NFTs, becoming angel investors, and operating as an incubator. The group wants to angel invest in early-stage projects, similar to MetaCartel — but with a focus on NFTs. PleasrDAO members are extremely talented, and many of them are VCs, programmers, and artists. The group wants to utilize the treasury to push the space forward and support the teams that are doing that.

PleasrDAO is also interested in becoming an incubator for people who have greate, unique ideas that aren’t necessarily productized or turned into a full-blown protocol. The group hopes people could propose ideas in-house and then allocate some of their treasury to them. Ultimately, PleasrDAO is about allocating resources to more exploratory ideas to help push things forward.

PleasrDAO Team

Jamis Johnson — Jamis Johnson is Chief Pleasing Officer at PleasrDAO. Machine learning engineer, blockchain investor, motorcycle enthusiast, aging skateboarder, NYC history buff, crossword, cruciverbalist, armchair economist, and stand-up comedy fan boy.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/_jamiis

Tarun Chitra — Founder & CEO of Gauntlet. Tarun is an alumni of D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES), Vatic Labs, an HFT firm, and Cornell. He fell into the blockchain world in 2011, when he was working on ASICs at DESRES and observed Bitcoin ASIC mining rigs substantially delay DESRES’s ASIC production. He has spent the last seven years working on simulation-based R&D at the intersection of high-performance computing and AI and is applying this knowledge to the blockchain ecosystem.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/tarunchitra

Matt Condon — Full Stack Software Engineer with a strong interest in developer communities, blockchain, and infrastructure. Matt is currently swapping for PaperclipDAO, hosting Digitally Rare, a part of Steak Network, and currently building XLNT.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/1ofthemanymatts

Mariano Conti — Mariano was working for MakerDAo developing the Dai Stablecoin System, the Dai Credit System. From smart contracts to price feed keepers. From infrastructure to user interfaces. Part of the DappHub Initiative. Mariano work experience includes: PaperclipDAO, ETH Dashboard, Element Finance, SelloutDAO, Maker and others.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/nanexcool

Santiago Roel Santos — is Angel investor focusing on tech and healthcare, Founder of EON Capital, formerly Crypto-asset investing at ParaFi Capital, Founder of Roca Capital. Santiago became involved in Bitcoin in 2013 after realizing its potential to disrupt the remittance industry and to democratize the access to information and services. Beyond disrupting legacy businesses, he is most excited about the rise of new forms of decentralized models powered by blockchains.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/santiagoroel

Cooper Turely — Cooper Turley is Editor at DeFi Rate, Scout at MetaCartel DAO. Chance favors the connected mind. Focused on building communities by making crypto cool again. I help early-stage companies find a compelling narrative from day one.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/Cooopahtroopa