I have felt that there's a lot of sort of like inequality in the sort of standard corporate system and how corporations work and how, you know, borders prevent, you know, sort of human capital from crossing them. I really thought that we could basically incorporate organizations in the Internet rather than in legal jurisdictions, and that we could use software to incorporate them. And this software could define the relationships and mechanisms by which organizations came to consensus.
If you create an organization and software, it can actually scale to billions of people, billions of dollars, and it might exist for 15 minutes, something that's not possible in the traditional world. And it brings incredible amounts of scale to creating organizations. Welcome to Epicentre, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralisation
and the blockchain revolution. I'm Federica Ants and I'm speaking with Dennison Bertram today, who is the CEO and Co founder of Tally, which is a decentralised governance platform. But before we get into all of that, these are our sponsors this week. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Course 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like Bit Go, Pantera Capital and Ledger Trust Corus One with their assets.
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Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Yeah, and you have been in Web 3 for a very, very long time. Tell us about yourself and kind of like your provenance and what brought you into this space. Yeah, so I've been in Web 3 almost since the start. I really got in involved in Ernest in 2011 when I had read the Bitcoin white paper and really like clicked for me at the time. It was just this thing that I read it and it's made total sense, right?
Like, you know, having gone through like 2008 and sort of seeing what, you know, happened in terms of like, you know, Financial Policy, fiscal policy, and you know, what happened to a lot of my friends in terms of just like what happened to their careers and jobs and opportunities, Bitcoin really just like stood out to me. It's like, oh, this makes sense. This is a narrative for the future.
And it was pretty interesting at the time because there wasn't really, I felt like anything else that was really competing for ownership of the future, right? And Bitcoin was the sort of like very revolutionary paper, but more revolutionary than I think people give it credit for. It was the, it was really a statement about using like the power of like math and mathematics to upend, you know, the control of the state over over money, right?
And it really leaned into this idea that, like, money is imaginary in the 1st place. And that means that, you know, anyone can create it. But to be successful at creating it and not have the power of the state to sort of like, you know, enforce it, you had to use something that would be universally secure. Everyone of course, that that was math. And, you know, that just struck me the sort of elegance of it. And, you know, it was, it was something that I just immediately got into.
So I, you know, started mining and got really involved in a lot of the early altcoins. And that was really my start. Since then, I've done a really large number of things. I started one of the first Bitcoin exchange of the Czech Republic a year later in 2012. That was a very scarring experience, but is very educational. For a little while I was working like a Bitcoin hardware wallet. I at the time I had a other career.
I was actually a very, really well known fashion photographer in Europe and I started a creative technology business. So I had actually started doing a lot of like creative technology implementations around a lot of stuff just in general as like the sort of fashion industry came online, but also around like the application of things like Bitcoin and supply chain tracking and how we could use it
for Providence of like art. You know, I was an early employee at Opens Upland and I first met Manu, one of the Co founders of Opens Upland in 2013 when he was working on a project called Proof of Existence. And that was like a time stamping service built on Bitcoin in 2013. And I had been really interested in using that to like do early NF TS like using it as like the provenance for for art.
So you know, I've been in this space for a really long time that that's that's at this point ancient history. Sometimes people talk about, you know, now on crypto Twitter, like how many cycles they've been and it stretches back all the way to like 2017. And you know, it's funny because even in 2017, we had already done everything in a really strange way. You know, this sort of came up recently for me. I was at an event and people were talking about like decentralized AI.
And they were like really talking about like there's all this unused GPU power out there of like, you know, teams that, you know, like people who've got extra GPUs so we can put them as decentralized network and decentralized processing. I was like, wow, you know, like crypto people were working on that in like 2013 you. Know like you know. Did you remember Golem? Oh, yeah, yeah. But even before Golem right there was made safe. And what was the other one there?
There was another one as well that they were trying to do these like decentralized, you know, processing networks. And so it's funny to see, you know, to have been in the space so long to sort of see everything come around again and again and again. You know, we're sort of like back of that phase of like a bear market where we're, we're all talking about like mass adoption.
And it's just like, oh man, I've been like listening to the mass adoption, like it's almost here and people are like, we're still early. I'm like really, because I feel like I'm, I've lost hair, I've gone grey, you know, like I've, I've been through this like countless times and like we're still out there, yet it's still early, right? So, you know, the journey's been very long.
I think though kind of interestingly, maybe finally, it's not that it's coming to an end, but like, maybe finally, like crypto will move on, right? Like, you know, it's, it's it's pretty amazing that block chain Bitcoin started as this really like political statement like we can, we can affect political change through code, through sort of like the speech, free speech of like encryption. And you know, that power has has
won, right? Like, you know, I, I used to say this thing which, you know, now sounds probably really controversial, but you know, now it's sort of like a little bit of anachronism. It's kind of funny. But I used to say that like, you know, Bitcoin was an example of being like a revolutionary without violence, right? You could use technology to, to affect this political revolution
without violence. And it was really fascinating the past 10 years watching that sort of like really culminate in how the Biden administration treated, you know, us shadowy super coders and, you know, and use and use language like, you know, Elizabeth Warren, you know, she's going to create a
anti crypto army, right? To, to go to war against the shadowy super coders just hacking away, doing open source, giving away their like time, energy and lifeblood for free to the Internet. And, and, and now it's one right. And and the, you know, the we used to say like, you know, first they mock you, then they fight you, then you win. And and, and it's, it seems like now, now we win. What? What? What's the metric by which you
would say we've won? Well, I think the obvious metric is the president of the United States is all in, owns tons of crypto, has promised a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which funny enough, I actually suggested. I think it's probably. Something that it's a bailout for crypto.
It's like 2008 all over again. It was very funny, I think to like, you know, there's that whole, there's, you know, there's all these these sort of like adages that sort of like become so fun to use, but you know, you either you would die a hero or live long enough to be the villain, you know? So it's like Satoshi, Satoshi or Bitcoin live long enough to be the villain in some really weird way, right?
But I mean, if you if you kind of think about kind of the reasons for which I assume you and definitely me kind of get got into the space for what it was kind of like this idea that you could build things on this new form of the Internet that
previously you couldn't build. So kind of like you could have these shared ownership structures, you could have individual agency, kind of, you would have the ultimately resilient and deficient, efficient kind of substrate kind of build stuff on top of you would have that formification and, and, and with that kind of a radically better user experience for, for, for your users and so on.
And while I do agree that kind of like, yes, the president of the United States has launched more than one shit coin. I, I, I would very much say that this was not kind of what, what got us here in the 1st place, right? So kind of like in, in, in the process of kind of like winning kind of that version of crypto that kind of we, we, we came here for it was marginalized. Would you? So, so This is why I'm kind of pushing back on the kind of like
we've wanted. I think kind of like, yes, someone's won, but it's not, it's not kind of like who I meant used to be. So I I have a little bit of a take that's probably going to come across like a bummer, but it's like it's it's a little bit of a multi part take. One of it, and this is something I was talking about for years now, is, is that crypto actually never had a plan for winning, which is actually pretty common in revolutions, right?
Like revolutionaries, they're like driven by this desire for the revolution, for this change, but they don't actually plan what winning looks like, right? And and often times the best, most successful strategies for revolutionaries are just somehow to like implement like a perpetual revolution. And crypto had very much this problem where it didn't plan for success and like most revolutions, he got Co opted along the way by the powers that be, right.
And I think that this has happened with crypto in many ways, but the world also changed at the same time. You know, one of the the things I always used to like to say, there's a lot of things I used to like to say. I don't know, I like to say these days, but one of the things I used to like to say is that, you know, sort of like the end of like the cypherpunk manifesto. It talks about how, like, you know, Cypher phones have the like, root access to the future, right?
And that's like part of the power of it. You've root access to the future. And my sort of response to that is like, yeah, but what if that future was already a long time ago, you know, and when we. Started crypto. Yes, yes, because when we started crypto right, I remember think about it, 2011 crypto start. You know, I, you know, I was dating my my now wife and her father had a video camera on his doorbell. He built it himself.
His video got camera on his doorbell and the sort of like running joke in her friend group was how creepy that was. Oh my God, he has like video camera on his doorbell and there was like video cameras around the house and it was like creepy because it's like, OK, every time I go over. And so I'm like wave, OK, you know, dad and my girlfriend, I guess you're like watching me, right? And privacy was something that, you know, had already been eroded substantially post September 11th, right?
I was, you know, I was in College in September 11th and I, you know, people today don't remember a world where you flew without security checks and you flew where you could go visit the pilot up front, where people trusted one another in society, right? Like people don't remember America and American freedom and global freedom before September 11th. It was a big difference, right? Like September 11th really chilled the nature of freedom.
You know, freedom went from the freedom to to the freedom from which is very, very powerful and very sort of like autocratic switch, right? But, but you know, I, I can always get off track here. But, but so when we think about when Bitcoin and you know, and web 3 and all that started, we talked about privacy and self sovereignty, right? And you Fast forward to today and everyone has a door as a video camera on the doorbell, right? And people have video cameras in their homes.
Nobody thinks it's creepy. Nobody thinks it's weird. I know people with video cameras in their bedroom, right? Their security camera system has video cameras in their bedroom, and everything that happens to the bedroom is streamed live to Google or Amazon, right? And they're fine with it, right? So a lot of the values that we had when we came into the space actually are no longer values that society really hold, right? Like privacy. What is privacy today?
You know, before people would be like, well, I don't want the government looking at naked pictures of me. Today there's a million people making naked pictures of us using AI every minute, right? Like nothing is real anymore. We don't take anything to be real. Any information you might particularly give us, we, you know, before there's a sense of like you need your privacy because information somehow had truth and that truth is like very scary if it was like something private.
But today nothing is true, right? Like it doesn't even matter if it actually happened and people saw it with their own eyes. Like you know, nothing is true anymore. So a lot of the values that we started web three with society no longer actually holds, right? Like young people, even even not young people, everyone streams
their life all the time. Everyone talks about, I mean, if you go on TikTok or Instagram, people talk about the most intimate experiences of their life, most humiliating, the most degrading, the most uncomfortable experiences of their life. And they they share it to millions of followers. There's no more privacy, right? And people don't care about privacy, right? Like we gave it all to Zuckerberg years ago and, and and we're fine. But do you think that's
irreversible? Because kind of like I, the kind of the optimist in me hopes that kind of this is this is a, a switch that we can kind of, you know, push back on and kind of revert to this state of privacy by default. So, and I think kind of like, I honestly, I don't object to kind of like people streaming their intimate lives on whatever service. I don't care about that. But I think kind of like you should be able to kind of live a privacy a, a pretty private life if you choose to do so.
So to me, it's kind of about the choice and kind of like just because a lot of people don't value that doesn't mean that kind of like the choice itself doesn't matter. So I agree with you, the choice does matter. But I kind of think two things. First, I think it's generational. So and I actually think everything is like generational and like cohort based
generationally. So I don't think that actually we can like teach new generations things that they don't sort of like naturally come to on their own. But also I think there is this interesting trade off. Like I'm not sure we're if you spent time in the Americas in the 1990s, you were able to feel the moment in the 1990s and early 2000s. You could feel the moment when you were losing your privacy. And that's because we converted to the society that had credit cards and cell phones.
And what happened was very slowly, you couldn't access society without tools that innately spied on you. I remember going to like Blockbuster and trying to like, rent videos when I first was going to get my own Blockbuster card. You had to have a credit card, right? Like you couldn't participate in, you know, renting a hotel room. You couldn't participate in renting, you know, you know, hotels existed before credit cards, but you can't book a hotel today without a credit card, right?
So you can't, you can't use a hotel today without giving up your private information, your privacy to the payment processors and all the different entities that exist and that sort of like data pipeline. So society slowly moves in a direction that actually forces you to give up your privacy or it sort of forces you out of society, right? Where it's just like, well, you know, if you don't have a credit card, you can't use Uber and you can't fly and you can't have a
hotel. So yes, you're, you're welcome to have privacy, but you know, you're also not no longer able to like participate in society in general, certainly in in many parts, you know, in America and a lot of like, you know, Western cities is sort of become Acto, right? It'd be very difficult to like exist without it. Certainly you can, but the sort of like amount of personal
effort that's really high. So eventually, like I remember when September 11th happened and I would just opt out of those full body scanners, right? I would just be like, this is no, you're not going to like irradiate me to like, you know, just you just pat me down, right? Like, why are you, you know, today I just walked through the scanners, right? Like, you know, it was a decade of like, hands up, the big worrying machine going around
you. You know, it's like how much effort eventually society kind of wears you down because you also want to live, right? You want to raise kids, you want to like go to birthday parties, you want to like, you know, rent a movie, you know, you want to go on vacation somewhere. So eventually it wears you down. I do hope that it's.
Reversible, but I think it's probably going to have to look different than how we came at privacy, you know, 10 years ago where maybe it looks more like your real data is, is indecipherable from like the noise of your data, right. Like if you think about like, you know the, the value of like encryption, like you know, when you, you know, back of the day, at least when you like encrypt your hard drive, you just filled it up with noise and your actual data was indistinguishable from
noise, right. Maybe privacy of the future is some version of that where your actual information is in is just just it's impossible to like, you know, from the outside of you distinguish it from the the the data about you. That's not real, right? Maybe that's actually. This is this is, this is strangely not very not not very comforting. It's like, well, you know, the the privacy you now get is you don't know which of these 5000 nudes of you is the real 1 and which one's just the AI
generated one. This is just a yeah. Yeah, yeah, I know it's, it's bizarre, right? And maybe I am become a little bit pessimist, but it feels hard to do it any other way now because, you know, like for me and my life, like what it would take to unwind the, you know, the doctor office, privacy documents that I've signed and like, you know, raising kids and, you know, like the the level of effort it would take would require me sort of like
leaving society. I think kind of like, I think kind of maybe it's on us to kind of build alternatives that kind of are usable for regular people, but are still privacy preserving and ideally things like self custodial and so on. Maybe maybe let's talk about that a little bit later, because kind of like we went on a very interesting tangent, but
nevertheless a tangent. Maybe that's kind of talk about kind of like the, I mean, you, you've, you were in Web 3 for a pretty long time before you actually started Tally, the project we're here to talk about today. So in a nutshell, what was the set of problems that you were looking to tackle in starting Tally? Yeah. So Tally was the sort of genesis of Tally was, you know, a lot of the optimism that we're talking
about. I had felt that there's a lot of sort of like inequality in the sort of standard corporate system and how corporations work and how, you know, borders prevent, you know, sort of human capital from crossing them. And I really thought that we could basically incorporate organizations on the Internet rather than in legal jurisdictions, and that we could use software to incorporate them. And this software could define the relationships and mechanisms by which organizations came to
consensus, right? You know, blockchain comes to consensus through a very programmatic way. Well, humans also have to come to consensus. And the way we do it in the sort of traditional world is very unreliable, right? You have to rely on like legal system, you have to rely upon force.
And there was this idea, of course, for like the Dow, you know, Dow was like decentralized autonomous organizations where have always been like a big part of especially the sort of like Ethereum lore and the the Ethereum sort of of history. And the idea behind Tally was like, OK, let's say you could incorporate in software. What would that look like? What sort of tooling would you need? Like, how would that be done? And it's pretty clear that actually be extremely complicated, right?
Especially when you thought of like, OK, if you create an organization in software, it can actually scale to billions of people, billions of dollars, and it might exist for 15 minutes, right? Something that's not possible in the traditional world. And it brings incredible amounts of scale to to creating organizations, incredible
amounts of scale, right? Like you can just go today and create an organization on Tally and it can scale to billions of people and billions of dollars and it costs nothing, you know, maybe a few dollars in gas fees, right? So this is sort of like real origin and root of Tally. And at the time a lot of people were thinking about Dows. You know, me and my Co founder, we used to like talk about them. We were really interested in them.
But the early incarnation of like Dows, you know, with with an exception for the DAO, was really kind of like these, these cooperatives on the blockchain. They're sort of like very utopian ideas of like social society structures built on the blockchain. And for us, it didn't really seem particularly useful. I was like, OK, that's nice, but I'm not going to live in a smart contract and I don't need to like, you know, use all the sort of like obtuse tools to sort of
like negotiate these things. But then we saw the sort of like start of Defy, right, particularly compound finance and they launched a Dow to operate compound finance. And it became really clear what the opportunity was, which is there are not only going to be Dow's, these decentralized organizations, but first they're going to be protocols. They're going to be software things, protocols that are very valuable. They have a lot of money. They generate money, they generate revenue.
They control very important smart contract parameters. And they really do need some sort of mechanism, some sort of tooling to intermediate political disputes and to come to consensus on things like changing the parameters and, you know, sending money and like updating things.
So from there, it was very clear that like, oh, you know, when we looked at how people were doing it, they're using things like Google Docs and like Excel sheets and, you know, just sort of like hodgepodge of different things. It was like, OK, really actually we need we need to start building the tooling and infrastructure to manage this. So that's where Tally started. It started as a Tao Dao tool. Today it's really grown into the infrastructure for tokenized
organizations, right? So you know, in the beginning is like primarily around like, oh, you create proposals and vote today. Tally actually does the, you know, entire, you know, nearly the entire flow of operating a tokenized organization from identifying the political stakeholders to launching the actual token, to distributing the token into, to people's hands, to the governance and
operation of protocols. The, you know, administration of roles and permissions to staking and, and, and value accrual mechanism so that the protocols that generate revenue have trustless modular structures for returning revenue to the participants. So it's really become this, this a complete platform for operating these, these tokenized infrastructure, these protocols at really massive scale.
You know, we just the other week we passed our big milestone where now over a billion dollars has been been transferred through our tools, which is which is an incredible milestone and sort of a statement to how real that initial idea that we can you know, make organizations and software really is. If you look at Daos today, I mean, I think kind of Daos for the past eight years or so, every year has been here kind of like the the year of the DAO and so on.
And kind of if you look at the state of Daos on chain, by and large, they're pretty dysfunctional. So kind of like what's what's where are we going wrong? Sure, So you're not wrong, but I think it is useful to to compare it to the alternative, right? There is a corporate entity structure in every jurisdiction on the planet, and by and large, the vast, vast majority of companies are dysfunctional, poorly run entities that eventually fail, right?
The vast, vast majority of them, right, None of them live, you know, almost none of them live for hundreds of years or even decades. You know. So it is useful to say to, to like put into comparison that with Dows, there's a level of transparency that's currently part of the sort of like ethos of a doubt. Maybe the transparency doesn't actually have to be there. That that's sort of like another question which might solve some of these problems. But corporations don't have that
level of transparency. So because we don't see what's happening in regular corporations, we don't see how dysfunctional they are. They only when they, you know, you know, Enron is a great example. It's only when they like spectacularly collapse, you know, or Lehman Brothers that we sort of realized like, oh, it was a shit show all along, right? But that isn't to justify the fact that there is a lot of
dysfunction in in Dows today. I think there's a, there's a number of different reasons for this. The structure is still new, still pretty, pretty early. I think there have been. So yeah, yeah, it's still early. It's still early. Yeah, Look at that. Look at that. Maybe it's so early it's just an excuse for not doing a good job, you know? Oh, well, we don't have mass adoption yet because it's so
early or we're doing a bad job. Yeah, there's been a lot of dysfunction and it, it has been disappointing, I'll admit it. It's, it's been disappointing. I, I think that there's a lot of folks now looking at ways to improve this. And I cast a lot of blame actually on the previous administration on on the Biden administration.
And, you know, the the Gensler SEC where a lot of the a lot of the ways that dows in the past, you know, four or five years have been structured, have been deliberately structured to just play this kind of like acrobatic yoga, twisty thing around regulations to make it possible. Right. Like when you think about how, you know, you build something in America and then you make a foundation in the Caymans.
And then you, I have a agency in the British Virgin Islands that like contracts an anonymous dude in like Chile to like launch a token that's transferred to the BVI that goes to the foundation, which goes back to the company and then AirDrop. It's really kind of like many of these structures were set up deliberately to make it not work right? You know, you see this with meme coins, right?
Like the industry has been hurt so much by this sort of by this not it's not it's not even legislation right by these like rulings that make us contour into deliberately non successful structures. And the great example is the the sort of like foundation set up and design. You're supposed to your founder, you create this idea and now to make the idea work, you have to really protocolize and have a
token. But to do that, you have to have another entity that does the token and that entity has to be totally separate from you. So you now have to give over control over what you're building and what you're trying to do to another entity that deliberately has to not be connected in any way. And you instantly create an opportunity for there to be divergent and goals, right?
And you, this has been kind of like a route of if you talk to like a lot of the lawyers in the space, especially in a lot of the, the, the people, you know, had to build these Dows, the this sort of like regulatory acrobatics has made it very difficult for these organizations to be successful,
right? They're set up deliberately to have to fight really hard to make it work, and then a lot of the energy and effort goes into kind of making it work rather than working on the thing that the the the project is about in
the first place. 100% agreed. But don't, wouldn't you expect if that is kind of like the main course of this functionality in Dow is to kind of have a number of grassroots Dow is kind of that are not incorporated anywhere that kind of just kind of chug along kind of in there a non kind of universe and kind of create value. So kind of because in principle, I mean because because what you're describing very much arises from the fact that there is this duality in systems,
right? So kind of we say kind of like, OK, the organization should live on chain, but kind of like obviously things also things that kind of live on chain are constrained technically at least kind of by, by legacy legal
systems, right. So by, by kind of saying, OK, we will bow to that ahead of time before anyone even come comes to us. I, I understand and that creates a lot of overhead and destruction and destruction and so on. But why aren't there more functional grass roots Taos without any legal set up? So I think there's a couple reasons there and the first one is, is that I don't think that situation that you describe actually can ever exist. And the RE, I think compound is
a great example, right? The compound DAO is not, there's no legal entity behind the compound now currently, right? And the result of that is that you have these sort of shark private plaintiff lawyers who buy a dollar worth of compound and then it goes down to $0.90. And then they file a lawsuit and they go after anyone they can find, right? So if you hold tokens, if you're a delegate, if your name is on it, they go after you, they name you in the complaint.
You know, this is this is what happened to Pool Together, right? Pool Together was a Dow, a really cool organization. And they ended up spending all their money and all their time and resources fighting these private plaintiff lawsuits where they were, you know, people in the Dow were named personally liable for this sort of like general partnership. So unfortunately you can't unless you have like complete anonymity, which you know, goes back I think to your earlier point around privacy.
It's very difficult to actually have that state of a truly, you know, decentralized org that doesn't have any of this because of the regulatory setup allows these private plaintiffs, you know, legal folks to actually should go after any person they can find, right? And this has happened.
This is, you know, there's this these groups of law firms that go around, they raise money and they just, you know, pick off these projects 1 by 1. So I think that is majorly a big blocker into making that sort of set up that you describe actually work, you know, a room with maker for a long time, you know, was trying to require everyone to be private, to be anonymous because this risk is very real, right?
Like if they go after you and they say that's a general partnership, they go after you for your dog and you know, your children's school fund and your house, right? So I think that again, it goes back to regulations where you actually can't have that because there are these opportunistic entities who will just find any individual and hold them liable. I think that's kind of the root of it because if. They have AUS if they have AUS angle, right.
So kind of like if if you're just someone on the other side of the world, say kind of like you're, you're someone in, in the Philippines, what would stop them from starting an organization like this? Well, I think it wouldn't. But what it does mean though, is many actors who might be high quality participants won't participate. Your access to things like on ramps and off ramps or trading locales is very limited. All these things in aggregate work against your success, right?
And if you do deal with US persons in any way, shape or form, those people become exposed. So, yeah, you can certainly have an organization completely firewalled from the US. Maybe part of that is I don't really know about them, right? I'm in the US. They deal with me more with like US entities. But it definitely limits your ability to have success.
But this isn't the only 'cause this is just like one of many things that I think probably what you're getting at is, is that like, people are messy and kind of like shit on the Internet and they're very difficult to like, you know, coordinate to do useful things together. No, and this is not what I'm getting at at all. So I think kind of like in, in principle, I think kind of like humans are the same off chain and on chain to a large extent.
I think, I wonder whether to some extent it's a question of culture, right? Because kind of like in in Daos, kind of like we have, we have started Daos with this idea that they're kind of like this egalitarian place and kind of like you, you vote on everything and so on. And I think kind of not everything should be voted on. Maybe this is my controversial take for today, but kind of like if you're running an organization, kind of like kind of decisions are not mix and match, right?
Kind of like they, they kind of you have to commit to a strategy and kind of you have someone has to wear the hat otherwise doesn't work. And I think in principle, there's no, there's this is not impossible. Kind of. You could have very hierarchical DAO, but somehow that's not in our cultural understanding of Dows. So Dows don't have ACEO, and maybe they should. Yeah. So I think you will see most Dows have ACEO going forward for
the reasons you describe. I it, it disappoints me a little bit, but I do think it's inevitable and it's actually probably good, especially in this period that sort of feels very inter intermediary, like it's sort of like a in between time for some reason, especially right now, I think going back to like our principles, there was a time when maybe we're looking towards more decentralization and actually much of the world is kind of gone more centralized, right?
Like there's, there's a very strong authority streak right now in the world globally. Even the idea of founder mode is very much, you know, top down as, as an idea that sort of like permeated the space organizationally. Also, I think that these Dows have had problems and how they initially distribute their membership, right? Membership is a big determinant of like success, right? Like if you give the wrong, you can't really say wrong. But an organization has to have a culture.
And if you don't have an aligned culture, it's very difficult to make decisions collectively, especially when. Actually, everyone in organization has different cultures. I think a great example of this is salaries in these organizations. You know, some of these organizations are extremely
valuable. And you look at like Uniswap Foundation, Uniswap Dow, you know, this multibillion dollar organization and, you know, people really complain about the foundation's proposal and how much they're going to pay people. And you have these sort of like participants in the space who are like, yeah, well, I got this cousin. He like, you know, he's in like, you know, some plays and he would do it for cheaper.
And it's just like, this is one of the most competitive financial organizations in the world based in New York City. They need to hire the most competitive, highly sought after talent that exists. That's expensive, and you have a natural divide between participants of what like a lot of money is and what a little bit of money is and what's worth something, what's not worth something.
I think this comes up a lot between the sort of like, programming community of Europe and the programming community of, like, San Francisco always on Twitter. Like, you know, European programs are like, why does this person earn $300,000 a year when I earn, you know, $80,000 a year? And these sorts of like, geographical issues filter into organizations, too, along with cultural ones. And it makes it very difficult for people to come to, like, a common alignment, right?
These organizations end up bickering about how much the dog gets paid instead of like what they need the dog for, right? And, and that really drives these organizations to like do a bad job or like, you know, they sort of like descend and sort of the, the, there's a, what was it?
Someone, someone put it really well recently where decentralized organizations end up mostly talking about themselves and their organization rather than getting anything done, which it's kind of a truism now that we need to think about it. But not to get too far off the topic, I think you were right that we will see more CEO of Dows right? Where, you know, if you read Miles Jennings how you know, A16Z and he are kind of thinking about what decentralization means, right?
Like we kind of came into this years ago with decentralization being like everyone in their grandma participates in voting on everything. And, you know, that has turned out to be a bad idea for a lot of different reasons. And now it's like, well, we have to redefine or sort of think, what does decentralization mean, right? Like who is involved in decentralization? Is it everyone on everything? Is it just the experts? Who determines what an expert is?
What's the oversight? All of these are very complicated questions which, you know, corporations have sort of figured out by just saying like, he's the boss and these are the board members that oversee the boss, and these are the shareholders that oversee the board members. But I mean, that's also a structure that's grown over
time, right? I mean, it's not like kind of like someone, I mean, we, we've, we've had corporations for hundreds of years and kind of I'm, I'm sure we've tried out many different things that didn't work. Sure. And I mean, even now we kind of have different Modi for operations, right? Kind of like you, you can have, you can have a cooperative, you can have a foundation, you can have a company limited by shares, you can have a public company and so on.
And I think all of these kind of I mean to some extent kind of you can, you can transition between them, but kind of they are kind of have found product market fit in a way, right? Yes, yeah. I we are I think in search of our product market fit for decentralized organizations, but I think we have some form of it right. Like protocols have to be decentralized.
You know, I think a great example is Arbitrome, which is on like kind of like the grandest experiment of them all at the moment where they fundamentally are operated by their token holders and the token holders have an extreme level of power, right? Like they, they can fundamentally alter the the way the network works. And you see this characteristic leading to their success, right?
Their success being, you know, you look at like Tether having chosen them as being like they're one of their new home bases. You look at the different organizations that build directly on top of them. And a big piece of that is because they have this certainty that they are building on top of infrastructure in which they have a tangible say in how it's governed and operated.
So I do think that we've found that nugget of product market fit, right, like you wouldn't trust, you know, like a Chinese company wouldn't necessarily build directly on an American company because they're always exposed to like geopolitical issues, right. But you know, a truly decentralized network where you have a credible share, you know, the the platform itself is credibly neutral and you have a credible participation level on it.
That is very valuable, right? Like that is something that you can trust that you can build on as, as infrastructure. Something I like to say is like, you know, if you're building on Facebook, you're the next Zynga. And I think that idea of like being able to trust the infrastructure that you build on is super important, right? Because we've seen that in, you know, the Web 2 space. You know, whether it's Twitter and the Twitter API, Reddit and the Reddit API, Facebook and
Facebook API. If you build something that's large enough and valuable enough, the underlying layer will steal it from you. Do do you think that's borne out by the state of which networks currently see developer adoption? Because to me it seems that there's kind of the the networks that are currently very successful. They are not the most decentralized, they are not the most credibly neutral. They they are the ones that somehow managed to hire the
right marketing people. That's a spicy, spicy hint there. Yeah, You know, that's a tricky 1 and it's tricky for a lot of reasons because you know, who are the developers today versus the developers 10 years ago or five years ago and, you know, two years ago. And I think that they look very different, right? Like when crypto, when I found crypto, it was very much about self sovereign everything, right and, and, and privacy and all
this stuff. I think people who find crypto today find it through very different mediums, right? Like it's not coming to them through some, you know, cryptography newsletter or you know, group chat. It's coming to them through, you know, meme coin prices and payments and stable coins and stuff like that. So I think we're also maybe catering to a different type of
developer. If you want to use like developer sort of like metrics, like there's a different kind of contributor who is joining the ecosystem. And I think this is, you know, I think a great example of this was NFTS and video games or like a big, big, big selling idea behind NFTS was like, wow, you know, video game. If you, if you participate in a video game, you could own your loot and it would be portable between games. And this is actually genuinely a really awesome, amazing idea.
But the larger video game developer ecosystem came to NFTS through like board apes and like $1,000,000 jpegs and they hated the idea, right? And then we could never get them off of that, right? Like they're like, oh, no, Ethereum, it burns the rainforest and it's for dumb jpegs. It's just like, no, no, no, no, we built this thing to like make it better for everyone. And they're like only heard the scam and they entirely rejected
it, right? So we we sort of like missed out on our entire like premise because they came to it in the wrong way. So I think today's developer base doesn't really come to crypto through the cypher funk values or the web three values, right? In fact, you know, I think, you know, a lot of criticism are going around is that we don't do a very good job of even like expressing those, right? For a long time, you know, the words World Computer just stopped being used in the
Ethereum space, right? It went from like world computer and like all this stuff does, you know, effectively just money, money, money, money, which is good for the price. And, you know, I wouldn't mind some aspect of that coming back, but that changes who comes in and builds. And the centralization component, it's efficient, right? The centralization is efficient
in these organizations. It means that, you know, someone is tasked with the responsibility of making each one of these developers who come in the door feel good and feel recognized and feel unique and feel special. And that drives participation, right? You want to be somewhere where people are excited. You know, I've, I, I go to both Ethereum conferences and I go to
both and Solana conferences. And you know, one of the things that struck me about the last few Solana conferences I went to is that everyone's really excited about making money, but really excited, right? They're like, wow, we are all here, we're going to make money. What are you building? I'm building money, money, money. Oh, I'm building money. Plus, I'm building money, money, money. And plus I'm building money with J bags. And everyone's like really
psyched. And that sort of real clarity of purpose. I think was is, is extremely powerful for, for that community, right. But you definitely don't have people saying like, oh, actually we need to start decentralized, right? Like you don't have that. You have a very different ethos and that's totally fine, right? Like this is not in any way dig. This is totally fine. Like there are so many more ecosystems in crypto today than there were in 2011, right? In 2011, there was just one, right?
There's actually a couple really soon after that. But but today there's just there's just thousands of the communities. So, you know, some days it's like you wish it were a bit more decentralized, but some days you recognize that there's going to have to be some like path in the middle to make sure you get to that product market fit, to make sure you build something that works.
That people need to make sure that like, you're focused on the task at hand rather than sort of like this real owneristic, just like it's about how we organize all the time, you know? Yeah, I, I think kind of I'd make the point that kind of like decentralization in itself is not a value. It's not kind of it's not something that people should pay to have. It depends on the use case,
right. So kind of like there's many things for which it's totally fine kind of build on a proprietary network somewhere just like kind of like I, I have stuff running on AWS. But yeah, there's other things like, I don't know, for instance, if I, if I had my identity on chain, I would be very worried about having it on a poorly decentralized chain. So we've we've talked about kind of like the general Dow space for pretty long time.
Tell us about kind of the things that are currently on your plate at Tally. So kind of what are you guys working on? What are you excited about? What do you think is going to meet move the needle on on how Daos operate in the future? Yeah. So at Tally, we are really excited about this new political
landscape. We can now build organizations or it looks like we can now build organizations that are more functional, that have more focus on success early on, that allow founders to have higher agency, that allow teams to build more transparently with a lot of like the sort of like shackles and limitations taken off.
So we, I actually think that we are probably closer to the original vision of like being able to, you know, incorporate organizations and software than we've ever been, which is incredibly, you know, exciting. Obviously the whole global economy is going through a little bit of a weird rough patch right now. And you know, I guess we kind of all have to see how that shakes out. But at its core, the idea now that you can just build an organization, you can or incorporate it on chain.
You can have high agency decision making, but you can have a large community. And by community, it could be just people who have an opinion or it could be actually like people who have power, right? And who have operative power is really exciting for us. There's actually some pieces here that are still missing. You know, very early on we recognize the need to have tokens that actually accrue
value, right? The problem with governance tokens, and this is another big thing thing historically, the problems with governance tokens has been that we've had to specifically say they don't have any value. And that negatively selects for the participants of your ecosystem, right? Because most savvy participants aren't interested in like the, the opportunity cost of like holding something that cost money but should be valueless, right? Like that's, that's a horrible
relationship. And that's actually been a big contributor to, you know, the, the success or failure failure of different organizations. So now we're building a lot of great modular tooling around value accrual for for tokens. You know, we've been working closely with teams around the idea of staking, using staking as this core primitive to drive the sort of like productive behavior necessary to operate protocols, which we think is really critical for their long
term success. We also I've been working really closely with teams to help launch their protocols, right, help launch their tokens. So really today it's about serving these teams in their whole journey and like getting
them out there. Because if you look at kind of like the history of like where the stock market has been in terms of like, you know, IP OS as sort of stats here, right in 2024, there was around 220 like IP OS, you know, in 2022, there's like 175. When you look at how many organizations are actually launching on software today, it's really pretty incredible. And when you look at how many of them are doing it on top of tally, right?
Like just the number that like we've passed a billion dollars in payments, like money moves on the platform really shows that like we have this really exciting opportunity to really compete with the wider ecosystem of like how do companies sort of like chart their path forward, right? You know, maybe we're going to even get to the point where companies are going to realistically, you know, look at tally and say, hey, we would like to go token instead of even
going IPO, right? Like this is kind of like this idea that really, really has gotten us very excited where we could actually be an alternate way for this new kind of organization to really go public in a sense, but in a very different way, you know, and, and obviously within, you know, a now a clear regulatory framework.
Yeah, that's very, I mean this kind of very much Rings of 2017 and I think kind of like this the the kind of ICO era in some way, kind of it's been maligned needlessly over the past couple of years. I mean, yes, there were pretty bad IC OS out there, but there were also a bunch of really good IC OS out there. And yeah, so I think kind of like having having this way of doing a crowd sale without and kind of having an investor base that's not necessarily kind of
accredited investors only. And that's not that that doesn't kind of require you kind of have prospectors and, and, and whatever. I think, yeah, I think that is tremendously worthwhile. And it very much goes back to kind of like this vision of shared ownership, right, Kind of that we talked about in in the beginning as kind of like one of the core tenets of Web 3. Yeah, I agree with you.
You know, people love to speak negatively about the ICO boom, but a lot of very good stuff came out of that. A lot of infrastructure got built. You know SAFE was an I ICO project originally, you know. There's a lot of great. Yeah, yes, exactly. Full disclosure is yours. You, you know, like there's a lot of actual great infrastructure that was built during this and there's a lot of magic around the capital formation primarily using an asset that was created from its
own ICO, right? Ethereum itself was an ICO which I did not participate in because of, you know, sorry, but poor choices, poor life choices. So, so yeah, in in many ways like, you know, going back to the sort of like certainly our original vision and I think a lot of people's original vision, we can do incorporation vastly cheaper, faster, more efficient, greater scale by using software as our jurisdiction then we can using, you know, you know, Delaware and the state
registrar's office. So what we, what we would like, of course we don't want a world coming back where, you know, I think, you know, people love to knock like Dentacoin, you know, the, the ICO like for, for dentists, like that's like the, the, the running sort of like punching bag. Although I will note that they might even still be around. But yeah, most businesses aren't a success anyway. So, you know, it's hard to hold that again. And we've seen the same with IPOs, right?
I mean kind of like, yes, we have Google, we have Google, but we also have, we also had pets.com, right? And kind of like that, that went exactly the way that Dentacoin went. So it's. Exactly, exactly. And you know, I hope that actually we get really clear regulation around this because the efficiencies and opportunities here for builders and you know, I would be remiss if I didn't mention for the Made in America builders is incredible, right?
Like that's sort of like efficiency that opportunity is. You can't really ignore that, especially today when, you know, we we are finally even contending with the idea that maybe even like AI and machines are going to start companies and build software and stuff like that. So, yeah, I would very much like to see. We are very much positioning ourselves for World War.
Regulatory clarity allows us to build many more exciting things where founders can, you know, maintain control over their vision for a lot longer so that they can get to, you know, PMF, you know, I, I, I think this is just, you know, extremely exciting. You know, we just have to get through this little rough patch that we're in right now. But, you know, ideally, you know, the, the president has promised legislation in the, in the summer.
So I think by fall we may actually know what the future is going to look like. Yeah, absolutely. So, Dennison, where can we send people to kind of find out more about Tally? So the most obvious place is tally or the website itself, Tally dot XYZ. You know, we also have a newsletter, a podcast, a Twitter as well. These are probably the best places to check, check out. You can also follow me as well on on Twitter at Dennison Bertram.
If you are building a project. If you're thinking about building a project. If you're thinking about building a token or launching a token. We are probably your best partners for that in the industry. If you're thinking about value accrual mechanisms, thinking about modular secure governance that, you know, secures 10s of billions of dollars across the ecosystem, we are your, you know, your best partner that you
could have. So if you are in a founder of any of this sort of sort or builder, you know, even the legal right, we have great, great recommendations and experience helping team set up even the legal sides of things. We're not lawyers, but you know, we can give you a lot of great recommendations to wonderful, wonderful teams as well, You
know, reach outreach out. We can be your partner in this in this process and help, you know, help you succeed the way we've, you know, helped hundreds of other organizations succeed. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on Dennison. Thank you, it's a real, real pleasure. I loved having this conversation.