How a roommate on a whitelist led to DAOs.

0:00AWhat’s up everybody, my name is Maseo. I’m out here in Philadelphia. I’m here from We Them Media. I’m going to tell you just a little bit about how I myself got involved in crypto. This whole week we’re going to be talking about crypto and community. Today we got myself, tomorrow we got Kafani, the day after that we got Marissa, and then Aziz, and then Gift, leading up to the Global Pizza Party on Friday where we’re expecting to have a major influx of content from people around the world who are going to be shooting content at the Global Pizza Party. Shout out to Pizza DAO, shout out to the Global Pizza Party this Friday, May 22nd.

0:00AIf you want to find your local pizza party, I invite you to comment down below. So what’s up everybody? So tell you a little bit about how I myself got involved in crypto and found myself involved in community. I, um, I was in college, 2021. My college roommate was making money off some different DeFi plays. He was involved in some NFTs. He was on the Doodles whitelist. And, um, I was just completely confused about how this guy was like on a whitelist where he had, you know, over $50,000 essentially and some value JPEG. I’m like, what the fuck is this? You know? And so I myself, uh, got really interested in learning.

0:00AMy first community that I was involved in was probably, uh, SharkDAO. It’s like, what the fuck is that, right? But essentially SharkDAO is a community that was people coming together to fundraise, crowdfund, to buy like larger NFT projects, one particularly called Nouns. Um, Nouns is still one of the largest NFT projects in the Ethereum ecosystem, in the world even. And it’s super dope to see that project proliferate and grow. I myself was inspired by that kind of vision of, you know, collective funding and cooperative action in the crypto space, in DAOs particularly. DAOs kind of being an innovation on cooperatives that leverages blockchain technology for agreements, for governance, and things of that nature.

0:00AEven like, you know, keeping track of community spending and things like that. Mm-hmm. Or I guess organizational spending, probably a better word to use, right? But I myself have been exploring what does it mean for me to be building community at the intersection of Black people, creators, and blockchain for the last couple years. And so it’s been remarkable. I’ve had the opportunity to interview Black people, Latino people, white people, Chinese people, people of all walks of life really, you know, about what they see as possible and happening in crypto on the blockchain, particularly when it comes to the creator economy. And as of late, I’ve been thinking a lot more and And even when I started, right, you know, how can Black people use this technology?

0:00AWhat’s the value to us? Is this even real? You know, and I’ve gotten to understand what inflation is and how it functions and how cryptocurrency, Bitcoin in particular, right, was designed to be a solve for inflation and actually give people a way to hedge against, you know, the ways in which our governments and our people who control our money, I would say, exploit us through inflation. And, you know, it’s been a remarkable journey. I spent, you know, a couple months in Asia, a couple months in Africa, and maybe about a month in Europe. And I’m just like Like, who -- I don’t know a lot of people my age who’ve gotten to do that.

0:00AAnd so I’ve gotten to learn, develop my global perspective, and now We Them Media is really experimenting and exploring what it means for us to be an international journalism cooperative. And can we create community around people who just want to go out and, you know, help people know what’s going on? So right now we’re kind of in that space and exploring, you know, what’s possible. And, and yeah, I hope you stay tuned and see where we head from here. Peace. Peace.