Creating Crash Punks & Bitcoin DAOs | Own Your Crypto: Episode 5

‍TRANSCRIPT:
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Elizabeth (Host): The last few weeks we talked a lot about Bitcoin  NFTs from digital art to marketplaces and domain spaces, so today we'd like to take a deeper dive into the creative process behind Crash Punks, which is one of the most prominent Bitcoin NFT collections out there that I'm sure many of you are familiar with. I see a lot of Crash Punks out there in the audience, so shout out to all of you. At the same time, while we're all here, we want to open up the funnel to a broader topic around how these collection owners or communities are working towards becoming decentralized autonomous communities, or DAOs, as we'll refer to them moving forward.

What is a DAO

Just a quick time for definitions here. DAO is a community of people who share a common interest and leverage blockchain smart contracts that establish the DAO community rules to form a legal structure or a decentralized governance. Similar to centralized organizations, DAOs also have treasuries and can decide how to deploy these funds through decentralized voting.

This is often weighted based on how many tokens each user holds. For example, a user who holds two tokens will have twice the voting power of a user who holds one token. Basically, for example, if there’s a decentralized community you're really passionate about, or an NFT collection that's forming this DAO, you can join or buy in and be part of the voting process and decide how that community is run from decisions around communications and events and marketing to even network changes.

A little bit of history. The first and probably the most famous DAO is dash. It is created in 2014 by Evan Duffield, so they've been around for a good amount of time. Today, we're going to be taking a deeper dive into DAOs emerging on the bitcoin blockchain and how this is possible, how DAOs in bitcoin blockchain are different from any other blockchains and so much more. We'll also dive into it more with our guest speakers:

• Grace Ng from Crash Punks
• Trevor Owens from Stacks Ventures
• Orlando Cosme from StackerDAO Labs
• Ken Liao from Xverse
  

We have the creator and founder of Crash Punks here which we're thrilled about. Grace, I see you're up on stage. Perfect. We have to start with you. Could you give us a quick hello and maybe a few words, just for everyone to get to know you and what you're working on?

Grace (Crash Punks): Yes, sure. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. I started Crash Punks. It's a really large NFT collection secured on Bitcoin with Stacks. The initial concept was all around a cyberpunk, anime, sci-fi theme. I just wanted to bring more awareness to the Stacks ecosystem. Also, we now have really exciting opportunities to test out some of the new platforms that are coming into the Stacks ecosystem, like Console and Xverse, and are really excited to be a part of it. 

Elizabeth (Host): Awesome. I definitely want to dive deeper into your creative inspiration, but so glad to have you here. Also, I’m thrilled to have Trevor Owens, a managing partner at Stack Startups and host of NFT Now. Trevor, I'm sure a majority of the people here already know you, but for those who are new to the ecosystem, can you also just give us a quick hello? 

Trevor (Stacks Ventures): Sure, and I love your Crash Punk, by the way, Elizabeth. It really looks dope. My name is Trevor Owens. I'm the managing partner of Stacks Ventures and we're an early-stage investor in 47 currently amazing companies such as StackerDAOs, and of course, Xverse. I’m really lucky to have the CEOs of two of our shining, fast growing, and killer companies here. I’m excited for you guys hosting these spaces. I think it's really fantastic. Thanks for having me. 

Elizabeth (Host): Awesome. Yes, thank so much for joining. I know it's pretty late on your end, and Grace, it's early on your side too, so thanks everyone for tuning in here around the world. I'm also super happy to have Orlando Cosme here from StackerDAO Labs. Orlando, can you also give a quick hello and tell us in a few words the project you're working on and we'll take a deeper dive later. 

Orlando (StackerDAO Labs): Yes, first off, thanks for inviting me. I’m glad to be here as always. I'm the co-founder and CEO of StackerDAO Labs and we're making it as easy as possible to create and manage web3 organizations like DAOs, powered by Bitcoin. The end goal is— You can think of it as a mix between Shopify and AngelList for web3 organizations. 

Elizabeth (Host): Perfect. That's great. I’m so happy to have all of our guest speakers here. I really appreciate your time. Let's go ahead and kick off with a few open-ended questions and anyone on stage can feel free to jump in here. I just would like to start off with some basics around why do we need decentralized autonomous organizations? What's driving the demand here? Also, what are some things DAOs can uniquely achieve that differentiate them from centralized organizations?

Orlando (StackerDAO Labs): I could maybe take the lead on this one. I've spent a lot of time obviously thinking about structuring and designing DAOs, and really, the key component of DAOs is the fact that they're trustless. It's a means of trustless coordination. This basically allows for three unlocks. The first is that it allows anyone, like any group of people from around the world to be able to coordinate and manage resources without really knowing each other. In a world, wherein this internet age, and this digital age, a lot of people end up meeting friends online. You may not know each other and might be in different jurisdictions. That becomes incredibly important because the fact of the matter is that I may meet someone online and if you want to raise money or some funds together to invest or build a product or something, if I just send you money, I have no idea where you are in the world. You could just end up rugging me and taking all my money. The rules of a DAO are written in immutable smart contracts, so I know that someone or a central group of actors can’t just rug me or shift the rules on me and take my money if I send or deposit some funds. That's number one. 

Number two second unlock is that if you're going to have a decentralized, censorship-resistant internet and protocols, they need to be managed similarly in a censorship-resistant way, so you can't really have a defi protocol that's purportedly censorship-resistant, but then it's being run by a company and then the government can always go after that company, and that company can just end up turning into the next JP Morgan, or like any sort of Wall Street Bank and really just be more like a monopoly. 

Then finally, the last thing I would say, is it provides a means of user, or community, or member ownership. This is important because if we want to go live in a world where, or if you're a vision for the future for crypto, is to have this user-owned internet, the only way you can really do so is if the people who are managing these products and organizations have some sort of real ownership. Your members can vote on proposals that can actually have some automatic functionality, so again, you don't really have this centralized group of actors. DAO members can actually have real power, and in that sense, real ownership over these internet protocols or these financial primitives and protocols.

Elizabeth (Host): Thanks so much. These are such great points all around. It’s really fascinating. Just to further clarify, given that this is fully decentralized, can DAOs still have a board of directors or certain leaders within the community perhaps that are still maintaining the balance of voting power but essentially drive the thought leadership and incentives for participation because I can imagine sometimes that people would be involved in multiple different DAOs, so how do you get them to continue to participate and engage in the voting process? 

Orlando (StackerDAO Labs): I think we all know this from our daily lives. If you're ever in any sort of group of people, you need some leadership or people to just raise your hand to actually do something. Even if you're in a group of friends, there's usually one to three core group of people that are actually the people that are always organizing things. I think it's inherent in human coordination that you are going to have leaders emerge. You can structure a DAO in any numerous number of ways, but the real important part at the end of the day, is if it's really just being checked and run by the membership of endowed members and power is flowing from DAO members from the bottom to this type of leadership, then I think it's fine. You're still furthering the principles of what a DAO is there for instead of having the top-down, heavy hierarchy where power flows from the top or the CEO or board down to the end user or lower employees.

Elizabeth (Host): That makes a lot of sense. While we have you up on stage, Orlando, could you give us a more in-depth overview of what you're doing over at StackerDAO Labs in helping to create Bitcoin DAOs, and also while you're at it, would you mind explaining to us how are Bitcoin DAOs different from DAOs on other blockchains?

Orlando (StackerDAO Labs): For the first question. We have dropped some alpha hints about this and have talked to people personally about this, and we're going to end up publishing something soon. We are having new line-up of three different products that will be a full suite of products as we move from this private beta stage to more of a public beta. The three products would be, number one is StackerDAO, aka our own namesake. If you get to ever check out MegaDAO, which is a DAO for Megapont, a stacker DAO is a more permissionless DAO that uses some sort of existing token or NFT as its governance token.

Basically, if there's an existing NFT community or if a project launches his own token or a defi protocol, it’s forming a series of smart contracts around that. The idea is that if permission was in the sense that anyone can just buy the token or buy the NFT, they're now a voting member in the DAO. That's a StackerDAO. 

Second product is called Clubs. Clubs is currently on testnet now. We're doing some UX testing sessions with people who have  membership gated DAOs that you can use to raise funds, govern, and take action together. The key component here is that it's membership-gated and that the DAO controls its membership. This is done through funding, so every member of the DAO needs to provide funds to the DAO. It's the way in which the DAO raises funds. They're also powered by what we're calling club passes. Club passes are non-transferable NFTs. If you have a club pass, you can then deposit into the DAO, and the reason why we went with NFTs is it makes it a lot more composable. You can use other apps, whether that's to gate your Discord or use it for console or whatever. It makes it just a lot more composable. Clubs are more appropriate for anything that you really want to raise funds from members for, like an investment DAO, or an impact DAO that may donate to a cause, to Ukraine or something, or maybe a service DAO that's made out of different freelancers that provide different contracts or services they want to organize to market themselves more easily and get some benefits.

Our final product is a multisig product called Teams. We actually have one team right now on mainnet that's being tested by a small NFT project. We're about to do a heavier testing probably starting tomorrow. Actually, it might be on mainnet starting by the end of next week, so you might want to watch out for that. Teams uses our same DAO framework but instead of having a governance token control voting and proposals in action, you're just using a list of addresses. What makes teams pretty powerful is it can almost do basically anything that an individual person can do. You just have to add what's called an extension. If you want to swap tokens, you can add extension to swap tokens or buy NFTs. That's how all of our products work. With Teams, it allows for collective action among working groups. This is a good use case for any sort of project team. Also, it's good for sub-DAOs and also any early DAO that wants to progressively decentralize. They can actually form a team and then pretty easily upgrade by just enabling some new contracts to the team and upgrade to a full-on decentralized DAO.

Those are our new products that we will be launching pretty soon. In terms of your second question in respect to Bitcoin, I would say that formation and smart contract DAOs on Bitcoin aren't necessarily that different from DAOs on Ethereum or Solana because again, Stacks are just smart contracts. I think the key here with Bitcoin DAOs is you can tap into the most decentralized, secure, and valuable network for your DAO whether you want to raise funds in Bitcoin. We've actually seen this with some potential customers where Bitcoin still has the previous web3 brand name. You actually have people who aren't that familiar with crypto or web3 and they want to form some club. Maybe they already have some community, and they want to form a club for their community, and their members feel a lot more comfortable using Bitcoin because they know Bitcoin. Everyone knows Bitcoin. My mom knows Bitcoin. My mom has no idea what Ethereum is. She doesn't understand Bitcoin, but she's heard of Bitcoin before. You're basing your funds—again, all Stacks smart contracts are anchored to Bitcoin—and your smart contract, and really, your foundation on the most centralized and secure network. In one of my pitches, if you want to form decentralized, autonomous organization, you may also want to build it on top of the most decentralized network. That's what distinguishes bitcoin DAOs from other DAOs, but in terms of smart contracts, they're pretty similar.

Elizabeth (Host): This is really fantastic and I’m excited to see how things roll out with StackerDAO Labs, so thanks for sharing that. Trevor, anything to add to that? As one of the OGs in this space, we would love to hear more about your perspective across the ecosystems. In particular, do you think there's anything that culturally differentiates Bitcoin from Ethereum DAOs, or DAOs secured by other blockchains? 

Trevor (Stacks Ventures): I think it's always great listening to Orlando. He's really an expert on this space, and coming from his background, has a really great understanding of the ins and outs of DAOs. I think I'm very excited for Bitcoin DAOs especially because it's something whose value is very obvious and hard to argue against in the sense that blockchain allows us to organize and coordinate human activity in a new way and verify somebody's voting power or coordinate that voting power. It's just a very clear and powerful use case for blockchain that you wouldn't do in a centralized server and it doesn't make any sense in the web two paradigm. I think that when it comes to the Bitcoin community, I expect that as these technologies like StackerDAOs become more mature, we will see a lot of penetration in the Bitcoin market, more so than we have seen with NFTs, for example, because the Bitcoin community tends to put their nose up against NFTs and say, ”Who cares about jpeg and stuff like that?” That whole ecosystem was birthed on Ethereum. I see NFT communities being a natural fit for DAOs. Of course, there's different levels of DAOs. Orlando talked about some really great examples and use cases such as investment clubs being just very clear and obvious that there’s no better way to do investment clubs going forward. I think most venture funds, as the space becomes more mature, are going to be moving towards that approach. I don't think we're going to see venture funds being done the way that they're being done now. It's just such an obvious and seamless future ahead for doing venture funds in all kinds of investment clubs in the DAO format.

I tend to think of the word DAO, which means decentralized autonomous organization, is not only a mouthful, but maybe a poor choice in the sense that it makes you think like you're ordering an Uber and then the Uber comes and shows up outside your place and there are no driver and it just picks you up and takes you where it goes. It makes you think of these offices where there are no employees, and just run by AI like from the movie, Terminator, when Skynet takes over and everything's run autonomously. But really, it’s about catering more towards the other side of the equation, and not purely for for-profit corporations. I don't know if that'll ever happen because I think that for-profit corporations have still so many more innovations that need to happen. The coordination aspect isn't going to make innovation easier. I don't think that the use cases for something like a big company are as clear or potent at this stage. That's going to be the final phase. 

I think the early go-to market and early maturity is coming in more of volunteer organizations and things that are not clearly for-profit companies. NFT communities fall squarely into that. Non-profits are where they have a constitution or they have some more formal governance. You're not going to be seeing start-ups being created as decentralized autonomous organizations. You're going to see school clubs where you need funds and you need to coordinate people around those funds and measure and trust that people or no one is counting the votes behind a closed door. That's all in the chain. That's how I think about it and where I see the obvious opportunities. Those that are not necessarily corporations, but like volunteer organizations, clubs, or any type of investment organization, and things that aren't clearly like a company, but more of like a community, or a volunteer organization, et cetera.

Orlando (StackerDAO Labs): Trevor, I actually, a hundred percent, agree with that. Very extremely large organizations, unless you really require some censorship-resistant component, like a defi protocol. I think DAOs are much better used in those smaller communities. You gave a ton of good use cases that I agree with. That's also why we are shipping our team product, which is not really a DAO but it can be used for any company for on-chain management of resources and action because we also saw that distinction as well that if you have a large company, it just doesn't really make sense in a lot of ways, at least like how DAOs currently are, to form that for-profit company as a DAO, so the Teams product also serve that market as well.

Elizabeth (Host): Absolutely. I think these are all so many great scenarios where DAOs would come into play here, especially thinking about these unlocks with philanthropic organizations and a lot of different communities that could use the blockchain as a source of truth. Also, it'd be interesting to talk about other unlocks and use cases in the future that could be seen to happen now. Trevor, I think you started to touch on this, but even within the ecosystem, you mentioned multisig, and  Grace, you were mentioning ConsoleDAO. I would be interested to hear from anyone here. 

What are the next steps of what you see happening within Stacks in the broader Bitcoin ecosystem in regard to future unlocks for DAOs.

Orlando (StackerDAO Labs): I think composability. I referenced this a bit when I mentioned our Clubs product, but there are a few people building more organizational tooling slash infrastructure . what we're going to start seeing now and I know this just because I've been in talks with other start-ups and other builders in the ecosystem, is we're going to see a lot of—maybe not now, but probably in six months or so—composability. I'll take it back a sec.

The first thing is, number one, any sort of DAO, if you think about it, if they take any action on-chain, they can interact with different protocols. We've been talking to the NFT marketplaces to have a seamless experience so that people can form a DAO and then they can buy or sell NFTs if they are a collector DAO. You and your friends get together and buy and sell NFTs, making DAOs composable with the NFT ecosystem and then if you want to trade tokens, connecting and interacting with Alex or Arkadiko, there's that vertical integration there, but then there's also some horizontal integration that would be coming as well. For example, you have this [unintelligible 20:30] which is working on on-chain reputation protocol. We've talked to them and there's a good amount of space for collaboration there. I mentioned before that our club passes can potentially be used like Console if you want to form a group chat there and it can be used as the base like an identifier in that Console group chat. 

We're also building on what's called the ExecutorDAO framework. It’s basically a framework for these very modular DAOs and basic things like a DAO in one smart contract, but it's several and each smart contract is like a different Lego block. Right now, on top of us, Marvin Janssen was the person who developed ExecutorDAO and he has a team who is also building some pretty cool stuff.

There's actually a DAO called ecosystem DAO now in the community, and it's actually being used as the place to vote for the Stacks 2.1 upgrade, so anything they build is actually composable with all of our DAOs and products because we also use ExecutorDAO as our framework and vice versa.

In many ways, we're like borrowing off each other. All our contracts are open source, so we're just literally copying each other's smart contracts, but it leads to this collective integration of everyone because we're all building on similar frameworks, et cetera. You're going to see different apps and different DAOs able to connect to each other, connect to different apps, and then also connect vertically to NFT and defi apps in the ecosystem.

Elizabeth (Host): That's actually absolutely perfect because I was just about to ask what other projects are out there on the Stacks ecosystem developing DAO frameworks and composition tools, so this is really fascinating. Thanks for sharing that, Orlando. 

I’d love to circle over to the star of our show here, and shift gears a bit. Grace, thanks so much for being on here. I would love to just shift gears and hear from you starting with some origin stories of Crash Punks and then of course, we can circle back getting into DAOs and that roadmap. 

First, we'd love to hear and really take a deeper dive into your creative process for Crash Punks. Did you work with other artists? What was your inspiration? How did it got started? I know Neil Stevenson got involved, which is super exciting. He’s the author of Snow crash. He coined the term or concept for Metaverse. I would be interested to hear artistic inspiration behind this collection. 

Grace (Crash Punks): Hi, I worked on Crash Punks last year and I think at the time it was just to use art to bring a united language to the Stacks ecosystem because at the time Stacks was still really young. I was really into NFTs. I saw the future of culture and art and culture just being built with NFTs. I just wanted to bring a common visual language to the Stacks ecosystem, and there weren't any NFT projects. There are some early projects, but not any bigger ones, so I wanted to just create Crash Punks as an homage to Snow Crash and to the Stacks ecosystem and celebrate the creation of Web3 and everything being decentralized with Bitcoin with Stacks, so I created Crash Punks. A lot of the traits have an homage to Snow Crash which was this book that was written in the nineties. Neil Stevenson himself coined the word “metaverse” back in 1991 and also wrote a lot about cryptography and decentralization and wrote about virtual currency and predicted Bitcoin in a way.

I just wanted to pay homage to that, so a lot of the traits have a reference to it. If some of you have like a pizza box or poor impulse control or any of those traits even Hiro the wallet was named after the main character in Snow Crash, so I just wanted to bring that to the Stacks ecosystem. 

For the creative process, I was drawing as a kid, but I stopped doing that. It was just like revisiting my artistic passions from when I was a kid. I just started drawing, and I was very influenced by sci-fi anime as a kid, so I just started drawing. The way the NFTs are generated was I drew the base traits and they're probably 280 something base traits, then you use an algorithm to generate more NFTs in the collection. I did want to go more complex. I really wanted to make more cyber futuristic assets, but ultimately, that wouldn't have worked out because of how the layering works and it just adds more complexity, so I did keep it more simple. Of course, I think, inspiration-wise, I was like, “Oh yes, it'd be cool if they had mecca characteristics or if they had some more cyborg characteristics and more futuristic outfits,” but just with the technical limitations, I did keep it more simple. 

I was also, at the time, thinking about DAOs and being able to use DAOs to crowdfund or draw awareness to a certain topic. There was another concept that didn't make it through, but basically, we wanted to tie the Crash Punks to— At the time, we were supporting another organization called Sustainable Bitcoin Standard which is making Bitcoin mining green, so we also wanted to tie Crash Punks to that narrative where maybe the Crash Punks can change to Solar Punks based on the progress that we're making towards making Bitcoin mining green. There were just some ideas like that. 

Also, a personal interest of mine has been using DAO frameworks to crowdfund for decentralized science research, especially a lot of underfunded initiatives with regards to ground-breaking research or any medical research, my personal interest which was neuroscience and consciousness research, or traditional science topics that have been underfunded in the institutions or overlooked in the institutions because it simply doesn't align with pharmaceutical interest or academic interests. I saw DAOs as an opportunity to crowdfund decentralized science research. I personally wanted to do something around that as well, so that was another idea that I wanted to do that didn't make it through, but overall, there’s a lot of different opportunities and different paths to take, and that was just the early initial approach for Crash Punks.

Elizabeth (Host): I absolutely love that. I didn't realize the initial concept and ideas around connecting Crash Punks to Sustainable Bitcoin Standard. I think that's so cool. It’s different and interesting that you explore these different ways to leverage DAO initiatives with advancing scientific research. 

Are you still crafting what you want the Crash Punk DAO initiative to look like? 

Grace (Crash Punks): Yes, so the Crash Punk DAO initiative, we just migrated over to ConsoleDAO so, all the Crash punks. So basically our Discord service is read-only now and as of this week, all the activities are migrating over to ConsoleDAO. ConsoleDAO is just launching and we're the first community to be part of Console and to be the first Bitcoin DAO. it's still early. We still haven't announced a lot of the surprises that are being worked on right now, but some of the aspects that I hope to be working with is Console has created a multisig wallet, so we can also have a shared treasury which increase opportunities for different members to partake. I'd be excited to see how that turns out because I do want Crash Punks to be more community-driven and to have members to be able to take part and vote on what they would like to see and vote on the future and vote on the vision.

There's the multisig shared treasury that will be coming up, and then there's also ballot box, which is another initiative from Console, which is basically being able to vote on proposals. What I’ve been heads down with is I actually worked on a web3 short film for Crash Punks. Basically, we worked on this Crash Punks animated series. It was partly funded by entertainment and funded by NFT collectors where we just announced, “Hey, we’re working on this short film.” Then our collectors got to buy character tickets to be part of this, to bring their Crash Punks to life, and bring it into a 3D world, and have a backstory to it. Now, it's premiering in Decentraland this Sunday. What I hope to go from there is to make use of some of the voting mechanisms that the Console team has been building so that the DAO and the Crash Punk holders can have more of a participatory, interactive storytelling aspect to the future of where the Crash Punks film is going. I just hope to see more community-driven initiatives and storytelling and more interactivity. I think the DAO and voting mechanisms really give a good platform for that. 

Elizabeth (Host): Absolutely. That's super exciting. You mentioned a few descriptive cues for what Crash Punks look like. Just for some people who are tuning in, for people who are listening and perhaps haven't seen a Crash Punk before. I’m curious how you, as the creator, or as the artist would describe your collection in a few adjectives. How would you describe Crash Punks visually to our audience? 

Grace (Crash Punks): It's cyberpunk, sci-fi anime, and a lot of what I like to explore is just the future of emerging technologies and a discussion around what are the possibilities and considerations. With the crash Punks, there was actually an initial storytelling element that I hope we can build out more with regards to the traits and everything, but I just want to explore a lot of the possibilities of emerging tech, so you can see elements of this within the Crash Punks traits. In fact, it's a theme within the Crash Punks animated series, exploring a lot of this sci-fi future and the metaverse and where we're going within the metaverse. 

Elizabeth (Host): Really love the collection and there's so many fun ways you can find your own Crash Punk that speaks to you and has some characteristic that's personalized in that way. I absolutely love it. 

Grace (Crash Punks): Yes, it'd be awesome if all the Crash Punks just dress up as their Crash Punk for Halloween. That would be really cool. We could have a costume contest.

Elizabeth (Host): Yes, it definitely needs to happen. Also, I realized we didn't cover when was Crash Punks launched again? Was it last year? 

Grace (Crash Punks): Yes, December. 

Elizabeth (Host): How many people are in the community now? 

Grace (Crash Punks): We just migrated over to Console. In the initial discord, there were about 20,000 members, but I think a lot of them were people who fomoed into the project early on, and so the people who have stuck around— We have probably a couple of hundred people who are contributing and sticking around and chatting. In the Console community, we just migrated over, so there's some early people who are in the Console chat right now. Shout out to Nicki, he's been super active, J2P2, Algorithm, Abra, and Good kitty, she's been Crash Punk of the month recently, so we have a lot of amazing people who are early in the Console chat platform right now. I hope everyone who hasn't migrated yet, migrate over. 

Elizabeth (Host): Yes, definitely such a great call to action here. There's definitely some Crash Punks here as audience members. Check out ConsoleDAO, basically the discord of the ecosystem, except even better. Crash punks is the first community to be on this ConsoleDAO, correct? 

Grace (Crash Punks): Yes. 

Elizabeth (Host): Awesome. Just a few more questions about Crash Punks. I’m curious in regard to— You've done so many partnerships in the Stacks ecosystem, from the Stacks Foundation to events, games, and working with individuals and leveraging new tools being built like ConsoleDAO. 

How did you seek to balance the collection from an artistic perspective, or the artistic value per se versus the utility aspect? 

Grace (Crash Punks): We've been exploring a lot of different ways to create more utility, and I think they all have an artistic or creative bet to it. For example, we have a Crash Punks game that you can play within Console. If you go to the fourth icon down, you'll see game, and then you can start playing this game. That's also artistic. Generally, I feel that web2 itself is very creative in nature. Everyone's just building from the  ground up, building from scratch, and working on the blockchain, working on Stacks, working on all these technical interactions. I think that's all creative and artistic in a way. I think web3 in itself is just a big pool of creativity right now. The game itself was Trevor's lead and basically that is just a fun way for people to engage and put their Crash Punks into a team and battle each other and that is artistic in itself.

Then there's the film which is utility and artistic in itself as well. It's a fun way to build out more of the Crash Punks world. I think a lot of what we're doing is just building out more of the Crash Punks world and having more of storytelling elements around it. With the film, a lot of the Crash Punks, or the people who got the character tickets, are able to turn their Crash Punks into a 3D avatar and then have more of a back story. I was leading up a lot of the creative direction and the storyline behind that.

Then we also have the merch drop that is this week. We've been working with Flat Lay on that. They've created this token-gated platform for us from the ground up. Basically, we have two shirts available right now and those are quite graphic. It was actually quite a process to get those made because it's quite a unique shirt, especially there's this geisha shirt that's completely printed all over. I wanted to make something cool for all the crash punk holders. I think a lot of the Crash Punks also initially really loved the outfits that the characters were wearing. It'd be really cool to turn the outfits into augmented reality filters or let people be able to wear them. For now, we have these two shirts that have an AR element to them. If you have the app and then you hold up your phone, you can actually animate your shirt and then become a geisha or become a samurai. It's just been thinking of fun ways for people to interact with Crash Punks, and that's how I’ve been able to balance the utility and the art, and just making sure that we have fun ways for people to interact with the brand.

Elizabeth (Host): Absolutely. I just have to say, I love the merch that you guys have come out with so far. It'd be even cool to see. I know Ryder is coming out with some really interesting NFC tagging capabilities that you can scan with Xverse, so who knows, maybe there's some interesting collaborations down the road there. Also, speaking of Xverse, I would love to bring up Ken to the stage while we have you. We'll be curious if you could share with our users. 

What do you think are the next steps in supporting DAOs with Xverse as a wallet?

Ken (Xverse): Xverse is like infrastructure for web3 and DAOs, so we currently support all types of applications built on Bitcoin using Stacks and DAOs are no exception. Xverse as a wallet is basically a way for users to authenticate with DAOs and hold assets. For example, if a DAO membership is gated by NFT or token, Xverse Wallet would be the app that holds these tokens. If you haven't downloaded Xverse before, we have a great NFT collection and management interface built in, so it's the perfect home for your Crash Punks. This is something that other wallets that integrate with Stacks do not have right now. Also, Xverse is a Bitcoin wallet, so you can hold, send, and receive Bitcoin right now with Xverse.

One feature that I think will unlock a lot of value for DAO apps is the ability for apps to request Bitcoin transactions from Xverse and not just talking about transferring Bitcoin from one address to another, but also including data in those transactions that can trigger more complex logic in a smart contract that can unlock functionality for Bitcoin DAOs specifically. This is a feature that we would love to launch in the next few months. Currently with Xverse mobile, all the apps actually run inside of the mobile browser window, and this could be pretty limiting in terms of user experience, so we're launching our browser extension in the next few weeks, and that will bring all of the functionality that Xverse mobile has right now to a desktop browser.

In the near future, we want to also allow native mobile app to connect with Xverse and request transactions. The DAO could have its own native mobile app with a great interface and everything, and it would just interact with the wallet through direct connection within the phone, and it doesn't have to go through a browser or anything like that. 

Lastly, we've partnered with MultiSafe, which you mentioned earlier, to basically have multisig wallet built within Xverse which I think will also be very useful for our DAOs. One recent development is that Muneeb dropped a couple days ago on Twitter that Stacks working group is working on this two-way pegged Bitcoin solution on Stacks, which means that using these smart contracts, Clarity smart contracts will be able to create Bitcoin transactions trustless-ly and in a decentralized way, which I think will also unlock a lot of additional functionality for all kinds of DAO apps and Xverse is going to definitely support that as well. 

Orlando (StackerDAO Labs): I would also add that the StackerDAO actually works pretty well in the Xverse mobile browser view screen which is funny because we didn't test it out before launching. It just worked out very nicely, so I voted on proposals using the Xverse mobile app connecting to the StackerDAO’s app. It's pretty cool. 

Elizabeth (Host): Yes, absolutely. Be sure to connect to StackerDAO Labs through Xverse. Check out Crash Punks NFTs on Gamma. Of course, if Bitcoin NFTs are new for you, you can get started on Xverse. It's available on iPhone and Android. Acquire some NFTs through the in-app browser, just by going to the marketplace of your choice. Type in, for example, gamma.io, so it's quite easy actually. 

It looks like we're out at time. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise with us as always. I really appreciate it. With that said, we are ready to announce the winner of our crash punk giveaway. Little bit of a drum roll here. Our winner is 20v.btc. Congratulations. I really appreciate everybody tuning in and definitely stay tuned and see you next time. 

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