For the past twenty one days I have been obsessed with a decentralized project called Higher. If interested in the origin lore you can read more here.
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We launched a channel on farcaster
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A community token was created and airdropped to channel members
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2M $higher was donated by core members for farcaster rounds
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We created a party wallet and raised $70k for LPing and grants
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Artists have created/minted for the first time bc of higher
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Artists have made more than multiple yrs prior because of higher
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Web tools have been created
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AI tools have been created
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A fashion brand has sprouted
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Zora did a mint w rev splits to the collective
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Founders of established projects have cosigned the project left and right
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The channel sits at around 14k members and the token at 100M mcap
Decentralized. Autonomous. Organization.
As a seasoned member of many failed decentralized orgs, some recurring patterns include:
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intense adoption mania
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followed by intense attention exodus
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leaving a handful of core contributors
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slowly petering out into obscurity due to
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lack of resources
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lack of positive feedback loops
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or lack of progress
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This is not uncommon for crypto natives of all interest profiles. DAOs have been relegated to punching bags in many circles. Over intellectualization has been long standing, and auctions lose traction quicker and quicker. Yet, we continue to improve the technology and add to the populace.
Memecoins
Conscious of the shifting meta to “over intellectualize memecoins”, what I am interested here is left curving daos and decentralized brands via memecoins.
When asked about a cast of mine that said, “everyone's talking about memecoins when the real convo is about daos” this was my response:
The motto we’ve been working under is - left curve it left curve it left curve it.
Additionally:
Left curve = instinctually make it simple.
Mid curve = purposely make it complicated.
Right curve = purposely make it simple.
When extending these frameworks toward decentralized autonomous organization, what seems the simplest organizer, is ERC20s as the dao membership, not nfts.
Nouns Builder, Party DAO, and Safe multisigs are all thought of as daos. Higher’s market question however is, what if they were instead financial group chats to work on the ‘real’ dao - the token?
Decentralized Brands
The core idea in this experiment is that using an erc20 as the dao provides:
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more wealth effects
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more overlap in crypto users
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less friction in permless media/infra/tooling/networks
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less friction in ‘financial group chats’
At higher, the only thing we all agree on is ↑ as the unicode symbol. Font choices, color ways, media profiles, tooling priorities, all the way down to motivations and tag lines, are unique to the individual members of ‘higher dao’.
For example, above is the creative direction currently most resonant to me. Through collaboration with other Higher members (Dom, Isaac, Paff, and Ilya) we have arrived at a fork of Virgil’s famous off-white quotation marks.
I currently work on fashion, media, memes, zine’s, and broader creative direction for higher. What is crucial to note here, is for higher. Not at higher.
This is warranted delineation of roles due to the permless nature of the ‘dao’. Above we have another member of higher, marc, who is working on web tooling for higher.
And lastly we have maty, who is making custom goods for higher.
For being the operative word, due to the structure of this decentralized brand.
To ‘join’ higher you buy $higher. Or:
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sell mints on zora in h
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build something cool and see if ppl will pay for it
- or higher co provides a grant
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swap other memecoins for h
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etc
The token acts as:
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Dao membership (skin in the game)
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speculative proxy for the brand (memecoin, ‘stock’ trade, etc)
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ecosystem reward (grants, mint rewards)
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brand identifier
In this line of thinking, owning 1H (even .1) makes you a member of Higher. From there it is decentralized-autonomous-organization all the way up.
Channel:
Website:
One of the Party wallets: