CityDAO community roundup vol. 6: building the foundation

November 26th, 2021

Here’s another CityDAO update!

Table of Contents

CityDAO so far
Community Shoutouts & Showcases
Overview of current projects
Overheard in CityDAO
Memes to go
Past CityDAO Community Roundups

What is CityDAO?

The CityDAO community is made up of ambitious and HIGHLY curious people exploring and building at the frontier of technology, governance experiments and physical land.

The vision of CityDAO is to build the city of the future on the Ethereum blockchain by experimenting with tokenizing land, rights, and governance. 🏙

🔈CityDAO so far

First, let’s do a quick recap of the CityDAO adventure so far:

Month 1: July - laying the groundwork

July 1 - DAOs can legally be recognized as an LLC in Wyoming
July 2 - CityDAO starts (Scott’s infamous tweet)
July 7 - First community call
July 15 - CityDAO Discord membership crosses 1000 people
July 23 - CityDAO officially registered as an LLC in Wyoming
July 28 - CityDAO gets voted in on Mirror’s $WRITE RACE

Month 2: August - bolstering the treasury

August 8 - The First Citizen NFT sells for 6.52 ETH
August 11 - Release Founding Citizen NFTs
August 12 - CityDAO treasury passes $30k
August 20 - CityDAO treasury passes $100k
August 25 - Founding Citizen NFT sells for 10 ETH live in a community call
August 25 - CityDAO treasury passes $250k
August 26 - Connect w/ real estate agent in Wyoming to help with land purchase

Month 3: September - voting on land acquisition

September 08 - CityDAO forum is added to aid governance discussions
September 15 - Dev & Design team demo the parcel viewer
September 21 - CityDAO citizens vote on first parcel purchase
September 27 - Citizens vote to make offer on “Parcel 6” (40 acres)
September 28 - CityDAO makes an offer on real land
September 28 - Offer accepted, land purchase process begins

Month 4: October - Vitalik stops by & we close the land parcel deal

October 06 - Vitalik Buterin stops by CityDAO to ask questions
October 07 - CityDAO flag put up on land owned by a DAO
October 14 - The DAO figures out how to buy land with a treasury in ETH 😂
October 23 - CityDAO Citizen NFT minter released
October 25 - Funds wired for land purchase
October 29 - Land parcel deal officially completed
October 31 - Vitalik posts the Crypto Cities blog post

Month 5: November - Explosive growth & Crypto cities blog post

November (first week) - Vitalik and Brian Armstrong purchase Citizen NFTs
November 13 - Season-0 kicks off
November 14 - Mark Cuban purchases two Citizen NFTs
November 14 - Citizen NFTs sell out
November 15 - CityDAO treasury hits 8.5 million

🖼 Community Shout-outs & Showcases

🌆 Thank you to the CityDAO community

I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone in the CityDAO community for your contributions and patience during November.

CityDAO has been an active community since July but in November we experienced explosive growth. We went from 1.5k in the CityDAO discord to 22k in a matter of weeks. This kind of growth is not normal and made for a chaotic and adventurous few weeks. The core team and community collectively rallied to adapt to the sudden scaling and I’d like to thank all of you for your contributions and above all, patience. 🙏

CityDAO is one of the most ambitious projects in crypto and there will undoubtedly be numerous ups and downs as we pioneer into completely uncharted territory. I’m grateful to be on this adventure with you all and can’t wait to see what’s next!

Live footage of citizens jumping into the CityDAO rabbit hole 👇 😂

🌆 CityDAO LA meetup!

Massive shout-out to @Syntonikka for putting in the work to coordinate this meetup ❤️

Also shout-out to the dog in the background who photobombed this picture 😂

🌆 Prague meetup!

🌆 Pictures from Citizens around the world:

I love how global the CityDAO community is! In the past few weeks, citizens have shared photos from Dubai, Florida, Prague, Portugal, Seattle, Ontario, Caribbean, Zurich, and New York.

Here are some of the pictures shared:

🌆 Check out @monsoon’s work / research on building decentralized cities with a nature-focus:

🌆 More BANKLESS DAO collaborations in the works!

We’re a big fan of BANKLESS and I personally view them as an inspiration for all-things DAOs.

We’ve utilized their DEGEN bot for POAP management during community calls and are in talks with them on using their new Bountyboard product, as well as potentially having a custom DAOpunk commissioned for CityDAO.

Super grateful and super excited for this DAO-to-DAO partnership to grow!

Here’s an example of a DAOpunk NFT (so damned cool!):

🌆 Shout-out to @Jeeves who put parcel 0 on Google maps

🌆 CityDAO Citizens create ways to be identified on twitter

Several CityDAO citizens have been experimenting with ways to signal affiliation on Twitter. Namely, via changing their twitter location to CityDAO or adding the (🌆 ,🌆 ) to their Twitter username.

Feel free to do the same! Here is an example:

🌆 @DenverCitizen and @alexthims have put in lots of work to assemble and edit this FAQ 🎊

🌆 Mark Cuban picks up a few Citizen NFTs

🌆 The CityDAO forum has been buzzzzzzing!

🌆 0xL0uis put together this amazing analytics dashboard

🌆 Snapshot vote: What direction are you most excited about for CityDAO?

Results:

Building a City: 71.74%

Buying land: 24.1%

Conservation: 11.74%

🌆 Wyoming Public Radio wrote about CityDAO

🌆 Articles covering Vitalik’s purchase of a Citizen NFT

🌆 @alexthims found a way to record community calls, see below for the first one!

Community call 21 audio recording:

🔈Overview of current projects in CityDAO

There are A LOT of projects being worked on in CityDAO. Here’s a high level overview of many of them. Note: some inevitably won’t be included as projects are in different levels of development. If I missed a project you think should be include please let me know! 🙏

Operations

Level-up our communications and documentation in Notion.

Constitution

Collectively develop CityDAO's constitution (charter).

Constitution-contract

Put the DAO's constitution on-chain.

Onboarding project

Design a best-in-class onboarding experience in Discord. See the project below as well.

City Tour Website

Onboarding site for those first encountering the DAO. Could potentially replace current site.

CityDAO Podcast

Create a podcast that highlights Citizens & related topics.

city-bot

Bot for integrating Discourse forum and Discord to gauge interest on proposals and establish a pipeline for proposal → vote.

land-token-standard

Develop a standard for land ownership tokens. Will later extend to more specific use cases such as rental properties and fractionalized land ownership.

transparency-dashboard

Contract for tracking DAO-owned wallets and transactions. Frontend dashboard for displaying DAO's funds and uses

Parcel-explorer

Storefront for ⛰️Parcel 0 sale.

Dev processes

Establishment of best practices and assisting the various teams in operational efficiency.

Land-focus: Project-1

Figuring out what the DAO will do with the first MVP parcel.

Land-focus: Project-2 ideas

Developing ideas for the DAO’s next big project.

Sobol member directory

Leveraging a tool designed for DAOs to better visualize the DAO in all its forms: member directory, mind-maps of working groups, projects, channels, etc.

NFT-Museum

a City Museum concept where we showcase significant NFTs.

A prototype:

🎤 Overheard in CityDAO

Random lines taken out of context from the CityDAO community

I have decided to be part of CityDAO because I believe it will be part of human history, the starting point of the future of global governance.

It is a pleasure to be a citizen of this great community

I’m a lawyer, licensed in NY. Taught law for 15 years at universities in China. Been in crypto since late 2018. Currently getting a Masters degree and my thesis is a comparative study of the Chinese metaverse. I plan to go for a Ph.D. in Metaverse Sociology.

Citizen or Citidaozen?

Good morning, Emergency Medicine Physician working in the region with property in Clark, Wyoming.

Reading through all of your thoughts, I agree completely that putting a piece of art on this land would be a fitting exercise in coordination, and we should shoot to prove that we can do this first.

Degree in chemical and pharmaceutical process engineering - Student in renewable energy and environmental techniques / Mineral, organic chemistry, biochemistry - Development of bio-efficient and symbiosis methods.

I work as a structural engineer full time. I also have experience writing smart contracts and building web apps.

a floating tungsten cube

I'm writing a TV show. The show is set in a city that's partially run on cryptocurrency. Today, I'm researching crypto and what a physical city would have to do to ensure the success of a large-scale, fully-functional system. It's very interesting and obviously our economic future

to be very honest, this is the best design research on future cities in crypto world, people talks a lot but not many people can design, people can create render but not all of them have systematic thinking and theory behind their design. This is really what we need in this community: high quality design research, really appreciate it

love the solarpunk future

since 2017, I've led strategy at Gnosis, building decentralized infrastructure for web3. i contribute to Other Internet research group and sit on the Board of Regen Foundation

i have a strong revit and VDC/BIM background, and i know some other citizens have other modeling or construction backgrounds, if theres any way i can may be able to help out please dont hesitate to reach out

I'll head to Prague for the Christmas market soon to visit some frens.

I'm from Europe, have 10+ years of product design experience. I like generative art, I run a mobile development studio of 13 people, and happy to help CityDao with design tasks if you need help

Fun fact(s): never would have thought I'd be on discord, yet here I am

One provision of the constitution that was pretty popular was the monthly reporting of various financial conditions of the dao. So my thought was maybe a simple provision that calls "a balance sheet showing in reasonable detail the financial condition of this DAO, a profit and loss statement showing the results of the operations of this DAO during the previous month and the previous year, and any other financial statements such a lists of contracts entered into, staff hired, initiative payments executed, bounties collected, etc. This provision should be callable and subject to inspection by any citizen. Gifts received by the DAO have to be reported as part of the financial statements.'

I have decided to be part of CityDAO because I believe it will be part of human history, the starting point of the future of global governance.

USA Hedge Fund CFO/COO 28 years, finance and sports, would love to help on the investing side of the CityDao and help with real estate and governance, Fun Fact on me is that I am a 50 something but far from a boomer, at least i think so?

Areas of interest: Gardening, Neuralink, Singularity, video games, space travel, cuisine (of course (à pied))

Hello Im Zach, some fun facts about me are that I speak Russian and Arabic. Crypto fanatic, I own a cat

Would love to help out this DAO in any way. Particularly - establishing design principles & patterns to guide city laws. Perhaps I could write a blog post to introduce those unfamiliar with Alexander's (author of A Pattern Language) fantastic ideas and how they might be applied.

Me and my girlfriend were dreaming about to get a land on a Greek Island but this one turned out to be more fun

For years I taught improvisational theater professionally in Chinese.

like to add some land near Berlin. a friend made me that as a present- maybe thats a the future for that place.

I'm 18 and just dropped out of college! I'm also a judge at MIT's 2022 Youth Innovation challenge

I have been working as a lawyer at CHINA STATE CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING CORPORATION, the largest construction company in the world by revenue and the 14th largest general contractor in terms of overseas sales. I'd like to get involved in CityDAO.