🎙Ex SushiSwap CTO Joseph Delong on Why DAOs Fail

Joseph Delong is the former CTO of SushiSwap, one of the biggest decentralized exchanges, and the founder of Astaria, a recently created NFT lending protocol. Joseph has been heavily involved in building and managing DAOs. With the recent controversial proposals surfacing on MakerDAO and Lido, we are once again reminded of the importance of DAO governance. We begin by talking about Joseph’s analogy on what would happen if a lemonade stand was run by a DAO and reflect on some of the DAO experiments that occurred over the last couple of years.

We go on to speak about the different factors involved in forming hierarchies within DAOs and how individuals assume leadership roles. Joseph also shares insights into his experience at SushiSwap and the difficulties he encountered as the CTO. Joseph goes on to share his thoughts on reward models across different DeFi projects.  He believes yield farming in the long term damage projects as costs of liquidity incentives become greater compared than revenue. A major discussion in DAO governance has revolved around token holder concentration. Joseph also discusses the current 1 token = 1 vote model and shares alternative governance systems. 

Podcast audio and video was edited by Daniel Flynn and Alp Gasimov. Transcript was edited by Claire Gu.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

📺 Watch the video here:

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👀 Only paid subscribers have access to the full interview transcript below.