Bankless DAO is a decentralized community that coordinates and propagates bankless media, culture, and education. Its goal is to drive adoption and awareness of truly bankless money systems like Ethereum, DeFi (Decentralized Finance), and Bitcoin.^[1]

It is a decentralized autonomous organization that acts as a steward of the Bankless Movement progressing the world towards a future of greater freedom.

Overview

Bankless DAO was founded by Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman. It is the world’s first media & culture DAO for crypto. Over 1,500 members have made Bankless DAO their home on the bankless journey.

The Bankless DAO team is settling, developing tools, and building a digital nation in the sky around a shared vision and goals. They have ambitious plans to grow, along with the economic resources to expand and make life inside the Bankless Nation better.^[2]

Going bankless is a journey towards freedom—self-sovereignty. By financial independence, it implies that there will be reliance on two types of bank:

1. Central banks
2. Commercial banks

With these, the team and users do not mean to hate banks since banks are still very much needed in crypto money systems — but they believe that they don’t need them anymore.

Although they cannot risk taking the decision of ignoring the bank at once in the early stage as it will be too difficult due to the fact that this open money system is just getting started. That’s why it’s a journey.

Mission

The mission of the Bankless DAO team is to help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized technologies through education, media, and culture.^[3][4]

Bankless DAO is a decentralized community that coordinates and propagates bankless media, culture, and education. Its goal is to drive adoption and awareness of truly bankless money systems like Ethereum, DeFi (Decentralized Finance), and Bitcoin.

Their goal is achieved through the collective participation of its community. The financial world today is run by analog banks. Crypto money provides an alternative. The option of self-sovereign money & banking.

Now:

In a world where private keys act as money, and code makes that money programmable, the entire money system changes. So Bankless is about banking less. And less banking. And less dependence on banks.^[5] Bankless is a journey towards freedom—self-sovereignty.

Going bankless means moving more of your money and banking to crypto-based systems. It means less reliance on the central and commercial banks that previously control users' life. People on the bankless journey eventually see two milestones.

First, their net worth in crypto assets starts to exceed their wealth in the legacy banking system. Second, they realize more of their banking activity now occurs in crypto rather than the old system.^[6]

Why Bankless DAO

Bankless is a movement for pioneers seeking liberation from the tyranny of the traditional financial system. Going Bankless means adopting decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant technology. Through these means, users will achieve financial self-sovereignty, security, and prosperity.

Bankless DAO will make it possible to live in a world where anyone with an internet connection has access to the financial tools needed to achieve financial independence.

The bankless movement is now larger than any single entity, newsletter, podcast, or person to contain. It needs an internet-scale organization to achieve its goals. Therefore, the Bankless DAO will act as a coordination mechanism for a collection of participating media nodes.

Participants can range from individuals acting on their own behalf, or larger entities with employees and resources. Bankless DAO will coordinate them all in order to achieve its mission.

The Bankless program is a platform that blends money and tech insights to help members level up their open finance game weekly. With a combined daily newsletter, podcast, and community. Bankless provides insights and tactics to grow user personal wealth using crypto assets like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and DeFi.^[7]

Features available to Users

Features available to users every week includes:

• 5 actionable newsletters every week
• Practical tactics to level up your crypto money skills
• Long-term strategies to help users maximize returns & avoid pitfalls

Values

Bankless DAO has the following as their core values:

1. Education: The team learns from each other. They seek to become a trusted guide that empowers people all over the globe to adopt DeFi (Decentralized Finance) by sharing accurate, truthful, and objective information.
2. Integrity: The team operates transparently and builds trust through radically public discourse and financial auditability.
3. Decentralized Governance: Users put decision-making into the hands of the collective. They create legitimacy through an environment where the best ideas win.
4. Culture: The team rewards action and embrace risk. The team empowers their community to continually drive new initiatives by providing a space to self-organize and quickly move from idea to action.^[8]

What Bankless DAO Do

There are a few things Bankless DAO is uniquely positioned to do.^[9]

Media Network

Bankless DAO has its roots in media. The genesis team built the youtube channel, podcast, and newsletter. They built a media node in the churning crypto ecosystem. Bankless DAO inherits that mantle.

The collective wisdom of media tells the community that content is king. It is a fact that; the quality, consistency, and energy behind everything Ryan, David, and co. have done, had drawn the Bankless DAO community to where they are today.

Through the teamwork scaled to the Bankless movement. Bankless DAO can create the largest media network in all of DeFi which include:

• Guides on every topic, from getting started to complex trading strategies.
• A blog specific to tokenomics with another on culture. One dedicated newsletter tracking DeFi product releases and another on the latest research.

The degree of reach Bankless has and the network effects achieved by word of mouth puts Bankless DAO in a very advantageous position.

DeFi Products

Ryan and David have been pushing to get the BED index 11 on Index Coop - an investment vehicle made of $DPI, $ETH, and $BTC.

Bankless DAO can create a suite of products that leverages the community size and treasury.

Merch

Merch are shirts, stickers, SOCKS! While a Shopify store would be great, the team is also exploring other cooler means such as with NFTs. For instance: a proposal to kick-off a meme competition. Winners of this competition will have their memes minted as NFTs and put in the DAO’s museum which will increase the meme worth in the long run.

Bullish on $BANK

Media income, financial products, and merch provide diversified recurring revenue streams. DAOs are designed to function around an asset that supports the entire ecosystem.

What Bankless DAO can accomplish

By continually innovating on ways to make capital use more efficient, on-chain revenue streams, and investment into Bankless DAO future, $BANK will feel immense upwards pressure. Presently, $BANK has no value.

Bankless DAO can accomplish a lot. A few apparent ideas include:

1. Promoting our media network,
2. Financial products, and
3. Merch/NFTs

Tokenomics

BANK is the DAO’s native governance token which coordinates an activity and gets distributed to community members for active participation in this movement. Information about the BANK token is as follow:

• BANK on Etherscan
• Token Contract Address: 0x2d94aa3e47d9d5024503ca8491fce9a2fb4da198
• Name: Bankless Token
• Ticker: BANK
• Decimals: 18

Bankless wants to reach 1 billion people. So there will be 1 billion BANK at genesis. BANK is a valueless token that simply represents participation in the bankless community. By design, there is no sale and no investors.

BANK is a fair launch distribution. The only recipients of BANK at genesis are individual community participants. The only way to get BANK is to participate in the bankless community. And the Bankless DAO will determine what qualifies as participation through token vote.

Distribution of BANK

A retroactive allocation of BANK will go to those that have already participated in the bankless community. The rest will go to the Bankless DAO treasury. The genesis distribution is as given below:

• 30% Retroactive distribution (liquid)
• 30% Treasury distribution (liquid)
• 40% vesting Treasury distribution (vested linearly over 3-years)

At launch, the bankless community will have 100% ownership over the DAO.

Retroactive Distribution

The retroactive allocation will distribute 30% of the total BANK supply to Bankless community participants largely via verifiable on-chain actions. The snapshot for all eligible addresses was taken on May 4th, 2021 at 12am EST. This includes:

• 2020 Badge Holders — Fixed distribution for all 2020 badge holders. The Bankless badge is a POAP NFT that was claimable by 2020 Bankless members. Any Ethereum or xDAI address that held a 2020 badge on May 4, 2021 at 7am UTC time (12am PST) is eligible to claim BANK tokens.
• 2021 Badge Holders — Fixed distribution for all 2021 badge holders. The Bankless badge is a POAP NFT that was claimable by 2021 Bankless members Any Ethereum or xDAI address that held a 2021 badge on May 4, 2021 at 7am UTC time (12am PST) is eligible to claim BANK tokens.
• Gitcoin Grants — Any address that donated more than $0.95 to the Bankless Gitcoin Grant qualifies for the distribution pro-rata based on the amount donated.
• BAPs — Early adopters of rare Bankless merch (BAP0’s). If user owned or redeemed a BAP0 (Bankless Apparel Token) on or before May 1, 2021 at 12am UTC, the user ETH address is eligible to claim BANK tokens.
• Premium Members (off-chain) — Snapshot of Bankless Substack premium subscribers. This allocation will be distributed pro-rata based on "unique emails seen" as calculated by Substack on May 1st. The distribution will occur after 30 days of ETH address collecting. If users were a Bankless Premium Member on May 4, 2021 at 7am UTC time (12am PST), the users may be eligible to claim BANK tokens 30 days from the date pending the passage of the Genesis Proposal. This allocation would be distributed based on the number of Bankless newsletters users have viewed up to May 1st, 2021 as tracked by “unique emails seen” in Substack. If the Genesis Proposal passes, the collection of Premium Member Ethereum addresses would be completed over the next 30 days and BANK tokens would be claimable after that.

Recipients of the retroactive distribution will be able to claim their BANK for 90 days after the Genesis distribution. At the end of the 90 days, any unclaimed distribution will be returned to the community treasury.

ETH Address collection for Premium Subscribers

Given Premium Subscriber emails are maintained in an off-chain database, the allocation of BANK for Bankless Premium Subscribers will be deposited to a separate multi-sig and made available to recipients after Bankless DAO members collect Ethereum addresses from Premier subscribers during the 30 day period after launch.

Future BANK Issuance

BANK will include an on/off issuance switch of 2% per year of the total supply governed by BANK holders as an optional growth stimulus. All tokens from the issuance will accrue to the community treasury.

BANK holders gain control over the issuance switch after all token vesting schedules have been completed 36 months following the genesis distribution. The annual BANK issuance will be mintable by the multisig on May 4th every year, starting in May 2024. Issuance will be off at default.

How to Join the Bankless DAO at Genesis

If users have a Bankless Badge from 2020 or 2021, they can join the Bankless DAO at genesis. Users who have owned BAPs or given to Bankless Gitcoin grants in the past also have the ability to join at genesis. The steps are as follows:

1. New users can go to bankless.community website. Any user who has an Ethereum address that fits under the Retroactive Distribution eligibility criteria and holds a 2020 or 2021 badge is eligible!
2. Claim BANK tokens: If the user has an Ethereum address that meets the eligibility requirements then the user will go to the Bankless DAO website, connect its wallet using MetaMask or WalletConnect, and claim BANK participation tokens. BANK tokens are valueless tokens — they are only used for access to the DAO discord and to vote in DAO proposals.
3. Join the Discord: The Bankless DAO discord is where DAO members congregate to discuss the talents they can bring to the DAO as well as to coordinate around governance and proposals. This discord requires a specified amount of BANK tokens to access all the channels.
4. Share skills: Users tell the DAO how they can help it achieve its mission. When new users join the Bankless Discord, they are to go to the intros channel and share their skills and how they can contribute to the DAO. Users expect the DAO to need developers, planners, writers, content producers, analysts, meme artists, and community managers. The result of this is expected to be great beyond discription by the community.^[10][11]
5. Vote on Genesis Proposal: After claiming BANK and joining the discord users can vote in governance proposals. The first item for a vote is the Genesis Proposal which has been put forward by RSA and David Hoffman. Users are to read the proposal and vote YES or NO using SnapShot.

Community Treasury

The official address of the community treasury is Banklessvault.eth^[12]

The community treasury is responsible for allocating BANK to anything that aligns with the Bankless DAO mission and passes an on-chain vote by BANK holders. The goal of the DAO is to drive the adoption and awareness of bankless money systems. This could include allocating BANK to distribution campaigns called "Seasons" giving out grants to other media nodes, and more.

The treasury will initially be controlled by a 4 of 7 multisig composed of community members and launch team members. Here are the list of signers and their respective addresses:

This is intended to be a short-term solution. In the future, the DAO can explore future treasury management solutions that decentralize control over the multi-sig. High-level options include SafeSnap, Yam’s DAO House, and others.

BANK Seasons

BANK will operate in 1–3 month distribution campaigns called “seasons” with the goal of driving participation and functionality to the Bankless community.

Bankless Genesis

At genesis, the BANK token will provide:

• Access to the Bankless DAO Discord channel (35,000 BANK required).
• Ability to vote on Bankless governance proposals.

The Bankless DAO Discord is the foundational communication and coordination hub for the community. At launch, access will be permissioned only to wallets that hold 35,000 BANK. All governance votes will occur on SnapShot.^[13]

Bankless DAO Markets

The table below shows the Bankless DAO markets.^[14]

Bankless DAO’s liquidity pool

Bankless DAO’s liquidity pool is an 80/20 pool. This means that 80% of the pool is in BANK while 20% of the pool is in WETH.

How to provide liquidity to the Bankless 80/20 Pool

Balancer is a customizable liquidity protocol tackling DeFi's liquidity issue through its flexible pools.

In partnership with Balancer, Bankless DAO launched a 12-week liquidity mining program to showcase its potential. The program distributed 85,000 BANK and 480 BAL per week to liquidity providers.

With this program, Bankless DAO is supporting BPT tokens as access to the community Discord. To gain Level 1 access, user will need 4,200 BPT tokens. For Level 3, the threshold is 15,000 BPT!

Preparation

The pre-requisites is an understanding of Balancer + BANK & WETH.

For users to prepare for deposit, they need to calculate how much BANK and WETH they will want to contribute. Then the following will be highly important to note by the users:

1. Decide. Users determine how much BANK they want to deposit into the pool.
2. Evaluate. In this example, a user has ~5.6k BANK tokens which result in about $530USD. As a result, the user will need 1/4 of $530USD in WETH, coming out to ~$132USD in Ether.
3. Commit. Now the user needs to exchange for the right sum of WETH. This is 0.0313 WETH.
4. Execute your WETH swap. To do this, the user will need to go to the "Trade" tab and select the right token. In this case, users need ETH → WETH. Once they are ready, users confirmed transactions on MetaMask and obtain their WETH.

Join the Liquidity Pool

Now for users to join the liquidity pool! First, users will make sure they are in the right Balancer pool! once the users are aready with their BANK and WETH, the following simple steps are to be followed:

1. Check. Users ensure that they are on the "Best price" option and have the right amount of BANK and WETH in their wallet.
2. Approve. Users have to approve BANK and WETH tokens if it is their first time depositing. Click "Approve BANK" and/or "Approve WETH" which will prompt the users to confirm a transaction in MetaMask. There will be gas costs with this!
3. Invest. Once users have completed their approvals, the button will change to show "Invest...". Once again users will need to confirm a transaction in MetaMask.
4. Settle. Once it is done, the dashboard will change to show that the transaction is completed and the users have now joined the pool!
5. Verify. The users then go back to the main page at Balancer and will see that they have their investment listed there!

That is all! Now you can put your BANK tokens to work and contribute to the stability of Bankless DAO’s liquidity too.^[15]

Teams

A core team draws a salary from the Treasury. They are very much responsible to the success of Bankless DAO as per its mandate, mission, and vision. The core team consists of full-time workers – People that are likelier to work 80 hours a week than 40 for the DAO. Their presence extends to all three layers of the Talent Stack. They are voices in the community. They vote on everything. They are efficient and precise in their work, and are prone to getting their hands dirty with some hardcore Resource Layer contributions.^[16]

Governance Layer

The top of the stack is the governance layer. It’s where Bankless DAO votes with $BANK and signals its preferences as a collective whole. It’s the ultimate decision maker on how the Treasury spends its assets. The goal of the governance layer is to make sure that the orchestration layer is executing on the will of the DAO.

Orchestration Layer

The middle level concerns itself with coordination. It orchestrates DAO resources in efficient and precise ways, like an assembly line robot. It’s includes the business functions we see in the traditional corporate structure, bizdev, growth, marketing, development, finance, security, etc. Members of the orchestration layer are community leaders that operate in their specialized working groups. DAO members that have demonstrated long-term commitment, have strong a voice in the community, and have made their way to the front by way of merit.

Resource Layer

At the bottom layer is sourcing skillsets. These are the specialists. Groups of writers, creators, translators, developers, designers, and dozens more that make their services known to the broader DAO ecosystem. "Guilds" is the Bankless DAO jargon for members of the the resource layer. The end goal of the the bottom layer is a fluid marketplace that matches the DAO’s demand for talent to its community pool.

For now, members of this layer operate mostly on bounty boards - Public places for specialists to take on paid work on directed tasks.

The Bankless DAO teams include:

1. Ryan Sean Adams (Founder)
2. David Hoffman (Founder)
3. Lucas Campbell
4. Michael Wong
5. Mariano Conti
6. James Montgomery
7. David Mihal
8. Nate Welch
9. Reuben Bramanathan

Ryan Sean Adams (Founder)

Ryan Sean Adams is an entrepreneur and crypto investor who’s slowly breaking with his bank. He’s a writer, podcaster, and open finance advocate with a mission to help onboard the first billion people to crypto. Bankless is the program he wished he had when he started in crypto. Ryan is also the founder of Mythos Capital. He is active on his Twitter handle.^[17]

It is stated on Ryan Sean Adams’s LinkedIn profile that:

He graduated from Brock University with honors with a BA in Business Administration. From May 2003 to March 2009, Adams served as the Vice President & Principal of Vivus Software – a regional technology consulting and human capital management company. From March 2009 to February 2010, Adams served as the CEO of Intalgent – system development and management organization. From February 2010 to February 2014, Adams held the position of Vice President of Sales at healthcare startup Meddius. From March 2014 to November 2017, Adams worked at healthcare improvement company Premier Inc as Senior Director, Foundations, and as Vice President, Integrated Platform & Analytics.

David Hoffman (Co-Founder)

David Hoffman is a pioneer of crypto investment thesis and wrote the defining investment thesis for ETH. David achieved financial independence before the age of 30 and holds 99% of his wealth outside of Banks and inside of Ethereum, and is focused on leading the way for others to do the same. He is the Bankless Nation Founding Father & The Etherean at POV-Crypto Pod. He is very active on his Twitter handle.^[18]

It is stated on David Hoffman’s LinkedIn profile that:

He graduated from Chapman University with a BA in Psychology in 2015. From May to August 2018, Hoffman served as a Blockchain Researcher at blockchain advisory company New Alchemy. Hoffman performed blockchain research at Bunker Capital from August 2018 to June 2019. From November 2018 to September 2020, Hoffman served as Chief of Operations at RealT – a platform for tokenizing real estate.^[19]