About

Venture DAO is a crypto-focused organization that operates as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The company manages a fund that is collectively managed by a diverse group of individuals, including founders, builders, engineers, community builders, product people, and investors. Venture DAO is supported by various firms and has made open source contributions to the crypto community.

History

MetaCartel began in 2018 as a technical working group to solve cryptoeconomic problems around meta transactions, the ability to interact with dApps without needing to use ETH. A key breakthrough was discovered and led to the creation of the Gas Station Network which was eventually spun out from the project. Afterwards, MetaCartel became an ecosystem grant fund to drive experimentation around use-cases for the Ethereum application layer. They garnered support from over 800 community members raising 1,100 ETH which was deployed to a variety of projects. While relatively successful, there were questions around the original MetaCartel's sustainability as it was funded through the goodwill of its members who were unable to participate in the upside of the funded projects' success. To create a more sustainable model, the DAO had to evolve into a venture capital fund where investments could be made which could produce returns for investors. With that in mind, MetaCartel Ventures was created as a Delaware Limited Liability Company (LLC) tightly coupled with Moloch DAO v2 smart contracts and incubated by SpankHouse to further the development of the Ethereum application layer.

The original members consist of people with deep ties in the Ethereum community as founders and investors. They will be contributing initial capital and will act as managers of the fund to source, diligence, propose and vote on investments. Known as Mages, these members are required to continually participate in managerial responsibilities or risk being expelled to the lower level for inactivity. The lower tier are known as Goblins and can contribute capital without exercising managerial rights. They can be thought of as Limited Partners (LP) in the fund while Mages are akin General Partners (GP), and both are free to move between the two groups. A third group known as Summoners are not necessarily members of the DAO but perform legal, financial and coordination tasks supervised by mages and paid through negotiable fees.