On March 3rd OpenChat, a chat application similar to Telegram (but with some cool crypto-enabled features), completed its decentralization sale. The result is that a DAO now owns and controls the entire OpenChat application; every single line of code and app tooling. This is historic because it’s the first Internet Computer SNS-launched application and because of the scale of OpenChat, which has thousands of daily active users. It’s also historic because, while other chains’ applications call themselves decentralized, true decentralization requires all aspects of the app to be on-chain, which is only possible on the Internet Computer.
This is a wonderful accomplishment for the engineers at OpenChat and DFINITY and its success is captured in the fact that the decentralization sale met its maximum goal of 1 million ICP ($5,500,000) for 25% of token supply in less than 6 hours(!). It proves that even in this bear market there is demand from app users to participate in decentralization sales. Additional apps built on the Internet Computer will no doubt be preparing themselves for their own decentralization sales.
The Great Social Experiment
For me, I’m mostly interested in what I believe will be an incredible social and “business” experiment, namely what happens when the users of a product are also the owners of the product. I’ve heard of employee-owned companies before, but I’ve never heard of an app in which its users have the option to participate in governance over every aspect of the application, including all code changes, the product roadmap and control over the treasury. I’m interested in this because it seems to me to be the perfect marketing tool… it has the potential to harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing and put it on steroids', perfectly aligning the interests of the application’s users and its controllers, because they are close to being one-in-the-same.
Where I live it seems like every 10th car I see on the streets is a Tesla. It doesn’t shock me that Tesla became the highest valued car manufacturer in a matter of a decade, but it does shock me that they did so with almost no advertising. They also had to re-invent the distribution model, foregoing the salesperson at the dealership and instead needing to educate its potential customers through an online presence only. If you had asked anyone in 2013 whether a new car manufacturer could capture any market share without a robust dealership network and with almost no advertising budget, they would have probably given the most confident “no” they had ever given. Yet here we are with Tesla and its all thanks to word-of-mouth marketing.
Tesla tapped into word-of-mouth marketing in a way that almost no company has before. They built incredible cars that caught the attention of other drivers on the road and were so feature-rich that their customer’s loved to brag about them. The nature result was selling a car was also putting the equivalent of a Telsa salesperson on the road. I believe OpenChat, and the dapps that follow in its footsteps, have similar potential in that their users are also highly incentivized to evangelicalize and market their applications as the greater the number of users of a dapp, the greater utility the dapp’s token has. OpenChat, as a communication tool which naturally has network effects, seems particularly well-suited for this type of potential growth.
And this isn’t even considering the fact that the users of these dapps are also now the product managers… what better way to align product design and roadmap with user desires than making the users the product managers?
I know I’ll be watching the progress of the OpenChat DAO, and those that follow in their footstep, to see if perhaps we are on the eve of a complete rethink of how “businesses” operate.
Let me know your thoughts below.
Kyle
To be honest I some sceptic for DAO at all. I don't believe that the community can appreciate good ideas. Progress is driven by visionaries and professionals.
But I have some $CHAT tokens anyway :-).