CityDAO: Born of Ethereum and stuck in Wyoming

On July 1, 2021, the U.S. state of Wyoming declared local law announcing that DAOs would be recognized here as Limited Liability Companies (LLCs). The day after the news broke, Scott, one of the founders of the AirGarage online parking station (a16z joint venture), took the opportunity and tweeted to announce the start of the CityDAO project. According to the description, CityDAO wants to "create the city of the future of Ethereum through the tokenization of land, property and governance rights."

Over the next month, they registered their business offline and started raising community funds in the form of NFTs on public sale. The official CityDAO website lists 3 different CitizenNFT. The first is the regular model, the price is 0.25 ETH, the total equipment is 10,000, the second is Citizen, the total equipment is 50, the lowest price is 10 ETH. The third is the first audience, with a total inventory of 1 and a final sale price of 6.52 ETH. Among them, the first Citizen went on sale on August 8 and 50 NFT Citizen were also released on August 11. By August 25, they had received approximately $ 250,000 in community funding and needed to contact a real estate agent to start buying land.

According to CityDAO data from Mirror and Wiki, as of September 28, they owned 40 acres (approximately 161,874 m²) of land in Wyoming, United States. This country is now flagged as CityDAO and even marked on Google Maps for anyone to see.

Good brand: a new city based on Ethereum

A few years ago, people tried various blockchain and town planning technologies, but most did not join off-chain organizations, and more and more were digitized. For example, he is the first to create a city like CityDAO by purchasing land like blockchain invoice, blockchain housing certificate chain, city blockchain token, NFT city art, etc. The administrator also promised that more of these facilities would be sold in the future and that these facilities would be designed and managed in accordance with the DAO and ultimately developed into a new city based on Ethereum.

This recent failure has also sparked interest in CityDAO, including Vitalik. V God wrote an article in November praising their initiative could bring "a new era of cryptocurrency city" with greater confidence, transparency and independence in city governance on several occasions, and that they would be a NFT citizen. .After the V God article was presented to CityDAO never to be seen again, those who had not sold public NFTs in the past were quickly sold and the community also received $ 8.5 million in funding. of dollars.

stuck in wyoming

However, the community has yet to have a clear idea of ​​how to repel the insurgents. Throughout the month of November, the majority of the content community has focused on media coverage and partnerships with organizations such as BanklessDAO. How to build a new city? It seems that we are still a long way from solving this problem.

There are geographic factors for this. On the one hand, good Wyoming laws forced the design and implementation of the CityDAO project.But, this time it also shut down CityDAO from that region. Wyoming, "America's least populous and disaster-free state," has no priority in improving the outside world of food and tourism.

There are many mountains, valleys, and grasslands in Huaizhou, and the lower one is desert. Due to the bouldering of the Rocky Mountains, the climate here is dry. Annual precipitation is 37 mm and snowfall in the north is 76 mm. The temperature is not suitable for living only in August, and it snows every other month. Currently, there are more than 50 provinces in the United States, and Huaizhou ranks 50th in the industry. With this physical technology, it is no surprise that the Huaizhou government has chosen to hold the Web3.0 world in order to seek market improvement. The cost of the initial investment in city water supply, district heating, power grids, roads and other construction projects is very heavy for CityDAO and others who want to build a new city first. .

Management issues

But on the one hand, the decision of CityDAO itself is also for a certain responsibility in the face of the current situation. One thing that needs to be done is that CityDAO itself is not a righteous administration. They have a "core group" which is essential for development and promotion, and they are slowly regaining their authority in the community. The community itself has also established a model of two-tier government between the US Senate and the House of Representatives. Obtaining citizenship is only one step, and 99 people will vote to create an “Investor DAO”. In most cases, important decisions are made by all members of the community, then completed by the DAO business community, and community funds can be used to start businesses.

While these processes can lead to the benefits of the project itself, you run into even bigger problems if the community delays decision making. Initially, the communities wanted to buy land that was easy to access and develop. During the consultation, they looked at over 10 applications including Bitcoin mining, wind farm construction, RV and campground construction, housing, farm leasing, and more. Together, the final information they provide is:

$ 50,000 to $ 150,000

3-100 daims

Low maintenance, easy to install and use for free

Less than an hour from the airport

Therefore, the first land I found when searching for land was very dry land with less than 10 inches of rainfall per year, also a dry area of ​​Huaizhou, and the poorest land we decide is . Really only a well, but satellite images show it was just a dumping ground.

In October, members of the community also asked for a house in Wyoming. However, they have no idea how to use the land. Projects that make members taste good usually require a lot of investment, and they end up with around 3,000 ETH on the ranch.

Decentralization: the difference between a virtual city and a physical city

Now in the world of Web3.0 there are many virtual real estate projects and people have created many virtual cities here.

Ferre Tower, Colosseum or Lower Manhattan are all built in the virtual world, and many places in the virtual city. But these companies rarely struggle to scale like CityDAO.

What is the difference? Meanwhile, building a city online is easy. Plans made from this material are of a similar or identical nature, do not require construction, and the surrounding area does not affect the building itself. Few people can build a big house.

However, in the real world, as I said before, the impact of the surrounding area cannot be ignored. Water and temperature not only affect the quality of life, but also affect the cost of future home repairs, a place in waste means high transportation costs. , regardless of the construction materials and operations required for the construction of the city. It all takes a real investment, but getting land is the easiest and cheapest step. for

Improvement and post-urban maintenance are also important. Blueprints and buildings will still exist unless you remove their data from the virtual world. But once you make the city truly uninhabited, it will immediately explode. For example, the former Soviet Union established a city in Siberia and in the Arctic Circle. When the country crumbles and the people leave, in an instant they return to the land of polar bears and snow.

Another place that can be used as a warning is the building experiment called "New Babylon". for

New Babylon City (NeoBabylon) was a "city of the future" designed by artist Constant Nieuwenhuys from 1956 to 1974. Influenced by the ideology of "Situationalism International", Newvenhuis hopes to liberate people from modern manufacturing and urbanization boring and disciplined in place. stay free and creative. He created this "new town" to establish independence, "research" and "growth" as a set of steel-reinforced buildings, following the camps where the gypsies lived. . Stakes ".

It's beautiful, free, happy, decentralized, it sounds like a new city, everything is familiar. However, the bragging project never really worked out, and some of the work and artists that took inspiration from it were canceled after a few years, and so it became a campsite for the homeless and poorly maintained. In a sense, the inspiration of the Gypsies is finally coming back to them. I recently saw people trying to rebuild a Babylon project in Decentraland, they were creating beautiful works of art and were planning to build an entire city in the last six months. for

What can CityDAO do?

If I go back to CityDAO, is there a way to move this project forward without being in the data?

In fact, the birth of a city was never motivated by external investment, architecture is only an outer layer, and perhaps the most important thing is intelligence. Examples include America's "Area 51", where legends surrounding foreigners originated in its own industrial economy, and small towns were visited by foreigners. CityDAO will also use the land in some form first and house some of the culture here, like offline crypto art auctions or crypto art festivals. Maybe they did. for

On the other hand, it is necessary to optimize the decision of the DAO itself. CityDAO uses offline capabilities and the realization of projects in its power. However, the delay in decision making also becomes an impact on the process. Communities need to understand faster than they need to now, and the “key team” for this concept will continue to exist for the long term. Moreover, this time CityDAO was born with the legal backing of the government, which is a central government agency, and it was considered that such appropriate work would be necessary in the future.

In short, we hope to buy all the new cities that can make world skylines as soon as possible, new cities where the earth has been realized and ruled by humans.