As the founder of the community and educational group Cryptocurrency NZ, Christchurch-based university student Harry Satoshi is a well-known figure in the Web3 community.
His passion for all things crypto also led him to float the idea of turning the University of Canterbury’s Crypto Society club (CryptoSOC) into a fully-fledged decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), with members voting on how to allocate the clubs resources and using a blockchain-based system to record all of the club’s activities and coordination.
But it hasn’t been a smooth transition pioneering a DAO from within the highly centralised university club system. Web3NZ caught up with Harry Satoshi to talk about his vision for the CryptoSOC DAO, progress to date, and where he sees it going beyond his time at the university.
Harry Satoshi (left) with members of the CryptoSOC club at the University of Canterbury.
You’ve become a key organiser of crypto-related online communities in New Zealand. What was the impetus for starting Cryptocurrency NZ?
I’m a big fan of decentralised ideology. I worked for EasyCrypto when I was aged 18 - 20. My favourite part was the community and mass adoption stuff, which inspired me to launch Cryptocurrency NZ. We went about creating and acquiring ownership of a lot of the big crypto groups on Reddit, Discord and Facebook in New Zealand.
We are trying to become some sort of Large Hadron Collider that catalyses connection, collaboration, friendship and enterprise in the NZ crypto space, by shoving a bunch of people with similar interests under the same roof, fueling them with beer and food, sponsored by all the big crypto and blockchain players in New Zealand.
We run 11 meetups per month, so around 120 events per year. We’re basically just trying to get people talking about crypto, talking about blockchain, talking about decentralised technologies. After the likes of LocalBitcoins and LocalCryptos went down as a result of the regulatory pressure on the peer-to-peer movement, I created the New Zealand P2P Crypto Marketplace. This is basically a big NZ-only Discord server, an open forum for people to discuss buying and selling crypto in a peer-to-peer fashion.
What led to you setting up a DAO at the University of Canterbury?
I’m a fourth year Bachelor of Commerce student there studying entrepreneurship & strategy, human resource management, and innovation. There’s a big club scene at the University of Canterbury, around 150 clubs. I got involved with the Cryptocurrency Society (CryptoSOC) club about five years ago, then became president of it and basically rebuilt the club from the ground up. It was during a bear crypto market, so there wasn’t much interest.
But we started putting up posters around campus to drum up interest and built a crack team of 6 - 7 contributors. At the end of last year’s AGM for the crypto club, I made this proposition to the club members: hey, do you guys want to become a DAO? It would be on-chain, decentralised, using crypto, and automated so I didn’t have to be there to sign everything off. The members agreed with the ethos. At the start of 2024 we became Oceania’s first university club DAO, UC CryptoSOC DAO.
It’s been an awesome experience. I’ve never seen people so driven to take the initiative and actually do things without feeling like they have to ask someone for permission. It’s a cool concept, everyone having equal ownership and control over coordination and ability to call shots in a decentralised fashion.
What was involved in setting up CryptoSOC as a DAO?
First, we wrote a constitution together, agreeing on the rules and goals of the organisation. We're really in sandbox mode on the technology side of things at the moment. We’ve built the DAO using DAOhaus, pretty much off the shelf, based on Optimism, a layer 2 token and scaling solution based on Ethereum.
Our lead developer Jake Thacker has tinkered away with customisation pushing adjustments forward as proposals that we can all vote on. We’re also still working on a whitepaper which outlines club processes.
I think Ethereum is definitely the go-to platform for DAOs and smart contract development. All the big DAOs build on Ethereum. It’s just that the fees can be ridiculous, which is why we went for a layer 2 solution.
How does the DAO operate?
We have around 50 members and operate on Discord, where we discuss things that we want to do as a club. The process for making proposals and the voting mechanism is done via the Daohaus platform. We’re planning to integrate the voting and proposal alert function directly into Discord for a smoother member experience. As members we decide what areas of the project we want to work on, for example core member Jayden Hunt takes care of event management and general coordination. Tim Blewden takes care of the socials. Thomas russ keeps us powered with fresh ideas.
We’ve put up 22 proposals so far, ranging from settling on the rules of the DAO, how we store our central treasury funds, to accepting sponsorship agreements from the likes of Web3NZ, and whether to migrate from Messenger to Discord. We require a set amount of people from the membership to vote on a proposal that is put up before a decision can be made. If it’s on-chain, it self-executes, and if it’s a signal type proposal, the members carry out the will of the DAO themselves.
We have sponsorship money available to spend on things. No members have put any of their own funds into the DAO at this point. As a collective we can propose how those funds are spent, but no one individual can just cash out. You can’t rage quit and take the funds with you, the voting token is separate from the assets of the DAO.
How has the DAO gone down with the university?
We took the ‘don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness approach’, as this is the crypto world after all.
The University of Canterbury Student Association oversees affiliated university clubs. When we revealed we had become a DAO, they contested our club affiliation and our access to university facilities. That’s significant as affiliated clubs can use theatres and event rooms free of charge and get other benefits.
The problem was that they’d never heard of a DAO before, and in fairness, we didn’t do the best job of informing them beforehand. In the UCSA policy for clubs, it actually says that you've got to have a hierarchical power structure with a president, a vice president and an executive team. We were the opposite of that. It was an understandable reaction.
We had a big meeting with USCA, during which we explained what DAOs are and how they work. It became clear that our DAO is actually more aligned with UCSA policies than the other clubs, because their policy is all about fairness, equity, transparency and inclusion. It’s the first time it’s been done, so the conversation around the table was fresh for everyone. UCSA now better understands what we are trying to achieve and are trying to rework their policy and perspective to accommodate us. That process is ongoing. We had the constitution denied for a second time due to misinterpretations we had at the meeting and the recently submitted whitepaper. We agreed that we needed a USCA representative for the DAO, but the nature of DAOs is that this representative would only have soft power and no hard power. This is the nature of decentralised governance.
We are technically not an official affiliated university club at the moment, until they have approved our constitution/whitepaper. This is sort of what we expected launching a DAO within a centralised system.
What is the legal status of CryptoSOC DAO?
We are not an incorporated society. We're not even affiliated with the university at the current time. So we have no legal status at the moment. If and when we are affiliated with the university, we need to adhere to its policies. I don’t believe the university is liable for anything we do, and let’s face it, we aren’t trying to do anything too radical, just use the DAO structure to organise our club.
Who owns the assets of CryptoSOC, including the sponsorship dollars that you’ve secured?
To be honest, we are still trying to figure this out. The DAO has a ‘no cash out system’. If you've got voting tokens as a member, you can't just take out the central treasury assets. We have been fortunate to receive sponsorship from the likes of EasyCrypto, Binance, BlockchainNZ and Web3NZ. Sponsorship money goes into the central treasury, and then we vote on how that's managed. The DAO ultimately owns the assets.
What will you spend the sponsorship dollars on?
The name of the game is to provide a platform for university students to learn about cryptocurrency. It involves presentations from us and bringing in industry leaders - Crypto 101, decentralised finance, blockchain basics, shitcoin investing, that sort of thing, and hosting general social events on campus.
We've got a pretty ambitious event lineup for the year that's bringing in speakers from all sorts of organisations, as many as we can really from across New Zealand.
What’s the future of CryptoSOC DAO
Ideally, we confirm its status as an affiliated club. I will finish my degree at the end of this year. With this infrastructure in place, it's pretty set that this organisation will survive the long haul, and according to UCSA, only 50% of the members actually have to be students. It would be cool to connect with and assist other crypto university DAOs around New Zealand, and participate more closely with Cryptocurrency NZ when that becomes its own DAO. These are early days here in the New Zealand cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Other than being crypto enthusiasts, what’s the appeal in being a member of CryptoSOC?
Every student wants to escape the rat race and make something of themselves and not do the nine-to-five thing. Our club is as much about entrepreneurialism and liberating yourself, as it is about technology and crypto.
While everyone likes the idea of having all these roles on their CV, we see people in our own ranks wanting to equalise that a bit more, and not be the guy who is calling all the shots. Putting it on the blockchain is just the clear-cut path forward. We are only of only a handful of DAOs in New Zealand, hopefully we can inspire others that it’s an approach worth pursuing for whatever type of organisation they are involved in. Reference Links: Sponsorship agreement acceptance written on chain, and the onchain vote that took place to accept web3nz funding and the ETH acquisition.
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Article written by Peter Griffin.