What Does Web3 Mean (For My Practice?), with Justine Humenansky

Announcer 1  (00:03):

Welcome to the Lawyerist podcast, a series of discussions with entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market lawyers, supports attorneys, building client centered, and future-oriented small law firms through community content and coaching both online and through the lawyers lab. And now from the team that brought you the small firm roadmap and your podcast host,

Ashley  (00:35):

Hi, I’m Ashley Steckler

Stephanie (00:36):

And I’m Stephanie Everett. And this is episode 379 of the Lawyerist podcast. Part of the legal talk network today, Zach is talking with Justine Humenanski about web three DAOs and NFTs. What the heck are they? And should you even care?

Ashley  (00:53):

Today’s podcast is brought to you by MyCase, LawPay and Posh virtual receptionists. We wouldn’t be able to do this show without their support. So stay tuned and we’ll tell you more about them later on.

Stephanie (01:03):

So Ashley, we told our audience a few weeks ago that we have just completed basically a month with like a third of our team on an extended leave for various great reasons. So today we thought we’d circle back and kind of talk about what we learned from that experience and how happy we are have them back.

Ashley  (01:23):

<laugh> yes, I’m very excited to have everyone back have a little bit more normalcy. We actually had probably six weeks. We’re going on six weeks of multiple trips, leaves, vacations for various reasons. All of which we planned our teams have looked a live little bit sparse. It’ll be really nice to have everyone back for sure. It’s coming up soon.

Stephanie (01:47):

Yeah,

Ashley  (01:48):

I think we had a lot of takeaways.

Stephanie (01:51):

Yeah. And I mean, ultimately while it was at times, you know, there was a little bit more on our plate. Like I’d like to think it wasn’t too bad. We tried to do as much work ahead of time, as we could, like knowing we had deadlines coming up. So like work that would normally get done in April was already done and just waiting for us. So that was nice. But I think for me, my biggest takeaway is the importance of what I’m gonna call the handoff document. You know, that when that person leaves really being very clear and documenting, here’s where my project are. This is what I need you to do while I’m gone. You know, this is what still needs to be done. Like there’s just a lot that happens in that transition. And while the person has done a great job to get ready for the, their leave, it becomes super important that everybody else who’s left knows where all those things stand and, and what they need to do to pick up and carry it forward.

Ashley  (02:44):

Yeah, absolutely. I think the handoff document is a nice way to just have everyone be able to say, here’s where it is. Here’s what I’m gonna pick up here are the things that need to be done. Right. We had a lot of batching, which was really awesome. We have password managers and project management systems. We have systems documentation, you know, there’s a lot of things that we do prior to someone leaving that we certainly were doing in this six weeks of various people being out, but you can have up to date and you can reassign project system tasks. Right. We make sure that there aren’t things on our plate that become overdue when we’re out, you can have all of your passwords shared to the appropriate people, you know, checking email or making sure that different account access is there. And you can have in the system, all of the things up to date so that people can jump in, but a handoff document is so handy because it’s almost like a, a memo of like, here’s where I am so that people can refer back.

Stephanie (03:56):

Yeah. And so our team members did that and maybe there’s even some lessons of what should be in that document because sometimes it was super helpful and super clear. And other times maybe, you know, could have been a little bit more clear in certain areas. And so it’s really helpful to also think through, you know, what needs to be in this document. And I know for us, you know, one person and put like, these are the things I do on a daily basis and here’s, who’s gonna be doing them moving forward. This is what I do weekly. These are some big projects I have going on here are random things I do that nobody thinks about. You know, it was super helpful though, to kind of see it in that way.

Ashley  (04:36):

Yeah. Absolutely. Here are important dates that are gonna happen when I’m out, just so that everyone has kind of that high level view of what’s happening. I think another thing that’s important is to have the people that you’re handing stuff off to look at it with you so that you can ask ahead of time, okay, what is this piece? And if I get stuck here, you know, you say that, so, and so’s gonna be handling it, just kind of walk through it together. So that you’re both on the same page. Not that you leave it as a document for them to see, you know, Monday morning.

Stephanie (05:13):

Yeah. And then I think my third piece of advice, if we kind of broke that up into two pieces would be as you’re handing projects off for work off, while you’re gonna be gone to help the person who’s receiving it, understand the priorities mm-hmm <affirmative> because you’re basically asking someone else to do two jobs. And so inevitably, right. Like if you just take two people’s jobs and put them together on one, like that is a lot of work and more work than they would normally do, even if you’ve batched work and kind of tried to get, you know, ahead of the game. And so I think it, where I saw, you know, an opportunity for us to do better in the future was sometimes the person who was taking on that new role didn’t understand or had a hard time seeing, like, is this a high priority?

Stephanie (05:58):

And being able to say like, yes, do not let this ball drop. If you do like this thing over here, that that actually does take up a good bit of my time really doesn’t matter. And if it’s still a mess when I get back, okay, we can fix that. But this other thing is super important to the business and you cannot let it drop and it has to be done. And sometimes, you know, it’s hard for new people stepping into a role to really be able to kind of come in and understand that. And so that was my job. A lot of the times, like sort of as the leader of the team, I found myself over the past couple weeks kind of flying in or what’s what would be the right term, like parachuting in and helping that person like triage and be like, you know what? Yep. We can just hold off on that. Not important, or let me reassign that because that’s easy to do or actually let me just do it because I can do it in five minutes and you’ve never looked at it before and helping get people so that they had a manageable amount on their plate with the people being out.

Ashley  (06:53):

Yeah, absolutely. I saw that coming up too. And that was something that I’ve been thinking about as, as we’ve had people out helping each person and the team decide what are my priorities on my own plate of the things I do every day, the projects I have coming up and how do I merge that together with the things that I’m taking on from someone else? It was interesting. I think we did well, I’m actually looking forward to the next time that we have a convergence of multiple trips and leaves and other things, because we have a lot of retrospectives. I know you and I have been keeping a list of like, this is a minor thing, but we don’t need to do that again. And so let’s have it on the list and make sure that next time we, we capture that.

Stephanie (07:36):

Yeah. So if you find yourself with a lot of your team out at the same time, don’t panic, you two can survive it, but you do have to be intentional about it, for sure. Like we, and we knew it was coming for months. And so we had done a lot of planning up to leading up to it, but I agree. I think, I think the overall, the team did a great job, but I am also very excited to have everybody back.

Ashley  (07:58):

Agreed, agreed. Now here’s Zach’s conversation with Justine.

Justine (08:03):

Hi, I’m Justine Humenansky. I currently lead Dow strategy, business development and meta governance at a series, a startup called rabbit hole and rabbit hole is guiding users through web three, helping them, how to use protocols and become contributors prior to rabbit hole. I was a venture capital investor at a fund called playground global. I did my MBA at UC Berkeley where I focused on crypto since early 2017. Prior to that did my CFA was an equity research analyst at Berkeley’s. And prior to that, I was a professional ballerina.

Zack (08:42):

So you really haven’t, haven’t done much in your life, Justine, you know, <laugh> um, the professional ballerina

Justine (08:48):

I bored easily.

Zack (08:49):

Yes. And that’s what it, that’s what it sounds like the professional route ballerina comes outta nowhere at the end of that, but, but that’s, that’s fantastic. Um, it sounds like you’re, you know, dedicated to your tasks, Justine, thanks for being with me. I really appreciate it. And all joking aside, you obviously know a lot about web three and Dows and NFTs and, and that area. And that’s what I kind of want to talk about today because there’s a lot of people in our audience who are interested in that, but it is a, it’s a murky, cloudy, opaque sort of area for a lot of us because you know, quite frankly, many of us don’t understand web two and how the internet works now. Yeah. So I guess starting there might be, might be helpful is helping us understand kind of what we mean by web three. When we talk about that.

Justine (09:39):

Got it. Yeah, this is actually, so when I worked at Barclays as equity research, I research analyst, I covered large cap internet, which basically was all the big, iconic web two platforms. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And that’s why I got interested in crypto because when I heard about Ethereum understood, this was not just a technology that could be used for monetary applications like Bitcoin, but that it was more of this like infrastructure layer that you could build applications on mm-hmm <affirmative>. And some of the characteristics of it could help us address some of the downsides of web two. So I’ll back up and explain web web one is basically like the original internet kind of like the protocol levels. It was basically read like you read access, you could yep. Read information that was hosted on websites. OK. Web two was basically when it became read and write access.

Justine (10:30):

So you could start posting content to say Facebook or reviews on trip advisors, something, but the user could start to interact with the content and post their own content. Okay. A lot of those platforms kind of were the pioneers were things like eCommerce or search or social networks, et cetera. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> some of the downsides of the way web two has developed. There was no native identity layer incorporated into web two Uhhuh <affirmative>. I won’t get into like the reasons for that. But what that caused was that each application that you use in web two, you need to kind of establish your identity separately with, um, so I have an account with face and I have a Gmail account that Google uses and I have a different account for Netflix and different account for Amazon Uhhuh. And then the business model that was kind of developed around that became very focused on monetizing, basically that user’s identity within your platform.

Justine (11:35):

So Facebook has a whole list of data mm-hmm <affirmative> and characteristics that are attached to your like Facebook login. And they use that to help advertisers, target certain types of users. And so it’s, it’s Facebook and the, a advertisers mm-hmm, <affirmative> that kind of benefit from this system, but not, not really the user, um, that’s interacting with these products or, or contributing content. And then also, because you have these individual identity silos, basically the tendency is for monopoly is more or less <laugh> to develop because you get very strong network effects act, then you can’t access anything outside of that system. So that’s like a general summary of like some of the downsides of, um, how web two developed mm-hmm, <affirmative> the concept of what web three basically expands upon the evolution of the internet to add ownership. So it’s read access, right access. And then you can basically, you have ownership over digitally native items and you have just, these it’s built on more open networks mm-hmm <affirmative> and because they’re open, there is no, there are no silos of identity or data, et cetera.

Justine (12:48):

And so the system should develop in a much more open way where the user is kind of at, at the center, right. As opposed to these platforms being at the center and the user being, supporting those platforms in a way that is extractive to the user. So, okay. Web three is this concept that you can own digital items that that’s all built in this like open network and that the, the user is much more at the center of it, or kind of like in control of their experience across all these applications, because there are no like walls around them.

Zack (13:23):

Okay. And so kind of to extrapolate through there, the reason that the user is at the center in something of web three is that these identities are kind of kept in a wallet. Your identity is your own, and you’re using that to connect to these websites or these applications. Exactly. And then that allows you to say, okay, well, I’m Zach Glazer over here. And I’m also that same Zack Glazer who has the sames stuff with him over here on this website. And I have control of my stuff behind me. Is that kind of a, a way of dumbing it down for me

Justine (14:04):

Ex exactly. Yeah. So, right. So everything’s kind of tied to an address that’s on the blockchain, all your transactions that take place mm-hmm <affirmative> across applications are also record on the blockchain and tied to that address. And the way that this all works is that basically anybody can go to that address and see the different transactions that are tied to it. So it’s tied to the address, which is on an open database, more or less on a transparent blockchain. And so any application can look at it, but no one application actually owns that information.

Zack (14:35):

Okay. So one of the, the examples I like to kind of use in my head here is if I’m a songwriter, let’s say, and I write a particular song, I record the song and I have that asset connected with my identity. I can then take that asset to a platform and let that platform use that asset. But it’s still my asset as opposed to posting a video of me singing that song on Facebook. And then it becomes Facebook’s asset

Justine (15:07):

That’s right. You would, I mean, there are other reasons you might wanna do that, like to love a different platforms, distribution, et cetera. Mm-hmm <affirmative> but yeah, the owner, the ownership of these things will always tie back to that wallet address. OK. And these assets are portable and again, it’s like the user that’s in control of their portability and where they live at any given time.

Zack (15:26):

Okay. So one of the, the places that I go with this is that now we’ve got a way of kind of keeping track of a person outside of these individual aggregators, I, I guess, and so we can kind of create a broader identity, create a mm-hmm <affirmative> more robust identity for ourselves on the, on the internet. And I say that with a lilt at the end as a question <laugh>, um, my excitement, I guess, in this type of platform is the ability to create communities with this mm-hmm <affirmative>. So with web two social networks, like Facebook TikTok, LinkedIn for that matter are a place where we interact. It’s a place where we can read edits, but it is a place where we don’t have a lot of control over. We don’t have a lot of autonomy and a lot of control over our own information that we put on there. Web three is allowing whether it does it or not, but, but has the potential to allow for that type of thing to change fundamentally, right?

Justine (16:32):

Yeah. <affirmative> yeah. So in web two, yeah. Social networks was a huge innovation that kind of came out of web two mm-hmm <affirmative> and a lot of the way those networks like developed over time or that the connections became, you know, kind of as platform scaled, the connections became less and less relevant and, or like strong. So you would just be connected to these people that you had very weak relationships with and actuality, and it became very easy to like posts or accept a, a request on LinkedIn, et cetera. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that all the activity that was kind of happening on these social networks didn’t mean that much like the weight of a Facebook, like is very low in terms of actually indicating how much you like that thing or that idea, or how much you would actually take steps to act on that mm-hmm <affirmative> in real life, which is what the advertisers primarily care about.

Justine (17:26):

So web three is different because again, it’s kind of tied to these on chain transac and ownership of, of things, and that can be individual ownership or collective ownership mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so kind of every action connection, um, that you make in web three has more weight to it or meaning to it. So for example, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I think that Dows which stands for decentralized autonomous organization and is basically a digitally native way for people to coordinate, to accomplish any given and goal really mm-hmm <affirmative> look very much like the web three version of social networks, uh, where it’s people coming together. But the differences are that there’s usually collective ownership. So everybody that belongs to a Dow has contributed some assets to that Dow that will be used to accomplish whatever goal that Dow is trying to accomplish. So again, that’s kind of a higher, you know, who, if you choose to join a do, that’s a higher kind of barrier or bar than it is to connect with somebody like on LinkedIn, because you you’re kind of you’re owning stuff together. You need to make decisions together. You need to accomplish this goal together. Mm-hmm

Zack (18:44):

<affirmative>. And so these organizations, they’re more of a commun than a social network, you know, like, yes, I can have a Facebook group. Yes. I can have people that I think are my close friends in Facebook or something like that. But these Dows inherently because people have skin in the game inherently create a, a community of people that have to work together that have to, and they, they have a common goal or a common idea that they’re they’re coming around. Otherwise they theoretically wouldn’t have come to this Dow.

Justine (19:23):

Right? Yeah. I think so people talk about collective ownership with the Dow a lot, but I think the collective decision making, um, people talk less about and is actually probably the more interesting part. I mean, collective ownership creates like some level of trust, basically, mm-hmm <affirmative> in that Dow, whether that be the technology that’s supporting that Dow or the other members of the Dow. Um, but the collective decision making is really like, you can’t outsource your participation in the do right. Everybody’s there. And if every, if nobody does anything, then nothing will get done. And the do won’t accomplish the goal. So you have to much more actively participate in the Dow than you do. I mean, you don’t necessarily need to participate per se on Facebook, or if you don’t as an individual, you know, Facebook will continue to run. Um, whereas in a, the individual people that are part of that group are not contributing or participating mm-hmm <affirmative>, then nothing will happen.

Zack (20:18):

<laugh> gotcha. Because they’re, it’s, it’s a, has to be a fully collective thing. So let’s pause right there. And we’ll take a break to hear a little bit from our sponsors and we’ll be right back to discuss a little bit more in depth of, you know, what we meet really mean even by Dow the lawyer’s podcast is brought to you by posh virtual receptionist as an attorney. Do you ever wish you could be in two places at once? You could take a call while you’re in court, capture a lead during a meeting or schedule an appointment with a client while you’re elbow deep in an important case? Well, that’s where posh comes in. Posh is a team of professional US-based live virtual receptionist who are available 24 7, 365, the answer and transfer your calls. So you never miss an opportunity with posh handling your calls. You can devote more time to billable hours in building your law firm <affirmative> and the convenient posh app puts you in total control of when your receptionist steps in.

Zack (21:11):

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Zack (22:19):

So you can focus on what matters most to your firm. My case is an affordable all in one solution that gets your business up and running quickly. Hundreds of lawyers have rated mycase. The number one legal case management software after making the switch to my case, one law firm saved over 100 hours per month time that would’ve otherwise been spent on tedious administrative tasks. It’s time to choose a case management software that works for you. If you’re looking to supercharge the growth of your firm, go to mycase.com/lawyerist and sign up for a free trial. Right now, lawyers listeners get three months at no cost on a new annual plan offer cannot be combined with other discounts, visit mycase.com/lawyerist to get started. So we’re back Justine we’re, we’re talking about Dows and how web three is kind of has the potential to change.

Zack (23:10):

We interact with people and how we participate on the internet, frankly. And so I, I wanted to dig a little deeper into Dows. I think we throw that word around and I, I see it a lot on Twitter in the legal tech space, even, but I don’t know that it’s obviously distributed autonomous organization, but I, I don’t know that a lot of people necessarily know what it means to be in that, to be in that organization and to interact with that. So how does somebody, I mean, just get basic, how does somebody join a do?

Justine (23:42):

Yeah, so one thing I’ll say, right, uh you’re right. People, very loosely throw the term Dow around. And so right now, an in actuality Dow can be anything from a community that’s supporting a fully autonomous protocol where voting rights are associated with tokens that are very widely distributed through the token holder base. That votes on what that Dow should do. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, that’s one form of a Dow, but people also use that term to refer to basically a group chat that has a shared bank account, which would be kind of like the loose sense in which people use that word. Okay. And so it’s hard to talk about Dows in generalized terms, because there are many different type, they have many different goals. They’re set up with many different structures, et cetera. Mm-hmm <affirmative> in general though, how you would, you would join a Dow there’s, there’s pretty much two ways to do that.

Justine (24:35):

And one is these like larger public Dows that tend to support protocols usually have you need to own some of the, that articles token, and then you join their, usually it’s a discord server, which is where a lot of crypto companies kind of host their public communications. Mm-hmm <affirmative> you can start voting on proposals with those tokens and joining the conversations in the discord, et cetera. The second way is like more social do smaller Dow. And that those you tend to get like invited to, and they have, you know, not tens of thousands of people, but maybe a hundred or so. And those, yeah, you kind of get invited to, because you know, that we call the people that start a Dow, like usually the core team. And there’s usually a handful of those people that then get a other people involved.

Zack (25:28):

Okay.

Justine (25:29):

Um, but that works similarly, like you would be invited to join some messaging platform where that Dow is gonna communicate. And then, um, there may or may not be a token, but there will be some sort of voting system, which is how that, that Dow will make decisions. Mm-hmm <affirmative> in general, like these tend to be, um, from like a technology perspective, what’s called a multisignature wallet. It tends to be no safe. That’s kind of the very, very dominant wallet that Dows use. But what it is is just a wallet that can only execute transactions with a minimum threshold of signatures. Okay. So you need to collectively basically agree for the funds that everybody has pulled together to be used in, in any way. And then around that multisig, again, there’s some kind of voting system whereby the Dow makes decisions. And a lot of times that’s tied to a token, but there are Dows that operate without a token.

Zack (26:28):

Okay.

Justine (26:28):

So that’s like the basic kind of technology <laugh> yeah. Um, what a Dow is at its core.

Zack (26:35):

Okay. So organization wise, we’re kind of talking around a, a bunch of lawyers here, uh, organization wise, it is an entity, you know, that that is its own thing theoretically in database sense. And it sounds like in the, in that last example, you’re saying this entity has its own wallet on the chain mm-hmm <affirmative>, and that wallet is controlled by multiple signatures, you know, but multiple participants have to make decisions in order to make that wallet, do the things that the Dow wants it to do. Right.

Zack (27:05):

And so we’re talking about having a collection of people that are running an organization, and I kinda want to go back to, we used the term discord server, and I don’t know that that’s necessarily defined here. This is an area where it is a private area where essentially people can communicate, they can chat. It’s kind of feels like slack, or even, you know, Facebook messaging back and forth. But it’s a little bit more, I don’t wanna say complex, but more robust than that, but it’s a private place that is not owned by Facebook or Reddi or something like that. Right?

Justine (27:45):

Yeah. So discord started as a platform, mostly where gamers were communicating. Okay. Um, it is similar to slack and that you can have many channels and different threads. And so it’s decent for coordination, which is kind of the goal of the higher level goal of Dows is really to coordinate, coordinate people online. Mm-hmm <affirmative> are like many downsides to using discord because it wasn’t designed to support Dows. And so I think in the future, we’ll see solutions that are designed for that be used more. But for now the vast majority of things are happening inside this discord server, in terms of the question about a Dow being an entity that’s, um, that’s a million dollar question <laugh>, um, I mean, like in their pure form or like theoretically, right. They’re kind of these digitally native internet organizations that don’t have an entity and don’t have a jurisdiction and are not run by any one given person.

Justine (28:43):

So it’s, you know, just from a corporation per se and in practice, what’s happening is like we’re seeing, Dows basically rap legal entities around themselves. And so that can either be sometimes that’s an LLC. Sometimes it’s actually a C Corp. Sometimes the Dow will split into differents. Men’s basically that have different legal structures around them. That’s like very much a developing part of the space where I don’t think there’s like a, the industry hasn’t coalesced on what the answer there is. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, there’s states like Wyoming that have tried to create framework for Dow specifically that becomes difficult because you have to define down like the word down, what that means in order to create that framework. And that’s, you know, nobody agrees on what that is. So <laugh>, that’s definitely a challenge, but there are, yeah, there are states that are trying to, to create regulation and framework specifically for doubts.

Zack (29:46):

So calling it an entity, especially in a, a legal sphere and, and thinking of it as a legal entity and of itself is not necessarily a good idea. Um, so that makes me think that there would be some potential for legal advice in a doubt, or, or potential for some sort of need for that sort of direction or that sort of leadership in, in something like that. I mean, if it’s not hashed out already then yeah. There’s a lot to be said there. Right?

Justine (30:15):

Yeah. I mean, I would say the web three is an industry in, in general is very much on the frontier and there’s a lot of gray areas and kind of existing regulation or laws are not well suited to this new technology. And so I would say demand for lawyers or council in the space is huge. It’s different than other industries. So I would say usually around like, uh, startups like 10th between higher number 10 and 20 is probably a general council, which is much earlier than you would see in like a traditional startup mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I would say like the top areas are really like entity specific things. So what type of legal entity is, is optimal for your company and ultimately your Dow and then like, which your stick you wanna be subject to because the regulations are different everywhere, et cetera. And some of them are more friendly and forward looking than others. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> the other like around a token and how to issue that. And the, in the best way that would meet the needs and kind of goal of, of the company while, while being compliant. And then the third one is really like a, like how do you set up that entity and do everything <laugh> by the book as much as possible that book’s not really written yet. So that’s challenging <laugh> um, but yeah, there’s huge demand for people that understand what Dow is and, and can start to work through that.

Zack (31:39):

Gotcha. So kind of a, a brave new world, but of business law in a sense, or, or governance law. I mean, it’s, it’s the same basic animal, but very different and a lot of potential out there for, for people to, to affect that, that area. For sure. So I wanna back up a little bit to make sure that we’re, we’re not just glossing over anything here and wanna kind of talk about token the idea of a token and that really web three is able to do what it’s doing. And it’s able to be frankly, web three because of tokens. But what do we mean when we’re, when we say, you know, a non fungible token, a token, all of those things in order to anticipate in a do or something like that?

Justine (32:26):

Yeah. Um, it’s a good question. That is one of the other innovations of web three that I didn’t mention is basically these like token economies. And so the business model is different. It’s not really supported by advertising. It’s more supported by these tokens and kinda ownership rights that gives to the token holders. But at a basic level, token is just basically a digital representation of some asset. When we say non fungible token, that means that each one of those NFTs is unique. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So I can’t exchange my NFT for year NFT one to one, because they’re valued differently. Right. Whereas if I have one ether, which is the token for the Ethereum network, and you have one ether, we can exchange that that’s fungible because they’re, they’re exactly the same, basically like the us dollar one bill is fungible with another dollar bill. Those things mean the same thing to everybody.

Justine (33:23):

1. Yep. So you, you can have a fungible to non fungible tokens. I think that should be clear. We can have a fungible token that represents a percentage of anything. Basically can represent a piece of a commodity like gold. It can represent a piece of, of a total supply, a currency like Bitcoin, or it can represent a, a revenue stream that comes from a protocol. So you, yeah, you can think of them in different ways, but at a basic level, that’s what it is. The tokens wide it’s relevant to Dows generally come with voting rights. So there’s, there’s something called the go token, which is just basically representing your voting percentage for that Dow. And there’s no other monetary value or like revenue streams that approved to it. It’s just your just gives you the ability to vote. Um, but that’s how right now Dows make decisions. It’s usually token weighted voting. So one token equals one vote mm-hmm <affirmative> and then you go to make a decision and you vote with those tokens

Zack (34:24):

And that would be a fungible token. Most likely correct.

Justine (34:29):

Okay.

Zack (34:29):

Yep. But I could use a non fungible token in a Dow in order to kinda show, well, no, the, the fungible token would be showing membership in the Dow and governance and, and whatnot, but I could use a non fungible token to do membership in the Dow as well. Right.

Justine (34:45):

Yeah. So to right now, fungible tokens are the most prevalent way to vote. Okay. NFTs are usually used to gate access basically. So like you are allowed to participate in the Dow it, if you have that NFT or you can join the, the server where the Dow communicates, you can do that on a technological level by ensuring they have that NFT. Okay. So it serves mostly as an access badge right now. Um, in the future, you could see more models where, you know, there’s a lot of downsides to token weighted voting because like, and for people that have the most tokens or the most money, um, have the most voting influence, and maybe you don’t want your community to have that dynamic mm-hmm <affirmative>. So I think in some cases we’ll see the model moving to one person, one vote, that’s what you actually want. And NFTs would be a way to do that.

Zack (35:42):

Okay. Justine, this has, this has been a lot of help for me. This is obviously stuff that I, I did not know, frankly, before talking with you, Vince. And so I, I really appreciate you sharing your expertise on web three. Now you’re all also connected with, as you said earlier, an organization called rabbit hole, right?

Justine (36:00):

Correct.

Zack (36:02):

And the goal there is to educate people and get people involved in web three and kind of help them understand some of the underlying aspects of this. So if there are other questions that people have other, other ideas that quite clear, I think rabbit hole would be, would be something that would help them gain connection with web three, right?

Justine (36:23):

Yeah. That was gonna be kind of my final piece of advice is I think the best way to learn about the space is by doing mm-hmm <affirmative>. I think I spent too much time reading white papers and trying to understand like the details of <laugh>, how the different blocks we’re connecting and why this consensus mechanism was better than another Uhhuh <affirmative> and not enough time just actually using, you know, setting up my wallet, using some of the different protocols, join a Dow, get in the discord server and see what it’s all about. Mm-hmm <affirmative> again. And you can, you can do things on a BA like a basic beginner observer kind of level. But I think actually using the products or actually being part of a conversation in a Dow is really gonna be the fastest way to get up to speed with what’s happening, what problems they’re facing, what works, what doesn’t work. What’s hard about it. You know, our UX feels a long way to go. So yeah, my, my best advice to people is to, to try to learn by doing

Zack (37:27):

Well. Yeah. And, and so people don’t have to get in and, and buy some expensive NFT in order, you know, on open sea in order to do that, they don’t have to choose whether they’re a punk or a ape or, or something like that. They can, you know, just get a wallet, get started, get connected with the community and then participate in that community in, in some way, bring your whatever expertise you have to that community, if it, if it needs it.

Justine (37:51):

Exactly. Yeah. I think, um, I’m a big fan of getting involved in things on a small scale in the beginning. Mm-hmm <affirmative> because again, the, the important thing is like, you’re doing the transactions, you are contributing, you’re participating, you’re part of the conversation, the kind of like size and scale at what you’re doing that is not relevant if the goal is learning.

Zack (38:11):

Right. Okay. Well, Justine, thanks. Thanks for being with me. Um, today I really appreciate this. This is a, a lot of information and there is a lot of information kind of in web three. It is a brave new world out there. Um, but if people want to connect with you, they can find you on Twitter at Justine Y dot E.

Justine (38:31):

Correct. Yep. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. We need more lawyers in this space rabbit. Hole’s hiring a GC actually. So <laugh>, I’d love to hear from people

Zack (38:41):

That is good to know. Yeah. So if, if you’re, um, you know, interested in this space, connect with Justine connect with rabbit hole, really, I, I think the big thing is go participate and feel around and see what it’s like and see if you like it. So again, Justine, thanks. Thanks for meeting with me. I appreciate it.

Justine (38:57):

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Announcer 1  (39:01):

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