Anastasiya Belyaeva, Head of Growth at PieDAO told us how community of individuals who care about financial inclusion building passive income products for Everyone.
Hello! What’s your background, and what are you working on?
Hello! My name is Anastasiya Belyaeva - and my story starts in Crimea (the disputed region you might have heard of), where I was born and raised. The region has experienced the effects of centralised power since the beginning of history. I’ve witnessed what leads to a failing economy, censorship, and lack of ambition & entrepreneurial spirit in young people - which preserves the vicious circle.
The idea of an economy independent from government control, and wealth creation mechanisms available not just to the oligarchy have always resonated with me. Unfortunately, I’ve seen too vividly what the alternative looks like.
I became a VC when I was 19, joining a small fund investing in early-stage stuff, and a few years later, I co-founded Fabric.vc to invest exclusively into the open economy & Web3. One of the things that drove me the most was the promise that what we’re building can eventually serve those who need it the most: people who’ve been excluded from economic participation.
When I was considering starting a project of my own to focus on this, I was lucky to meet the team at PieDAO. They have made it their mission to make tools for wealth creation accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Obviously, it wasn’t just a branding line for them - each of the team members have personally lived through the unfairness of having their family sweat for salaries instead of compounding capital. So I jumped in!
So what is PieDAO trying to achieve, and where is it today?
PieDAO is an attempt to make complex DeFi strategies something regular humans can understand and invest in.
Web3 could be the most important revolution we’ve seen this century, and yet the investment products it has given birth to are still exclusive to those with capital, time, and expertise to go down the DeFi rabbit hole. PieDAO is changing that by creating tokenised portfolio allocations with embedded passive income: a user can just get their hands on a single token to get exposure to a diversified portfolio of assets, which also automatically generally yield to maximise returns. So let’s say you are new to crypto and would like to get exposure to DeFi, but you have no idea which of the hundreds of tokens to buy - and the complexity of lending & staking just freak you out. By buying a single $DEFI+L asset, you’d get exposure to 8 of the blue-chip projects carefully vetted by a multi-thousand people community. On top of this, those eight assets (wherever applicable) will compound capital by bouncing between protocols to generate the highest yield:
There are currently eight portfolio products (we call them Pies) available for users to buy - from relatively low-risk BCP (BTC, ETH & DeFi) to more niche PLAY (a portfolio of 17 NFT & metaverse tokens).
So this is the product side of PieDAO. But you can’t build a new world with old tools, so I think it’s important to mention how the organisation is structured.
PieDAO has been a DAO from day one, which means all decisions are made by an inclusive community rather than a centralized company. This is a crucial part: not only can you participate in wealth creation by being a user of PieDAO products, but you can actually step up and be in charge of what might become the Bridgewater Associates on steroids by participating in decisions of the DAO.
I think it’s undeniable that thousands of people from across the globe, with drastically different experiences, struggles, and worldviews, will make better, more well-rounded decisions than a handful of investment analysts from the Ivy League.
What does PieDAO’s governance look like? How can you become a member, and what does it mean?
PieDAO is a decentralised community of individuals who care about financial inclusion - there are no gatekeepers on joining and governing the DAO. Anyone, including anonymous members, can join from anywhere in the world, as long as they have an internet connection.
I think this level of inclusivity is crucial to the success of the project. Yet, if left in this basic shape, it could lead to thousands of people passively free-riding off the hard work of a handful of individuals. We came up with to counterbalance this and incentivise long-term alignment & active participation in the native staking of the PieDAO governance token, $DOUGH.
Here’s what this means in practice: instead of just buying DOUGH and direct access to governance (no long-term incentive, prone to lack of participation), you only get to be a governance member if you stake (lock) your DOUGH for a period of time (long-term alignment, strong participation). Not only do you get to have a say in governance matters, but your shiny new staked version of the governance token (veDOUGH) actually gives you the right to receive your share of the DAO’s revenues on a monthly basis - like a paycheck for your governance work. The time lock can be anything from 6 months to 3 years, and the longer the lock, the higher the voting power - and the bigger the paycheck.
What are your goals for the future?
PieDAO has focused its efforts during the last few months to bring to life the Governance Mining initiative. This initiative has brought to the community advantages and improvements in revenue sharing and long term alignment of our investors. We believe that the mission has been well accepted through staking and KPI incentives, and we’re ready for the next steps.
The DAO will begin a journey to explore and analyse different venues in the coming months. The target is to improve current processes, build unprecedented DeFi native mechanisms and increase our portfolio. The engineering roadmap is currently being fine-tuned, below are some of the topics of interest
- Single token vaults.
- Enhanced liquidity mining program.
- Cross-chain governance on EVM compatible chains.
What are some of the challenges of being a DAO, and how are you overcoming them?
One of the biggest challenges is exactly what makes it so powerful - a large decentralised community. While it leads to an abundance of ideas, skills, and experiences, it’s not easy to organise in ways where goals are clear across the organisation, and things get done. Individuals often throw brilliant ideas in Discord or Forum, but it’s a long way from that to completion. In centralised organisations you typically have firm-wide high-level goals (typically directed by leadership), individual-level OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and structured team hierarchies. In DAOs, things are different by definition as the organisational culture, long-term goals, mid-term objectives, and short-term tasks all tend to be community-driven. So I think there’s a lot of work to be done for DAOs to work out - by trial and error - which features of traditional organisational processes to mimic while still leveraging the power of the community at large.
We at PieDAO are experimenting with UMA KPI options - a way to establish a single quantifiable KPI the entire organisation should be moving towards, with built-in token economic incentives. Each community member personally holds KPI tokens, which convert to a certain amount of the organisation’s governance tokens, depending on how close they got to the established objective. We are currently running this as an experiment to incentivise community action towards more DOUGH staked. You can read up on more details here.
Where can we go to learn more?
Go to PieDAO’s Discord https://discord.link/PieDAO or https://www.piedao.org/ to find out more about the current products & the organisation. You can also check out more details about DOUGH Staking and start getting paid for governing PieDAO.
Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with announcements: https://twitter.com/piedao_DeFI
