ATHDAOx: Building the future of Web3 in physical-digital with DAOs

ATHDAOx, an event in the tradition of the Solana Hacker House, took place on Dec. 9 and 10 in Athens, Greece, to discuss all things decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

From governance and legalities to community building and security, the event brought together the local DAO-focused community in Greece and abroad.

Cointelegraph was on the ground for the event and spoke with one of the event’s founders, Dimitris, aka Takisoul, about his experience building a physical space to discuss digital communities.

Athens DAO was first held in 2022, during which Takisoul said it hosted around 150 attendees, many of whom were from outside Greece. In its second year, he told Cointelegraph that attendance was anticipated to be four times that of the first event and with much higher participation from the local Greek community. 

“One of the many other things that we wanted to achieve is to bring the vibes of a conference from abroad, like Breakpoint, to Greece and at scale.”

“We’re trying to be the glue between the devs and the community,” he said. Takisoul said that physical meetups on this scale are “opportunities” for beginners and the “blockchain curious” to meet people at the forefront of building projects in the space.

The event had support and attendance from prominent developers in the space, such as Solana, Bankless DAO, ApeCoin, GrapeDAO and more.

Why DAOs? 

Asked why it’s important to educate and activate a local community on the possibilities DAOs present Takisoul said that non-Web3 natives often have “superficial notions” and awareness of the space. 

“Many are not aware of the wonderful ways Web3 and DAOs unlock human coordination. They are changing the way that we collaborate as groups and also instill a sense of ownership.”

He said an ideal outcome after Athens DAO would be at some point to see more EVM communities eyeing Solana DAO tooling for their applications and Solana DAO infrastructure realms as well.

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“The other part that would make us immensely happy would be that in the next hackathon, whether it be on Solana or Ethereum, we see more Greek-based teams take part in hackathons,” he said.

Manolis Nikiforakis, CEO of Athens-based Web3 startup WeatherXM which tokenizes locally sourced weather data on the blockchain, told Cointelegraph the company is launching its own DAO in the next month. “Timing couldn’t be better for a two-day DAO-focused event next door,” he said

Democracy and governance

One of the key principles in the DAO community is transforming the means of governing and structuring community-run projects. 

In one of the panel discussions at the event about the legal structures and policy related to DAOs, one speaker highlighted that “Athens is the city that founded democracy” and that ATHDAOx can be at the “forefront of lobbying for DAO policy on a legal level.”

The same panel discussed the biggest challenges DAOs face today, including governance framework, transparency with donations and decentralization. One of the panelists advised, “never stop exploring governance methods.”

“Find out what suits your needs, don’t copy and paste from what always works for another DAO.”

Regarding decentralization, the same panel concluded that “perfection is an illusion” when seeking a totally decentralized DAO, but transparency is the key to achieving it. One panelist said that the only “truly decentralized DAO is Bitcoin.” 

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