Patrick Thompson talks Ape token, the future of DAOs on Faiāside chat

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The Bitcoin SV ecosystem has seen hundreds of projects in the past couple of years, all serving their niche, from payments to supply chain management to the health industry. The latest, and one which has taken the ecosystem by storm, is Gorilla DAO, the first decentralized autonomous organization built on Bitcoin.

George Samuels, the managing director of Faiā, caught up with Gorilla DAO’s community manager Patrick Thompson for a Faiāside Chats episode in which he delved into what Gorilla DAO is, the motivation behind the project, what being an Ape means and the future of DAOs on the Bitcoin blockchain.

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Thompson revealed how he came up with the name Gorilla DAO. “You see people when they make new investments going, ‘Alright, I’m going to ape in.’”

Bitcoin SV can do whatever Ethereum can do, and does it better. However, having been in the digital currency industry for five years now, Thompson had observed that Bitcoin SV still lags behind when it comes to the solutions being built on Ethereum. One of these is DAOs which have been on Ethereum for over five years. With this, he decided to take it upon himself to bring DAOs to Bitcoin.

Thompson observed that blockchain technologies have been targeting enterprise use, and rightly so. However, enterprise solutions take years to build. This hasn’t stopped other blockchain networks from creating applications that allow the retail users to interact with these blockchains. They range from the current NFT craze, decentralized finance and more. While crooks have exploited some of these avenues to enrich themselves, they have nonetheless attracted interest from the non-tech-savvy users and the wider public.

Taking on the role of community manager at Gorilla DAO was partly influenced by Satoshi Nakamoto, Thompson said. After launching Bitcoin, Satoshi was very actively involved in the very early days before leaving it to the community to further its development.

In addition, a DAO is decentralized and shouldn’t have any one person dictating what happens.

“The reason I choose to call myself a community manager—and I will play this role until I don’t have to anymore—is that a DAO should run itself. We’re already seeing this happening even though it’s in its infancy.”

Conversely, a DAO’s decentralized nature also poses a challenge in ridding the ecosystem of bad actors. With no central authority, no member can “get kicked out.” According to Thompson, there are additional guidelines that “make it nearly impossible to be a bad actor.”

Gorilla DAO has been running on Money Button which allows simplicity of use, especially for those without a technical background. Thompson revealed that he, together with a few other developers, is exploring the Run protocol. While Run avails more functionalities for the Ape token, Money Button has an advantage in its simplicity, especially in a projects early stages.

Once the Ape token migrates to the Run protocol, it will become available for trading on the recently-launched RelayX Exchange (REX). “For Ape token to trade on the RelayX DEX, we would have to make that migration to Run protocol. Until that happens, I don’t see it trading on the RelayX DEX because right now, 99% of our users are on Money Button.”