# The DAOs of the East by Joshua Tan | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: [Joshua Tan](https://streameth.org/speakers/joshua-tan)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 24:36
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-VK3Uv1G_hHI
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK3Uv1G_hHI

## Description

DAOs are growing fast in East Asia, and they work very differently from DAOs in the West. From regional revitalization in Japan to Taiwan's digital ministry to the Chinese diaspora, I'll cover many examples and what they mean for the global community of DAOs.

Speaker(s): Joshua Tan
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Coordination
Keywords: DAO, Collective Intelligence, Regulation, asia

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## Transcript

[Music] all right hey folks can we see the slides let's see does the slides work amazing okay technology it works uh hi folks welcome hey um so it's my pleasure today to talk to you a little bit about some more work that we've been doing at dowar and medov uh basically a sequence of reports on Dows in Asia especially East Asia so I'll go over today uh a number of different questions and sort of like basically summarizing some of the reports uh we actually just had a session a panel on this where some of the authors were talking about Dows in Korea Dows in Taiwan Dows in sing sore Dows in Japan uh I don't think we have yet a report on Dows in Thailand uh but we're actually working on it so the thoughts that I'll share here uh over the next you know 10 15 minutes or so I'm going to probably keep it relatively short uh is just a more of a top level glance at what is happening on some trend lines and ideas and that I personally and my team have called from the sequence of reports about to understand like what exactly is happening in Asia in sort of the Dow landscape what does that actually mean for Dows in the west or let's say Global Dows uh and how can we use that to improve the way that Dows work in general um oh I guess I should maybe briefly explain who uh I am and what I'm doing here so I'm Josh I'm a co-founder of metov and dowar and Dow Stars we'll see later is the standards body for Dows all right uh the brief narrative that we're going to begin with here is that Dows are setting in the west but they are rising in the East uh I don't know how many of you here in the audience feel like that Dows have been going going through a a trough in popularity there's a sense of are they actually solving the coordination problems that they had defined just in let's say 2022 uh or have they become let's say vehicles for other kinds of questions uh or let's say other kinds of purposes than coordination uh on the other hand what I'm going to tell you about here is the idea that actually hey in Asia there's still a lot of excitement there's still a lot of energy as we sort of look to what Dows can actually accomplish and the Top Line sort of like the tldr here is that a lot of this surprisingly or perhaps not surprisingly really depends on top- down support uh that means a lot of these narratives are driven in many ways um by governmental support from the top as much as they are from gratuits energy down below so here's F kishida uh former I should say Prime Minister of Japan uh in 2023 so if you consider Dow uh people who are interested in the same social issues can come to form a community and he's talking about NS here I think that these types of blockchain Technologies using web 3 are effective in solving the problems that Japan has so Dows are rising in Asia government support from the very top uh and the second sort of theme that coming out of this set of questions or this set of observations is like well what is the difference between these local Dows that we see in Japan and Singapore and Taiwan and the global Dows that we're familiar with here uh I think we just had a talk on was it stable coin stability and that there's governance tokens and the way that Dows and these governance tokens are often used within sort of like Global Financial platforms that's a very very far cry from some of the Dows we're going to see here which are still very very much oriented around different Notions of community so uh what I'll do uh in the remainder of this talk is I'll go through these different examples examples examples examples so we'll go through Taiwan uh which has really been focused on different levels of government supported digital Innovation around experimentation beginning with experiments like the V Taiwan series uh we'll head to Japan uh where we'll talk about Regional revitalization and the way in which Dows and NES and other kinds of experiments have been used or are being used to uh basically carry forward this uh some very very deliberately government defined attempt to repopulate or put more economic attention onto local communities uh outside of the sort of like the Metropolitan Tokyo region uh we'll talk a little bit about uh the considerations in China and especially the Chinese diaspora and the way groups like GCC planker and others are exploring uh and using Dows to organize themselves we'll talk about Singapore uh and well uh I think the uh the community Enterprises that are emerging in Singapore many of whom don't like being called Dows we'll talk about Korea and girl groups uh and uh somewhat dramatically the shrinkage of the Korean race um which I found truly hilarious when we talked about it earlier today and talk a little bit about what's next in store for some of the uh dowar Asia research projects okay uh and just uh to check in again uh dowar is the standards vality of the Dow ecosystem we were founded uh three years ago as part of a project involving pretty much 80 plus organizations in the Dow ecosystem including uh pretty much all the major Dow Frameworks uh many major Dows uh or by folks like ethereum optimism arbitrum Aragon uh and many many wonderful folks um supporting the SE today all right what are Dows doing in Taiwan so uh there's actually a really long Genesis to this um you kind of have to understand the framework of dows in Taiwan with respect to all that's been going on over the last really 10 years um as this as there has been this kind of incredible pattern of democratic renewal and experimentation uh led by folks like Audrey Tang uh who I believe is speaking at one of these uh sessions um beginning with the kind of the the gov zero project uh and the early experiments that led to these deliberative democracy experiments around like V Taiwan uh Dows are part of a more recent effort um bringing together many many folks uh kind of in SE groups exploring ways in which this set of blockchain Technologies can and have been supporting uh this longer term gov zero project the um part of that is using this idea that you know we can take these Community inputs these uh you know the token offerings the kind of very specific kind of voting that happens within Dows in these contexts and use that to shift or convert the more uh deliberative inputs the the deliberative context in these communities in gozero for example uh into sort of more conscious kind of resource management uh just quote here uh Dow zero here was created as a spin-off from guv zero to enhance the capability of go zero with web3 tools such as digital reputation while the tools did not become a permanent part of gozero the ethos of nobody open source open collaboration and durra approach is deeply engrained in Dow zero as well and this is something that happens over time uh s they have a bimonthly hackathon which is the backbone of gozero and many sort of folks have been participating in these hackathons coming from the dowo ecosystem uh there's a number of different examples uh so some of these range from uh more nft based art collections like v um which has been part of that sort of Dow zero sort of hackathon group um volume Dow uh Fab Dow which is also using nfts to sort of do more public goods funding uh so these are some of the kind of early experiments with Dows in Taiwan uh moving to Dows in Korea uh so in our research we've observed three different kinds of dows uh we have conglomerate nft so these are basically experiments being conducted by large chibbles and sort of technology companies holding companies with nfts to sort of promote things like loyalty clubs uh fan club Dows uh this is actually a really interesting example that I've started hearing about almost three years ago now um and I'll talk a bit a little bit that uh below um and then there's more sort of like early stage uh decentralized organizations that are coming together using some of these Technologies to say hey how can we bring together a group of communities around a token uh around a community currency in order to self-organize uh this is a just a example of some of the uh large nft Dows uh sort of the the chibbles that pull together uh and where they've um uh when did they released you can see like there's a lot of focus in the 200 uh 22 era uh the thing Trip s how many people here have heard of Trip s I'm kind of curious okay uh it is actually a okay I I'll of admit I'm not really a Kpop fan or follower uh but what I was reading about this it was just kind of incredible in the report I really encourage you to take a look at the report itself um on some level this is arguably the world's most active and vibrant Dow so they use uh a set of nfts uh which represent you know like basically collectible nfts representing different members of this girl group uh they vote on lots of different decisions like including like things like who's actually participating and seeing in this group uh and there's incredible amount of activity uh that's rising in this Dow based on sort of the participation of fans uh in this fan culture around uh Trip s very interesting experiment uh definitely take a look at it all right I'm going to all right I'll skip over and come back to the we are disappearing from the face of the Earth question maybe we can get it at the end if we have time um Dows in Japan uh so this is actually uh the earliest and first style report we commissioned uh came out uh earlier in the year uh I think I already quoted fumio kushida um and as of at least end of 2023 there were more than 54 Dows in Japan um focusing on many of them um are focusing on sort of this question of regional revitalization that was emphasized by I should say now the previous Japanese government so this is something that you know is very very sort of like a big problem in Japan this hollowing out of rural communities uh and smaller towns in the countryside and Dows are actually have been used as a way to explore this I think I have a slide here uh yeah um so oh so I'll just show this slide very briefly uh so you can see like the variety of dows um and on the regional revalidation front um this is basically um how do I say it in 2023 uh the Japanese government initiated a set of initiatives called around Regional rization uh and they put quite a bit of money into it around $900 million uh to support different kinds of ways of not just bringing people back into these sort of non- Toyo non-metropolitan regions but ways of connecting them to those populations into those uh localities Dows have been used for example um in various experiments as ways of giving uh Tokyo natives or you you may have moved to the big city to get a job but you might still have a connection to your you know where you grew up or to a historical maybe like a family home or even just a place you like to vacation and you could like to visit the idea of these tokens the way these Dows are getting used is a ways of connecting a sort of person who may not be like actually in person uh in these communities a way of giving them some sort of say and some sort of representation in these like let's say yamagi Village or um different sort of like principalities outside of Tokyo uh it's way of creating this what we think is like a visitor population or a related population uh okay I'm running a little bit close on time so uh jabil da in Greater China uh so this is once again actually really interesting and it shows the importance of government intervention in a very different way right because we see in China a much uh bigger Crackdown as opposed to support on let's say not just Dows but on web 3 activity in general so there was a ban on icos training and Mining uh and this caused a lot of the the very large sort of crypto population web three people Builders investors and many sort of like um uh folks in this ecosystem to move abroad uh so in this case Dows in this larger Community have often viewed viewed as a kind of route to Global citizenship that is um it provides a way of creating a alternative community in a sense of belonging that uh in some sense was less accessible because there was this larger diaspora across different countries and different nations it's very tied to the more Network State narrative that's emerged in folks uh in outfits like fores and you see that in actually the structure and the relationship um of these Min Dows where Network stake language is much more popular um and there's these many Dows like planker ox GCC uh 4C's that all have like a large set of overlaps um to create this this uh this network structure of many many Dows and I'll say like the size of these things like the size of many things in China is truly astounding uh for example uh weo inali uh this is a large L um uh event in 2022 atted over attracted over 10,000 people uh there is a huge amount of interest in participation in China just in terms of volume right perhaps still small relative to what else is going on in that country um oh maybe just mentioned here uh part of the idea is that as this community has faced you know like transitioning uh out of their own country trying to sort of tap into a global diaspora they really try to emphasize uh Innovation experimentation with more modular forms of governance uh this relates to the idea it's Al you're already seeing at this like inow level this network structure uh lastly I'll talk about Dows in Singapore um and here I think it's um once again there's a a clear government component so the monetary authority of Singapore has led in many ways um in this ecosystem on different kinds of experimentation support with different initiatives in the blockchain there's a very large an active Community uh with you large events like token 2049 but one of the issues we've seen here with Dows is that there are often Community Enterprises sort of which are very web3 adjacent using web three tools but for various reasons don't like to call themselves Dows and be hardly because in Singapore the word Dow is very very closely ass associated with defi Dows with large defi um Dows like I'm sure the ones we're all familiar with like Unis swap maker things like that um and they don't think this is actually a word that applies to them in an interesting way that's like not the case for example in places like Taiwan um oh gosh I this is the thing I really wanted to put in I totally forgot to do uh by the end of this um because I I took this photo um after the end of the last talk where uh basically this group of young people researchers producing these reports were talking about Community Enterprises and Dows uh and how you know they wanted to fight against this commodification of community that they were seeing especially uh in Singapore uh and trying to face up with this fact that like people didn't want to use the word down anymore because they associated with something with something very very defish and then we have uh a group of let's just say uh older group of folks from the previous sort of like era of dowo innovation which is to be fair only like two or three years ago and we're all only talking about like where's the money right now in dowas where what what what are def doing you know what are delegates doing uh it's interesting how there's this uh there's already this kind of generational Gap especially in the way I think that the you know the people who are just discovering Dows and building Dows in Asia you can still feel that culture difference in the way that they engage with and think about Dows it's much more movement focused it's much more decentralization focused I think that's something that's still very powerful um in the community today all right uh with that I will end it uh a little bit early uh once again I'm Josh you can see all this stuff at dow. org uh and at our substack dow. substack docomo for but it's a wonderful presentation about Dow in the East super interesting to see what's going on um thank you so much we have three questions and if you have more questions you can scan this QR code um yeah and and post more questions so the first one will be from a coordination point of view have you seen any difference between how GM Dows organize themselves in comparison to Western Dows mitali uh so by GM Dows I assume you mean uh Global majority okay great um honestly like first off maybe the question I would pose to you is what exactly is a global majority Dow um since that's I've actually only recently encountered that through song e um and it's I think it's a it's a great term but I I still don't know exactly what that means if we mean by GM Dows all the different kinds of locals Dows that you know these Community Enterprises small Dows my sense is like they often first off uh and this is a very clear pattern we see in the reports they don't use onchain infrastructure nearly as much um at most maybe they'll use a multisig to manage some sort of onchain you know like assets maybe some nfts uh but they're not investing in like large deployments anywhere to the scale and these large token deployments of course anywhere to the scale that we see in uh quote unquote Global DS um there's a few other things part of this that maybe reflects on Vibes because like you know you could argue that there are some kind of like social Dows that are not clearly Global majority that are more like one either westernized um these are things like I don't know more traditional like smaller DS like dorg um or even raid Guild that you could argue are not exactly Global majority and you you can see once again uh in the pattern in these patterns that there's much more investment in onchain infrastructure uh whereas maybe GM Dows not so much let's go to the next one uh so what attributed what attributes okay uh does an organization need for it to be considered a DA as per your definition oh boy all right um I wish I could uh okay well there's another hourong presentation that I actually just gave two days ago on exactly this question uh I wish I wish I give you a link to this oh what's the right place uh so okay um if you just Google Dows by example this is a book chapter I literally just wrote on this question basically saying uh can we not talk about definitions um there are definitions of DS that are very more focus on like you need a lot of onchain infrastructure you need like a smart contract that's managing crypto assets for it to be a DA on the other hand you could use you know if you go all the way to back to like Nick zabo's um original definition of a smart contract you know like lot any kind of digital artifact could be a smart contract in that sense and a dow in many ways is just an organization or a set of people that operate through a smart contract so in that sense in that original sense a dow is any kind of digital artifact that happens to sort of be used uh to create digital organizations or sort of human organizations my sentence is here like this is something you should find out in the dat itself uh and there's like a data set of over 60 different examples on which you can test your own definition what feels right to uh what kind of decolonizing perspectives of any do you see in collaboration in global majority DS I think like maybe like the quick answer to this is that goes back once again to the change in tone in the movement and the way that money has I think changed the way that we talk about and interact and build within the Dow movement right you know Dow movement C 2020 or 2022 it was very I think like decolonizing even in the western parliaments right it was much about co-ops Community Focus uh nowadays we're really talking about we've Like You could argue some people would say uh and I would say also agree uh many Dows that we're sort of talking about decentralization have kind of graduated to questions of like corporate governance of corporate efficiency are we managing these assets you know well on behalf of a large group of people uh and I think for Global majority DS and the Dows that we see in some of these reports uh they're not there yet they're still figuring out very much still adopting that uh decolonizing or that sort of like more movement sort of progressive uh decentralization itic all right I'll stop there all right time is up give you a big Applause for Josh