Crypto is an incredibly challenging space to navigate for a new team to the space. It represents unique challenges for teams trying to launch that wouldn’t necessarily be found in the centralized startup realm. This covers the spectrum from dealing with global partnerships, and with anonymous developers and founders, to building and managing mission critical software, as well as wallet security planning and more.
Many don’t fully grasp that with public blockchains you’re building mission critical software that often controls millions or billions of dollars – one simple mistake and all the funds in a smart contract can be drained along with that team’s reputation. This presents new challenges in terms of education on risks along with auditing & writing contracts that only teams close to the space can truly understand. One that incubators inside the space are helping teams to navigate and overcome.
Incubators are companies that seek to discover new projects in the crypto space with the goal of guiding them through the fundamental stages of their early life cycle. This starts right from the bottom up, including helping them with capital, helping them build and run their marketing strategies, consulting, growth hacking, ICOs and IDOs and more.
For a startup that is chosen by a crypto incubator, this brings massive advantages as the teams get to draw from the wisdom of the experts to help drive their success. The opportunities that working within an incubator can bring are not to be underestimated.
One unique incubator is leveraging the equanimity and advantages of a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization to first select potential projects and then to help guide them on their future trajectories. New Order brings both the first class experience of building within an incubator, whose members have deep knowledge of the space, while doing everything in the open and on a level playing field through a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO.
We spoke to Eden Dhaliwal about New Order and the kind of results a DAO incubator can help teams achieve.
Eden, can you please tell us about your project and what led you onto the blockchain?
I’ve been involved in early stage ventures for 10 years now through my time as a partner with Outlier Ventures and within the DeFi community for the past 3. In that time, our group has been building side-by-side with teams and for DeFi, we see first hand the missing pieces in the ecosystem. In this way, I expect we’ll be able to attract the best global talent for building new applications that help grow the DeFi space.
Can you give us the highlights of what New Order does?
New Order DAO is a permissionless community driven venture DAO incubator for decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. The platform is led by community members through an open and transparent voting process and aims to fund early stage DeFi applications and surround teams with talent and resources to fast track growth and development.
What makes you unique in the space and sets you apart from other blockchain incubators and launchpads?
Having been involved in DeFi throughout the bear market, we’ve been encouraged to foster deep personal relationships with the developer community building with them side-by-side even when all the attention and opportunities were not there. We’ve run several hackathons with over 1000 developers and learned the challenges they face that are unique to the smart contract / DeFi space. Our structure as a DAO also demonstrates our goal of transparency and building in the open with our community. I think this combination of transparency and deep knowledge of the space makes our group unique.
So you are the first ever incubator run by a DAO, what advantages does that bring the projects and the investors?
For projects, we’ve built a great community full of auditors, venture capitalists, developers and much more which we’ve put together being involved in DeFi these past few years as well as from having run several hackathons. This type of deep expertise and support network is hard to come by with other incubators. Moreover, we discuss and build out in the open meaning your prior connections are not a hurdle – all you need is a good idea to start. From there our community will help rally around the idea.
For investors, our token will give you a percentage allocation in all future incubated projects and moreover, you will be able to see all the development for yourself in the public forums and voting process. This radical transparency should breed more trust and faith in the direction of the DAO while also allowing you to take a voting interest or allocate your vote to someone else.
What kind of projects will you be looking to launch and how do you select them?
This will really be up to the community to decide but initially we have three projects in the pipeline including Redacted (a fork of OHM), H20 (a fork of RAI but using datatokens) and OptiFi (a yield aggregator protocol). These were all opportunities identified by our community but we are really open to any core infrastructure for DeFi.
What kind of involvement will New Order have with its incubated projects?
Our aim is to help incubated projects through the entire lifecycle of bringing their application to market. Whether this is introductions to tier 1 partnerships and exchange, smart contract auditing, or marketing resources – we have the community and support network to help. Beyond the launch, we expect to take an active role in the incubated project by way of proxy voting using allocated tokens to the DAO.
How does an incubator monetize?
We expect to be given a token allocation from the new project in exchange for seed funding and the DAO’s resources including community and expertise. This model is similar to a traditional incubator program. Tokens will be added to the DAO’s treasury for proxy voting, yield farming or whatever the community members choose to do with the allocation.
What does the blockchain look like in the next 5 years?
Our thesis is that crypto markets are becoming very rich and diverse, extending from Bitcoin to now stablecoins, NFTs, datatokens and everything in between. Essentially, any form of value is being tokenized and mashed up to create new and interesting things everyday. For instance, one of our portfolio projects – H2O is using datatokens (essentially datasets) that people find value in as a source of collateral for issuing non-pegged stable assets against. This mix and match would have been unheard of years ago but tokens and their globally tradeable markets let us put a price on this information in real time.
Another thesis revolves around the convergence of machine learning, blockchains and the metaverse that will create rich, immersive experiences with data driven decision making automated. It’s the verifiable and interconnected data sets that blockchains provide upon which a new sort of global internet will be rebuilt. Finally, from the standpoint of traditional organizations we feel that banks, institutions and users will be able to tap into this open, interoperable, value layer to build their applications and we plan to have New Order DAO take a large role in helping build out this Layer 1 infrastructure.
Final Word
Incubators are in on the sharp end of the crypto ecosystem. They hear about the most interesting and innovative projects and solutions out there. Experts that work within the incubator and in the case of New Order, the DAO community, tend to be experts in their respective realms. Whether the future be machine learning merging with smart contracts and chains, or Layer 3 projects, some of the best innovations will likely come from incubator projects and it’s well worth staying on top of their activities.
