Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Web3, Decentralization, DAOs
Arca Report: DAOs – Institutional Guide to Decentralized Governance
Arca | May 5, 2022
Corporate organizational structure has remained relatively unchanged since the development of the corporate form in the 17th century. This stagnation presents an opportunity to enhance and optimize aspects of collaboration. DAOs offer a novel way of attracting, organizing, governing, and incentivizing talent by integrating blockchain into the organizational framework.
What Are DAOs?
DAOs are blockchain-based, self-governing organizations that enable participants to work toward a common goal on a trustless network. DAO members can communicate, pool capital, vote, and develop projects, demonstrating the future of blockchain technology and coordinated decision-making.
See: What It’s Like Working at a DAO?
DAOs start with an idea based on a defined goal, are organized using smart contracts, and stimulate action by granting access, voting rights, and ownership to contributors in exchange for tokens of the underlying project. Participants use governance tokens to vote on topics relevant to the DAO’s mission.
Innovations like DAOs challenge conventional ideas of centralization and inspire a generation of global citizens who prioritize autonomy, ownership, and democratization.
Web3
Societal change can evolve from cultural, political, economic, scientific, or technological forces. In the last decade—and especially recently—the global community has endured seismic waves in all categories. Civil unrest, wars, financial downturns, and an unrelenting pandemic have rattled confidence in traditional establishments, energizing the search for new possibilities.
Read: VC-backed DAO Startups Racing to Define What DAOs Actually Are
Technological advances have provided a bright spot among the uncertainty, and blockchain technology, in particular, has stimulated innovations that challenge conventional ideas—especially those pertaining to centralization. The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a recent application of decentralization that endeavors to improve legacy systems. Powered by blockchain and web 3.0, DAOs seek to modernize the formation of talent and capital as a means to efficient and democratic collaboration. This technological force can pave the way for positive systemic change.
Source: Arca report
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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NFTs are volatile: Otherdeeds virtual land sale
Fortune | Olga Kharif and Bloomberg | May 3, 2022
Many purchasers of Otherdeeds, the virtual land that sparked a buying frenzy last weekend and led to skyrocketing transaction fees on Ethereum, are underwater as prices dropped after the initial euphoria wore off.Yuga Labs, the creator of the popular Bored Apes Yacht Club collection of NFTs, helped raise approximately $320 million on Saturday from a sale of Ethereum-based Otherdeeds NFTs, making it the biggest sale of its kind. Each purchaser paid $5,800 per NFT, plus as much as $6,000 in transaction costs or “gas fees,” which together added up to a total of roughly 4.21 Ether at current prices.
Buyers, earlier today, could pay as little as 3.6 Ether for these NFTs on OpenSea, the world’s biggest NFT marketplace. Many buyers selling their NFTs at that price could lose $1,700 per transaction.
See: NFTs for Skeptics
“I think the Otherdeeds sale was botched, leading to user backlash,” said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion. “It remains to be seen whether it can recover user trust and enthusiasm.”
The drop has also prompted backlash from Twitter fans who had snapped up the NFTs.
The NFT market is volatile. NFT transactions in Decentraland, a platform where users can buy and sell virtual plots of land, are down 37% over the last 30 days, according to tracker DappRadar.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Sequoi’s Shaun Maguire on decentralization and crypto venture conviction
TechCrunch | Lucas Matney | May 1, 2022
In a conversation on TechCrunch’s new web3 podcast Chain Reaction, Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm’s commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still don’t understand.
Earlier this year, Sequoia announced a $500 to $600 million sub-fund dedicated exclusively to buying up cryptocurrencies. The firm has made a number of equity investments in crypto startups over the years including Fireblocks and FTX, but while Andreessen Horowitz was early to commit to a dedicated crypto fund in 2018, Sequoia has continued made its equity investments through its general funds.
See: Crypto dating show leverages Crowdfund to raise $6 million (including from Paris Hilton) to build ‘Netflix of Web3’
While the crypto industry continues to mint new unicorn startups, the rapid cooling of public market tech stocks has threatened to stall growth in the emerging category, which has still proven awfully susceptible to macro conditions. In our conversation, Maguire emphasized his belief that plenty of other funds dipping their toes into crypto “are going to pull back” when the market grows less frothy, but he believes that Sequoia has already committed to a lengthy relationship with the sector — “we have permanent intentions.”
The crypto category has dealt with plenty of skeptics, some in the venture capital community, who believe that the sector’s benefits are being oversold and that the web3 promise of decentralization is just smoke and mirrors.
Maguire says:
Decentralization is not a silver bullet that just solves all problems and is better for everything. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. For a lot of decision making, centralization can be better for certain types of decisions. More important than decentralization for its own sake, is the ability of users to 'be able to leave with their identity and data'
See: A Normie’s Guide to Becoming a Crypto Person (and down the rabbit hole)
...an effort which should protect consumers from platform overreach. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldn’t be thrown out.
I think people sometimes forget that a lot of the consumer protections put in place by US law were won out of hard-fought lessons over like a century. And there’s a lot of wisdom in there.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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