PageDAO was founded in 2021 by a community of Web3 enthusiasts who wanted better-quality publishing tools for use on Web3 payment rails. Three years later, the concepts have taken on a life of their own. Numerous teams work quietly together on a handful of objectives calculated to change the very course of the publishing industry. These teams use the $PAGE token to distribute value to reward the people doing the work in a trustless, coordination-oriented way. The present job of the DAO is to build a technology system, a community, and a value network for transacting assets.
Over the years, PageDAO has built various technology stacks and platforms, each emphasizing different features in decentralized publishing. Readme Books features a Polygon NFT-gated minter and beautiful flipbooks the whole world can read for free from the web browser. Readme Books are decentralized assets, meaning there’s no website that users need to use to access their content. These assets are also tradable on OpenSea and other marketplaces via the Polygon blockchain. Readme 2.0 launched in 2023, offering gated assets to secure content and emphasizing the user's need to purchase the work to view it.
Now that it's 2024, PageDAO is releasing an entirely new technology stack built with Secret Network's assistance, guidance, and encryption. Leveraging technologies ranging from ThirdWeb to Lit Protocol and Dynamic, the new platform is still in the late phases of construction and development, but it already offers users everything the prior instantiations did, as well as a marketplace to facilitate transactions between users on the platform. Due to the level of focus by PageDAO team members over a period of years, the application also incorporates a wide swath of access and linking technologies to enable Web2 accounts to mint assets to Web3 destinations. It even has support for the US dollar as a transaction currency.
As the process continues, it's important to note that PageDAO has chosen a different path for itself than traditional businesses do. Already, PageDAO has survived conditions that would have destroyed any corporation, simply by repositioning itself away from fiduciary profit motive and angling the development cycle in the direction of community.
As time ticks on, PageDAO will continue to iteratively develop technology in the new niche it has created for itself.
Thus far, this blog post sounds like its subject could be one of those tiny Cosmos ecosystem development teams. But PageDAO is not a handful of supercoders who enjoy one another's company and have little use for the world outside their small, insular bubble. Far from it.
Instead, PageDAO has numerous partnerships throughout Web3-friendships, even, with other DAOs that respect our values and commitment. Today, PageDAO consists of one main DAO and three mission-oriented subDAOs to handle most of the decisions that we face as we complete the initial buildout of the first fully functional PageDAO structure.
PageDAO's Official SubDAOs
- Core Team. The first subDAO, the subDAO that emerged from the brutal bear market of 2022-2023. Core Team is primarily concerned with governance and management of PageDAO broadly, and it has been known to staff and structure other subDAOs. Core Team has worked with Clinamenic LLC and with Bittrees recently, in addition to its long history of coordinating Web3 Publishing-specific events and initiatives and pitching products and upgrades to PageDAO infrastructure. Core Team hosts a weekly call in the Discord server for Team Members to share updates with one another and the community more broadly.
- Community & Publishing. The subDAO you're most likely to become familiar with, Community & Publishing is the face of the PageDAO. Community & Publishing takes as its goal the messaging of the PageDAO mission. MediaCraft, C&P's subDAO, takes on specific writing & content-related tasks. C&P also works closely with publishers such as Vagobond Magazine, Whitney Morgan Media, and Cryptoversal Books, among others, to bring resources, innovation, and an enriched community to PageDAO members. Each week, Vagobond Media gives PageDAO and PageDAO members a voice on Twitter X Spaces: VMGM. Additionally, every week, MediaCraft holds a meeting to address the current needs of both the team and the community, to discuss ongoing events within the DAO, and to look to the future with excitement and celebration, all while focusing on building a welcoming atmosphere that includes, informs, and uplifts the community.
- Research & Development. The subDAO with the goods, the team your ideas go to before they get built, the promise and hope of the technical PageDAO vision. Research & Development is the engine that transforms the raw power of the ideas of PageDAO's assembled writing community into actionable, useful tools to publish and share written works. R&D boasts direct partnerships with Platform Cooperatives, Secret Network, and a number of project founders around the Web3 space, inside and outside of groups specifically working on publishing problems. R&D hosts a weekly Dev call in the Discord to present development efforts and take questions from the DAO more broadly.
PageDAO's subDAOs are presently owned by the main DAO, but we're evaluating the possibility of granting them independence at the end of 2024 to establish a more even playing field for builder DAOs that see the PageDAO mission and platform as a powerful means by which to create technology that can change the world.
$PAGE Tokenomics: The Long Term
The $PAGE token is the means by which each of the subDAOs has been able to coordinate its efforts in good faith with the others. Introduced in 2021 with a total supply of 100M tokens and a 10M/yr issuance schedule, $PAGE has been the primary reward for joining the DAO and finding a way to assist with the buildout. Currently, PageDAO is evaluating ways to tie $PAGE more closely to governance operations and to decentralize the means by which members can earn tokens for contributing to ongoing projects.
At present, the discussion is leaning in the direction of a permanent solution to the issuance of $PAGE that involves 3 phases.
- Phase 1 involves automatic, programmatic disbursements of $PAGE to stakers who participate in governance decisions. Chances are that Phase 1 will also involve an airdrop to PageDAO members who have historically held staked $PAGE and voted on issues that came across governance. Phase 1 will be voted on soon.
- Phase 2 ramps up the capabilities toward a vision of PageDAO that involves substantial decentralization and autonomy. This phase will begin when the Beta version of the PageDAO WebApp launches and will introduce the idea that staking should grant users some control over $PAGE token issuance. Phase 2 will be instantiated by vote at such time as R&D declares is appropriate.
- Phase 3 may coincide with Mainnet Launch of the PageDAO WebApp and will potentially be a permanent $PAGE tokenomics strategy to be ratified by vote of the PageDAO. Creating the specific plan for the final $PAGE tokenomics will take time, and it will involve observing Phase 2 for some time to make a determination about the best way forward.
The WebApp
PageDAO's new WebApp will, first and foremost, facilitate the activities of the writers who make up our community. The primary needs of writers we have identified in our years of talking with them are financial - writing for a living has become a struggle! Part of the reason for this is that predatory platforms users can get access to for free have taken off. These social media applications, despite not paying users directly, have pulled in a large portion of the collective creativity of humankind. We see algorithms that tell authors what to write and strategies that force the hand of the author class down a creative path that is not necessarily aligned, even for the lottery winners, the people who successfully master it and are financially rewarded by it.
Bringing Web3 financial rails and high quality publishing and distribution tools together in an application that all writers have the ability to use is a task so ambitious that it takes years to even fully conceptualize it. The goal is not only complex in the sense that it requires a lot of different moving pieces to come together to enable the technology to match the vision of what is possible, but it also involves difficult complex systems theory to design the decentralized monetary system that can facilitate the benefits of Web3 in a package that continually meets the needs of writers everywhere.
It's better to think of the WebApp as a process than as a static endpoint with concrete, well-defined goals, and goalposts that don't move. The consultants working with PageDAO have frequently struggled to understand the orthogonality of the space in which the DAO operates. Not only is value to be orchestrated as a series of flows that involve the native ability of participants to influence the structure of the framework in which they conduct their business, but thanks to Web3 technology, the foundational framework that enables these operations can continuously adapt to provide increasing levels of value. Nobody has ever done anything quite like this before, and the reason has been that it was impossible.
In other words, it's fairly complicated, but we're working with people who understand the traditional frames that things fit into and putting together a sort of backward-compatibility framework even for our most technically advanced features. Hence, what begins as a marketplace for books that enables users to transact their literary wares with collectors. The open source foundation of the PageDAO also ensures that builders and financiers who have an interest in the new technology space can find the support they need to provide real value to the PageDAO community.
What began as a simple way of storing a PDF to a public blockchain will now increasingly offer its users the opportunity to engage with that content, to participate in its adaptation to an increasingly decentralized world with ever-more advanced automation, and to creatively monetize all sorts of written ideas in ways ranging from vertical IP integration to private chats between fans and authors with monetized access tokens that can be bought and sold on liquid markets irrespective of the presence or absence of market participants in real-time.
Conclusion: The Future Is Bright
The future, for PageDAO, has never been brighter. As we prepare to offer access to the PageDAO WebApp to the first group of users, we're preparing governance tools to empower new voices to join our ecosystem and make an impact. And that's not all, either; we're also streamlining the issuance of the $PAGE token to ensure that everyone who joins the DAO will have a clear view of the token's structure and an equal opportunity to participate in the onchain literature economy it represents. PageDAO will push the envelope in ways that even projects with major backing cannot because, despite our years-long R&D initiative, we never took a cent of VC funding. As a result, the DAO we have built has few debts to pay. The users who enter the ecosystem will find a stable platform to share ideas and technologies from.
Three years after our formal Founding, PageDAO is finally ready for prime time. Head to pagedao.org and our Discord to learn more about how to get involved. Follow PageDAO on X and Farcaster to keep up to date. Our community is open and our new application is more than just another web-based application—it’s a decentralized platform for books that we think you’ll fall in love with.
T. Dylan Daniel has been a student at half a dozen institutions of higher learning in Texas and has taught philosophy at two. A lifelong learner, Daniel has spent years researching the problem of consciousness, first from the standpoint of philosophy and later through scientific means. In 2021, Daniel co-founded the PageDAO to bring writers access to advanced publishing technologies and new payment systems.
Originally Published at Vagobond Media's Substack.
