Decentralised autonomous organisations – or DAOs – are continually evolving our understanding of the interaction between physical and crypto environments. One such DAO – CityDAO – is seeking to re-define land ownership.
CityDAO takes advantage of a new Wyoming law which gives legal personhood to DAOs and became the registered proprietor of 40 acres of land near the Yellowstone region in northern Wyoming.
CityDAO’s vision is for a collectively governed blockchain city offering citizenship and governance tokens in exchange for the purchase of a ‘land NFT’ that grants the purchaser rights to a plot of real land. Notable citizens of the CityDAO currently include Vitalik Buterin – a founder of the Ethereum network.
Buterin has previously praised the CityDAO model of voting rights attaching to each land NFT and has suggested that future governance tokens akin to the Citizen NFTs would be ‘soulbound’ and only available to real-world citizens of the city to avoid power-hungry, wealthy investors accumulating an undue proportion of tokens.
The first Citizen NFT in the CityDAO community has recently gone up for auction, per its original owner Justin Kalland. Kalland has said:
My decision to sell First Citizen comes from a position of gratitude and planning for the future. I immediately fell in love with CityDAO and jumped straight in as the first “investor”. The vision combined with the calibre of people joining fueled a lot of enthusiasm.
The CityDAO community was unfortunately recently subject to an attack vis their Discord (chat) server. A hacker gained access to one of CityDAOs co-founder's accounts and issued an announcement for a fake land drop of NFTs. The hacker's wallet received ~30 ETH within 24 hours.
The CityDAOs co-founder in question was quick to accept responsibility and concern over blockchain city-building and noted the Discord server was the weakest link that led to the attack.
Despite this small set-back, CityDAO remains one of the only crypto projects which is both legal and has real land represented by tokens, which has been a dream of many crypto projects to date, and so will be one to keep an eye on.