Writing

Some friends and I started a Basketball DAO in Miami
I co-created a DAO with some friends and it was fun!


Published almost 3 years ago.

Origin story

So a few weeks before the Bitcoin conference I caught wind of a basketball game being organized by @Lawmaster from The Block. I thought it would be a good way to meet Larry, and had recently seen this guy Christian Garrett on #MiamiTechTwitter - so I cold DMd @CGarrett_15 and invited him to team up with me, Pomp, and two other friends that happen to be very good at basketball to take down the block team at the Bitcoin conference.

Larry never stepped up to the plate, but we Christian ended up organizing an awesome game, that I invited my newly minted friend Trevor (@whatdotcd) to - little did I know that Trevor was one of the genius minds behind $FWB. At the same game, I met Derrick Thomas (@DT_32)!

Derrick kept the movement going by launching an NFT powered basketball experience at the Watsco arena that I participated in. At that game, Derrick talked about launching a DAO to take the experience to the next level by coordinating things like booking the FTX arena and having access to game info for members only.  I was in, but I wanted to rope Trevor into this and so Miami Tech Runs was born.

The DAO Stack

As you might have guessed, we were heavily inspired by $FWB. So we ended up requiring members to have at least 200 $MTRS1 tokens to be able to vote, get access to the Telegram, and more. To token gate our telegram group, we used Collab.land which is free. Collab.land needs some features and has some bugs, but it's free + alpha software - beggars cannot be choosers.

Cooper recommended we use Gnosis Safe to manage our treasury (don't try to use the python CLI lol) so we did that - it was easy enough. We set up a 2 of 3 signature via the UI and it was easy enough. We lost a bunch of gwei trying to get fancy and use the Gnosis python CLI tool, which is not compatible with the UI because they use different versions of the smart contract. Don't make the same mistake! 🤣

After making these basic decisions, we then needed an ERC20 token. We ended up copying the $FWB smart contract and making basic edits to suit our needs. I thought it would be cool to deploy the ERC20 using our Gnosis Safe, so I tried connecting it to remix via the wallet connect plugin but that proved to be a dead end. In the end I ended up deploying the $MTRS1 smart contract using my personal wallet and just minting all the tokens into the Gnosis multi-sig address.

Finally, we needed a way to roll up member sentiment and let them make suggestions on how to improve the DAO. For this we chose snapshot! Another piece of software we looked at closely was WithTally but it doesn't seem to support arbitrary DAOs at the moment.

How to join

Pretty cool that we're already at 10-ish members even though we don't have publicly available tokens at the moment! But if you're interested in joining us for Season 1 please reach out to me, DT, or Trevor on Twitter.

We're also working on a website, which should be available at miamitechruns.xyz very soon!