venture capitalist: What is decentralised venture capitalism?

Hailed as the forebears of a decentralised new age that would challenge centralised government, traditional wage labour, and the established banking system, it’s no secret that crypto and blockchain have long been of interest to institutional investors and venture capitalists.

By 2021, 55 out of the 100 top banks, ranked by assets under management, have invested in crypto and blockchain ventures. The biggest funding rounds were led by Standard Chartered, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, UBS Group, and

, which contributed $1.5B USD investment from these five banks alone.

Major corporations are now investing in the crypto space as well. In fact, between September 2021 and June 2022, which includes the period when “crypto winter” had already set in, 40 global blue-chip companies invested a total of $6 billion into blockchain startups.

One might argue that all of this is promoting large scale adoption; however, the original advantages offered by decentralisation now risk falling short.

The promises offered by decentralisation in Web3 include: Data ownership by the people instead of by big tech; Censorship resistance – giving everyone a voice and equal access to information, including algorithmic responsibility; Enabling greener, energy efficient technologies such as edge computing; Respect for user privacy rather than the commoditization of data; Fairer decentralised finance and economics.

In short, crypto and blockchain projects – once hailed as beacons of social change and financial justice – are now being co-opted by big business and mainstream venture capitalism.

To remedy this, in February of this year, the world’s first decentralised financing mechanism was created to fund decentralisation and spark a revolutionary change in society in service of good. Cult DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) is a nonprofit, anonymous organisation that is wholly run by volunteers from the projects that participate in its ecosystem.
Like Bitcoin, its code is immutable and since its launch, unstoppable. The project is associated with the activist group Anonymous; and as Cult DAO’s dashboard shows, since February of this year, it has funded 106 projects in ETH with a dollar value amounting to over $2M USD. That’s a solid track record for a DAO that operates purely on a grass roots initiative.

Power to the people
To sketch its vision, Cult DAO cites Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator speech: As humans, we should “live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.”

The DAO recognizes that the current financial system is essentially flawed, and only serves to keep the people poor in a society built on debt, that needs inflation to function. It aims to correct these faults by supporting projects that will change the foundation on which society and the current monetary system are built.