In the past year, the blockchain ecosystem has seen rapid growth in the number of new DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that have been formed to tackle some of the industry’s biggest challenges. In particular, one DAO has been growing at a rapid pace due to its mission to empower the application layer using social capital.

For those unfamiliar with MetaCartel, the project was created a little over a year ago by a group of individuals looking to standardize meta transactions: a method for abstracting gas fees to optimize user onboarding.

After realizing that issues like meta transactions were just a drop in a much larger bucket of mass adoption, MetaCartel forked MolochDAO to create the first DAO focused specifically on evangelizing killer blockchain applications.

What Makes This Unique?

While many funds and incubators actively search for killer apps to build and invest in, MetaCartel offers a new paradigm of community engagement and application development.

MetaCatel’s existing community network

More specifically, MetaCartel’s 40+ shareholders bring a vast amount of industry experience that allows for the most up-to-date insights on industry trends and use-cases. In practice, this allows MetaCartel-based projects to leverage the skills, ideas and services from its members without ever having to go out and waste time wondering if potential partners are reputable (and valued).

Taking this a step further, MetaCartel grants are starting to offer increased signalling that any given application may have a strong potential for future growth. Unlike many legacy blockchain investments (think ICOs or equity raises of $10M+), MetaCartel deploys small, focused funding in the range of $2k-8k. Most importantly, these grants are dispensed in as little as 14 days, a sizable improvement over corporate structures which have been known to take upwards of a year to distribute. As stated by one of MetaCartel’s members:

Too many projects are overfunded. This allows the founders to lazily walk around and casually try to hit their milestones. With our grant structure, our projects are constantly sprinting. Whether it’s stress testing, adding new features or genuinely doing something unique, we make sure developers are funded, but not overcompensated.”

Funny enough, this model seems to have been drawing a strong amount of interest from the very investors we just mentioned. Grant recipients such as Mintbase and Kickback have seen easier venture fundraising opportunities due to their involvement with MetaCartel.

DAOs Championing Social Capital

When it comes to selecting new members, projects or tasks to focus on, MetaCartel leverages the idea of social capital. In an industry that was largely predicated by wealth accumulation, MetaCartel changes this notion by focusing on people, regardless of their track record.

Whether it’s a 15 year old developer from India or a serial entrepreneur with decades of experience, the grant process is one in the same. MetaCartel deploys funds into killer products in exchange for user insights, analytics and general knowledge that is truly on the cutting edge of what the blockchain ecosystem has to offer.

Stated another way, you can think of MetaCartel as a group of individuals looking to find people market fit. With 24/7 chat channels, weekly conference calls and a suite of internal projects, the progress and effort being made each and every day is extremely enticing to say the least. By focusing on data-driven experiments, it becomes much easier for projects to build on top of one another, further propagating the idea of money legos, a term popularizing the composability of the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Tip of The Iceberg

Perhaps the coolest aspect of MetaCartel is the rapid expansion of the underlying systems spawning out of the DAO itself. While MetaCartel is becoming increasingly more recognizable by name, there are a vast amount of new sub-groups forming within the DAO itself. Combined with a long list of recognizable industry partners, the MetaCartel ecosystem is growing by the minute.

To summarize, becoming a member of MetaCartel not only grants you access to a group of industry thought leaders, it also opens doors to new niches that were non-existent up until now. For anyone who prides themselves on staying up to date with the industry’s latest trends, MetaCartel aggregates a refreshing community of young, passionate individuals striving to bring web 3 to the mainstream.

If you want to go quick, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

What’s Next?

In the next article, I’ll be diving deeper into some of the people making MetaCartel a reality. We’ll take a look at different community members and their role(s) within the DAO. In the meantime, I recommend heading over to the main MetaCartel forum to get caught up on the latest topic(s) of conversation. For more passive involvement, be sure to keep tabs on MetaCartel through Twitter or Medium!