Web3 Foundation Director to step down to pursue DAO project

In a series of Twitter post on Monday, Ryan Zurrer, director at Web3 Foundation (W3F), has announced that he will be stepping down from his role.

Zurrer has been serving as the director of the web-focused non-profit since October 2017. He was also Principal and Venture Partner at Polychain Capital until November 2018.

In his tweet, Zurrer said that he will be leaving Web3 Foundation at the end of this year to “focus on investing [and] specifically DAOs.”

3/7 With the success of the DOTs sale, the success of the @web3summit & the Foundation in a strong position organizationally, I will gradually step away at the end of this year and go back to what my primary passion is - deploying capital and helping early-stage teams build.
— Ryan Zurrer (@rzurrer) August 5, 2019

Speaking of his interest in decentralized autonomous organizations (or DAOs), Zurrer said that the 2016 DAO was one of the “coolest projects” that he has come across. He said:

“If it hadn’t imploded, today it would be the largest capital deployer in the space & the quality of due diligence that we saw from the community in those early days would have tempered the ICO craze of 2017.”

It can be recalled that The DAO was one of the much-hyped projects of 2016 and had raised a massive $150 million worth of ether in a public crowdsale. However, the project suffered a major hack in which $50 million in ether was stolen.

He added that there was a lack of certain tools back in 2016, along with the lack of regulatory clarity in several jurisdictions and deeper understanding of smart contracts, crypto-economics, and decentralized coordination.

“All of these tools exist now. It is the right time to explore this venture,” Zurrer added.

6/7 The dream of a sustainable decentralized organization that attracts and filters for great talent, supports genuine innovation and meaningful experimentation, and delivers outlier value to its members is really the most compelling project in my humble opinion.
— Ryan Zurrer (@rzurrer) August 5, 2019

According to the draft of his upcoming project’s white paper, it appears that Zurrer intends to create a for-profit, decentralized company, which will also be called The DAO, CoinDesk reported. The white paper states:

“DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization designed to sustainably develop a diversified portfolio of crypto-assets and accrue value for DAO members.”

Zurrer said that he will be making some key announcements along with a detailed overview of some of the new DAO concepts at the Web3 Summit on August 19th.