Incredibly tough day for me. Probably the lowest I’ve felt in a while. Wanted to share some thoughts in the hope it helps the community understand where I’m coming from & how I can improve going forwards. When I first met @markus9x & @ropirito we were (and still very much are) curious geeks genuinely excited about the potential of Crypto AI. In fact one of the first things I remember Rop saying on a call was “Whatever I make from my work I’m going to donate to open source AI devs” That’s when I knew I wanted to build something with him. First time I came across Mark was his educational tweets, & then in numerous discord groups He was always trying his best to learn and help out. That’s when I knew I wanted to build something with him. For me? I just want to be the best, quickest learner about things I’m passionate about & then teach it to others. The result? I ended up in this niche yet exciting rabbit hole of crypto AI! Those of you who’ve watched me on Bankless AI Rollups hopefully see that. Personally, I’ve never been about this KOL thing, said many times I’ve no interest in being one (I had 3K followers 3 months ago, this is all new to me) But what I do value is people telling me that they were able to learn something cool and were inspired to build. To me that’s worth it. Then one day Rop, Markus & I had an idea (in the midst of a 2 hour call figuring out how AI agent frameworks were going to evolve) Why don’t we start a DAO? We could bring like-minded people together. Builders, ecosystem advocates, communities who could collectively drive towards a vision of open source, decentralized AI. A world where agents are the largest consumers and users of blockchains, across all ecosystems (Base, Solana, L2s etc). We couldn’t shake the idea, we were going to do this. Around this time, AI DAOs (human-agent DAOS) were starting to come into their own. We were put in touch with the Daos Fun team who shared the same excitement & said they would help. Mark, Rop & I put our heads down and started to plan why & more importantly *how* this dao would be different. We would be a hybrid investment & development DAO focused across multiple chains. Investing & incubating the future leaders of the space. Without prompting, Rop got to work designing an architecture that would help achieve our goal which spawned what will be our first Agent. We were excited. Naturally word spread out and people started asking how they could get involved & help. We were blown away by the response, people we looked up to & learned a lot from wanted to be involved & help. Speaking transparently, I think this is where things started going awry We got swept up in excitement and got ahead of ourselves without properly thinking through the structure & allocation process. That’s on us & I’m kicking myself for not slowing down. We were just keen to get going & believe we have a set of advisors that will help us get there. We also didn’t believe for a second things would get as crazy as it did. We thought launching on a day markets were down was a good thing, we’d have a slow start & scale with a bigger community over time (through airdrops, dao donations etc) But things exploded so quickly & before we blinked, things had gotten out of hand. That’s on us for not preparing accordingly. Moving Forward It is my belief that Aiccelerate DAO will ultimately fulfil its vision. While this is a setback I don’t believe it’s unresolvable. We will learn, grow & accelerate forwards. Mark, Rop & I are determined. To start: 1. I will personally be donating a chunk of my own allo to the community. The rest will be put into vesting. I’d be nowhere without all of you here teaching me new things every day. 2. Aiccelerate DAO will conduct a wider community distribution of $AICC. This will be a mixture of airdrops & donations to DAOs. Details to follow. Thank you to everyone who’s supported us so far. Aiccelerate (more cautiously)