Bankless Founders Vow to Separate Media Company from DAO Amid Controversy

In the midst of an ongoing controversy surrounding cryptocurrency media platform Bankless and its associated decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), the company’s founders have announced their intention to separate the brand from the DAO.

Co-founders David Hoffman and Ryan Sean Adams plan to submit a governance proposal to BanklessDAO, outlining their proposal for the separation of the two entities. 

They took to X (formerly Twitter) on November 26 to make the announcement, further stating their plan to burn all of their BanklessDAO (BANK) tokens.

Hello CT👋

To lead with the obvious, we could be better in accepting criticism of @BanklessHQ.

I hold Bankless very dear, and I've got an innate reflex to protect it when I see it being unfairly attacked.

This clouds my ability to hear what CT is trying to tell me,… pic.twitter.com/7L5ufQ1bAu

— DavidHoffman.eth/acc🦇🔊 (@TrustlessState) November 26, 2023

The decision to separate Bankless from BanklessDAO comes as a response to community criticism over BanklessDAO’s grant application to Arbitrum. 

The application, filed on November 20, requested 1.82 million Arbitrum (ARB) tokens, equivalent to approximately $1.8 million, from the layer-2 scaling project for the Ethereum blockchain.

Concerns arose within the community that BanklessDAO was leveraging the Bankless brand, which they did not create, for their ambitious proposals. 

David Hoffman expressed these concerns by indicating that BanklessDAO should not benefit from a brand they did not produce.

The BanklessDAO community quickly voiced their criticisms, questioning the lack of detailed information regarding how the grant money would be allocated for content creation. 

In response, BanklessDAO committed to revising the proposal by shortening the grant period to three months and providing clear key performance indicators and milestones.

Crypto Twitter Lashes Out at Bankless

The argument between proposal supporters and opponents swiftly escalated on social media platforms. Delegate Cash CEO Foobar, a pseudonymous delegate, went as far as accusing the Bankless founders of “legitimacy grifting” by pretending that BanklessDAO had no connection to Bankless.Another critic, a Bitcoin enthusiast known as Pledditor, slammed the Bankless founders for denying being grifters while simultaneously promoting projects like Nexo. Pledditor clarified that the founders were paid $31k to promote Nexo, not the alleged $250k.In response to the criticism, Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams defended the practice of running ads and emphasized that calling creators grifters for doing so was untenable. He further pointed out that paid subscribers have always funded Bankless’ mission.Bankless, founded in 2019, is a crypto media company dedicated to promoting the adoption and awareness of bankless money systems. In May 2021, Bankless launched BanklessDAO, a decentralized community aimed at coordinating and promoting bankless media. It was also during this time that they introduced the BANK token.In April 2023, Bankless founders revealed plans to raise a $35 million venture capital fund to invest in seed-stage Web3 companies.