Andrew Yang Turns to DAO in Web3 Lobbying Push

For­mer pres­i­den­tial and NYC may­oral can­di­date Andrew Yang is aim­ing to launch a DAO to get lob­by­ing dol­lars and the law­mak­ers they influ­ence on board with Web3.

Yang announced the ini­tia­tive, called Lobby3, in a Twit­ter post Thurs­day. After its lob­by­ing infra­struc­ture is built, a por­tion of the pro­ceeds will fund a DAO (decen­tral­ized autonomous orga­ni­za­tion). The mint­ing of Lobby3 tokens is set for Feb. 28.

It is a blockchain-dri­ven piv­ot from Human­i­ty For­ward, a non­prof­it launched by Yang in 2020 focused on anti-pover­ty mea­sures, includ­ing the child tax credit.

“But now I’ve real­ized that the most pro­found oppor­tu­ni­ty to fight pover­ty lies in Web3 tech­nolo­gies,” he said in the Twit­ter video. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly our lead­ers in DC don’t real­ly get these tech­nolo­gies — they’re a lit­tle bit ner­vous about them, so that’s what we have to change.”

Lobby3 token hold­ers can par­tic­i­pate in com­mu­ni­ty votes, round­table dis­cus­sions with pol­i­cy lead­ers and exclu­sive events.

Base­line DAO mem­ber­ship costs 0.07 ether, while becom­ing an “advo­cate” — with addi­tion­al access to cer­tain vir­tu­al and in-per­son events — is priced at one ETH.

Lobby3 intends to fund advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tions in DC to form rela­tion­ships with law­mak­ers and edu­cate them on Web3. It’s also look­ing to recruit gov­er­nors and may­ors to run Web3 pilots to show how blockchain tech­nol­o­gy can boost finan­cial inclu­sion and reduce poverty.

Yang pre­vi­ous­ly told Block­works that Web3 must become a vital source of mon­ey, media and votes.

“Let’s say that we were to do a cryp­tocur­ren­cy pilot in a Black neigh­bor­hood in Ohio, and then the Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tor, Sher­rod Brown, was to see that some of his con­stituents are able to access finan­cial ser­vices in a way that they weren’t able to before,” Yang said. “Then, when he gets asked about the tech­nol­o­gy, he has a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive and out­look on it.”

Brown called cryp­to “a shady, dif­fuse net­work of online fun­ny mon­ey” in July.

The launch of Lobby3 comes as spend­ing on cryp­to lob­by­ing grew to near­ly $5 mil­lion in 2021, accord­ing to a Cryp­to Head analy­sis of OpenSe­crets data — a 116% increase from 2020.

Coin­base, the Blockchain Asso­ci­a­tion, Rip­ple Labs and Robin­hood have each spent more than $1 mil­lion for cryp­to lob­by­ing over the past five years, the report found.

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