Neta, the asset, that one you see on CoinGecko, the one with the closed contract address created by Core-1, is a blank canvas.

Neta is a permissionless asset. Neta is your asset. You, the person reading this sentence, have just as much authority around it as anyone else.

No individual controls this token and all recipients (early Juno Network governance participants) started on mostly even ground. You do not need to wait for any person or group of people to perform an action with it. If you want something done with Neta, you should consider building it or working with someone else who would like to build with it.

You have to accept one of two ideas behind NETA’s creation and its hands-off, experimental structure:

  1. Core-1 (whether it was one or many members doing so) created Neta for a well-thought out reason that, should individuals follow its blackpaper’s stated use case, could be a net benefit for the ecosystem.
  2. Core-1 created Neta for no reason other than they were bored. They had a surplus of time to draft tokenomics, write a contract, determine airdrop criteria, query addresses active in governance, create graphics, build a website, and create social media outlets because they wanted to give away money. JunoSwap began offering RAW LP incentives for no reason.

If you choose to believe #2, that Neta was created for no good reason or purpose, you are choosing to believe that Juno Network’s core development team makes decisions without regard to structure or purpose and should be questioning the future of your potential JUNO holdings.

Neta is your playground. I have spent months trying to convey this to people who FUD themselves by acting like this token will start developing itself on its own without human involvement. You determine its success. It can be argued if this is a fair asset model, but it was always an experiment. No one can say that it was a surprise - its characteristics were stated to people during its launch window here:

and here:

and here:

and here:

and here:

I am an active contributor to Neta DAO. Here are my goals of becoming involved in blockchain development and what I would like to accomplish by building around Neta:

Ensure the survival of Juno Network.
If Juno succeeds, Neta may succeed depending on how much the Juno audience chooses to utilize it per its designed purpose. But if Juno fails, Neta fails. Neta holders are placing inherent trust in Juno Network and have an obligation - at least to a small degree individually - to ensure it survives.

Promote decentralization of infrastructure throughout IBC.
IBC is largely a protocol aimed at decentralizing finance, but a great deal of planning occurs on Discord, meetings are scheduled through Google, websites use Cloudflare, events are hosted through Twitter Spaces. All of this is bad. We do not have data sovereignty; we do not have ownership over our tools or infrastructure. Running on Google Cloud, Hetzner, Heroku, and AWS and calling ourselves “decentralized” is not real decentralization regardless of how permissionless blockchain application code is written. If I search “defi Cloudflare outage” and receive results from both 2017 and 2022, a crucial conversation has not been happening. Cloud providers could change their terms of service at any time for no reason and cause considerable harm to a network.

Actualize a true “decentralized autonomous organization” that reaches beyond direct coin/token application code.
There is no such thing as a DAO. For a “DAO” to be truly decentralized (and later autonomous), all actions on behalf of the alleged “DAO” name, however small, need to be performed through governance: blog posts, DNS changes, container deployment, domain name renewal, everything. Every action on every single service needs to come to governance; actions cannot be left to individuals. Every action being taken in the name of an organization needs to be put to vote and executed programmatically or else it isn’t decentralized and cannot be autonomous. Cryptocurrency was conceived as a means of using cryptographic engineering to perform financial actions programmatically to eliminate dependence and trust on middlemen - this needs to extend to services beyond application code. Until this happens, all “DAOs” are just committees with extra technology.

Promote further adoption of free and open-source software (FOSS).
Cryptocurrency began as FOSS principles applied to an economic model. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts dislike the idea of using centralized payment processors for interpersonal transactions but have no problem using Mac OS to share proprietary Microsoft PowerPoint files for their “DAO” meeting via Google Drive. Actualizing a state of self-sovereignty cannot stop with just finance, it must extend to all levels of the technology stack. Meaningful FOSS alternatives exist for virtually every proprietary service you can think of and more are being developed by the day. Adopting and using this software will not only assist existing projects with self-sovereignty and resiliency, but can lead to onboarding more users to accelerate adoption of blockchain technology.

Assist in adoption of privacy solutions that mitigate the risks of a transparent blockchain.
Transparent blockchains are not good. Holding Neta mitigates a lot of this as it was designed for long term holding and is “not intended to be an asset that is used to pay for your daily coffee,” but even a low volume asset is still transparent to everyone on the planet. Additionally, IBC’s usage of the Bech32 address standard without any kind of stealth address implementation means that if I have your address on one chain, I can see what you have on all the others. As IBC continues to grow, this will become even more of a problem.

Bring back a culture of using cryptographic engineering as a counter to the fraudulent stock market and structural absence of fiat currency.
It’s not a coincidence that the Bitcoin whitepaper was published in late 2008. Refer to page 14. Unless you have directly registered your shares in your name outside of a securities intermediary (DRS), you do not own any shares, you own broker IOUs. Between payment for order flow (PFoF), SEC complacency/complicity, insider trading, and other forms of market manipulation, you are at the mercy of the traditional finance power structure - and they are not merciful. Exchanges can restrict or limit buying or selling when they’re caught with their pants down and there is nothing you can do about it. Gary Gensler talks about most of retail investors’ orders being routed to dark pools. Think about the term “market maker”: big players literally create the market. You don’t.

There is nothing stable about the United States Dollar. There is no counter to this. You do not control the monetary supply or its policy, you do not vote for members of the Federal Reserve - an independent entity, it is not a federal government component nor does it hold reserves. Making USD a cornerstone of your ecosystem through liquidity or “stablecoins” is building a foundation on sand.

Help transform an audience into a community.
Cryptocurrency is an extremely shallow asset class. Most people speak positively about a project or a group’s efforts if they:

  1. aren’t laughably centralized in tokenomics or structure;
  2. can be used as a means of obtaining more United States Dollars

If something doesn’t do this immediately, it’s a useless shitcoin ponzi rugpull Tulipmania exit liquidity grift scam and you’re dumb for holding when you could have “cashed out” (this isn’t a real thing; you don’t “cash out” of currencies, you exchange them). How many people post about building on Evmos and teach each other about it compared to people who enjoy its present status as a “money printer”?

If your only common denominator is trying to make a number go up, that’s not a community. To really grow, start affecting the world, and displace this opaque, rife-with-fraud traditional finance system we’ve all grown up in, we have to build communities. We have to start treating each other as peers and helping each other learn and grow in a hospitable environment instead of dumping on each other and hurting people for money. The only real enemies are the malevolent institutions in traditional finance and the longer we squabble with each other, the more ground they can gain in this Wild West we’re in. We can’t let that happen.

I didn’t plan on building in Web 3.0 - I initially joined the weekly meetings just to transcribe. But after some time, it became clear to me that if I left, I couldn’t be certain that others would take up a mantle. There was - and still is - a bystander effect where no one wanted to pick up a shovel, acting like building around Neta was the responsibility of the elusive Someone Else. It’s too early for me to say if I want to continue doing this on an extended timeline (5+ years), but changing the culture of this space and building software that matters is too important to me to leave.