We Shipped a Sustainability DAO in 60 Days

December 2023.

Our CEO put an idea on the table that sounded noble and dangerous:

“Build a sustainability DAO.”

My first reaction wasn’t technical.

It was predictable.

This is going to become a deck. Ten smart slides. Three big words. Zero change on Tuesday.

So we forced a constraint that would kill the deck instinct:

Ship v1 in 60 days.

Not a pilot. Not research. Not a “strategy doc.”

Something a real user can touch. Something a real user can break. Something that still works next week.

Two months isn’t enough time to build the perfect DAO.

It’s enough time to build a DAO that exists.

In sustainability, existence beats eloquence.

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Why most sustainability efforts die on a normal Tuesday

Sustainability isn’t hard because it’s “complex.”

It’s hard because it’s behavior.

And behavior is where systems collapse.

Verification is messy. Incentives get gamed. “Impact” turns into marketing. Real life stays the same.

Most programs don’t fail in boardrooms.

They fail on a random Tuesday morning when someone is tired, busy, and not interested in becoming a better person for a points dashboard.

If nothing changes on Tuesday, nothing scales on paper.

So we flipped the approach:

Start with habits. Verify them. Reward them. Repeat weekly.

Then let the network decide what deserves more fuel next week.

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The whole DAO, translated into one weekly loop

We built VeBetter as a set of apps that reward “better actions.”

Small actions. Low friction. Repeatable.

Here’s the machine we shipped:

1. You do an action in an app
2. The app verifies it
3. The app records the exchange as a Sustainability Proof (S-Proof) and pays you in B3TR
4. At the end of the week, proofs are aggregated
5. The network votes on where next week’s rewards go
6. Apps compete for that allocation
7. Apps use rewards to pay users again
8. The loop repeats

If “DAO” language makes you flinch, translate it like this:

Every week, the system decides what it will pay for next.

That weekly cadence is the trick.

It turns sustainability from a campaign into a feedback loop you can feel, week to week, without needing to “believe” anything.

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The design choice that mattered: standardize the proof, not the behavior

I assumed the breakthrough would be technical.

It wasn’t.

It was bookkeeping.

Sustainability isn’t one thing. Cleanups aren’t cups. Cups aren’t fitness. Fitness isn’t shopping.

So we didn’t standardize verification.

We standardized what every app must record.

The Sustainability Proof is the standard.

An S-Proof is simply the recorded exchange:

a verified sustainable action → paid out in B3TR

That’s it.

No mysticism. No philosophy. No “trust us.”

Apps can verify in different ways because reality is different.

But every app must write down the same core truth in the same shape: what got verified, and what got paid.

Once you do that, “impact” stops being a vibe.

It becomes legible.

And once it’s legible, incentives stop being debate club. You can steer with evidence, because you’re comparing receipts instead of arguing about intentions.

Give a network receipts and it learns.

Give it stories and it performs.

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The surprise: builders changed faster than users

We didn’t set out to build an incubator.

But the incentives turned it into one.

Builders showed up and immediately hit real constraints:

1. Normal users punish confusion instantly
2. Adversaries show up early
3. Verification becomes part of the product, not an afterthought
4. Most users aren’t crypto-native, and they don’t want a lecture

And teams still shipped.

Because the platform gave them two things early products rarely get:

Distribution. And a working economic loop.

Not “build and hope.”

More like: build, plug in, prove usage through S-Proofs, earn next week’s allocation.

That changes builder behavior.

And builder behavior is what eventually changes user behavior, because builders shape the surfaces people actually touch.

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What 60 days actually looked like

We didn’t ship fast because we were heroic.

We shipped fast because we were ruthless.

One rule.

Ship the loop first. Earn complexity later.

Scope rules that saved the timeline:

1. Working contracts over elegant contracts
2. Weekly cadence over fancy mechanisms
3. Clarity over maximal features
4. Product behavior over governance theory

Small team.

One product lead (me). A few engineers. Designers who kept asking: “Would my cousin understand this?”

We launched with a small set of apps.

Then we iterated weekly until the loop stabilized.

No big launch saved us.

The loop did.

Because once you can consistently record verified actions and B3TR payouts as S-Proofs, aggregate them weekly, and route next week’s rewards based on what actually happened, the system starts teaching you—quietly and relentlessly—what works.

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What you can steal if you’re building incentives

1. Ship the loop before the narrative. Reality creates strategy.
2. Standardize the proof, not the behavior. Receipts beat opinions.
3. Pick a cadence and stick to it. Cadence keeps incentives honest.

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What I actually learned

Sustainability doesn’t fail only because people don’t care.

It fails because systems forget.

They can’t prove what happened. They can’t compare outcomes. They can’t reward honestly. They can’t correct quickly.

So in 60 days, we didn’t “solve sustainability.”

We built memory.

Verified action. B3TR paid. Recorded as proof. Counted every week.

Here is an example of the idea in action.

And here’s the part that still makes me laugh:

Once you stop selling “impact” and start keeping receipts, the movement shows up on its own.

Because Tuesday doesn’t care what you meant.

It only counts what happened.

If you made it this far, watch this video and feel inspired by the vision.