dOrg - Co-Founder

dOrg is a full-stack Web3 development collective and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that operates globally through smart contracts, with members worldwide. We started in 2018 with an initial plan to build DAO tooling — but in the very early days of the space, DAOs were largely theory. To prove the model in practice, we chose to run ourselves as a DAO and use that real-world operation as the product story.

My Role (Technical Co-Founder / Tech Lead)

I helped stand up the organization from scratch: early hiring, onboarding initial clients, scoping delivery, and building the technical execution model. As tech lead, I owned engineering direction across multiple parallel client projects — recruiting and onboarding more than a dozen developers, personally leading roughly half a dozen key engagements, and partnering with my co-founder on operating rhythm and client selection.

I helped design how dOrg operated onchain: what decisions were governed, how proposals were made, how voting worked, and how funds and payments flowed. A core design we converged on was a worker-cooperative model where members earned non-transferable reputation/voting power through paid work — aligning ownership with contribution rather than speculation.

A Living Organism, Still Running Today

The cleanest way to understand dOrg is as a coordination organism that continues to live on: people and processes wired together so demand turns into scoping, delivery, and onchain follow-through, with governance, tooling, and the legal entity acting as the connective systems around the body of work.

Legal and Organizational Foundations

In 2019 we established dOrg LLC in Vermont, in collaboration with the law firm Gravel & Shea, as what was recognized at the time as the first legally established DAO in the United States. This milestone made it possible to enter contracts and provide limited liability protections to members — a practical bridge between smart-contract coordination and real-world commerce.

• dOrg Launches First Limited Liability DAO (June 2019)

Selected Project Highlights

• DAOstack: During the Arc v2 protocol upgrade, I helped integrate changes across the stack — from the Arc client (arc.js) and flagship app (Alchemy), to migration tooling (migration) and the indexing subgraph (subgraph). I also shipped net-new ecosystem projects as a dOrg open-source release: the React integration layer (arc.react) and the DAO deployment flow (DAOcreator). I also gave a conference talk walking through DAOstack’s open-source ecosystem and how teams could build with it: Jordan Ellis of dOrg on DAOstack’s Open Source Stack @ DAOfest Berlin.
• The Graph: authored and implemented GraphQL mutation support, culminating in a published and merged RFC (RFC-3: Mutations); collaborated closely with leadership (CEO/CTO) to deliver the TypeScript implementation and developer-facing spec.
• GoodDollar / eToro: built Identity DAO — a DAO-curated onchain identity registry meant to be a decentralized source of truth for Sybil-prone “unique human” problems (voting, UBI, and similar apps). I partnered closely with their CTO to architect and ship it: DAOstack-powered curation where incentivized curators vote and stake on registry proposals, plus user-friendly onboarding portals (starting with the GoodDollar UBI dapp). The model cleanly separates Humans (apply), Curators (maintain via votes/stakes), Portals (submit applications on behalf of users), and Apps (read the registry to authenticate) — with intentional overlap in practice (GoodDollar acts as both portal and app).
• Gnosis: built OpenRaise — an early open-source bonding-curve fundraising system for DAOs, spanning Solidity contracts and a web UI for continuous funding flows.
• Balancer + other protocol clients: shipped frontend + protocol integrations and custom SDKs for emerging Web3 products, working end-to-end across smart contracts and full-stack application layers.