Raising $8.3M to Fund a DAO Space Program | Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz from MoonDAO

#032 - Welcome to another episode of Quorum, where we believe that contributing to a DAO is the best way to find engaging and rewarding work in the new Web3 economy. 

In today’s show, I spoke with Pablo Mocada-Larrotiz, Cofounder of MoonDAO — which is a DAO with a mission to democratize access to space exploration.

We discussed: the importance of decentralizing access to space exploration, becoming the first DAO to send someone to space, the current state of space travel today, and how to get involved in the MoonDAO community. 

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Resources:

🎙️ Brandon Nolte: https://twitter.com/brandoncnolte

🎧 Quorum Podcast: https://podcast.quorummedia.xyz/

🗞️ Quorum Newsletter: https://www.quorummedia.xyz/

🤝 Quorum Twitter: https://twitter.com/quorummedia_xyz

🚀 Pablo Mocada-Larrotiz: https://twitter.com/LarrotizPablo

🌕 MoonDAO: https://twitter.com/OfficialMoonDAO

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More about MoonDAO:

Historically, space exploration was mainly controlled by governments, and more recently by private companies as well like: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic... But MoonDAO aims to change that.

MoonDAO has kind of a funny history — they initially had the idea of buying a moon rock together, more as a PR stunt, but pivoted into sending someone into space, when one of their DAO members had a connection to Blue Origin (the private space company founded by Jeff Bezos).

So around December 2021, in order to fund this idea, they set up a crowdfund on Juicebox for $450K (which is roughly the cost of a ticket to send someone to space). 

They not only hit that goal, but ended up raising over $8 million dollars worth of ETH in the end. This is so cool, and it shows you just how passionate people on the internet are about space. 

Now since that historic raise, they became the first DAO to send someone to space via Blue Origin (which we talk about in this episode), and they also have a decent sized treasury in order to fund the rest of their roadmap. 

MoonDAO is just a really exciting project to be watching because they go big with their ambitions, and it’s inspiring to see just how much traction they’ve gotten already. It really shows the power of collective action when funneled around a common purpose and goal.

Also, Pablo from MoonDAO is incredibly humble despite these ambitious plans. I really enjoyed speaking to him and hearing the current state of space exploration today and how MoonDAO is working towards being a big part of this frontier industry. 

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Quorum Partners:

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🏴 BanklessDAO: https://www.bankless.community/