Krause House DAO is a group organized by crypto fans who are raising money to try to buy an NBA franchise.
Krause House DAO
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Krause House DAO
Krause House DAO is a group organized by crypto fans who are raising money to try to buy an NBA franchise.
Krause House DAO
Thousands of Crypto Investors Recently lift up over $40 million and almost – but ultimately fell short – bought a copy of the US Constitution.
Now, a distinct group of crypto fans is building momentum with another acquisition goal: An NBA franchise.
In either case, crypto enthusiasts are organized under what is known as a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO, which is an online group with a collective bank account and mission statement.
Calling itself the Krause House DAO, a reference to the late Chicago Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, the group of about 2,000 members lift up the equivalent of US$4 million in Ethereum cryptocurrency for six days. The crowdfunding, in the form of an NFT sale, ended on Thursday morning.
This idea is still not exactly a scam.
For one thing, that’s not the place in the universe of what the team would need to place a believable bid on even the lowest valued NBA team (The Memphis Grizzlies, estimates valued at about $1.3 billion).
Second, persuading the NBA to open the door to a jointly regulated crypto investment may not be the easiest sales pitch.
Krause House DAO organizers are asking the public not to laugh.
“We understand a reader’s first instinct might be to mock this and say the owner would never let this happen,” read the group’s so-called “flight report,” a nod to the more traditional white paper research report.
It said: “It is important to understand that not so long ago, the players were in the same place on the totem pole, where the fans are today. “There’s no reason fans can’t do the same if properly organized.”
A co-creator of Krause House DAO, who speaks only to NPR using his pseudonym on the social network Discord, said the money raised so far will be invested in future projects, focusing into becoming a serious NBA contractor someday. However, the exact plan for all this new cash is yet to be detailed.
The members of the group will vote on where the money should be spent. The ultimate aim, however, is to be able to demonstrate to franchise owners that a DAO can be an effective way to run a professional basketball team.
In its Discord community, organizers sign up for team updates with “WAGBAT,” which stands for: “We’re Buying a Team.”
The pandemic ushered in a new generation of crypto investors, but there are few ways to use the newfound wealth. Some switched to buy NFT – a kind of limited edition digital collectible – but now there is more and more impetus to turn to higher ideas, such as trying to help create the next version of the Internet. This, named Web3, which seeks to give collective control of major online sites to the crypto masses. The DAO is part of that utopian dream, now only hoping to have collective ownership of everything in the real world, like an NBA team.
Investor Michael Lewkowitz, who put the equivalent of $100,000 into the Krause House DAO, dismissed questions as to whether the effort is just the crypto community’s latest public stunt or not.
“Kraus House is completely serious,” Lewkowitz said in an interview. “We often think of a billionaire buying a team as a one-off event. But this is different. It’s about people coming together and owning something they’re really passionate about. Sports should in the hands of those who care most about it.”
In a way, the DAO community is still healing its wounds from the failure of the DAO Constitution.
That group, auctioning for a rare copy of the United States Constitution, decided to dissolve, with investors now trying to get as much money back as possible, some of which has been eaten up by the notoriously high transaction costs known as gas fees.
However, Lewkowitz, who has invested in CharterDAO, sees a stroke of luck. Unsurprisingly, crypto fanatics tend to be enthusiastic and optimistic.
“You can see it as a lost bid, or you can see it as thousands of people who came together for a common cause and almost accomplished something amazing,” Lewkowitz said.
While crypto fans taking control of the NBA franchise might be a fluke right now, team members now have NFTs, of course.
With NFT, is the image like a ticket to a Krause House fantasy basketball game, with community voting rights, in the form of $KRAUSE tokens.
But the disclaimer on the page, the fine print as proverbial, acknowledges what could be the end result of this movement.
The team’s website states: “Neither this NFT nor $KRAUSE ticket is a promise of future ownership by a team.
