What I always look at when I see new technologies doing something is I just imagine if it ten-x and what that would look like and if it worked, and then I just ten-x it one more time. So what we're going to see, I predict, is this $40 million Dow will turn into a 400 million won in the next two years, and then a 4 billion won in the next ten.View on YouTube
Jason’s prediction tied the then‑current ConstitutionDAO raise (~$40–47M) to a 10x then 10x again scaling of DAO capital formation on roughly these milestones:
- Within ~2 years of late 2021: see a DAO of roughly $400M scale (a ~10x from the ~$40M ConstitutionDAO example).
- Within ~10 years of late 2021: see at least one DAO of roughly $4B in capital (another ~10x).
What actually happened by the two‑year mark (late 2023):
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ConstitutionDAO itself raised about $47M in November 2021 and then disbanded.
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The largest clearly comparable, single‑purpose crowdfunding DAOs that followed (e.g., AssangeDAO in early 2022) raised on the order of $50–55M, not hundreds of millions. AssangeDAO collected about 17,400 ETH (~$55M) to bid on the Censored NFT for Julian Assange’s legal defense – a bit larger than ConstitutionDAO in dollar terms but nowhere near $400M.
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Historically, even before this podcast, the biggest DAO crowdfund, The DAO (2016), had raised roughly $150M in ETH, which is still well below $400M and shows that the space has not progressed to a new 400M+ crowdfunding scale since.
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Looking at ecosystem‑wide DAO treasuries, the total value of DAO treasuries was already about $11.5B by late 2021, and by March 2023 it had grown to around $25.1B – roughly a 2× increase, not the 10× jump Jason was heuristically projecting. Over that period, top DAOs like Uniswap and BitDAO were already in the multi‑billion‑dollar range well before the two‑year deadline, and later layer‑2 DAOs like Optimism and Arbitrum reached $4–5B+ treasuries. Those figures show that large DAOs exist, but they mainly reflect token allocations and price movements, not new, ConstitutionDAO‑style capital raises on the order of $400M.
Given this, under any reasonable reading where “this $40M DAO will turn into a $400M one in the next two years” refers to the scale of new DAO fundraising / single‑DAO capital formation:
- No new DAO crowdfund anywhere near $400M appeared by late 2023. The largest high‑profile issue‑ or purchase‑focused DAOs (ConstitutionDAO, AssangeDAO, FreeRossDAO, etc.) all topped out at tens of millions, not hundreds.
- The 10x step from ~$40M to ~$400M within two years did not occur, so that time‑bound portion of the prediction failed. In compound predictions, failure of an early, necessary milestone makes the overall forecast wrong, even if later, less‑specific conditions (like the existence of some $4B‑scale DAO treasury) are or become true.
Therefore, as of November 30, 2025, Jason’s prediction that DAO capital formation would scale from ~$40M to ~$400M within about two years (and then to ~$4B within ten) is best judged wrong, primarily because the 400M‑scale DAO fundraising milestone was never reached in the stated two‑year window, and the overall 10x‑then‑10x growth story he sketched from the ConstitutionDAO example did not materialize.
Key sources:
- ConstitutionDAO raising about $47M in November 2021.
- The DAO (2016) raising roughly $150M as an earlier record‑setting DAO crowdfund.
- AssangeDAO raising on the order of $50–55M in early 2022, the largest well‑documented follow‑on crowdfunding DAO but far short of $400M.
- DeepDAO / Messari data on total DAO treasuries (~$11.5B at end of 2021; ~$25.1B by March 2023) and top DAO treasuries (Uniswap, BitDAO, Lido, Optimism, Arbitrum in the multi‑billion range).
- 2021 end‑of‑year analyses showing Uniswap and BitDAO already controlling treasuries of roughly $2–3B each, indicating large DAOs existed before but without any new 400M‑scale crowdfunding step in 2021–2023.