DAOs Are Dead. Why Onchain Cooperatives Will Usher in Crypto’s Golden Age

A crypto war is raging in Washington D.C. with some of the industry’s most powerful players jockeying for regulatory capture as laws are being written in real-time.

In the fog of that war, Coinage has joined a contingent to fight for the most important innovation in the history of crypto — and the SEC seems to agree.

It’s not new technology and it’s not a blockchain, but it has everything to do with why crypto’s next chapter will be revolutionary. SEC Chair Paul Atkins just confirmed as much in his first-ever keynote speech on digital assets since assuming his new role, addressing why regulatory clarity will be paramount to unlock crypto’s full potential.

“Blockchain technology holds the promise to allow for a broad swath of novel use cases for securities, fostering new kinds of market activities that many of the Commission’s legacy rules and regulations do not contemplate today,” Chair Atkins said. “Tokenization can also enhance capital formation by transforming relatively illiquid assets into liquid investment opportunities.”

Indeed, this is what Bitcoin pioneered: A token that powered a network that accrued value back to the very people who used it. Over more than a decade since its creation, certain regulatory clarity along the way — like recognition as a commodity and approval for Bitcoin ETFs — helped Bitcoin explode to surpass a $2 trillion market cap.

One could argue that without that regulatory clarity (and reluctant nod of approval for ETFs at the SEC) Bitcoin would not have been able to amass the capital it has to reach its new zenith. And while that has all worked out for the Bitcoin community in their mission to build decentralized money – what about all the other communities on the internet?

In 2021, ConstitutionDAO launched an amazing attempt to bid on one of the last remaining copies of the U.S. Constitution. More than 17,000 strangers on the internet pooled more than $40 million dollars to bid on it together. And while they were eventually defeated at auction, it did raise the question: Could they have even shared in the upside if they won?

For so long, the SEC under Chair Gary Gensler had fought to ensure communities on the internet could not enjoy the same benefits of capital formation and ownership that Bitcoin’s community has. Any token that delivered any sort of utility would be pursued with the fullest extent of the SEC’s force.

In 2023, the Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher-backed NFT project Stoner Cats was sued for an unregistered security offering after attempting to let people own NFT versions of characters featured in an animated show. In 2024, the SEC sued the membership-based restaurant FlyFish club for offering NFTs as well.

That was the backdrop we founded Coinage in. It was immediately clear to us that in order to build a community-owned project, we would need to figure out an entity structure that could allow for all of the things that make crypto great — permissionlessness, shared value accrual for users, technological efficiencies — but that we would also need to fit into existing legal frameworks.

As it so happens, that legal framework has existed in the U.S. for decades. And not only has the Supreme Court blessed it — and so has the SEC.

They are called cooperatives. And the cool thing about cooperatives is that they look a lot like DAOs: People with a shared mission and passion can unite to participate and own something, together. The outdoor store REI is a cooperative, which pays a dividend out to people who shop there. And so is the beloved cranberry juice brand Ocean Spray, which is co-owned by the farmers who help grow the product that makes it all possible.

In the world of crypto, DAOs really don’t look all that different. And simply bringing cooperatives onchain certainly shouldn’t be illegal. Which is exactly why when we founded the first ever community-owned Web3 outlet in Coinage, we chose to launch as an onchain, U.S.-registered cooperative. This has enabled us to go where no other NFT project has gone before.

In 2025, Coinage became the first Web3 media cooperative to pay a distribution to our members (NFT holders) and have the value of our intellectual property and content accrue back to the very people who make us who we are: You.

As a media company, we are natively an attention company. We thrive on people watching our content and reading our articles — giving us their attention. And yes, we can command more revenue from advertisers when it all works well. (The trust we've built in our brand has also fueled a booming staking operation.) But as Bitcoin proved, it’s not the simple act of rewarding users that makes Web3 special — it’s really about giving users ownership.

When Coinage launched, we set out to tokenize a capped amount of our memberships. Unlike other NFT projects, we didn’t care about minting out at launch. It didn’t matter. We have systematically raised prices around membership as Coinage has grown and our content has won awards. And, importantly, this isn’t just some ephemeral token based purely on speculation. It’s a real membership that constitutes real ownership in a real entity that holds the Coinage IP. 

Most crypto projects, including memecoins, have failed miserably in their attempts to replicate Bitcoin’s success at tokenizing community. One could list many reasons as to why that has been the case, but I would argue there is one, most-pressing external factor: We have not been allowed to.

As SEC Commissioner and Head of the Crypto Task Force Hester Peirce recently admitted to me, that has been one of the largest failures at the SEC during its crusade against crypto – and one she fought so hard to prevent under the last administration.

“I really do want to flip that so that we're encouraging people who are offering real value,” she told me. “It seems like before, if you were offering something of real value, you were more worried about getting hauled into the SEC for an enforcement discussion.”

As a founder who has spent the last three years digging into U.S. cooperative law and constantly living in fear we would suffer a similar fate to other crypto projects, I could not nod emphatically enough. But until there is regulatory certainty, I’m afraid more projects will not try to pursue what we have attempted to do. And I am not exaggerating when I say this: I think America depends on it.

If you haven’t been paying attention, inequality in the U.S. is getting worse every day. And this isn’t a political statement, it’s just a fact that leaders in both parties understand. Part of the problem is that technology is accelerating at a faster and faster rate. Opportunities to own that technology continue to shrink and shrink — and most of the upside by the time a project goes public has already been had 10-times over by Silicon Valley. And when fewer people stand to benefit from owning some of the most important technology of our time, that can lead to incredibly bad outcomes.

The founder of ETHDenver, John Paller, recently revealed to me why he also chose to establish his industry-leading conference as a cooperative. His answer was eye-opening.

“When you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, for example, the only responsibility you have is number-go-up for the stock price,” he said. “They don't have structural benevolence to their constituencies. And that includes their customers. It includes their distributors or stakeholders, the contributors, everybody who's involved in this game that they've built.”

Historically, that may have been a result of existing rules around funding, registered offerings, capital formation, the model for companies to go public, and yes, treating everything like a security.

But that’s the cool thing about cooperatives. There is plenty of precedent from both the SEC and the Supreme Court to demonstrate cooperative memberships aren’t securities. And, more importantly, there is also decades of history to show cooperatives can enable shared ownership and lead to better outcomes.

By the new Chair of the SEC’s own admission, crypto has enabled things many people could not have contemplated – or, even actively chose not to consider.

“In the past few years, the SEC first pursued what I call the ‘head-in-the-sand’ approach – perhaps hoping that crypto would go away. Then, it pivoted and pursued a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach of regulation through enforcement,” Chair Atkins said. “It claimed that it was willing to talk to prospective registrants, ‘Just come in to visit,’ but this proved ephemeral at best and more often misleading because the SEC made no necessary adaptations to registration forms for this new technology.”

So Coinage has decided to take up the SEC’s call for change. We formed a new contingent – the Coalition for Cooperative Blockchain Organizations – along with ConstitutionDAO’s founder Graham Novak, ETHDenver’s John Paller, and our coop attorney friends at Jason Wiener and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe to attend a meeting with the Crypto Task Force and advocate for clarity around building onchain cooperatives.

We intend to continue fighting for the betterment of the Coinage community – and any community anywhere who wants to own things together online.

The time for real onchain ownership in America has come. Join or Die.

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