PDP-22: PsyDAO Rebirth

Summary

Authors: Core Team

TL;DR:

PsyDAO is passing through a rebirth. The token-flywheel thesis the DAO was built on did not hold, and an accountability gap inside the governance structure let a former co-initiator retain ~$224K in DAO assets. This proposal names what was, what remains, and how we restructure.

What was.

The assumption was that tokenised scientific IP would generate a secondary market large enough to refill the treasury. It did not — the IPTs produced no meaningful secondary market activity, and the cost of launching them drew materially on the DAO's capital and contributor time. Downstream of that, an accountability gap inside the PSY / PSYC structure — information asymmetry between the handful of people with real-time visibility into wallet activity and everyone else — let a former co-initiator retain ~$224K in DAO assets before the pattern was surfaced.

What remains.

The mission — advancing psychedelic science and culture — is unchanged. The work the DAO funded is intact: the NextGen Empathogens IP (clean PCT Written Opinion in April 2026), the eDMT / DMT biomarkers programme, and the Kené licensing relationship with Shipibo-Conibo partners. The treasury is ~$620K liquid. The two-tier shape — 1 PSY = 1 vote over the treasury, PSYC as a stewardship layer — is preserved; what's changing is how each tier is held accountable to the other. How we restructure. A three-wallet architecture (Treasury / Public Benefit / For-Profit) routes every outflow from the Treasury through an explicit allocation vote.

A node model

Contributors compensated through the initiatives they run, with the DAO as a thin connective-tissue layer across a network of nodes — aligns incentives with initiative outcomes rather than flat payroll. An accountability layer — quarterly transparency reporting, multi-party control of all admin, conflict-of-interest disclosure, a formal dispute process — closes the informational gaps that allowed the failure.

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View the following document to see the full proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kJkDulwr8rO3oX8LVNc1SPNDJFLPzURRQdbUrw2XUlU/edit?usp=sharing