devcon8 / a dao shipped an aircraft what it takes to coordinate atoms with tokens
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A DAO Shipped an Aircraft: What It Takes to Coordinate Atoms with Tokens
Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN
Speaker: Thomas Garrison
Type: Talk
Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic
Event: Devcon
Date: Nov 2026
DAOs have gotten good at funding software and much worse at funding things with mass. Hardware has lead times, capital costs, and no way to fork your way out of a bad decision. Most token-coordinated attempts at physical engineering die in the gap between a passed proposal and a finished object.
Arrow is my evidence base: an open-source 25 kg VTOL designed, funded, and flown by a token-coordinated community, now doing paid agricultural work in Texas. Using its public governance record (failures included), I'll cover why software-style bounties collapse when applied to hardware and what replaced them, how an open design becomes a manufacturing protocol others can build from without permission, and how AI agents forced a redesign of contributor incentives. You'll leave with a concrete playbook for coordinating physical-world engineering on-chain, and a clearer sense of which parts of DAO tooling generalize beyond software.
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