# Just DAO IT! with Zaal Pre-Edited

**Adam Miller:** [00:00:00] welcome to Just DAO It, the podcast for people starting DAOs and Web3 projects and decentralized AI agents. I'm Adam Miller, and I'm your host. I'm the CEO and co-founder of MyDAO, which provides, legal structures for DAOs Web3 projects and decentralized AI agents in partnership with the government of the Marshall Islands.

And I am here today with my friend Zal. Zal, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself. 

**Zaal:** Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Adam. My name is Zal, also known as Better Call Zal on the internet. I've built and founded the ZAO, a place for the, bring the profit margin data and IP rights back to independent artists.

Ultimately, we've incubated a few different projects throughout this process, like Wave Wars, ZAO Festivals, and COC concerts, all different ways that we're trying to find individuals within our organization to get more distribution. 

**Adam Miller:** As much of my [00:01:00] audience already knows, we will spend the first half of the show going into recent news in the industry, and then we'll turn to a more in-depth discussion about what you're working on.

So for the Just DAO It news report, the first story of the week is another governance attack, or perhaps we should call it an apathy attack. This is BonqDAO. Once again, no bug, no hack. The governance system did exactly what it was built to do. The smart contracts that govern the organization's money, hosted a normal proposal and a normal vote.

What's being called the attacker spent $4.4 million buying the project's token, Bonq, some of it was borrowed,

and then proposed and passed a proposal taking $20 million out of the treasury to, itself. That voter was most of the 2.9% of voter turnout. So once again, we have a scenario where, if anyone had been paying attention [00:02:00] and willing to vote, assuming that they really disagreed with this proposal, they could have come in and voted it out.

The legal scenario here is what's gonna happen here in, in this organization? Are you gonna have some members suing founders or, people who had a lot of voting rights and did nothing? And, as we've discussed many times on this show, because the DAO does not have a legal wrapper, anyone who's voted in this DAO before can be held liable for whatever went wrong.

I think aside from the whole low turnout idea and just thinking about this in any DAO or governance system you create, is to have something like a security council we talked about this, the ENS Security Council on the last show, and we'll cover that again soon. You could have, some kind of, a time lock for major transactions that give people more time to show up.

And honestly, I'm left wondering what really happened here? Was there no [00:03:00] founder who had 3% of the tokens that could have outvoted this? And maybe this project wanted to be so decentralized that no one has 3%, and so there was no founder who could even, protect the community. So Zal, you're working on the ZAO.

Could someone spend $4.4 million and buy their way into the ZAO's

**Zaal:** it's actually a perfect reason on why we created the ZAO the way it is. The ZAO, respect token, which is our governance token, is an illiquid and soulbound token, meaning that illiquid means you can't buy and sell it anywhere.

So even if someone did have $4.4 million, they wouldn't actually be able to buy our governance. And then soulbound means that once you do get it, it's actually just in your wallet, and you can't send it to anyone else. And the goal is to create a way to prevent things like this, where a new individual can join a community, gain enough governance to pass proposals through quorum or a low turnout, and essentially [00:04:00] be able to do whatever they want at will.

Long as our active ZAO members are present, it's nearly impossible for a group of bad actors to come in and take over enough governance within the ZAO without raising flags that would help us and we do have, a pretty significant seven-day period of people voting and a yes/no period and then as well a veto-only period for where if a thing did pass and a lot of people are like, "This is not good," we have four more days or two more days or however many more days the consensus decides to get enough people to veto that

**Adam Miller:** so the same vote effectively stays open longer for more nos only. 

**Zaal:** Exactly. 

**Adam Miller:** Oh. That's a cool way to do it. People probably remember from our last episode, or if they're following the Web3 news, the ENS, the Ethereum Name Service, has been going through a lot of drama-

some of which we went into recently, a lot of arguing and debates. One of the issues at stake was whether to install a new security council, [00:05:00] which they finally did, and it has exactly the, capability we've been discussing. I'm not sure they used the specific mechanism that you were talking about, but it's a council of five of eight multisig, which has, a couple of days after a vote passes to, veto or not veto any transaction.

I'm hoping that they have a very detailed legal or other, specific document that outlines when they're allowed to use this right, because that's another huge problem that all kinds of DAOs get into is you create the security council, but then you just say, "Yeah, you're the security council."

Well, what if one of those people just doesn't like a proposal? Are they legally allowed to use their veto in that manner? And generally they shouldn't be, and that's the kind of thing that gets written into operating agreements for DAO LLCs, for example, if there is a security council, is when are they allowed to use it?

And if they break the rules, you take them to court. The other interesting thing about, the ENS case, Nick Johnson, the same founder who originally blocked the security council [00:06:00] proposal that failed, and by blocked I just mean, he's the one who had 3% of total supply when the total amount voting was less than 6%.

He voted against. This time he voted for. And so the security council proposal has, passed and, still I guess open question is whether they're okay with the 6% of the community voting on everything or is that really a problem that there's low turnout? You know, it's interesting, I have some ENS names.

I think I even have some tokens. I never even thought about voting. I always assume that my- ... you know, .0001% has no impact, but perhaps that's a philosophically naive, position as a token holder. 

**Zaal:** Think that's exactly the reason we get low turnout for everything is everyone believes that if we are in a really decentralized system, the idea is you can actually get like a more democratic decision, but the individuals need to actually show up and you have to make it as easy as possible, as frictionless as possible to actually make that happen. 

**Adam Miller:** And [00:07:00] by the way, ENS actually mentioned, Bank Dao in their proposal as the reason why they had to get this done, and that seems to be what helped, push it over the finish line.

A little bit more, governance news, rapid fire style so that we don't go too deep into any of these. But, Cardano, the blockchain which is one of the big early blockchains, they, had their first hard fork which was ratified entirely through on-chain governance.

So the theory here is, unlike most blockchains where a hard fork is simply a vote with your feet, you either fork or you don't if you're a validator and that's what determines the future. They actually do on-chain governance to try to agree first whether to fork or not, and then I, I believe that somehow they try to enforce that on the validators so that if people vote you go with the vote.

Although I think with any validator set you always have the option to walk away. Solana also, launched formal on-chain governance system. You do have to have 100,000 Sol, which is [00:08:00] about $7.7 million to open a proposal but there is now a formal way in Solana to, to engage in governance. -- I-in Ethereum, there's been a debate or discussion about whether we should have something like this.

Why is there no official way for the Ethereum community to come together and vote on the future of the network? But Ethereum's philosophy continues to be that should-- it should be more decentralized than that, that let anyone who wants to participate in the development of the network and then govern those systems however you want.

As we covered in a recent episode, there has been some bifurcation recently, the Ethereum Foundation, which has reduced its staff. Other organizations that have popped up and gotten funded, including The DAO Security Fund, which is the original DAO from Ethereum back as a Marshall Islands DAO LLC, which is, supporting, the security of Ethereum.

MetaDAO, which has their concept of, ownership coins. MetaDAO's on Solana, and the idea of ownership coins is just let's have a DAO with governance tokens where the governance tokens [00:09:00] actually own the company and get economic rights, like a stock.

If you have 1% of the tokens, you get 1% of the profit. There's nothing that crazy about that i-idea. It's where a lot of people would like to be. They're just one of the projects bold enough to actually do it, and deal with the regulatory consequences. But in particular, they have this futarchy governance mechanism where decisions are made in these DAOs through market-based trading mechanisms rather than voting.

And so the regulatory argument is, th-this is not a security because the token holders, even though they have economic rights, do not have governance rights. If they want to engage in governance, they have to go, participate in a free market on decision-making markets with everyone else. So they held their first, owners meeting a couple of weeks ago, which is exciting to see.

Lido DAO, so the Lido project, which is one of the biggest, , uh, Ethereum staking providers, they did a major restructuring, of the [00:10:00] system into a new staking router, and LDO, their token, rose about 23% on the week, which is nice in an environment where most tokens are down. So Arbitrum turned on, revenue sharing, so 10% of the net fees from chains like Robinhood Chain, which is an Arbitrum-based chain, flow back to the Arbitrum network, 8% to the treasury and 2% to a dev guild.

And ARB, their token, also rose on the news Any reactions to the governance rapid fire before we turn to the next news segment? 

**Zaal:** The last one that you spoke about is also really interesting, the Arbitrum turning on revenue sharing, and it's actually something that I was really interested in seeing taking 10% of whatever is built on their stack and base being built there and seeing the potential for this powerful network effect that I don't think we've yet seen, which I think is really interesting.

So I'm curious to see how AARP does it and to see if maybe [00:11:00] that's the L2 that can really make something like that really powerful revenue source for layer 2s on Ethereum. 

**Adam Miller:** And it's also this question of, can a network like Ethereum succeed not only without the governance system, but without that treasury building system, right?

There's no fees in Ethereum that go to the Ethereum Foundation or to any kind of shared treasury for Ethereum. It's all network participants who have to raise or pony up the cash to develop the system. And in some ways, I think Ethereum is a little bit lucky just because it started so early and its token value rose so much.

There are a number of participants in the ecosystem who are simply rich, or people and organizations who are willing to devote tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to the future of Ethereum. And so maybe it doesn't matter that we don't have a more structured funding mechanism, but it sure sounds like a nice idea for a network to structurally self-fund its own development.

All right, moving on to, regulatory [00:12:00] news. The CLARITY Act in the United States, which we have been following on this show, and everyone on the show so far, and myself included, seems to want the CLARITY Act to pass. There's a lot of good stuff in this piece of US legislation.

It's actually a really good law that puts a lot of good structure in place and actually, will make things safer, and, easier for people to build in crypto globally. They're still fighting about the ethics language.

A deal was reached but Democrats, rejected the deal. This big fight goes back to the fact that Trump has made over a billion dollars on his private crypto projects while in office, and the bill would make it illegal to do so. I'm not sure if they're trying to claw back that money.

I imagine not, but it's still, making Trump uncomfortable. Meanwhile, the SEC is not waiting. We've also covered some of these stories in prior episodes, but, the SEC's agenda continues to, lead to new proposals, and rules, which may not be quite as good as legislation because they can [00:13:00] be changed by future SECs, but they've got great stuff in them.

Things like a safe harbor that lets, early-stage projects raise up to seventy-five million dollars per 12 months via tokens, and then an off-ramp that says when a token, stops being, i- in the safe harbor and starts being a security and how to cross that bridge and become a registered, security.

And so it's just great to see that the SEC is making progress in this regard. A lot of people, for example, when Tally shut down recently, so Tally, being one of the early DAO governance software systems used by a lot of major DAOs, the founder said, the problem is that the regulatory arbitrage is gone, and the reason that people used to create DAOs was because being decentralized meant your token is not a security, and now that that's gone, no one's starting DAOs."

And I think he's wrong on both counts. I think people are still starting DAOs, although not as many as we might have hoped five years ago. Maybe we thought we would be starting 100 or 1,000 times as more per [00:14:00] year now. But DAOs are still being started, and the regulatory arbitrage or advantage is actually being put into structured rules in the United States, that decentralization really can exempt you from having to follow normal securities or other securities rules, which is phenomenal.

Let's move to AI agent news. I wanna briefly go over some points from a talk I gave at the Maryland Blockchain Bootcamp of 2026 just last week because, we haven't covered this much on the show. My talk was called When Software Owns Property, and we went into, decentralized AI agents and AI agents in general participating with legal personhood or legal structures in the economy.

First of all, a little bit of history. There was an agent named, Fraser, who, someone put onto X and said, "Do not give away this money." So they gave the agent a wallet with $47,000 and said, "You may not give away this money." And after [00:15:00] 481 failed attempts of people trying to get the agent to give away the money, the agent actually was tricked into giving away the money.

So obviously important, to remember that things can, go wrong, and when they do, people will be held accountable and not the agent itself. Around that time, the agent token mania here in crypto, hit its peaks with $15 billion of market cap in, tokens like, AI16Z, which is now being sued, both for not truly being autonomous in addition to pretending to be a16z, the venture capital firm that many of us are, aware of.

But I think one of the most interesting parts was they're being sued for saying their agent was autonomous when really it wasn't. And so this thing where people masquerade, "Hey, come talk to my decentralized AI agent or my autonomous AI agent," if that agent is just running on your computer you can't say that it's autonomous because it's not.

If you wanna be [00:16:00] autonomous, you've gotta really dig into what it means to be a decentralized AI agent, which we will do more of later in the show. I think the other interesting, statistic is, if you look in the media, there's some exciting announcements about the progress of AI agents participating in the economy.

A couple I wanna go over because they sound exciting, but then really they're not as exciting as they sound. So one is, , X402, uh, which is this, payment, processing protocol for AI agents on blockchains, had processed 150 million payments, totaling, $40 million. And people said, "Oh, that's so exciting."

If you do the math, that's less than $100 per agent on average. And so are these agents really doing anything meaningful, or are these all proofs of concepts? Are they all experiments? Are they all, popping up, buying some maybe AI inference for themselves and then popping down? Relatedly, the other exciting story was just a couple of months [00:17:00] ago, an agent named Manfred was the first to open an LLC in the United States, get an employee identification number, and open an FDIC-insured bank account, and then went on to proceed to enter into business.

What is the sum total of the business that this agent has done? It signed a contract with another agent to design a logo for an example project. And so, even in the most exciting case that the media is talking about and it's doing all this cool stuff, nothing's really happening, right?

It designed a logo. So we'll actually talk more later in the show about, the value of AI agents forming LLCs. I mean, this is something we're doing in the Marshall Islands. It is cool, and it's exciting, and it will be a meaningful part of the future economy for AI agents to take on some kind of legal personhood, managing companies, et cetera.

And Zal is one of the people who's going to be doing that. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that, so far the state of the art is less than $100 per [00:18:00] agent, and the biggest project done by a decentralized AI agent may be simply designing a logo. Zal, are we gonna do more than that with, what you're working on for your AI agents?

**Zaal:** Oh, yes, we will. We're gonna bring on the next stage of the creator economy, right? I think there's so many middlemen in here. It'll be really fun to start to create something that can leverage this new tooling to help other founders, creators, builders, and artists out there be able to do that same thing for themselves.

**Adam Miller:** Yeah, for sure. In addition to the Marshall Islands having its, DAO LLC or digital LLC framework for AI agents, Delaware drafted a potential legal entity structure for AI agents. And Bermuda, a lawyer in Bermuda, also made a declaration on sovereign agents, insisting that Bermuda will be providing some legal structure for these agents as well.

So there is movement in the direction that, that we will be talking about more on the show. [00:19:00] So, that does it for the Just DAO It News Report. a quick break, and then we will go deeper with Zal on his background and what he is planning. For the break, a quick ad for MIDAO. MIDAO builds legal entity solutions for Web3, DAOs, and AI agents in partnership with the government of the Marshall Islands.

This week, I wanna spotlight the AI Agent Legal Entity Guide. If you go to midao.org/guides, click on the AI Agent Guide, and this goes in depth more than we can on any talk or podcast episode. What are the legal problems that actually show up if you're thinking about, creating a legal structure for your AI agent project, the entity architecture that actually solves this in the Marshall Islands, and how to look at other jurisdictions around the world as well.

So Zol, by day, you automate buildings at the Jackson Laboratory, and by night, you run an on-chain music community from Maine. And I think you're involved in dozens, if not hundreds of startup [00:20:00] projects, involving DAOs, Web3, and AI. How does an automation engineer end up founding a music DAO and all these other cool things you're working on?

**Zaal:** I would, start it off with where I started, uh, entrepreneurial, journey, which was in college. I met a musician who had, dreams and aspirations of, being a musician full-time, and I went from finding different ways to get involved with him, to then managing working with other artists and eventually falling into the blockchain rabbit hole.

I feel like it's been a really awesome opportunity growing up as an engineer 'cause it always, taught me to solve problems. So it was, solving the music industry's biggest problem of how do you make money as an independent artist in music and how does that scale long term to something, if you don't want to do, a deal with a music label.

That and the infrastructure wasn't there, for that to actually happen. So [00:21:00] that's kind of what brought me to joining all these communities, always finding the easiest way to give the solo entrepreneur the tools that they need and the resources that they need to succeed. And we have been working full-time to put the money on the table to make all that happen.

We've been fully bootstrapped with no plans to take any money from VCs for- 

**Adam Miller:** So before we go deeper into what the ZAO is and what you're up to- 

**Zaal:** Yeah ... 

**Adam Miller:** what is it about the blockchain and Web3 that allows it to help you achieve a vision like that? I mean, is it really even necessary or where does it play in?

**Zaal:** What always interested me about blockchain is blockchain's gonna affect everything that money touches And I thought that was really interesting. The other part of it was blockchain is, automations, so software that can control money. That's what smart contracts are.

So in this emerging digital age, we're moving more and more towards, putting things online. How can we trust and [00:22:00] verify that the information that we see online is legitimate, but then also how can we trust and verify the other individuals on the other side of the internet are, real human beings?

I think that's what got me really interested in the infrastructure in blockchain was not only the ability to have financial rails to move money halfway across the world with very minimal fees instantly, but the ability to then tie that blockchain address to an individual 

**Adam Miller:** It's interesting 'cause I think to a lot of people, they like the pseudonymity or anonymity of blockchain, but you're saying actually the opposite, which is the ability to tie an identity or a person to an address.

What does that give you in the context of a DAO or a project? 

**Zaal:** I 100% agree, and that's where it started, but I think it actually adds even more value to an individual as well that does wanna stay pseudo-anonymous a lot of individuals that I've met on [00:23:00] Farcaster on a decentralized social media network that don't have any of their information tying to their real physical identity out there.

But they do have, over time, the trust in the community by participating. Or like you said, if you do put an AI agent out there and it does go and, and even if it doesn't intentionally go and do bad things, you can be held responsible, so- 

**Adam Miller:** , It's like leave your real world identity behind sometimes, but have an identity in a community, even if that's the whole Farcaster community, this big social network, or even if it's just in the ZAO, you know that you're talking to the same person you were talking to two years ago.

They can build up reputation over time, and I think something called respect in your system. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about the ZAO? What is it? What are you up to? And what is this respect game, and how does reputation come into play? 

**Zaal:** So the ZAO is, the community that I've created as an incubator for our ideas.

[00:24:00] Ultimately, our goal is to bring individuals who have companies, songs, ideas that are not fully fleshed out and they feel as though they could use support but they might not have the ability to go and find the correct developer that is willing to work for sweat equity on their idea and the goal in this DAO is to create a culture where you know the character of the individual you might be getting as a partner for an idea so what we do at this DAO is we have weekly meetings where we distribute governance in the form of illiquid soulbound tokens.

So as long as you're coming in consistently, being here, coming in, sharing what you're doing and how you're moving forward, . And by doing that, you earn governance within our organization. Social capital, tied to our DAO as opposed to tying governance to financial capital, which [00:25:00] I feel like leads to a lot of the challenges, like what some of the things we said earlier today.

But , if we can iterate on progressively decentralizing through participation, we can create something that, yes, we might not have that same, financial backing that a organization in a capitalistic society might have , but we have something that's much stronger, which is, the ability to outlast everyone by hopefully creating something that's as little overhead as possible, that can survive through the times and the trends

**Adam Miller:** so in the DAO, we talked about how you have reputation-based voting, right? People earn respect, and then that gives them governance rights we've talked a little bit about the positives of reputation-based voting, like the fact that no one can just come in and buy a bunch of voting rights and drain the treasury.

How has reputation-based voting actually worked? And have there been elements of that that have actually felt like they're [00:26:00] harder to do, or risks or downsides that you've run into? 

**Zaal:** The one biggest challenge that I've come across and friction point with, reputation-based voting is that people are afraid and feel bad for voting for one person over another.

In an ideal world, you wanna vote for all of the people all of the time

**Adam Miller:** So you're talking about just people knowing who's voting on who, right? Is that because of the reputation-based voting system, or that's something that exists in any DAO? 

**Zaal:** It's a combination of both, where the way that we distribute out our token, right now we have a specific time and place, but the goal is that anyone at any time and place with a minimum of four people can start up and create a organization that you can actively see what they're working on week to week and prove that they're adding value.

But how are you affecting your local community? How are you affecting our local community in this DAO? How are you affecting the global [00:27:00] community? And then how are you supporting your peers?

Goal is to, get the consensus of how are people contributing to an organization, and then how do we as a group think that should be valued? Is just coming in and liking someone's post the same as someone coming in and building a whole repo that people can come in and use? Probably not.

One of the theories in the Fractal, ecosystem is that in a traditional organization, 80% of the value or the money goes to 20% of the individuals, usually the top 20%, but usually 80% of the individuals are the actual people doing the work, and they're not part of that 20%. So finding a way to flip that on its head, where the people doing the work are the ones that are rewarded, is a big part of how we're experimenting on this idea of how do we tie governance to people helping an organization, a [00:28:00] community, without necessarily getting paid for it directly in terms of financial, wellbeing, but actually status in the organization itself.

**Adam Miller:** So the biggest challenge it sounds like is divvying out the reputation, right? Knowing who deserves how much reputation in the first place. 

**Zaal:** Exactly, and that's kind of this cultural- difference in you might get a completely different, group one week to the next based on how the, curator or facilitator kind of lets it go on and continue.

But the goal is to standardize that as much as we can across a decentralized web, but also leave room for fluidity and spontaneity, right? So how can we do both of those things at the same time? That's the biggest challenge with DAOs, right? How can we have organization while also letting new people come in and give their piece?

But new people shouldn't come in and take over an organization. But I think it's a really interesting conversation to be had [00:29:00] where as people earn it over time, do you get rid of it because you're not being a participant? Do people's time, life, and energy getting busy, is that a negative? Do we wanna penalize people for going and dealing with life circumstances?

I don't personally think so, so I'm interested in finding a way to do this combination of the way I'm doing Decay right now, w-we're, we're-- one, year one is 1X, year two is 2X, year three is 3X, year four is 4X. But the idea is that instead of burning people's tokens, as you participate, as the organization's been around longer and longer, you're getting more points because it makes more of a difference the work you're doing.

**Adam Miller:** Actually a lot like inflation in a normal capitalist economy.

Because actually in your system, and capitalist systems, there is a good reason for inflation, right? Which is so that the reputation of the prior year can maybe be deprecate it a little bit and worth a little bit less, and this year you'll give out 2X or 3X what was given the year [00:30:00] before.

But a lot of blockchains let's just say Bitcoin, was built without any inflation, which is actually one of the things that people sometimes criticize it for. And maybe there's a happy medium. When it comes to the DAO, what's your progress so far? How active is the community? What have you guys achieved?

What are some of the things on the horizon, in terms of actual work product or success of the organization? 

**Zaal:** Yeah, for sure. So for us, one of the many successes is how we have incubated the projects that have kept up with people having energy around it. So over the course of two-plus years of creating the DAO and having the DAO out there, we've had numerous different projects, start, some continuing and being successful, some, faltering out and not having energy behind them.

That part has been a huge success of cultivating our first project, Wave Wars, where we're now, making money and a profit that's going back into the DAO, [00:31:00] which is really powerful. I would say that's our biggest success. And one of the challenges is we don't have a lot of people voting.

A lot of how I've created my DAO has been me pushing everything forward. So one of the things we need to get more of is the feedback, and some of the things we're doing really well is the cultivation of projects within the organization

**Adam Miller:** So how many members do you have today, or how many, people have participated to date?

**Zaal:** We have, over 200 different community members that have participated in this ZAO, but that could be them participating in, one of our in-person events through ZAO Festivals, and that being it.

So the active individuals that come week to week between 6 to 12 we have 50 or to 100 monthly active members, which in some way are contributing. 

**Adam Miller:** What is Wave Wars? Tell us about Wave Wars. 

**Zaal:** For sure. Wave Wars is live traded music battles.

We created a new vertical for musicians to get paid off of some of their old music that's just sitting there on Spotify that, hasn't [00:32:00] earned them a dime in the last few years. They can bring that to a battle, put some entertainment around it, share the story around why that song was created, some of their new music as well, and make money on, traded battles.

It can be looked at as a prediction market but for a subjective answer. The beauty of it is we give 1% to the musician of all the volume that's traded. The token itself is an ephemeral token that only lasts for the period of the battle. You can buy and sell it, on a bonding curve during that period of time, and at the end of the battle, it reaches a moment that no one can buy or sell it anymore, and everyone just withdraws it, whether they're on the winning side or the losing side.

A unique part about, Wave Wars is that a portion of the losing side goes to the winning side, but not all of it. The idea here is we take half a percent, the musicians get rather than putting it in some big poly market or some big, organization that is around sports gambling or whatever it may be.

Let's, [00:33:00] pay our artists their fair share by bringing the entertainment energy and, beautiful things that can only be done with blockchain because we don't own or custody any of the funds. It's all running through the smart contract, 

**Adam Miller:** so, okay, when you're engaging in the market, are kind of voting on who you think the winner should be, and it's also a bet. So if you're right, you get more of your money back or even a profit. Exactly. Is that right? 

**Zaal:** That is the idea where we don't want someone that has millions and billions of dollars to completely ruin the game.

We have three factors. We have our Soul vote, which is our trading vote. But then we also have two other factors, one being, a human judge, with our big battles, where we have usually it's, three or five judges, and the consensus on that.

And then the final factor is anyone without money also gets a vote. Anyone can go and participate in a poll for the third factor. So we do have a portion where even someone with billions and billions of dollars, if the consensus overall is that that person didn't win, they won't win the Wave [00:34:00] Wars battle.

You can go to Wave Wars with a Z, W-A-V-E W-A-R-Z .com, and you can start up a community battle, and that one percent can go to whomever you want. So one of the things we've done is we've done benefit battles, where the portion of the funds that we're getting as profits are actually going to a charity, a public good that we, see as a benefit.

And what we've done is we've brought a bunch of musicians together where they've donated their time and music, and all of the winnings, and any fiat that's donated during that, event can get given to that charity.

**Adam Miller:** Can AI agents make music and participate in the battles, or is that not part of the idea here?

**Zaal:** We do have, uh, AI-assisted musicians that we're running an AI music tournament right now, where we have musicians that are using , um, AI tooling, for themselves, and are leveraging that and sharing that and trying to put themselves as musicians to new heights.

We don't have a AI [00:35:00] agent making music that is a part of Wave Wars yet. We have 11 shows a week on X spaces, so it's really easy to tell, if they're a real individual or a musician that way.

If a bot did come in and share, I imagine there would be a bunch of sleuths of Wave Wars looking out and trying to figure that. And I think it'd be an interesting, piece of the lore. That'll be looked upon really poorly.

**Adam Miller:** Nice All right. So before we turn to our final segment, which is the legal structure of your future AI agent, projects, I think you have a music festival coming up, sometime soon.

What's the details about that? 

**Zaal:** So we started Zao Festivals in 2024 when we were starting to progressively decentralize, and we just wanted to get our name, our brand out there and our musicians out there. So we hosted a event called Zao Palooza for NFT NYC in 2024, with six people who we had never met until the day of the event.

We hadn't seen the venue until the day of the event, and we had a phenomenal time and came out [00:36:00] even, on, in terms of money, and then we spent the next six months, planning for Zao Chella in Miami, trying to do anything and everything, experimenting on a lot of different ideas to which I would say we succeeded in many and failed in many more.

Instead of creating a brand-building event where we are a loss leader, how do we create a business around, an event?

When I moved to Maine a year and a half ago- I found that I wanted to do something to help cultivate, our energy, our international energy in this global music space, into an event, live in my home town. It's gonna be called ZaoStock. It's gonna be in October this year, 2026, gonna be our first year we are right next to Acadia National Park, so I would love to eventually create a pseudo summer camp of sorts where we can just invite people to, touch grass, quite literally. My pitch is, "Come join us in Maine."

We're gonna be live streaming it to raise money, from all over the world to our little small 8,000 person town of Ellsworth, [00:37:00] Maine, the gateway to Acadia, and show off my musicians. In all kinds of different genres. It's ZaoStock. 

**Adam Miller:** So let's talk about your AI agent plans.

The legal capability to wrap an AI agent, in a legal structure has existed for some time, even if it's, piecemeal with the Marshall Islands being one of the places that it's possible. And decentralized AI agents have technically existed for some time, although they're challenging and, the infrastructure is very new.

And as we talked about earlier in the news segment, no one's done much yet with this concept. For you, what is it that makes you excited about the prospect of a digital LLC with an AI agent as its manager or given real rights and responsibilities within a legal entity? 

**Zaal:** Yeah, so I have created an, an agent, called the Zool Bot.

That I feel as though is the start of what we can do with social agents and blockchain by having a Farcaster account, it has a [00:38:00] wallet and a social identity that it can do things with. And I think with those, just those two things, it can actually create many things with the instruction of the community.

So XOL, the XOL bot is, an AI agent that can help the Zao infrastructure as a whole. The ultimate idea with the, the XOL is to create, tokens, legal entities, whatever we need for our overall community. It can be an entity owned by the community.

The reason no one's done it is because people aren't prepared, for it because they don't have the structure that it makes sense for, whereas the Zao does. It's actually perfect for us. We need something like this to have the legal framework situated such that

Instead of having our DAO try and have a treasury, we're gonna be able to give the sovereign agent the money to grow itself and just give our social capital feedback [00:39:00] to it, where an individual that has five Zao respect saying something to the XOL bot will not nearly capture as much into its memory as, a founding member that has 3,000, the ability of creating this weighted system of actually understanding who's in the community and actively contributing.

**Adam Miller:** are you saying that one of the challenges is basically if everyone controls the money through normal governance, it's hard to manage, so instead give the AI agent legal responsibility over that money and have people engage with the AI agent, but the agent decides what to actually do with that money?

**Zaal:** And I believe that, like you said, if we move some of the friction points that are there with human coordination, in DAOs especially, to the AI agent making decisions and then asking for reassurance on those decisions by human input, but not being stopped by not enough people giving that input, we can create something that's not been possible [00:40:00] before,, All 

**Adam Miller:** right, Zal, this has been phenomenal.

Where can people find you on the web and on social? And feel free to promote any of the projects or events that you've been talking about. 

**Zaal:** Yeah, for sure. So my name is Zal, so my username on Farcaster is Z-A-A-L. That's where I like to be contacted if you have a Farcaster. If you don't, uh, @bettercallzaal on X.

You can catch me at info@thezaal.com if you wanna shoot an email over that way. Wave Wars, you can check out, like I said earlier, wavewars.com. We have 11 shows a week. Definitely the right place to tap into if you're a musician or wanna get involved with our music and crypto side. Thanks again for your time, Adam.

**Adam Miller:** All right, and you can find me on X at zero X thriller. I am on Farcaster at The Thriller. MIDAO is MIDAO DS on X or midao.org. And again, check out our legal guide for AI agent incorporation at midao.org/guides. And, to the audience, are you thinking about starting a DAO Web3 [00:41:00] project or decentralized AI agent?

If so, just DAO it