The General Store DAO · Minneapolis · Founded 2018
A store. A community.
A different way to work.
Founded in 2018 in Minneapolis, The General Store combined a physical workplace cooperative with blockchain governance. A real place to test how ownership, shared work, and community might fit together.
The original DAO is inactive. This site preserves the experiment and its lessons.
The main film
What we set out to do.
Bring a physical place and a shared system of ownership into the same experiment.
A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization: a way for people to organize shared decisions through rules and tools, including blockchain technology. At The General Store, that idea met the practical work of running a room together.
A physical place
A workplace where shared work and community could happen face to face.
Shared ownership and accountability
A cooperative proposition in which participation meant helping shape the place, not just using it.
Contribution-based reputation
A proposed connection between what people contributed and their standing in the community.
The historical Collaboration Code asked members to share their work at the task level, invite other businesses and organizations, and contribute to the space. The presentation describes these expectations; it is not a record of how consistently they were carried out.
Inside the General Store
What we tried.
Three rounds described in the August 2019 Berlin presentation moved from an abstract invitation toward more tangible reasons to gather.
- 01
A future-of-work proposition
The first round led with the idea: a different way to work, with a physical community and shared governance.
- 02
Pizza and the invitation
The next round made the invitation more concrete through pizza and the possibility of coming together in the space.
- 03
Something to do together
Creative activity, including a coloring window and a shared brunch, gave the gathering a practical starting point.
What we took from it.
Our reading of the original material
These are interpretive lessons, not measured causal findings.
People need a reason to walk through the door.
A proposition becomes more tangible when there is something specific to share, make, or do.
Onboarding is part of governance.
The path into a community shapes who can participate in its decisions.
Reputation needs concrete contribution.
Sharing tasks and helping maintain the place gives an abstract idea of participation a practical form.
A room and a protocol need design together.
The physical arrangement and the rules for working together are parts of the same experience.
New summary of a recovered 2019 design note: the physical layout had not yet caught up with the project's social ambitions. The original note, dated December 3, 2019, is held in the project archive. That observation is a useful design question, not an explanation of why the DAO became inactive.
Source library.
The original material and a clearly separated contemporary reading.
Original public introduction, July 2019
The film shows the shared workspace, people working, conversation, and table tennis. A brief look at the physical place and the everyday activity around it.
Berlin, August 2019
Selected original pages 13, 27, 28, and 29: onboarding, structure, the Collaboration Code, and daily operation.
Download the four-page selectionThe three-round narrative was checked against the full original 31-page August 2019 Berlin presentation, recovered and read from the owner project archive. The approved public download includes only original pages 13, 27, 28, and 29.
A note on the physical space
This is a new summary of a recovered design note dated December 3, 2019, not an original whitepaper. The note observed that the physical layout had not yet caught up with the project's social ambitions.
Our reading: a cooperative space needs its everyday arrangement to support the interactions its governance asks for. Where people sit, work, and gather belongs in the design conversation alongside shared rules and reputation.
The original note was recovered and read from the owner project archive and is held there. The DAO Landscape URL below is a separate historical public link, not the source of this design-note observation.
The experiment in its own context
Historical references, not live-verified services. The original site's domain was observed expired on October 16, 2026. Historical About URLs may redirect after revival. These links may be unavailable or may no longer show the original material.
No whitepaper has been found.