Timber sDAO will be Slow Ventures' first tokenization of productive agricultural land, representing a new way to invest in real world assets using crypto. NATION's all-in-one platform combines fundraising, tokenization, and a breakthrough legal framework to power digital cooperatives and DAOs on Solana.

NATION aims to bring billions into crypto through a platform that creates a seamless user and customer experience.

In March of 2022, NATION launched as a single-page project from Diego Segura (COLLINS, Waybridge) and Ryan Shea (Solana Labs). Aid for Ukraine, a cross-community effort from leaders at Everstake, Solana Labs, and the Ukranian Government, then used the platform to raise over $3M for humanitarian aid from contributors around the world through a DAO — a digital autonomous organization.

NATION aims to abstract complex technicalities with crypto, simplifying on-chain interactions for users. It enables communities to create community movements, manage contributions, and fundraise using tokens and legally-compliant entities.

Launching Timber sDAO with Slow Ventures

With Timber sDAO, NATION and Slow are bringing a hard asset (income-producing timberland) on-chain, leading to increased liquidity of the underlying equity. DAO participants can join a community on NATION where their tokens represent ownership of a hard asset through the sDAO legal framework pioneered by Slow.

Clay Robbins, Partner at Slow Ventures, claims that “crypto’s ability to lend liquidity to the vast majority of physical world assets — which today are hard to trade, and thus left out of modern finance — represents a major, long-term opportunity.”

sDAOs are similar to traditional LLCs that hold ‘hard assets’ (like land and IP), but use crypto rails that enable tokenized ownership. This creates a liquidity advantage by enabling investors to sell their shares (after a 1 year hold period) much more easily. Slow DAO Hard Asset Manager, LLC (“Slow”) has created an entity called Slow DAO Hard Asset Manager, which established the sDAO format, and forms and manages sDAOs.

So far, they have done an initial test 700K USDC sDAO, which purchased land in Montana in August 2022. The Timber sDAO, their second sDAO, has some structural improvements based on learnings from sDAO 1 with a goal to produce and distribute income to owners from the sDAO ownership of timberland.

“Whether it's a community managing non-profit donations, a filmmaker fundraising for their next production, or an investment firm purchasing a real-life asset, this is a paradigm shift for how people — and resources — come together to make an impact,” said Ryan. “It's fundraising with an ownership layer. That ownership layer changes everything.”

“DAOs — communities built around sharing ownership — can redefine how humans convene.” said Ryan Shea, the founder of NATION. “They have the opportunity to cohere all of the technological primitives in Web3 toward something easily understood by all: communities gathering around a cause.”