Season of the Bear | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup

Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO

Jul 30

Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,

Shipping this last newsletter of Season 4 brings mixed emotions, as it's been quite a journey this season. Despite a few bumps in the road, we have continued on our mission to help the world go Bankless. We do this by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.

During the slowdown in the markets, the DAO maintained a steady pace of work. Many guilds and projects established a more comprehensive framework for their operations, while others explored fresh ideas, providing new perspectives on coordination and governance.

We saw DAOlationships close sponsorship deals, as did the Newsletter Team and Bankless Academy. Bankless Card went full throttle this season, grabbing attention after showcasing their prototype at ETH Barcelona. The Marketing Guild got our socials buzzing and AV Guild is posting some seriously good content on YouTube.

The bears were well out of hibernation, to paraphrase a line from this week’s editorial, but in the future, we will recall with pride how well we managed this first bear season. It is amazing how we retained our energy, and it shows us how strong we are as a family. So let's find a comfy spot, read AustinFoss’ Season 5 preview, and then register for the DAO’s August Coordinape.

Season 5 promises to be fabulous, but busy — so rest well during this gap week. bDAO strong!

Contributors: theconfusedcoin, anointingthompson1, AustinFoss, WinVerse, Trewkat, siddhearta, hirokennelly.eth, ab_colours

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Community Highlights

🧭 Distribution of BanklessDAO Survey POAPs

If you completed the recent BanklessDAO survey from the Marketing Guild, it’s time to claim your POAP. Once you have claimed your POAP, sign up for the raffle for your chance to win 4,000 BANK! Thank you to everyone who took part! This survey enabled the Marketing Guild to collect information about our varying backgrounds, experiences, and stories, which will help them guide our vision and strategy.

What’s New

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Get Involved

🌎 ETH Latam Partnership

We are happy to announce that BanklessDAO will be featured as a media partner at one of the most important Web3 events in Latam, taking place August 11-13 in Buenos Aires, Argentina!

The ETH Latam conference builds upon the work of the local pioneers who laid the foundations for a vibrant community, making crypto mainstream in one of the countries where it’s most needed.

Tickets are free and are released in batches. You can find out when a new batch is released through their Twitter account. In partnership with the event, bDAO is giving away a free ticket via Twitter. Look out for the message in your social networks!

We have also been provided with two extra tickets that are strictly for the bDAO community! In order to be eligible for a ticket, you must have a membership level of L1 or above, and be sure that you can make it to the event (so the ticket doesn't go to waste). Sign up now! Submissions will be accepted until August 4 at 15:00 UTC. The winners will be announced at the Community Call the next day.

If you are interested in helping the bDAO team at ETH Latam, check out the ETH Latam thread in the BDAO@GLOBALEVENTS channel. See you there!

ETHLatam @ BA 🇦🇷 @ethlatam

TY @banklessDAO for joining #ETHLatam as media partner! 🎙️📰 #WAGEI

📃 Bankless Academy

You can never get enough education on security. Knowledge matters, and at Bankless Academy, we take this seriously. Buying and/or earning your cryptoassets is hard; do not wait until it’s too late to keep them safe.

We are big supporters of growth, but most importantly, responsible growth. This is why you should take our newest course: Web3 Security.

For this launch, we’re calling all Explorers. New ones and OGs; security is for everyone. The Academy invites you to learn how to protect your assets from the most common scams in Web3. In this lesson, we cover secure seed storage, social engineering, social media best practices, scam tokens, and more. Level up with the Academy. Access the lesson today!

The Academy is also now taking the opportunity to recognize generosity, on chain. We’re closing Season 4 with a great partnership: MintKudos. To kick off our journey together, we’re distributing soulbound tokens to all the Academy Gitcoin Grants supporters between Rounds 11-14. If you’ve donated to Academy during this period, make sure to claim your free Kudos on Polygon here.

Don't want to miss out on new announcements and the next Explorer opportunities? Make sure to follow Bankless Academy on Twitter, and join the curated community on the Web3-native social platform gm.xyz.

💰 Ready to Become a Notion Ninja?

The BanklessDAO Notion Ninja Learn2Earn Course is a three-stage educational course consisting of YouTube videos and quizzes. You will learn best practices for the way BanklessDAO uses Notion — the source of truth for the DAO’s operational knowledge. You will learn how to modify, manage, and create pages, and how to create and modify Notion databases. At each stage of the course the student can earn a very cool 2D Bankless Ninja NFT, with each Ninja being a progressive belt color.

If you have taken the White Belt Course and are ready for the Orange Belt Course, feel free to start now. This time you will find your PFP as unlockable content within the NFT; get started with the Orange Belt self-study course.

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@casperBGD @banklessDAO @banklessadria @_iamthompson

🙏 Sponsor: humanDAO — improving lives through crypto.

Season of the Bear

Author: AustinFoss

Learn to love the bear, even if it’s scary. Image credit: ab_colours

It’s the middle of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the bears are well out of hibernation. During this past season, the entire blockchain ecosystem experienced a hard wake-up call. From Terra and 3AC collapsing to the greater macro-economic influences, the last 12 weeks of Season 4 have not been the easiest ride for anyone. As a result much of the fat in the crypto ecosystem was shed quite suddenly, leaving everyone involved hungry and eagerly looking for the next meal.

Regardless of the recent hardship across blockchains, there’s not a lot of bearish sentiment out there amongst those who work in Web3. None of us believe crypto has crashed for good, or that there’s no intrinsic value to what is being built. Every once in a while some doubt may creep into the back of our minds while looking at the charts, but even the bear knows in its heart that another meal will come around eventually.

There’s only one way to find where that next meal is going to come from: keep moving forward and keep building. Onward into Season 5 and let’s fatten up before winter comes around again.

Governance Is Everyone’s Responsibility

On July 12 we had our end-of-season temperature check and the community voted on the key points the seasonal spec would define. Early participation in this process lets us voice how each of us would like the DAO to operate before the spec is set in stone for the final vote on Snapshot. Compared to S4’s community vote, averaging at 64 votes per question, we had an increased participation of 32%, at 84 votes per question. Although some of those votes would have been cast after the spec was drafted it is still helpful to have a large sample of the DAO’s opinions.

If you were not able to, or missed the opportunity to do so, make sure to set a reminder for yourself that we will have another community vote near the end of S5. New joiners or long-term members, Guest Pass holders or Level 2 contributors, we want to hear from all of you.

Voting on Snapshot will be open over the course of the weekend and the coming gap week, so don’t miss your last opportunity to have your voice heard before S5 kicks off.

Schedule and Funding

Beginning on August 8, Season 5 will continue through to October 30. For this season we have decided to keep the same budget from Season 4 — 22M BANK — which is approximately 14% of the DAO Treasury’s 154M BANK balance. Keep in mind that ~11M BANK is unlocked per month, as per the Genesis vesting proposal.

Distribution of the seasonal 22M BANK is as follows:

The Grants Committee's remaining S4 budget will be topped up for S5 to create a 7M BANK total balance. So far, in S4 the Grants Committee (GC) has only allocated 30% of their budget on new projects, compared with S3’s 50%. This decrease in allocated funds suggests that “there were fewer new projects in S4, and/or those projects didn’t request as much funding.”

Compensation for Grants Committee members has been increased to a total of 702K BANK. Our GC election recently concluded, and the new team consists of links, 0xRene, jameswmontgomery.eth, lion917, and the three new members: Ap0ll0517, p8ul.eth, and jengajojo.eth. We look forward to a successful season of funding allocation under their guidance.

Automatic Guild Funding

One of the bigger changes being implemented next season is to implement automatic guild funding using a defined formula. This change will relieve some of the administrative load on both the GC and the guilds by making the process more streamlined. This recurring funding disbursement to the guilds will be contingent on them fulfilling all required responsibilities. You can find out what those are in the Forum proposal.

Guild budgets for S5 were to be submitted by July 13, 2022, and will be included as part of the Snapshot vote. It’s expected that automatic guild funding will begin in Season 6.

Membership Threshold

The question of how much BANK is required to meet the membership threshold was again asked in this season’s community vote, with 74% voting in favor of having it remain at 35K BANK. This was a noticeable increase from the 51% in favor in last season’s vote.

Pro’s and Con’s Raised:

Pros of increasing: Requires people sitting at the threshold to “opt-into” the next Season.
Cons of increasing: Increases barriers to entry for new participants.
Pros of decreasing: Increases accessibility for joining the DAO (less of a need for guess passes!).
Cons of decreasing: Leave contributors with less skin in the game.

With the value of BANK following the same trends as the rest of the ecosystem, the barrier to purchase full L1 membership has never been lower. Although this could be frustrating for those who worked hard to earn their membership, just keep in mind that the value could just as easily swing the other way by the end of the season. And of course 1 BANK = 1 BANK.

For the time being, the community has voted to leave the threshold as it is. One pro not listed in the vote for maintaining the threshold is that this locks up more BANK as new members join, and if the value falls, as it has, it makes it easier for those tokens to be taken out of the circulating supply, potentially setting up this decision to be a very good long-term play.

Coordinape Changes

A second major change to the way funding is distributed this season is in regards to our Coordinape rounds. We are moving away from having a Circle for each membership level in favor of a single circle from which to allocate and receive GIVE tokens.

In order to be eligible to receive any BANK tokens from any of the Coordinape rounds in S5 you must allocate at least 50% of your GIVE tokens, except for Guest Pass holders who cannot allocate GIVE to prevent abuse of the system.

GSE First Solutions

Our Governance Solutions Engineers (GSE) team has now completed their first full season in operation and one of the results from their efforts was a financial analysis published on July 21. Final numbers for S4 are still pending and the bDAO community has been asked to dive in and provide any insight we can offer about that data.

Perhaps the biggest deliverable expected from the GSE so far is the BanklessDAO Constitution and Community Handbook, including the bDIP (BanklessDAO Improvement Proposal) template. A lot of work has gone into these guiding documents which will be officially implemented later in S5.

Embrace the Bear

Season 5 could certainly be starting off on better footing, but the markets are not within our control. It’s not like working through the bull market, but all of the things in our control are setting us up for success. We don’t always get to work in perfect conditions; sometimes the weather is cold and rainy.

There’s so much to look forward to building this season — let alone Ethereum’s Merge come September — Fight Club is launching their public mint of membership NFTs, Bankless Academy, Bankless Card, and lots more to be excited for. Most of all, working with every member of bDAO makes it more than bearable. We could be anywhere, doing anything else, but we choose to wake up and build together.

Enjoy the gap week everyone, don’t forget to vote on Snapshot, and we look forward to building with you in Season 5!

🏛 Governance

Proposals in Discussion

ETH Mexico: Onboarding for BanklessDAO in Spanish

Ethereum Mexico has become a fast-growing community, with more than 300 members on the Telegram channel and 1,038 followers on Twitter. Since its creation in June 2022, they have focused on teaching complex and high-value topics, with excellent speakers. Many BanklessDAO Mexico members will be participating as hackers at the ETH Mexico event. This proposal discusses hosting an onboarding session at the event for people interested in collaborating with BanklessDAO. The session will be followed by distribution of merchandise, Twitter Spaces, and a networking breakfast.

✅ Action Items

📖 Action: Coordinape is back! Go to #bot-commands and type: /coordinape form-request.

📺 Review Bankless Academy’s latest lesson and claim a soulbound NFT, if eligible.

🏃‍♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.

🤸‍♂️ Enjoy: Gap week!

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