Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,

Our hope for you this week is that you have embraced the JOMO — the Joy of Missing Out. The DAO’s Gap Week is the time to pull back and take stock, perhaps work on something you’ve been putting off, or just go hug a giant mushroom at a music festival. Whatever you’ve done this week, it better have prepared you for BanklessDAO’s BEST SEASON EVER.

It’s a light edition of the Rollup this week, but Season 5 is incoming. It is going to be hot in the kitchen this upcoming season, as there are so many things cooking that even the neighborhood dogs will be confused. Make sure you mark your calendar for the Season 5 Kickoff event on Twitter Spaces — happening on August 12.

Before that, it’s worth taking a little time to reflect on Season 4, the season that roared. Trewkat has written a thoughtful recap, part laundry list and part love letter. Check it out and let it warm your engine for Season 5: the season that bDAO comes ALIVE.

LFG, and see you next week.

Contributors: Trewkat, siddhearta, hirokennelly.eth

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The Season That Roared

Author: Trewkat

Given that this is the DAO’s Gap Week, it’s time to do a little reflection on the season we’ve just had. Seriously, does it seem to you as though May, and our one-year anniversary, happened just a couple of weeks ago? Season 4 (or Season Roar as I referred to it in the first Rollup introduction of the season) began with a huge amount of excitement, as teeLAROO wrote in the Season 3 Recap:

“With governance and tokenomics primed, the bDAO engine is tuned up and we are ready to bust out of the bear market in Season 4 and retain our title as the Metaverse’s DAO to watch. Projects are starting to generate revenue, and new creations are launched weekly. Season 4 is going to be the best one yet. LFG!”

It’s so interesting to look back at the words we write to mark particular occasions or record our aspirations for the future. When we look back, it is always with the benefit of hindsight, and it can be at times amusing, uplifting, poignant, or cringe-worthy to read the assertions of our former selves. That’s not to say Tee’s prediction was cringe — not at all. It’s an expression of the sentiment of the time, and no doubt it inspired many of us to strive for great results in Season 4. The reason I am drawing attention to it is that I want to think about whether it was, in fact, our best season yet.

I think Season 4 is where the rubber hit the road for BanklessDAO. I wasn’t here in Season 0, having joined about halfway through Season 1. It’s my sense that during the DAO’s first few seasons, when a new issue arose, it was okay to say ‘we’ll need to work that out’ or ‘somebody is working on that but we don’t know yet’. In Season 4, this sentiment changed. We turned one year old and found we had some growing up to do.

To be fair, this was evident in Season 3 too — it’s the reason the GSE program was proposed and implemented. As 0xJustice (GSE) noted in this recent Twitter Space conversation with Boardroom:

“... we want governance to be everybody’s job, but it’s possible to have something … called responsibility dilution — if something is everyone’s job then sometimes it means it’s no one’s job.”

But Season 4 was the point where we really had to embrace the need for positive change and a structure for evidence-based decision making.  Embrace it we did. The GSE has written the first iteration of the BanklessDAO Community Handbook, and developed new proposal templates for funding requests and for changes to the Handbook itself. The Grants Committee introduced the need for projects to record some KPIs, not as mandatory milestones but as indicators of the health of the project — a mirror for us to check every so often.

Among all this strategic change, I tried to get a sense of everything that has been achieved this season, but there is too much to include in one, low-key, gap-week Rollup. So what I have done instead (with apologies to those project reps who sent me some text) is list each guild below, with a link to its Season 5 proposal and a wrap up of S4 focal points.

Writers Guild

During Season 4, the Writers Guild focused on building strong vibes in our community, educating current members, and onboarding new talent to the many projects that have been developed out of the Writers Guild. One highlight has been the guild’s partnership with Taptive to deliver a cohort-based learning program; the results are impressive, with our DAO writers exploring their creativity and overcoming perceived barriers to publishing their work. In its first three weeks, the cohort has shipped over 40 articles!

Grant @grant_nissly

Week 2 Posts from BanklessDAO Writers Genesis Cohort are live 🚀 Read about NFTs, DAOs, web3, and more ⬇️

July 29th 2022

3 Retweets16 Likes

Season 4 also saw the launch of the DAO’s latest newsletter, the DeFi Download.

BanklessDAO 🏴 @banklessDAO

🚨 The DeFi Download is now a bi-weekly newsletter! This month we have our 📘 Guide to AMMs, Part 1: 👉 Purpose of AMMs 👉 Technical Mechanics 👉 Basic Concepts 👉 Top Projects 🙏 Sponsor @oasisdotapp banklessdao.substack.com/p/the-amm-edit…The AMM Edition (Part I) | DeFi DownloadYour Trusted Source for 101s, Project Announcements, and Tokenomics Tutorials.banklessdao.substack.com

August 4th 2022

18 Retweets38 Likes

Treasury Guild

Treasury Guild aims to give a financial overview of BanklessDAO and its guilds, making this information readily available to all. In Season 4 the guild successfully established four different working groups to research different tokenomics topics: L2 Migration, BANK Utility, Treasury Diversification, and Tokenomics Leveling Up.

Translators Guild

Translators Guild set a major focus on onboarding new members during Season 4, with development of a handbook as well as an onboarding presentation and POAP for newcomers. The guild is working on curation of an extensive Web3 term glossary into various languages, with the aim of making this a revenue-producing project.

Research Guild

Research Guild’s purpose is to operate as a support node for conducting, guiding, and funding research that aligns with the goals and vision of BanklessDAO. As well as conducting various research projects within workgroups, the guild held regular opportunities to learn more about DAO tools such as Discord, Notion, Gnosis Safe, Sesh, DeWork, and Snapshot. The guild also introduced a Member of the Month Award (MOMA) during Season 4, with Joe King, infinitehomie, and Whales selected as MOMA winners to date.

Project Management Guild

Having been founded during Season 4, the PM Guild has made impressive progress onboarding new members, facilitating guild and project retrospectives, and creating guild documentation. Progress towards a Web3 Project Management certification has been made through development of a ‘Skill Tree’.

Making Bank Podcast @makingbankpod

New Episode of Making Bank 📣 .. is all about the Project Management Guild at BanklessDAO, with the Guild Coordinator, @0xReneK, interviewed by @EffectDrost. PM guild was recently formed in response to a need within BanklessDAO, with a mission .. 🧵 making-bank.sounder.fm/episode/making…Making Bank: Project Management Guild with 0xReneToday’s guest is René from the Project Management Guild at Bankless DAO. The PM Guild was recently formed in response to a need within the DAO. René brings a background in economics as well as software development and project management...making-bank.sounder.fm

July 12th 2022

3 Retweets18 Likes

Operations Guild

Ops Guild is responsible for the workstreams which make BanklessDAO a safer, more productive, and friendly place. During Season 4, the guild continued its focus on bots, cartography, comms, tooling, member compensation, membership perks, community management, seasonal planning, and surveying and analyzing behaviors and sentiments within the DAO.

Marketing Guild

Marketing Guild is focused on increasing the reach and visibility of BanklessDAO projects and educational Web3 content. There was growth across all DAO social media channels, with followers on Twitter reaching 57.7K, and Instagram at 1,865 followers. If you’re not following yet, now is the time!

Legal Guild

Legal Guild continued to produce the Decentralized Law newsletter during Season 4, which is a wealth of material on the hottest topics in the crypto-legal arena. The guild also finalized the first NFT report on crypto tax law within various jurisdictions and started researching the topic of DAO legal wrappers.

BanklessDAO 🏴 @banklessDAO

This month in Decentralized Law: 🎙 Interview 👩🏼‍💼 @alexamil_ on decentralized DAO compliance 👉 Regulations can be good 👉 Innovative compliance is key 👉 Education is essential 📕 DAO Legal Entity Research Project @OGLawPanda banklessdao.substack.com/p/decentralize…Decentralized Autonomous Organizations | Decentralized LawA Monthly Legal Journal Covering the Crypto-Legal Spacebanklessdao.substack.com

July 29th 2022

14 Retweets35 Likes

Education Guild

The Education Guild’s main focus is to focalize the organization of the guild, the nourishment of talent, and the coordination of necessary labor required for DAO operations and governance. Since taking over delivery of the New Joiner Session, the guild has organized several successful onboarding sessions for new members throughout Season 4.

Developers Guild

Dev Guild completed a Guild Constitution in Season 4, which covers membership, elected offices, project distinctions, elections, and meetings. Season 4 Knowledge Share sessions have been a success, as have in-house demos of the Bounty Board and DEGEN projects.

Design Guild

Design Guild aims to bring clear communication of the BanklessDAO mission through intelligent next-gen design. The design work completed in Season 4 includes the weekly Community Call POAP, the new BanklessDAO website, Instagram posts in collaboration with Marketing Guild, regular design tool tutorials, and development of the Drawing Board — an external jobs and portfolio portal.

DAOlationships Guild

DAOlationships Guild members work continuously to facilitate relationships between BanklessDAO and other leading Web3 organizations by utilizing an old-school CRM and good-old-fashioned institutional knowledge. AMAs, demos, IRL events, and cross-pollination meetings are just some of the collaborative activities held during Season 4.

BanklessDAO 🏴 @banklessDAO

Did you know BanklessDAO helps facilitate product demos in our Discord server? Our next demo is this Tuesday in the DAOlationships voice channel for our next demo with @TallyCash! Join the BanklessDAO server to find out more 👇 discord.gg/ntpfxvPH

July 10th 2022

9 Retweets39 Likes

AudioVisual Guild

AV Guild has been actively creating content for the YouTube channel during Season 4, working with material from live events and podcasts to produce high quality, on-brand videos that can then also be used by Marketing Guild.

Analytics Guild

The Analytics Guild serves BanklessDAO by providing data, analytics, insights and infrastructure, working closely with the Developers Guild as well as fielding ad hoc requests.

That Doesn’t Cover It …

There are countless brilliant things happening in the various project teams across the DAO; the information above is a small slice of the action. If you are curious about Season 4 project outputs or Season 5 plans, I encourage you to check out the forum or join the relevant team in a Discord voice or chat channel.

So, back to the question I asked before: was Season 4 really BanklessDAO’s best one yet? Yes it was, and I’ll tell you why. It was the best one yet because it’s the one we just had.

Let me explain.

Despite the continuing bear market, despite the drop in contribution rates and nose-diving satisfaction levels among some DAO members, the DAO has prevailed. We’re still here, and those of us who have chosen to be here have a strong belief in the value of our community and our vision. We keep going, and therefore we keep getting better at what we do.

Speaking of which, there are some things that we need to get better at. Here are my top four:

• We must somehow be more inclusive to contributors outside North America. Despite my location, I am not a fan of the idea of separate Asia-Pacific Community Calls, mainly because I really like hanging out with people from all over the globe, not just half of it. But sometimes, I feel a little excluded, and I think we could do more to ensure a bigger range of voices can be heard. Maybe that means including pre-recorded segments or alternating the time for the Community Call.

• We could really improve our record-keeping. There are meeting notes taken every week, but somehow, many of the big decisions end up buried in Discord or worded ambiguously so that down the track, we don’t know what was intended. This is not a criticism; it’s an observation, and despite my background in information management I still need to get better at this for the DAO.

• In the same vein as information management: we could benefit from a little tag restraint. Let’s agree that as a community, we don’t need the same information posted in every guild and project channel, complete with role tags. We just don’t need that. If there is something important you would like the community to know, include it in this wonderful weekly newsletter. If you’re worried you will miss important updates, subscribe to this wonderful weekly newsletter.

• I don’t profess to be a tokenomics expert, but in my opinion, the fact that BANK is a governance token with a market value seems to cause a division between those who want to earn a living and those who can afford to contribute without payment. I don’t know the answers, but I’d like to move that conversation along because it’s been around the block(chain) several times.

That’s a Wrap

I’ll leave you with a quote that has stayed with me. It’s from the Rollup editorial by Bankless Brasil a few weeks ago:

“Again, there are no clear answers, but what we do know is that all these questions and challenges have been a great opportunity to learn how to coordinate in a more efficient way, overcome differences, keep building toward our goals, and build a more resilient community.”

This is so true, both for Bankless Brasil, and for BanklessDAO and the many guilds and projects that are held within.

Before I joined the DAO, having heard about these new ‘decentralized autonomous organizations’ via a webinar at work, I envisaged an organization where people were anonymously voting for or against various smart contracts. It sounded intriguing but a bit sterile.

I had no clue, no inkling, that I would find my way to the amazing, challenging, joyful, hilarious, talented, inspiring, and STRONG community that is our BanklessDAO. Smart contracts are just a tool — what we’re really doing here is pioneering new forms of organization. I have no doubt that our next season will be our best one yet, and when it kicks off with the Twitter Space launch on August 12, I will be listening at 1am because there is no place I would rather be than bDAO.

That’s a wrap on Season 4, and I look forward to surfing Web3 with you in Season 5.

✅ Action Items

😎 Chill.

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🤣 Meme of the Week

Upside Australia @Upside_Aus

gm. our chief meme officer started today. brace yourselves. this is not a drill.

August 4th 2022

2 Retweets26 Likes