WildFireDAO Proposal Ignites a Conversation | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup

Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO

Sep 3

Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,

We are certainly proud of all we have been able to achieve so far this season. The Forum has been a constant buzz, and the community always vibrant. Remember to take time to replenish now and then; the pursuit of excellence is a marathon, not a sprint.

The Rug is getting serious about its brand of funny this season, launching a monthly newsletter, putting covers up for mint on Rarible, and building a website. Meanwhile, Crypto Sapiens rebranded, and the podcast has a refreshed identity and its future is looking brighter than ever.

If you thought the Writers Genesis Cohort was a blast, then get set for another round of inspired writing. The second Cohort is set to kick off on September 9, and the sign up is already underway. If you missed the genesis cohort, make sure to take advantage of this opportunity to write, receive peer feedback, and ship!

Bankless Academy continues to show their great work, securing a partnership with humanDAO to provide an education platform to help teach Web3 basics to the crypto curious. Nice work, Academy.

Bankless Research, a project months in the making, is ready to take the next step towards launch. They aim to provide best-in-class research on the Web3 ecosystem for external organizations. With a very promising core team, make sure to keep your eyes on this project.

Our most recent Community Call had numerous Forum proposal updates, with the authors pitching their ideas and taking questions — a welcome addition to the Community Call format. In this week’s editorial, teeLEROO takes us through the WildFireDAO proposal and all the discussion it sparked.

It’s the weekend! Take a break, have some fun, and make sure to sign up for Coordinape!

Contributors: HAshBrown27, Paulito, teeLEROO, WinVerse, Trewkat, siddhearta, Dippudo, HiroKennelly

This is the official newsletter of BanklessDAO. To unsubscribe, edit your settings.

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🗓 Weekly Recap

Community Highlights

✍️ BanklessDAO Writers Cohort

BanklessDAO Writers Cohort is back!

We are building on the success of our last round and running another BanklessDAO Writers Cohort — starting September 9, 2022!

Here’s what writers from the first cohort had to say about it:

If you really would like to write, here’s your excuse to stop making excuses.

It was a life changing experience, and I wouldn’t miss out on the next one, neither should anyone.

This was one of the highlights of my summer.

The framework I learned streamlined my workflow to write more qualitative articles faster, and peer feedback was immensely helpful in improving my articles’ structure!

Why should you join?

Writing online is hard. It’s lonely, intimidating, and tough to stay consistent. But, writing is a core competency in the decentralized, remote, and asynchronous Web3 world. BanklessDAO Writers Cohort is here to help with a four-week, cohort-based writing program tailored for BanklessDAO members. Our goal is to help you improve your writing, publish more, and build relationships with other members of the DAO. You can sign up here!

👫 humanDAO Academy Launch Powered by Bankless Academy

Underserved communities worldwide are leveling up big time thanks to humanDAO’s new education platform: Learn Web3 with humanDAO.

The heart of Bankless Academy, pumping knowledge into the humanDAO ecosystem. That’s how we can define this essential collaboration. It’s a big day in the DAO2DAO space, and we must celebrate! 🎉

Bankless Academy, BanklessDAO's Web3 education platform, partnered with humanDAO during Season 3. After three months of deep dev work, mutual collaboration, and iterative feedback, the humanDAO Academy is ready to be launched! LFG 🚀

humanDAO aspires to improve the lives of people by implementing crypto assets, NFTs, and Web3 technology to provide new opportunities for the underserved communities of the world. The mission is reflected in humanDAO's four core pillars:

Wages include opportunities such as play-to-earn scholarships and a jobs board.
Education includes learning modules on cryptocurrency and Web3.
Feed includes meal programs and partnerships.
Funds include grants for project proposals.

Bankless Academy is honored to provide the necessary tech and infrastructure to help humanDAO achieve its second goal, education. The platform, Learn Web3 with humanDAO, consists of five interactive modules that provide the necessary tools to get started in Web3: Crypto Wallet, Crypto 101, humanDAO, Financial Literacy, and Web3 Opportunities. Most modules have several sub-modules for specific topics.

The community of more than 65,000 members will be able to get plugged into the Web3 space, crypto, and the mission of humanDAO, thanks to a smooth and creative onboarding experience and educational tech born from passionate DAOs.

This fantastic collaboration marks the launch of the first white-label partnership for Bankless Academy. A special shoutout to the humanDAO core team, Chris, Corey, and Haider, for their trust in the Academy vision, and for driving development via humanDAO's particular set of use cases.

Curious to see how the final product looks? Check out the humanDAO Academy platform and discover what well-aligned teams and dedicated work can do for the DAO space.

If you’re interested in having an easy-to-use, customizable, and scalable onboarding/education platform for your DAO, project, organization, or community, learn more about Bankless Academy’s white-label product.

Save time and money by leveraging the Academy’s infrastructure and experience; contact the Bankless Academy team here.

What’s New

🎙 BanklessDAO Podcasts

Get Involved

🌱 New Joiners Session S5x02

Do you want to spend time with seasoned BanklessDAO contributors to discuss your DAO experience and receive advice? This New Joiners Session may be just what you are looking for … a pleasant chat with no bots allowed. Join us on September 5 to discover more about bDAO and how to get engaged. Meet mentors who could help you on your path to DAO life and other new members who may serve as fellow pilgrims. To get plugged in and feel the BanklessDAO vibes, RSVP in the #calendar channel.

#️⃣ WeAreDAO

Bankless IMN 🦇🔊🏴 @IMNbankless

#WeAreDAO presents the Members Point of Contact of the Translators Guild, who is also one of the core contributors of @BanklessDE 🇩🇪 Whether reading a macroeconomics book or taking a long beach walk, crypto is always on her mind 🧠🪙🐇 @banklessDAO, this is @lanlanlany!

🙏 Sponsor: humanDAO — improving lives through crypto.

WildFireDAO Proposal Ignites a Conversation

Author: teeLEROO

Image credit: Dippudo (adapted from the original artwork by Kaitans Illustration)

In a proposal pitched at furthering the BanklessDAO mission — to help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture — WildFireDAO is seeking funding to host a series of AMAs with core members of prominent Web3 projects. The idea is that quality content released under the Bankless umbrella will draw attention to our brand and the virtual space where our community is active, in addition to eventual generation of sponsorship revenue.

As an offshoot of the Fire Eyes DAO (🔥_🔥), started by 0x_Lucas, gladstonecallum, Coopahtroopa, and James Waugh, WildFireDAO works in DAO collaboration and governance. The original four founders expanded membership on this meta-governance initiative under the categories of DeFi, Public Goods, Creator Economy, and Infrastructure.

WildFireDAO is particularly suited to the task of attracting key people from leading projects such as SuperRare, ENS, RocketPool, and Aave, since WildFireDAO founders are already engaged with these key protocols, offering product support from the launch phase to ongoing maintenance.

For those who have never attended an AMA (Ask Me Anything), they are live interviews hosted on Twitter Spaces or in Discord where the audience can interact directly with the guest. In terms of content creation as laid out in the proposal, the weekly AMAs proposed by WildFire include promotional tweets and video archiving on YouTube.

The work of WildFireDAO will be carried out by their Creator Economy Squad, with the actual AMAs hosted by Jaris James and NF Thinker — who is the current host of bDAO AMAs on Twitter Spaces.

The Proposal requests funding of $25,000 (or about 1.9 million BANK) to support WildFireDAO’s production over its first one or two months. The original proposal asked for twice this amount, and was revised in response to the community feedback received. The plan is that after building viewership with the seed funding, sponsors will be sought at $10,000 USDC per month, to be split 60% to WildFireDAO, 30% to BanklessDAO, 10% to NF Thinker/show host.

Community Reaction and Concerns

The comments on the Forum proposal tap into the same issues we experience in relation to funding bDAO-initiated projects. Are we getting a good return on our investment? Are we preserving BANK value for token holders? The conversation is ongoing, and the best way to gather information is from the proposal, but the main concerns to date are related to the level of funding sought and the value proposition for BanklessDAO.

To the question of whether our return on investment is satisfactory, we can clearly see the value in communicating with and beyond the Web3 community. Twitter and YouTube remain foundational communication platforms for reaching a non-Web3 audience, and the more time we spend immersed in that community, the better our chances of spreading the Bankless message. Sponsorship is likely to follow when bDAO’s community visibility is good.

Particularly in the case of YouTube, BanklessDAO has yet to optimize this platform. If the AMA series is able to deliver a steady stream of high-quality content, viewership will increase and the channel will rank higher. The benefit of a popular YouTube channel accrues to all the content posted there, in future as well as the existing material.

If we are to trust the task of spreading word of the Bankless movement to anyone, it seems a good fit to choose a seasoned crew who can boast connections with the space’s top protocols — in addition to strong bDAO ties. Their previous AMA experience mitigates some of the risk in the projections of strong viewership and sponsorship revenue down the road. The team looks strong, but is that enough?

Questions Remain

While there appear to be tangible benefits for bDAO, the proposal parameters and revised ask of $25,000 worth of BANK for WildFireDAO’s service are worth exploring:

(1) Why is the revenue split weighting WildFireDAO’s contribution as twice that of bDAO? WildfireDAO’s use of BanklessDAO’s platform and reach to operate is key to the proposal. There’s no easy way to set the value on the usage of the Bankless name and 59K Twitter followers, but it merits further discussion. What is the draw of the WildFire banner and its champions compared to ours?

(2) Why is bDAO shouldering the upfront cost and the risk? Why not build and then seek funding? If for some reason WildFireDAO is unable to execute on the promise of viewership and sponsorship, the loss is borne by bDAO alone. What is WildFireDAO’s skin in the game?

(3) The use of BANK from our treasury, and its imminent sale as WildFireDAO spends the disbursement to pay for operational expenses, puts downward pressure on the BANK token at a time when the token price is nearing one cent.

(4) Why doesn’t the project ask for less BANK and keep more of the sponsorship revenue in return?

(5) Are assumptions on sponsorship revenue realistic in the current market? Cycles in Web3 are sudden and volatile. Without proof that projects are waiting with sponsorship dollars, it’s hard to trust project forecasts. What kind of assurances can bDAO get around sponsorship?

The Next Step

As the price of BANK remains depressed and our treasury’s runway diminishes, there is some urgency to address the problem through contemplation of solutions that leverage our name to generate sustainable payment streams. WildFireDAO’s proposal may or may not amplify the BanklessDAO name, but it does appear to have the right ingredients to do so.

DAOs are not corporations with tested frameworks that have a prescribed solution for discrete challenges. Nor do we want to do it the corporate way. However, in the absence of a warning siren that goes off every time a significant amount is requested of our treasury, it remains crucial that individual DAO members bring their critical thinking to bear on each and every proposal.

🏛 Governance

Snapshot Votes

🪙 Tokenomics — L2 Liquidity Deepening

BanklessDAO has the Balancer pool on Polygon which has a volume (usage) of around 1,000 USD daily. Currently we have BANK liquidity depth equivalent to 46K USD on this L2, which is resulting in high slippage for people using and trading on Polygon. BanklessDAO wants to support the liquidity depth for operational usage, and so plans to migrate 24K USD of liquidity from SushiSwap and 26K USD from the Balancer L1 pool to provide depth to the Balancer L2 pool. This proposal is to gain approval from the DAO to migrate this liquidity to support operations on Polygon. Please vote.

Proposals in Discussion

💸 Gitcoin Proposal [Part 2]

The BanklessDAO Gitcoin proposal has been updated following the conversation and comments in the Forum last week. After considering the latest round of input we have determined the best course of action is to go ahead with a collaborative BanklessDAO projects proposal. Check out the updated version of the proposal here.

📊 Introducing Bankless Research

Bankless Research is an organizational unit seeking grant opportunities and developing research reports for projects and protocols in Web3. We aim to establish ourselves as a research-focused, externally facing entity of BanklessDAO. The project team is fully aligned with the BanklessDAO mission of onboarding people into crypto and aims to achieve that by creating the highest quality research content in the Web3 space.

✅ Action Items

🎙 Sign up: Coordinape is back! Go to #bot-commands and type /coordinape form-request.

📖 Join: BanklessDAO Writers Cohort starts soon! Sign up here.

🗳️ Action: Go vote on the Tokenomics - L2 Liquidity Deepening proposal.

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

🙏 Thanks to Our Sponsor

humanDAO

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