Communities That Work Together Win Together | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup

Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO

Sep 17

Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,

This week, we witnessed a remarkable moment in history. The Ethereum Merge, a process always planned for and likened to swapping out an engine mid-flight, happened without a hitch on September 15, 2022 at 06:43 UTC. There were cheers, there were pandas, there was pixel painting, and there were yawns from our North American friends who aren’t used to having key historical moments take place outside their time zones.

The Merge was more than six years in the making, and putting aside the evident technical brilliance for a moment, it is clear that this was a triumph for teamwork. In this week’s editorial, siddhearta makes an excellent case for what can be achieved by BanklessDAO if we focus on working together as a team.

Whether you experience the bDAO Community Call live, or catch up afterwards, you’ll know that the slides offer us a glimpse of what is happening in small teams across the DAO. Treasury Guild is working on BANK utility and value, the Podcast Hatchery continues to produce excellent content, the Writers Guild is running a second Cohort program, the DAOlationships Guild is hosting demos with a huge range of Web3 project teams, and the IMN’s #WeAreDAO campaign highlights the diversity and dedication of individuals in our bDAO family.

It’s crucial that we maintain our focus on these wonderful workstreams but also that we zoom out and have a really good look at the ‘big picture’. A number of current proposals on the Forum are tackling this challenge from various angles: ideating on contributor recognition and role badges, a horizontal centre of excellence, and bottom-up community sentiment checks. To pick up on links’ comment in relation to the bDAO Card project, “it doesn’t matter what you do, we need you” — so please go and engage with the latest Forum content. One post you definitely won’t want to miss is the GSE Deliverables (Cohort-1) summary report.

Read on for all the latest learning opportunities, a light-hearted new section where we ask the tough questions to our contributors, and a feast of content for you to enjoy as you savour your first post-Merge weekend. bDAO Strong!

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

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🙏 Sponsored by humanDAO

Uplifting underserved communities with Web3's most useful NFT.

🗓 Weekly Recap

Community Highlights

MCON Event

In the late summer sun at an unused school in Denver, Web3 builders, innovators, and change-makers congregated for four days of learning, connection, and play at MetaCartel’s MCON2 event. From an insightful speaker series on the main stage to small-group discussions (including some lead by bDAO’s own Bryan Petes and Humpty Calderon), the well-curated event surpassed expectations.

Favorite talks included one from from Rafa0 (Mirror DAO) and Kevin Owocki (Gitcoin), titled Kumbayah DAOs: How to Defend Your DAO Against Incompetence and Bureaucracy. Side events and happy hours did not disappoint, and dinners (including bDAO’s Crypto Nomads Peking Duck dinner) were fantastic. Best of all it was just a great all-round experience of connecting with fellow Web3 enthusiasts in a beautiful place. We left with great memories, new friends, and great merch — many thanks to the team at MCON for putting on such a great event.

#️⃣ WeAreDAO

Bankless IMN 🦇🔊🏴 @IMNbankless

Gm world! Today #WeAreDAO presents another one of @banklessDAO's power women💪She is a talented designer and translator who dedicates her time to both the Italian Node of the IMN and her other creative projects😻We love to have you onboard, VallentinaC 🔥

This week, we are kicking off a new section aimed at getting to know our bDAO friends a little better. Thank you Links, for fronting up as our first featured contributor!

What is your favourite DeFi protocol?
PoolTogether is the one I am on the most.
What is your favourite ice-cream flavour?
Well … it's pretty rare but Baskin Robbins used to have a concoction of gummy worms mixed with cookies ’n’ cream that they called "Dirt ‘n’ Worms". Try before you deny!
Which of the NFTs that you own is your favourite?
DAOpunks — Shadowy Super Coder #36

Where would you love to travel to?
Italy, Greece, Australia, New Zealand
What did you aspire to before you discovered crypto, and has that changed at all?
My aspiration is to be inspired. I'm still seeking inspiration every day =)

That’s it — short and sweet! If you would like to be featured in Kat’s Roll Call, answer the questions via this form, and keep consuming the Weekly Rollup goodness.

What’s New

🎙 BanklessDAO Podcasts

Get Involved

🌱 New Joiners Session S5x03

Do you wish to spend some time with seasoned BanklessDAO contributors to discuss your DAO experience and receive advice? This New Joiners Session may just be what you are looking for … a pleasant chat with no bots allowed. Join us on Monday, September 19 at 13:45 UTC to discover more about bDAO, connect with fellow newbies on the Bankless journey, and meet others who may serve as mentors on your path to DAO life. To get plugged in and feel the BanklessDAO vibes, RSVP and fill the form in the #calendar channel.

🎓 Bankless Academy

Bankless Academy will be hosting a Twitter Space with humanDAO on Thursday, September 22 at 19:00 UTC. The discussions will center around how education empowers the humanDAO community, their mission, and details on the launch of their very own Web3 Academy. We hope to see you there.

📖 How to Sesh Session

Sesh is a bot used to create calendar events and set up polls in Discord. Do you want to make sure you don’t miss any meetings you’ve registered for? Join 0xZfi on Tuesday, September 20 at 13:00 UTC in the #watercooler-chat voice channel to gain insight on how to make use of Sesh. RSVP to this event here.

💰 Gitcoin Grants Round 15

Gitcoin Grants are live! Please consider donating to BanklessDAO and other projects you wish to support. Your funding goes a long way to supporting projects in the early stages of building an ecosystem to change the world.

📖 How to BANK Session

BANK is the native token of the BanklessDAO community. Join Ernest_Of_Gaia and Anase on Thursday, September 22 at 13:00 UTC in the #watercooler-chat voice channel to gain insight on the history and tokenomics of the BANK token. RSVP to this event here.

🙏 Sponsor: humanDAO — improving lives through crypto.

Communities That Work Together Win Together

Author: siddhearta

Gitcoin Grants Round 15 is open! Go support BanklessDAO Projects and step into the world of public goods funding.

GitcoinDAO is a community of builders, creators, and protocol teams that are on a mission to build an internet that is open source, collaborative, and economically empowering. Every quarter, Gitcoin hosts fundraising events for projects of all sizes, using the power of quadratic funding (QF).

QF is the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community. Rather than rewarding dollar-for-dollar the grants supported by whales and centralized power brokers, the QF algorithm matches funds by prioritizing the number of contributors to a project rather than the total amount funded. This means projects with many small donations will receive more matching funds than projects with only a handful of wealthy donors.

An example of Quadratic Funding in action

QF is built around a simple premise: communities that work together win together.

A number of BanklessDAO projects have received Gitcoin Grants in the past, including Bankless Academy and Crypto Sapiens. In previous rounds, several BanklessDAO projects have applied to take part but were not approved because of a Gitcoin mechanism to prevent manipulation of the QF system through sybil attacks.

Gitcoin 🤖 🌍 @gitcoin

Whether it's spam attacks on emails, Wiki defacements, or somebody gaming an online system, chances are you've come across some form of a Sybil attack. Understanding the problem is the first step in addressing it effectively.

Meet My Friend, Sybil

Gitcoin verifies all projects and users in order to maintain the integrity of their QF matching process. Users need to create a Gitcoin account and obtain a Gitcoin Passport after being verified by some or all of Gitcoin’s identity partners. The greater number of partner verifications, the higher the trust verification score. A higher trust score increases the amount Gitcoin will match to your donations. As part of the Grants Verification Process, Gitcoin limits eligible grants to one per project per round.

BanklessDAO has multiple projects that have applied for grants, each with their own multi-sig and website. However, since all of these fall under the BanklessDAO banner, Gitcoin treats them as one project — and therefore will only allow one grantee per round. Technically, there is no risk of sybil attack since these are discrete projects, but because Gitcoin considers them to be part of BanklessDAO they are excluded.

For some time, the DAO’s grants team has been in discussion with Gitcoin to work around this issue. After no progress with the Gitcoin team, there was a bDAO Forum proposal in August to move forward with a BanklessDAO Projects Grant. The idea was that this would allow multiple projects to receive funding.

Given the short notice provided to DAO members to participate in the BanklessDAO Projects Grant, many projects that may have been eligible were omitted. The decision to split the funds equally between Bankless Academy, Bankless Africa, and the International Media Nodes (IMN) was made on the Forum. Since that vote, and seemingly without explanation or community discussion, Bankless Research has been added to the Projects description and appears on the BanklessDAO Project Grants page.

BanklessDAO 🏴 @banklessDAO

Gitcoin Grants are live! Please consider donating to BanklessDAO and other projects you wish to donate to. Your support count! BanklessDAO strong! 💪🚀 gitcoin.co/grants/7393/ba…

💰 BanklessDAO Projects | GrantsBanklessDAO Gitcoin Grant Proposal THE BANKLESSDAO MISSION... BanklessDAO is a decentralised community coordinating and propagating bankless media, culture, and education. BanklessDAO launched on May 4, 2021, and its goal is to drive adoption and awareness of truly bankless money systems like Ethe…gitcoin.co

A Missed Opportunity

Let’s go back to the simple premise behind QF: communities that work together win together.

The teams involved in the Gitcoin Grants have been trying to work around some of the roadblocks to enable more BanklessDAO projects to qualify for the grants rounds. So far, no clear resolution is in sight and the result is that many projects that should be eligible to receive funding are missing out. This season we decided to move forward with collectively funding BanklessDAO projects, but the effort was so last-minute and disorganized that we were scrambling to figure out which projects to include and how to distribute the funds.

We can do better. We need to work together if we are going to win together.

When we see problems and failures happening, it’s easy to start blaming teams or people. But this is not a team failing, or particular people failing. This is a system failing. To solve system problems, we need to design better systems.

Prioritizing Readiness and Engagement

Gitcoin Grants rounds happen every quarter. We can plan for them.

First, we need to develop a clear strategy for deciding which projects are eligible. For the purpose of grants, we need to focus on projects that truly provide goods and services to the public.

Once we know which projects are to be included in the Projects Grant, we need to determine how best to allocate the shared funds. The simplest option might be for projects to put together a proposal for how they plan to use funds, and then have the bDAO community use weighted voting on Snapshot to decide how much of the total grant to allocate to each project.

Those are easily achievable steps to complete prior to the next Gitcoin Grants round. Next, we must focus on the most important step: mobilizing our community.

One of the biggest challenges for many Gitcoin Grants projects is building a community to support their work. We have a community. But we need an active, engaged community.

Engagement has been a challenge for us during the past few months. It’s a tough market out there, vibes are low, and our time and attention are limited. We have consistently seen low engagement on the Forum, Snapshot, and even on Twitter.

When it comes to engagement, small actions matter. Liking a tweet, sharing content, commenting on a Forum post, voting on Snapshot. Those don’t seem like momentous actions, but small actions over time by a community can create momentum.

Power resides in an active community. Small actions done collectively create a driving force.

Remember, QF is optimized for a large number of small donors. If we activate all of our media channels and can mobilize our community for the next Gitcoin grants round, our projects will be rewarded with greater matching funds. We want more project revenue, and here is a key revenue opportunity! Let’s start working together!

Which brings us to the last critical point: we need to help our members become verified Gitcoin users. Since verified Gitcoin Passport users can receive a Trust Bonus of up to 150% on their donations (versus only 50% for unverified users), it literally pays to plan ahead. We need to make it easy, have a quarterly workshop, and invite Gitcoin to help walk us through the process.

With a clear strategy, readiness, and engagement aligned behind a shared mission, BanklessDAO wins. Hands Down. Every. Time.

We have one of the biggest communities in Web3. We believe in the power of crypto-native tools to impact our world, and we act on those values. We are builders and explorers with boots on the ground, a force for change, helping the world go bankless.

With the support of our community, we can do anything. But let’s start with building a coherent Gitcoin Grants strategy.

🏛 Governance

Proposals in Discussion

🧭 Defining Priorities Within BanklessDAO ft. jokedao

BanklessDAO has experienced a governance reboot and rapid contributor growth in the last year. Opinions vary, however, about how much progress has been made in aligning capital and contribution with clearly defined, long-term goals. We would like to organize a DAO-wide sentiment check in which all BANK holders can raise their voices with equal weight about what’s most important to them. We suggest a new method of collecting sentiment and clarifying priorities within BanklessDAO using the new governance tool jokedao.

👨🏽‍💼 Bankless Advisor: Fiduciary Planners + Non-Custodial DeFi

Bankless Advisor seeks to equip a generation of financial advisors with the education, technology, and legal tools to introduce one billion people to the Bankless life. The objective of this proposal is to provide a landing and incubation space for the Bankless Advisor project inside BanklessDAO and for the DAO to provide talent for the initial design, marketing, and website work. We are not requesting any BANK tokens; Bankless Advisor will purchase BANK on the open market to pay for bounties and it is our intention to use external funding or revenue generated from the platform if/when any would be required.

👬 BanklessDAO x ConsenSys DAOlationship Proposal

ConsenSys is seeking the opportunity to onboard some of their employees to BanklessDAO to support the DAO across various guilds and projects. This initiative will enable employees to explore DAO culture, experiment with external contribution in a DAO community, and provide value to the wider Ethereum ecosystem. As part of this DAOlationship proposal, ConsenSys would like to secure 50 Guest Passes for a 3-month period so that ConsenSys employees can have a trial period to experience BanklessDAO prior to joining the DAO independently.

🤝 Zero Liquidation Loans: BanklessDAO and Forth DAO

Decentralized finance has transformed many lives, but it is far from perfect. If we are going to successfully build a better world with Web3 technology, then we will require a more stable financial system. On our mission to onboard the next billion people, we must create more safety nets for all participants. This natural collaboration of BanklessDAO and Forth DAO proposes a way to yield positive-sum outcomes but needs careful consideration.

📣 Bringing BanklessDAO AMAs to the Next Level

WildFireDAO has proposed to partner with BanklessDAO to deliver weekly AMAs with high-profile projects such as ENS, Gitcoin, Aave, and many more. The first season of funding is intended as a trial run and sponsorships would not be pursued until an audience has been built, but in future seasons a share of sponsor revenue would be returned to bDAO in exchange for each seasonal grant. Jump in here whether it be for the first time or to see the most recent comments — it’s one of the most actively discussed proposals we’ve seen in a while.

✅ Action Items

📖 Donate: Support Gitcoin Grants.

🗣️ Engage: There are proposals on the Forum that need your constructive input.

🍨 Front up for Kat’s Roll Call — it’s only five questions!

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

🙏 Thanks to Our Sponsor

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