GM! This is Jim Myers, the CTO at Flipside. I’m guest posting on Bears Are for Building because I wanted to dive deeper into last week’s post, and share my perspective on it.

If you’re of a more technical sort, I think you’d appreciate my newsletter, Jim Myers Tech. Check it out if you want a closer look at the technical underpinnings of the industry!

Now, let’s get to today’s post:

Last Monday morning I opened the Flipside slack to a pretty jarring assertion:

The narrative that crypto helps or will ever help people is laughable at best

— brave Flipsider speaking their mind

I respect that someone had the courage to post this and start a discussion. Whether it goes unsaid or not, I am willing to bet many inside of crypto have had similar thoughts lately.

In light of such events as FTX, the collapse of Terra, or the uncertainty of SEC enforcement, I get it. Whether you are in the industry, or on the outside, bad actors are creating a lot of noise that distracts from real progress.

What followed was an honest slack debate about what blockchain can unlock for society, what’s worked, and what’s failed.

Now, I’m not writing to share every potential use case (you’ve probably heard many of them already), but I do want to share an astute remark from a wise Flipsider:

We didn’t join this industry hoping it would work out, we joined to be the reason it does work out.

That statement both inspires me and scares the hell out of me — am I, are we, doing enough?

Flipside’s mission is to enable blockchain ecosystems to live up to their full potential.

Full potential means billions of users. Billions of users mean real problems solved at scale.

That only happens when we effectively enable communities of builders.

But builders need simple access to usable data, mature tools, tactics for attracting and retaining users, and simpler governance, to name a few.

Here are six things from the past couple of weeks the Flipside Team is doing to break down barriers for builders.

1. Our analytics engineering team continues to drive data curation with our blockchain partners to make data accessible & usable for builders— most recently in a partnership with Coinbase to support Base!

2. Our product engineering team continues to build the best tools to access this data, most recently with the release of our new Data Studio and a soon-to-come new state-of-the-art query engine called Compass.

3. Our enterprise data offering is taking flight, the goal being to provide a deeper level of data integration that enables product development and provides an easy bridge for web2 organizations into web3.

4. Our Protocol-Eng group is driving the development of key on-chain EVM primitives to unlock barriers for builders such as Liquid Labor (powering MetricsDAO) and Badger, the on-chain role-based permission system.

5. Our Protocol Advocacy (+Data Science) team is working with blockchains such as Avalanche, Axelar, Flow, Near, Osmosis, and Solana to drive user adoption and retain real users.

6. Finally, our governance team is out there making DAOs and Foundations a bit more approachable, most recently in their work with Aave and Balancer.

In all that we do we aim to be pillars and responsible stewards of the blockchain ecosystems we serve.

Hoping it works out is not a strategy, what are you doing to be the reason it works out?

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