Hello frens,
At Bankless, writer David Hoffman has said
the legacy of crypto will instead be a renaissance in human culture.
and
The values that are baked into these crypto-economic systems extend outwards from the code itself and into the community, and the art that we share and value.
I want to take a moment and tell you a few of Gitcoins experiments in crypto/culture/art and how they have become symbiotic with our mission.
Longtime followers of Gitcoin may have noticed a different type of storytelling coming out of our orbit in the last year. These projects - $SACKS, MoonshotBots, or The GreatestLARP - and other launches from GitcoinDAO or GitcoinDAO-adjacent groups have two goals:
- Spread the narrative of Gitcoinâs mission, and other friendly Moloch-fighting, Regenerative, Solarpunk, economies being built in the web3 space.
- Raise $$$ for public goods.
Fundraising & Storytelling through art
It started with stickers in 2018-2019. Hope you got some bot stickers. Looks Rare:
And the Gitcoin Avatar builder, the best darn Open Source Avatar generator out there. Supporting over 99999999999999999999999 permutations of ways you could express yourself online since 2019!
In 2020 we started producing comic books. Hopefully by now youâve read the amazing comic books produced by the artists at Blaylock Comics.
In 2021 you may have picked up a moonshot bot or SACKS.
Hopefully by now, youâve also got some stuff from the Gitcoin schwag store:
If youâre a true og, youâve perhaps bid on a premium NFT or two !
Or three or fourâŚ
If you arenât, maybe youâre discovering the investments weâve been making in these beautiful artifacts for the first time.
Why do this?
We started producing these Gitcoin-adjacent tool as a way of exploring how to convey our mission & our culture to the outside world. Each of these tools was a deeper way to engage an audience on our mission/culture.
- instead of talking about community, weâre now playing hackey sack and together experiencing it.
- instead of talking about ways we might fund open source, weâre actually doing it.
- instead of talking about how someone should build a moloch slayer, weâre meme-ing it into existence.
- instead of talking about how funding public goods is cool, weâre creating the dopest merch + only giving it to public goods funders.
- instead of being resigned to doomerism, weâre painting a picture of a Solarpunk world
As a rule, the more visceral the better. Visceral can mean cold hard cash for public goods. Visceral can mean aesthetically engaging. Visceral means giving people experiences.
Like David Hoffman from Bankless says, âthe legacy of crypto will instead be a renaissance in human culture.â. By creating a culture, fundraising, and meme-machine weâve just And upon it!
Gitcoin-Grants Adjacent & GitcoinDAO Powered
Gitcoinâs primary assets are:
- Gitcoin Grants - which has generated $20mm in public goods funding, but relies on continous matching pool funding to continue to operate.
- GitcoinDAO - a DAO that governs Gitcoin and is becoming the primary for itâs culture, mission, ethos, and results.
This culture, fundraising, and meme-machine augments Gitcoinâs existing assets:
- it deepens & spreads the lore.
- it raises money for Quadratic Funding
Hereâs what it looks like:
If we are can spin this flywheel, we can pull more & more people into the orbit of our mission
So where is this all going?
First and foremost, i believe we need to focus on meat and potatoes.
- Mission - deepening our understanding of our mission.
- Culture - making sure that we are making time to focus on deliberately designing our DAO culture.
- Results - turning the screws on our product/ops to make sure we actualize our mission as much as possible.
There are numerous ways that we can do that. Itâs in everything we do. Every Discord message we send. Every zoom call. Every tweet. Every conference we attend. Every project we execute. Every idea we brainstorm.
I cannot possibly contain all of the diverse & beautiful ways that we could do so in my head. There are many options, and many of them are wworthy of being funded by the DAO.
One Direction we could go
I see an opening for one direction this could all go.
We get really good at transmedia storytelling. We build a metaverse.
This means creating a distributed content generation & fundraising machine. Illustrations, Comic Books, Movie Clips, Stickers, Schwag. Any medium is a possibility for building lore.
One tangible step we could do is to ask different Ethereum community members to partner with us to launch Comics. Iâm envisioning
- The Raid Guild raids Molochs Lair!
- The CoordinAPEs coordinate to destroy Moloch!
- The AAAVE Ghosts vs Moloch.
In each of these stories, weâd help share the diversity of what makes that community special, what their super powers are⌠Weâd catalogue own fights against Moloch, and add them to a larger narrative of the whole open web fighting Moloch together.
After having produced a handful of NFTs, comics, and other transmedia goodies, weâd have a few little saplings of what a GitcoinDAO Metaverse could look like. Plus Iâd get to start giving our Moloch-Comic-Box-Sets to everyone at conferences
Looking for Leaders
None of this will happen unless the community decides it should.
Iâm looking for dreamers & leaders who are inspired to make this a reality to join the GMC - the GitcoinDAO Metaverse Coordinators - a group dedicated to laying down pieces of this metaverse brick by brick, campaign by campaign, one fight against Moloch at a time.
Leave feedback below or join this telegram to learn more.