Bankless to Banned: A Rallying Point for Permissionless Education | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
It’s been a rough week in the markets with the Terra ecosystem imploding and most digital assets down significantly, causing mayhem in the cryptoverse. But we’re here for the long haul, and we know that if we stick together, we can make it through anything. This is one big family, and we all have each other’s backs. If you need to talk with someone, don’t hesitate to contact anyone in the DAO. Check CC chatter for important information if you need help. ❤️
Let’s shake it off and continue to build. History has shown that projects built during a bear market come out stronger! In the famous words of Taylor Swift:
But I keep cruisin' Can't stop, won't stop groovin' It's like I got this music in my mind Sayin', "It's gonna be alright"
The Permissionless conference is next week and we’re excited to connect, learn, and be inspired by the minds building our new decentralized internet. Will you be there? Don’t forget to rep your Bankless merch!
Coordinape submissions for May are now open. Sign up and remember to reward active members who show up day in and day out, contributing and creating an enabling environment for people and projects to thrive. Now, more than ever, is a good time to leave a kind message with your GIVE.
Contributors: HAshBrown27, Yofi, Tetranome, d0wnlore, Trewkat, siddhearta, hirokennelly.eth, Dippudo
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🗓 Weekly Recap
Community Highlights
👥 May We Coordinape?
Yes!! It’s Coordinape time again! The sign-up period is open and will end on Monday, May 16 at 12am EST. The allocation period (epoch) will run from Wednesday, May 18 until Sunday, May 22. Check the announcements channel for full details. Let’s reward vibrant contributors and boost the morale of our community!
💳 Bankless Card
Version 1 of the Bankless Card roadmap is nearing completion! The project is looking for devs to join the team. If you love working on Web3 fintech products, send a DM to NFThinker. Follow Bankless Card’s Twitter and don't forget to sign up to be part of the pre-launch.
🍸 Permissionless: BanklessDAO Cocktail Hour
It's time to unwind and chill out with frens at Permissionless! Join us on Tuesday, May 17 from 6pm-10pm for a BanklessDAO cocktail hour at Steel Tie Spirits Co. — and get ready to meet some amazing people. If you would like to chat about blockchains, Layer 1s, DAOs, and connect with the minds building the new decentralized internet, then come on down. If you just want drinks, food, and great company after the event, come on down too! Either way, this is one night out you don't want to miss!
💹 Get Ready for Cryptonexus
Cryptonexus is a one-day interactive workshop, developed by Fintech Nexus and BanklessDAO, to enable financial service and fintech professionals to move from crypto-curious to crypto-capable. It is critical for financial executives to understand the power of the blockchain, how to use crypto tools, and how to navigate the Web3 landscape.
Who is on the Cryptonexus team?
Cryptonexus was conceived by Bo, co-founder and CEO of Fintech Nexus, a media and events company dedicated to innovation in lending and digital banking. At the end of 2021 he recruited Manuel Maccou, and together they started working on the mission and vision of Cryptonexus. Coffee & Crypto joined shortly after as a lead instructor, with experience leading crypto education sessions for professionals. Since the formation of the genesis team, Cryptonexus has expanded to bring on more instructors, partners, and advocates like rotorless | Amicus.eth, senad.eth, Eric Hill, and Ella Dane.
When is the next workshop?
There are currently two workshops scheduled for May 23 and 24 in New York City. Tickets can be purchased by visiting the Cryptonexus website.
What’s New
🎙 BanklessDAO Podcasts
Making Bank
In this episode, Making Bank chats with Mike Rabinovici, aka ComeBackKid, a self-described “recovering lawyer” and member of BanklessDAO. He is an occasional writer for the Legal Guild’s Decentralized Law newsletter and hosts its new podcast series called Ab Initio, which features leading practitioners addressing DAO and crypto-related legal issues.
Bankless Africa Podcast
Bankless Africa @Bankless_Africa
🚨 Episode 2 of the Bankless Africa #Podcast drops tomorrow 💃🏽 In this episode @_MissPurple__ talks with @pumpernikhil of the @CeloOrg on "DeFi for the People" 🔥 Stay Tuned !🎧 Here's a sneak peak 👇 #web3 #defi https://t.co/Su0KutnMdFBounty Hunter
Crypto Sapiens
Crypto Sapiens @CryptoSapiens_
🔊Tomorrow on eXchange Points 🎙 @JarisJames @flow_science & @nodestardao will be discussing "Decentralizing Internet Infrastructure. What if the web itself, can be owned by the #community?" 🤔 ⏳1PM EST Don't miss this Space 😎 #web3 #nft #blockchain https://t.co/qTQRUXlAun✍️ Bankless Publishing
📰 Bankless Africa Newsletter
Bankless Africa is launching a newsletter focused on Web3 stories from Africa, the diaspora, and Africans at heart. Subscribe to the newsletter if you are interested in:
staying up-to-date on the latest news about crypto and Web3 in Africa.
learning more about the potential of crypto and Web3 technologies to improve banking and financial systems in Africa.
supporting African entrepreneurs and developers working on innovative projects in the crypto and Web3 spaces.
Get Involved
🐦 #WeAreDAO Campaign
The International Media Nodes is launching a Twitter campaign called #WeAreDAO which will run throughout Season 4. The campaign is inspired by the previous success of the #WhyWeDAO and #HowWeDAO campaigns.
The objective of #WeAreDAO is to shatter the misconception typically surrounding DAOs — that collaborator teams solely consist of developers, people with IT backgrounds, and those extremely knowledgeable about crypto.
The campaign will showcase contributors with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skills. Short interviews with DAO members will be posted on Twitter and translated on IMN channels. There will be a POAP for interviewees.
Fill out this sheet if you would like to be interviewed for the #WeAreDAO campaign, and please retweet when you see the hashtag.
🥊 Fight Club
Fight Club will be hosting a launch party / AMA Twitter Space next Thursday, live from Permissionless on the BanklessDAO Twitter. If you are a Level 1 contributor, get whitelisted by filling out this application. Join the Fight Club Discord here.
💹 Bankless DAO - Strategic Planning Survey
Strategic surveys are an important element of the strategic planning process. We are still seeking responses on this form! So far, the responses are insufficient to gather DAO sentiment, and your voice needs to be heard! Also note that the Community Handbook link is listed on the survey form’s submission page. Please offer your thoughts and additions to the manual.
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Bankless to Banned: A Rallying Point for Permissionless Education
Author: Tetranome
Did you somehow miss last weekend’s crypto-Twitter fiasco that garnered 8,500+ supportive retweets? The BanklessHQ YouTube channel was suddenly and unexpectedly terminated.
That is ... until YouTube heard the overwhelmingly negative community response to their ‘mistake’.
But whether or not the YouTube channel remained banned is beside the point, because the ability for modern social media platforms to silence any group they deem ‘dangerous’ still remains unchecked — a worrisome feature of their centralised nature.
Knowledge is Power
Education is one of the few tools of empowerment readily available to a modern public that lives under systemic dehumanisation. Today, many people find themselves locked in a position beyond their immediate control; they are bound to a dissatisfying job they can’t risk leaving, or mistreated because of their ethnic background. When the dominant system censors divergent schools of thought or new systemic models, the public becomes knowledge-locked into the existing process, unable to find a better way of living. Even when this bias is an unintended consequence happening under the guise of protection, the impact on freedom of thought is the same: we learn that it’s best not to think differently.
But how can humanity grow if we aren’t empowered to learn anything new?
Censorship is one of those fundamental territories on which the public must take a firm stand in saying ‘No’, lest it encroach on our ability to discover and engage with new perspectives. Yet when we assert that everyone should be empowered with freedom of thought and deed, we must acknowledge the importance of the accompanying responsibility: to find solutions for the negative consequences of such freedom — those that censorship originally sought to solve.
In this case, if YouTube was trying to protect the public by censoring streams of crypto media that might potentially lead to financial devastation, then we need to acknowledge this potential danger and shoulder the responsibility of protecting new settlers and explorers ourselves. One answer is a stronger push for more practical education.
The Bankless Movement
The bankless movement has quickly grown into a crypto-literacy powerhouse, but with the current state of the broader ecosystem, we need to take a hard look at repeating patterns and revise our education/broadcast formula to mitigate crypto’s increasingly negative narratives. One of these is scam culture. Scams are rampant in the crypto space, and aren’t helping the image of a stable, fair economy that we want to pitch to the world. (I want to be clear that in discussing scams I am not referring to the recent events with Terra/Luna — though I do think that pushing for stronger education in crypto-project analysis and portfolio distribution could also help mitigate such events.)
With so much capital and opportunity, it is inevitable that some people will try to take advantage of others, and with pseudo-anonymity these offenders can simply disappear for a time and reappear under a new name. The question of the hour is, “How can we best educate newcomers against the scams that leverage the necessary, inherent principles of crypto space?” Every day that we defend self-sovereignty while failing to give a satisfying answer to this question, we cost newcomers both their investment and their faith in a movement that initially sought to liberate them.
At Bankless Academy, where I contribute as a core builder, we recently partnered with BanklessDAO’s InfoSec team to research and develop a fundamental security course for new users, so that we can best understand the most important security tips to share with explorers before they fund their wallet. In our view it isn’t practical to expect that everyone will read a supplementary security article before diving into an exciting new community or buying their first tranche of tokens (not to say that articles don’t have their place). Instead, security needs to be embedded in the initial onboarding process, and it needs to be engaging so as to embolden the fresh explorer, without scaring or boring them.
Of course, as scams become more sophisticated and covert, we must continue to evolve our security content, with further lessons and revisions.
However, educating about scams is only one part of responsibly equipping new explorers, and the Academy initiative will not solely build the comprehensive crypto-literacy education that the bankless movement requires. The entire Bankless network needs to work cohesively to build a space that empowers newcomers with safe and exciting strategies for exploration.
Note that this education process flows both ways. If only the most adventurous explorers set foot in our ecosystem, we must pay close attention to what we can learn from them — so that we can progressively develop an onboarding experience that encourages the more risk-averse.
Yet as we work towards building a space for exploration — and in the process gain trust with the external bodies ready to censor or over-regulate us — the keys to the knowledge-lock aren’t in the hands of the people. The threat of censorship still looms, ready to be enacted when those with authority see fit.
The bankless movement can only grow if we can explore and correct our shortcomings; a system-shifting movement such as ours fundamentally needs permissionless educational media to succeed. Sovereign individuals know that if the current system won’t give us the keys to our own house, then we’ll find a new plot of land to build a community where sovereignty is accepted and its associated responsibilities are respected and taught. We need to build systems where unbounded, permissionless education is systemically preserved, and where we can unlock the fundamental human strengths of self-awareness and growth to an optimal degree. Only then can we have a system ready for onboarding the world and protecting freedom of perception and thought.
Web3 Tools for a Web3 Journey
Building and transitioning the world to Web3 social media protocols is easier said than done (and when I say social media, I’m including YouTube alongside Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.)
Generally speaking, the public doesn’t fully realise the tradeoffs they’re making on their media platforms. You only realise the need for decentralised, permissionless systems after you’ve been censored or deplatformed, and it's difficult to care about your data being sold as a product when you don’t understand the systemic implications of privacy erosion — or when you don’t see any alternative.
Remember Google+? Even Alphabet failed to capture traffic from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Crypto is going to need a pretty attractive Web3 social media package if we want to onboard the world to our censorship-resistant ecosystem.
Aligning Incentives
Creating attractive solutions is a Web3 strength, because this space respects frictionless design, self-sovereignty, and multi-party incentive alignment.
Take Verifiable Credentials, for example. If a user can easily log into all of their social media via a Web3 browser wallet, then there’s the possibility to have the user back-end carry all of their data and allow them to choose what they give access to. It's a frictionless user experience that actually makes internet navigation more simple, it's a self-sovereign solution to data-mining, and it allows the user and website to reach a mutually beneficial agreement that delivers the intended service without crossing any unannounced boundaries.
Another incentive that drives adoption is the possibility of an airdrop for early adopters and regular users, as well as retroactive public goods funding for the builders themselves. Adding financial motivation while distributing governance power is the sort of incentive process that helps a protocol ecosystem to build itself.
With mechanisms that fundamentally operate by and reward humane design, the Web3 social media sector is lined up to boom off of the back of its quickly ageing Web2 counterpart — a good omen for the achievement of the bankless and the cypherpunk missions, but also a call for preparation. The question is simply, “When will it boom?”.
There’s your daily alpha.
Exploring the Frontier
The events that have unfolded over the last week have created a rallying point for the bankless movement to reflect and recognise our collective opportunities for stimulating ecosystem development. While I’m certain there’s more to consider, I am confident that continuing to explore the bounds of comprehensive Web3 education, frictionless and trustless tools, and community self-awareness is what will push our decentralised brand towards achieving our mission.
The powerful and immediate rallying cry of the Bankless community in response to YouTube’s censorship actions clearly shows the interdependent power of the Bankless network, and it shows why brand trust and network effects are so important in this nascent space.
Bankless 🏴 @BanklessHQ
Hey @SusanWojcicki thanks for unbanning us! Know your battling spam bots and scammers, but sometimes it feels like crypto is being targeted and the crypto community is left wondering why. You wanna stop by the podcast and chat? We can talk web3 and NFTs while we’re at it. https://t.co/60VtLQ1B9rWith great power comes great responsibility. If we want to push for further adoption, then we need to lead the onboarding charge with the high standards of education, tools, systems, community awareness, and collective growth, standards that distinguish the Bankless movement from projects actively tarnishing the reputation of crypto culture. Representing and building the movement starts here: if you can lead by example and show a newcomer, first-hand, how rewarding this space can be when approached with a sustainable mindset, then they are likely to share their knowledge with the next explorer and we will all be one step closer to a functional, permissionless future.
How do you onboard the world? One explorer at a time.
This is Bankless. We are the first explorers of Web3 and decentralised finance.
We are the force that protects and propagates permissionless learning. We are the builders. We are the educators.
And we are, in many ways, the learners too.
🎣 Phishing School
Authors: d0wnlore and the InfoSec Team
Travel Tips and Getting Through the Turmoil
Many of us at BanklessDAO will be heading to Permissionless next week. We’re revisiting the basic travel safety tips we provided during ETHDenver, so you can renew your security posture while you are on your journey.
We are also contending with a very depressed market where some projects have failed more spectacularly than others. This is a very tumultuous time where you may be more distraught and losing focus on the bigger picture. Scammers will see these very human responses to the situation as vulnerabilities and will try to take advantage of them if they can. So let’s take some time to look at getting through the turmoil without feeding the scammers.
Travel Safety Basics
The following are the essential practices you should adopt before you head to Permissionless, or any other conference. These were mentioned in a past Weekly Rollup that went out during ETHDenver, which has further tips on travel safety should you require more practices to increase your security posture.
Do not post photos of your boarding pass online. Other than the personal and booking information printed on these, they also have a barcode containing information that can assist a bad actor in social engineering attacks targeting your airline loyalty account. I know a few people that have had fraudulent loyalty points bookings made through their accounts after they posted their boarding passes on Instagram.
Do not let important documents and devices out of your sight, such as your passport, phone, or laptop. Always be aware of who has them and what is being done with them. For example, when checking into a hotel, is the front desk trying to make a photocopy of your passport when they only need to retain some information for their records?
Do not carry hotel keycards in the envelope with your room number on it. If you lose your hotel keycard let the hotel staff know immediately so that they can deactivate the old card and issue you a new one.
Update all your devices and apps before departure so that these are less vulnerable to exploits while traveling. It may be less convenient for you to update these while on the go.
When working in places such as a hotel lobby or café, be mindful of ways that you can be eavesdropped on by people, mirrors, and cameras near you. Reposition yourself or leave the area if it’s possible you’re leaking information to people or devices around you.
Staying Safe During Turmoil
The looming bear market will be a first for many of us. Depending on how your portfolio is performing, your thought processes may not represent how you would feel or act under more jubilant conditions.
Remaining grounded is key to not getting knocked out of this ecosystem for the long run. You need to survive the games being played during these market cycles so that you can stay in the long, infinite game of being able to play and work in this exciting new space.
Playing short-term games in order to “quickly make up for the losses” is what can knock many people out of the long-term game. They will take on new, even riskier bets than the ones that put them in a bad position in the first place, such as swing trading or other activities that could realize quick gains in a short time frame (if they are lucky).
Scammers will also take advantage of this depressed period in our industry by tweaking certain dials that will make their fraudulent offers more enticing. Offers from scammers for recovering our funds if we were caught by a theft, liquidations, or Ponzi schemes, will all likely rise during this period. Other offers may promise a quick turnaround if we deposit just a little bit of something, sometimes all we have left in our portfolio, to kick things off.
Don’t blindly attempt activities recommended to you by people you don’t know well. It will not only be scammers that will use this period to their advantage. There will be other market participants, new and old, that may not be committing outright fraud but are playing zero-sum games that won’t be in your favor.
Stay safe and remain grounded frens.
🏛 Governance
Snapshot Proposals
💰 Tokenomics - Stake 10 ETH from Treasury using Rocket Pool
The proposal is to stake 10 ETH from the treasury to generate passive yield and support permissionless, decentralized PoS ETH staking. The reason for starting with a 10 ETH stake is to minimize our initial Rocket Pool protocol risk exposure until we have more confidence in the protocol. The future vision is to use this protocol to make holding rETH (or other decentralized ETH PoS pools) the standard for the BanklessDAO treasury using any ETH not set aside for gas. This proposal is our initial foray into this vision.
💰 Tokenomics - Fulfill Contractual Obligation with Balancer
Per bDAO’s agreement with Balancer Protocol, Balancer requires 475K BANK to distribute rewards to those who provided liquidity during the rewards period for the original BANK/wETH pool on Ethereum. Due to miscommunication with the timing for rewards distribution, Balancer ran rewards for five weeks beyond what was agreed upon. As a result, they have come up short on BANK to distribute. We propose to provide Balancer with the necessary BANK to distribute as rewards to those who provided liquidity during the extended rewards period.
Proposals in Discussion
Please see previous issues of the Rollup for a summarization of these forum proposals, or just click the links to read the forum posts.
🎙️ Crypto Sapiens Season 4 Budget Proposal
😎 S4 - DEGEN Forum Proposal
💰 Changes to the Grants Committee Process for S4
🧑🏾🎓 New Joiners Session Moving to Education Guild
💊 VitaDAO <> Bankless DAO Token Swap
✅ Action Items
🎙 Action: Sign up for Coordinape using /coordinape form-request in the bot-command channel.
❤️ Action: Talk to someone if you are going through a tough time because of the markets. Please don’t keep it inside.
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.
🙏 Thanks to Our Sponsor
CitaDAO
CitaDAO is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, allowing real estate to be tokenized on chain. The ERC-20 tokens will be composable with other DeFi applications and primitives that operate within the Ethereum protocol, creating an ecosystem for real estate in the DeFi ecosystem.
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Even with being hacked I still believe in bankless and a decentralized money but security is the issue