Surviving and Thriving in Season 5 | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
This week’s issue of the Rollup is light on content, in the spirit of the DAO’s official gap week. It’s our hope that you are reading this in a haze of contentment, relaxed and ready for Season 6 after a week to recharge.
Often when we take time away from regular routines, we make space for new ideas. Our minds, freed from the cognitive load of remembering meeting schedules and task lists, tend to make interesting connections between our existing knowledge and the world we encounter each day.
If you’ve had a terrific idea for the DAO during the break, what do you do with it? Think it through, write it down, and talk it over with some of your team. Depending on the scale and applicability of the idea, you might need to progress it through the DAO’s discussion and feedback mechanisms.
This process of ideation, of taking an idea from soft to formal consensus, might involve adding to a meeting agenda, creating Discord discussion threads or polls, developing a proposal with interested collaborators, posting on the Forum, and seeking funding through Grants Committee or via Snapshot where appropriate.
Throughout the process, be open to different perspectives and potential connections. Addressing concerns and being willing to expand or clarify a point of contention creates opportunities to strengthen your own understanding and commitment, or to change direction if required!
In this week’s editorial piece, we take a look back at a small slice of Season 5. Together we have achieved great results despite the challenges of building a global organization in a volatile world. We can attribute some of this success to the steps the DAO has in place to take the spark of an idea and develop it into a solid program, product, or process. Let’s continue to ignite our passions in Season 6, together.
Contributors: Lucent1, Trewkat, ab_colours, HiroKennelly
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Surviving and Thriving in Season 5
Author: Lucent1
As we’ve written about and alluded to more than a few times in Season 5, we’ve been bear market building, and in many ways, we’re not just surviving, we’re thriving. BanklessDAO has been launching projects, expanding its guilds, and onboarding new members on a daily basis. So while the crypto market is still in bear territory, the bear market builders of BanklessDAO are feeling pretty bullish.
As we move into Season 6, the crypto markets are starting to come to life, if just a little bit. Some of this is due to web2 platforms integrating blockchain tech and institutional investors who are starting to realize the power of post-Merge ether. No one knows where the market is headed, but the market for eager contributors aligned behind a common mission to create user-friendly onramps to web3 has never been greater. So what have we been doing while surviving and thriving during the bear? Let’s take a look.
Crypto in Transition
Season 5 kickoff was the first time our season launch was hosted by BanklessDAO’s Twitter account rather than relying on BanklessHQ’s Twitter presence. Of course, Ryan and David showed up for the event, and the vibe was positive as usual, but it felt like a transitionary moment for the DAO — an optimism that was in stark contrast to the general feeling in the cryptoverse following the Tornado Cash sanctions.
Not long after these sanctions, however, Ethereans rejoiced as The Merge, the highly anticipated and intricately-planned transition from Ethereum’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake, went off without a hitch. To pull off such a complex technical feat, the Ethereum core team spent many years planning, testing, tweaking, and testing again, until the devs were sure they could get it right. After years of deliberate and dedicated planning and teamwork, Ethereum became more decentralized and secure overnight, a success six years in the making. Likewise, as the DAO continues to build, it also becomes more decentralized and secure. Season 5 was proof of this.
Meetings Strengthen the Bond
One of the ways we fortified and aligned in Season 5 was through in-person events. There were many global events this season, which helped to cohere our community while giving us insights into how to make the community stronger. Let’s revisit some of the biggest events from Season 5.
MCON and the GM Bus
The GM Bus started their U.S. tour during Season 5, spreading good vibes and helping to bring a little crypto culture to far-off lands. During their journeys, they crashed the MCON 2 event. This event was held in Denver, where web3 builders and innovators gathered to learn, play, and connect. The GM Bus is one of the ways to help the Bankless nation reach new communities that don’t know about crypto, certainly apart from mainstream FUD. Keep on truckin’ GM Bus.
ETHSafari
As the first ever ETH event in Africa, ETHSafari was held in Kenya with people from around the world coming together to learn, hack, and celebrate the decentralized financial future. The event started with a boot camp in Nairobi, then the conference ran from September 22-24, in Kilifi, on the Kenyan coast. The online hackathon started on September 1, and through a partnership with Encode Club, there were opportunities for local and international teams to show their skills. Bankless Africa created a podcast journey through the Ethereum ecosystem in Africa, using storytelling to describe the far-reaching influence it has had on the development of the African web3 space.
Ibiza NXT
BanklessDAO continued to support the Spanish crypto-native community — this time at Ibiza NXT as an official media partner.
The event was the second edition of Ibiza NXT, a conference by IbizaToken that aims to educate citizens, companies, and institutions about the potential of blockchain technology. The bDAO Global Media team was active at the event, conducting interviews, making connections, and gathering leads. They also participated in a thought-provoking talk about the way DAOs are disrupting traditional organizational structures through community ownership, diversification, and globalization.
A Season of Many Partnerships
During Season 5, the DAO entered into many partnerships with the greater web3 ecosystem. Among the highlights this season was a proposal to partner with ConsenSys — the company behind crypto’s most-popular wallet MetaMask, the news website Decrypt, and Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura. ConsenSys employees will be working in BanklessDAO for three months to get a better understanding of the DAO ecosystem and to explore DAO governance in action. Contributors from ConsenSys will officially be joining BanklessDAO at the start of Season 6. We’re ready to learn and grow together!
We also partnered with ThriveCoin to reward the DAO community for cross-network activity and engagement. Maintaining and growing an active, highly engaged community is essential to the success of bDAO.
Other DAO-wide partnerships included Otterspace, Domain DAO, The List of DAOs, and others. Here’s to more cross-ecosystem relationship building in Season 6!
Our projects also partnered up in Season 5. Bankless Academy continued to show their great work in the community, but one of the highlights of this season was a partnership with humanDAO to provide an education platform to help teach web3 basics to the crypto curious. This platform is the humanDAO Academy.
Bankless Academy also partnered with 1inch to launch a lesson about DEX aggregators. Yes, 1inch! It says a lot about the Academy that they are partnering with one of crypto’s premier decentralized exchanges, and it’s a bullish sign for all we are building in the DAO. GG Academy.
The GSE Program
The Governance Solution Engineering (GSE) program was formed to work on contributor incentives and strategic prioritization. This mandate was distilled into three deliverables: a risk framework and financial report, a DAO constitution and improvement standard, and a compensation framework. The GSE was also tasked with proposing a better quorum requirement. Although there was some work product released around financial reporting, the substance of the GSE’s work was the Constitution and bDIP, while the remaining issues remain a work in progress and are probably destined for bDIPs.
Read about the GSE program’s first cohort and listen to a podcast where the GSE explained the program below:
Contributors Are Acknowledged
The DAO has always been about rewarding those who are diligent and work for the betterment of the community, and we saw what must have been a record number of L2 nominations in Season 5. Great job, contributors, and thanks to our community for recognizing the contribution of your fellow bDAO members.
A quick aside: I must admit that becoming an active contributor in the DAO has brought out a lot of potential in me and I find myself achieving things I felt I couldn't do before. I'm humbled by the level of understanding and communication, and it inspires me to work hard to improve as a contributor. My life is about to go on a truly amazing journey, and I am incredibly appreciative to BanklessDAO for bringing this portion of it to life.
Growing Into Season 6
As Season 6 approaches, we can take time to celebrate the work we did together in Season 5, but let’s make sure that we don’t gloss over the issues we are yet to resolve. DAO governance is still a great challenge; the confusion around Season 6 demonstrated we need to get to work amending the Constitution. Cross-guild and project coordination is still more dream than reality, even if we do see some improvements in that area. As the SAFE airdrop and Gitcoin funding confusion showed us during Season 5, attempts at coordinating DAO-wide responses are very much a challenge. As with all things DAO, as we better learn to work and play together, and take down the silos that prevent seamless collaboration, we can expect the energy flow to propel us to new heights.
Bring your ladders (or your jet packs) and see you in Season 6.
💪🏻 bDAO strong! 💪🏻
✅ Action Items
🗳️ Vote on the three active Snapshots which impact Season 6 operations.
🤩 Bring your A-game for Season 6 at BanklessDAO, which starts on Monday.
🤣 Meme of the Week
Get ‘Back in Bankless Black’, ready for Season 6 🏴.
