Greetings Rainmakers! ⛓️🌴
Welcome to the latest edition of the Chainforest Weekly Recap, where you’ll find up-to-date information on upcoming Chainforest DAO programming and industry events, the community feature of the month, a round-up of the most exciting happenings in our Discord this week, and a welcome to our new Rainmaker’s!
The top three channels were: 🤖│ai, ⚡│connect-potw, and 💬│general-chat.
Champion of the Forest Challenge 🏆🐯
🏆 Champion of the Forest 🏆
Champion of the Forest is an 8-week journey consisting of a series of quests and games in Chainforest. For each quest a member participates in, they will receive TEAM points based on performance. The top TEAM point earners will win prizes! (For full event details, check out our announcement post!)
🏅 Current Standings (After Week 4): The race is heating up! Congratulations to the current leaders:
🥇 Satyajeet Pal (Engineering Manager at Bitwise)
🥈 Vasanth Thiruvadi (Head of Finance at Chainforest)
🥉 Blake Kim (Co-founder, Head of Product & Community Myosin.xyz)
Check out our leaderboard to see the latest standings!
🧠 GIGABRAIN 🧠
After an exhilarating four weeks of community participation, GIGABRAIN has finally drawn to a close. We want to express our sincere gratitude to all the participants for their extraordinary efforts and contributions. Your thought-provoking responses and enthusiastic engagement have made this event truly unforgettable! From exploring real-world use cases to the intersection of crypto and AI, we were inspired by the diverse range of perspectives and ideas shared throughout the competition. It's been an incredible journey, and we're honored to have shared it with such an amazing group of people!
🏅 Final Gigabrain Standings: Congratulations to all of the winners and participants:
🥇 Satyajeet Pal (Engineering Manager at Bitwise) - 19.5 points
🥇 Bryan Linton (Sr. Software Engineer at Tholos) - 19.5 points
💰 Lottery Winner: Abhinav Gaur (Abs) (Co-founder of urFeed.xyz)
View the full details (including our point system & leaderboard) here.
🔎 Scavenger Hunt 🔎
Chainforest is excited to announce the launch of our second 🏆 Champion of the Forest 🏆 game: Scavenger Hunt!
Throughout the next two weeks (starting on Monday 4/17), we’ll periodically post mini-quests on our Discord server. These mini-quests will range from creating/verifying your profile in the Chainforest directory to finding the Chainforest member with certain background details, establishing connections, and many other quests in between.
For each mini-quest you complete, you’ll get TEAM points, increasing your position on the Champion of the Forest leaderboard. During the game, you’ll be able to help each other by using the live chat features on POTW when you bump into someone on the same POTW page as you
Upcoming Chainforest Programming ⛓️🌴
Monthly Town Hall Meeting (May)
Details: Join us to stay updated on the latest developments at Chainforest DAO including upcoming events, new member orientation, in-depth analysis of deal flow, and much more!
When: May 2nd, at 2:00 pm EST
RSVP: here
Previous Events & Recordings
Monthly Town Hall (April 2023): Did you miss our April Town Hall meeting? Check it out here!
Covered during the Town Hall:
We were thrilled to be joined by Cam Greer, Co-founder of heds DAO, as our latest Town Hall guest speaker. If you missed the discussion on heds DAO, you can listen to the recording here
What is heds DAO? hedsDAO is a decentralized audio-visual collective. Once a month, hedsDAO will release and auction a collaborative mixtape, created and curated by the community, as its own NFT collection
Discord Highlights 👀
Rainmaker’s share an individual they look up to or respect in crypto and why 🌟
Bryan Linton [Andreas Antonopoulos]
Bitcoin OG & Educator: He is a Bitcoin OG, an early adopter of the internet, and explains extremely difficult-to-understand concepts plainly and concisely
Integrity, Ethics, Infrastructure Inversion: He has in my opinion, a great sense of integrity, morals, and ethics. One of my favorite videos of his is describing the concept of Infrastructure Inversion, which I think is a fundamental concept to understand for revolutionary technologies
Multi-disciplinary expertise: He also has a strong understanding of software engineering as well as economics, both of which are extremely important for understanding crypto. In my opinion, it's rare to find someone who deeply understands both of these broad topics (generally tech only people prefer ETH and economics-only people prefer Bitcoin)
Macro Investor & Visionary: He's a serious man with a bit of a rebellious streak, as someone who came from TradFi but started Real Vision with the mission to democratize financial investing for the masses, and as a macro investor who slowly and surely got red-pilled into crypto, it's refreshing to hear his hot takes on macroeconomics, the nature of the global financial system, and how it's all connected into his broader thesis on the Exponential Age, aka where all these technologies are evolving and developing and combining to create a perfect storm of innovation that will transform the world around us
His takes are always sober, not too hype-driven, and he seems to care passionately about the principles of crypto. It's sort of funny to me that he had a podcast with Su Zhu back in the day. He currently works at Flashbots, which is an initiative I love on Ethereum, and is currently doing a series of podcasts on Bell Curve about MEV
Principled & Thoughtful Crypto Analysis: I've seen him on Bankless a few times now and I really appreciate the way he thinks about crypto. He seems like a first-principles type of thinker, but beyond that he's well-mannered and calm. I've never really seen him try to shill his bag or run a grift, which is very impressive given the length of time he's been in crypto
Multidisciplinary thought leader: Ex-CTO of Coinbase, a name I'm sure almost everyone in this Discord will know. He's a modern-day renaissance man with a deep understanding of socio-economic systems, techno-optimism, and futurism. One of the qualities I admire about him the most is his deep insight and understanding of so many different realms of study, and creating a cohesive mental model of how all these pieces fit together
Members share why they are still bullish on the crypto industry 💰
Blockchain Transparency & Payments: The stated purpose of blockchain was to make inherently opaque systems more transparent and to engineer out of existence powerful entities' ability to edit history. We've been using computers and databases for a long time. It's always been difficult to reconcile data between them, ensuring that everyone has the same record of the facts. It's also been difficult to build payments on top of the internet (remember when payments were illegal online?)
Value & Information Protocols: The Internet layer connected records of what occurred, but didn't have tamper-proofing or payments built into it. To massively simplify down to a heuristic - the world runs on at least two protocols: the exchange of value, and the exchange of information. We've always needed both to accomplish anything
Crypto has both - payments are built in natively, and editing history is excruciatingly difficult. So difficult that a sacrifice must be made to achieve it (paid in energy used for computation)
While it is unwise to re-invent an existing system (no matter how inefficient they might seem) from zero, crypto keeps trying to do that with finance. For good reasons and for bad; to poor outcomes and ones it collectively learns from
Crypto’s Supportive Developer Community: All of the software in the world was built by roughly 29M people. In a world with 8B, that's less than 0.4% of the entire population of this planet. Crypto counts some 25-50K of developers that actively contribute to this ridiculous and wonderful paradigm. And the vast majority of them are so goddamn helpful to each other
Crypto Fosters Community Collaboration: If you look in the right places, there's still this beautiful energy of intelligent people who truly believe in something & all working together in a growing industry. It's a really fun, invigorating feeling and something worth being part of. When I meet new people at industry conferences or events, there's this instant understanding
Web3 Gaming Potential: Web3 gaming is still a passion point for me, as a lifelong gamer, part-time streamer, and finance nerd and I think the games in the space are learning from past mistakes and moving towards a fruitful direction. I know people in my stream community who've spent >$10k on Genshin Impact, a web2 gacha game. There's definitely something here
Importance of Decentralization: With the recent wave of sudden changes in Twitter, the US trying to ban Tiktok, bank runs, etc., it's only reinforced my belief that decentralized systems that are resistant to the influence of one person/group/board/government are more important than ever. I believe that outside of illegal activity, people should have the freedom to transact and manage their money how they want, and the freedom to digitally transact and engage on the web, with whatever apps they want - I think there are a lot of ways crypto can benefit people and the industry still has so much potential, bear market or not, and it's fun to be on the frontier
IA:
The Party Hasn’t Started Yet: I'm still here because there's deep work to be done. We're still light years away from fulfilling the promise of universal sovereignty that (*quite possibly only) crypto can enable...so that means that the party hasn't even really started yet! Leaving this space now is like leaving the hottest party of the decade at exactly 9pm (like dude, what are you doing?!)
The last few years of crypto have only marked the first wave of this technology. When you spend your entire career studying and working with emerging technologies (like I have...like many of us here have), your hype cycle radar and BS detector gets sharper and sharper, and you begin to start learning how to ride (and even influence) the incremental waves and stages of a technology's life cycle and adoption curve
If You Look at Gartner's Hype Cycle Framework, you'll probably recognize that crypto's currently in the "Disillusionment" stage, but trust me, the "Enlightenment" stage is emerging and up next, and this is honestly the most exciting time to be, build, and invest in this space.
So as a crypto founder, I'm still here (building slowly and surely) because the second mover advantage is about to be killer ⚡️
The products and solutions currently in the market are like horse and buggies (IMO), but the sophisticated solutions that'll be mass adopted, sustaining the test of time (like the automobile) are all waiting just below the tip of the iceberg
Entrepreneurial Friends with Common Interests: I’ve made lifelong friends in the industry who have common interests. This is the first time I’ve found friends that are interested in ideas and execution, have hustle, and entrepreneurial mindsets and it is refreshing to me
Alternative Financial System Needed: I believe that the world needs an alternative financial system that people are able to access if they so choose, to prevent (potential) government overreach
Crypto is a combination of math, economics, and game theory, which I love and am good at
Belief in Indusry’s Impact: It is fun to feel like I am a part of an industry that I believe will better people's lives. I believe it will bootstrap third-world countries to produce first-world world economic output, which will create a positive flywheel for all of humanity
Desire to Build Meaningful Tech: I am still here because as someone who's spent his whole career in early-stage tech, building in diff areas and methodologies, I've always wanted to help build new companies and tech that pushes the world further in a positive direction. In recent years I was feeling particularly stuck, as it felt like all the opportunities for innovation were already explored/disrupted etc. How many more apps or d2c brands can we build/need? Furthermore, are they really helping the world?
Web3 Potential is Transformative: And with crypto/web3, while imperfect and currently the wild west, it's clear that there's still so much potential for how this can completely transform so many industries, from enabling brands to empower and collaborate directly with their consumers (we have a whole post on this, what I call Direct to Community), to enabling Decentralized Finance, more trustless systems, etc., as we move towards an inevitably more digitally oriented future, it's obvious that web3/blockchain is going to be absolutely critical to underpinning much of the tech we use in the coming years. How can we live and work in "the metaverse" if we don't know who owns what? How can we leverage AI if there's no trustless way to verify authenticity and provenance? They're all big hairy problems that have yet to be solved, but people are working on it, and someone has to do the dirty work of actually trying, failing, and trying again. And if we all do our jobs well, we can make an impact AND pump our bags, all at the same time. I fully subscribe to the philosophy of "you can have your cake and eat it too.”
Crypto Empowers Decentralization: I'm still here because crypto is the first technology that enables a decentralized, transparent, virtually indestructible, and immutable ledger that allows for the free flow of value, language, and ideas. Unfortunately, a small percentage of humans (or collections of humans like governments and companies) tend to want to accumulate as much power (including power over other humans) as possible
Empowers Individual Sovereignty: This new technology empowers individuals to retain their sovereignty and autonomy in a world where other humans and organizations are trying to take these things away from them. They can verify on their own by spinning up their own node, verifying transactions, messages, etc. on the blockchain. They can retain true ownership of the value they create through a scarce asset with an immutable supply dynamic with a hardware wallet. They can access financial products without the risk of being censored for certain qualities/characteristics they exhibit. The list goes on
Not everyone cares about retaining their own sovereignty and autonomy, but for those who do there should be a solution out there for those people. This new technology is the only thing that enables this in the new digital age that we live in
I Want More Credibly Neutral Platforms: So far, the reason to get excited about this has been primarily defensive. And those ideas still resonate with me. I want a way to opt out of the system that is built that, as Bryan said, tends to lead to the accumulation of power. People should be able to hold value without being reliant on the proper functioning of a system led by a specific set of humans
Possibilities Enabled by Neutral Platforms: But I'm more excited about the future possibilities enabled by credibly neutral platforms upon which others can build reliably, without worrying about growing so big that their access is taken away or that some arbitrary decision will remove their access. In some spaces, I think more innovation is possible than if we were reliant on non-neutral platforms. Money is one of those platforms that should be credibly neutral. Finance should be as well - we know the flaws of a non-neutral financial system. Social networks are as well I think
Rainmaker’s discuss how they have been utilizing ChatGPT & AutoGPT 🤖
Sariel: I'm using GPT3 to help me build an inventory system database. It's kind of crazy what it can do if you treat it like a collaborator
Abhinav Gaur replies that they need to trial more prompts where you give it a goal to understand more about your project/subject... and so then it's basically running through a series of questions for you to provide context
Abhinav Gaur: I have been playing around with Godmode.Space & AgentGPT.Reworkd.Ai
Godmode.Space looks really promising but it kind of goes into a circular loop and I never get any useful output from... but the methodology it seems to be taking is deep and impressive
AgentGPT.Reworkd.Ai which is again similar .... feels like an endless loop, but it spits out more useful stuff on its meanderings. seems to exhaust itself of energy in the end. Think these things are not really a good fit for a freemium model in the context of the amount of processing they are taking on. either way, fun experimenting with them
Abhinav adds: Been using it for whittling down investors who are a good fit... it looks at their other investments, stated interest based on what it understands of our business model. Even the non-auto GPT, the Google Sheets version has been great. I got it to identify investors that are part of a startup investor tax rebate program, their previous investments, key contact, and email.... and then draft an email to each one.
Chainforest announces its new and improved deal flow tool to the community 🤝
Have you ever missed an exciting shared deal in our deal flow channel due to not checking Discord? 😢
Have you ever had trouble following deal comments? 💬
Have you ever wanted to search for past deals, but couldn’t? 🔍
NO MORE! We’re launching a new deal tracker in our Proof of Teamwork hub. Starting today, all new deals will be sourced in the deal tracker, with updates automatically shared to Discord (In the #share-deal-flow channel).
With this new tool, you can share new deals, comment or ask questions, tag others, search for past deals, and more!
Access our new deal flow tool here! 👀
For more on how to share a deal or use the deal tracker, check out this instructional video here
Upcoming Events 🗓️
Consensus 2023 - Consensus is the world's largest, longest-running, and most influential gathering that brings together all sides of the cryptocurrency, blockchain, and Web3 community
When: April 26-28, 2023, Austin, Texas
Details: here
Bitcoin 2023 - Join your fellow Bitcoiners in Miami Beach for the biggest annual celebration of Bitcoin in the world. Don't miss out!
When: May 18-20, 2023, Miami, Florida
Details: here
Community Feature of the Month🎉
Our Community Feature of the Month for April 2023 is Alex Palmer, Co-founder of Poet Network! Check out his full feature here!
Connect with Alex Palmer:
Twitter: @ThatAlexPalmer
LinkedIn: https://t.co/3AmcWwcXBn
Interested in joining Chainforest? ⛓️🌴
How to apply: You can apply to become a member by completing our application on Typeform. We will review your submission and grant access after approving your profile.
Why join Chainforest?
Becoming a Rainmaker means accessing our Discord, our IRL events, our deep dives, and our complete programming. Most Rainmakers love the community because it offers the best environment for web3 learning and exploration on the Internet today.
Rainmakers also have the opportunity to support Chainforest's VC fund. Rainmakers have the opportunity to earn $RAINDROP, our token backed by carry in our VC fund, in exchange for identifying, evaluating, and supporting investment opportunities. Note that Rainmakers are not required to invest in order to participate, but also do not have a vote on investment decisions.
Apply here: https://chainforest.typeform.com/apply
I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition of the Chainforest Weekly Recap!
Till next week,
Sloan (@sloan0_0)