CULT x GG19
An overview of Cult DAO and the Gitcoin Grants Round 19
Welcome to The Cult DAO Round. In the same spirit as MetaCulture’s Gitcoin Grants Round 18, this Round we incentivize adding to the stone soup at the heart of the Cult DAO ecosystem.
Working with the talented Gitcoin team which Kevin Owocki has synched us with is how you as DAO members can begin to sustainably capture the value you create. At a community level, this grows Cult DAO’s decentralized impact through network effects, incentive alignment, and building legitimacy in ways we have talked about many times, yet not had the capacity to put into practice.
Thus, if you have an idea you’d like funding for which grows the DAO’s culture in terms of Branding and Partnerships (see below), please submit it and we will review.
As starting points, consider the themes below which are present in The Cult Manifesto and OG medium articles, and serve as directions for thinking about branding and partnerships:
- Decentralized organizing & community building
- The environment & sustainability
- Peer-to-peer mental health care
- Public goods funding
You may have other themes in mind or combine the above of course.
If you do, please submit your reasoning, keeping in mind that the purpose of this Round is to incentivize contributions to Branding and Partnerships in order to grow the Cult ecosystem in new directions.
Eligibility Criteria
In order to be eligible for your idea to receive funding, you must meet either one or both of the below criteria:
- Branding
Combine Cult DAO branding with graphics and content from Lunarpunk and Solarpunk communities, Cult ecosystem projects such as protocols building on Modulus, past Cult grantees, and other Cult aligned projects applying for Gitcoin funding.
The purpose is giving directions to how we communicate on Twitter by converting our raw energy into value alignment and incentives for other communities and contributors.
What do I mean by incentives? All crypto communities want to trend on Twitter. $Cult trends all the time. So, what if any hashtag or cashtag we choose trends on Twitter whenever $Cult or #Modulus trends?
If $Cult trends on Twitter X times a week during a bear market, then what if everyone who tweets “$Cult” shifts to tweeting “#Gitcoin x $Cult”? This creates more energy within our core community while building network effects for the DAO. The limit is simply whether we choose to create and scale effective bridges to other cultures and vibes in crypto.
Then, Cult DAO imagery and memetics come to automatically represent decentralized, permissionless, and crowdsourced public goods funding. This is the kind of outcome we’re looking to create through building our branding. Our community’s passion becomes any community’s audience reach, and positive sum feedback dynamic between the DAO and its ecosystem.
To get there, think in terms of the qualities we want to communicate along with the level of our Twitter usage. For example, find Gitcoin graphics and memes which communicate Solarpunk vibes and speak the language of folks within the regenerative finance community. When it comes to Lunarpunk community organizing and philosophy, read the Agorist journal along with this article.
Take the Cult community’s Twitter presence & frequent trending during the 2022/2023 bear market as being a “demo mode” for other communities looking for exposure. Everyone sees us trending, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the right people are more likely to read The Manifesto.
As food for thought, ask who in crypto you think is aligned with Cult, or who would be aligned if they recognized others in their network already talking about Cult. Keep in mind that others are more likely to take the time to read The Manifesto and support when they receive the signal from others they trust that Cult DAO has the legitimacy they look for.
If you have already developed branding of this kind which is inclusive of other communities in the past, then please submit it.
The upshot? Network effects beget network effects, incentivizing others to reframe how they perceive and interoperate with Cult DAO. And, by way of pointing towards where we’re going, we also move closer to the bull market reality of having Cult DAO matching pools on quadratic funding platforms like Gitcoin, CLRFund, Public Goods Network, and Giveth.
People read The Cult Manifesto when we share a common language and positive sum incentives are clear.
To be clear, incentives do not equate to trending on Twitter. There are many incentives for other protocols to interoperate with Cult. Twitter is a starting point as a pre-existing mechanism to leverage and help bridge to deepening partnerships.
2. Partnerships
If you have ideas for developing sustained partnerships with value aligned communities or individuals, or you have already done so and can provide evidence to back your claims, then send us your ideas. Think of protocols and initiatives which support environmental sustainability and regenerative finance, decentralized organizing, etc.
The objective is value-aligned returns on relationship (a term due to Holly) which build Cult DAO’s legitimacy over time when properly managed. Please send your plan as to why your partnership idea fits. This is not about flashes in the pan or influencers promoting Cult.
As an example initiative, MetaCulture is applying to this round. If you would like to fold your idea within the MetaCulture umbrella, please say so in your application. For example, I am looking for folks with skills in running Spaces and repping MetaCulture, developing a first generation of branding, as well as work on bridging to other Web3 social platforms.
MetaCulture is also a petri dish in the sense of onboarding and demonstrating on-chain governance additions in more agile ways than the core DAO currently can. We’ve kicked around a bunch of ideas on building out on-chain DAO tech with Bootleggers and rnDAO, and envision funding development on this front also.
Our objective across longer time horizons is that these Branding and Partnership criteria function as a Schelling point and replicable form so that builders can run their own quadratic funding applications and rounds.
For example, if you are a Cult grantee looking to fund your project then consider this a model you can use in funding development while also marketing to Cult DAO and our partners.
As each round grows in success, we are at the same time cultivating a dedicated base of knowledgeable DAO members and partners in catalyzing network reach for contributors to the DAO, past and future Cult DAO grantees, and zkEVM Modulus.
Remember that we are in early stage network effects. You are at the appointed place at the appointed time, and you have the power to shape the future you are already part of.
-Wastelander & MetaCulture
