Web3 market, coordination, and infrastructure

Also join us tomorrow for another community learning session!

Feb 05, 2025

Transcript

Hello friends!

This time I’ll share a few subjective high-level observations from January. I’m also co-authoring two in-depth articles we plan to publish this month. In the podcast episode, Colin shares a lot of his perspective on the current market environment, why certain behaviors move the market, and briefly talk about the recent Ethereum story.

I hope you enjoy it, stay healthy and I hope you’re all doing well!

Recent internal updates

I facilitated a short workshop with the Devconnect team of the Ethereum Foundation, helping them reflect on past events and understand what to focus on this year. I’m beyond excited about their approach and am proud to share their first newsletter documenting the journey.
Join us to discuss note-taking practices and how they relate to knowledge management. If you’re interested in chatting about the topic, feel free to read through the papers in this Luma invite or join us on Twitter spaces.
Anya, Stacy, Hazem, and Bence are still working on a website for Fyde. We’ll document the design and testing process for early-stage startup landing pages soon.
We’re writing two articles - Anya and I about user adoption and website design for early-stage teams and Savannah and I about a deeper incentive analysis of the web3 space. I aim to release both within the next month.
Balint and I spent some time on a lead gen/outreach process. So far, neither reaching out to ex-clients nor using processes to find new clients have been successful. This further validates the importance of peer-to-peer trust, education, and upfront value provision.

Total Treasury Balance: $7,682.00 (0,082 BTC)

I calculated the value on Feb 3rd, 12:00 Indochina time. Since the BTC price is starting to fluctuate, it might not be accurate over the next few days.

I added liabilities (light yellow in the left-hand bar), showing incomplete projects and internal payments.

Opportunities to de-noise DAOs

For the last few weeks, I submerged myself closer into online DAOs and communities to help them streamline operations and project management. Linear conversation threads (Telegram, Slack, Discord,…) are used to organize around tasks but lack the affordance to create deadlines and see responsibilities. As a consequence, they often end up as ephemeral and never-ending idea dumps, where many thoughts are difficult to articulate and understand.

More examples of coordination software

I also spoke to Christina Bowen, the creator of socialroots.io. Her socio-technical software takes inspiration from biology and addresses coordination issues in online-native environments. If you know of grants funding social tech, please let me know or reach out to her! If you’re interested in learning more about her, here’s a podcast episode worth listening to.

Image from an article on the shortcomings of the social media landscape

They are running out of their current grant and we could integrate Deep Teams with them. I also started a list of tools that focus specifically on simplifying coordination. Legra.app is another example that focuses on accountability.

Web3 grant ecosystem is maturing

I’m starting to pay more attention to the web3 grant ecosystem as the submission criteria are becoming more refined. We are also gathering experience in writing grant proposals, so if you see grants that align with Deep Work’s mission or values, let me know and we can try submitting proposals to get interesting work funded.

Case studies increase work for experts

Since we work like a cooperative, I regularly share our case studies and refer talented experts to potential clients. If a project you worked on can not be found on our website and you would like me to consider it, let me know and we’ll upload it. The referral process has most recently led to work in the consultancy (Sarah facilitating workshops) and design/websites (Anya leading website design). If you’re an expert, you can also add it yourself to make us look stronger.

Upcoming IRL Events

Feb 10. - Feb 16. Cyborgcamp in Château du Feÿ, in Burgundy, France. (I won’t be there but can highly recommend)
Feb 23. - Mar 2. EthDenver (Sarah will most likely be there)

Detailed financial report

I noticed that Grafana, the software that shows our detailed revenue/profits, has a license issue. So this time I can only show the basic breakdown of our treasury. Apologies for the inconvenience, I’ll fix it by next month.