Dear @MS1 and Optimism Collective
I will introduce myself. I am CryptoReuMD, project lead of Nación Bankless, the spanish media outlet for onboarding spanish speaking audiences to web3 through media and culture. I’m writing this on behalf of the sentiment and opinion of our subDAO. Already a few months into the forum, as an observer, student and critic of the proposals, I am pleased because each moment has made me a better contributor and allowed me to keep our community aligned with the fundamental principles of ethereum and the optimistic code.
The TL;DR of this forum post is to comment a little bit on the wonderful story we have gone through to become another star in the decentralized universe.
Going back to 2021, on May 4th David Hoffman and Ryan Sean Adams decided to make an AriDrop to their YouTube and Newsletter subscribers. The vision: allow people to continue working and doing what they love, bringing the Bankless philosophy everywhere.
With this first distribution of tokens, Bankless “citizens” (as the Podcast listeners were referred to) began to organize themselves into departments and guilds, and also projects were created. Among them theInternational Media Nodes. At its beginning it represented 16 languages. It was a full bull market many contributors joined. among them Lalo Cripto and Ana Tech who created the Spanish node.
The chain of creation was then: first BanklessDAO, then Translator’s Guild, within them, the International Media Nodes (IMN) and sprouting from there the Spanish node.
With only a few contributors, we began to gain participation within the DAO. I began my way in the governance of BanklessDAO in 2021, reviewing the statistics and impact of the nodes in order to make the distribution of the BANK for future decisions. Our project began to grow, the work was not enough and of 50 members, practically we were 4, this does not sadden us, on the contrary, people who worked initially in BanklessDAO are now in independent projects and even applying to this round of RPGF3.
As the bear market stretched for longer than expected, the time spent in contributions to the DAO became difficult to justify. Our Spanish node team was still motivated, organizing IRL events, translating content, creating content on YouTube and on Spotify.
With time our ambitions grew and we declared ourselves an official branch of BanklessDAO, instead of being a small project within the International Media Nodes. We wanted to become the first fully independent and self- sustainable node, to better be able to dedicate ourselves to break the language barrier completely and onboard people to web3 in Spanish more effectively
The process to achieve this status, which you can read about here, started at the beginning of the year. We don’t have salaries for our contributors, aside from the governance token we distribute, so we rely on Grants. For season 6, our first independent one, we made the proposal in the BanklessDAO forum. We talked with the DAO OGs, people around the ecosystem to read our initiative and reach quorum, this evidently, you can check it in our forum and that’s how we started.
We have been supported by BanklessDAO to survive the depths of the bear market price crashes, however the work didn’t stop. You can see a newsletter “BanklessDAO in spanish proposal Está en LLamas” , where we had the backing of the community to create this initiative.
We seek to be self-sustainable. We always work in a community and make shared decisions. Over time the size of the team has decreased steadily but fortunately those who want to fill in the open positions are arriving. Our voice has been rising but it is clear and strong now.
Our First external funding was from a subDAO, NounsAmigos DAO, a fork of Nouns for Latin American impact projects. We were granted 0.5 E to organize an IRL event, (read the detailed report here) At the time we also started to work with Push Protocol, and you can find what we’ve done here.
We have only benefited from a Gitcoin participation round with Meta Pool and the community round, one from CLR.fund that is about to be disbursed in December, and at all times we continue to grow and create. It is important for me and for all of us to mention that most of our work is considered volunteering since the payment we receive is well below a basic income.
BanklesssDAO is going over some decisive moments of their branding and history, since we are a DAO that shares the same name as DH and RSA. However we (NaciĂłn Bankless) have no relationship with either of those companies. Our documentation and our content is our own, such as our videos, creative newsletters, spaces and interviews. (We do some translations to spanish from their free newsletter, as we also do many translations of other web3 content). We are a permissionless community, in which anyone can enter. We have a telegram group to organize our work and through where we teach the tools and the way and also at any time they can leave without any penalty.
We follow the recommendations of each proposal that we have made, without purposes of economic returns, we have begun to use more web3 tools such as farcaster, with my personal account to share the links of the newsletter that are now in Paragraph, which can be minted in Base or Optimism.
I hope this can clarify the situation because our sister communities are Mexican and Spanish, in addition to sharing efforts, affection and we have even held several events with Latin American associations.
Without further ado, this is a bit of our journey and how public goods have kept us moving forward in this moment of construction, and with all the help of the community we are going to continue here growing and helping.
