Got a very important realization today. I keep thinking what is the best way to move forward and I keep wanting to arrive at the final answer. But very much like a chess game, you can’t really start playing trying to predict the entire game, there are too many variables and too many things can change, your best bet is simply to focus on your next move and trying to see only a handful moves into the future, with a general idea of what you are trying to accomplish.
Just like that many of my thoughts are marinating in my mind and as time goes by, they get worked in the background. I am now starting to finally get a picture of what I need to do and how I should try to get there.
I’ve realized a few things.
1- The Spanish Testnet Community.
While I love working my co founders, it is obvious to me that the level of innovation here will always be slower. Same as people say “the chain is always as strong as the weakest link”, when working in a group you can always go as fast as the slowest one. I’ve noticed I am the one who is always bringing the new ideas, the one who is constantly pushing us to do more and I spend too much time trying to convince the others to follow. Some of them are not contributing much and slowing us down, yet they still have the same voting power and we can’t move forward without consensus, which makes it very inefficient for me.
This does not mean that I will stop working with them, I love to have a space in which I get to collaborate with them. But I still need to work on something that is my own. Which is why I can’t let go of Independent Academy, in fact it is something I need to add renewed efforts into building out.
2- Independent Academy:
Alright, so here is where things get interested. Before Independent Academy was solely focused on crypto, Bitcoin, Blockchain and Web 3. Which made a lot of sense as we were working in the industry full time, and we were wanting this “proof of work” to help us gain more opportunities in the space.
Yet, the idea behind Independent Academy was always to focus on holistic education. Not to narrow ourselves to one 1 thing.
Now that I’ve stopped working in the industry directly and that I am no longer looking to get a job in a crypto startup or build my own. I am finally free to fully pursue the original goal of my vision.
To study everything that can help me improve my own life and be fully independent. And to put my journey in the service of others.
This is what I need to work on now.
For this I will be dedicating myself to study, learning, exploring and experimenting in all the different fields that can help me. I will re vamp the podcast but not to focus on interviewing people building crypto products, but rather, anyone who has anything to teach me that will help me in this mission.
I will also revamp the idea of the INDY token and the DAO as I want this project of mine to share the value it generates with others who are seeking the same things I am.
While this token-DAO idea is not new, and I’ve been trying to get it off the ground for a while, I have understood the mistakes I’ve made and I now have a better understanding on how I need to do it better.
A) Before I was trying to hard to get people to get the token. My thought was that if I get people to start accruing the token by interacting with the content and then use the token to distribute rewards I would be able to form the initial community. Thinking that once people start to get rewarded they would become more interested in what I was doing.
I no longer believe this to be the best way to move forward. This strategy only attract people who want to gain from what I am doing and are not really interested. Once they earn the token there is no real way for me to take it away. So it will only serve to get the token in the hands of the wrong crowd and do nothing for my project long term.
B) There was no real way for me to know if the people holding the token would continue to interact and add value to what I was trying to build or if they would just get the token once, then do nothing and continue to extract rewards forever.
Basically my mistake was trying to make the token easy to get, in the hands of the wrong people and then no way to measure the level of engagement of the token holder.
At the moment of writing luckily all tokens are still in my possession so no damage has been made. I realized the problems with the system and stopped it before anyone exploited it.
I am now thinking this a lot more thoughtfully. First, I need to make the token harder to get, be more discriminative on who gets to own it. So that I can be more sure that this are real people interested in the project and what I am building, a community of independence seekers and life long learners.
Secondly, how to measure activity?
Owning the token is the first part of the puzzle, this is what allows you to be part of the community. But, simply owning the token will not be enough to qualify you for the rewards. I don’t want people who participated only once, got a token and then don’t do anything else and continue accruing rewards forever. That would diminish the value for new members who are adding more value.
In order to fix this my idea is to use Charmverse as my main community hub.
The thing about Charmverse is that people can create their accounts, and you can actually measure their activity. And you can create ways within the Charmverse hub to earn the tokens, NFTs, POAPs and other credential that I can issue.
All this is what I will do at the moment of distributing rewards. Not just measure who has the most tokens, but which account has been the most active.
While this adds a lot of friction, people need to create their accounts, be active, etc. It does make sure that value goes to the people who go through all those hoops. And honestly, if no one does it, it would be ok too.
My idea is to create an initial funding for the DAO, and simply invest it. If no one participates then 100% of the profits will be re-invested until someone does. If no one ever does, that only means the treasury of the DAO will continue to grow until I decide a use case for it.
Hopefully people do get interested in participating though, that would make all this much more interesting.
As I move away from simply doing crypto content there is a lot more things I can explore. Like a book club, live meditation sessions, and much more.
By creating this on a Charmverse instead of Notion, then anyone can participate and add their own thoughts into whatever they are into that help people become more independent.
If the community ever gets strong and people really identify and become a part of it, we can use the tokens to fully decentralized as Charmverse has a way of doing voting with tokens and the DAO treasury can be accessed that way too.
Which would make for a super interesting experiment.
Another thing I want to start tackling now that I am free to broaden my scope of subjects to study. Is to delve into no-code tools, combining that with the power of AI to see what type of things I can build.
There is a no-code MBA that I am really keen on doing, and start exploring what happens when you combine that with the added power of open API in the world of blockchain.
I think that would be something incredibly interesting to study, explore, document and share with the community.
As I am going full on Independent tools, I will mostly be focusing on web3 socials and things like Charmverse, Bonfire, Aragon, Farcaster, Nostr, Lens, Paragraph and others that I find along the way.
My experience of being banned from X suddenly without wanring or reason and no legal recourse has left me with a bad taste for centralized companies.
I am not interested in growing fast or turning the academy into a profitable business so I am very much ok with the fact that the decentralized platforms do not have the large audiences that big tech has. I am ok with that, this is all one big experiment in which my only goal is to continue to explore and learn.
I will continue to publish my daily thoughts and the things I learn on the way in the newsletter and will look into making videos and re-starting the podcast so that others.
I believe I can create a very unique community as not too many people are so far ahead in all the technological trends, and willing to experiment and build as me. Whatever happens it will be an incredible experience I am sure.
If you are interested in being part of the Charmverse hub you can find it here:
It is incredibly empty at the moment as all this is new.
But you can already create an account with your wallet, connect your farcaster account and share some of your thoughts within it.
See you there!
