Every once in a while, a new technology arrives with the potential to change everything. Navigating change can be hard, and it’s easy to lean away from paradigm shifts. Rational even. The potential for discomfort can be scary. But builders lean into change to actualize potential.

Builders love revolutionary technology. It gives us an opportunity to reimagine; a chance to drive step-change improvements. It fuels our imagination with visions of following in the footsteps of our creative heroes. It offers us new ways to collaborate and discover with others.

Web 3 is the future of the internet. It’s still too hard to build on Web 3 because most projects are sparsely documented; even the most brilliant ones. There’s nothing more frustrating as a builder than getting stuck in partial explanations. In blockchain, we have a revolutionary technology that inspires us to build a better internet together. Yet, for the most part, we lack the learning materials to fuel that inspiration into accelerated progress.

Learning Together

Over the last year, we embarked on a mission to introduce more developers to Web 3. We partnered with a community of developers to establish Learn. We worked together as leading blockchain protocols and infrastructure platforms encompassing the full stack to publish tutorials. We explored different formats and tested assumptions.

In the process, we built a global community of thousands of developers eager to learn. We published 100+ tutorials on 14+ protocols. We worked with hundreds of developers eager to roll up their sleeves and learn by helping fellow developers. We distributed more than $500,000 in rewards. Most importantly, we validated the need for a solution to the Web 3 learning problem for builders.

We were ambitious. But, as it turns out, not ambitious enough. It’s still too hard to build on Web 3. Traditional education platforms are constrained by their top-down structure. They lack engaging collaboration and a sense of ownership. Bootcamps introduce strong social dynamics but they’re hard to maintain, operate and scale.

If only we had a better way to organize communities, enhance peer-to-peer collaboration, and remove learning pain points for everyone working to build a better internet. We will soon.

Builder DAO

The best way to supercharge a community is to combine purpose with action. So we’ve formed a team of builders from Arweave, Ceramic, Figment, The Graph, Pyth, and Solana to launch Builder DAO. More are sure to join us soon.

Builder DAO is a community to build a better internet, together. Its mission is to help builders create the future of the Web. We plan to execute on that mission by building a learning platform. DAO members will be able to propose tutorial guides and get feedback before publishing them. Writers and reviewers will be rewarded for the content they produce. And anyone with an internet connection will be able to access the guides and collaborate with other members to build.

This is a huge problem space and we fully expect Builder DAO to grow its membership, partner with others, and inspire more solutions. For instance, there’s a need for better documentation and Q&A databases. Maybe the community will vote to build a product that addresses one of these. Or maybe Builder DAO will spawn a subDAO for it. Or better yet, a team of members will choose to collaborate on a solution.

The opportunities are endless. We want to lower the activation energy to pursue them.

What’s Next

Today we’re announcing our intent to pursue this vision. As a first step, we’re building a learning platform prototype. But we can’t do this alone. We need your help. If you’re interested in helping us test the platform, join us on Discord. We’ll be posting regular updates there over the next few weeks and asking for feedback.

The Discord will evolve over time as Builder DAO matures, but for now, this is a place for us to get to know each other. And if you’re interested in brainstorming about your projects with other builders, we’ve created the #brainstorm channel just for that.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be setting up additional infrastructure and documentation. The current plan is to spend the next couple of sprints building a testnet platform. Then we’ll spend time iterating with the community to inform the mainnet roadmap.

In the meantime, stay tuned for regular updates @TheBuilderDAO. We can't wait to collaborate with you on this journey. This is the community we wished existed when we got started. It’s time to stop fantasizing and start building, together.