We have decided to close the chapter on the Newt experiment and wanted to share next steps and most importantly, celebrate our accomplishments.

A year ago, we put together the Newt skunk team as a fun experiment within the Aave Companies to inspire and scale innovation in crypto and form a deeper connection with the broader web3 community. Working alongside external builders, our mission was to ship proof-of-concept apps and share ideas.

At the time, we hoped Newt would serve as an inspirational playbook to other Web3 companies (by providing a way to co-build with communities) as well as foster creativity and innovation.

The Newt experiment was a success! Over the course of a year, Newt shipped three flagship products: Aika, Config, and re:meme. We formed a Discord community of over 3K members – with 20+ active contributors.

With Aika, 4K+ NFTs were created, which symbolized time on-chain. From consulting services to conference speaker slots, Aika was an experiment on the future of work and was a primitive for public, on-chain, verifiable credentialing.

With Config and re:meme, Newt built quick and novel applications. Config provides easier analytics for users of various protocols, including Benqi. re:meme created the first on-chain primitive for remix culture. With re:meme, artists can create canonical image templates and inspire others to build iterations on top of them.

We believe Newt has paved the way for collaborative product development via dogfooding, rapid experimentation, and simultaneous engagement with the community. In this way, Newt has served its purpose, and we’ve taken in our learnings and embedded this deeper into our ongoing product pods.

As for next steps, the Newt Discord and Twitter account will soon be disbanded; however, the websites, config.fyi and rememe.lol, will continue to run. Going forward, we hope to see new features coming from community contributions.

The aika.market frontend will be sunsetted, but the source code will remain available publicly to allow anyone to host their own instance. The Aika Polygon contracts will live forever on-chain.

The Newt GitHub organization will remain open. It will be an artifact of our ideas brought to life, and we hope people will continue contributing to them and will use the code for their own experiments.

We are proud of what we have accomplished together with the community. Our team will continue to innovate within our product development pods and will support builders through hackathons and other events and efforts.

Thank you to everyone who contributed over the past year and for being a part of our journey. Onwards!