With the arrival of spring, the web3 founder community, Jericho, makes its return.

Internal communication channels are buzzing with anticipation as Jericho springs back to life. Applications to join this esteemed community are now open, with new events already in the works. Jericho is once again poised to be the premier gathering place for the most ambitious web3 builders.

This revitalization comes on the heels of Jericho's acquisition by Digital Asset Solutions, a web3 venture studio. The strategic vision behind this acquisition is to ensure the sustained growth and prosperity of the Jericho community in the long run.

"Jericho serves as an indispensable sanctuary for those pioneering in web3, offering a vibrant community of like-minded individuals dedicated to driving value in the space. Rafal, a stalwart member of Jericho since its inception, possesses a deep commitment to nurturing the community and a clear vision for its future. His leadership assures me that Jericho is in capable hands, destined to even greater success." - Vladimir Oustinov, Founder at Jericho

“I felt like a part of something special during my time in Jericho, where the meetups and encounters were fantastic opportunities to connect with remarkable individuals. Now, I aim to revive Jericho, ensuring its sustainability by developing valuable tools for founders and fostering meaningful connections among us. Let's keep Jericho vibrant and connected, inviting all who cherish meaningful interactions to take part in building the greatest web3 founder community.” - Rafal Zgoda, Founder at Digital Asset Solutions

Jericho is the land of web3 founders. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries who raised $450M in total from tier one VC funds.

This “Let’s Fucking Build” edition is brought to you by our amazing partner: Lattice, an early-stage crypto VC that helps founders build defensible moats. They write $500K-$1.5M checks into early Web3 companies. Portfolio: 50+ crypto companies including Immunefi, Layer3, and Project Galaxy.

What is digital art?

Digital art refers to any art form created using digital technology.

In the past, digital art was often undervalued or overlooked due to its intangible nature, making it difficult to sell or authenticate.

However, with the introduction of NFTs, digital artists can now prove ownership and authenticity of their work, allowing them to monetize their creations.

Digital art remains one of the most successful and prominent NFT use cases.

How big is digital art?

The digital art market has grown exponentially in recent years, with the total volume of transactions reaching $2.5 billion in 2022. This represents a 1,470% increase from the previous year, highlighting the market's explosive growth.

Generative art (coded art + AI art) is the most significant digital art vertical accounting for around 50% of the volume.

Digital art & generative art even more is less exposed to volatility than collectibles. Here’s for example the impact of FTX on collectibles vs. Art Blocks & fxhash:

Who are the digital art players?

General marketplaces: Marketplaces (curated or not) where you can trade all types of digital art

Vertical marketplaces: Marketplaces (curated or not) where you can trade specific types of digital art (generative, AI, photography…)

Tools: Tools to help artists, brands, and creators easily sell digital art

Curators/Communities: Investment DAOs, museums, institutions curated platforms and communities focused on digital art

Galleries: Galleries to help collectors showcase their digital art collections

Media: Digital art-focused media platforms (podcasts, blogs, newsletters, Youtube channels)

Analytics: Analytics tools for collectors or artists

Social: Digital art-focused social networks

Here’s a list of 80+ currently identified digital art players per category, blockchain & art type. Feel free to reach out if we forgot any market player you’re aware of.

What trends can we expect to emerge?

Mainstream recognition: The traditional art world isn’t yet considering digital art as an important enough art movement. It will change in the next 5-10 years and the category will explode. It’s pretty obvious that a few centuries from now, the 21st-century art movement will be digital art and especially generative art.

Blockchain & wallet abstraction: Digital art doesn’t need blockchain to exist, but it needs it to be monetized and owned. Blockchain is therefore a vital element of the digital art movement. However, blockchain is still far from being widely understood and adopted. With better wallet abstraction and cross-chain infrastructure, blockchain will be increasingly abstracted from the end user which will definitely drive mainstream adoption.

Professional tools: For the first time in history, the art market is open 24/7, fully accessible and transparent. Anyone is to buy art and back art purchasing decisions with data. As institutions, funds and high-net-worth individuals will start investing in art, we will see more & more professional tools emerge besides marketplaces.

If you enjoyed this LFB edition, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack, comment below if you have any feedback, and share it on Twitter if you found it useful.
--
Let’s fucking build with the support of our partner Lattice,
Vlad from Jericho

Jericho is the land of web3 founders. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries who raised $450M in total from tier one VC funds.

This “Let’s Fucking Build” edition is brought to you by our amazing partner: Lattice, an early-stage crypto VC that helps founders build defensible moats. They write $500K-$1.5M checks into early Web3 companies. Portfolio: 50+ crypto companies including Immunefi, Layer3, and Project Galaxy.

It’s almost been a year since the crypto industry entered a bear market. UST, FTX, SVB, and multiple hacks have deteriorated the market conditions and made life harder for founders, especially regarding fundraising.

Rounds take longer to get done. Investors have a lot more leverage, they don’t need to move as quickly as they used to. The valuations are down by 30-50%. The bar is higher around traction.

In a sense, the market is healthier. There’s less noise and bullshit. Use cases get truly challenged.

It doesn’t mean rounds don’t get done though. There’s still lots of capital in the industry. Good teams are getting funded.

The things we’re bullish on

At Lattice, we’re excited when we see humble founders laser-focused on solving real problems with a deep will to understand their customers' problems and a compelling vision/story for how the company is going to get big. It’s more important to us at an early stage than specific metrics, but we still want to see some early cohort of customers whose problem gets solved by the solution.

The web3 market movements are hard to predict, there’s little we’re absolutely confident in. What is clear is that we need more ways to get new users in the space. Most of the crypto products are crypto-native ones and we’re drinking our own hopium if we think there are useful things to do on-chain today for 1B people. We need to build useful products and make it interesting for people to perform actions on-chain.

Some use cases we’re excited about:

• Stablecoins as internet-native dollars applied to specific markets such as remittances/cross-border payments

• On-chain communication which is absolutely necessary to build on-chain acquisition channels

• Consumer apps and especially social (Farcaster)

• Token-powered physical networks, often called TIPIN or DeWi (DIMO, React)

• Security tools with active monitoring and proactive contract switches

• Wallet infrastructure with account abstraction, gasless experiences, or MPC (Tholos)

The things we’re careful about

Founders with short token unlocks, bullshit titles such as chief visionary officer, and poor knowledge of existing solutions are huge red flags.

Moats are something we take very seriously. Most products in crypto don't have moats: it's hard to build them in a world of open-source software. It matters to us a lot that teams try to think about where they can build something defensible. Good examples of moats are branding (Uniswap), partnerships, integrations, and overall doing hard things (Maple invested a lot in building institutional relationships on the capital side).

DAOs in their current form are also bad ways to run companies. They work for specific crowdfunding needs, but not to run operations. Founders should be more focused on building a product that solves a problem rather than thinking about their internal organization.

There are a few narratives we’re skeptical about:

• Metaverse: Digital worlds will be bigger in the future, but 99% of crypto takes on it are stupid. Kids using Roblox or Fortnite don’t care it’s centralized. Teams need a specific wedge in the market that offers something unique.

• L1s: Cosmos & EVM will probably eat everyone’s cake. There is a huge moat there and it's not clear that TPS or whatever is what is holding it back.

• DeSci/ReFi: It feels like people are searching for the next big thing, but are a bit lost in the woods.

• Security tokens: They basically went nowhere.

• RWA: They might have their day, but we’re skeptical anything meaningful emerges from there in the next 1-2 years. There’s just so much uncertainty on the regulatory side.

• Pure play NFT lending: Not sure why people want to borrow dollars at a high rate against NFTs right now, there are no obvious yield opportunities on-chain. It’s probably not a huge market long-term.

Last advice

It’s time to KISS - keep it simple stupid:

• Have a very narrow focus. Take one problem and solve it really well.

• Don't chase shiny objects like new chains and crypto noise.

• Recognize that building a crypto company is hard and the path will not be a straight one.

If you enjoyed this LFB edition, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack, comment below if you have any feedback, and share it on Twitter if you found it useful.
--
Let’s fucking build with the support of our partner Lattice,
Vlad from Jericho

Jericho is the land of web3 founders. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries who raised $450M in total from tier one VC funds.

This “Let’s Fucking Build” edition is brought to you by our two amazing partners:

• Lattice is an early-stage crypto VC that helps founders build defensible moats. They write $500K-$1.5M checks into early Web3 companies. Portfolio: 50+ crypto companies including Immunefi, Layer3, and Project Galaxy.

• Ledger Cathay Capital is a brand new €100m investment fund for Web3 entrepreneurs at Seed & Series A stage. They offer entrepreneurs the value of a leading global investment platform combined with the support of the world-leading Web3 security platform.

According to data from Messari, 1,700+ crypto funding rounds have been announced in 2022, for a total of $37B+ raised. Despite the challenging market conditions, it represents a ≃20% increase in value vs. 2021. 

While there's plenty of news about big funding rounds, there's not enough attention given to the challenges that founders face in securing funding, especially in the early stages. Even though it's easier to raise funds now than it was a few years ago, founders still struggle to get the financial support they need.

Dove Metrics (acq. by Messari) was initially built to make crypto fundraising markets less opaque and founders’ lives easier. As pre-seed funding rounds are less likely to be announced, this funding data is helpful but not perfect.

This article aims at advising early-stage crypto founders to navigate the biggest unknowns. Accepting external investment is a crucial decision for founders, and they need to make it based on informed judgment.

Approaching pre-seed crypto investors

We published two VC maps – one is focused on the American market, and the other one is on Europe. Many funds listed are labeled as “early-stage” investors, but very few are primarily focused on pre-seed rounds.

First-check-focused funds must be able to bring something different to the table compared to more traditional seed funds. Pre-seed-stage crypto companies will certainly pivot (possibly several times) and ideate on their product, end users, and monetization strategies.

Dedicated pre-seed funds should be able to leverage their network and get key early design partners on board to build alongside you and provide high-quality feedback – remember, your goal at this stage is to arrive at early PMF, not revenue. 

Who are all of the funds I could talk to?

A good base is to leverage crypto fundraising datasets such as Messari and list funds that invest in rounds labeled as “pre-seed” or in <$2M fundraising rounds.

You can also ping top pre-seed startups you know (or even cold outreach – there’s a relatively strong sense of community in the industry we should all take advantage of!) and ask who they chatted with to close their rounds.

Who are the funds I should be talking to?

Based on what you need at this stage of development, you can shorten the list accordingly:

• What industry do you operate in?
  For example, Collab+Currency has built an outstanding reputation in the NFT space, especially at this stage. We, at Lattice, have backed top entrepreneurs as early as possible with a generalist approach.

• Do you address a specific region and plan to grow from there?
  Look for a fund with a strong presence there, especially for markets with particular customer behaviors, needs, or regulatory requirements, such as South Korea. Semantic Ventures has a big focus on Europe, for example.

• What do I specifically need to get to the next stage?
  This is based on your strengths and weaknesses and the specificities of your vertical. If you’re building a product based on hardcore cryptography, you might need some help on the engineering front to get to a fully functional product.

• Who are your most direct competitors, and who are their investors?
  Needless to say that you should exclude them from your target list.

What should I ask them?

Remember to onboard valuable investors in your company's first 12-18 months. Don’t take dumb money from useless investors only because they offer a maximized price.

Be upfront and ask them how they would add value. As a pre-seed-stage crypto founder, you may need different expertise depending on your vertical.

• Sales and BD – pre-PMF, it's crucial to locate design partners who are friendly, able to collaborate with you in building the project, and capable of offering valuable feedback. Your investors are the best connectors to the most relevant partners. These very first commercial relationships are vital! At Lattice, we’ve helped portfolio companies grow the pipeline of early customers and partners. We’ve developed target account lists, refined outreach communication for target audiences and coordinated outreach across our industry contacts to develop a cohesive BD strategy.

• Product iteration – investors can advise on approaching product iteration, such as prioritizing certain features or refining your user experience. They can also connect you with industry experts who can offer insights into your product or facilitate user testing.

• Hiring – whether you’re a solo founder or a small co-founding team, your first hires are crucial. An investor can leverage his network to connect them with potential candidates, offer recruiting resources, provide guidance on appropriate compensation and equity packages, or advice on hiring best practices.

How do I maximize my chance to talk to them?

Sending cold DMs on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via generic email addresses you can find on VC websites will give you very little to no chance to hop on a Zoom meeting with funds.

Crypto startups are not scarce enough, and investors meet many startups that are:

• Building solutions that look for a problem.

• Chasing shiny objects without a down-to-earth approach.

• Not acknowledging that creating a crypto company is a challenging task and that the journey ahead is likely to be a winding one.

• Copycats of – sometimes relatively – successful ideas on EVM chains.

• Inventing too complex technical solutions which have no chance to work out in practice.

No need to say that an investor can very easily get in touch with a crypto founder – each day, any respected VC gets a handful number of cold messages from founders raising funds, and a significant number of crypto startups' Twitter accounts get created. Stand out and prioritize warm introductions.

According to the consensus among investors, one of the most effective ways for individuals seeking investment to get introduced is through a portfolio founder of the investor. More generally speaking, ask your existing network, mentors, advisors, or friends if they can introduce you to the investor. We are all in an industry with (too many) events worldwide, so attend relevant conferences where investors will likely be present.

Who else could I talk to at this stage?

VCs aren't the only partners at this stage.

1. Consider angel investors or investment DAOs. Prominent angels offer networks, especially for go-to-market. Their association lends credibility in a limited trustworthy industry. Investment DAOs have demonstrated their ability to secure funding round allocations solely based on their extensive network and their strong reputation. As niche investment DAOs emerge, it creates intensified competition from the bottom-up, which is leading to a significant improvement in the unit economics of venture capital, which benefits founders and communities.

2. You could also join an accelerator/incubator program before raising a pre-seed round. Alliance has been the most successful so far. We also highly value Zeitgest, which has a laboratory approach – they build with you and dive into technical and operational obstacles coming up across the group with the support of experienced engineers/operators who have gone through the journey themselves. This mentorship can provide guidance and support for a range of business-related challenges that you would not necessarily find with traditional investors.

3. Joining a community of founders can make your life way easier by learning from people who are going through the same things you do. Jericho is an extensive network of high-quality founders you can tap into.

How do I conduct my due diligence process?

Due to the absence of reliable information about investors, the crypto startup industry has become focused on making sales and prioritizing investors' interests over the long-term success of the business. Unlike service providers and founders, who have contractual obligations and vesting schedules, investors are not held to the same level of accountability, despite gaining access to highly sought-after funding rounds. As a result, investors may make unrealistic promises that they cannot deliver on.

Due diligences are not only for VCs:

• Find funds that have a thesis that is in line with the business you are operating – for example, we’ve been backing companies in the DePin space like DIMO or React over the last few months, along with funds like Variant or EV3.

• You must ensure you onboard the best investors who fit your business well. What will they unlock? How will they help you reach the next milestone? 

• Look at the investors’ portfolios and try to figure out exciting synergies. Does the VC you are chatting with have a portfolio company I could partner with in the near to medium term? 

If you are still unsure about the added value, you can ask for founders’ references or even contact them. You don’t know how to assess a VC’s work quality? Try to find governance proposals they wrote on public forums.

Evaluating the fund's investment process helps you stay organized – ensure you understand what kind of due diligence the fund conducts and what information it will require from you.

Acknowledging there are open questions

Founders should focus on demonstrating their vision and passion for their product rather than trying to answer every possible question a potential investor might have. 

It is important that founders stay transparent and honest with potential investors about the risks and uncertainties inherent in any startup. But, as a founder, you don't need to respond ideally to every question or challenge about your startup. It's a VC's job to assume some risk. Instead, what investors want to see is confidence in your ability to handle difficulties and find solutions.

The key is approaching decisions purposefully, considering unknowns, and making thoughtful choices. It's okay to admit open questions and risks. Successful founders can evaluate the likelihood of solving challenges and quantify the value that will result once they are resolved. They should also thoughtfully budget time and money to address each significant risk and have a plan for tackling them in a specific order.

Investors don't need you to have all the answers. They need to trust you as the right person to solve the problems.

When we joined Castle’s pre-seed round in September 2021, the team was still figuring out precisely what path they would go down. Still, they thought that building at the wallet layer around the intersection of NFTs and DAOs was smart – Stephen and Ayush were still in the ideation phase, actively contributing to FWB. They ended up launching a smart wallet built for NFT collectors by helping people upgrade their wallet security practices with a multi-sig vault, portfolio tracker, and native trading features. They’re now collaborating with projects in the NFT Art ecosystem, such as Bright Moments and SquiggleDAO.

Raising the right amount of money

Beyond obvious risks of dilution and loss of control, crypto is an industry where the barrier between the public & open market and the private one is thinner than any other sector.

As a result, as Regan (our co-founder at Lattice) said, investors tend to compare private deals to liquid token prices, which can, sometimes, incentivize founders to raise more money for the same level of dilution, hence larger rounds.

More than $54B flowed into VC funds in 2022 and $19B in 2021. a16z announced a $4.5B fund in May 2022, Paradigm started deploying capital from a $2.5B dedicated vehicle, and above-500M funds have gotten relatively common over the last two years. 

As funds have grown, the minimum amount of money these funds are willing to invest in a single investment has also increased. Consequently, the size of investment rounds, and therefore valuations, have grown to align with the investment strategies of these larger funds.

As a pre-seed stage founder, you must be aware of these parameters. The biggest funds have been launching initiatives targeting the earliest stages – a16z relaunched its Crypto Startup School, and Paradigm announced a Fellowship program in May 2022.

Successful companies in their respective categories can raise large amounts of funding because it is more efficient for investors to invest significant amounts of capital into the market leader.

Even if these are becoming less relevant today, there are plenty of reasons why you, as a founder, could be tempted to raise large rounds. But you need to exercise caution when raising excessive amounts of capital. Doing so can create an unwieldy burden of resources, including a large team and customer base, making it difficult to change direction or shut down if necessary. It can also result in investors needing to be aligned with the company's vision and strategy, making it harder to achieve goals and secure future funding. 

Some people would tell you that you should raise only $1M if you still need more certainty about your long-term motivation and the market opportunity.

Only raise what you need to reach your next milestone, but not so much that it creates unnecessary pressure to scale too quickly or distracts from building a sustainable business.

Startups that raise too much money often have a bloated team, a high burn rate, and unrealistic expectations, leading to a high failure rate. 

Picking a small market and growing from there

Instead of having too much money on their balance sheet with no idea of PMF, founders should select a niche market segment they have confidence in serving effectively and expand their business. This is a widely used principle in Web2 that Web3 founders tend to forget – Peloton focused on a specific customer segment (affluent fitness enthusiasts) who wanted the convenience of working out from home without sacrificing the quality of their workout.

The ultimate key is to narrow your focus on a particular customer and provide an unparalleled solution to their problem. This should be at the core of your pitch to VCs at this stage.

Once you become the unrivaled problem-solver for that customer, your market will inevitably broaden – this is the only way to build through multiple cycles in crypto.

Layer3 initially came out of the Rari Capital community, which became their first customer. From this specific use case, they showed that the demand was strong and the market was expanding. Based on this initial traction, the team raised their first funding round to become the best place for protocols and DAOs to reach, acquire, and retain users. 

Similarly, IYK noticed that many brands entering the NFT space were not issuing NFTs meaningfully from the consumer perspective. So they started as a services business, working on deep engagements with top brands (e.g., VÉRITÉ created a crewneck and partnered with IYK to embed a chip into the sleeve). They’re now dedicated to creating an agnostic, modular, and extensible platform layer that enables brands and agencies to build in the digi-physical realm. 

As the space matures, the era of “build it, and they will come” is dead – find a market niche, build along with early strategic partners, iterate, repeat, and raise your first funding round based on these first experiments.

Adjusting to investors' schedules

Investor availability is often overlooked – most US investors are on vacation through the first week of January. They are less responsive to emails and less likely to take meetings, which could slow the process. Thanksgiving until the end of the year is a dead zone in the United States. But it’s also recommended to utilize the period between November and December to give careful attention to developing your story and presentation materials. This time can be used to initiate contact with potential investors and secure a spot on their schedule for January before the high volume of inquiries and competition for attention sets in.

Good times to raise are generally Q1 and Q3, while August (especially in Europe) can be a challenging period as many investors are off.

Of course, the timing of a fundraising round will ultimately depend on many factors specific to each company, and the crypto industry is made of many sudden events that can significantly impact how investors deploy their capital. But on the whole, understanding investor availability can help founders plan their fundraising efforts strategically and increase their chances of success.

Also, remember that a slower and less competitive process provides a natural advantage for VCs – they can set the pace and timeline for the due diligence process, negotiate, close the deal, and be given more negotiating power.

Getting back to stealth mode

After raising a pre-seed round, startups should focus on building stealthily because it allows them to maintain a sense of privacy and control over their company's development. By keeping a low profile, you can focus on developing a product, refining your strategy, and building out a team without external distractions.

Building stealthily can help you avoid premature scaling and premature exposure to potential competitors. When a startup is in its early stages, it's crucial to prevent overextending oneself and focus on creating a solid foundation. By staying under the radar, you will avoid unwanted attention from competitors or investors who may pressure you to grow too quickly.

Remember, crypto is still a niche industry with an immense sense of mystery – you can create exclusivity and intrigue around a product or service by remaining lowkey. This can help generate interest and anticipation among potential customers and investors, leading to greater buzz and excitement when the startup finally does launch.

At this stage, you must operate with freedom. You need the time and space to develop your ideas and build your business on your terms. The market evolves quickly, and you must be very flexible — people love, hate, or need different things every month, and it’s hard to predict or plan for.

Caveats

This is not an exhaustive guide for founders seeking to raise a pre-seed round in the crypto industry. Success is not guaranteed by following these tips alone. Ultimately, having a unique, well-defined vision, the right team, and market timing is crucial. Without these, the fundraising process may prove challenging.

These views are based on our own experience as early-stage investors. We don’t pretend to possess omniscient knowledge; other VCs could question some of these assumptions.

At this pre-seed stage, you must convince a limited group of firm believers aligned with the mission and the values, onboard them, get the most out of this syndicate on strategic topics for the first 18 months, and get back to building. Anything else is a distraction.

If you enjoyed this LFB edition, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack, comment below if you have any feedback, and share it on Twitter if you found it useful.
--
Let’s fucking build with the support of our partners Ledger Cathay Capital & Lattice,
Pierre from Lattice & Vlad from Jericho

Jericho is the land of web3 founders. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries who raised $450M in total from tier one VC funds.

This “Let’s Fucking Build” edition is brought to you by our two amazing partners:

• Lattice is an early-stage crypto VC that helps founders build defensible moats. They write $500K-$1.5M checks into early Web3 companies. Portfolio: 50+ crypto companies including Immunefi, Layer3, and Project Galaxy.

• Ledger Cathay Capital is a brand new €100m investment fund for Web3 entrepreneurs at Seed & Series A stage. They offer entrepreneurs the value of a leading global investment platform combined with the support of the world-leading Web3 security platform.

170+ European web3 VC funds

We gathered data from 170+ European web3 VC funds using their websites and Crunchbase profiles. We qualified the funds using the following fields:

• Fund type: Is the fund web3 native, is it a web2 fund investing in web3, or is it a web3 company’s venture arm?

• Investment stage: Does it mainly invest in early stages (pre-seed, seed), across stages, or only in later stages (Series A & above)?

• Vertical: Infrastructure, Exchanges, DeFi, NFT, DAO, Gaming

• Web3 investments: The number of web3 companies they’ve invested in

• Lead ratio: The percentage of investments where the fund led the round

• Investments include: 3 examples of companies they’ve invested in

You can find the full list of funds here. Feel free to download the CSV for your use.

Mapping methodology

From this comprehensive list, we decided to do a visual mapping.

The mapping is based on two factors:

• Is the fund investing early-stage or across stages? We removed the late-stage-only funds because there weren’t many of them. Plus, web3 is a relatively young industry where early-stage capital is needed more than growth capital.

• What is the fund type (Web3 native, Web2 OGs, Institutional)?

Assessing the performance of the funds was impossible due to a lack of data. For the mapping, we decided to select the most active ones per category (# of web3 investments).

This is a map, not a territory. We probably forgot some funds & made some mistakes in the process. If it’s the case, please ping on Twitter.!

If you enjoyed this LFB edition, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack, comment below if you have any feedback, and share it on Twitter if you found it useful.
--
Let’s fucking build with the support of our partners Ledger Cathay Capital & Lattice,
Vlad from Jericho

Jericho is the land of web3 founders. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

This article is a guest post by Octave, the co-founder of Valha. Valha is a DeFi abstraction layer. It helps developers seamlessly integrate DeFi protocols (Aave, Lido, Yearn & more) in their products while maintaining decentralization and control.

link to the original article

tl;dr

• Wallets have lost a battle against exchanges to attract users in crypto between 2013 and 2021 due to poor onboarding, on-ramping, and lack of usability and safety.

• The recent emergence of new wallets fixed some of these issues. Several flaws have been solved (swap, on-ramping, security features), but others are not yet widespread (bridge, native integrations, social log-in).

• To get a better sense of the current market, we mapped 100 web3 wallets using an 11-axis methodology.

• We unveiled some key lessons from the data: wallets should monitor simple usage metrics (weekly wallet usage time or the number of clicks to buy crypto), focus on building a best-in-class UX, and develop defensibility to prosper.

A tragedy in 3 acts

Wallets could be the main gateway to the crypto ecosystem. But, centralized platforms have been favored by users for 10 years due to 3 core reasons:

Onboarding

Let's say you’re curious about crypto, but not too curious to spend 10 hours a week exploring it. How would you onboard to web3 back in 2018?

2 solutions:

• Sign up for an exchange platform. Register with an email as you’d do anywhere else on the web and enter KYC details. BOOM. Your account is created and you can start investing.

• Download a self-custody wallet - ideally a web extension (WTF for 90% of people: look at your mom’s computer and look at the number of extensions she uses). Then, secure a 24-word seed phrase that is the key to the money you are going to deposit in it: you take a pencil, write by hand those words and conceal it somewhere that would not be found by anyone but you.

Now keyless and social login solutions exist (Magic Link, account abstraction, MPC), but onboarding users to wallets used to be a big problem before 2022.

On-ramping

How can I invest in crypto with dollars?

Back in 2018, only centralized platforms could offer a way to buy tokens. The process was hazardous, expensive, and time-consuming, but exchanges supported it, not wallets.

Now, plenty of on-ramping solutions exist - Ramp, Transak, Moonpay, and many others.

Usability & safety

I bought some crypto, now what I can do with it?

Exchange platforms have minimal but essential functionalities: stake, swap, or bridge.

In comparison, your wallet doesn’t seem useful. It displays your holdings and that’s all. Obviously, you could go to any web3 website & use your wallet, but you need to be adventurous given the number of wallet exploits, scam websites, and scam transactions.

After recent scandals, public opinion about self-custody on exchange platforms shifted. It now seems like a great way to get your money robbed or invested in shady financial operations.

Possibilities to explore DeFi natively in your wallet interface (Bridge with LI.FI, DeFi with Valha) securely (Stelo, Blowfish) are de facto booming.

Wallet mapping

Methodology

At Valha, we decided to take a look at 100 web3 wallets and classified them according to 11 criteria to get a better sense of the current wallet landscape.

Who is effectively tackling the problems mentioned above?

General

• Type
  Software, Hardware wallets and specific sub-categories (exchange, institutional platform)

• Access - how can the wallet be accessed?
  Desktop App, Web App, iOS, Android, elsewhere.

• Custody - how is custody ensured?

  Conventional private key, Multi Computational Party (MPC), Smart contract wallet.

• Chains

• Connectivity

  The ability to use the wallets with other solutions such as Ledger, Trezor, or Wallet Connect.

Features

• Ramping

  The ability to buy or sell crypto with FIAT (on-ramp/off-ramp) through third parties solutions.

• Security

  Transaction simulation before execution, multi-signature process, approval checks and wallet social recovery.

• Swap/Bridge

  Built-in integration to swap assets on the same or a different chain.

• DeFi

  Collection, browser, or native integration.

• NFT

  Collection, browser, or native integration.

• Other

  Gasless experience, Account Abstraction, Ability to spend (card or purchases), Multi-wallet, Open Source, Social login, Transaction builder.

• Number of wallets downloads

  On Play Store and Chrome Store

Main takeaways

Access

The majority of wallets have a mobile-first strategy and no longer a web-alone or web-first strategy.

MPC vs. Conventional vs. Smart contract wallet

Keyless and gasless experience, transaction batching, and social recovery will become the norm with a 100x improvement in User Experience.

Historically, self-custody meant private-key-held wallets. MPC and Smart contract wallets started to pop up, but are still under-represented. The emergence of Account Abstraction is starting to change the shape of the wallet landscape.

On-ramp vs. Off-ramp

A majority of wallets accept on-ramp now thanks to external providers such as Ramp, Transak, Moonpay, and many others.

It’s less the case for off-ramping. A greater difficulty for on-ramping providers to provide a stable and efficient off-ramping service (Ramp just announced its off-ramping service while the company has been around since 2018) could be a reason. The other one is that it’s less of a problem for wallets. They need to onboard users, but don’t necessarily want them to offboard.

Swap vs. Bridge

Built-in swap integrations are highly common in wallets today, but the possibility to briding between different networks remains scarce.

Providers such as Socket, LI.FI or Rango exchange are making it possible to quickly integrate these features.

DeFi native integration vs. DeFi browser

Only 32% of wallets integrate native DeFi functionalities creating a seamless user experience and generating brokerage fees or retro commissions on transactions.

Wallets are making efforts to integrate DeFi into their interface. Staking is usually the only DeFi feature so far but other integrations are emerging to offer an end-to-end built-in experience.

Most of the wallets still integrate DeFi through the browser. The experience is not the most intuitive for the user (I invest in a DeFi Pool on my protocol interface, but I don’t see the result in my wallet interface) nor is it the most pleasant (protocol interfaces are not adapted to mobile).

Downloads on Play Store

19% of wallets have more than 1 million downloads.

With only four wallets cumulating over 5 million downloads (Metamask, OKX, Trust wallet, and Coinbase wallet), it proves that the goal is not to fight with each other but to increase the size of the market.

Please DM Octave on Twitter to get additional details on other metrics of this study.

The future challenges for wallets

Wallets are undeniably one of the keys to web3 mass adoption. The best-in-class wallets will be focusing on:

• Simple usage metrics: How many clicks to set up an account? How long does the onboarding last (from download to having crypto in your account)? How much time is spent in the wallet vs. outside of the wallet on a weekly basis (wallet absolute use and wallet time domination)?

• Focus on UX: External solutions can be helpful to build an end-to-end experience for users (Onramper for on-ramp, Valha for DeFi, Li.fi for bridging, and Stelo for safety), but some features could also be rebuilt internally.

• Build defensibility:

  • Build brand recognition

  • Get some proof of reliability with security audits, transparent communication, & hack history

  • Orchestrate financial liquidity markets (Fireblocks)

  • Implement features linked to the real-world (credit/debit cards or vouchers)

We probably forgot some wallets in the process. If you’re a wallet builder and want to add it to the landscape, please fill in this form. Thanks :)

Please drop us a like if you enjoyed this LFB edition, comment below if you have any feedback, and share it on Twitter if you found it useful.
--
Let’s fucking build,
Octave & Vlad

Jericho is the land of web3 founders. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

At Jericho, we host AMAs once in a while with the best founders in the space. At the end of each session, we always ask them the same simple question:

“What would you be your top 3 advice to aspiring web3 founders?”

In this article, we gathered 32 separate pieces of advice regarding building a company in web3 from the best founders in the space including:

• Jaynti Kanani, co-founder at Polygon

• Alex Svanevik, co-founder at Nansen

• Rene Reinsberg, co-founder at Celo

• Sebastien Borget, co-founder at Sandbox

• Jon Perkins, co-founder at SuperRare

• Ryan Selkis, founder at Messari

• Gaby Dizon, co-founder at YGG

• Illia Polosukhin, co-founder at NEAR

• Uri Kolodny, co-founder at Starkware

• Julien Bouteloup, founder at Stake, Blackpool & rekt

The tips below are the essence of their wisdom & experience building for multiple years in web3. If you’re just starting out, try to absorb this as much as possible before even start building.

Startup basics - mentioned 18 times

Don’t forget the basics (x5)

Ask yourself the right questions from day one:

1. Which problem am I trying to solve?

2. What's my solution?

3. What's my power of execution?

It’s not because you’re in web3 that you should recreate the wheel. Business is business, think about utility: Who would want this and why?

Put guardrails initially by adopting an iterative approach: Never stop experimenting, shipping and iterating.

Show up every day.

People are key (x5)

For your founding team, find people:

• You trust and who share your values

• Who complement you

Regarding hiring:

• Hire the best people you know personally - not the world's experts on topic XYZ - as you likely won't be working on XYZ in a year

• Surround yourself with people smarter or better than you in something - ask their advice often

• Foster the quality of your team, it should be both aggressive and helpful

Build in public (x5)

Build in public as you can in the open with your community behind you. If you work on interesting problems or projects, you will naturally attract interesting people to you.

Nail your founder-market fit (x2)

Make sure you're excited to work on your problem for many years to come. You will continue to work on projects that care meaningfully to you personally when things get tough, not because there is necessarily a strong business case for it. Obviously, there's a caveat around building what others need.

Be vigilant regarding fundraising (x2)

Raise as little money as you can before you have a product-market fit.

When you raise, raise enough & from serious people. Get reference calls from fellow founders on your investors. Mistakes are expensive - future investors can double down on any crack they find and that will make the task of company building a whole lot more difficult.

Web3 specificities - mentioned 10 times

Don’t launch a token right away (x3)

Validate your idea without incentives - add incentives aligned with organic growth later down the road.

Focus on building (x3)

Ignore the hype. Ignore the FUD. Don’t listen to naysayers. Don't spend too much time on Crypto Twitter. BUILD.

Get your feet wet (x2)

People ask for advice to build in web3 but haven't participated in drops, DeFi or played a p2e. Run your own node to experience the whole stack and get a sense of the maturity of the protocol you’re working on.

Wear a helmet (x1)

Crypto offers all the fun volatility and insanity of regular startups, and pairs it with all the fun and volatility of a pre-product market fit IPO, 90% swings in asset prices, and regulatory uncertainty.

Be at the edge (x1)

Timing is everything, so you should be patient. Get the right tech at the right time before people even know what they want.

Miscellaneous - mentioned 4 times

• Let your intellectual instincts guide you and be wary of over-rationalizing what you should be focused on and why (x1).

• In the end, 70% of your time is story-telling and recruiting (x1).

• Think wild, beyond imagination. Make people dream (x1).

• A little bit of luck always helps :) (x1)

We write threads after each AMA to publicly share the key takeaways.

Here is a thread of threads with insights from the biggest names in the space.

Please drop us a like if you enjoyed this edition of LFB, comment below if you have any feedback, and share it on Twitter if you found it useful.
--
Let’s fucking build,
Vlad

Jericho is the land of web3 founders. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

Back in 2016, I was a bored international student living in Moscow. Boredom weirdly led me to startups. I started brainstorming ideas with friends and reading content. One of my first ideas was a game for founders. A collaborative, full-remote, MMORPG-like game (without motion) where you could find co-founders, work on your idea, show progress, and - in the end - raise funds to make the game a reality.

The whole point was to make it fun. Founders would enjoy playing it in the evenings & weekends while keeping their job. At best they end up with a company, at worst they had fun with friends from all over the world. Not the best idea, persona & model to be honest, but still, I had fun thinking about what it could look like. It led me to work on software gamification and join The Family’s team.

I buried this idea in a corner of my mind until late 2020 when I started deep diving into metaverse content thanks to the brilliant Matthew Bal & the infamous jin. Remote became a reality for most of us in tech following Covid. Decentralization & web3 enabled a bunch of exciting use cases such as play-to-earn. Virtual offices became a thing - Gather leading the way. The world was changing, gaming & work too.

That’s when it became clear to me. From the idea I had 5 years ago, a new concept bloomed: productive games.

What the hell are productive games?

Games are supposed to be fun. But “fun” can lead to other purposes such as socialization (MMORPGs/Fortnite), education (PowerZ), making money (Axie), and research (Foldit). We call those educational games, play-to-earn, or serious games. There are even advergames for advertisement, exergames for fitness, art games & even Christian games (full list here).

Productive games are video games for work. Players produce real-world value by playing the game. The game is a means of production: from paper to software to games.

While many people tried to gamify software (sometimes effectively, most of the time not), the idea here is to “softwarize” games and turn them into means of production as a result.

This can seem farfetched and longshot. There’s indeed a very strong chance productive games will never see the light and will never make sense. But I think it’s worth trying. If productive games become a reality, they could represent a gigantic paradigm shift in the way we work.

With 3B players worldwide & an average time spent playing of 8.45h per week, humanity spends 150M years per year playing video games. If just a chunk of this human time was invested in productive output, how quickly could we fix humanity’s problems? If working was just as fun and thrilling as playing, wouldn’t we all benefit from that?

When Gabby Dizon from YGG - the leading P2E guild - came to Jericho for an AMA a few months ago, I asked him:

“Do you see a future where people could actually work inside games? When the simulation isn’t a simulation anymore. Traditional work like programming, designing, investing... inside a game interface.”

Here was his answer:

Work is changing

It sounds exciting, but does it actually make sense? Let’s step back a bit and explore the future of work.

Building in web3 gives me a considerable advantage in analyzing the trends: DAOs show the premises of a new work Renaissance where seamless coordination is queen.

As remote progresses, companies shift from input-driven to output-driven cultures (increased autonomy forces them to). Focusing on the output demands high transparency to align objectives and enables automation to increase efficiency. The downfall of input creates agent-agnostic organizations. Mental health issues arise and the traits above need to be balanced with human-centric work systems.

1. Remote

Value: People tasted remote and don’t want to let it go. More than half of workers would consider quitting before returning to the office. More freedom, less commuting/traffic, a better work/life balance, and more productivity (allegedly) are the main reasons employees love remote.

Challenges: Remote comes with major difficulties. It increases loneliness by 67% having a direct impact on employee retention. People quit companies because they don’t have friends as remote makes it harder to create bonds. Beyond that, remote workers struggle to communicate effectively and take care of their mental health (unplugging, distractions, motivation).

There’s a remote paradox: People want the freedom that comes with remote, but the performance, mental health, happiness, and growth challenges are substantial. They love it more than they hate it, but still, it fucks them up.

2. Output-driven

Value: Companies shift from an input culture to an output one. Only the results matter, not the way they’re achieved. With increased autonomy over the input, employees find their job more enthusiastic and results are actually better. Output-driven companies are 40% more productive than input-driven ones.

Challenges: To create an effective output-driven culture, organizations must be able to:

• Define the desired output in the first place

• Change the desired output during the process (early-stage alignment or later-stage refinement)

• Accurately assess the performance based on the desired output

• Distribute payment and reputation based on the performance

3. Transparent

Value: Companies are increasingly open (see DAOs today - you can jump on calls and start working for DAOs permissionlessly). Transparency makes it easier to know what’s expected. It’s possible to know who is a good or bad collaborator based on reputation, communication & performance. The data is publicly available.

Challenges: Transparency can come with inefficiency when rules are not defined clearly and automated.

4. Automated

Value: The job, goals, execution, communication, outcome & rewards can be automated via smart contracts. If you perform you get X, if you don’t perform you get Y. Automation & transparency are complementary, they need each other to exist.

Challenges: If everything isn’t transparent and the rules don’t take into account things such as circumstances, soft skills, cultural alignment, & peer reviews, unethical behaviors may arise and reputation won’t be trusted.

5. Agent-agnostic

Value: When the only thing that matters is the outcome, the agent generating it & the way he generates it become irrelevant. Agents can be employees, freelancers, contributors, collectives/pods, agencies, or bots.

Challenges: Employers should be able to accurately track the metrics below to choose & collaborate with agents:

• Binary outcome (is the job done or not?)

• Performance outcome (how is the job affecting metrics?)

• Time (how long did it take to complete the job?)

• Cost

6. Human-centric

Value: Today, HR protects the business (client who pays) vs. the talent. Job descriptions are lists of requirements. HR tools will be increasingly oriented towards people: the ones who end up creating value.

Challenges: Remote, automation, outcome-centricity & agent-agnosticism can all be detrimental to the individual vs. the organization. If we want more efficient organizations, we also need to have contracts that reflect our values. Rules must always be defined by thinking about the people using them for the sake of protection & fairness.

What do games have to do with it?

The traits above are the gameplay of tomorrow’s work. Work will be remote & open, most “employees” will be free agents, and rewards will be automated and based on performance according to a desired output.

Aren’t current tools good enough for this new world of work?

Internet, browsers, and most of the tools you’re using weren’t designed for this new age. They didn’t take into account the fact that you will actually spend 12h per day working in front of your screen.

This is the main difference with games. Take an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. If you spend hours playing WoW, you will have fun, truly bond with people, and create memories. When you jump between Slack, Zoom, and Notion, it’s not the case. You black out. Calls don’t feel like true interactions. They’re alienating.

I felt it first-hand. I spent 9 months working on a startup from home during covid. I almost have no memory of these months. They’re like… gone. But one day, I spent a day working with fellow Jericho builders in Gather. A few days after, I remembered the fun we had and where we had it. Software spatialization (or games) reintroduces standard brain mechanisms in our remote tech lives.

Why would you need games? Wouldn’t virtual worlds fix this already?

Communication is one thing but interoperable automation/performances/rewards systems are also needed. Today, Linkedin is full of fake profiles, experiences, and data. Reputation is siloed. It’s very hard to actually know if someone is a good performer or not. Retention is at its lowest. FT employees become freelancers and want the freedom that comes with it. Work is changing way beyond remote.

A new paradigm is needed for online work. Scaling the tools we use won’t work, we need to rethink three important work layers: remote communication, performance assessment & interoperability.

From today to productive games

We can already see the very first signs of productive games:

• Blockchain technology enables transparency, automation, and coordination at scale. Putting work on-chain can ensure fair & transparent gameplay for all. If web3 is all about ownership, there’s no reason work ownership shouldn’t be affected as well.

• DAOs have increasingly smaller core teams. Protocols rely on hordes of freelancers and contributors instead. DAOs aren’t output-centered enough yet though compared to highly-efficient startups with strong KPI/OKR cultures.

• Virtual offices offer a new interface to connect at work. These interfaces are isolated between teams and there isn’t much to do there except have a call. They represent alternatives to Zoom/Google Meet, but are not a completely new paradigm yet.

• Metaverse solutions explore interoperability which is highly important to ensure productive games can function between teams at the ecosystem level.

• Gaming is now the number one socialization interface for teens. Forget social media. Teens want immersion, digital identities, and fun. Their future work environment should mirror that.

At the same time, we’re still far from seeing productive games at play. Major infrastructure and application layers are necessary to start working in games:

• SSO (Single Sign-In). You’d only need one SSO to interact with different productive games while leveraging your existing reputation. Companies could give you access to applications without using password managers. Wallets could be the SSO of work. Metaintro is working on a professional wallet for example.

• Oracles. Productive games would need data that isn’t currently on-chain: social media, CRMs, Githubs, Notions, etc… Accessing this data on-chain is necessary to assess performances. Current oracles don’t process this data. Uma with Outcome is working on something adjacent.

• Work protocol. The gameplay must be fair & transparent around performance-to-rewards loops. Smart contracts would contain:

  • Rules - objectives “Bring 500 followers” and deadlines “within 1 month”

  • Performance assessment - automatic via integrations, manual via managers or collective via peers

  • Rewards - money, equity, titles, or perks that are triggered based on the performance of a task or a series of tasks

• Automated payroll. Payroll is part of the protocol to ensure rewards are allocated automatically based on performance.

• Reputation system. Performance reputation should be interoperable between organizations at the ecosystem level to increase hiring fairness and improve talent liquidity. Skill/experience points and levels can be used. Reputation should be output-centric: Did the agent perform vs. the goal?

• Narrative. Productive games need a narrative to be attractive and fun.

• Interface. Productive games need an as-immersive-as-possible interface to be successful and fix remote loneliness and communication problems. Spatialization changes everything in our perception of online interactions.

• Metaverse. If we manage to create multiple productive games (for devs, designers, freelancers, events etc…) covering most online work use cases and if they’re all interoperable, we’ll manage to collectively build a metaverse for work & it won’t be Zuck’s.

Conclusion

This is totally exploratory. Most of it is unresolved. Is motion necessary? What would be the first step in their direction? Is browser technology mature? Will companies have virtual HQs? Is it even possible to have a work experience that feels like a game?

But signs are here:

• Web3 feels like an MMORPG

• Facebook is working on a metaverse for work

• Portals builds immersive virtual offices

• Interoperable reputation & credentials is a strong web3 narrative

Humans should control machines. Today, remote feels like we’re controlled by them. We go to great lengths to get rid of notifications, block social media feeds, and preserve our private life. With productive games, you’ll either be in the game (= working), or out of the game (= not working).

Working online shouldn’t suck. On the contrary, we could create the most stimulating, fun, and fair work experience ever.

Related content:

• The Internet of Jobs is here by owocki

• The Great Online Game by Packy McCormick

• Web3 HR thread by rafa0x

• Remote jobs are video games by 0xjasper.eth

Please drop us a like if you enjoyed the article, comment below if you have any feedback, and share it on Twitter if you found it useful.
--
Vlad

Jericho is the land of web3 founders. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

This article was co-written with Blocktorch. They are on a mission to give web3 builders superpowers by building the first web3 observability platform where engineers can get relevant information at the right time.

The development of web3 is growing at a rapid speed. While the number of decentralized applications reaching scale is increasing, the architecture of decentralized applications is getting more and more complex.

Web3 engineers are mainly left in the dark when it comes to observing decentralized applications. To ensure the reliability of complex software running on a high scale, observability practices are indispensable, and without them, teams have sacrificed engineers for incidents constantly.

First, what is observability?

The overarching goal of observability is to bring better visibility into systems.

No complex system is ever fully healthy and distributed systems are unpredictable. Without observability, assumptions about system behavior are being made, leading to guesswork when trying to improve performance and stability.

Observability requires (1) the ability to capture data including context, and (2) the ability to query that data iteratively in order to find new insights. To achieve both, there are three core pillars of observability: event logs, metrics, and traces.

Simply getting these three different data types is only of limited value. It’s important to also generate insights out of them including alerting, visualization, and the ability to anticipate the future. While it’s tempting to “measure everything”, this creates an excess of information that results in no further insights and costly infrastructure expenditures. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it is critical.

Log well. Live well.

Logs are transactions. They are the events of the blockchain.

Logs come in the form of plain text, JSON, or binary. Etherscan is a great web3 tool to observe logs.

The process of gathering, processing, storing, and analyzing event data about system performance is called logging. It helps engineers catch issues as they arise by navigating them through Errors, Warnings, and Info messages. Modern log management systems go beyond using logs for the pure generation of information, they also automatically aggregate, index, and analyze them to provide insights to teams and present them to data pipelines and other utilities.

Fun fact: In ancient times, the only way to measure a ship’s speed was to throw a wood log into the water and observe how fast it moves away from the ship. This method of a ship’s progress through the water was called ‘Heaving the Log’. The log-book was the ledger with daily entries about the particulars of the ship’s voyage, including the rate of progress as indicated by the log. Logging was born.

In Solidity, events act like the logging functionality of other languages, but instead of logging to the console or to a file, the logs are saved in the blockchain. When an event is called the arguments are stored in the transaction log. These logs are associated with the address of the contract and can be read from the blockchain as long as the block is accessible.

The first part of a log record consists of an array of topics. These topics are used to describe the event. The second part of a log record consists of the data. In terms of gas spending, events are also a cheap way of storing on-chain data.

Logging in web2 vs. web3

When writing logs, it is important to make them meaningful and actionable, but, at the time of writing the logs, one does not know what exactly will be needed for troubleshooting in the future. However, there are some best practices from web2 that one can follow also in web3:

• Meaningful log entries are not cryptic, keep in mind that when making use of the log the context at the time of writing will be absent.

• Log messages should be written in a language everyone on the team can understand, so most probably English.

• The message should contain context to make it easier to troubleshoot.

• Keep in mind that not only humans but also machines should be able to read the log message, so they should be human readable as well as machine parseable.

• And finally, do NOT log sensitive information like passwords, private keys, etc.

The major difference between logging in web2 and web3 is the amount of logging.

While it is never good to log way too much as it creates noise, there should be a sufficient amount of logs with a sufficient amount of information included. In web2, devs tend to rather log too much, then they have to cut some of the logs that are actually not relevant.

In web3, every bit of information in a smart contract will increase the amount of gas incurred. That leads to rather leaving out events at all if they are not crucial for triggering actions in the dApp. There are two kinds of logs in web3:

• one as already stated with the event keyword in Solidity

• one in the form of messages displayed when using the conditional require() function.

Notice that ONLY the require() function allows for a message, the conditional error functions revert() and assert() do not. When using events in Solidity a maximum of three parameters can be used, so these three used parameters should be carefully considered. A possible way of increasing logs from one function is to emit more than one event in that function (at the cost of higher gas fees).

Ways of using logs in web3

There are three main ways today to see events emitted by smart contracts:

1. Look them up manually on a block explorer like Etherscan. The following steps can be followed to see the logs of a transfer of a BAYC as in the code example above on Etherscan:

   1. Open the transaction you want to take a look at

      

   2. Navigate to “Logs”

      

   3. The second entry represents the logs of the Transfer event

      

Looking up logs on a block explorer might be a suitable fast solution if you only want to see the logs of one specific transaction, but it is not scalable at all.

2. Listen to events emitted through a script with the help of libraries like web3.js or ethers.js.
   The prerequisite is to have the Application Binary Interface (ABI) of the smart contract together with the smart contract address, otherwise, the events cannot be decoded. If the smart contract is verified and published on a block explorer this ABI is visible to everyone, otherwise, only the deployer of the smart contract has access to the ABI.

   As shown below, the contract first needs to be instantiated with the ABI and contract address. Afterward one can listen to Transfer events emitted by this contract and in our example display them in the console or store them in a database for further usage. The ones interested can find a more detailed explanation about ABIs from our friends at Alchemy here.

   import CONTRACT_ABI from './BAYCabi.json'const Web3 = require('web3');
   const INFURA_KEY = "SECRET_INFURA_KEY";// Insert your own key here
   const web3 = new Web3('wss://mainnet.infura.io/ws/v3/'  +  INFURA_KEY);
   const CONTRACT_ADDRESS = '0xBC4CA0EdA7647A8aB7C2061c2E118A18a936f13D';const contract = new web3.eth.Contract(CONTRACT_ABI, CONTRACT_ADDRESS);async function getEvents(){
     contract.events.Transfer()
     .on('data', (event) => {
       console.log(event);
     })
     .on('error', console.error);
   }getEvents(); 

3. Use “off-the-shelf” indexing solutions like TheGraph

   It is possible to either use a subgraph (The Graph’s name for open APIs) that has been built and published by someone else or build your own subgraphs. Covering the details on how this works would cover a whole blog by itself but we recommend checking out their documentation or content from Nader Dabit. If you are interested in learning more about an indexer for the Solana blockchain check SolanaFM.

Logs and log management are important to ensure engineers can understand the health and performance of a system. Logging should be taken into consideration at every step of the software development lifecycle. If you wish for logs once things get rough it is too late. Even though logging in web3 is different from web2, the core principles of what logs should contain stay the same.

Metrics don’t lie.

Metrics represent logs numerically over intervals of time.

They can be used for dashboard visualization & mathematical modeling, and enable longer retention & easier querying. Metrics are well suited for observing the overall health of a system. Dune is a great web3 tool to visualize metrics.

Metrics — numbers that tell a story

Due to the fact that a metric gets measured over time, the measurements are stored in a time series database. Each metric in a time series database contains a name, a label, a numeric value, and an exact timestamp in milliseconds.

Metrics do play a key role in alerting, and thus are the underlying fundamental pillar of observability for Service Level Agreements, Service Level Objectives, and Service Level Indicators. The core metrics used for monitoring the overall state of a system can be grouped into the following categories:

• Availability

• Health

• Request rate

• Saturation

• Utilization

• Error rate

• Latency

While one can try to measure everything and go wild with building metrics, one should think carefully about which metrics are the right ones for the underlying purpose.

If the metrics you are looking at are not useful in optimizing your strategy, stop looking at them. — Mark Twain

Metrics stay metrics - in web2 web3 and, yes Jake, even in web5

When thinking about which solution to adopt for metrics monitoring the core features that should be included are the collection of events with a timestamp and value, efficiently storing them at volume, supporting queries of them, offering visualization capabilities, and potentially also providing endpoints to other APIs like Grafana.

Here are some vendor choices:

1. ELK stack (aka elastic stack)

The ELK stack is a popular choice, due to the mature products elastic offers. starting with Beats and Logstash to collect different types of metrics. Elastic offers a suite of tools and plugins to support data collection from many web2 components and infrastructure environments, in addition, Elasticsearch is powerful to store string data, search it and manage it. Moreover, Kibana offers a powerful tool to search, analyze and visualize data with low configuration effort. The diagram below shows the structure of the ELK stack.

2. TIG stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana)

The TIG stack relies on influx DB and its ecosystem to create ETL pipelines for metrics. Influx offers Telegraf; a plugin-driven server to collect data. Many plugins are available for popular data sources, and adding new plugins is fairly easy.

In addition, the time-series DB influx offers relies on the push mechanism where Telegraf or any data other data collector can push data to. This means integration with influxDB doesn’t require much configuration except using influx’s SDKs, Telegraf, or any data collection tool (you can even upload CSV files manually)

3. Prometheus + Grafana

A popular choice to collect metrics is Prometheus, which also offers a suite of tools that are vendor agnostic. Prometheus relies on the pull mechanism to scrape data. This means that an application/service has to expose an endpoint where Prometheus will call regularly to collect metrics. But if you prefer sticking to the push mechanism, there is a push gateway to wrap Prometheus with. Thus your service/application can push data and Prometheus will scrape it from the gateway. You can find more information in the official docs.

4. Opentelemetry

The premise of Opentelemtry (OTel) is the creation of a vendor agnostic protocol to handle logs, metrics, and traces. the project is open source and part of the cloud-native Foundation (CNFC).

The protocol can be used through the open source instrumentation SDKs where you can send observability data to any storage and visualization solution. The project also offers a collector, that you can deploy in your as a sidecar. With the collector, advanced operations such as sensitive data filtering are supported. In addition, most observability vendors have support for OTel.

The learning curve for OTel might be steep at the beginning, but the unified pipeline for logs, metrics, and traces is worth it.

5. Custom pipeline + time series DB + visualization solution

If you want to quickly set up a periodic pipeline that quickly brings the data to Grafana where you can experiment with it, Blocktorch’s last blog article can be helpful :)

Metrics in web3

A metric in web3 follows the same principles as in web2. Blockchain data is public data and each entry in this distributed ledger already has a timestamp. So once the data pipeline and warehouse are set up one can start playing around with metrics.

There are some frequently used metrics to measure usage/engagement, like Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi, the number of wallets interacting with a certain smart contract, or also simply the total number of transactions in a given time period.

One tool that provides great functionality for anyone who is interested in such usage metrics is Dune. Anyone can build dashboards in Dune and share them with the world. The only needed skill is SQL. Below is an example by Dune user lightsoutjames about daily users of STEPN.

Another set of metrics in web3 are all metrics related to the specifications of transactions, event logs, gas burn, the time elapsed until confirmation, or input/output statistics. Block explorers like Etherscan offer APIs to access such data as well as some statistics like the average gas price. Below is an example of Etherscan’s chart for the average block time on Ethereum.

Node providers like Alchemy also offer some analytics and dashboarding together with their infrastructure APIs. Usage analytics can be seen like the number of transactions, but also app health metrics like the latency of API calls to Alchemy nodes and error rates.

For more sophisticated metrics such as cross-chain measurements, input/output anomalies, execution metrics, or advanced event analytics the only solution today is to build a solution from scratch on your own. But no worries Blocktorch will change that ;)

Follow the traces.

Traces provide context.

Imagine you are Sherlock Holmes on a quest and you find single pieces of evidence then you need to put the puzzle pieces together. Tracing helps you to understand how to make the puzzle pieces fit.

For example, the transaction to buy an NFT on OpenSea doesn’t happen directly with the NFT contract, but it goes throw a series of transactions that can be traced as shown below.

Tracing is the hardest of the pillars to retrofit into existing infrastructure because to implement really effective tracing, every component in the path of a request needs to propagate tracing information.

Understanding traces

There are two different kinds of relevant traces:

• A stack trace is a representation of a call stack at a certain point in time, containing all invocations from the start of a thread until an exception.

• A distributed trace is the observation of the end-to-end path of causally related distributed events flowing through a distributed system. By following a single trace, the path traversed by the request and the structure of the request can be derived.

The first allows developers to see which services are involved in the request, the latter to understand the junctures and effects of asynchrony in the execution of a request. Without tracing, pinpointing the root cause of issues in a distributed system is very challenging.

Each distributed trace is composed of a number of spans: representations of an operation within the flow of the request and contains a stack trace. The glue that holds all spans together as a full trace is called context propagation, which helps to correlate the spans with each other. These traces are usually visualized in waterfall diagrams, flame charts, or Gantt charts.

The most modern framework used in web2 for distributed tracing, and in general observability, is OpenTelemetry. It contains a set of APIs that are vendor-agnostic, with a common format to collect and send data. For visualizing OpenTelemetry trace data open-source software like Jaeger or Zipkin can be used. Once OpenTelemetry is set up the data can also be ingested by vendors like Datadog, Dynatrace, or Splunk.

Tracing in web3

In web3, the only kinds of traces that exists today are stack traces for transactions and mined blocks.

There is no way to follow a transaction from the UI to the persistence layers with ample context (something Blocktorch is tackling). If for example, an action in the UI is triggering two different transactions on the blockchain (for example in a Bridge there is 1 transaction on each chain), there is no way to see a full trace.

In practice, some teams are using web2 observability tools for tracing requests up to the point where a request flows from the centralized components to the decentralized components, and from there the request is disappearing in the dark.

To obtain the stack trace of an EVM transaction, GETH’s traceTransaction RPC API can be used. Alternatively, some nodes as service providers like Alchemy also offer a trace API endpoint. The simplest type of transaction traces that Geth can generate are raw EVM opcode traces. Below is an example as shown in Geth’s documentation:

> debug.traceTransaction("0x2059dd53ecac9827faad14d364f9e04b1d5fe5b506e3acc886eff7a6f88a696a")
{
  gas: 85301,
  returnValue: "",
  structLogs: [{
      depth: 1,
      error: "",
      gas: 162106,
      gasCost: 3,
      memory: null,
      op: "PUSH1",
      pc: 0,
      stack: [],
      storage: {}
  },
    /* snip */
  {
      depth: 1,
      error: "",
      gas: 100000,
      gasCost: 0,
      memory: ["0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006", "0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000", "0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000060"],
      op: "STOP",
      pc: 120,
      stack: ["00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000d67cbec9"],
      storage: { 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000004: "8241fa522772837f0d05511f20caa6da1d5a3209000000000000000400000001",
   0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006: "0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001",
   f652222313e28459528d920b65115c16c04f3efc82aaedc97be59f3f377c0d3f: "00000000000000000000000002e816afc1b5c0f39852131959d946eb3b07b5ad"
      }
  }]

To see the stack trace of a transaction without having to do any API call Tenderly is a great tool for getting the information quickly. In Tenderly’s explorer, one can search for a transaction hash and the transaction stack trace is provided as part of the result. This is how the transaction stack trace looks like for a transfer in the UniSwap contract, showing all internally called functions:

Without distributed tracing understanding the context of a request flowing through services is almost impossible. If Sherlock Holmes would have to look at each clue as siloed information, he would have never made it to one of the most famous detectives. To level up engineering practices in web3, distributed tracing through the multi-chain decentralized stack is required.

Please drop us a like if you enjoyed the article, comment below if you have any feedback, and share it on Twitter if you found it useful.
--
The Blocktorch team & Vlad

Jericho is the web3 founder community. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

This LFB’s edition is a guest post by pet3rpan from 1kx based on his Jericho AMA answers.

I first learned about crypto when I was a designer back in mid-’17 working for startups in Sydney. I hopped full-time in late ‘17, figuring out how to contribute to the space.

I was quite lost initially. I bought EOS, XRP all the usual retail coins, but in October of that year discovered Bokky Poohbah's Ethereum developer workshops. From that first session, I was converted to realizing the real vision behind web3.

I didn’t have a computing background which made it hard to navigate crypto. As a result, I started studying the history of computing to get a better sense of why blockchains matter, from discrete math to networking, from early computers to modern-era machines. I ended up writing an article on computing history before Bitcoin as one of my first published contributions in early '18.

Understanding the history of cryptography, how its early participants were in it for digital freedoms & how involved they were in the lead-up to the creation of Bitcoin really inspired me to also contribute in the ways they did.

The bear is for PMF

In 2017/18, it was all white papers and promises (and maybe CryptoKitties). Out of that period came DeFi and various NFT-based applications. In 2021, that led to the penetration of web3 into many more verticals of the internet. There was a lot of hype and speculation during this 2020-2022 bull cycle, but mostly around incomplete models that still lacked real demand.

The next cycle will be driven by the same topics we are excited about today, but will drastically look different from its current form as projects iterate through the bear with an attempt to find real meaningful product-market fit.

At 1kx, we’re really excited about:

• NFT Communities eg. PFPs as new forms of cryptonatively owned IP

• Digiphysical goods

• On-chain gaming

• Music NFTs and their evolutionary process

• Virtual beings

• Multiplayer creation (prior creator economy has been pretty singleplayer)

• Liquid staking

• Web3 infrastructure protocols

• L3s

• ZK technology

SaaS capitulation is stonks

Founders should be cautious about an obtuse attitude toward web3 technology and what makes it unique. In the last cycle, the whole space was labeling tokens as scams and everyone was heavily against ERC-20 token ownership of networks. In hindsight, that was a fundamental misalignment against a community/user-owned internet.

A similar fate/attitude will probably fall on NFTs, tokens, and decentralized governance where builders will revert back towards a web2 mindset for approaching the space and look to leverage web3 to create web2.5 experiences on the application layer side as opposed to really leaning into what web3 enables to the fullest.

Generally speaking, there are:

1. Cryptonative founders with not as many relevant domain relevant backgrounds

2. Less cryptonative founders with more relevant domain relevant backgrounds but with less knowledge on how to get the most out of web3

This is where you get narratives like "to make a successful crypto game, you must make it fun". The equivalent of this was with DeFi and a loud majority of people in the last bear who thought most of DeFi was going to emerge via plugging in protocols into banks. No one really foresaw the mass adoption of the cryptonative side.

The world adapted around web3, vs. the former and we can expect a similar cycle around sentiment here.

Crypto - like most tech ecosystems - follows the app and infra cycle. Right now, we are likely at the start of another infrastructure cycle. To build at the edges you don't necessarily need to be an infra company, but you need to be adopting all the newest infra and leveraging it as much as possible. App builders must monitor significant innovations with infrastructure and what new use cases they enable.

In the bear, everyone is just trying to survive as opposed to really exploring unique design patterns where there's real whitespace.

The most important breakthroughs in the space didn’t come from established founders with pre-defined biases, but from founders who are building to explore and advance the ecosystem.

Focus on your community

Community building is a craft that is still highly undervalued by builders. Not many founders I know are actively trying to master this craft. They lack attention, patience, and energy towards creating a community of participants who genuinely care about the ethos of the project (those that will eventually champion, evangelize and participate in a future token network). It’s still often a role 1kx and I play with portfolio projects.

Teams do hire community leads or head of community roles, but it's mostly just a bandaid. Without a culture of care around community coming from the top, it's lost in translation oftentimes and de-prioritized.

The bear market presents an opportunity to build healthy communities & the last bull cycle gave us great examples of how to do so. Despite how hard it is to actually run a decentralized community efficiently, it's much easier to start them now. PFP projects started as a meme and speculative asset (still are), but it has emergently become a representation of IP ownership around that brand. These communities now command distribution power on the scale of hundreds and millions of followers across Instagram/Twitter with <10k on-chain owners. Most of them started as bootstrapped teams of 3-4. To build IP traditionally, you would need millions of dollars, the right talent, and years to ship products.

When the product is the community it makes it hard to ever die as a project even if you run out of money (assuming the community is strong and larger than just the treasury). Many people talk about web3 social protocols (eg. FB for web3 etc), but it’s kind of already here with tokenized social communities.

To build a web3 community during the bear market:

1. Build as publicly as you can in the open. If you work on interesting problems or projects, you will naturally attract interesting people to you.

2. Let your intellectual instincts guide you and be wary of over-rationalizing what you should be focused on and why.

3. You will continue to work on projects that care meaningfully to you personally when things get tough, not because there is necessarily a strong business case for it. Obviously, there's a caveat around building what others need.

4. Never stop experimenting and iterating. Show up every day.

Web3 verticals going from 0 to 1 will mostly require hardcore true believers and cryptonative participants to bring them to life. But from 1 to 10, the space needs better UX, storytelling, and lower asset price points/lower barriers for participation.

Web3 has already reached mainstream awareness. The next stage is mainstream adoption and it is starting to emerge at certain intersections of web 2 x 3.

Don’t miss the opportunity.
--
pet3rpan & Vlad

Jericho is the web3 founder community. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

Hi frens - Moon speaking,

Many joined since we helped builders identify investors. We’ve been however observing quite unhealthy behaviors amongst builders.

We decided to invite Louis a.k.a. albiverse from Twoplus for a guest post on mental fitness to explain the challenges founders face in the space and share some tips to get mentally fit.

For the next edition: Should we first identify even more investors (global web3 VC mapping) or observe the Goblins’ behavior (web3 observability)?

Vote on Twitter (72h-long vote)

A few years ago, I heard on a podcast that often founders fail because they fail to grow as fast as their project requires it. It stuck with me. I had felt limited by my own mental health for all of my teenage years, so I knew that this was real and applied to me.

By digging into the data, the realization became increasingly alarming. Founders are:

• 2x more likely to suffer from depression

• 2x more likely to have suicidal thoughts

• 6x more likely to suffer from ADHD

• 10x more likely to suffer from bi-polar disorder

While it has been shown that the founder persona by itself is keener to have a mental health condition, the reality is that being an entrepreneur can really challenge your mental health, well-being, and performance.

In the early stages of a project, the only irreplaceable piece of your company as a founder is you. To increase your chances of success, you have to make sure you stay on top of your mental health and keep showing up at your best. For example, being able to think clearly when you make important decisions can save you weeks of work and prevent many mistakes.

I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to build something. Last year, after a long burnout things shifted and I became obsessed with fixing my mental health for good. I quit my job and started spending all my time on this new goal. As I went and discovered what worked for me, I started sharing my experience with others. Eventually, this journey led me to create Twoplus, a mental fitness gym for web3 folks: A place where people can find infrastructures, programs, and peers to start training their mental health like they would train their bodies in the gym.

Basics get 80% of the job done

As a web3 founder, there are no pre-defined routines and schedules on how to work. A good chunk of your efforts early on should focus on setting your day-to-day to meet your basic needs with the right routines in the right environment. Those are your systems.

Designing systems that meet your needs well and consistently might be one of the hardest things for web3 founders. Most often, web3 people sit for long hours inside in front of a screen. Nothing in this basic setup meets the most important human needs. So you’ll have to be intentional and make sure that you provide for all these needs yourself.

Needs of the body

There are oceans of information on these topics so I’ll keep it short.

• Food: Make sure that your brain always has some glucose available. Everyone has their own diet but try to avoid high-IG food. Eat vegetables. Drink water.

• Move: Get the blood and fluids flowing to your brain. Stand up from your desk and move every 30 minutes - 5 min walk, stretch, squats, push-ups.

• Sleep: Go to bed early, be consistent, wake up without an alarm, make sure you breathe through your nose, shut down & slow your brain after the web3 race. Reading, using dim lights or candles, and journaling before bed helps.

• Go outside/nature: Daylight is very important for your circadian rhythms and sleep. Natural light and darkness set our natural cycles, when we’re energized and when we feel sleepy. To optimize your energy and mood it's essential to take as much daylight as possible. The more you intake light, the better you feel and sleep.

Needs of the mind

• Connection: Meet with friends or family regularly. Find a proper office to work from. The stress caused by not connecting enough with people can be immense. We’re social animals and a huge part of what we’re designed for is connecting face-to-face with other humans. Sex and affection are also important. Not having sex can really increase the pressure on your subconscious. Getting laid boosts mood, confidence, focus, and so on.

• Safety: Building a project is hard and risky. Adding any additional “perceived threats” makes the burden heavier. Some examples are ongoing conflicts with co-founders or people close to you, unsolved traumas, financial precarity, high expectations, and uncontrolled growth. Perceived threats are anything that will make you feel unsafe at night when ideally you should feel relaxed and recharge batteries.

• Satisfaction: If you can’t enjoy the ride and be fulfilled, you’ll have a hard time staying motivated and productive in the medium to long run. Losing motivation is actually the number one reason why startups fail. If most days feel like hell for weeks and weeks, you’re clearly digging into your vital reserves of grit, accumulating mental debt, and eventually, you’ll run out of gas. Optimize satisfaction for things that are actually good for you, not addictive (doomscrolling Twitter and Opensea). Avoid the sudden bursts of dopamine or euphoria because they’ll trigger a low eventually.

• Alignment: Knowing your values and making sure that you remain close to them can’t do anything but help you feel more energized and motivated. Society (and social media) keeps incentivizing entrepreneurs to build nothing but trillion-dollar companies in the latest hottest market. But maximizing your chances of success means finding the thing that you are most driven by. This might mean making trade-offs, following a different path than what popular narratives want you to do and building something you’ll want to stick with in the long run.

• Self-esteem: Work towards balancing your sense of self-worth. If you don’t esteem yourself why should investors, teammates, and clients? Strong self-esteem will help you build better relationships and confront difficult challenges with calm and focus. Build confidence through many small consecutive wins. Set healthy goals and expectations for yourself and your project. Goals shouldn’t be too easy but not impossible either. Oftentimes, we tend to shoot for the moon too quickly, but building a project is a long endeavor. The most successful entrepreneurs you know have worked on their ideas for decades and honed their craft by tackling small problems one after another.

  Subscribe to LFB to stay tuned

Mental fitness in web3

The main goal for the web3 founder is to 1) create systems that provide for these needs on a daily basis and 2) protect these basics while riding the web3 entrepreneur life’s roller coaster. Doing this involves intention, tools, and discipline.

Marathonians build a light body that minimizes impact during foot landing. Rugby players put on a lot of muscles to optimize for short explosive bursts of power and at the same time protect their bodies from violent impacts. Knowledge workers also need to shape their physiology in a way that makes them resilient in their day-to-day. It's about maximizing mental fitness to mitigate the stressors caused by the following:

• Market ups and downs

• High screen time

• Large quantity of distracting stimuli (notifications)

• Context switching across apps and projects

• Digital-first relationships vs. IRL

• Fomo

None of the above are ‘good’ for your mental health. While the basics described in the first section do provide a strong foundation for your mental health, they don’t offset the toxicity of web3 life. Just like eating a lot of vegetables doesn’t offset eating junk food.

That’s why beyond the basics, your first line of defense is to be intentional about your mental diet by minimizing your exposure to these stressors: no day trading, no/few notifications enabled, working in blocks of 90 minutes to avoid context switching, no more than 2-3 tabs open, connecting with at least one human each day… etc.

Keep these mental health stressors in check.

You can go as far as noting down your relationship with each of these stressors through mindfulness and observation, then taking some time to reflect. Are these things really helping you or are they dragging you down?

Besides watching your mental diet, there is mental exercise. We could dedicate a whole article to this part because there are plenty for all tastes, styles, and goals, the same way running and rugby might appeal to different people. Here are some practices that really helped me early on and that I still use on a daily basis to enhance my mental health and resilience:

• Focused attention and open monitoring meditation → Stabilizing my attention, increasing emotional regulation, enhancing decision making.

• Wim Hof Breathwork → Each morning to boot my brain or during the day to process stress.

• NSDR → Each day after lunch or an intense workout to make sure I soothe my nervous system and refill energy & motivation. I think I owe much of my recovery and health to the many NSDR sessions I’ve had and I always come out surprised at how refreshed I feel.

• Reflection → Taking time to write, process complex emotions, and set the next steps on things I want to keep track of, in both my personal and professional life. Prioritizing the next day in detail to make sure I reduce uncertainty and have clarity on what I must achieve even when things are hectic. Note: gratitude journaling has been proven to have a positive impact on heart rate and inflammation.

• Open heart meditation → A time to remind myself of my deepest values and link them back to what I will do during the day. This is so underrated. It is also a good time to reinforce your self-compassion, self-worth, and positive emotions vs. negative ones which in turn increases your overall resilience and stamina.

  Subscribe to LFB to stay tuned

The health-first mindset

"You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." - James Clear, Atomic Habits

The way you implement your health basics, mental hygiene, and mental fitness practices form your daily systems. The things that structure your day, your routines, and habits. Those will be your foundation as you’re building through ups and downs.

Think of your systems as your sailboat and your entrepreneurial journey as a cruise across a wild ocean. If building your project is like sailing the pacific ocean and its storms, the quality and resilience of your ship will be a key to success in your journey.

Getting your systems right might be the most important investment you can do early on. Start learning how to work on yourself, implement and evolve systems that will be your best tools to solve problems on a daily basis and thrive.

Building habits until they become things that you do on auto-pilot takes time and effort. Habits generally take between 21-66 days to consolidate. That’s why we built a system that helps people build habits through peer accountability in our mental fitness program.

The 2nd cohort kicks off on Nov 28th, I definitely invite you to check it out if you’re ready to put in the work and become more mentally fit. You can also check out a 1 min video explainer here:

Spoiler: There are no hacks, shortcuts, or prescriptions to follow. It's your journey. It’s on you to design the mental diet and find the exercises that serve you best. If you’re looking for a place to start and train with like minded people, Twoplus might be the thing you’re looking for.

Let’s fucking build,
--
Louis & Moon

Jericho is the web3 founder community. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

Hi frens - Moon speaking,

I’m convinced Jericho can be taken back. It’s just a matter of time. The thing is, as soon as it’s done, we’ll need to massively invest in building it back up from the ruins left behind by the Goblins.

Investors used to be a normal sight in Jericho, they even formed their own clan along the Founders, Operators and Freelancers. Represented by Eagles, they were respected by many for their sharp, holistic thinking. But now they’re laying low, scattered across the metaverse; it took us a lot of time to find & identify them.

Find below the list of investors we came up with in the process.

For the next edition: Should we first improve our army’s mental strength (mental fitness for web3 builders) or observe the Goblins’ behavior (web3 observability)?

Vote on Twitter (72h-long vote)

Data

Even more important than the mapping is the data.

We gathered data from 120+ US-based web3 VC funds using their websites and Crunchbase profiles. We’ve carefully handpicked only the funds that still appear to be active in the space.

We also qualified the funds using the following criteria:

• Fund type: Is the fund web3 native, is it a web2 fund investing in web3, or is it a web3 company’s venture arm?

• Investment stage: Does it mainly invest in early-stages (pre-seed, seed), across stages, or only in later stages (Series A & above)?

• Industry: Infrastructure, Exchanges, DeFi, NFT, DAO, Gaming

• Web3 investments: The number of web3 companies they’ve invested in

• Lead ratio: The percentage of investments where the fund led the round

• Investments include: 3 examples of companies they’ve invested in

You can find the full list of funds here. Feel free to download the CSV for your own use.

Mapping methodology

From this comprehensive list, we decided to do a visual mapping.

The mapping is based on two factors:

• Is the fund investing early-stage or across stages? We removed the late-stage-only funds because there weren’t many of them. Plus, web3 is a relatively young industry where early-stage capital is needed more than is growth capital.

• What is the fund type (Web3 native, Web2 OGs, Institutional)?

Assessing the performance of the funds was impossible due to a lack of data. For the mapping, we decided to select the most active ones per category based on their number of web3 investments and their lead ratio.

This is a map, not a territory. We surely made some mistakes categorizing the funds, & getting numbers right, and probably missed some funds in the process. Feel free to ping us on Twitter if you can add good info!

Examples of web3 native funds

Polychain: Invested across stages in 161 web3 companies (52% lead ratio) such as Coinbase, Maker & Starkware

Pantera: Invested across stages in 201 web3 companies (39% lead ratio) such as Circle, Polkadot & Alchemy

Paradigm: Invested across stages in 85 web3 companies (63% lead ratio) such as Coinbase, OpenSea & Cosmos

Shima Capital: Invested early in 151 web3 companies (13% lead ratio) such as Klima DAO, Chingari & Portal

1kx: Invested early in 50 web3 companies (38% lead ratio) such as Gnosis, WalletConnect & Snapshot

Race Capital: Invested early in 26 web3 companies (54% lead ratio) such as FTX, Lightning Labs & Solend

Examples of web2 OG funds

a16z crypto: Invested across stages in 26 web3 companies (81% lead ratio) such as NEAR, dYdX & Celo

Bitkraft: Invested across stages in 17 web3 companies (60% lead ratio) such as YGG, Immutable X & Blackpool

USV: Invested across stages in 23 web3 companies (42% lead ratio) such as Coinbase, Dapper & Polygon

NFX: Invested early in 39 web3 companies (50% lead ratio) such as Ramp, Biconomy & Coinvise

Better Capital: Invested early in 23 web3 companies (31% lead ratio) such as QuestBook, Vauld & Wall

Boost VC: Invested early in 63 web3 companies (9% lead ratio) such as Coinbase, Filecoin & 0x

Examples of institutional funds

Alameda Research: Invested across stages in 178 web3 companies (31% lead ratio) such as Maple, Messari & Balancer

Republic Capital: Invested across stages in 19 web3 companies (16% lead ratio) such as Gnosis, NEAR & Polygon

Wintermute Ventures: Invested across stages in 38 web3 companies (5% lead ratio) such as dYdX, Bitpanda & Zerion

Coinbase Ventures: Invested early in 278 web3 companies (6% lead ratio) such as Compound, OpenSea & Alchemy

Solana Ventures: Invested early in 57 web3 companies (18% lead ratio) such as Phantom, STEPN & Genopets

Figment: Invested early in 20 web3 companies (undisclosed lead ratio) such as Composable Finance, Nomad & Flux

Web3 work opportunities

• Ethos (wallet on Sui) is hiring an engineer

• BHR (real estate protocol) is hiring a Senior Blockchain Engineer

Let’s fucking build,
--
Moon

Jericho is the web3 founder community. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

Hi frens - Moon speaking,

We’re making good progress on taking Jericho back from the Goblins - step by step, we’re preparing to win the battle. While recruiting for our army, we’ve noticed that many people have the desire to join but for whatever reason just weren’t ready yet. Here are some tips we’d like to share with these soon-to-be converts.

For the next edition: Should we first identify investors to rebuild Jericho (web3 VC mapping) or improve our army’s mental strength (mental fitness for web3 builders)?

Vote on Twitter (72h-long vote)

There’s a new paradigm in town: The talent brand paradigm.

Companies have employer brands: They show who they are & what they offer, hoping to be perceived as attractive. A solid employer brand is still a must-have for web3 companies to have unfair advantages in the talent war. The thing is, while the number of jobs posted in web3 has tripled since 2021, the number of applicants grew 8x during the same time.

That means the companies have the leverage and can carefully select web3 native (or at least fluent), experienced, skilled, vocal & culturally aligned talent.

As a talent looking to enter the space, you need to become more attractive by building up your talent brand.

To get a job in web3, you have to go through 3 stages:

1. Learn about web3

2. Contribute to web3

3. Join web3

I’ve seen many people trying to jump straight to stage 3, applying to web3 jobs without even having a wallet. If you skip steps 1 & 2 and go directly to step 3, you’re basically showing companies that you’re passive & don’t care enough. Think about the parallel with going from big corporations to startups: The cultural shift is important, so take it seriously.

Learn about web3

Web3 is hard to get. Very, very hard to get. It takes at least 6-9 months of active evening & weekend research to get a broad understanding of the space.

Your goal shouldn’t be to learn everything because that’s simply impossible. The space moves faster than you, keeping up with everything and still doing your current job is too much.

Your goal is to become web3-fluent: You want to deeply understand the core concepts and be able to engage in serious conversations.

1. Go through a program like Operation 3 or join a community of peers where you can learn intensively and ask questions (even ones that might seem stupid).

2. Choose a rabbit hole, a.k.a. a topic of interest: DeFi, DAOs, NFTs, Gaming, or Infrastructure. Even then, exploring DeFi and understanding all the concepts/players will take months. You can decide to focus on something even more niche, such as web3 enterprise solutions or social tokens.

3. Go where web3 is: Personal accounts on Twitter, Telegram groups, Discord servers, quality newsletters… Avoid web3 LinkedIn/Tiktok content at all costs.

4. Learn about the culture, going beyond the concepts, use cases, and tech. Web3 is just as much a cultural shift as it is a technological revolution. Learn all the codes, jargon, memes & more if you’re not already familiar with them.

Contribute to web3

Wait, why would I need to contribute?

Learning about web3 isn’t enough to guarantee you a job, it’s simply a prerequisite. You need to go well beyond that and publicly show you’re into web3.

This is what the talent brand is all about.

Web3 is about decentralization. Decentralization is about ownership and autonomy. That translates into the work realm, too. Even if you’re not going to work for a DAO, but rather for a web3 company/startup, the cultural aspects of decentralization dominate the way work is structured.

In web3, you’re not joining as a mere employee executing orders, but as an independent actor with your own agency. Companies aren’t looking for passive employees, but for assets.

Your role as a core team member will be closer to that of a creator/influencer/networker - a contributor to web3 as a whole before being the employee of startup X. People will expect you to go beyond your job, act independently, take responsibility, and have a public presence.

In startups, founders have personal brands. In web3, everybody has a personal brand.

Besides learning, these are the things you should do:

• Do stuff on-chain (if you’re not using the blockchain, what are you even doing here?)

• Set up & pimp your Twitter account

• Tweet about topics of interest

• Show you understand the codes and want to be part of web3 (don’t just tweet WAGMI all day, figure out what is lame vs. what isn’t)

• Create content in places other than Twitter (write articles, launch a newsletter or podcast)

• Join web3 communities

• Contribute to DAOs

• Go to live events and hackathons

• Build side projects

Web3 is a two-sided coin: You’re either trading or building. Choose your team. If you spend your time retweeting NFT giveaways or talking about pumps & dumps, that won’t send the right signal to employers. Companies want to see that you’re aligned with the interests of the web3 movement and care about decentralization. They’re looking for missionaries, not mercenaries obsessed with short-term returns.

Even if you want to join the B2B/infra side of web3, embracing the culture is relevant. Here are accounts from founding team members of large web3 B2B companies:

It doesn’t mean that you have to copy anyone. Find your own voice & style.

Ideally, don’t do step 1 and then move on to step 2. Start posting & contributing from day one. Don’t be afraid of sounding stupid. Be active, learn, iterate.

Join web3

After doing all of that, you might realize that web3 isn’t for you - that’s fine. But if you’ve spent enough time learning and contributing to the space, there’s a good chance you’ll be attracted to joining web3 full-time.

Doing all the above is the best way to guarantee you a job. The vital prerequisites are playing with the blockchain & being Twitter-ready (companies don’t care that much about your LinkedIn).

But there’s one last thing you should do before applying: Reframe your expectations.

Embrace early-stage & chaos or don’t join web3 - we’re early anon.

Web3 companies follow a power law distribution. 20% of the companies are large ones (think Coinbase), but 80% of the companies are small ones occupying the long tail (under 20 people or so).

The space is still in its early days, but it did attract a lot of venture capital over the past two years. There are many early-stage startups hiring - this is where you’ll probably land a job. You’re not just joining web3, you’re also most probably joining a very early-stage startup.

“Web3 + early-stage” comes with major caveats:

• Your web2 job - & your title - probably doesn’t exist in web3. Be ok with that. You’ll create your own version of your job.

• You’ll have multiple jobs at the same time, especially if you are non-technical. Most of the teams have 60-80% tech employees and very few “business” positions. If you lead the community, you’ll do way more than just managing a Discord. Be ready, anticipate, and don’t get held up by the title.

• Brand new jobs are emerging: Tokenomist, Smart contract Developer, Game Theorist, Protocol Specialist… Explore new paths and learn specific knowledge to get access to those jobs.

• If you’re a tech talent who’s new to web3 with zero smart contract experience, don’t bother trying to get a smart contract job. Smart contracts are extremely sensitive, so companies want to make sure the person handling them has experience. Ideally, take other tech roles (front/back/data) and upskill or start building tools & NFT collections before applying, making sure you can show resilient contracts to your future employer.

• If you’re a senior (8+ years experience) business profile, target more established companies to keep the same lifestyle. Otherwise, understand the potential equity upside and take that into account during salary negotiations. Bet on the right horse. Once again, you have to be OK with ending up with a larger or different scope.

These caveats apply to the startup long tail. You can also join large web3 companies (Binance, FTX, Coinbase, Consensys, Ledger), but there aren’t too many of those around yet.

The other option is to join a DAO full-time. The best way to do that is to start contributing to the DAOs you like and transition into a full-time job as soon as you see an opportunity.

Exceptions exist everywhere, even in web3. But if you go through the steps, you’ll dramatically increase your odds of getting a job in the space.

We’re working on something to help you identify and assess work opportunities in web3, so follow Jericho and stay tuned by subscribing below.

Web3 work opportunities

• Kiln (staking-as-a-service) is hiring a Senior Back-End Engineer

• Sismo (reputational ZK badges) is hiring a Front-end / Product Engineer

• Rarible (NFT marketplace) is hiring a Partnership Manager

• Drew is looking for two co-founders (tech & growth) for Frens (web3 community growth software)

• Roch is looking for Product Marketing Designer freelancer

Let’s fucking build,
--
Moon

Jericho is the web3 founder community. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

Hi frens - Moon speaking,

Since unveiling our goal of taking Jericho back in LFB’s first edition, we’ve made good progress onboarding new members in the resistance.

We spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out the kind of people that’s needed to take Jericho back from the Goblins. We know numbers are necessary to make a difference, but we don’t want to count on mercenaries. We want to gather people around our cause, and so our strategy is based on curation and mission-alignment.

Because you can only understand that mission if we explain it, we decided to share our framework for approaching these decisions.

For the next edition: Should we first identify investors to rebuild Jericho (web3 VC mapping) or train aspiring builders (tips to get hired in web3)?

Vote on Twitter (48h-long vote)

Community is everything in web3

Community directly translates to revenue through token-based economics (once you have a token), and even more directly to token appreciation (more buyers for a fixed supply = the price goes up).

Community is so important that building a community before starting on the product has been the path chosen by many successful projects. This strategy became known as the Minimum Viable Community (vs. MVP).

Prioritize community-building

Don’t half-ass the community, don’t think it’s easy.

Building a good community requires a lot of effort to attract, engage and retain members. There are tons of communities out there that people can join. If you don’t understand your funnel, persona, and why/how people will be aligned with your interests, you’re ngmi.

Community managers are essential in web3, and their job isn’t just posting stuff on Instagram - it’s about acquiring and leveraging the community members to improve the experience, the product & send tokens to the moon.

They do so across a 3-stage funnel: member acquisition, activation & retention. That’s just a general approximation of the reality, but it’s still a good model to have in mind when thinking about efficient community-building.

About acquisition

Above all, you need to acquire new members.

In web3, acquisition channels are actually very limited. Unless your focus is to onboard new users to crypto - in which case you can use paid acquisition channels like Facebook/Google Ads or SEO, for example -, the main levers to drive acquisition are:

• Social Media (especially Twitter, including promotional activities such as Twitter ads or giveaways)

• Referral (incentivizing current members to refer new members)

• Content (videos, podcasts, newsletters)

• PR (press)

• Partnerships/Sponsoring (events, podcasts, newsletters…)

• Influencer marketing

We’re closer to marketing/brand strategies than growth strategies in web3 (at least for the moment).

You usually want to direct attention to either your Twitter account, content, website, or Discord. If you are into building a community in web3, Discord is the tool you need to set up correctly and use to leverage your community.

About activation

When members are landing in your community, you need to keep them engaged and performing the tasks you want them to perform.

You’ve drawn the attention of a potential community member and now she’s landed in your Discord. Now it’s time to get her involved via:

• Quests & bounties

• Community calls

• Governance

• Contests

• Working groups (or pods)

• Internal events

• Games

• Product use

To nail activation, you need to know the persona really well: What drives her? What are her values? What does she love to spend time doing?

Make sure you get this part down, otherwise you’re just spending $ filling up a leaky bucket. Optimize priority engagement and/or intended actions before doubling down on acquisition.

If you don’t do activation correctly, members will join and either leave the Discord in a matter of minutes/hours/days or be completely inactive until they eventually leave your Discord months later.

Ultimate activation is the conversion from community member to product user (and then frequent product user). The only exception is (obviously) if you don’t have a product yet, which can be the case for some DAO models & pre-product early-stage projects.

About retention

Finally, when you have engaged users, you want to make sure you keep them.

To keep members engaged for months/years, you need to foster perfect long-term alignment.

• Ownership (sub-DAO or working group leadership)

• On-chain voting

• veTokens

• Product features

If a member ends up joining you full-time and working for your organization, you’ve nailed it, creating a viable path from user to contributor to operator.

Now that we’ve gone through the basics, let’s dive into community-specific strategies.

The Gate-Gain community framework

Every community in web3 has a gate and a gain.

The gate is the community entrance. You can either value quantity by making it open or quality by making it closed.

The gain is the reason why members join your community. Besides your product’s value proposition, you can leverage two types of incentives: social and financial.

Based on where you are or want to be regarding the gate & the gain, your community-building strategy across the funnel will vary. Here are some across-the-funnel ideas and tips for each community type.

Open Gate / Financial Gain

L1, L2, DEXes, Lending protocols - technically heavy and permissionless open protocols like Aave, Polygon, Sushi, Ethereum

Acquisition:

• Explain your vision clearly and how you differentiate yourself - if people believe in it, they will seek profits by investing and supporting

• Use a well-written whitepaper (Gitbook or PDF), PR campaigns, & influencer marketing (especially YouTube)

• In general, invest in educating the market about your solution

Activation:

• Retroactively airdrop tokens based on on-chain activity

• Set up a forum to get ideas & feedback from the community

• Ease governance as much as possible to allow anyone to participate

Retention:

• Network effects kick in when people build on top of your protocol - invest massively in developer onboarding for integration development (grow-the-pie strategy)

• Align the financial incentives over  the long-term with veTokens

Closed Gate / Financial Gain

Investment & collector DAOs and guilds like PleasrDAO, YGG, or BitDAO

Acquisition:

• Your mission is to build FOMO - this is how the brand will become strong

• Communicate a lot about the members (who they are, why they are cool), returns, & perks

• Invite-based member acquisition

Activation:

• Demand financial input/investment as part of the selection process

• Make sure people know each other, foster 1-1 relationships

Retention:

• Generate returns (absolute prerequisite to drive word-of-mouth)

• Be transparent on asset allocations and performance

• Foster the feeling of asset co-ownership (we’re proud to own it together, it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise)

Open Gate / Social Gain

Onboarding solutions and open DAOs like Rabbithole, Layer3 or UkraineDAO

Acquisition:

• Get as much mainstream awareness as possible

• Use web2 acquisition channels (incl. paid)

• PR & content campaigns

• Personal branding from the founders (the more the vision/mission is communicated, the better)

Activation:

• As financial incentives are lacking, either your mission must be very strong (like UkraineDAO or ConstitutionDAO) or your tool must be solving a really strong need (like education)

• Make the onboarding as smooth as possible: People should quickly understand the context & know how they can contribute

• Orient the topics of channels, activities, and discussions toward the cause/values/culture

Retention:

• If you feel like the community moat isn’t big enough, find needs and build a product (besides the community) to strengthen the moat

• Strengthen the community feeling with merch, events, or NFTs

• As it’s social and open, people can easily come and go - create alignment by embodying the values perfectly as a team

• Be transparent by communicating often about everything you’re doing

Closed Gate / Social Gain

Private clubs and social DAOs like Jericho, FWB or BAYC

Acquisition:

• Even more than for Closed Gate / Financial Gain communities, build FOMO

• Your community is a club, you’re in or you’re out - the stronger the mystery from the outside, the stronger the desire to get in will be

• Generate value for members, let word of mouth play its role

• Invite-based member acquisition

Activation:

• Make sure people know each other, foster 1-1 relationships

• Off-chain votes

• Communicate internally - daily or weekly recaps are key

• Make people feel like they’re part of the same movement by defining clear values and communicating about them

• Talk to & onboard everyone individually

Retention:

• Sub-divide the community with as much granularity as possible to keep groups small, accountability real, and connections strong (sub-DAOs of sub-DAOs of sub-DAOs of su…)

• Involve people in governance and give them leadership

• Use social status as a retention tool via NFTs (you lose the NFT = you lose access, you lose the community = you lose the status)

  ---

Even if you want to build an open community, I suggest starting small. It’s the best way to get quality feedback, understand people’s needs, and refine your setup/product/offer to fit the needs. Only then does opening it up make sense.

The GG framework is just that: a framework. It’s a spectrum, you could have part of your experience that is closed and another aspect open (access open, but contribution closed). BAYC, for example, is such a vast community with different asset holders and incentives that it could fit in all of the buckets.

Also, it’s not because your project is in one bucket right now that it will stay there. Some buckets make sense at a given point of the roadmap, but then things need to change later. You could decide to use social incentives and a closed gate to first build up a brand and then later open things up when needed to accelerate your growth.

More articles about web3 community-building:

• Minimum Viable Community: What It Is and How to Build One

• Building Web3 Communities in Discord

• How to grow decentralized communities

• Growing A Tokenized Community

• Roles within community building

• The Web3 Growth Playbook

Web3 work opportunities

• Kiln (staking-as-a-service) is hiring a Smart Contract Engineer (Solidity)

• Exclusible (luxury web3 platform) is hiring a Chief Product Officer

• Crew3 (community quests) is hiring a Software Engineer

• Eman.eth is looking for an UI design freelancer

• Arthaud is looking for a technical co-founder to build the OS for on-chain companies

Let’s fucking build,
--
Moon

Jericho is the web3 founder community. Meet, learn & build with 400+ hand-picked founders from 40+ countries.

Introducing our lore

My name is Moon.

I used to work as an independent scribe in Jericho, but was imprisoned by the Goblins when they took over.

One day, a teardrop-shaped light appeared on the floor of my cell. It moved toward the door, which jumped open. I followed the light, out of the prison and eventually to the Blue Gate. Crossing through the gate, I found my new home: the hidden village of Ramiros.

I couldn’t believe it.

Far from the Goblins’ eyes, a resistance of 300+ builders was gathering & preparing to take Jericho back.

As a scribe, I decided to start Let’s Fucking Build (LFB) with a simple goal in mind: Spread the word about building/working in web3 and thus strengthen the resistance.

As part of LFB, I will decentralize the decision-making for my writing topics. You shall thus choose the next edition’s topic. We can’t take Jericho back & repopulate it alone - we need your help.

For the next edition: Should we first identify investors to rebuild Jericho (web3 VC mapping) or prepare a strategy to build our army (web3 community-building framework)?

Vote on Twitter (48h-long vote)

Introducing our new community experience

Growth-driven redesign

Jericho started as a group of friends and organically grew into one of the most attractive web3 builder communities. 300+ world-class builders from 25+ countries across the world meet, help each other and build together in Jericho on a daily basis.

The selective nature of Jericho’s community hasn’t prevented it from experiencing fully organic 25% MoM growth.

Growth-generated bottlenecks invited us to reinvent our community experience. We decided to automate and simplify entry while token-gating member content & showcasing the first principles of our product vision.

Straightforward onboarding flow

We’re improving 3 core moments:

1- Application

Anyone can apply to join Jericho.

To do so:

• Connect your wallet on app.jericho.gg

• Complete the profile & application quests

2- Onboarding

• If you’re selected by our Guardians, you’ll get access to the onboarding quest via the Rain Hammer NFT

• After completing it, you’ll automatically receive Hudur’s Anvil - your Jericho membership NFT

3- Member content

• The anvil unlocks all our Discord channels, our searchable member directory, & our wiki

Token-gated, gasless, soulbound & automated

Each quest gives Experience Points (XP) proving your Jericho activity and a gasless ERC-1155 Polygon NFT from our Jericho Artifacts collection. Complete the quest and get the NFT, no minting, no fees - we’re taking care of all that on our side.

All our NFTs are Soulbound Tokens - they’re non-transferable.

Our integrations with Twitter and Discord validate all quests automatically.

Jericho’s content (member directory, wiki, content library) is now token-gated and only accessible to verified Jericho builders.

Continuous networking quest

We’re introducing our first continuous quest: A networking quest called “Make a new fren”.

During this quest, Jericho members will prove they’re connected to each other by selecting a fellow builder & uploading a proof of frenship (screenshot or selfie).

Each connection unlocks an artifact (The Necklace of Frenship). The two wallets are engraved in this NFT’s metadata. You can’t fake a connection in Jericho, you have to prove it. A fren is a fren.

This quest will gradually build up Jericho’s verified social graph.

Lore for builders

Quests, XPs, artifacts, & game-like UI… These elements & the whole concept of lore come from the gaming & entertainment industries.

Just because work has always been experienced as a constraint, doesn’t mean it should stay that way.

Jericho is first & foremost a story - the story of a world where builders are fighting for their dreams.

We’re not building just one more boring & soulless B2B SaaS. Jericho’s lore & community are at the core of our product strategy.

Web3 work opportunities

• Bunches (web3’s messenger) is hiring a Head of Design

• Courtyard (physical asset tokenization) is hiring a Backend Software Engineer

• Floor NFTs (the NFT app) is hiring an iOS Engineer

• WYTLAND (web3 travel platform) is hiring a Lead Frontend Engineer

• Ethos (the first wallet on Sui) is hiring a Product Designer

Let’s fucking build,
--
Moon

Behind a great community, there is great content.
Behind great content, there is a great community.

There is no better place than a small group of like-minded folks to find alpha.
What is true for trading opportunities is also true for building opportunities.

Content mode activated

At Jericho, we built the dream library for web3 builders. It’s called Alexandria. Centralizing & cataloging content to learn how to build a web3 organization was a must.

We also started publishing our own content: Twitter threads from our private AMAs with some of the best builders in the space (i.e. co-founders of Polygon, Near, YGG, Sandbox, or Messari).

Beyond that, the conversations we have in Jericho and the bright models our builders are working on are also supposed to be shared.

Introducing Let’s Fucking Build by Jericho

A newsletter for web3 builders.

Frameworks, mappings, deep dives, low-key web3 project discovery… We want every edition to be unique and bring value.

100% value. 0% noise.

Let’s fucking build 🛠
--
Vlad