BanklessDAO Gitcoin Grants Proposal The BanklessDAO Mission BanklessDAO is a decentralised community coordinating and propagating bankless media, culture, and education. BanklessDAO launched on May 4, 2021 with the goal to drive adoption and awareness of truly bankless money systems like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Together, the BanklessDAO community collaborates to create user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralised financial technologies through education, media, and culture. The BanklessDAO community runs a variety of projects; for the scope of this grant we are focusing on the ones which provide goods and services to the entire world such as Bankless Academy, Bankless Africa, International Media Nodes, Bankless Publishing, and BanklessDAO Newsletters. The projects listed below have had contributors working on them for many months and although some of the project contributors earn governance tokens, the work being done far outstrips the existing remuneration. Second, and perhaps more importantly, these projects aim to help the wider crypto ecosystem and not just the Bankless community — and hence are public goods. Bankless Academy 🚀 Brief Bankless Academy is a leading web3 "knowledge on-ramp" - a practical & engaging education experience with infrastructure preparing to be scaled across the blockchain multiverse. We're helping the world adopt the permissionless tools they need to go Bankless. 🔥 Vision We are building a web3 world where: 📚 Information is frictionless and free. 👊 Communities are high-impact creators. 🌐 Education is permissionless (no central body dictates what you can/can't see). 🗺️ Trajectory Current focuses: Establish a Bankless-native syllabus/user journey to move users from Centralised Exchanges to Ethereum Layer 2 self-custody. Pursue collaboration with popular dApps to educate users on trusted tools available to them. Build theory lessons with expert guests from the Bankless 'Hall of Fame'. Form frontier partnerships so that the Academy dApp continues to support interoperability and cutting-edge use cases. Continue research, development, and onboarding for our whitelabel platform to scale our efforts into other web3 ecosystems. Build a framework for contributor content creation to empower talented community educators. 📀 Try the dApp: https://app.banklessacademy.com/ Multiple wallets supported Mobile friendly No download https://giveth.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmPkVpSqhUr1bUALLHL2ErzytqM5wHh2RmkCF82GApe8Lv 🌏 Let's scale permissionless education together! Bankless Africa Our community is focused on promoting the bDAO mission. We leverage crypto-based creations like Bitcoin, DeFi, and NFTs to tackle problems faced by Africans. Achievement/Growth: *Our podcast highlights projects and people making an impact in the African crypto/web3 ecosystem. *Our Newsletter provides well-curated information on Bitcoin, DeFi, crypto regulations, projects, and web3 funding in the crypto/web3 space in Africa. *Our website helps Africans access educational courses. It includes a link to Bankless Academy, where many excellent web3 courses are available. Eventually this website will become a native-educational platform for Africans. Website v1 can be found here: https://banklessafrica.com/ *We onboard and train contributors using a web3 ethos, teaching them how to contribute in various DAOs and potentially bootstrap project ideas they have. Some links to get into our community can be found at https://linktr.ee/banklessafrica. International Media Nodes (IMN) Only 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers and roughly 15% speak English on some level. The initial goal of the IMN project is to reach the remaining 80% by translating and distributing content about blockchain technology, DeFi, the Metaverse, and web3. All links can be found at https://www.banklessimn.xyz/. The International Media Nodes project believes in the liberating effect of going Bankless and what it can do for improving financial wellbeing and stability throughout the world. Creating and maintaining communities of people who do not speak English and educating them/opening the door for them to onboard into web3 is one of the most crucial pieces of infrastructure if we want web3 to be any different than web2. The story so far… In Q1 2023, we produced content in 15 languages, which gathered an average of 20,000 views. Producing original written and AV content is a challenge in itself, still our talented contributors produce over 100 pieces each month. Over the next months and years, as we continue to produce content, we will also start developing local language communities which will develop web3 talent in local languages as well as organising events in different geographical locations to onboard more people. Bankless Publishing Bankless Publishing has a simple mission: ship top-shelf educational web3 content. The World’s First Decentralised Publishing House Bankless Publishing has pioneered the concept of a decentralised publishing house. Working with a global team of editors and designers, we have shipped nearly 200 articles, focused mainly on introductory content covering various protocols, projects, and communities within web3. We continue to ship multiple times per week, and work to refine what it means to publish in a web3 world while embracing a web3 ethos. Our vision is to ennoble our writers' work through a multi-stage editing process, and we seek to launch 1,000 new web3 writers. We’re proud to be well on our way to achieving this goal. Bankless Publishing can be found at https://banklesspublishing.com/ BanklessDAO Newsletters BanklessDAO has been shipping newsletters since the DAO was founded nearly two years ago. We started with one internal newsletter, the Weekly Rollup, and quickly added more, including: Decentralized Arts, with a focus on NFTs and the Metaverse. State of the DAOs, which explores the latest developments and thought leadership in the DAO space. Decentralized Law, which produces high-quality legal analysis on issues arising within web3. DeFi Download, analysing all-things decentralised finance. Bankless Publishing Recap, which summarizes recent articles by Bankless Publishing. We’re proud and excited to announce that we’ll be shipping a new publication at the end of April about the burgeoning Layer 2 ecosystem. We are closer than ever to our vision of shipping a newsletter each day of the week. As with Bankless Publishing, the BanklessDAO newsletters are shipped using decentralized processes and a diverse global talent pool. We have grown our subscriber base to more than 19,000, and regularly ship close to 20 newsletters per month. You can find our newsletters at: https://banklessdao.substack.com/ Our Ask to the Crypto Community ... At the highest level, the web3 education provided by BanklessDAO stands to empower humanity with the informed decision making required in our digital future. We firmly believe that we align with the vision of the Gitcoin Community, and that together we can work to slay Moloch. We seriously can’t wait to show you what we have to offer this space. Let’s Impact Together! BanklessDAO believes in the liberating effects of going Bankless and the impact our ideals can have on improving the financial stability and wellbeing of our world. With the help of the Gitcoin Community, we will accelerate the spread of an ungated web3 education for everyone. Let’s help the world go Bankless!