The tree and the shrine.
Maybe this is just a delusional Eduardo who visited Tokyo for the first time. But for the first time in my short period at the Public Goods ecosystem, I felt that it was cool to be on a PG panel.
Why? DAOTokyo was held at a traditional Japanese shrine. Not a conference, not a stadium, not a small room on the other side of the city, but at a traditional Japanese shrine from the 730s. Yeap, it was 1300 years old. That by itself gets you excited as soon as you arrive.(For more context, there wasn’t only one, but many old and traditional buildings surrounding it)
Then I realized how uncool Public Goods were before. It was like there was a Before Nouns (B.F.) and After Nouns (A.F.) era for me. Public Nouns were the first funding mechanism for Public Goods that made me wanna spend my ETH on a NFT. The gamifying, simple, and aesthetically pleasant project that Public Goods nouns is, shows how far we can take a narrative that is hard to grasp and translate it into big head’s images that people are excited about.
So it’s not only making the funding mechanism and distribution of funds universally attractive, but also 1. How can you create a narrative that people can relate to?
That’s a hard question to answer rather easier to spot: Anna, Austin and Auryn (my co-panelists in DAOTokyo) were strongly related to Public Goods and each on their own were thriving to improve the ecosystem. However, despite our shared passion and dedication, we still felt somewhat isolated from one another. Each of us has our own grants and grantees, but there wasn’t a common ground for us to come together and share best practices, bad practices, or the struggles of retaining grantees engaged with our respective communities.
2. How do we succeed in keeping the builders excited and engaged?
That’s another question for the pot.
Since I believe we can only learn from each other, I will share what ENS Public Goods grants is doing: this initiative is creating a (nearly) reliable source of funding that supports both big-name projects and smaller builders alike. It’s a scaling grants program (and also an experiment) that starts at 1 ETH on Step A and can go up to 50K USDC in Step C.
The answers to these questions (1 & 2) are yet to be found, but in the meantime, ENS is experimenting with nurturing and giving back to the communities and builders who make the whole project a living one.
This idea of a scalable funding mechanism for Public Goods was my pitch at DAOTokyo, and I got back things like: a Superfluid for bounties, an UBI for builders, and many other coming from people who actually, like me, believed that DAOTokyo made it cool to talk about Public Goods.
We were all excited, and it still feels like, even in the midst of a bear market, there are people trying to answer the previous questions.
Of course, I also recognize that there are still many more questions to be answered: How do we measure the impact of Public Goods? How can we incentivize funding for Public Goods? Does the concept of Public Goods change from the legacy system to web3? How do we connect Public Goods with IRL circumstances?
Even though I am still jet lagged and optimistic from Tokyo, I’m eager to hear other peoples questions and answers, because it still feels sometimes like the tree falling on the forest that no one heard.
At least this time, the tree was heard loud and clear at the Kanda Myojin Shrine.
Epilogue: Special thanks to the team of Fracton Ventures, MetaGovernance Stewards, Makoto, Luc, Anna, Greg and Jeff.
