Backdrop

A platform that's connecting tokenized communities

👋 Welcome to the seventh issue of The Syllabus from Invisible College – a weekly newsletter that will help you navigate the complex world of web3. To get this newsletter delivered to your inbox, subscribe here:

Before we begin, a disclaimer – nothing here is financial advice. We’re analyzing projects that we find interesting in the hope that you’ll enjoy learning about them as well.

With that, let’s dive in.

Community is at the heart of most web3 projects. But, as any member of a token-based community can attest, participating can be exhausting. Between sifting through noisy Discord servers and parsing on-chain decisions via Etherscan, there is a lack of tooling to bring order to the chaos. That’s where Backdrop comes in.

Keeping up with Community Activity

Backdrop enables community members to follow and participate in tokenized communities by providing digestible information about on and off-chain activity. Here are some features that Backdrop uses to keep community members informed:

Community profiles

Each organization on Backdrop gets a public profile that displays important links, community stats, a member roster, and a feed of on-chain community activity. Since Backdrop is web3 native, it also gives communities the ability to create discussion threads that are only open to token-holders.

Activity Feeds

Backdrop adds context to on-chain and off-chain decisions, making it easier for community members to keep up with updates and decisions. 

Notifications

For contributors who want important notifications pushed to them, Backdrop offers users the ability to get daily or weekly updates about community activity right in their inboxes.

Individual Reputation & Community Discovery

Backdrop also creates profiles for individual community members that allow them to display their shipped projects. Not only does this give communities an easy way to evaluate potential members, but it also provides helps communities to get discovered by potential members.

Finding Signal in the Noise

Backdrop isn’t necessarily trying to replace existing community tools like Discord. Instead, founders Joey DeBruin and Rapha Menezes are building a tool that aggregates high signal information like announcements, proposals, or votes.  

Given the information overwhelm that accompanies participating in web3 communities, there is no doubt that Backdrop is tackling a big problem. If they are successful, it seems likely that a host of token-based communities will prosper alongside them.

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Want to get started with Backdrop?

• Explore their website, sign in to your wallet, and set up your profile. 

• Follow the company on Twitter

• Check out Backdrop’s community profile on the platform

Other projects we’re exploring

• Dopex – An options trading platform on Arbitrum attempting to unlock on-chain derivatives.

• Squads – Provides the on-chain building blocks for Solana-based DAOs.

• Anchor – A decentralized savings protocol that offers ~20% APY on Terra stablecoin deposits.

Invisible College Recommended Reads

• From Minimal Viable Product to Minimal Viable Community | 7-minute read
  A framework for launching and iterating on token-based communities.

• Infinite Games - How Axie Infinity and Play-to-Earn is Transforming Gaming | 60-minute read
  A free e-book exploring GameFi through in-depth, on-chain data analysis into the top blockchain games.

• How to Judge if a Crypto Protocol can Execute its Vision | 9-minute read
  A useful list of things to consider when assessing new web3 investment opportunities.

Community Updates

Decentraliens Public Sale

After a successful first week of the mint, the IC treasury is now well-funded enough to hire the team we need to launch the next phase of Invisible College.

Accordingly, we’ve decided to conclude the public sale early – on Sunday, March 6th at 12:30 pm PT. Any NFTs left at that time will be minted and held in the Invisible College treasury.

By keeping a significant portion of our NFTs in the Invisible College treasury, our community will have the ability to grow a much larger treasury and control supply on the secondary market.

In the meantime, if you’d like to mint your Decentraliens, you can visit the Invisible College website here.

This video will walk you through how to mint.

Rarity & Secondary Sales

Once the mint has concluded on Sunday, we will open up secondary sales on Magic Eden and publish trait rarity on our website.

Upcoming Events

🧠  Web3 Learning Events

• Kickstarting a New NFT Ecosystem w/ Chris Pham of ENFT – Mon (2/28) @ 1:30 pm PT (Discord)

• The Tokenomics of Axie Infinity – Tues (3/1) @ 1 pm PT (Discord)

• Owning a Piece of Digital Real Estate – Wed (3/2) @ 12 pm PT (Twitter Spaces)

• The Philosophy Behind Creator Cabins – Thurs (3/3) @ 10 am PT (Discord)

• DeFi Deep Dive on Convex Finance – Fri (3/4) @ 12 pm PT (Discord)

🙌 Community Events

• Town Hall – Thurs (3/3) @ 12 pm PT (Discord)

Events Calendar

Want to get Invisible College events on your Google calendar? Just click this link to subscribe to our events calendar.

Invisible College, is a learning DAO that helps web3-curious builders and creators explore and launch projects. If you’d like to learn more about our community and get smarter about web3, check out our Discord server.