WIM Community Update - Birthday Edition 🎂

It’s been only a year… Wow!

Such a packed one!

365 days ago, a handful of Web3 folks gathered for some nerdy blockchain talks in a bar.

Now this group is a beautiful DAO with +330 members, +60 contributors and some of the most exciting projects in the space — including our own conference and our own trading protocol.

A year of hard work, friendships, challenges, victories and learnings: Let’s come back on the major milestones of this adventure and look at what’s next.

Web3 Island Makers is a DAO that emerged in Canary Islands in Summer 2022. It was created by a group of Web3 professionals of all levels who wanted to create an epicenter for Web3 and Tech entrepreneurship.
Well…
Let us spoil you right away: It is not only about Web3 anymore, neither is it limited to Canary Islands. It is expanding to new territories and techs. But we’ll get to that part.

Note: If at any point in this article you feel like exploring the timeline in greater details, check our previous updates here.

Chapter 1: Connect. From Meetups to our own Conference

Can you guys remember that very first Meetup?

August 2022, Puerto De La Cruz, Tenerife.
It was just a test to see if there was some Web3 peeps around. And the answer was yes!

We had a talk about Web3 in the Music Industry and even had a participant, Steve Mariani, coming on stage to pitch one of his (many) projects!

At the end of the event, one of the most encouraging compliment was gifted by the audience: “For a minute I was wondering if i was in Silicon Valley or in Canary Islands! This is really needed here!”

So this is how it started: Casual drinks enriched with blockchain use cases presentations. And also some other drinks after the first drinks. 

30, then 40, then 50 attendees.

1, then 2, then 7 cities on 2 different islands.

Despite a settling bear market, new blockchain developers, marketers and entrepreneurs would show up and connect at each edition.

Let’s be honest, this first success was probably due to that BANGER video staring Mattia: “HELLO MAKERS! 📺”

Throughout the year, we experimented various events formats:

• The WIMeets: with community members presenting their work and pitching their project ⚾️
• The Crypto Tapas series: with the Web3 quizzes 🫒
• The proper Talk format: with professional speakers 🎤
• The technical Workshops: with hands-on blockchain dev courses 🧑‍💻

In total, 20 EVENTS were organized in one year!

After each event, more connections were made, extending the width and depth of this Community. And a sense of belonging emerged.

This led us to scale up and organize our own Web3 conference!

Almost right after the first events, we imagined and started to promote a bigger format: “WIMake”, a sort of 2-days hackathon for web3 builders. But it was way too early and complex for such a young DAO - we had to call it off. This was our very first vote 🗳️!

We continued to work on our community, on our network of partners, on our events…

Until the launch, in April 2023, of “Web3 Con Canarias”! WCC was the first major blockchain event organized in that region of the world: a self-funded POC edition that attracted 100 attendees and 20 speakers, from Spain, France, Norway and even the US!

Along that intense event-track, threads were opened with institutional and business partners like the local University, Polygon or Bit2me. Canary Islands are also a formidable landscape for digital nomads, naturally interested in emerging techs. So we found a good alignment with co-living and co-working expat communities.

Now at the core of our Community DNA, we deeply believe in the power of IRL events to foment new initiatives.

Chapter 2: Forming a DAO

After connecting, you can imagine that many initiatives started to emerge. “Let’s build our own products!” - “What if we had our own office!?” - “Could we get a grant for this or that project?” - “Let’s build a school!”.

Some form of structure was needed to leverage the power of this growing group of crazy builders.

Can you guess the first question we tried to answer?

.

.

.

“What are we doing here exactly?” 😅

It is no easy task to find a common ground for such a variety of profiles, projects and motivations.

We were quite proud to land our first mission statement:

🎯 “Web3 Island Makers empowers the people building an ecosystem for Web3 entrepreneurship in Canary Islands”

With this solved, we decided to form a DAO and elaborated a first governance system: 2 roles, a proposal/voting system and our own $PEAK token — Don’t look for it, it isn’t listed for sale (yet).

Getting everything decided and ruled on-chain is not so easy, but our weekly campfires, a good light paper and a few tools like Dework and Snapshot did the job.

Our formal legal representation on the ground is an non-profit association registered in Spain.

After some times we developed a more elaborated governance system with 3 roles, our own minting interface and more solid processes.

We now collect paid memberships and use the funds to fuel the best community initiatives and cover our infrastructure costs.

For most of us, setting up this kind of organization was a first. And with a step back, it was such an important step in our understanding of the core Web3 values “decentralization” and “transparency”.

Chapter 3: Community Studio & Galleon

Events are obviously not the only reason why we gathered in the first place.

We are here to build cool tech stuff.

From junior marketeers, to senior web3 developers, we are all animated by an unquenchable thirst for learning, experimenting or scaling new techs. And in the midst of a Crypto/Blockchain fast-moving technical environment, getting our hands-dirty is not an option.

So we launched our Community Studio to incubate projects and get community members to work on them - either to learn, either to earn or both.

14 projects applied to the first venture that would benefit from the attention and support of all the DAO. And over +30 evaluation criteria, the best one was selected: Galleon.

Galleon is a pure Web3 product: a DeFi protocol for derivatives exchange on skSync. A perpetual futures trading platform for crypto, stock and commodities.

The contributors team went from 2 to 20 members in 6 months, all rewarded with both the tokens of the project, $GALL, and our governance token $PEAK.

These days, on the marketing side we’re accelerated by Buildspace, crafting a unique community game for “future” traders. And on the tech side we’re finalizing our testnet version. Look for a product launch around Q4. If you want to follow this project, here's the X account.

WIM and the community studio will continue to support Galleon, and soon will integrate additional ventures.

Chapter 4: Next steps

After one year, we took a step back to reflect on our major next steps. We summarize them in 3 areas:

• Make the best out of our core community, by leveling up the DAO support to each and every member in their individual and group projects
• Open to other emerging techs and talents, outside web3, with a special focus on AI
• Support the organization and participation to emerging Tech events by community members, with grants and operational support

We will expand on each of these axis in due time with proper announcements.

Shoutout to every single contributor who has played a role in this adventure, from the first day until today: Hemen, Mattia (Core team), Nicolas, Roni, Steve (Core team), Marco (Core team), Tommaso, Seth, Sharon, Donal, Maria, Otman, Philippe, Astrid, Fermesk, JuanMa (Core team), Toni, Juraj, Surajdeep, Shira, Jay, Raphael, Josh, Daniel, Andre, Martina, Pablo, Antonio, Eladio, Nadia, Fran.

Thank you — with a deep and sincere belief that the best part is ahead of us.