State of the Union Q1 2024

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1. Network state event at ETH Denver with global series to follow

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We threw a profitable event on "Building Network States" during ETH Denver that vastly exceeded initial expectations and met with incredible reception.  What was originally supposed to be a small side event ended up escalating into an all-day summit with 186 paid tickets, an entire museum for a venue, incredible speakers across seven panels, and five dedicated talks with an open social at the end.  Due to its success, we've been getting tens of inbounds for co-hosting future network state themed events including Token 2049 Dubai with Logos (just completed), Consensus in Austin Texas, ETH Dublin, and even a Hard Tech Hackathon in Space Coast, Florida.  We have secured ~$11K in funding from Zenon Network through a consensus vote as a result of this success to continue organizing this series of events around the world.

2. build_r&d Activation

Due to the nascency of the network state concepts, our community has attracted a large amount of interest from academics, researchers, and think tanks which we felt compelled to channel into our ecosystem.  As such, under the initiative and guidance of Chris Pennino, we've spun up a build_r&d vertical that exists within build_republic.  This platform serves as a "decentralized think tank" for the production of collective knowledge, cultural expressions, and products that will define the cities of the future.  The first build_r&d output will be a print journal sourced from community contributors and released with on-chain revenue splits. You can read the full press release on build_r&d here.

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3. Live video embedded into platform

The build_republic is now taking its weekly meetings inside of our own platform complete with all the basic functionality seen on providers such as Google Meets or Zoom.  This feature is one of our most well-received releases amongst the community and is open to anyone who owns a Dream to host their own workshops, focused "coworking" sessions, or anything in between.  We have several differentiations in the pipeline for Q2 that will make this even more compelling than Meets/Zoom unique to builders' needs.  While originally not planned for the roadmap, this is a feature we are most excited about going forward to further allow the engagement of not only our own communities, but the cross-pollination of communities that our platform is designed to accommodate.

5. ETH Denver Hacker House

In addition to the Network State event, we accommodated Dream NFT holders in 2 co-located AirBnBs as an MVP for the Resident tier.  More than half of the occupants stated that they preferred to spend their time at the actual house hacking and socializing rather than going out for side events or the main conference.  One member-founder succinctly stated, "I wish I could bring that same energy back to my hometown around the year."  While we received a lot of anecdotal validation of the concept, this is exactly what we are building for and looking to replicate at scale not just for a week, but year-round in hundreds of cities around the globe.

6. New City Voting

One of the most centralized decisions we had up until this point was answering the request for adding new cities to the platform so that users could start populating the directory.  As a result, we built a mechanism by which Dreamers could request to add a new city which opens up a 7-day ballot for adding cities.  The most upvoted city (upvoting also limited to Dreamers) would then be populated onto the map after the ballot is completed.  This represents the first governance rights available in the platform and a first step in the progressive decentralization of the build_republic.  The next decision to be delegated to Dreamers will be capital allocation into the different cities.