Having read Elroy’s take on the concept of a community-as-a-brand, I can’t help but think why web3 is a meaningful solution to this. Elroy’s proposal is that it’s a combination of ownership (through NFTs), collective value acrual (through price), and shared values (through curation).

I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the concept of product managers/ brand men shares the word “elroy” in their name. In the case of ARC, the product is the community, while the product managers are also the community. This results in a certain level of reflexivity which can lead to flywheels that might spin out of control and thus need occasional self-critique that can help sustain the community’s reputation.

My natural worry is that over-degen-ness which seems to creep into every web3 community might take hold. This generally works when markets are up, but can be really painful on the flipside. My conversations with Elroy have always been on the transformative potential of web3, never about prices. So I know we’re generally in good hands.

It is my wish that when people hear and talk about ARC members, there’s an air of admiration not because of the social following or net worths of its members but because of the strides we have facilitated in not only demonstrating but adopting web3 in ways that benefit humanity itself. To wield this collective voice and power towards a meaningful end.

So here’s another perspective based on my own observations of the Ethereum community. Where being in Ethereum is its own community-as-a-brand. This brand is now so strong that people fight to define what Ethereum-alignment means while ironically being too dogmatic about being Ethereum-aligned is not being Ethereum-aligned (the keyword is to be cypherpunk by the way).

Ethereum doesn’t exist simply to perpetuate Etheruem (the network). It’s the best chance we have at creating a global hardened shared foundation of trust where more complex human relationships can be established. That’s why we put so much effort into client diversity, keeping any one entity’s stake below 33%, OFAC regulations, and keeping discussions as open as possible.

Therefore any one lens that we use to understand Ethereum’s use cases are always limited. The best one I’ve heard is that it strives to be a permissionless layer for human coordination. Here’s where the mandatory Feynman quote comes in handy, “science gives humanity the key to either heaven or hell”. We can simply rebuild the structures that we currently have or dream bigger and empower entirely new human relationships that we cannot even currently imagine. Elroy will know that I commonly describe this situation as “don’t try to out-web2 a web2 company”.

Here’s why Web3 is relevant to communities. Ethereum gives us the tools to build entirely new games (not just 3,3), digital public goods, new ways to store and exchange value (financial, semi-financial), and of course many more. We might finally be able to overcome what seems to be the inevitable breakdown of trust any large community eventually faces as we no longer have to rely on over concentrating power.

There lies the wisdom of encouraging the Ethereum community to play infinite games. Our perspective on what Ethereum can become is highly limited by the human relationships that we have today. It is through the continuous discovery and collective experimentation that we can make breakthroughs. To push towards winning is self-defeating as it will always be a mere local maxima/minima when one takes a decades-long view.

However, this process of discovery is punishing and gruelling. Mistakes will be made, relationships wil be strained, and the blockchain will be littered with the undead smart contracts of long abandoned projects. Human resilience at an individual level is very fragile. Our hope lies in our collective resilience which imbues us with antifragility (🎶). This is something a community can facilitate.

We might not realise this but the ARC app, audio rooms, and individual interactions are the manifestations of the collective resilience we possess. We are our own “Brand Men”, and therefore the fate of the community is our own doing. The role of the core team is paramount in marshalling our collective resources to navigate the space and weather its difficulties, overcoming the principal-agent problem that other communities will face (if you’ve ever felt rugged by an NFT community, you’ll understand this).

Take the Protocol Guild as an example. It encourages the habit of projects building on Ethereum to include its members in their launch parameters (read: allocation to TGE).

The question here is why would projects want to do this for ARC? We’re already seeing this happen with a couple projects. So maybe a refinement to the question would be “when and what projects should include ARC in their launch parameters?”

“If ARC is successful at building out the kind of community we envision, it will be the start of a new generation of investment and project incubation powerhouses.”

Remember this from the article? Both questions are seeking the same answer.

Here’s where I’ll end my article and leave it to discussion as it must arrive from the community (there’s a dual meaning here). Afterall, what does a community of builders do?

We build.