Welcome, Treegens — Our First Formally Onboarded Community 🌱
External Wallet Linking
Making Spaces for Bigger Communities
Your Email Stays Yours
$SELF, Showing Up Correctly Everywhere
Expanded Documentation
Upcoming events
This is the announcement we've been building toward since the beginning.
Treegens is officially part of the SpiritDAO ecosystem: our first formally onboarded community, now operating their own pod with their own token, their own governance, and their own way of working.
If you don't know Treegens yet, you should. They're a world-record-breaking tree-planting DAO where anyone on Earth can plant trees and earn a living doing it. Their founder, Jimi Cohen, once planted 30,469 mangrove trees; the most any human had planted at the time. Their model is as rigorous as it is ambitious: every mangrove is filmed, GPS-tagged, and counted by AI with over 97% accuracy, then minted on-chain as an eco-credit. Proof of Tree, they call it — one $MGRO eco-credit equals one mangrove grown for three-plus years. No hand-waving. No unverifiable offsets. Real trees, real footage, real coordinates you can check on satellite.
They've been featured by BBC, CNBC, and DW. They've been voted first place in three Gitcoin climate rounds by the ReFi and public goods community. They're building the GROWalition, a coalition working toward a billion-tree world record with a dozen nations committed to country-wide planting days.
And now they run on SpiritDAO.
Their community of over one hundred members governs through their pod. Their $TGN token gates eligibility for roles and votes, read directly from members' own wallets, never held by us. Their treasury, events, knowledge base, and coordination all live on infrastructure they control.
This partnership is exactly what SpiritDAO was built for: a mission-driven, globally distributed community doing verifiable regenerative work — with the operational sovereignty to match. Much of what we shipped these past months exists because Treegens needed it. That's how this is supposed to work. Communities shape the infrastructure. The infrastructure serves the communities.
Welcome to the ecosystem, Treegens. Let's GROW. 🌍
Treegens' arrival drove our newest capability: wallet linking.
Most Treegens members hold $TGN in their own wallets (MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet) not in the embedded SpiritDAO wallet we create at sign-up. Asking people to move their tokens to us was never the answer. Your assets should stay yours, where you keep them.
So now, from your Identity page, you can connect a personal wallet and sign a single free message proving it's yours. We can never touch, spend, or transfer anything in your wallet; the platform only reads the balance. Once linked, the tokens you hold there count toward your community's eligibility and votes, combined with anything in your SpiritDAO wallet.
A few design choices worth being transparent about:
It's deliberately gated. Wallet linking is enabled pod-by-pod, and only SpiritDAO's Executive Pod can switch it on, a community's own leaders can't quietly change what counts for their votes.
It's governance-only. Partner tokens like $TGN are a signal of standing in that community. They're never involved in bounties, the marketplace, or anything financial in the app.
Voting stays one person, one vote. Tokens affect whether you're eligible. Never how much your voice weighs.
If you're a Treegens member, a step-by-step guide is waiting in your pod's knowledge base.
Building alongside Treegens surfaced real needs, and the platform grew to meet them:
Pods can now hold ten thousand members. The previous cap of one hundred was fine for our early days and quietly limiting for anyone bigger. That ceiling is gone, existing communities have been raised as well.
Community tokens are visible in the treasury. Pods that bring their own governance token can now see it where it belongs, alongside $SYSTEM in the treasury view. Treegens is the first: $TGN now appears in their pod treasury. A deliberate boundary remains: community tokens are for governance and identity only, never connected to the marketplace, bounties, or payments.
The Advocate token has new artwork on your identity page. It retains the same meaning; the is credential earned through your first donation and grants users agency in DAO-wide voting (typically associated with spending SpiritDAO-wide treasury on initiatives).
As we welcome new communities, we took a careful look at how members reach one another. The short version: contacting a fellow member is simpler, and your email address stays private.
We removed the old email link from profiles. If you want to reach another member, open their profile and tap Message; it starts a Direct Message that's private, real-time, and arrives as a notification. Your email is no longer visible on your profile or in the Members directory. If someone wants to reach you, they message you in the app. You decide how to respond.
We also added a short explanation to the Openness to Connect setting. Actively Collaborating, Open, or Low/Limited changes your badge and where you appear in the directory, a signal of your availability, not a gate. Any member can still message you.
When we redesigned $SELF into its current form, a few corners of the app were still reading from the old token. Nothing was broken in how $SELF works, but some displays showed numbers from the retired version. We set them right.
Pulse now shows real participation hours earned as $SELF across the community. Gifting is for $SYSTEM only; the $SELF option was a leftover from the old transferable model and has been removed, since soulbound $SELF can't be sent to anyone.
Treasury and balance displays are consistent: every $SELF figure across the app now shows your real, current, decay-aware amount.
Sixteen written guides now cover every part of the app: getting started, pods, governance, surveys, the encrypted password vault, AI agents, chat, pod agreements, and a plain-language explainer of $SELF and Tenure. All live in the in-app Knowledge Base, alongside our reorganized video library.
Sensemaker has been retrained on all of it, including wallet linking. One source of truth, three doors in.
We strongly recommend registering for events within the SpiritDAO app (Events section) at app.spiritdao.org, it's how we gauge attendance and shape the flow of each session.
Town Hall — Mon, July 20th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here
First Contact — Wed, July 22nd · 8:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here
Feedback Loops — Fri, July 24th · 8:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here
SpiritDAO is 100% donor-funded. There are no subscriptions, no paywalls, no venture capital. Every community on this platform uses it for free — and that's by design. Our runway is small, and every donation directly extends how long we can keep building. If this work matters to you, even a small contribution goes further than you'd think.
→ Donate at spiritdao.org/donate
SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3). Your donation is tax-deductible. (EIN: 99-1308806)
The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
Or write to Ron Rivers: ron@spiritdao.org
Thank you for reading!
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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.