Another month of bustling activity and the Unlock Train continues along the tracks we have laid out for it 🛤🛤🚂🚃🚃🛤🛤
We've got Steward Role renewals, Contributor Spotlights, Finance & Marketing updates, and all kinds of opportunities to contribute. It's always a great time to be engaged, so make sure you check out all the updates in this month's newsletter to get inspired for what you want to contribute next...
Current Active Proposals:
Please cast your votes!
We had a big month in June for governance, with a whole entire proposal getting approved! The May Payroll was successfully executed, keeping the Unlock DAO train moving onward. Work is getting accomplished in many different areas; we've got people working on the train engine, we've got people out scouting the tracks for new destinations, and there's a hive of activity in the train cars themselves, promoting and progressing community projects of many flavors!
Every train needs responsible people managing key roles, and that is why Unlock has a core of DAO Stewards to help keep things rolling:
Recently, my poorly formatted proposal was approved for Communications Steward. It is my responsibility to keep our weekly DAO calls organized and relevant. I also draft this newsletter every month to help keep everyone informed!
Andreu is refreshing his role as the Steward of Finances. Please review his proposal and cast your votes!
Ceci has also drafted her renewal for Steward of Marketing. Please review it for important info on all that the Marketing Team has accomplished under her expert care! Leave any feedback or questions in the chat.
Anupa is drafting a proposal for funding the work she's done with the U-Make-Us program she developed and shipped this year. This has been a fantastic series, so make sure you check our Community Spotlights to see who has been building their communities and projects with Unlock. This is steward-level work that has been volunteered and, as such, deserves serious consideration for compensation & reputation from the DAO if we wish to see the work continue.
The first campaign for Metopia has concluded, with an impressive 3,867 users engaging. The program focused on introducing people to Unlock and helping them discover how to use it. Everything always starts with education!
With this groundwork in place, the second campaign with Metopia will be structured specifically around driving more paid locks. Projects and communities that generate e-commerce and use Unlock to manage their workflows are the lifeblood of the protocol, so this is a crucial next step for Unlock to continue on the track toward a sustainable economy.
An important part of a decentralized organization is drawing from a community of active contributors. This means people generating submissions for the DAO, in the form of usable content. It isn't as simple as just letting anyone post 'official content', however. There has to be structure, guidelines, and accountability to ensure that consensus reflects the entire DAO, not just the arbitrary decisions of a chaotic system.
Enter Incented: a platform built to enable a community to actively participate in making submissions as well as deciding which ones are approved vs denied.
Officially launched on June 8th, the Incented Campaign offers cold, hard cash (repurposed from the Carrot Castle sponsorship at EthDenver2025) for participants and $UP tokens for voters. Both content contributors and voters are rewarded, so everyone can participate!
Check out this intro video from Stella to get informed on how to participate!
Straight from Ceci's role renewal application, here are the stats on engagement from the Marketing Team:
Awareness
161,000+ X impressions
17,600+ LinkedIn impressions
6,100+ TikTok views
3,867 participants engaged through Metopia
3,800+ users completed Unlock Academy missions
Active contributor ecosystem maintained throughout the year
+471% website activity during educational campaigns
+57% increase in locks created
+38% increase in keys minted
The numbers don't lie: the Marketing Team is getting the word out there! It is up to us, the DAO, to make good use of this ecosystem awareness and keep connecting with projects that produce real value for their communities and align with the goals of Unlock.
Andreu has the next quarterly budget drafted and should move to the proposal stage soon. The current wait is on the Steward role refresher proposals. Once they are nailed down and approved, this proposal will go up for voting as well.
We also have a new budget-tracking and forecasting report, courtesy of our stalwart Steward of Finances. This resource should help DAO members make more informed decisions about expense proposals and new initiatives to manage & generate revenue. You can download the full PDF here.
There is a lot of great data and analysis in the full report, so I highly recommend reviewing it. Here are the strategic recommendations from the report:
These are important considerations for us to take seriously as we continue to push the Unlock Train out of the station: we need enough runway to reach the next destination to avoid getting stranded without access to support! If you have thoughts, insights, or alternative analyses to share about this data, please hit us up on Telegram!
A crucial part of any decentralized protocol is managing the technical contributions of a wide audience of potential contributors. With the advent of AI, automated and semi-automated GitHub commits have become a major source of spam. This further exacerbates the burden of managing contributions as we transition away from a formerly closed team structure.
As Julien continues to work his way through submissions, we, as a DAO, must strive to help by coordinating and self-organizing in a way that actually reduces this burden, not adds to it. This is no easy task, but if you are one of the many GitHub contributors who have expressed interest in helping us attack our list of issues and improve our docs, then make sure you head over to Telegram and find the "Technical Contributions" topic to share what you are/would like to work on to help make your contributions more visible and easily vetted! Let's get organized! Feel free to tag me directly in the TG group to get more involved.
I want to take this time to give a little bit more exposure to Anupa's work on the U-Make-Us series. This showcase event has been fantastic at drawing attention to important projects that are actively using Unlock to help them achieve their community goals. As season 1 comes to a close, now is the time to review this great contribution and consider its value in helping push the goals of the DAO:
Watch us have a silly old time enjoying each other's company and sharing about what makes Unlock special for us.
Episode 2 - Thibaut aka theDesignIconoclast
Learn more about Thibaut and what he's contributed to Unlock re: the integration with ENS that enables new levels of decentralized onchain naming for Unlock contracts.
Episode 3 - Paul & the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) for Crypto Community
Check out this episode to see an advanced implementation of Unlock that showcases the protocol's potential beyond the entry-level use we are most familiar with.
Episode 4 - G2 from Creative DAO
Catch up with G2 and learn how he is using AI and decentralized onchain primitives like Unlock to help bring music artistry into the next generation in a way that empowers and inspires human creativity.
Episode 5 - Our very own Julien Genestoux
Don't miss a chance to hear from the longest-standing locksmith in Unlock and gather insights from the man who's been behind the scenes since day 1.
Episode 6 - WillT (final episode of season 1)
Find out what the legendary WillT is up to and how he has been building with Unlock for longer than almost anyone in the community, plus some secret tips from a master of productivity to help you streamline your workflows.
These episodes are not only interesting and entertaining, but they are shining examples of why Unlock exists and what it enables for other projects. The more we share these stories, the sooner other projects will learn how to use Unlock to achieve their own community goals.
The demise of Discord seems somewhat inevitable. It is a lot of overhead to manage a Discord server, and the days of thousands of daily active users in DAO Discords are gone. As the contribution circle tightens around the DAO's active core, many have found themselves most active on Telegram rather than Discord. This is a signal, one that needs to be acknowledged.
As such, the Steward team has migrated entirely to Telegram. We will keep the Discord open and updated as best we can, but if you want to engage in a more regular contribution cycle, Telegram is the place to be.
Make sure to join us and share your feedback on all topics from this month's newsletter, and bring up topics you'd like to see more attention on!
Thanks for following along, fellow locksmiths, and always remember:
Stay classy out there,
Trigs