Highlights from the event:

• Anyone who used a BCard at the bar got airdropped an exclusive NFT by Perchy.

• All attendees received a custom POAP by Perchy.

• A raffle with multiple prizes, including Chippi merch and a Ledger Nano.

• Great vibes from the Chippi fam!

Thanks again for making ChippiCon a blast, and a special thanks for helping us run this fun experimental NFT drop with BCard!

Looking forward to seeing you at future events!

Cheers,

The BCard Team

We’re thrilled to announce Glo Dollar as the newest addition to our ever-growing list of partner communities. Glo Dollar is a fiat-backed stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar, and they are a shining example of a purpose-driven organization using blockchain for good.

• Like other stablecoins, Glo Dollar earns revenue from the treasuries held in its reserve.

• Unlike other stablecoins, Glo Dollar’s sponsoring organization (Glo Foundation), gives away all income it earns from the coin to support public goods.

With BCard, we can all support public goods with ease 🤌

How Does it Work?

Spend as you normally would, receive $USDGLO rewards directly to your wallet, HODL 💎🤲, and that’s it.

Glo Dollar automatically directs most of their stablecoin yield to public goods funding. It's a win-win! Remember, $USDGLO is a stablecoin, so you don’t need to worry about price volatility.

Start Collecting USDGLO

• New to BCard? Sign up at getbcard.io (currently US only).

• Already have your BCard? Choose USDGLO as your reward token.

  • Spend to earn

  • Rewards arrive in your account automatically

BCard Helps You Earn (not spend) USDGLO

Yes, Glo Foundation is working on a future card that will allow you to spend $USDGLO.

Your BCard Glo Dollar rewards let you you earn USDGLO, so you can start funding public goods today.

Together we define the future of purpose driven communities. 🤝

Luckily, we have a small tool that'll make it easier: BCard Taxman.

Taxman will:

• ask for your wallet address, local currency, and dates

• automatically scan your address on ETH mainnet, Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, and Polygon for incoming and outgoing transactions

• automatically convert your crypto transaction to your local currency using the historical price at the time of the transaction

• allow you to mark transactions as Income/Expense/Ignore

• send you a CSV which you can use in your favourite tax software (or to do your taxes manually for those of you who are gluttons for punishment)

Our product pipeline is full as we continue on our quest to provide more value to communities and community leaders, but the pieces are coming together. We'll soon release our first cut of in-app voting, which makes it easy for ANYONE to vote on community Snapshot pages with the tokens they earn for their BCard spending. This will further bridge the UX gap between web3 and the real world, and position us to onboard more communities.

• 💰 Transaction Volume: 113 users have collectively loaded $48,666 onto their cards and spent $40,581

• 👥 Community Funnel: We're slowing down our outreach as we add new features, but expect to get the Glo Dollar community and Black Flag DAO on BCard in the next couple of weeks.

• 📱Product

  • Updated and re-released Taxman, our free DAO income tax lead/grant generator.

  • Continue to run our Black Flag endowment fund as a proof-of-concept, and figured out a way to allow fiat deposits into the pools, opening this mechanism up for crypto-curious communities.

  • We expect to launch in-app voting in the next week, and spend the next couple of weeks refining it in a single community before we open it up to all communities.

• 📣 Distribution

  • Our current marketing efforts on Farcaster/X/LinkedIn have users trickling in, but we plan to leverage the Black Flag endowment fund to push this further (giving away money every month is high-signal).

• 🏦 Finance

  • We have about 1.5 ETHx coming in from Flow State

  • We received 800 OP from DAO Spring

  • We still have >40 months of runway at current spend, but aren't paying contributors yet

• If you are part of a community with a US membership that wants to distribute tokens, unlock passive revenue, or proliferate brand, have them fill in our Community Intake Form.

• Want to contribute? Just respond to this email!

Our current goal is to create revenue and engagement for our partner communities, and to do that we're focusing on dog fooding our own products as part of the Black Flag Collective community. We're already creating some engagement and revenue for event hosts and will seek to build on that in the coming months.

— links, BCard Champion

Despite adding new communities, our user growth has been slow, so we've decided to concentrate on increasing the value we provide for communities while also looking at other segments of communities to target. We've mainly been targeting crypto communities with large US presence, but now aim to onboard smaller crypto-adjacent communities and non-profit crypto-curious communities. The hope is to allow any community of any size easy access to web3 tools.

• 💰 Transaction Volume: 107 users have collectively loaded $18,398 onto their cards and spent $13,417

• 👥 Community Funnel: We have successfully launched Higher, Purple, OMF, BCard, and Treegens

  • We also shipped a card allowing Nouns users to collect $nouns in addition to $nogs

• 📱Product

  • Latest round of user tests revealed some issues around top and bottom of funnel, so we added a monthly email statement (similar to a credit card statement), and also plan to add some automated emails when users join

  • Released our digital-first card, eliminating some issues we've had with physical card delivery

  • Analytics and database upgrades to help us track incoming user cohorts

  • Experimented with a new form of onchain endowment funds, which we could use for non-profits

• 📣 Distribution

  • Participated in the Octant accelerator, which gave us coaching and access to mentors, as well as some co-branding distribution

  • Started developing X audience (for new users) and LinkedIn audience (for new communities) with 2x weekly posts, content experimentation including audiograms, and cross-promotions

• 🏦 Finance

  • We still have >40 months of runway at current spend, but aren't paying contributors yet

  • We are on Flow State and getting matching donations - even a small donation from you could lead to 100x matching from sponsors, so please consider opening a monthly donation stream

• If you are part of a community with a US membership that wants to distribute tokens, unlock passive revenue, or proliferate brand, have them fill in our Community Intake Form.

We continue to plug the gaps in our user funnel, but to figure out product-market fit we will need to iterate on the product and market. Look for more iteration the rest of this year!

— links, BCard Champion

The product is new, so may be difficult for some to use. This guide will help you navigate the process.

Quadratic Funding uses # of donators to distribute matching funding, which means it can be gamed if people create multiple accounts. To ensure this doesn't happen, donators must obtain a donator badge.

1) Go to https://guild.xyz/octant-sqf-voter

• Try to use Desktop and not mobile - it's way less buggy

2) Click "Join Guild" on the top right of the screen

3) Sign in using your wallet

4) Connect your email and do the captcha (you can also do GitHub if you have one)

5) Click on "Recheck Access"

6) If you connected your GitHub, or your address is from Coinbase, you can skip down to step x, otherwise you'll need to Setup a Gitcoin Passport.

7) After you go thru the steps to create your Gitcoin Passport, you should now have access, but if not you can click the "Join Guild to check access" button on the top right.

8) Now click the "Reveal secret" button on the center and click on the link to take you to the next step

Now that you have a donor NFT, you can donate in the round.

1) If you haven't, go to https://flowstate.network/octant

2) Scroll down to find a team you want to support - BCard is a good choice! (you can support multiple teams)

3) A sidebar will pop up. You can enter your monthly donation here.

• 0.0004 ETH is the minimum (about $1.25/month). 0.001 ETH is about $3/month

4) You may need to wrap your ETH to ETHx so it can be sent monthly from your wallet to the team you want to support. We recommend wrapping a little more than 3-6 months worth of donations so you don't have to think about it for the next 3-6 months.

5) Flow State will now ensure you are eligible by checking for the NFT. If you didn't already have it, you'll have to press "Claim Voter NFT"

6) You can now donate by clicking Submit. If you need to wrap ETH -> ETHx, you will have to sign two transactions.

All of the builders in this Flow State round are purpose-first, so your donations will go a long way to helping them make the world a better place. Thank you! 🙏🙇

Something amazing just happened in the BCard community... 💳

Remember how we're all about building cool stuff together? Well, we just found our perfect match! We've teamed up with PoolTogether, and this collaboration is unlike anything we've done before.

Why? Because this card was born from pure community creativity!

✨ The Story Behind the Magic:

• Picture this: An entire community of creators competing to design THE card

• The result? An absolutely stunning piece of financial art

• And yes, you earn POOL tokens every time you use it! 

🌟 What Makes This Card Extra Special:

• It's not just a card – it's community artwork in your wallet🎨

• Powered by PoolTogether's no-loss savings protocol

• Every swipe builds your financial freedom💳

• Did we mention it's gorgeous? Because it really is!

• And this is the first time a BCard design has been created entirely by the community. Pretty revolutionary, right? 

Want to be part of this revolution?👇

Keep blazing trails!

The BCard Team

Community-based organizations are essential social infrastructure upon which many of us depend for a range of services and fellowship. We’re all familiar with these groups — churches, sports leagues, cultural organizations, and health clinics. Many people participate in this ecosystem, whether as a donor, volunteer, member, or service recipient. And although the functions of these organizations vary, they are united through a similar struggle: to create a financially stable and sustainable organization with an engaged stakeholder base. To many, this is not news. What is news? BCard can help to fatten the piggy bank while also giving members a say in how the organization operates.

BCard was developed to help digital-first communities — read web3 — become more sustainable by redirecting a portion of debit card transaction fees (known as interchange fees) to an organization the user chooses to support. Digital-first communities are just like any other community-based organization with the exception that they use blockchain-enabled digital assets, known as tokens, to help them further their mission. 

That said, there’s no reason why traditional, offchain organizations can’t benefit from interchange fees too. In fact, these fees can serve as a much needed source of recurring revenue while also helping to foster alignment between the organization and its stakeholders. Each time a member uses their org-branded BCard, it reinforces their commitment to the organization while also directing funding to it, a rare win-win where economic and social incentives align to further sustain the organization.

Of course, unlike web3-native communities, traditional organizations don’t have an associated token, and that’s just fine. The important part for most organizations is that each time a member of the community uses the card, the fees that would normally go to the bank go to the organization instead. In a world where these fees amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, the benefits quickly add up. 

If an adventurous soul were interested in tokenizing their community, BCard offers additional incentives. Moving your community onchain enables BCard users to also receive a portion of the interchange revenue in the form of the organization's cryptocurrency token. These tokens are typically used as a form of voting weight, enabling members to have a say in running the communities about which they care so deeply. This symbiosis creates even deeper alignment between the organization and its stakeholders, as these people are helping to create a more sustainable community through card usage while also helping to shape the organization’s future as active decision makers. To that end, BCard is working with partners to be able to help you easily tokenize your community. 

BCard is a community largely made up of impassioned, volunteer contributors; we understand the problems and possibilities that both traditional and digital-first organizations face. We see the work you do to create a better world and we want to help you succeed in your mission. 

Sustainability is more than a mantra; it’s a vision that aligns with the good work you do every day. Having a recurring source of revenue is but one piece of building sustainable organizations, but it’s the focus of BCard, and with your help, it can become a source of inspiration for your members to swipe more, to dream more, to be part of the change they seek to make.

Author Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and shippoooor at IndyPen CryptoMedia, builder at Black Flag DAO (soon), Governator at DAOplomats, and a lover of people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics. 

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at IndyPen CryptoMedia and a builder at Black Flag DAO (soon). She’s interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

OMF Joins BCard! 🌟

We’re excited to welcome Open Medicine Foundation (OMF) to the BCard community. OMF is a real-world 501(c)3 non-profit organization leading collaborative medical research for chronic complex diseases like ME/CFS and Long COVID. 

Now, with BCard, anyone can easily support their groundbreaking work with everyday purchases. Together, we can accelerate the path to life-changing answers, treatments, and cures.

Join Us at Octant Demo Day! 🚀

We need your support at Octant Demo Day - click here to attend!

As part of the Octant Accelerator program, we’ll showcase how BCard empowers communities to become self-funded, giving people tools to collaborate in ways that are far more innovative than TradFi solutions.

Why attend? 

• You’ll show your support for BCard to the Octant team.

• Exclusive perks will be revealed only to attendees. Hint: you won’t want to miss what’s coming next! 

Stay tuned, stay bullish,

The BCard Team

It’s a huge part of our journey in the Octant Accelerator program, and your vote can help us take the lead. We need your support to ensure BCard shines in this exciting contest! 

🕒 Voting is open until Wednesday, October 16th, 12 ET

And a reminder - it’s super cheap and easy (just 0.0001 $ETH)

Your support means the world to us! Thanks to you, BCard will continue making it easier than ever to support your favorite community with every swipe. 

Stay tuned, stay bullish!

The BCard Team

Did you know we were accepted into the new Octant Accelerator program? It's a 4-week program for builders serious about growth, and BCard is definitely that! We've already started our journey, and we need your help. One of our tasks is to participate in a JokeRace – and that's where you come in!

Show your love, support us and vote for us in this upcoming JokeRace. The voting opens on Monday, October 14th at 12 ET and closes Wednesday, October 16th at the same time. Just 48-hours to vote! 

And it’s super easy and cheap to vote - only 0.0001 $ETH to vote

We’ll send you a reminder, so get Ready to Vote for BCard On Monday!

Thank you for your ongoing support! Because of you, we can keep improving BCard, making it easier for you to support your favorite community with every swipe.

Stay tuned, stay bullish!

The BCard Team

The biggest change (which is still in progress) is moving to a digital-first card program. Users are now prompted to immediately add their cards to Apple/Google wallets and load funds, which will hopefully reduce instances of users waiting for physical cards to start using the product.

Our rewards flow has also been updated to allow for gasless claims. This reduces the complexity of claiming rewards considerably, and reduces testing we have to do on browser/wallet combinations. Early feedback has been very positive.

August will likely prove to be a slow month for us, as our card provider has given us some compliance issues to deal with (in progress), and many members of the team are taking well-deserved vacation.

• 💰 Transaction Volume: 89 users have collectively loaded $13,241 onto their cards and spent $8612

• 👥 Community Funnel: We have successfully launched PoolTogether

  • We have removed the gating for Nouns, opening the card up to many more people

  • Look for Higher and Treegens launches soon

• 💳 Card Program: We are moving to digital-first card programs which will (hopefully) improve the UX and reduce costs.

  • We had our card provider call out some compliance issues which we are in the process of fixing

• 🏦 Finance: Latest cashflow gives us 48 months of runway (mainly due to the digital-first cards)

• 📱Product: some huge feature drops

  • Gasless reward claims are out

  • Onboarding has been revamped for digital-first strategy, taking user through the steps to add cards to Apple/Google Wallets and immediately loading their card

• If you are part of a community with a US membership that wants to distribute tokens, unlock passive revenue, or proliferate brand, have them fill in our Community Intake Form.

To find product-market fit, we'll need to definitively prove WHO our market is, WHAT we are offering them, and HOW we deliver that value. Now that we have a working product, our focus is on experimenting quickly so that we can answer those three questions with real product proof.

— links, BCard Champion

We launched Origin Protocol this month, refactoring our app to make it easy to launch the next communities. We also updated our CRM to help us keep track of our deployments. Adding communities is the key to our growth strategy. We aim to launch 2 communities each in July and August, and refine our communication flow to ensure each community launch yields new, long-term users.

We disbursed our first rewards this month. You can view our public rewards report to get an idea of our progress over time.

We also spent time refining our support flow and app metrics, giving us the visibility to improve systematically over time. Expect us to further refine these critical processes in July.

• 💰 Transaction Volume: 85 users have collectively loaded $10,307 onto their cards and spent $6646

• 👥 Community Funnel: We have successfully launched Origin Protocol, and aim to launch 2 TBD communities in July.

  • We also started our communication funnel with launch videos/emails for our Public Beta and Nouns Launch.

• 🏦 Finance: Gitcoin grants have awarded us $1400 USD in May.

  • Applied for Alliance, OrangeDAO, Higher Collective, BASE Onchain Summer, EdCon, and other grants.

• 🪙 Rewards flow: Rewards flow has been tested for 13 different combinations of browser/wallet, rewards calculations are updated, and we have successfully disbursed rewards for May.

• 📱Usability: currently tracking a new user SUS score of 75.7 (goal: 80+), and revealed/fixed significant issues in our onboarding flow. Look for more fixes in July.

• If you are part of a community with a US membership that wants to distribute tokens, unlock passive revenue, or proliferate brand, have them fill in our Community Intake Form.

Our biggest bet lies in partnering and serving great web3 communities. Accordingly, we'll be making inroads with up-and-coming communities and refining the product and communication based on their feedback. Any help you can give us will be greatly appreciated!

— links, Bankless Card Champion

We also shored up our Rewards flow in the past few weeks, claimed 19K OP for our RetroPGF grant, and earned ~$1.5K USD in Gitcoin 20.

This month we will be concentrating on our community deployments - working through go-to-market with Nouns DAO while adding a new community (Origin Network). links was at Farcon early May, and Farcaster-based communities are extremely interested in getting on BCard. By making it easier to add and market communities, we're hoping to ramp up to 25 communities by the end of the year.

• 💰 Transaction Volume: 56 users have collectively loaded $5857 onto their cards and spent $3786

• 📢 Public Beta: BCard is now available to any US resident.

• 🪙 Rewards flow: Refactored and updated the rewards flow. User testing is next.

• 👥 Community Funnel: Our next community will be Origin Network (OETH on Arbitrum), and expect to onboard a Farcaster-based community next.

• 🏦 Grants: OP RetroPGF now claimed, Gitcoin next. 10M NOGS also claimed.

• If you know a US-based business on-ramping service, we'd love an intro!

• If you are part of a community with a US membership that wants to distribute tokens, unlock passive revenue, or proliferate brand, have them fill in our Community Intake Form.

Public beta is a milestone, but BCard is only as interesting as the communities with which we partner. Accordingly, we will spend most of our energy over the coming weeks launching and becoming essential to web3 communities.

— links, Bankless Card Champion

We've also confirmed with Nouns that we will be receiving 10M NOGS to distribute to users of our nounish card. NOGS recently launched their LP to great fanfare (and 525 ETH). We look forward to helping build energy around this token by giving Nouners a way to earn NOGs.

We recently got accepted into Gitcoin Grants and would love your support. Even $1 donation will help considerably.

We expect to launch our public beta in May, and add at least one new community card to the mix as well.

• 💰 Transaction Volume: 39 users have collectively loaded $4404 onto their cards and spent $2646

• 💳 Apple/Google Pay: The first BCards are now on Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

• 😎 Nouns Card: We are approved for a grant of 10M NOGS

• 🪙 Rewards flow: This is the last piece of the puzzle to launch publicly. Just smoothing out some UX issues and we'll be ready.

• 👥 Community Card: We've got a few communities ready to roll, including Origin Dollar DAO (stablecoin) and GLOOM (memecoin). We may also permissionlessly launch a DEGEN card to capture energy coming out of Farcon.

• 🏦 Grants: Donate to BCard on Gitcoin Grants. Even $1 would help a lot!

• If you are part of a community with a US membership that wants to distribute tokens, unlock passive revenue, or proliferate brand, have them fill in our Community Intake Form

With our public launch a short few weeks away, we will be looking to prove our hypothesis that web3 communities are the new frontier of branding. Accordingly, look for more co-branding communication coming from us, and if you have strong brands that want to extend their reach, send them our way!

— links, Bankless Card Champion

We also worked on our new card offering - a card we can deploy to any community in as little as a few days. This offering will allow us to test more communities faster, allowing us to reach more people sooner.

• 💰 Transaction Volume: 24 users have collectively loaded $2100 onto their cards and spent $1380

• 😐 Beta Testing: we've improved our average experience from 2/10 -> 8/10 this month based on user feedback

• 😎 NounsxFarcaster: We submitted a proposal for a $100K grant to write a Farcaster client found Nouns DAO

• 🪙 Rewards flow: we have our token claim contracts live on Optimism ($BANK) and Base ($NOGS)

• 👥 Community Card: our new offering has passed most of compliance and should be ready for order in the next 2 weeks

• 💳 Apple/Google Pay: we have gone through compliance and may be able to get our cards on Apple/Google pay in the next 2 weeks

• If you have a Noun, please consider voting for us for NounsxFarcaster (polls end Friday Mar 29)

• If you know communities with a large US-based membership, connect them with NFThinker (Telegram)

With our rewards flow in place, we will have a compete user journey: get a card, use your card, support your community, get rewards. This is the first of many user journeys we will be adding, but having this will allow us to move to public beta soon!

— links, Bankless Card Champion

Regarding the rebrand, Bankless Card will be known as bCard going forward. While we love the Bankless brand, recent events have made it impossible for us to use. On the upside, this move will reduce our compliance burden, allowing us to expand to new countries more easily.

Progress

We're currently in beta testing, with US-based users using bCard for online and in-person purchases. Our goal for the next month will be to move from beta to a general release.

• 💰 Transaction Volume: Users have collectively loaded $455 onto their cards and spent $166.

• 😁 Alpha Phase complete: our 5 alpha testers have helped us refine our card issuing, loading, and spending while refining our UX scores from 2/10 -> 8/10.

• 😐 Beta Phase started: we plan to get 50 users onboarded in the next month and release our reward claim functionality, allowing users to claim BANK and NOGS on a monthly basis.

• 👥 New community offering: working with our card-issuing provider, we've figured out a way to allow communities of ANY SIZE to release a card with us for no upfront cost.

• 💳 Digital cards: we're currently in a queue to enable our cards for tokenization - that is, inclusion in Apple and Google Wallet. This will reduce friction at point of sale for users.

• 🎨 Rebrand: we've changed our app URLs, emails, and physical card assets to our new brand. Next up will be our website and socials.

Asks

• links and NFThinker will be at ETH Denver - if you're there, reach out! We'll have something interesting to chat about.

• If you know communities with a large US-based membership, connect them with NFThinker

• If you're based in the US and want to beta test the product, reach out to links.

These are humble beginnings - we've made about $0.16 in revenue thus far. That being said, being able to make ANY revenue on card transactions is a huge step. Now that we have a revenue model in place, we can focus on development and distribution to make number go up!

— links, Bankless Card Champion

Now that we are nearing launch, we want to keep a tighter loop with our patrons. This is the first of a monthly email you will receive to keep you updated on the state of Bankless Card.

We made rapid progress in 2023, committing to getting a proof-of-concept launch before the end of the year. We came up a bit short due to issues with our card-issuing vendor. Those issues should be smoothed out this week, allowing us to soft-launch shortly, with a public launch expected in February.

Progress

Our main focus is getting our proof-of-concept product launched. Bankless Card will be available for residents of the USA, allowing users to: sign up and choose a community (BanklessDAO or Nouns DAO), receive a community-branded digital/physical card (note: this doesn't include Apple Pay/Google Pay which we expect to release post-launch), load money onto the card via ACH transfer, and receive BANK and NOGS token in exchange for their spending.

To that end, we have achieved the following:

• 💰 Fundraising: Raised $21K from 16 patrons and qualified for ~21K OP from Optimism RetroPGF

  • all patrons have been airdropped their patron NFT

• 💳 Compliance: Can legally issue payment cards in the USA

• 😎 Partnerships: Partnered w/ Nouns DAO for reach (we were mentioned in Nouns Proposal 473 and have co-brand campaigns ready for launch)

• 📱 Product: Proof-of-concept 79% complete, with remainder expected to be completed this month

• 💰 Revenue: Negotiated to get interchange revenue share from the first dollar

  • Revenue share increases as total spend on all cards increases

Asks

• We're still looking for quality early patrons - if you know anyone with whom you want to build a next-generation organization please connect them with links or NF Thinker.

• Post-launch we will be gearing up for a seed funding round. If you want to be involved or know potential investors who would be interested, reach out to links or NF Thinker.

• If you know communities with >500 members (with large US-based membership) who would be interested in joining our next wave, connect with NF Thinker.

• If you're based in the US and want to beta test the product, reach out to links.

To the Bankless Card contributors, the moment when our product is in the hands of users is the STARTING LINE. We're very close to the starting line, and it's due in no small part to the support of our patrons (you!). Thank you, we're excited to be on this journey with you!

— links, Bankless Card Champion