People work in teams. Grant authors tend to represent subgroups within their organization. As a result, they collaborate with others inside and outside of their organization to finalize project descriptions and decide who would be a great fit for their published grants. Interestingly, builders working on Radius grants also often represent teams. These builder teams can be incorporated companies, but they can also be (and many times, are) informal squads of people who band together as needed to work on new projects.

We realized that we needed a way to natively represent these funder and builder teams in the product. Funders needed a way to collaborate with their colleagues on making great project decisions and builders needed ways to seamlessly share in the financial and reputational rewards associated with working on Radius grants with their teammates.

That’s why we decided to build Teams on Radius. And today, we’re excited to roll out the first set of Team features to the Radius community.

Teams on Radius

The first phase of our Teams feature rollout includes the ability to create and manage funder Teams on Radius directly. A funder is an entity that is interested in finding teams to build out important product/project ideas, and is able to fund these ideas with financial capital.

Once a funder team is created, you can add team members by their Radius username, set their role permissions for your team, and adjust team settings such as team name, bio, logo, and URL.

If you’re a member on a team, you can see grants created by other team members and help make approval decisions on applications and milestone submissions for grants that one of your teammates (not you) authored.

When creating a grant, you can select which Team is funding the grant.

We’re rolling out this initial foundation for Radius Teams today, with many more additional Teams-related features coming soon, including:

• Builder teams -- Build with your squad and have your team’s projects show up on your Radius profile!

• Funder teams review functionality -- Share notes with your teammates to collaborate on making application review decisions

• Opening up funder team creation flows so anyone can create a funder team

• Share/collaborate on grants with others outside your team -- Provide one-off access to other collaborators even if they’re not part of your team, but are collaborating with you on a particular project

• Additional team-specific settings, such as shared team wallets, contracts, reward splits, and more!

We’re excited to see the first teams come online on Radius, and to see what you all do with your teams! If you want to discuss more about Teams, Radius, or the future of work, come find us on Discord.

Onward! 🚀

Several grants made significant progress in July and August 2022. We summarize some of those grant highlights in this post.

• Completed grants

• Completed milestones

• Conclusion and thanks!

🏆 Completed grants

Between July-August 2022, five grants were fully shipped!

• Engineering plan for blockchain state on IPFS/Filecoin: Two grantee teams (Ketan and Vulcanize) worked on this project, which began in March 2022, and successfully submitted their final milestones! We’ll be publishing more info about the results of this grant project soon!

• Uptime and churn of IPFS network nodes: Dennis Trautwein was the grantee working on this grant, and successfully completed this project! When reviewing Dennis’ work, the funder mentioned: “Dennis is vision aligned, very enthusiastic, and a very capable implementor that is [detail-oriented]. He gets the job done on time, cares for documentation and is a great individual to work with!” Great work, Dennis. 👏

• Location of IPFS end users and requested content: João Leitão was the grantee on this grant as one of the IPFS Requests for Measurement series of grants!

• IPFS Provider Record Liveness: cortze represented a team from Barcelona Supercomputing Center on this project. The funder left this review: “[This team] has a lot of interest and experience in Web3 tech, along with [a] deep understanding of the IPFS stack. [They] had great passion for the topic/area and wanted to dive deeper into the details as results started coming out. In their work, they paid lots of attention to detail and interfacing with the community to discuss the project. Great work overall! I would happily work with them again in other projects we have lined up.” Nailed it!

• Logo designs for Filecoin API service chain.love: There were several amazing grantees working on this project, and ultimately Chocolona and Peter were both selected as grant winners. Congratulations!

🎉 Completed milestones

A couple of grants also saw milestones completed during this time period:

• Dedicated PB-scale client onboarding: Irene completed a proof of concept for milestone 1, which included onboarding a small portion (<10 TiB) of the client dataset onto Filecoin and testing a workflow with this stored data!

• Storage provider discovery platform: Laura and the FileDrive team delivered the product for milestone 2 of this grant by delivering a functional product that can be used to discover storage providers in the Filecoin network. Up next: getting to significant traction and adoption of the product!

• New node software for large-scale clients with PB-scale data onboarding: The team of XinAn and Fei Yan completed milestone 2 for this grant! This milestone involved shipping a set of tools with complete functionality to aid in onboarding PB-scale client data to the Filecoin network! The next milestone will include end to end user testing of the product and full documentation.

🙏 Conclusion and thanks!

Thank you to all of the grantees, grant funders, and ecosystems that are part of the Radius network. Onward!

Ian Norden left his biochemistry PhD program in 2017 to begin a career in web3. Over the past five years, he has started his own algorithmic trading firm (now dissolved), co-developed the initial implementation of EIP-1559, and helped Vulcanize build the soon-to-be-launched Laconic Network. We first met Ian, and the Vulcanize team, because of their work on a Radius grant to develop an engineering plan and roadmap for persisting blockchain state on IPFS/Filecoin.

Many people enter web3 after learning about it from a friend, and Ian’s story is no different. He laughs as he relates how his friend first got him into cryptocurrencies through Dogecoin in 2014.

“It was around the time when Dogecoin had its first boom, like the first time it showed up on NASCAR. I mailed a $200 money order to a now defunct Canadian exchange, and had no idea what I was doing, hoping it would actually show up on the other end.”

He spent the next few years investing and trading while continuing his academic studies as a PhD student. Before long, the 2017 bull run kicked off. This was the critical turning point in Ian’s career path. His PhD thesis was nearing completion, with inconclusive results, and he felt a window of opportunity opening. He could either start a new thesis project altogether, with a different focus, or try something new.

“So it was unclear at that point how much longer I’d [stay] in graduate school. So…I decided to take a different gamble: jump ship and start working [in web3]. Ultimately, I am glad that I took that approach. I do wish that I could have gotten my PhD but it just wasn’t really feasible at that time.”

As the bull run continued, Ian’s enthusiasm for the more technical aspects of cryptoeconomics grew. He and his friends had already been tinkering with arbitrage bots and quickly decided it was time to create one of their own.

“[There was a] major bull run and interest at that time, as well as market inefficiencies. So you could make quite a bit of money doing arbitrage…That's what I taught myself how to program for, for that project. That’s where I learned Go.”

Soon after diving into algorithmic trading, and starting his algo-trading firm, the market crashed. Ian was undeterred and emphatically grateful for what he’d learned, as well as the people he had met along the way. These same people eventually introduced him to Vulcanize CEO, Rick Dudley, who hired him on as a Junior Developer.

Through Vulcanize, and specifically their product VulcanizeDB, Ian initially wrote watchers and other software to support protocols such as MakerDAO, Optimism, and the Cosmos SDK.

“It was a very long learning process, I kind of had the privilege of being able to learn things by mistake and over time [while] working with Rick, over these past 5 years.”

Working with Vulcanize as a contractor over those years exposed Ian to a wide variety of different systems and blockchains. He co-authored EIP-1559 during this time, became a core contributor to the Cosmos SDK, and developed his interest in data structures, especially IPLD, through his work. These years didn’t come without their challenges though, some of which led to him abandoning certain projects, like EIP-1559, and taking time for himself.

“Part of the main challenge is the isolation you experience working on these types of things. Both physically, because I work remotely, and also the technical isolation as a result of working in such a small team. There weren’t many people back then who were also interested in working on these types of things…that you could [speak to] and share your experiences with.”

The negativity surrounding the post-crash crypto industry compounded the personal isolation he felt. Many friends and family considered his work as contributing to a “Ponzi scheme,” consequently straining his relationships. Then of course, the pandemic drove us all inside, and exacerbated collective isolation.

“[I] ended up getting pretty heavily burnt out on everything working at home and not seeing anybody. That's actually part of why I ended up working on something [aside] from 1559. “

After taking some time away and focusing on himself, the market picked up and another bull run was underway. New people came in, excitement and interest ramped up again; Ian felt himself reinvigorated. This time, he knew he needed a stronger focus on work-life balance. His goals for the next year include learning how to sail, learning Spanish, and moving closer to friends and family. Above all, Ian dreams of a life connected to nature and a retirement that includes one of nature’s most important pollinators.

“I grew up in the middle of nowhere, on the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana, with 56 acres of woods. I've always wanted to go back to that in a sense. And because of how much time I’ve been spending in front of a computer, how much time I’ve spent thinking about tech stuff for the last 6 years, it just sounds very nice not to have to think about any of that at all. [To be] able to be outside and do something with my hands, where I can see something tangibly taking effect. I don’t know [what I’d grow], but I do know it would also be an apiary though.”

At the end of every Humans of Web3 interview, I ask what guest, dead or alive, they would like to have over for dinner. Ian’s response:

“Oh man, that’s a tough question. I mean I think it would be cool to have some of the pioneers of early computer science. But also, those conversations probably wouldn’t be all that interesting because things have changed so much since then hahah. It would basically be me catching them up on the current state of computer science. But yea, people like Alan Turing or Ada Lovelace would be interesting. I’ve never had the chance to sit down and talk to Vitalik either I guess. We’ve been on calls together but I’ve never had the chance to sit down and talk with him, so that would be interesting of course. Nick Szabo would be great too.”

If you’d like to find out the name of Ian’s apiary (or eventually buy some honey from him), you can find his Twitter here and his GitHub here.

Our first guest for the speaker series is Molly Mackinlay. Molly leads core Protocol, Product, and Research Development at Protocol Labs. Her work leading the Protocol Labs Engineering & Research team includes stewarding protocol design and development for the IPFS Project (including building new developer on-ramps and scalable content routing tools), the Filecoin Network (including the lotus implementation and major new breakthroughs like the Filecoin Virtual Machine), and libp2p implementations used by many other blockchains like Ethereum2 + Polkadot. Molly also created PL Launchpad, a new six-week, full-time onboarding program designed to train, develop, and match technical talent at scale with opportunities in web3 across the Protocol Labs Network (PLN).

This chat was a special one. Molly is a close friend of the Radius project, and one of our dear supporters. We covered many topics such as Molly’s childhood aspirations, her passion for human-computer interaction, how her time as a Product Manager at Google has been helpful in her web3 career, leadership lessons she has learned and currently embodies, her vision for the future, book recommendations, and more. 

Watch our first Speaker Series chat with Molly below.

Prior to starting Ech Design, Phil and Neil, who were childhood friends, created a clothing brand together. They sold their shirts in markets across the UK, promoting the brand wherever they could. Soon after, Phil began DJing various university parties and nightclub events in an attempt to promote the clothing brand. One thing led to another and he found himself in the company of some fairly notorious artists. This, ultimately, impressed upon him a vision of success that looks different for everyone.

“We put on some pretty wild events back in the day. Lots of pretty scary DJs and emcees that we’d bring down. I guess thinking about it, that was my first taste of successful people who weren’t successful in the traditional sense. My first time doing nightclub events and doing t-shirt prints and getting to meet graffiti artists, musicians, breakdancers, etc. The general street scene was a real eye opener for me, finally meeting people who were similar to me who wanted to create and build stuff.”

His path unfolded before him when a customer asked if Phil and Neil could build a website. Neil had an interest in the technical aspects of web design, so they bought some programming books and went for it. A few websites later, they realized the potential in pursuing design full time. Thus began The Ech Design Agency. “It was very barebones stuff in the beginning, you know,” he laughs as he remembers. “We started off quite small, and ran out of a spare room. We even took doors off [our] wardrobes so Neil could use them as a desk. [Eventually] we won our first website pitch because we could do rounded corners. That's how wild things were back then. [I] remember going over to see [my] parents, and they’re having friends over, and they’re like ‘My son’s in web design,’ and [the neighbors would] go ‘Wow, that's very futuristic!’”

Since then, Ech Design has worked with clients ranging from local hardware shops to giants like Amazon and Spotify. Phil emphasizes that during the early years, they generally avoided being heavily profit-minded and focused on consistent, organic growth. They have maintained this strategy in developing their web3 portfolio.

“There are some people I know, maybe because they’re a better salesperson, or frontman, or such, who burst on the scene and within a few months have 20-30k followers. But they don’t know much about the space, and I think they quite quickly get found out. I guess the process we’ve adopted has been similar to the way we did our [traditional work]. Small projects, small onboarding, more referrals.”

He feels that since the NFT and crypto spaces are still quite small, their confidence and competence is being recognized and that they have benefited greatly from word of mouth.Their experience in launching a few pfp collections, including the cronut NFT collection and their own in-house project “DR/VRS”, has allowed them to confidently explain the minting process and onboard non-crypto native clients.

“I see the last five years as having put in the legwork. We’re not cutthroat at all. We’re much more clued up in that respect - a bit more savvy. Sometimes I feel like a lot of that has come from me being in the space. And seeing the opportunities as well. Seeing that there’s potential to work with someone like [Protocol Labs], who I feel is changing the face of the planet. They practice what they preach. The whole no HQ thing where everyone is spread out. It’s a good thing to be involved in. It feels like you’re doing your bit for the progress of mankind, even if it’s just a small bit.”

In the past, he admits to not having concerned himself greatly with financial or world affairs. He shied away from excessive or unsustainable workloads, and enjoyed doing more grassroots, rewarding work. With his increasing involvement in web3, he has found himself reflecting more on his personal goals and what the world will look like for his kids. Today, Phil’s proudest accomplishment is the birth of his three daughters and, in the end, all he wants is to pursue work that would make his daughters proud.

“Personally, getting into web3 got me learning about things I didn’t necessarily want to learn about before. They became more fun. I’m not particularly a businessman. I hate maths to be honest, but, I think the actual process of being in web3 [has] changed [me] as a person. I’ve learned more about the way the world operates, financial instruments, the way power structures work, all kinds of things that before then I would’ve just said ‘well I just draw pictures, that’s just not my bag.’

Now that I’ve had kids, this switch in me has been turned on, where I want to protect [them] and help shape the world. Even more so recently - the Ukraine-Russia war has been a bit of an eye opener. You realize you’re responsible for bringing them into the world so you should really be responsible for tailoring it to how you think would best suit them. You’re only one person so you can only do so much, but it feels like web3 at the moment - and some of the projects that you can work on - can truly make a difference.”

At the end of every Humans of Web3 interview, I ask what guest, dead or alive, they would like to have over for dinner. Without pause, this is what Phil had to say:

“It’s got to be Satoshi. It’s got to be, I can’t believe anybody would say anything else. I’d have to see his face, know who he is. I’d basically spend all night asking him questions… I guess also it would be interesting to see what he thinks of the way the space is panning out. Did he predict this? It’s such a bold move I think, did he predict the move of DeFi? What does he think of NFTs and tokenization and different L1s? Would he essentially say, ‘It’s all great, you’re all having fun, but these projects are all rubbish’...or whether that was the whole point. [Whether] he is the spark of the flame of a thousand different torches. I’d like to think that whoever it is would be relatively proud of that. I guess that just goes back to my experience in the different projects that I’ve worked on, the amount of people that work on this in their spare time, that have been bitten by a bug and are working to change the future.”

If you’d like Phil and his team to help you make the world a better place, you can find his Radius profile here, his Twitter here, and the agency’s website here.

Jacob Hanson, a multidisciplinary artist based out of Tampa, Florida, has done it all (including some lovely designs for Radius). It is difficult to distill his life into a few defining moments. His artistic journey has been marked by so many moments of growth and humility. Perhaps the most compelling thing about Jacob’s journey, however, is the convergence of his creative interests into a career that feels perfect for him.

Jacob started his creative career at the age of 20 doing graphic design for startups. He quickly recognized that role wasn’t for him. “I realized that a majority of the perks would be a fridge with beer in it or a foosball table, and I wondered what I was doing.”

Wanting a more physical connection to his art, Jacob pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture and functional art. The body of work and skills he’d developed during his degree imbued him with an adaptability that was essential for his growth into an interdisciplinary artist. Shortly after graduation, when Jacob was 27, an opportunity presented itself in New York and he took it. He had many friends out in the city who’d built a community for themselves and wanted him to join.

“NY was tough, I got by with a lot of support from my friends. Whether that was finding me jobs, bringing me onto their shoots, or even setting up photoshoots in the apartment and taking family portraits of all our friends…Every time we had a party we knew we had to document it. I brought out lights, bounce flashes, everything.”

The pivotal moment for him came as a Production Assistant on the set of a high-end photoshoot. He recalled a moment with photographer Roe Ethridge, when he noticed that Roe used the same camera sensor as Jacob did. This made him feel that his path of being an interdisciplinary artist was much more approachable.

“When you boil it down, it's a camera, a computer, a background, [and] a model. I felt way more connected to the process [after realizing this]. It seemed like a possible career path. Maybe not as a photographer, but at least living in the ecosystem.”

Unfortunately, the NY hustle quickly became unsustainable. “I felt trapped, like a cog in the machine. I knew that as soon as I had the opportunity, I had to leave NY.” Despite his desire to leave, Jacob clearly has many fond memories of living in the city. When asked about these, he laughed. “I think that’s because the pictures turned out so good. All the stuff we didn’t capture was the hard stuff, the hungry nights.”

After two years in the city, he got an offer to join the graduate program in sculpture at Indiana University. Compared to New York, which was a constant struggle of leaping from job to job and making ends meet, graduate school was a stable time of reflection. “It allowed me to crystallize so many ideas I had about why I was doing art, how the world sees art, how an academic community sees art, what its greater function in education is. I mean, what are the goals of an artist?”

Between teaching college freshmen creative drawing and working on his thesis project, he began fleshing out his plans. It became increasingly evident that staying in academia would disconnect him from the rest of the world, or people outside academia.

“Making art for a group of very committed individuals is great, especially when you need feedback and you want to improve or level up, or draw from experience from all the makers…but it does feel removed from the real world, from connecting with other people…I’m making things that I want to go out in the world and live, [I want for my art] to connect with somebody and they want to bring it home, and I felt there was a disconnect there.”

During the last six months of his Master’s program, Miami called, and he desperately wanted to answer. He had great memories of working on an installation during Art Basel and felt magnetically attracted to Florida. The culture, the art, and the community were so vibrant; it resonated with him deeply. His excitement was palpable as he told me, “I was a depressed midwesterner who was making conceptual, hard art, and Miami [was] so flashy, the street art was ‘what you see is what you get’.”

By the end of his program, Miami became less feasible as an option. The cost of living was rising exponentially, and the pandemic created instability. Regardless, Jacob knew Florida was calling, and he was determined to make it work.

His search ultimately landed him in Tampa. He worked on photoshoots in Miami and South Beach for various clients, doing swimwear launches and social media promotions. In spite of his extensive portfolio, and his varied skills, the creative work was irregular enough to require supplemental income. After a brief stint at an Art Materials store, building a granular understanding of the tools artists use, he found the perfect job.

“I was looking at all the skills, the application requirements, and [I remember thinking] they should’ve just put my name on it.”

Jacob Hanson joined the Home Shopping Network in 2020, building and maintaining sets for all their needs. He immediately felt a connection to the work because he’d been on both sides of the lens, as photographer and builder. Above all, the work afforded him the stability to keep growing and tackle whatever challenge is next.

“I get to work 4 days a week, with later, longer hours each day. It's this fun adaptive new work style. With creative projects, at work and at home, the more time you can throw at it the better. Elongated dedicated hours, whether it’s working those long hours four days in a row, or having three whole days off, really helped me to focus on my projects.”

Jacob now owns a home in Tampa, with a dedicated studio space that he uses to paint for clients or continue illustration work for organizations such as Radius. When asked to encapsulate his artistic journey, this is what he had to say:

“In the end, the support of my friends, the interest, enthusiasm, and encouragement from them, [was key]. I owe so much to that. And then also, those gut check moments, where you’re like, here’s the opportunity. [In order to become] a multi-disciplinary artist…I took a couple classes on photography, I taught myself a lot, looked up a lot of stuff, and learned a lot through experience. But to get and have those [high-end] jobs, and work in that realm for a small amount of time, it's like holy crap. You get opportunities to do new work, like the Radius illustrations and there’s fear. There’s always risk, there’s always doubt, and it’s just strange. But there’s also motivation, to be prepared ahead of time, to show up, and to just get the work done.”

Jacob Hanson is a set production magician, multidisciplinary artist, and capitalist deconstructor extraordinaire. He’s also passionate about food scarcity and the right to food. Check out his website here, his Instagram here, and his Radius profile here.

🏎 Summary

This week, we publicly announced the Radius product for the first time. The Radius product today enables workers and funders to sign up, build their profiles, post/explore/apply to grants, manage ongoing work submissions, and keep track of required payments.

As part of this soft launch, we updated to the Radius brand (replacing the early MVP brand of DGM, or Decentralized Grants Marketplace), updated the authentication scheme for the product, introduced profile features, revamped the Radius account management features, and addressed many smaller features and bugs.

✨ Feature Updates

Over the last 2 weeks, we shipped:

• Updated authentication scheme: Formerly, the Radius product asked users to connect their wallets to access the product. We decided to move away from MetaMask wallet connect as the primary sign-in, and instead have GitHub or email as the primary authentication method, with wallet connect being a subsequent step (to be implemented). We want to lay the foundation so that Radius can enable first-class wallet/financial support for different ecosystems down the road, not just the Ethereum ecosystem.

• Initial account setup: When you log in to the Radius product, you are now asked to complete an initial set of questions to set up your username/email, join Discord, and indicate your work preferences (if you’re looking for work in the Radius ecosystem).

• Account management: We also released a totally revamped look for the user profile and account management. Our new account management navigation enables richer functionality for users to curate their public presence (including their public portfolio) and manage their Radius work. We plan to introduce more account management features over the next few weeks.

• Public profile: Radius users now have a public profile that they can share with anyone. The public profile includes some of your work preferences (if indicated) as well as your active grants. More features coming here soon. If you are a Radius user, you can check out your profile at https://app.radius.space/profile/YOUR_USERNAME 🖼

• Radius brand: We are super excited for our new Radius brand. The Radius name and brand aim to celebrate the powerful individuals of web3 and beyond. And it’s just fun! Our brand update includes a new brand name, logo, colors, typeface, marketing site, about page, visuals, video, social media presence, and more. Let us know what you think in Discord!

💜 Thank you

🎉 Stats

In the last month…

• 94 merged PRs

• 105 closed issues

• 8 authors with 256 commits to main

• 6,714 additions and 3,125 deletions

👏 Thanks

We want to give a huge thank you to the many amazing contributors that contributed to these Radius product changes. Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication! 🙏

• @Codigo-Fuentes

• @Johnrobmiller

• @funkytek

• @yocontra

• @PBillingsby

• @green-knight

• @triham

• @yocontra

• @jsdevel

• @dweberdev

• @JeffLowe

• @greatjobnat

• @jma

• @isa-belch

Onward! 🚀

With new protocols and platforms coming out every week in web3, it is easy to lose track of the most fundamental aspect of innovation and growth: the people building it. XinAn Xu and Fei Yan, currently working on a grant to build PB-scale storage software for the Filecoin ecosystem, are nothing short of charming, engaged, and knowledgeable. Our conversation was refreshing, fun, and offered a window into the best possible outcome of good community engagement. At its core, it was two friends talking about their friendship.

XinAn and Fei initially forayed into web3 because of their interest in mining. In XinAn’s retelling, he recalls becoming interested in the blockchain world around the height of the GPU shortage in 2017. He fondly remembers how it got so hot in his tiny apartment that he would vent the apartment every night before bed, even with his industrial-sized humidifier humming in the background.

“There were wires coming from the bathroom, from the kitchen, there were wires everywhere,” he said. Bashfully, he briefly mentions that he has gone to great lengths to avoid his parents seeing his mining rig. “They wouldn’t understand anyway,” he laughs, “I do plan to tell them when they come to visit, but for now, I just ask my wife to angle the camera away.”

XinAn’s path to the Filecoin community was one of pure chance. “There was this project, Burstcoin. When Burstcoin no longer existed, I had all these hard drives and I needed a new plan.” Around the same time, Fei was seeking energy-efficient ways to mine. He started mining Filecoin and building relationships within the community.

Their paths finally crossed at Slingshot, a community competition that rewards the storage of real and usable data. Their digitally native relationship began in the Filecoin community Slack space, something many people in the web3 space can empathize with. Building entirely digital, true friendships over Twitter and Discord, though often a meme, is grounded in a true need and desire in web3: community.

For many, this means similar senses of humor, or a similar programming style. For XinAn, the main prerequisite is empathy. He maintained communication with Fei and the two worked on Filecoin mining strategies continually. Once the opportunity to co-work on a grant came together, it seemed a natural fit to them.

When reflecting on what their proudest achievements have been over the past few years, both seemed to agree that they were proud, and admittedly surprised, that they’d stuck to their interests in web3 and specifically Filecoin. They attribute this perseverance primarily to their connection with the Filecoin community. Fei, generally reserved throughout the interview, spoke very earnestly about how the community was actively engaged in helping newer members, how many connections were made, and especially how many of these connections became genuine friendships.

This sense of community that Fei and XinAn both experienced pushed them to make their involvement in web3 less of a hobby, and more of a passion. Both repeatedly asserted that the community kept them going, and that they wanted to contribute back in any way possible, even if some of their ideas felt impractical.

“I’m always putting more hats on myself,” joked Fei, as he discussed his and XinAn’s involvement in a Filecoin governance program that gives efficiency bonuses to people storing real data. “I agree with Fei. We trust [the Filecoin community], we’re partners, we’re building a very healthy community [and we] want to keep that rolling,” XinAn responded.

Mining can be unpredictable and changing market conditions can be difficult for a family. They had both brought up, earlier in the interview, that it was hard to discuss the technical aspects of mining, along with the circumstances that inform their work, with their families. Despite these difficulties, Fei and XinAn both credit their wives for their patience and open-mindedness, which affords the duo greater freedom to experiment in new areas. Fei does concede, however, that bear markets tend to leave everybody in zombie mode. They both agree that being able to focus on their Radius grant has allowed them to take their eyes off the market and to build rather than stare at numbers.

By the end of the interview, we had joked about mining, families, bear markets, and even awkward corporate “ice breakers,” so I couldn’t resist asking them one last question.

“You guys are having people over for dinner and you can invite anyone in the world, dead or alive, who do you choose?”

They both pause to think, likely groaning internally at the question.

Fei finally answers.

“Well, XinAn and I haven’t met yet, so him.”

Today, we are extremely excited to announce the launch of Radius. Radius is a decentralized network that connects talented individuals and teams with the best projects in web3. We’ve been around for a couple of months in super MVP mode (fka dgm.xyz), iterating on the short-term plan toward our long-term mission and vision. Our launch today marks the beginning of many exciting releases for our growing community. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on. 🥁

Radius’ mission is to onboard the next billion workers into web3. Our hope is that we can address the talent crunch in web3, build the infrastructure for web3 ecosystems to scale to hundreds of millions of people, and provide billions of people with unparalleled freedom, autonomy, and fulfillment.

The Radius approach rests on four pillars:

1. Attract workers into web3 and the Radius ecosystem

2. Train workers to be effective with web3 work opportunities

3. Match workers to work opportunities within web3 ecosystems

4. Support workers and funders to achieve successful project results

With today’s launch, anyone can now access the following:

• 💻 Radius product: The Radius product is an application where workers who are looking for work in web3 can sign up, create a profile, and apply to projects, and funders in web3 ecosystems can post high-impact projects that need talent. If you are someone who is looking for work in web3, sign up today! If you’re a funder who is looking for talented individuals to join your ecosystem, fill out this form and we’ll follow up to see how Radius can best support your goals.

• 📖Community home: The Radius community has a home on Notion, where you can find our community events calendar, announcements, and quick links to Radius resources. Bookmark it today.

• 👪 Discord community: The Radius Discord will be the place to go to meet other community members, learn about the latest, meet potential teammates, and more. Join the Discord here.

• 📚 Radius content library: We know that web3 can feel inaccessible to the uninitiated. We are developing asynchronously consumable content that encompasses topics such as the fundamentals of web3, how to be a <insert role type here> in web3, ecosystem-specific onboarding content (e.g. working in Ethereum, Solana, IPFS, Filecoin, etc. ecosystems), and more. The library is a work in progress, but we’re releasing an alpha version today. You can see the latest here.

• 🏛 Fellowship program: We know that some individuals prefer learning in more structured environments, and some may be more serious than others about getting their web3 career started as soon as possible! We are designing a cohort-based fellowship program for those that want a more intensive experience to get the best start to their web3 careers (or level up, if you’re already in web3).  You can apply to join the Fellowship here. Our first cohort will start in summer 2022.

• ✨ And much more to announce soon! We’re actively working on other projects, including new protocols, new product features, original content, and more. Follow us on Twitter @joinradius to hear of the latest!

With a mission like ours, it’s impossible and antithetical to do it alone. We are so grateful to be launching Radius with some of the most ambitious and inspiring ecosystems in web3. Stay tuned for more projects from each of these and other ecosystems we’ll be announcing soon.

And one more thing: Radius is the first of many projects by Tephra Labs, an organization that is focused on enabling large-scale human coordination to address humanity’s most important challenges and opportunities. You can learn more about Tephra Labs here. We are looking for more teammates and contributors! If any of what we’re doing at Radius or Tephra Labs speaks to you, consider joining us.

That’s all for now. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped get Radius to this moment, and thank you in advance to those who will join us in this movement in the months and years to come. 💜

Onward!