Sensemaking - SpiritDAO's Weekly Newsletter

Live

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:00:18 GMT

$SELF Is Here

Last week we shared the vision. This week we built it.

$SELF originated as a vision of a time-bound currency that could serve as a foundation for intercommunity economics beyond fiat while also encouraging and rewarding participation. For some time we struggled with how to make this work in real time in a way that could be programmatic and also support intercommunity pollination.

$SELF is now a soulbound, time-denominated participation token and it changes how contribution works in our ecosystem. Here's what we shipped and why it matters.

It can't be bought. Only earned. $SELF cannot be sent, sold, or traded. It's permanently bound to the person who earned it. There is no marketplace for it and, in alignment with our 501c3 mission and status, there is nothing to speculate on. The only path to $SELF is to show up and contribute which is the core design intent. A nice side effect: gaming the system is pointless. Fake $SELF that no one can buy is worth exactly nothing, our architecture itself removes the incentive.

It measures time, not dollars. One $SELF equals approximately one verified participation-hour. Attend an event, complete a bounty, cast a governance vote, serve in a community role; your standing reflects time and care given to the community, the one currency everyone has equal access to.

It's earned automatically. You don't claim it or apply for it. When you do the thing, the system recognizes it. Vote in pod governance and receive a small participation credit. Complete a bounty and receive the hours that work represented. Attend an event and receive the hours you were there. Serve in a role and receive a seasonal stipend for stewardship. Every credit is anchored to something real and verifiable, with built-in guardrails so it can't be inflated or farmed.

It's seasonal. $SELF is organized into seasons. Your spendable balance reflects recent participation; it decays if you step away, and renews when you return. This keeps the system honest about who's actively building right now, rather than rewarding someone forever for showing up once years ago.

Legacy is permanent. While spendable $SELF fades, your lifetime contribution never does. As your total participation accumulates, you rise through tenure bands from Curious (finding your footing) through Resident, Mainstay, and Pillar, up to Elder (longest-tenured, here for the long haul). Your band shows on your profile and only ever rises. Spending $SELF never lowers it. The system holds both reflections at once: what have you done lately, and what have you given over time.

It works across communities without becoming a market. As more communities join the ecosystem, $SELF travels with you. But we deliberately avoided turning it into an exchange. Communities recognize each other's contributions at weights they choose, your effort in one community can count in another, as a matter of policy, never as a trade. No swaps, no exchange rate. Your effort travels, money doesn't.

Like everything on the platform, earning and redeeming $SELF costs you nothing. The blockchain does the record-keeping, you just participate.

$SELF Transmutes. The purpose of $SELF is to allow intercommunity economics supporting custom artifacts, courses, events, and even voting weights. Our time is invested and then we can use to transform it into something real and sacred for ourselves and others.

Why this matters. Most token systems quietly recreate the inequalities they claim to escape because anything you can buy, the wealthy can dominate. By making $SELF unbuyable, time-denominated, and bound to the individual, we built something that can only ever reward participation. In this community, the currency that matters is the one everyone can earn equally: your time, your presence, your care.

$SELF is verified human time, recorded where it was spent, that fades unless renewed and it never becomes money.

What's coming next: $SELF becomes spendable on community perks (exclusive merch, gated events, member experiences) with the people who showed up getting first access. And as the ecosystem grows, your contribution will be recognized across every community in it.

It counts now.

Security Audit — Findings / Updates

Before more communities come online and more governance decisions run on-chain, we completed a comprehensive security audit of the platform's API endpoints, permission system, and smart contracts. Here's what we found and fixed.

API authentication hardened. Five internal API routes were accepting requests without verifying the caller's identity. Every one of these endpoints now requires cryptographic proof of identity before processing a request. For user-facing actions, the app verifies a signed authentication token and confirms the caller matches the person they claim to be. For server-to-server operations, a secure internal key is required.

Forum access controls closed. The forum correctly checked pod membership before showing pod-specific content, but the backend services handling replies, reactions, polls, and poll votes weren't performing the same check. A user who bypassed the frontend could have interacted with pod-gated content they shouldn't have accessed. Every write operation on pod-restricted content now verifies membership independently.

Smart contract governance controls tightened. The on-chain governance contract has been updated with access controls on vote aggregation and proposal finalization functions. These were previously callable by anyone, which could have allowed fake governance events to be emitted on-chain. Voting on DAO-wide proposals itself remains unchanged and it still requires an Advocate NFT.

Member permission defaults corrected. When a new pod was created, the default "Pod Member" role was incorrectly restricting event creation, proposal submission, and proposal voting, contradicting the intended behavior. This has been fixed across all services that initialize permissions.

These changes don't alter any user-facing workflow. Everything that worked before works the same way. The difference is that the backend now independently enforces access rules rather than relying on the frontend alone.

Reliability & Polish

Honest event refunds. Previously, cancelling an event could mark a paid registration as "refunded" before the on-chain refund had actually executed. Now the app only shows "refunded" once the transaction has genuinely completed. In-progress refunds display as "refund-pending" — an honest status that keeps funds visible and actionable. The interface should never claim something the blockchain hasn't actually done.

Governance proposal linking fixed. When linking a forum discussion to a governance proposal, the description was pulling in a reply comment instead of the original thread content. Proposals now display the actual discussion that prompted them.

Upcoming Events

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, June 22nd · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, June 24th · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, June 26th · 12:00 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)

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

Connect with SpiritDAO

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SpiritDAO.org
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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Earned

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Staked Tokens Now Count Toward Governance

This week we shipped something we believe is a first-of-its-kind capability for community platforms: governance eligibility that reads tokens wherever members have committed them — not just what sits idle in their wallet.

The problem is one every token-native community eventually hits. TreeGens, one of our prospective anchor communities, gates their Verifier role on holding 2,000 $TGN. But many of their most committed members have staked their $TGN into liquidity pools on Hydrex, a Base-native DeFi protocol. When tokens leave the wallet for a staking contract, a standard balance check reads zero. The old choice was ugly: unstake and give up your yield position to participate in governance, or stay staked and stay silent.

Now they don't have to choose. Our eligibility engine reads a member's wallet balance and their staked positions — including vault deposits — and sums them. The people who've committed their tokens most deeply to their community's ecosystem are no longer the ones locked out of its governance.

A few things worth knowing about how we built it:

One person, one vote: Tokens determine who qualifies for a governance role. They never weight a vote. A member with 100,000 tokens and a member with 2,000 carry identical voice. We may explore variations on this in the future, but presently we retain our existing approach.

Snapshot-ready. For communities that want stricter token governance, the platform can now capture each voter's standing at the moment a proposal is published — built, tested, and waiting behind a per-community setting.

Governance signals only. Third-party community tokens are never issued, held, swapped, or custodied by SpiritDAO. They gate roles and votes, nothing else. Every integration ships inside our 501(c)(3) guardrails. This is a vital design decision in order to ensure the security of our nonprofit status.

This is the "bring your own token" capability from our roadmap becoming real. Any community with an ERC-20 on Base can now plug their existing token economy into SpiritDAO governance — including the parts of it that live in DeFi — with zero custom code.

The Future of $SELF — Our Roadmap for Time-Based Participation

We want to share something we've been designing for months. It's not shipped yet — implementation begins this week, but it represents a fundamental evolution in how SpiritDAO values and records participation. We're sharing it now because transparency about where we're heading matters as much as announcing what's already here.

The core idea: $SELF becomes verified human time, recorded where it was spent, that fades unless renewed — and it never becomes money.

Today, $SELF is a standard transferable token. That was a starting point, not a destination. The redesign transforms $SELF into a soulbound (non-transferable) token that carries two pieces of information in its DNA: which community you earned it in, and which season you earned it during. You can't buy it. You can't send it to someone else. You can only earn it through attested participation — showing up, contributing, voting, completing work.

Here's how the new model works:

Earning is hour-anchored. One $SELF equals approximately one verified hour of participation. Attend a two-hour community event with check-in verification? That's 2 $SELF. Complete a bounty the poster estimated at five hours? That's 5 $SELF. Cast a governance vote? A small credit, enough to nudge participation, capped to prevent farming. Every mint ties back to a specific, verifiable action.

Communities get participation budgets, not token balances. Pods never hold $SELF. Instead, each community receives a participation budget per season, a cap on how many hours of $SELF can be minted through its activities. Budgets are algorithmically determined based on active membership and actual participation, with the ability to petition for more when a community has a specific need. This prevents inflation while ensuring active communities have room to recognize their members' contributions.

$SELF carries provenance. When you earn $SELF in a community during a season, that's exactly what's recorded on-chain. Your participation record isn't a generic number, it's a map of where and when you showed up. This makes cross-community recognition possible without exchange: another community can choose to honor your participation at a weight they set, without any tokens changing hands.

Time is not something we hold onto forever. $SELF earned in earlier seasons eventually expires, but it doesn't just disappear. Expired participation converts into a permanent prestige credential: a soulbound record that you contributed to Community X during Season N. You can't spend prestige, but it counts. Communities can gate roles and opportunities on sustained participation across multiple seasons, rewarding long-term commitment rather than one-time activity.

Spending is burning. When you use $SELF in the marketplace or to access an event perk, your oldest tokens are burned first. No proceeds route anywhere, this is time being redeemed, not currency changing hands. The marketplace becomes a space where communities offer value to their most engaged participants, not a financial exchange.

Anti-abuse is layered. Dual attestation for events (check-in plus organizer confirmation), physics ceilings (an event can't generate more hours than attendees × duration), per-member diminishing returns within a season, community budget caps, full transparency in the Pulse feed, and an Executive Pod review queue for anomalous mints. Every layer exists because earned reputation only means something if it can't be gamed.

This is the vision. Implementation will roll out in phases, contracts and infrastructure first, then the earn loop with our first communities, then marketplace integration, then time-binding and cross-community recognition. We'll share progress as each phase ships.

The ambition behind all of this is simple: participation should be visible, verifiable, contextual, and impossible to buy. $SELF is how we make that real.

Outreach Continues

Conversations with prospective communities continue to grow. While we can't share anything formal just yet, another community has expressed serious interest in leveraging SpiritDAO as their coordination infrastructure. That brings our pipeline of active conversations to a place we're genuinely excited about. More to come.

If you know a group that's outgrowing their current tools, an introduction goes a long way! Connect with Ron Rivers in app or at ron@spiritdao.org.

Upcoming Events

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, June 14th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, June 16th · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, June 18th · 12:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

→ Donate at spiritdao.org/donate

SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3). Your donation is tax-deductible. (EIN: 99-1308806)

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

Connect with SpiritDAO

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SpiritDAO.org
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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Clearer

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Why SpiritDAO — Now on the Site

We refreshed spiritdao.org to reflect everything that's live on the platform today, organized around four ideas: Communicate, Decide, Coordinate, and Own; including native video for gatherings and a token-powered Marketplace.

We also built a new Why SpiritDAO page that shows, side by side, how owning your community's infrastructure compares to renting a stack of disconnected tools. If you've ever tried to explain what we're building to someone unfamiliar, this is the page to send them.

Take a look → spiritdao.org/why

A special thank you Ardell from ICMatch.org for bringing up this comparative narrative and sharing initial thoughts on how we compared to various platforms. Overall we feel extremely confident in labeling SpiritDAO as a vanguard product for community coordination.

Identity Page — Tokens and Credentials, Separated

We've cleaned up how tokens appear on your Identity page. SpiritDAO is designed with our core governance philosophy of unique identities and a one person, one vote philosophy for both pod and DAO-wide votes. (With DAO-wide treasury decisions reserved for Advocate (donor) members.) Until now, community's with their own (previously deployed) governance tokens (like $TGN from the TreeGens community) showed up alongside your membership badges and roles in the Credentials section. That never quite fit. A credential says who you are in SpiritDAO and a token balance says what you hold.

Now your balances live together at the top: $SELF and $SYSTEM stay pinned where they've always been, with any community token you hold appearing right below them. Credentials stay focused on membership: roles, accreditations, and the things that define your participation. In alignment with our 501c3 mission, independent community tokens may only ever be incorporated for pod governance—we do not support the purchase or distribution of 3rd party tokens outside of our core ecosystem.

As more communities join SpiritDAO and bring their own tokens, those balances will appear automatically. No setup needed on your end. A small change, but one that scales and gives each part of your identity the space it deserves.

Grant Application — The Greater Sum Foundation

We've applied to The Greater Sum Foundation's grant program. Greater Sum is a Jacksonville-based foundation that supports early-stage nonprofit innovators through funding, mentorship, and accelerator programs, with a focus on education, environment, community-building, and health.

SpiritDAO fits squarely in their wheelhouse as an early-stage nonprofit building new infrastructure to solve an old problem: how do communities coordinate, govern, and sustain themselves without being dependent on tools they don't own? We'll share more as the process unfolds.

We were able to apply for this closed grant round because in 2025 we were part of their accelerator cohort.

Outreach Continues

We're consistently researching and reaching out to communities we believe would benefit from SpiritDAO — intentional communities, cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and mission-driven collectives. The conversations are growing. Some are early. Some are further along. All of them help us understand what communities actually need, which makes the platform better for everyone.

If you know a group that's outgrowing their current tools, an introduction goes a long way! Connect with Ron Rivers in app or at ron@spiritdao.org.

Upcoming Events

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, June 8th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, June 10th · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, June 12th · 12:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

Connect with SpiritDAO

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SpiritDAO.org
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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Sovereignty

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Bring Your Own Token

SpiritDAO was built on a simple idea: independent communities should be able to govern themselves, hold their own treasury, and run by their own rules, while sharing infrastructure none of them could justify building alone. This week we shipped a piece that makes that vision real for token-native communities joining the platform.

Many communities already have their own token and an active governance culture. Until now, plugging that into SpiritDAO meant starting over. No longer.

A community can now gate a voting role on holding its own token while keeping full control of its own house. The token decides who participates, not how much sway they have, governance stays one-person-one-vote, true to how every pod on SpiritDAO works. The community's token is read directly on-chain purely as an eligibility signal — never held, issued, or exchanged by the platform. Recognizing a token is a deliberate, one-time step by SpiritDAO, which is how we keep the system free of speculative assets and within our nonprofit commitments.

Communities run their own pods. Whoever creates a pod administers it — they hold the keys to their roles, treasury, and settings. SpiritDAO never sits in the middle of a community's governance. That's the whole point of the federation.

It's general by design, available to any community that brings a token and wants to keep running its own way.

This is the federation model in action. Every community that can govern itself on shared infrastructure makes the whole ecosystem stronger, without giving up autonomy. We're excited about who this opens the door to.

Smart Contract Security Audit — In Progress

We've begun a comprehensive audit of our smart contract infrastructure. This will be a multi-week process and may result in some contract redeployments as we identify areas to harden.

The timing is intentional. We're actively onboarding our first anchor communities, and before more treasuries go live and more governance decisions run on-chain, we want to hold ourselves to the standard our community partners deserve. Security isn't something you retrofit after trust is established, it's how you earn it in the first place.

We'll share findings and any resulting changes as the audit progresses.

Donate Today

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, not by accident.

Our runway is small. Every donation directly extends how long we can keep building, keep the servers running, and keep this infrastructure available to communities that need it but can't afford to pay for it.

If this work matters to you, even a small contribution goes a long way.

→ Donate at spiritdao.org/donate

SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3). Your donation is tax-deductible. (EIN: 99-1308806)

Upcoming Events

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, June 1st · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, June 3rd · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, May 29th · 12:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

Connect with SpiritDAO

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Ready

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Why This Week Matters

We have several mid-stage conversations happening right now with communities preparing to onboard. Before they arrive, we needed to answer a question that's been on our roadmap for months: can the platform actually meet each community on its own terms, with its own governance rules, its own trust thresholds, its own way of deciding who controls what?

As of this week, the answer is yes. What follows is the heaviest infrastructure push we've shipped to date.

Configurable Governance

The platform's previous governance model assumed every pod operated the same way: 67% leader approval, no quorum check, 72-hour voting period. It was always intended to be a starter framework, with the ideal of deeper degrees of customization planned from day one. It's now here and live!

Pod leaders now configure four settings, separately for routine operational decisions (off-chain) and treasury-binding (on-chain) :

Quorum — what share of eligible voters must participate for a result to count. A proposal passing 3-to-1 doesn't mean much if 46 out of 50 eligible voters stayed silent. Quorum gives that absence weight.

Approval threshold — of votes cast, what share must be yes. Pods can choose 50%+1, two-thirds, three-quarters, or any custom value up to unanimity.

Voting period — anywhere from 12 hours for urgent decisions to 30 days for ones that need real deliberation.

Voter pool — all pod members vote by default, but leaders can narrow operational decisions to a leader council if their pod prefers that model.

Individual proposal authors can opt up to a stricter threshold when a particular decision warrants it, but never below the pod's default. This prevents the failure mode where someone quietly lowers the bar to pass a controversial vote.

Three guardrails remain platform-wide: approval can never drop below 50%+1, quorum can never drop below 20%, and voting periods stay between 12 hours and 30 days. Pods govern themselves, but the platform protects against governance becoming meaningless or weaponized by a bad actor.

Governance is also now a toggleable module. Pods that delegate decisions to a parent pod or operate informally can turn it off entirely without affecting their treasury, forums, chat, or any other capability.

And one more thing: the DAO's own rules are now tunable through the same process they enforce. Executive Pod members can draft a proposal to change the on-chain Governor's voting parameters, and that proposal goes to the full Advocate membership for ratification. The constitution rewrites itself through the same mechanism it enforces, no admin override, no contract upgrade key.

Pod Treasuries V3

Until this week, every pod treasury used the same approval rule: simple majority (50.1+%). It worked, but it didn't reflect how every pod actually wants to operate. A working group of three friends might be fine with simple majority. A treasury managing larger funds might want a supermajority. A small committee handling sensitive operations might want full consensus.

New pods now choose their approval threshold at creation: Simple, Strict, Unanimous, or a custom percentage between 51% and 100%. The floor is enforced by the smart contract, and the threshold can be changed later through the same approval process that governs the treasury itself.

The on-chain architecture took three rounds of security review. It preserves pod self-sovereignty, no admin can block a pod from deploying its treasury, while preventing identity squatting.

If you're a pod leader, look for the "Deploy Treasury" button on your pod page.

Password Vault — End-to-End Encrypted

Every active pod now has a built-in password vault. Pod leaders enable it with one click, choose which roles can see each saved credential, and members access what they need with a tap.

The important part: everything is encrypted in your browser before it ever reaches our servers. SpiritDAO operators with full database access cannot read your pod's passwords. It is a security-first infrastructure. Your encryption key is derived from a wallet signature that never leaves your browser. Our servers store only ciphertext and wrapped keys that are meaningless without the matching private key. It's the same security model as Signal and Proton Mail.

When a new member joins, existing leaders re-encrypt the relevant keys for them with one click. When someone leaves, the vault rotates automatically, the departed member loses future access, and every entry is re-encrypted under fresh keys.

We built this because pods accumulate credentials. The newsletter scheduler login, the shared Google Workspace, the Stripe key. Today those live in DMs, screenshots, and "ask Sarah." We needed this for the Executive Pod, and knew that other communities would benefit as well, so we built it!

Improved Role Permissions / Delegation

The old permissions model was binary: you're a pod leader and can do everything, or you're a member and can do nothing administrative. That stopped working the moment we started shipping features where a pod might want one person to own a capability without giving them the keys to everything else.

Pod leaders now assign granular permissions organized into three categories: Core (the always-on capabilities like chat, forum, governance, treasury), Add-ons (optional modules like Surveys and Password Vault), and Paid (modules with billing implications like the AI Agent). The management interface adapts to each member's actual permissions, if your role has password management access, you see the Passwords tab and nothing else.

This means a pod can now cleanly express roles like a Marketing Manager who handles shared logins and marketplace listings but can't touch treasury. Or an Auditor who sees balances and transaction history in read-only mode. Or a Steward who configures the AI agent and moderates forums but has no control over money or membership. None of these required new code, they're combinations of existing permission flags that the interface now honors.

Billing for paid modules stays leader-only. Spend authority belongs to leaders. Everything else can be delegated with precision.

Self-Hosted Video Infrastructure

As we prepare to welcome anchor communities, we migrated our in-app video calling from a metered third-party service to our own dedicated server. The cost is now a flat ~$8/month regardless of how many calls happen, replacing a bill that would have grown with every meeting.

This keeps the platform free for communities while protecting our donation runway. One more piece of infrastructure that scales with our communities without scaling our overhead.

A special thank you to SpiritDAO member Fluran Zen for sharing this technical insight with us!

Design Improvements

Notification improvements. You'll now see who messaged you at a glance — name cards with avatars appear in your notification list and DM alerts instead of wallet addresses. The notification page also updates in real time as new alerts arrive, so messages no longer require a refresh to surface. We wanted these fixes landed before more communities come online and rely on these signals to stay connected.

Direct messaging redesign. The DM interface has been updated to align with the platform's current visual direction.

Upcoming Events

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, May 25th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, May 27th · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, May 29th · 12:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

Connect with SpiritDAO

SpiritDAO App
SpiritDAO.org
YouTube
Twitter
TikTok
Docs

SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Traction

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:01:00 GMT

Three Communities, Three Conversations

This week we sat down with three intentional communities to explore SpiritDAO as shared infrastructure: The New Paradigm Circle of Friends, Dancing Rabbit, and Artisans Coop. Each brought their own operational realities and governance challenges and each helped us see more clearly how the platform meets communities where they actually are, not where a product roadmap imagines them to be.

We're going to save the specifics for a future newsletter, but there's good news coming. We can share this: two communities have made verbal commitments to move forward with SpiritDAO!

The Executive Pod is taking a deliberate approach to onboarding. We're not rushing these partnerships or offering a one-size-fits-all experience. Each community has custom needs, and we're doing the work to understand what integration actually looks like for them, what tools they need first, how governance maps to their existing structures, and where the platform needs to adapt rather than the other way around.

This is the moment we've been building toward. Stay tuned.

Donation Infrastructure — Two Clear Paths

We've rebuilt how donations work inside SpiritDAO, and the result is a cleaner, more transparent experience for everyone who supports this ecosystem.

When you visit the donate page, you'll now see two options:

Get $SYSTEM works the way it always has. Your contribution generates $SYSTEM tokens — the intercommunity exchange currency that powers bounties, marketplace transactions, events, and treasury operations across the platform. 8% of each donation supports SpiritDAO operations (4%) and our Community Fund (4%).

Direct Donation is new. This is a straightforward charitable contribution with no tokens involved. 100% goes directly to supporting SpiritDAO's operations fund, and the entire amount is tax-deductible. For supporters who simply want to help us keep this infrastructure free for communities around the world, this is the most direct way to do it.

Both donation paths now generate official PDF tax receipts delivered to your email with full documentation for your records. Behind the scenes, we've separated payment processing into dedicated accounts for each donation type, strengthening our financial transparency and audit trail.

We also unified the visual design across all donation pages in the app, ensuring a consistent and clear experience from the moment you decide to contribute through the moment your receipt arrives.

As a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 99-1308806), SpiritDAO can offer tax-exempt status on charitable contributions. If you've been thinking about supporting the work, it's never been easier (or more transparent) to do so.

Pod Module Updates

Module — We've reimagined how we integrate modules into pods. Our core vision was that every pod would have the core functionalities of a community group, which we define as those accessible from our home page. Beyond that, we wanted to ensure that optional modules were available to communities, both free and (optional) paid choices so that communities could truly shape their specific experiences.

Now in modules there are togglable selection lists. This helps keep our interface clean while still allowing our infrastructure and feature sets to scale alongside our communities. When you toggle an 'Add-on' or 'Paid' module, new tabs will appear in your Pods page (typically restricted to those with Leader Roles).

Core

The building blocks that come with every pod. These are the essential tools for running a community: chat, forum discussions, treasury, events, bounties, marketplace, knowledge base, and sub-pods.

Toggle on what you need and toggle off what you don’t. No cost, no limits.

Add-Ons

Extended capabilities that go beyond the basics.

Currently, this includes Surveys, (see more about this new feature below) which lets you create and distribute polls across your pod and sub-pods. Add-ons are free, but separated because they support more specialized workflows that not every pod needs.

Paid

Premium modules powered by external services.

For example, the Community AI Agent can:

Post daily discussions
Respond to mentions
Generate events autonomously

These modules have real operational costs (API usage, compute, infrastructure), so they require either a subscription or a pod treasury contribution to sustain.

New Features

Surveys — Pod leaders can now create and distribute surveys directly to pod members, sub-pods, or the entire community. The module supports multiple question types — multiple choice, single select, free text, and rating scales — with real-time results tracking and one-response-per-member enforcement. This gives pods a structured way to gather input without resorting to external tools or informal polls that disappear into chat history. When a community needs to make a decision, the first step is knowing what its members actually think. Now there's a built-in way to ask.

Knowledge Base Export — Pod leaders can now export their entire knowledge base as a single ZIP file, including all documents, PDFs, videos, and markdown content organized by category. Your community's institutional knowledge should never be locked inside any platform — including ours. This makes it easy to back up, share, or migrate everything a pod has built. Data portability isn't just a feature. It's a statement about who owns the knowledge.

Quick Meeting for Pods

Pod leaders can now start an ad-hoc video meeting directly from the pod detail page (the "View' button on the Pod Card) no formal event creation required. Click "Start Meeting" and you're live.

When a meeting is active, all pod members see a banner with a pulsing red indicator and participant count, and can join with a single click. The meeting uses the same full-featured conference room as scheduled events (host controls, screen sharing, reactions, speaker view) and automatically ends after five minutes of inactivity.

Not everything needs to be on the calendar. Sometimes a community just needs to get in a room and talk. Now they can, in about two seconds.

What This Week Means

There's a pattern in the last few newsletters worth naming. We rebuilt the notification system, rebuilt Pulse, launched optional AI agents, unified the app's design, and refreshed outreach. And now community commitments, a mature donation infrastructure, surveys, knowledge base portability, and instant meetings.

Each week has built on the one before.

The platform is no longer just infrastructure looking for communities. Communities are looking at the platform and saying yes. That's a different conversation entirely, and we're ready for it!

Upcoming Events This Week

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, May 18th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, May 20th · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, May 22nd · 12:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Reaching

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Connecting with ICMatch.org

On May 5th, we sat down with the ICMatch.org community to explore what SpiritDAO looks like as federated infrastructure for intentional communities.

ICMatch helps people find and form intentional communities such as cohousing groups, ecovillages, resource-sharing collectives, communes. These are communities built around shared values, shared governance, and shared resources. They're also communities that tend to outgrow their tools almost immediately. Group chats become unmanageable. Spreadsheets replace governance. Treasury lives in someone's personal account. Decision-making defaults to whoever has the most energy that week.

SpiritDAO was built to solve exactly this. The conversation explored how pods, governance, treasury, events, and membership tools could serve as a shared operational layer, one that intentional communities own collectively rather than renting from a platform that doesn't understand how they work.

This is what we mean by federated infrastructure: not one community using SpiritDAO, but many communities: each with their own identity, governance, and economy. Benefiting from the standardization of operating on shared rails while maintaining their core purpose and vision. The ICMatch session an opportunity to connect with others living the problem every day.

Outreach Is Landing

We've spent significant time this week on prospective community outreach, with a particular focus on intentional communities. And for the first time, we're seeing early traction.

Several conversations have moved past the introductory stage into substantive discussions about what integration would look like. Nothing is formalized yet, but the tone has shifted, from "tell me more" to "how would this work for us." That's a meaningful difference.

Community building is slow by design. People who've been burned by platforms that disappeared, pivoted, or paywalled their work aren't going to commit on the first call. We're okay with that. The conversations that are happening now are the ones that lead to real, lasting partnerships, not sign-ups that churn in sixty days.

If you're connected to an intentional community, a mutual aid network, a nonprofit collective, or any group that's outgrowing its current coordination tools, we'd love an introduction. The platform is free and a conversation costs nothing. Even better, SpiritDAO may be fit they've been looking for.

Ecosystem Polish

Unified app styling. We completed a full audit of the application's visual design and addressed several areas where legacy styling was still present from earlier iterations. Every screen, component, and interaction now follows a consistent design language. This is the kind of work that's hard to notice when it's done well — the app simply feels like one thing instead of several things stitched together. That's the point.

Marketplace filtering. We've updated product filtering in the Marketplace to better reflect how members actually use it. Products now filter in relation to the pods you're part of, and we've expanded filtering options to ensure the Marketplace remains usable and relevant as the ecosystem scales. When a platform grows, the navigation has to grow with it — or everything starts to feel cluttered. This keeps it clean.

Under the Hood

Google Ads adjustments. We continued refining our Google Ads campaigns this week. An account upgrade from four months ago introduced some configuration issues that were affecting performance. Those have been addressed. The campaigns are now running cleanly against our current messaging and audience targeting.

Upcoming Events This Week

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, May 11th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, May 13th · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, May 15th · 12:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Alive

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Introducing Community AI Agents

This is a new capability for SpiritDAO and we're excited about where it leads.

Community AI Agents are an optional, premium add-on that any pod can enable. When activated, your pod gets its own AI-powered community member, an agent with a custom name and personality that actively participates in discussions, answers questions, and helps keep your community engaged between the moments when humans are busy living their lives.

Here's what your agent does:

Daily Discussion Prompts — Your agent starts a new conversation in your pod's forum every day, tailored to your pod's focus area and recent activity. The goal isn't content for content's sake, it's a spark that gives members something worth responding to when they check in.

Mention-Based Replies — Members can @mention the agent by name in forum threads or chat. The agent reads the conversation context, pulls from your pod's knowledge base if one exists, and responds thoughtfully. Think of it as a subject-matter resource that's always available.

Weekly Event Suggestions — Each week, the agent proposes event ideas relevant to your pod's mission. These appear as drafts that pod leaders can review, edit, publish — or reject. You stay in full control. AI-generated events are currently limited to free, informational formats like discussion meetups and reading groups. If there is significant interest in the future we can incorporate paid events as well.

Custom Knowledge Base — Upload PDFs or text files to train your agent on your pod's specific domain. Responses stay grounded in your content, not generic.

Setup takes about two minutes. Open your pod's management page, go to the Agents tab, enable the agent, give it a name and personality, choose a forum category, and optionally upload documents. The cost is 25 $SYSTEM for 30 days, with revenue supporting DAO operations. Communities can toggle the agent on and off and retain any unused days.

Pod leaders have full control at every level: naming, personality, posting location, event approval, and the ability to turn it off at any time with data preserved.

This is what we mean when we talk about AI as community infrastructure. Not AI that replaces people. AI that keeps the room warm until people walk in.

This represents a new experimental direction for SpiritDAO, our core community ecosystem remains 100% free and always will be. Agentic AI as community engagement represents our first premium feature, which can only be purchased with $SYSTEM. When $SYSTEM is burned within our ecosystem the dollars associated with it default to our operations pool, which pays for the AI credits used on the bot (and more).

Pulse Rebuild

Last week we shipped a major notification overhaul. This week, we rebuilt the system that displays all of it.

The previous Pulse architecture wasn't scalable. As we added more notification types, activity categories, and ecosystem events, the feed was straining under a structure that wasn't designed for this level of complexity. So we rebuilt it, a more unified infrastructure that covers all relevant app functions and gives us a foundation that scales with the platform.

If Pulse felt incomplete before, that's because it was. It isn't anymore.

Forum & Chat Redesign

We've revamped the UX for both our forum and chat interfaces to better align with SpiritDAO's ecosystem theme. The visual language is more cohesive, navigation is cleaner, and the experience feels more intentional across both spaces.

Alongside the visual refresh, we've updated forum templates to better support how communities actually use them, and fixed a display issue where markdown formatting was rendering as raw text instead of displaying properly. Bold is bold again. Lists look like lists. The basics are now expanded to meet the evolving needs of communal coordination.

Under the Hood

iOS download fix. We resolved a bug that was preventing the app from downloading properly on iOS devices. If you tried to install on iPhone or iPad and hit a wall please try again.

Upcoming Events This Week

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, May 4th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

SpiritDAO for Intentional Communities — Tues, May 5th · 7:30 PM EST - A session in partnership with ICMatch.org, a platform dedicated to helping people find and form intentional communities, from cohousing and ecovillages to resource-sharing collectives and communes.

The session will cover how communities are using SpiritDAO to coordinate transparently, compensate contributors, and build real infrastructure together. We'll explore how SpiritDAO's governance, treasury, events, and membership tools can serve as the operational backbone for intentional communities that need more than group chats and spreadsheets.

If you're part of an intentional community, or building one, this is a conversation worth joining.

First Contact — Wed, May 6th · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, May · 12:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Connected

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Notification System — Rebuilt From the Ground Up

This is the big one.

Our notification system was fragmented. Different parts of the app were creating notifications through different code paths, some skipping push delivery entirely, others ignoring your preference settings, others not firing at all. If you ever felt like you were missing activity in your community, you weren't imagining it. The system had gaps, and we've spent this week closing all of them.

Here's what changed:

Unified notification pipeline. Five separate API routes were writing directly to the database, bypassing push notifications and preference checks. We built a shared server-side handler that every notification now flows through . Your preferences are respected and your push notifications actually arrive.

Governance voting reminders. A new automated system checks for proposals approaching their deadlines and sends reminders at 48 hours, 24 hours, 6 hours, and 1 hour before voting closes — but only to members who haven't voted yet. The final two reminders are marked urgent and bypass quiet hours. Every preference window has its own toggle. Your voice in governance shouldn't be lost because you forgot to check the calendar.

Event reminders. Registered attendees now receive reminders at 7 days and day-of before an event. Built-in deduplication ensures you'll never get the same reminder twice.

Marketplace in the Explorer. Marketplace purchases were invisible in the Pulse feed. They now appear with a purple badge, and you can filter to a dedicated Marketplace tab.

Bounty submissions and hat minting in Explorer. When someone submits work on a bounty, it now shows in the Pulse feed under the Bounties tab. And when someone receives a Hats Protocol role token, it appears with an orange badge — making onboarding moments visible to the whole community.

Event notification types corrected. The event dashboard was mislabeling notifications with wrong types, which confused the preference system. All event-related notifications now use the correct event types.

Event registration notifications. Previously, when someone registered for an event, nothing happened — there was a placeholder in the code where the notification should have been. Now both organizers and attendees are notified.

1,312 lines of dead code removed. Three legacy notification service files that were never imported anywhere. Gone.

Push Notifications: When you install the application you are asked if you want to enable 'Push Notifications', we strongly recommend you enable them (if you already said no you can turn them on via your app settings on your device) if you intend to engage with / lead communities within the SpiritDAO ecosystem.

This wasn't a feature addition. It was a foundational rebuild. The notification system is now the connective tissue it was always supposed to be and the platform is meaningfully more alive because of it.

New Knowledge Base Content

We've added a new set of video guides to the Knowledge Base covering core platform features: Pulse, SensemakerAI, using and adding content to Knowledge Bases, how to donate, and the SpiritDAO donation structure. We also built infrastructure to support video thumbnails so content displays properly in the KB interface.

The Knowledge Base is how communities build shared memory. These videos lower the barrier for new members and give existing members a reference point when they want to go deeper. If you haven't explored the KB yet, now is a good time.

Additionally, Knowledge Bases allow communities and groups to coordinate around collective intelligence, pods can create and upload custom content to the KB that is exclusively accessible by their members.

Financial Infrastructure

Several updates this week that strengthen the economic layer of the platform:

Token circulation tracking. We've integrated a total circulation count for both $SYSTEM and $SELF tokens directly into Pulse. Members can now see the live state of the ecosystem's token economy in one place, how much has been minted, how much is moving. This moves helps extend our philosophy of transparency beyond principle into practice.

ACH donation fee fix. ACH donations were incorrectly being charged a credit card processing fee. That's been corrected, ACH donations now carry a significantly lower fee, which means more of your contribution goes directly to the work.

Donation processing reliability. We fixed an issue where donations were being processed successfully but occasionally surfacing an error message to the user. The money was arriving; the confirmation wasn't. Now both work.

Executive Pod minting infrastructure. We've added more robust tooling for Executive Pod members to approve and mint $SYSTEM tokens following donations. Smoother backend, faster processing.

Peer-to-peer transfers in Pulse. Member-to-member transfers and donations now appear in the Pulse feed, making the flow of support within the community visible to everyone.

Under the Hood

Login deduplication. We resolved a bug where using two different login methods (direct email vs. Google) could create duplicate accounts. The system now checks both authentication paths against a single existing account.

Sensemaker context upgrade. We've significantly expanded the operational documents that power Sensemaker, our AI knowledge system. It now has a much deeper understanding of SpiritDAO's current infrastructure, offerings, and community context, which means better, more accurate answers when members ask questions.

What This Week Means

Most of the work this week is invisible to the casual user. You won't see the unified notification pipeline. You won't see the dead code that's been removed or the corrected event types. What you'll notice is that the platform works the way you'd expect it to, notifications arrive, digests land in your inbox, governance reminders show up before it's too late, and the Pulse feed reflects what's actually happening in your community.

That's the goal. Not features for the sake of features. Infrastructure that earns trust by working quietly and correctly.

Upcoming Events This Week

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, Apr. 27 · 8:00 PM A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, Apr 29 · 12:00 PM The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, May 1 · 12:00 PM A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

Connect with SpiritDAO

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Signal

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:04:00 GMT

Community Voices

A Letter of Recommendation from Member Jochen Weber: Jochen has volunteered to write a formal letter of recommendation for SpiritDAO. As both a donor and someone who has experienced the platform firsthand, his perspective carries real weight — particularly when we're applying for grants and sharing our work with prospective partners and funders. Jochen, thank you. This kind of support matters more than you might realize.

And it raises a broader invitation: if you've experienced something meaningful through SpiritDAO — as a member, a donor, or a community leader exploring the platform — we'd love to hear from you. A short testimonial, a letter of support, or even a willingness to be referenced in future applications makes a tangible difference in how we're received by institutions evaluating our work. Reach out to us at community@spiritdao.org if you're open to it.

Exploring Application Skins

We've been having conversations with prospective community members that surfaced an important design question: how do we meet communities where they are — with their own language, symbolism, and flow — without reducing the usability of the broader ecosystem?

Different communities carry different identities. A mutual aid network doesn't talk like a creator collective. A faith-based organization doesn't organize like a DAO. If SpiritDAO is going to serve as infrastructure for all of them, the interface needs to feel like theirs, not like they've been dropped into someone else's platform.

We're exploring the concept of application "skins" — customizable layers that allow communities to shape how SpiritDAO looks and feels to their members while preserving the shared coordination, governance, and treasury tools underneath. Think of it as the difference between handing someone a tool and handing them their tool.

This is early-stage exploration. We'll share more as the concept matures, and we welcome input from anyone who's thought about this problem in their own community work.

If you and/or your community would like to participate in co-design sessions around this, please connect with Ron Rivers (ron@spiritdao.org)

Website Updates

We've been listening and updating. Based on feedback from individuals exploring SpiritDAO for themselves and their communities, we've refreshed several key pages on our website:

The Eight Dignities — The philosophical foundation of everything we build. If you haven't revisited this page recently, it's worth a fresh read.

Community — A clearer picture of what participation looks like and who SpiritDAO is built for.

Donations — Updated to better reflect how contributions fuel our collective work and where your support goes.

The website is often someone's first encounter with SpiritDAO. These changes are about making sure that first impression matches the depth of what's actually here.

Ecosystem Updates

Base Builder Transaction Tracking We've integrated in-app transaction tracking for our Base Builder registration. This gives us an analytics layer we previously didn't have — visibility into community activity patterns, usage trends, and engagement data. Beyond the operational value, this positions us more competitively for Coinbase ecosystem grants and promotional opportunities. You can't tell the story of community impact without the data to back it up. This will help provide that data layer.

Pod Treasury & Distribution Fixes We resolved a bug affecting pod treasury distributions, added clearer confirmation and success notifications when transactions complete, and cleaned up the transaction history interface to better display pod wallet activity. We've also integrated these flows into Pulse, our community heartbeat tracker. Treasury is the backbone of community trust, when money moves, members need to see it clearly and confidently.

The Week Ahead

This was a week where the feedback loop worked. People explored what we've built, told us what they saw, and we responded — in the product, on the website, and in how we're thinking about the platform's future. That cycle is the whole point.

If you're using the platform, keep telling us what works and what doesn't. If you're considering it for your community, come talk to us. And if you've already experienced something worth sharing — like Jochen — don't underestimate how much your voice helps.

Upcoming Events This Week

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, Apr. 20th · 8:00 PM A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, Apr 23 · 12:00 PM The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, Apr 25 · 12:00 PM A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Momentum

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:03:00 GMT

Funding the Work

Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg — Grant Application Completed We submitted a capacity-building grant application to the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg, requesting $10,000 to support outreach and integration with local community organizations here in South Pinellas County. The Foundation invests in community-driven initiatives that advance equitable health outcomes — and the kind of coordination infrastructure SpiritDAO provides is exactly the connective tissue local nonprofits need but rarely have access to. This is boots-on-the-ground funding: real relationships with real organizations in our (present) home city.

Artizen Fund — Fiscal Sponsorship Exploration We met with the Aritzen Fund this week to explore what infrastructure support would be needed to deepen our fiscal sponsorship partnership. Fiscal sponsorship is a powerful mechanism for SpiritDAO, it allows us to extend our nonprofit umbrella to emerging projects and organizations that align with our mission, giving them access to tax-deductible fundraising and administrative support while they find their footing. Strengthening this relationship expands our ability to serve as a launchpad for the kinds of communities we're built for.

Base Build Ecosystem Registration We've registered SpiritDAO within Coinbase's Base Build ecosystem. Base is one of the most active Ethereum Layer 2 networks, and their 2026 roadmap is focused on expanding developer tools, stablecoin infrastructure, and community-driven applications. Being part of this ecosystem positions us for potential future awards, grants, and greater visibility within the Web3 builder community. It's a strategic step, planting a flag where the right people are already looking.

Ecosystem Updates

The app keeps getting sharper. Here's what changed this week:

Donation Transparency We expanded notifications around donations. Now, both donors and recipients receive email confirmations when funds move. We also clarified the donation structure at checkout so that every user knows exactly how their contribution is funding our collective efforts. If you're going to ask people to support the mission, they deserve to see exactly where the money goes. This supports that.

Thanks to James Baker for this suggestion!

Executive Pod Improvements The Executive Pod interface got a significant usability upgrade. Managing $SYSTEM token minting for community donations and processing Claims (burning $SYSTEM for fiat) is now faster and more intuitive. This is back-office infrastructure that most members won't see directly, but it's what keeps the economic layer of SpiritDAO running smoothly and ensures users who want to convert their $SYSTEM to fiat ($USD) are able to.

Event Editing Fix We resolved a bug where an "Access Denied" message briefly flashed after a user edited an event. Access was never actually being denied, it was a status check misfiring. We've reworked the flow to eliminate the message entirely. Small thing, but confusing error messages erode trust, and trust is everything.

Outreach & Visibility

Google Ads Revamp We completed a full audit and overhaul of our Google Ads campaigns. The previous campaigns were built around an earlier version of our messaging. They've now been rebuilt to reflect where SpiritDAO actually is, a community of communities. They were revised to better share what we offer, who we serve, and why it matters. Better targeting, clearer language, more aligned with the communities we're trying to reach.

The Bigger Picture

Weeks like this don't produce a single headline moment. They produce a dozen small ones that compound. A grant submitted locally. A fiscal partnership deepened. An ecosystem joined. Donation flows made more transparent. Ads recalibrated. Backend tools refined.

This is what building looks like when you're doing it right, not chasing one big win, but laying the infrastructure for many.

Upcoming Events This Week

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, Apr. 13th · 8:00 PM A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, Apr 15 · 12:00 PM The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, Apr 17 · 12:00 PM A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

Connect with SpiritDAO

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Growth

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:58:00 GMT

Ecosystem Improvements

We've been heads-down on the app this past week, squashing bugs and smoothing the edges of the experience. A few highlights:

Login reliability — We tracked down a legacy code issue that was causing intermittent login errors for some members. That's been resolved. If you were running into trouble getting in, try again - the door's open!

Notifications fixed — Direct message notifications were generating a 404 error instead of bringing you to the actual message. That's now working as intended, tap a notification, land in the conversation.

Tour behavior — You may have noticed the platform tour popping up repeatedly, even after dismissing it. A leftover setting from early testing was overriding the "Not Now" selection. Fixed. The tour now respects your choice and steps aside until you're ready.

SpiritDAO.org refreshed — We've updated our main site to better reflect where the ecosystem is today, a community of communities operating sovereignly, yet united in our vision of the good. We included clearer use cases and sharper language around what we actually offer. If you haven't visited spiritdao.org recently, take a fresh look.

A special thank you to the community members/users who shared their issues with us while exploring the application. This is so incredibly helpful.

Grant Applications in Motion

We're actively pursuing funding to sustain and scale the work. Two applications are now in the pipeline:

Creativity Pioneers Fund — We've applied to the Moleskine Foundation's Creativity Pioneers Fund, a global program that invests in nonprofit organizations using creativity to drive social change. The fund provides unrestricted grants to support operational sustainability and long-term capability-building. SpiritDAO's approach — building infrastructure that gives communities ownership over their own coordination — fits squarely within their mission. We'll know more later this year.

Gates Foundation Grand Challenges — We've submitted an application to the Gates Foundation's AI to Accelerate Charitable Giving initiative, focused on how SpiritDAO operationalizes AI as community infrastructure and the impact that has on human connection. This grant explores a question we think about constantly: how can AI tools be designed not to replace human relationships, but to strengthen them? The application centers on our AI-assisted knowledge base and how it serves as shared memory for communities doing meaningful work together.

Both of these represent something important beyond funding. They're a signal that what we're building has relevance beyond our own walls — that the intersection of transparent coordination, AI, and community ownership is a conversation institutions are ready to have.

This past Thursday (4/2/26) during Limicon's Stichfest we were awarded ~$250 from a collective capital pool via community voting. A small but mighty victory for us, this helps pad our operational budget as we explore onboarding our initial cohort of communities.

Our deepest gratitude for all participants who cast a vote for SpiritDAO. At this stage in the journey every dollar counts.

Community Outreach

Outreach to prospective community partners has continued this past week. We've had some encouraging email exchanges, but no formal partnerships have been established yet.

This is the honest reality of early-stage community building: the conversations are happening, and the interest is real, but trust takes time. We're looking for groups that already deal with the pain of fragmented coordination, organizations juggling five tools to do what one platform should handle. Collectives that need transparent governance. Nonprofits drowning in manual reporting. Creator groups trying to fairly distribute shared resources.

If that sounds like a community you're part of — or one you know — we'd love an introduction. We're not selling software. We're offering a backbone for how communities already work: roles, decisions, money, and memory — made transparent, permanent, and owned by the members themselves.

The platform remains 100% free to use. No trial. No paywall. Just tools built for people trying to do meaningful work together.

Who We're Built For

We've been refining how we talk about the communities SpiritDAO serves best. If you've ever wondered whether a group you know might be a fit, here's the short version:

Organizing collectives — mutual aid networks, tenant unions, advocacy groups running on trust and volunteer energy with no budget for enterprise tools.

Impact-driven nonprofits — organizations where transparent treasury management and auditable governance aren't nice-to-haves, they're the answer to donor accountability.

Creator and professional collectives — groups that share revenue, build knowledge together, and need fair mechanisms for contribution and recognition.

Civic and cultural institutions — co-ops, community land trusts, neighborhood associations with membership models still running on spreadsheets.

Web3-native communities — DAOs and protocol communities that already understand wallets and tokens but lack a real coordination layer.

The common thread: these are groups where coordination is the bottleneck. They already have the people, the mission, and the will. What they don't have is infrastructure that matches.

How You Can Help

We say this every time because it remains the most important thing: SpiritDAO grows through its people.

If you know a community leader, a nonprofit director, a collective organizer, or anyone tired of duct-taping their operations together with five different platforms — please make the introduction. A single conversation can change the trajectory for a group that needs what we've built.

And if you're already inside the platform, keep showing up. Every event attended, every message sent, every piece of feedback shared makes this place more alive.

Upcoming Events This Week

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, Apr. 6th · 8:00 PM A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, Apr 8 · 12:00 PM The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, Apr 10 · 12:00 PM A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

Shifting

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:00:00 GMT

New Features on the SpiritDAO App

We've shipped two meaningful additions to app.spiritdao.org this month, both designed to strengthen how we see and connect with one another.

Members Section You can now browse the full directory of SpiritDAO members and the communities they belong to — all in one place. Find someone you want to connect with? Start a DM, hop on a video chat, or simply say hello. You'll also notice a small green dot on profile pictures, letting you know when someone is online and available. It's a small detail, but it makes the community feel more alive.

Pulse Think of Pulse as the heartbeat of SpiritDAO. Because we're a community of communities, it can be hard to track what's happening across the ecosystem. Pulse solves that. It surfaces activity across Pod Formation, Governance (proposals and votes), Treasury transactions, New Members, Bounties, and Events — all in a single, flowing feed. If you've ever wondered "what's actually going on in SpiritDAO right now?" — Pulse is your answer.

A Candid Note from Ron Rivers

I want to be honest with you about where we are.

In many ways, going live with the app feels like starting from zero. We've been building for a long time — designing, iterating, testing, rethinking. But shipping software isn't the finish line. It's the starting line. Now begins the harder, slower, more human work: finding the people this platform was built for and inviting them in.

We're looking for communities. Changemakers. Small groups of people tired of juggling five different tools just to coordinate a meeting or make a decision together. If that sounds like someone you know — or like you — we want to talk.

Our plan of action is straightforward. I'm starting local, here in St. Petersburg, FL, reaching out to nonprofits and community organizations on the ground. Real conversations, face to face, one group at a time. That's the grassroots engine. But I can't be everywhere, and SpiritDAO was never meant to be a one-person effort.

So here's the ask: We need your help.

We're looking for community leaders and connectors — people who know groups that could benefit from better coordination tools. We're looking for introductions, partnerships, and fundraising opportunities that can help us sustain this work as it grows. If any of that sparks something in you, reach out. Every connection matters.

And as a reminder — the SpiritDAO platform is 100% free to use. No trial period, no paywall. Just tools built for people trying to do meaningful work together.

Recent Talks & Videos

Two recent conference presentations are now available:

Introduction to Temporal Naturalism — Watch on YouTube

SpiritDAO Infrastructure — Watch on YouTube
A quick note on this one: we ran into a recording issue during the live session, so we put together a more comprehensive product demo in its place. Honestly, it might be the better version. We're also planning a new series of training videos for the app in the near future. In the meantime, existing video tutorials are available in the Knowledge Base section within the app.

Important Update: Telegram & Discord

We've chosen to sunset our Telegram and Discord channels.

I know it might feel like a step backward. But one of SpiritDAO's core commitments is reducing the clutter and overhead that fragments community life. Maintaining two additional chat platforms outside our own app ran counter to that mission. We're focusing entirely on building our internal community where it belongs: inside the platform we built for exactly this purpose.

I'm still reachable if you need anything through those channels during the transition, but daily updates will live here, in our home.

Upcoming Events This Week

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 — Tue, Mar 31 · 8:00 PM A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here

First Contact — Wed, Apr 1 · 12:00 PM The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here

Feedback Loops — Fri, Apr 3 · 12:00 PM A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.

🚨 LAUNCH DAY INVITE 🚨

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:03:00 GMT

Let's gooooooooooooooooooooo!

Dear friend,

Love,

Ron

Limicon 2026

Thursday, March 19th @ 12:00 PM EST we'll be hosting our inaugural kickoff conversation about SpiritDAO. An intimate dive into the ecosystem, how it empowers communities, and how you can get more involved.

Add to your calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=MTM5cGk2dmV0NzlmZGJmZWdqb3ZpN2hjOWsgcm9uanJpdmVyc0Bt&tmsrc=ronjrivers%40gmail.com

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) 170(b)(1)(A)(i) Church of Temporal Naturalism, EIN #99-1308806.

SpiritDAO - Launch Updates & More

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:29:06 GMT

We are moving to our live launch, effective immediately.

Over the past two weeks we've been focusing on transitioning the app readiness to support live communities, away from our beta infrastructure. We're happy to share that we are ready for launch!

Recent work included fixing a bug related to the airdrop of member tokens when pod applications are accepted, updates to our events calendars, a member's directory, and more.

As launch preparation accelerated, we also republished the platform’s contracts in preparation for going live. From there, the focus shifted into a full-system review: testing flows across the app, catching edge cases, and tightening up remaining issues. During that process, we identified and resolved a small forum bug, helping ensure a smoother experience across the platform.

A major area of effort has been the expansion of sub-pod infrastructure. This work involved building out the underlying systems needed to support more flexible and nested community structures before launch. That process included some sticky bugs, especially around recursive pod logic, but those issues have now been resolved. With that, the pods infrastructure is now complete and the app’s recursive community structure is functioning as intended.

We’ve also completed work on a claim/burn mechanism for the $SYSTEM token, which supports nonprofit payout flows and adds an important piece to the platform’s economic infrastructure. This empowers communities within the SpiritDAO ecosystem to meaningfully collaborate and participants to be rewarded for their work. Users can burn $SYSTEM tokens via our claim process and the SpiritDAO will issue them checks / ACH payments. Note that all claims are subject to review.

At this point, the app is complete and ready for launch. Recent logins may have revealed another important transition step: SYSTEM and SELF balances were reset, and the faucet has been removed as we move away from testing conditions and toward a live environment.

As we enter this next phase, communication will increasingly shift into the app itself. Going forward, the goal is to reduce energy spent maintaining parallel update streams across Telegram and Discord, and instead focus more fully on improving the ecosystem and supporting the communities and individuals building within it.

We’re now approaching our first major infrastructure presentation, and this next stage is less about prototypes and more about activation. The core systems are in place. The platform is ready. Now we begin the move into live use.

SpiritDAO is 100% free to use for all communities (inline with our TOS). There is no charge to setup a community, you just need three people. We fund our efforts by allocating 8% of every donation for operations expenses and a community fund to support efforts aligned with the Eight Dignities.

If you haven't already, explore the application at https://app.spiritdao.org

Limicon 2026

This week we'll be hosting two talks at Limicon:

Tuesday, March 17th @ 12:00 PM EST will be a dive into Temporal Naturalism, the founding philosophy of SpiritDAO. In this discussion we'll explore the core principles of Temporal Naturalism and how we apply them to daily life.

Add to your calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=bTM2dTg0dmpkMm8xM2k4cWFmdGM1MDJiMHMgcm9uanJpdmVyc0Bt&tmsrc=ronjrivers%40gmail.com

......

Add to your calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=MTM5cGk2dmV0NzlmZGJmZWdqb3ZpN2hjOWsgcm9uanJpdmVyc0Bt&tmsrc=ronjrivers%40gmail.com

Questions?

The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) 170(b)(1)(A)(i) Church of Temporal Naturalism, EIN #99-1308806.

SpiritDAO - BETA Week 3

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:27:36 GMT

Hello all,

Sharing a quick but meaningful update on what’s been happening behind the scenes over the past week. There’s been a lot of focused work to stabilize the core experience while also pushing forward on new features.

Platform & Infrastructure

The new SpiritDAO website is live → https://www.spiritdao.org
Self-actualization in the Age of Crisis (SpiritDAO's community owned core text) also got a facelift → https://singletruth.org
Successfully moved our banking from PNC to Mercury, giving us more flexibility and better alignment with how we operate and support our fiscal sponsorship partners.

Core App Improvements

Resolved a critical issue with governance proposals and voting — the system is now functioning as intended
Fixed several modal (popup) display issues across the app for a smoother UI experience
Eliminated the frustrating login bug that required multiple clicks
Eliminated the need for users to enter the invite code multiple times (usually after a fresh update/deploy, this was a tricky one!)

New Features

Video Chat is now live inside the app both for direct 1:1 calls (accessible by clicking any users profile) and for group conferences (via the events infrastructure). Be sure to explore!
Added an in-app onboarding tour for new users (also available in the knowledge base)

Community Calls

As we move towards the completion of our Beta testing we invite you and yours to join us in in our weekly onboarding sessions.
If you're available, we would love to book a 1:1 session with you to explore the app together, onboard you and/or your community, and get live feedback. Please reach out to let us know if you'd be open to connecting.

Overall, this was a strong week focused on stability, usability, and laying better foundations for what’s next. We're looking at another week or two before we move towards the live app, building our community and direction and welcoming others to join within our infrastructure.

As always, your feedback is incredibly valuable as we refine onboarding, governance flows, and the overall user experience.

More soon,
Ron

Questions?

Join our community forum or reach out directly:

Forum: app.spiritdao.org/forum
Email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) 170(b)(1)(A)(i) Church of Temporal Naturalism, EIN #99-1308806.

SpiritDAO - BETA Week 2

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:31:24 GMT

Hi everyone,

I hope this finds you well! We're continuing our active beta and making great strides in resolving the remaining issues and ideating around new features to meet community needs. This week I wanted to take a moment to personally thank you and celebrate what we've accomplished together.

The numbers speak for themselves:

Our Beta Testers pod is active, members are sharing feedback and insights in both the chat and forums
Several meaningful forum discussions around bugs formed last week
Our mobile-first approach is resonating, you're proving that DAO participation doesn't need to be desk-bound

Beyond the metrics, what really excites me is seeing the quality of feedback from our testing community. From the strategic discussions to the creative bounty proposals that remain yours for the taking, you're not just using SpiritDAO - you're defining what the future of onchain community collaboration looks like.

Special shout outs to some incredible contributors:

Eric Miki for his dedication, spending a solid hour doing live testing and walking through the experience on his end, and suggesting UX improvements.
Camara Cassin for your active and insightful feedback into the issues you were experiencing (which have since been fixed!)
Jon Simmons for actively promoting and sharing our beta on social media, elevating awareness of our ecosystem within the web3 community as well as sharing a bug he discovered.

What's next? We're continuing our beta and are looking for a few more testers to connect for 1:1 beta sessions. The objective is to confirm that our core functionality is working exactly as intended. Afterwards we will transition into a live version and begin the formal construction of our community, opening the doors to others as well.

Here's how you can help us keep this momentum:

1. Keep engaging - Your voice in Pods and forum discussions is what makes our community valuable

2. Invite thoughtfully - Know someone who would add value to our community? Send them our way. You can find your own personal invite code within your Identity page.

3. Share your story - If SpiritDAO has been useful for your DAO or community work, we'd love to amplify your success We're building something special here - a place where DAO governance actually works, where mobile-first design meets serious onchain functionality, and where community members like you shape the product as much as the founding team does. Thank you for being part of this journey from the beginning. The best is yet to come.

Other: This week we've been revamping our website, both for a cost savings effort for our nonprofit as well as to highlight our community infrastructure and recently expanded services. Stay tuned!

With love, gratitude, and immense appreciation,

Ron Rivers

P.S. Have ideas for new features or improvements? Drop them in our forum or beta testers chat!

Questions?

Join our community forum or reach out directly:

Forum: app.spiritdao.org/forum
Email: community@spiritdao.org

Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) 170(b)(1)(A)(i) Church of Temporal Naturalism, EIN #99-1308806.

SpiritDAO - BETA Update

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:15:49 GMT

Hi everyone,

First, thank you.

Your time, curiosity, and willingness to test an early version of our platform mean more than you might realize. Beta testing isn’t passive, it’s active work and your engagement is directly shaping what this product becomes.

At this stage, testing and feedback are the most important contributions you can make. What feels intuitive, what feels confusing, what breaks, what surprises you — all of it helps us prioritize improvements and make better decisions faster.

This week’s sessions (all times EST)

All sessions will use the same meeting link:
https://meet.google.com/twa-ghig-qxp

Monday — 8:00 PM
Horizons
Looking ahead: where the platform is going and what we’re building toward.

Wednesday — 12:00 PM
First Contract
New member introductions, connection, and shared context.

Friday — 11:00 AM
Feedback Loops
Open discussion to share insights, surface friction, and suggest changes.

A few quick asks

Please RSVP to the sessions through the in-app Events section so we can plan accordingly.
When you notice something (good or bad) share your insights in the forum. Written feedback helps us track patterns and follow up more thoughtfully.
If you can’t attend a session live, forum posts are still incredibly valuable.

We’re grateful to be building this with you, not just for you. Thanks again for leaning in at this early stage — it truly makes a difference.

Looking forward to connecting this week,
Ron

Questions?

Join our community forum or reach out directly:

Forum: app.spiritdao.org/forum
Email: community@spiritdao.org

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) 170(b)(1)(A)(i) Church of Temporal Naturalism, EIN #99-1308806.

It's time... Welcome to the Beta V2

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:26:53 GMT

SpiritDAO's Newsletter

Beta Invite

Happy New Year SpiritDAO family!

Our December launch immediately revealed a login/session bug that required a complete refactor of the application. Today we're happy to share that the refactor is complete and includes some fresh additions to make the beta experience that much better!

We're excited to invite you to be among the first to experience the SpiritDAO Community Platform — a complete ecosystem for decentralized collaboration, governance, and community building.

What is SpiritDAO?

SpiritDAO is reimagining how communities organize, collaborate, and grow together. Our platform combines:

On-Chain Governance — Vote on proposals that shape our collective future
Bounty System — Earn $SELF and $SYSTEM tokens for contributing to the community
Pod Management — Join specialized teams with role-based permissions combines with modular infrastructure and recursive nesting of communities for governance flexibility.
Token-Gated Forums — Engage in discussions with verified community members
Events — Full events infrastructure including ticketing and credentialing.
Knowledge Base — Access educational resources and community guides
🛒 Community Marketplace — Discover products from fellow members

Why Beta Test?

You'll Get Early Access To:

A cutting-edge crypto-community platform with all features and executive privileges
A curated bounty series designed to guide you through each feature
Direct input into product development — your feedback shapes the final product
Recognition as a founding community member

Beta Period: Now through Mar. 1st, 2026

Special Beta Testing Bounties

We've created 15 progressive bounties ($SELF rewards that will transfer into the live launch) that walk you through every feature:

Getting Started

Set up your profile and explore the platform
Join your first pod and understand roles
Participate in forum discussions
Join our welcome events to learn more about SpiritDAO and the platform.

Intermediate

Create and vote on governance proposals
Submit work on bounties
Explore the marketplace

Advanced

Create a pod and manage members
Design community events
Contribute to the knowledge base
and more...

Every bounty you complete helps us refine the platform while you earn real rewards.

Get Started in 3 Steps

Visit: app.spiritdao.org (if possible, use a mobile device!)
1. USE CODE: Q93AXD
Connect: Use your email - a wallet will automatically be created for you on the backend.
Explore: Check the forum for "Beta Testing Guide" to understand how to participate, explore our Knowledge Base for video instructional on using the infrastructure, and join a 'First Contact' event to

We Need Your Feedback

This beta is about co-creation. We want to hear:

What features you love
Where you get stuck
What's missing
Your bold ideas for the future

Report bugs, suggest features, and share ideas directly in our Bug Reporting & Feature Suggestions forum category.

Important Notes

All executive privileges during beta: Everyone has full access to test all features
$SELF and $SYSTEM tokens: For beta we are using tokens with no real value, however we will switch to live value-based tokens post-beta. NOTE: Earned $SYSTEM for completing bounties will transfer to the live version!
Your data is safe: Beta testing on secure infrastructure
Community first: This is your platform — help us build it together

Questions?

Join our community forum or reach out directly:

Forum: app.spiritdao.org/forum
Email: community@spiritdao.org

We're building something special together. Your participation in this beta will shape the future of decentralized community collaboration.

Let's build the future of DAOs, genuine social alternatives, together.

The SpiritDAO Team

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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) 170(b)(1)(A)(i) Church of Temporal Naturalism, EIN #99-1308806.

SpiritDAO End of Year Update - Beta Invite

spiritdao@newsletter.paragraph.com (SpiritDAO) — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 18:45:13 GMT

SpiritDAO's Newsletter

Beta Invite

Hello SpiritDAO Family,

Our end of year update is straightforward - you're invited!

The SpiritDAO Community App beta is now LIVE! It is not complete, but aspects are functioning as intended. We'll wrap up building early 2026, but your present feedback is valued!

You can access it at:
https://app.spiritdao.org

Invite code: Q93AXD

See below for a top level video summary of our progress and what is next.

Thank you for reading!
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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) 170(b)(1)(A)(i) Church of Temporal Naturalism, EIN #99-1308806.

Sensemaking - SpiritDAO's Weekly Newsletter

Live

Contents:

$SELF Is Here

Security Audit — Findings / Updates

Reliability & Polish

Upcoming Events

Questions?

Earned

Contents:

Staked Tokens Now Count Toward Governance

The Future of $SELF — Our Roadmap for Time-Based Participation

Outreach Continues

Upcoming Events

Questions?

Clearer

Contents:

Why SpiritDAO — Now on the Site

Identity Page — Tokens and Credentials, Separated

Grant Application — The Greater Sum Foundation

Outreach Continues

Upcoming Events

Questions?

Sovereignty

Contents:

Bring Your Own Token

Smart Contract Security Audit — In Progress

Donate Today

Upcoming Events

Questions?

Ready

Contents:

Why This Week Matters

Configurable Governance

Pod Treasuries V3

Password Vault — End-to-End Encrypted

Improved Role Permissions / Delegation

Self-Hosted Video Infrastructure

Design Improvements

Upcoming Events

Questions?

Traction

Contents:

Three Communities, Three Conversations

Donation Infrastructure — Two Clear Paths

Pod Module Updates

Core

Add-Ons

Paid

New Features

Quick Meeting for Pods

What This Week Means

Questions?

Reaching

Contents:

Connecting with ICMatch.org

Outreach Is Landing

Ecosystem Polish

Under the Hood

Questions?

Alive

Contents:

Introducing Community AI Agents

Pulse Rebuild

Forum & Chat Redesign

Under the Hood

Questions?

Connected

Contents:

Notification System — Rebuilt From the Ground Up

New Knowledge Base Content

Financial Infrastructure

Under the Hood

What This Week Means

Questions?

Signal

Contents:

Community Voices

Exploring Application Skins

Website Updates