In the coming years, web3 will go mainstream and redefine people's interactions with products, platforms, applications, brands, and each other. It will usher in a new era of the internet where the full potential of online (and in the future, on-chain) communities, organizations, and economies will be realized at an unprecedented scale—powered by web3 technologies. And its foundations are being built right now.

Over the last decade, each market cycle progressively brought web3 closer to mainstream adoption as new infrastructure and higher levels of abstraction unlocked new platforms and applications that made it easier for companies to build and more people to use. Importantly, new infrastructure also unlocked new user experiences, interactions, and business models that were previously not possible—which are critical for any new technology to gain mass adoption.

Over the last two years, our work with some of the largest and most innovative communities in web3 has led us to many discoveries and new possibilities we never imagined. We learned that on-chain communities are foundational to the future of the internet itself and everything built on top of it. This will lead to a major shift in people’s understanding of the critical role web3 technologies will play in evolving the internet—as all of its applications, products, platforms, experiences, and businesses will move towards ones that are fundamentally more community-driven, co-creative, and user-centric.

Infrastructure for the Next Wave of Web3

Syndicate is building the infrastructure to power the next wave of web3 platforms and products at scale. Our work with startups and Fortune 100 companies to help bring on-chain communities mainstream has shown us that the next wave of web3 products will be built very differently. And this will require new infrastructure.

Syndicate's new Transaction Cloud, APIs, and modular smart contracts (and more to come) radically improve the experience for developers (DX) and their end users (UX), making web3-powered products easier to build, grow, and use at mainstream scale. For example, developers can broadcast on-chain transactions via Syndicate using a simple set of REST APIs. These APIs and other services open up incredible possibilities, ranging from simpler account abstraction to easier NFT mints to powerful on-chain automation. This is just the beginning, and we’re excited to share more about our current and new products in development in the coming weeks and years.

Let's Build the Next Wave Together

We are now ready to work deeply with more innovative developers, startups, companies, and brands to build and help take web3 to the next level of maturity and adoption. Like previous cycles over the last decade, forward-thinking teams came together to pioneer the next wave of web3. We're here for it, and you. We're excited to build things that will profoundly change the internet together.

Links

• Visit our updated website

• View our developer documentation

• Follow us on X

• Follow us on Warpcast

• Follow us on LinkedIn

Over the past two years, our work with some of the largest and most innovative projects in web3 has led us to new discoveries and possibilities beyond the limits of our original applications. We’ve come to realize that our infrastructure and protocols can serve far greater needs. We’re excited to share more details soon.

To bring this new vision to life, we’re sunsetting Investment Clubs and Collectives by the end of June. For more, read our Gitbook FAQ or contact us at hello@syndicate.io.

Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to this new era for the internet and Syndicate.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Collectives, a new social networking and community building primitive for web3 built by Syndicate. It launched in public beta today and enables anyone to create on-chain social networks with powerful, modular ERC-721M NFTs that are able to evolve with communities and are composable across web3—including all of Syndicate’s current and future products like Investment Clubs.

Collectives are built on a new standard (ERC-721M) developed by Syndicate and are decentralized, evolvable, and composable—meaning anyone can create, use, and build on them. Evolvable, composable social networks are one of the next major breakthroughs in web3, and Collectives are at the forefront of this innovation. There are already over 60,000 holders of ERC-721M NFTs and growing: Rug Radio, BFF, Kamp Kilmer, FWB Fellowships, and more have been built on Collectives’ ERC-721M infrastructure. ERC-721M has been audited, formally verified, and will be open sourced.

Use Collectives to assemble the top experts in DeFi. Form a Collective of musicians to support music NFT projects. Create multiple Collectives to build LP, scout, founder, and expert networks around your investment fund on-chain. Connect people with shared interests and expertise. Find opportunities as a network. Share investment ideas, and win deals together. Support projects as a community. The possibilities are endless.

Easily launch a Collective for your social network or community that is composable across web3—for your DAO, company, co-investors, LPs, investment club members, friend group, or more—in just a few clicks via our no-code tool for Collectives here.

Social Networks Are Different in Web3

Social networks in web3 will be designed in fundamentally different ways than web2. Unlike web2, social networks in web3 will be owned by their users—not by any single company, service, or protocol. They’ll also be decentralized, customizable, interoperable, evolvable, and programmable.

To accomplish this, web3 social networks will need to be designed from the following first principles:

• Built on open industry standards

• Decentralized

• Tokenized

• Composable and interoperable across all of web3

• Modular, customizable, evolvable, programmable

Collectives are designed and built from these five core principles, giving social networks powerful new-to-world capabilities and properties uniquely enabled by web3.

Collectives: Social Networks With Web3 Superpowers

Collectives are the first of many social networking primitives for web3 from Syndicate that will revolutionize how capital and communities work together.

The combination of novel social primitives with Syndicate’s financial protocols will enable founders to raise capital instantly from their social networks, investors to syndicate deals just-in-time on-demand, communities of contributors to provide work for ownership, and so much more. Collectives help lay the foundation for this future.

Collectives are built on ERC-721M (“M” stands for “Modular”), a new standard developed by Syndicate that extends ERC-721 in powerful ways:

• Transforms ERC-721 into a developer platform through modularity and plug-ins

• Infinitely customizable mint, burn, transfer, metadata, and rendering plug-ins

• Ability to evolve the NFTs and contracts over time (as well as lock key functions)

• Gas-optimized bulk mint and distribution capabilities to one/multiple addresses

• Powerful tools for community managers to build and grow communities on-chain (e.g., admin functions, royalty fees, token recovery)

And so much more.

Creating a Collective for your network—whether it’s five friends or 50,000 community members—is easy via our no-code tool. Customize a few settings (e.g., Collective’s name, image, description, member limits, price to join, transferability), and in a few seconds, your network or community is launched as an ERC-721M smart contract on-chain. As you grow your community, you can always dive deeper with low-code customizations once our Collectives Developer Platform is live.

A custom page and link are automatically generated for your Collective that you can easily share with people privately or publicly. Members can join by claiming the Collective’s NFT in a few clicks. From there, your community can immediately utilize and interoperate with any web3 tool that supports ERC-721, like Syndicate Investment Clubs, Snapshot (voting), Guild (permissioning web2 platforms), Gatekeeper (IRL events), Lobby (knowledge bases) and more.

Let’s review in detail some of the most exciting features of the Collectives ERC-721M primitive developed by Syndicate.

1/ Built on the ERC-721 Industry Standard—Making Collectives Composable Across Web3 & Syndicate

Social networks and communities in web3 should be built on open industry standards—not platforms or protocols that lock people into proprietary systems. That’s why Collectives and ERC-721M build on ERC-721, the industry standard for NFTs.

Thousands of companies, projects, and teams have been building on ERC-721 for years like OpenSea, Gnosis Safe, Zora, Genie, Snapshot, Guild, Mirror, Shopify, and more—meaning Collectives are built on one of the most battle-tested, widely distributed technologies in all of web3.

As a result, social networks and communities powered by Collectives are out-of-the-box composable with all products, applications, and tools that support ERC-721 across web3—whether it’s a permissioning system, communications app, governance tool, collaboration software, investment club, or anything built by Syndicate or the industry today and in the future.

For example, you can now token gate Investment Clubs on Syndicate with a Collective, create multiple Collectives (e.g., LPs, scouts, founders, contributors, experts, advisors) around an investing DAO, and create multiple investing DAOs (e.g., seasons, deal-by-deal) within a larger Collective that represents a social network, community, company, or DAO like We3, GCR, Outliers, or The Symmetrical. New possibilities are unlocked when you combine ERC-721M social networks with DAOs via composability.

2/ ERC-721M transforms ERC-721 into a developer platform through modularity and plug-ins for mint, burn, transfer, and metadata

Unlike other ERC-721 standards, ERC-721M is designed to be a developer platform, enabling anyone to build custom plug-ins that can be modularly swapped in and out of an ERC-721M contract upon its creation or at any time. Custom plug-ins for minting (how people can join, invite, and refer people to a Collective), burning (how memberships can be redeemed or destroyed), transferring (how memberships can be shared), and metadata (images, content, identity, roles, reputation, badges, levels, etc.) are all possible with ERC-721M—providing Collectives with infinite customization opportunities based on each social network or communities’ unique needs.

Want to create a network where each person gets five invites, and each of those invitees get five new invites? Want to give special on-chain roles, badges, or levels to some members, or create an on-chain reputation system with custom parameters that dynamically update and make each person and NFT in your Collective unique? All of this is possible with ERC-721M’s modular design. Syndicate has already developed several mint, burn, transfer, and metadata plug-ins for communities like Rug Radio, BFF, and more—but we’ll be opening the platform to other developers to build custom ERC-721M plug-ins for your community and others.

3/ Collectives can evolve with communities over time (and lock functionality to decentralize)

One of the most powerful dimensions of Collectives and ERC-721M is that they can evolve and grow with communities over time as they change and scale. Due to ERC-721M’s modular design, plug-ins can be swapped in and out to change how the network operates, and in particular, each Collective’s metadata renderer can be updated any time to account for any change—whether it’s adding roles, content, identities, reputation, experiences, or even other contracts or applications.

With Collectives and ERC-721M, you don’t need to deploy new NFT contracts each time your community changes—instead you can deploy a Collective once and evolve it over time as you see fit. Rug Radio, BFF, and others have used ERC-721M in this way.

ERC-721M also enables admins to permanently lock functionality and prevent future changes if the Collective wants to create permanence or decentralize. For example, you can lock the ability to update plug-ins (e.g., mint, burn, transfer, metadata) and run admin functions (e.g., royalties, member management, bulk minting). ERC-721M also enables admins to renounce ownership of the Collective if they want the contract to be completely decentralized and community-run. The options to not only evolve but also lock functionality and renounce ownership provide communities with complete control over their development and maturation—which is exactly the way it should be.

4/ Gas-optimized bulk minting, distribution, and onboarding capabilities

Syndicate’s extensive research and work in gas optimization make Collectives incredibly efficient, scalable, and inexpensive—particularly when it comes to ERC-721M’s built-in bulk minting and distribution capabilities. These features are important as many social networks and communities in web3 will live on Ethereum Mainnet, and they need gas-efficient ways to onboard people and members.

Collectives and ERC-721M enable admins to bulk mint many NFTs in one transaction to a single address in a gas-efficient manner (e.g., if admins want to pay for the gas to mint many NFTs to their own wallet then gift and airdrop them to their community) inspired by ERC-721A. ERC-721M also enables admins to mint an NFT to many addresses at once. And when we deploy ERC-721M to L2s and sidechains, Collectives become dramatically more scalable, where on-chain social networks and communities with members in the millions become possible—and multi-chain wallets and applications like Syndicate, MetaMask, Gnosis Safe, and more can immediately support them with no additional work or integrations.

5/ Powerful tools for community managers to grow networks and communities on-chain

Collectives are built for community managers to build and grow their social networks and communities on-chain. As such, ERC-721M includes a range of built-in admin functions including the ability to manage memberships (via mint, redeem/burn, and transfer), set fees and royalties (at the Collective and/or specific NFT levels), and transfer ownership and control of the contract, among others.

Community managers can also utilize the factory ERC-721M contract to create many Collectives for different communities (e.g., DeFi experts, DAO experts, NFT collectors), or even multiple Collectives for the same community (e.g., GPs, LPs, scouts, advisors). As the factory utilizes clones, creating many Collectives is easy and gas-efficient.

And Much More

This is just the beginning for Collectives and ERC-721M, as Syndicate and other developers will be adding new plug-ins, capabilities, features, and user experiences to them in the months ahead. We’re excited for this important first step—we can’t wait to see where the ecosystem takes Collectives from here.

Join Our ‘Syndicate Genesis’ Collective

Today we also launched the ‘Syndicate Genesis’ Collective, an on-chain social network for Syndicate’s growing community. ‘Syndicate Genesis’ is open to anyone for the next seven days for just the cost of gas and is non-transferable.

We plan to evolve and customize our ‘Syndicate Genesis’ Collective over time to add new functionality, update the Collective’s artwork, assign new community roles, distribute badges, and more—making ‘Syndicate Genesis’ a vibrant and dynamic on-chain social networking experience for Syndicate’s earliest community members. We’re excited to push the boundaries of Collectives and ERC-721M with our community.

Join ‘Syndicate Genesis’ here.

The Future of Communities and Capital

To revolutionize investing—and beyond—we must not only build financial protocols but also social primitives that reimagine how communities and capital work together. Collectives and ERC-721M are the first social networking primitive built by Syndicate that sets us on the path towards this expanded vision.

To revolutionize investing and the social networks that power it is to redesign a system at the heart of how our world works and how the future is built—and for the first time, we have the opportunity to positively reshape it in a span of years, not generations.

Let’s go. Together.

Start a Collective today, and see our Guide.

Or join our Collective.

Or build ERC-721M with us.

But within the next decade, investing will become decentralized, democratized, and community-driven. This transformation will have a major impact by expanding what gets funded and built in the world. It’ll level the playing field, empower more communities to invest in new ideas and technologies, and introduce radical new models for investing to society that are fundamentally more open, free, and fair.

The democratization of investing at scale is not only inevitable—it’s imperative. To build the world, more of society must be brought into the process of investing in its development and participate in the incredible prosperity that will be created as a result. For too long, the tools and capabilities to invest have been limited to too few. The time has come for this to profoundly change for the better, for everyone.

Investing is a Network of Money and People

To revolutionize investing, however, it’s far more complicated than just changing how money and capital move. Investing is a complex, interconnected web and system of money and people. Investing is both a financial and social network.

Critically, it’s the social network of formal and informal relationships between people, organizations, and communities that determines how capital is allocated in our world—so it’s necessary but not sufficient to only redesign the financial protocols of investing. To revolutionize investing, social networks and the interplay between money and people must also be reimagined.

Doing so will create billions of dollars in economic growth, efficiencies, and wealth. It’ll unlock the potential of millions of promising people, projects, and communities everywhere. Reimagining social networks and their central role in investing is essential to democratizing how the world allocates capital and important resources.

Social Primitives for Communities and Capital

New social networking primitives and protocols for how the world connects people and money will need to be built. They’ll need to be designed in fundamentally new ways, by taking advantage of the latest advancements in web3. Unlike today’s social networks, they’ll be verifiable, interoperable, programmable, and owned by users—not by any single company, service, or protocol.

Here’s what we’ve learned at Syndicate about how these new social networking primitives will be designed:

• Built on open industry standards

• Decentralized

• Composable and interoperable

• Programmable, modular, customizable

• Simple and inexpensive

When designed from these first principles, new social networks for investing—and beyond—can be built that reimagine how communities and capital work together on the internet. People and capital will be able to connect and coordinate more efficiently. Promising entrepreneurs, projects, and communities will be discovered more easily than ever before and receive the backing they deserve. Capital will flow seamlessly and programmatically across these new financial and social networks on the internet, enabling anyone in the world to invest in our shared future.

This is no longer science fiction. We now have the blueprints to start building them.

Change in Years, Not Generations

Investing is much more than just about allocating money for financial return. It’s about what and whom the world gives important resources to.

Investing is also more than just money. It’s also the social networks of people, organizations, and communities that come along with it—and the time, expertise, connections, work, attention, and support that they provide.

To revolutionize investing is to redesign a system at the heart of how our world is built. And we now have the opportunity to positively reshape it in a span of years, not generations.

Let’s go. Together:

Syndicate is building accessible, effortless, and social web3 technologies to democratize and transform how the world allocates capital. In January, we launched our first tool, Web3 Investment Clubs, enabling anyone to create and run an investment club as a DAO as easily as starting a group chat. More than 20,000 investment clubs have been launched via Syndicate to date—by student clubs, mission-driven organizations, angel investor networks, NFT collector groups, DAOs, and more. Syndicate’s community-driven models for investing are filling important gaps in the ecosystem and accelerating long-term structural change.

Since launching Syndicate’s first product earlier this year, we have witnessed an explosion in investment clubs. As some may know, investment clubs launched on Syndicate can invest in on-chain assets (tokens and NFTs) or, if the club is accredited, they can also invest in off-chain (startup equity).

In the Syndicate discord, we have regular discussions with our community members about their investment clubs, connecting with external experts (lawyers, accounts, and tax advisors), and the do’s and don’t of launching an investment club. Syndicate’s guidebook provides guidelines for launching and establishing investment clubs. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you set up your investment club, plus a friendly reminder to always seek advice from counsel in your jurisdiction.

What is an Investment Club?

The SEC’s website defines an investment club as a group of people who pool their capital and make investments together. Here are some more characteristics of investment clubs:

• Up to 99 members (individuals)

• All members must actively participate in investment decisions

• No performance fees (a.k.a carry)

• No public solicitation

• Must not make, nor propose to make, a public offering of its securities

• If investing in startup equity, club members must be accredited

• No transferability of tokens or membership

• Responsible for following all applicable laws and tax obligations

All Investment Clubs are not created equal

Who are the club’s members and how do they work together?

Every investment club on Syndicate has two types of members: admins and non-administrative members.

The admin is the person (or people) who creates the investment club. Admins are club members who participate in investment decisions and also do administrative functions for the club like managing the club's wallet and settings and helping members enter or leave the club.

Non-administrative members are participants in the club who contribute funds and help make decisions on investments but are not expected to do ongoing administrative work for the club. In our current product, only individuals (as opposed to companies or DAOs) should be members of investment clubs.

Investment clubs can share ideas amongst members, learn together, increase buying power, share risk, and reduce transaction costs.

Investment clubs are generally not regulated by the SEC. If a club has more than 99 members, then it may not be considered an investment club anymore. It might be another vehicle that the SEC does regulate, which would have additional registration and compliance requirements. Your legal and tax counsel can help you navigate this if it applies to you.

Governance is a requirement of all clubs because every member who has allocated capital to the club should have voting rights and decision-making power in each investment. The governance structure is flexible and can be decided collectively by the club members.

The most asked question from our community is how can they input carry and management fees or why can’t their investment club have carry or management fees. Our product does not currently allow investment clubs to have carry because of the risk that if someone (such as the club admin) is paid for providing advice about the club’s investments and/or selecting investments for the club, that person may be considered an investment adviser. According to the SEC, unless an exemption applies, an investment adviser must register with the SEC and any applicable states. Even if an investment adviser is exempt from registration, the antifraud provisions of the Advisers Act still apply.

How do clubs raise money?

Investment clubs are meant to be small groups of people pooling their capital toward things they care about. One way the investment club stays small is because of a hard limit on the number of members, as mentioned above. A second way is because investment clubs are not allowed to publicly solicit for money or members. Instead, they should find members privately.

What is public solicitation? It varies depending on the specific situation, but things that are more likely to be considered public solicitation include: a public website, tweet, or post that might suggest a club is looking for new members or money. Public solicitation can also include ads, or seminars where attendees have been invited by general solicitation or general advertising. It’s always best to check with an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction who has experience with securities law because the definition is so context-dependent.

What can clubs invest in?

So far, investment clubs launched on Syndicate have invested in tokens, NFTs, startup equity, real estate, art, collectibles, and DAOs. Most of the on-chain assets clubs invest in, like tokens, are available to unaccredited investors.

Some assets, like startup equity, are only available to accredited investors except in rare cases. One exception may be when the startup equity is regulated under the JOBS Act. The JOBS Act allows retail or non-accredited investors to invest in startups that qualify as Regulation A offerings and have done the corresponding legal and compliance work to accept retail investors. In the vast majority of cases, startups are too tight on cash or focused on building their products to go through this process. This means that either the club or all of its members must meet the SEC’s definition of accreditation in order to invest in most startup equity.

At Syndicate we take our mission to democratize investing seriously and are always looking to give people who have been excluded from the traditional financial system more opportunities to build wealth and fund what matters to them. Join our Discord or follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates, and please let us know what you think!

This overview is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal, financial, tax, or other advice. You should not act or refrain from acting based on any information in this overview. Please check with your legal and tax advisors to make the best decisions for your specific circumstances.

To realize our important yet complex mission to democratize investing at scale, we’ll need a lot of help. That’s why Andreessen Horowitz, South Park Commons, Carta, Ledger, Circle Ventures, OpenSea, Uniswap Labs Ventures, CoinList, FalconX, Polygon, United Talent Agency, Xoogler Network, Yield Guild Games, PoolSuite, Global Coin Research, Chainforest, Sfermion, A* Capital, Outliers VC DAO, and over 30 others including the core teams and creators of FWB, Rug Radio, Loot Project, Deadfellaz, Nansen Alpha, Stonks.com, and more are investing and teaming with us. This will deepen our capabilities, partnerships, and networks in important areas as we work to revolutionize investing, together.

As part of this round, we’re also proud to partner with 10+ mission-driven organizations and investors, including Flourish Ventures (financial health), Evolve (emotional well-being), Reach Capital (education), Unshackled Ventures (immigrant founders), Ulu Ventures (diverse founders), We3 (women and non-binary web3 talent network), Afropolitan (global African community), The Players Company (pro athletes community), and more.

These partners will play a critical role in bringing our revolutionary technology to important markets and communities in the months and years ahead. Syndicate’s 50+ new strategic investors include:

• DAOs

• Customers and users

• Fintechs

• Web3 infrastructure and marketplaces

• Foundations, nonprofits, and philanthropic organizations

• Talent and alumni networks

• Mission-driven investors

• Institutional fund of funds

We’re excited to share more details on how we’ll be working together soon. Until then, we invite you to join us and our growing community:

• Follow us on Twitter

• Join our Discord

• Apply to open positions at Syndicate

• See our requests for strategic partners

• Start a Web3 Investment Club

Our New Strategic Partners

A* Capital Multi-stage venture capital firm.

Afropolitan DAO Building a digital nation to help Africans around the world live abundant lives.

Andreessen Horowitz Lead investor of Syndicate’s Series A in 2021.

BlueYard Capital Early-stage venture capital firm based in Berlin.

Broadhaven Ventures Fintech and crypto venture capital firm affiliated with a financial services investment bank that has completed over $90 billion in M&A and financing transactions.

Carta Software platform with 28K+ companies and nearly 2M investors, employees, advisors, and law firms to manage cap tables, valuations, investments, funds, SPVs, and more.

Chainforest DAO Community of founders, operators, and builders across web3.

Circle Circle Ventures is part of Circle Internet Financial, a global fintech firm that builds payments and treasury infrastructure, and is the issuer of USD Coin (USDC).

CoinList Platform where crypto projects build and grow their communities and early adopters trade and stake digital assets before other exchanges.

Evolve Venture firm and foundation that backs initiatives that support the evolution of consciousness to materially impact the lives of billions of people.

FalconX Digital assets and cryptocurrency platform for institutional investors.

Flourish Ventures Early-stage global venture firm, funded by Pierre Omidyar, backing entrepreneurs whose innovations help people achieve financial health and prosperity.

GD1 Crypto New Zealand based venture firm investing in early-stage crypto and web3.

Global Coin Research (GCR) Research and investment DAO focused on web3.

Green Bay Ventures Venture firm backed by icons in fashion, luxury, hospitality, media, food, and more investing in breakthrough technologies.

Hutt Capital Independent blockchain venture capital fund of funds platform.

Ledger Secure digital asset wallet, treasury management, and DeFi provider for DAOs of all sizes.

Moonbase Investment club of Coinbase employees and alumni.

OpenSea NFT marketplace with 80M+ NFTs, 600K+ users, and $20B+ volume.

Outliers VC DAO Investor in web3 through scientific research and collective intelligence—started by a student group at MIT in 2016.

Polygon Decentralized Ethereum scaling platform.

PoolSuite Internet leisure corporation and community powered by NFTs.

Reach Capital Venture firm investing in startups that expand the definition, reach, and impact of education.

Script Capital Early-stage venture firm partnering with South Park Commons on its Web3 Founder Fellowship.

Sfermion Investment firm focused on NFTs and accelerating the emergence of the metaverse.

South Park Commons Community of founders, technologists, and builders helping each other get from -1 to 0. Partnering with Script Capital on its Web3 Founder Fellowship.

States DAO DAO based in South Korea focused on finding talent, providing learning and work opportunities, and investing in web3.

Steel Perlot Deep tech management company creating and investing in breakthrough technologies.

Transpose Platform Venture firm that backs founders building companies, firms, studios, platforms, DAOs, protocols, and factories of companies.

Ulu Ventures First Latina-led venture firm in Silicon Valley investing in diverse teams through decision analysis powered selection.

Uniswap Labs Ventures Developer of the largest decentralized protocol for trading and automated liquidity provision.

United Talent Agency (UTA) Global talent and entertainment company uniting ideas, opportunities, and talent based in Los Angeles.

Unshackled Ventures Early-stage venture firm investing in U.S. immigrant founders and companies.

Xoogler Network Global community of Google employees and alumni working with and investing in the startup ecosystem.

Yield Guild Games (YGG) Global play-to-earn (P2E) gaming guild onboarding players to the Metaverse, allowing them to earn crypto rewards by playing NFT games.

We3 Talent network for women and non-binary professionals in web3.

6th Man Ventures Early-stage venture firm investing in web3.

And core teams and creators:

Alberto President of the Knight Foundation.

Alex, Mayor of Friends With Benefits (FWB) Group of cultural creators and maintainers using web3 tools to build community and foster creative agency.

Ali, Founder & CEO of Stonks.com Live platform for startup demo days.

Betty and Psych, Creators of Deadfellaz Web3 brand and NFT project.

Farokh and John, core team members of Rug Radio Decentralized web3 media ecosystem.

Friends With Benefits core team members Group of cultural creators and maintainers using web3 tools to build community and foster creative agency.

Mel, Advisor to Rug Radio, TIMEPieces, SuperRare Labs and more Web3 media and NFT communities.

Mike, Co-Founder of LinksDAO, 6th Man Ventures, The Block Web3 golf enthusiast community, venture firm, information company.

Nansen Alpha team members Global curated community of crypto mavericks, supported by its blockchain analytics platform providing real-time crypto and NFT insights.

Sheldon & Amir, Co-Founders of The Players Company and BankDAO Pro athletes building web3 systems to enable wealth generation across its communities.

TimShel, Collaborative World-Builder and EIR at Windranger Labs Building technology for on-chain, collaborative world-building. Bringing the Lootverse to life on the core team of Genesis Project and DivineDAO.

Note: Several organizations are not listed as their investing programs have not yet been publicly announced.

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/10478

Join Us On Twitter Spaces

This week, we'll be hosting a series of Twitter Spaces with different partners from this strategic round to discuss just a few of the many ways Syndicate and DAOs will profoundly transform investing.

Each day, a Twitter Space link will be shared by our @SyndicateDAO account on Twitter.

Tue, May 3 @ 9am PT

Wed, May 4 @ 3pm PT

Thu, May 5 @ 11am PT

Fri, May 6 @ 9am PT

We’ve written about who should start an Investment DAO, but the toughest part is the how. Like any other DAO, Investment DAOs require governance processes that allow for members to make their voices heard and understand the ins and outs of the decision-making process.

With over 1000+ investment clubs launched on Syndicate’s protocol in less than 3 months, we’ve been getting into the weeds with our communities on the best ways to govern their clubs as a DAO. Not only that, but we’re committed to democratizing access to investing for all while sticking within the guidelines for investment clubs from the SEC, adding another dimension to the governance process.

Governance is often the most overlooked aspect of building an investment club. The infrastructure is there, but how should you run it?

For investment clubs, Syndicate’s Gitbook has provided guidelines for addressing and establishing governance within your community. For example, everyone in a club must actively participate in every investment decision.

But there are many other decisions that a club will make that aren’t explicitly defined rules – they’re up to you. These include how to think about adding or removing members, how to split a non-fungible asset if a member decides to leave the club before liquidation, and so much more.

From a club admin’s perspective, one of the biggest challenges is explaining the governance structures to club members. Governance voting can be on-chain using tools such as Tally or off-chain using Snapshot—the preference is up to each investment club and its members.

What involvement looks like is up to you to define!

Club Charters

Oftentimes, investment club members will ratify a “charter.” These are working agreements amongst members that answer questions like:

1. What type of investments are we making? For example, a club might choose to only invest in liquid tokens (on-chain assets, tokenized equity), startup equity, or collectibles (NFTs).

2. What is our investment thesis or area of investment? Investment clubs or investment DAOs vary in their investment focuses. Some are mission-driven, like solely investing in women or minority-led companies, while others are focused on the assets themselves, like NFTs, governance tokens, DeFi, etc.

3. Why do we exist? Is the club a group of friends just ape-ing into tokens together, or is it an angel collective with a high returns-driven goal? Keeping expectations aligned is critical.

A club charter doesn’t need to be an extensive contract – just something that is collectively agreed upon to set expectations around the club’s purpose and existence.

Membership

Another critical question is around membership. How should a club think about adding members?

There are a few considerations, some purely practical and others with legal implications:

1. Trust. How well do you know the members of your club? Are people's values and expectations aligned? Having low trust communities means you’ll need to solidify more rules and expectations in writing vs. just running on “vibes.”

2. Accreditation. Are members accredited? For investments that are only offered to accredited investors, typically every member of the club must be accredited. Keep this in mind as you decide who can gain membership to your club and what your club will be investing in.

3. Role. Many investment clubs have various roles for members: some source deals, others do portfolio management, and others do admin work. As long as all of these members are actively participating in all investment decisions, you should be in good shape. But having clear roles helps folks understand how they can help and makes the club function much more smoothly.

Again, membership is basically all up to you! You could gate access to a club based on ownership of a specific token, an application process, or anything else. Just keep in mind that clubs created on Syndicate cannot publicly solicit investments. Make sure to keep your membership search to colleagues, business partners, friends, family, and people you already have a relationship with—not to the general public.

Voting on Investments

There are countless ways you could structure voting for a club. Again, so long as everyone is voting, what the voting system looks like is entirely up to you. Some questions to consider include:

• How should a proposal be made for an investment vote?

• How are club members made aware of proposals?

• How are proposals communicated?

• How long should it last? Does this timeline make sense (e.g., if the club is investing in startups, is your timeline too slow to get into competitive deals)?

• How many votes does it need to pass?

• How are deals executed and by whom? (e.g., who is on the multi-sig?)

• How should a proposal be made to exit or sell an investment?

Every Syndicate investment club mints non-transferrable “club tokens” for members that represent their stake on the cap table. Given that these are ERC-20 tokens, they can also be used across web3 governance tools! Some structures include:

• On-chain and off-chain voting

• Token holder voting

• Token weighted voting

• …or good old fashioned emoji voting in Discord or polls in Telegram

To enable web3-driven governance, there are quite a few tools you can use. For example:

• Snapshot: off-chain voting, gasless, multi-governance community polling dashboard

• Tally: governance protocol with multi-chain support for DAOs.

• SafeSnap: Combining the Gnosis Safe with decentralized governance platform Snapshot, SafeSnap enables decentralized execution of crypto governance proposals, through on-chain execution of off-chain votes.

Investment Clubs for All

Starting an investment club on Syndicate is as easy as ever. Start one today here.

We’re developing the investing infrastructure for web3, and we believe web3 investment clubs are a core primitive to allow communities big and small to invest together and win together.

Join our Discord or reach out to DAO Vader on Twitter with any questions! We are here to help!

DAOs are eating the world. As new web3 infrastructure, tools, and applications emerge, DAOs are quickly becoming one of the most exciting design spaces for the future of organizations, work, and capital. 

At Syndicate, we believe that the world-changing potential for DAOs lay in their transformative ability to coordinate humans and capital natively on the internet together at scale. This will have dramatic implications, particularly with respect to capital formation and allocation—in other words, investing. After all, a DAO isn’t a DAO without a treasury, and that treasury must be invested to serve the DAO’s higher level mission.

Missions of DAOs, like organizations, can widely vary—from publishing media, to developing a protocol, to providing services, to funding new creators, to growing communities. We’re just at the beginning, and there’s no telling where DAOs will go next or what they’ll achieve. But DAOs are here—and here to stay—and they’ll only grow in terms of their popularity and impact in society the months and years ahead.

Syndicate is focused on one type of DAO today: Investing DAOs.

What is an Investing DAO? Why Start One?

An Investing DAO leverages smart contracts to enable members to collectively pool capital, invest (e.g., in startups, tokens, and other on- and off-chain assets), manage the portfolio, and run important community, operational, and governance processes. The core action of an Investing DAO is the pooling and investing of capital with the intention of generating financial and/or social (e.g., philanthropy, grants, social impact) returns.

Investing DAOs can exist as standalone entities or fit within existing DAO structures via SubDAOs. At Syndicate, we’re working with hundreds of DAOs and web3 communities on the full spectrum of Investing DAOs and their variations. We’re building a wide range of tools that we plan to release in the coming months, but our first tool, Web3 Investment Clubs, recently launched and we believe are the foundation of Investing DAOs.

While Investing DAOs can take many forms, this piece will be focused on Investing DAOs with Investment Clubs at their core. See our announcement of Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs here.

Investment clubs are groups of people who pool their capital to invest together—to share ideas, learn together, increase buying power, share risk, and reduce transaction costs. They invest in stocks, bonds, real estate, art, and collectibles—and these days, startups, tokens, and NFTs.

Bringing investment clubs to web3 makes it possible for communities and groups of friends around the globe to pool capital, invest on- and off-chain, and powerfully manage assets in an easy, efficient, and compliant way. As a result, Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs are a perfect tool to easily launch and run an Investing DAO. 

In our experience, Investing DAOs are launched for three reasons:

1. See More Deals: Investing DAOs can collectively see and access more investments together, and meet higher minimum thresholds by investing as a group versus individually.

2. Win More Deals: Investing with a community is attractive to projects and founders, as Investing DAOs greatly increase the number of people who care about their project’s success and can help them in a variety of ways based on the group’s unique networks and skillsets.

3. Learn, Grow, Win Together: Investment DAOs are community-run, meaning that the members of Investing DAO all learn, grow, and win together. Not only do Investing DAOs democratize investing, but they also democratize knowledge and expertise.

The power of Investing DAOs lies in their ease of accomplishing all three goals simultaneously. While there are other solutions that enable groups of people to co-invest, Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs are built with the full composability of web3, making community-driven investing easier, faster, and more powerful than ever before.

Who Should Start an Investing DAO?

DAOs are community-driven at their core. Before starting, you should evaluate whether your community is aligned (e.g., values, mission, strategy-wise) and ready to take the next step to create an Investing DAO.

Many different types of communities have launched Investing DAOs on Syndicate to date. But here are a few that we’re seeing often:

• Friend Groups: Ape-ing into NFTs and tokens is more fun together, and Investing DAOs are being formed for this purpose within small friend groups. They often start as small group chats on Telegram or Discord.

• Mission-Driven Organizations: Allocating capital is one of the most powerful ways to make change and drive a cause forward. Investing DAOs are being formed by advocacy groups and mission-driven organizations to invest in people and projects building toward their shared goals.

• Angel Investor Collectives: Angel investing can be lonely, but teaming up with other angel investors to co-invest, share deals, and crowdsource diligence and portfolio company support is a huge win for angels and the founders they invest in.

These are just a few examples, but an Investing DAO can be any community or group of people who would benefit from collectivizing capital and investing in the things they love and care about together.

Your Community is Everything

People often overly focus on the financial aspects of Investing DAOs and forget that it’s actually all about community. Community building is critical to getting your Investing DAO off the ground, running your Investing DAO, and making sure that your Investing DAO is living up to its mission.

Having a pre-existing community—whether a friend group, group chat, or Discord—helps a lot. It ensures that everyone is values-aligned and has a high degree of social trust. It also helps with compliance as investment clubs cannot publicly solicit to maintain their status.

Another key piece of the community-building equation is making sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of commitment. Investment club guidelines require active participation from all members on investment decisions, so passive members might cause your investment club to lose its status and can create significant compliance and legal risks. Vetting members for active participation is a best practice.

Finally, your community should be ideally stacked with a diverse range of skill sets and outlooks. Investing isn’t easy, and you’ll want people who will put the time and effort into sourcing, due diligence, portfolio management, and project support.

Invest Together, Win Together

In the coming weeks, Syndicate will be highlighting some of the most exciting Investing DAOs on our protocol who are pushing the boundaries of the future of investing.

Maybe you’re a group of DJs like Morii Music investing in creators and the future of artist ownership and fandom.

Maybe you’re an angel collective like The Council DAO, We3 DAO, Eve, or Women in VC DAO who are collaborating to create new opportunities for women to build and invest globally.

Maybe you’re a DAO like GCR, Forefront, or SLCF looking to give members of your community the opportunity to invest in ecosystem projects.

Maybe you’re a startup community like South Park Commons looking to enable your ecosystem of founders, alumni, and members to invest in each other.

Maybe you’re a VC like Chapter One, Julia Lipton, or Script Capital looking to push the boundaries and re-invent the venture capital industry with DAOs.

Or maybe you’re a group of friends and degens like DAO Jones or Chad Capital looking to ape into the next big NFT collection together.

Investment DAOs are going to fundamentally change investing forever, and we’re excited to build with the community and go on this important journey together.

✺ ✺

Start a Web3 Investment Club Read our Gitbook on Web3 Investment Clubs Follow us on Twitter Join our Discord See open positions at Syndicate See our requests for strategic partners

**

**​​Syndicate cannot provide any legal or tax advice, and the contents herein should not be construed as such. Syndicate makes no claims as to the accuracy of the information in this announcement or as to the legality of any activity on the Syndicate platform. Before creating and/or operating a Syndicate, we encourage you to seek advice from an attorney and tax professional licensed in the relevant jurisdiction(s). Failure to comply with the guidelines stipulated for investment clubs or failure to seek legal counsel could lead to regulatory investigations and/or actions.

Friends, angel investors, and web3 communities can now create and run an investment club as a DAO as easily as starting a group chat. Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs can invest in tokens and NFTs—as well as off-chain startups and assets. They can attach legal entities, open bank accounts, and issue K-1s. And they’re powered by ERC-20 infrastructure, making them out-of-the-box composable with any DAO and web3 tool like Gnosis, Snapshot, and more.

For far too long, the powerful tools to invest with others have been excluded to those who can afford expensive SaaS and service providers. But now, virtually anyone can launch and run an investment club as a DAO with Syndicate—in 100x less the time and cost of an investing vehicle built on today’s TradFi and web2 platforms.

This marks just the first of many steps in our mission to radically transform investing through accessible, effortless, and social web3 technologies. Web3 communities like South Park Commons-Script Founder Fellowship, Global Coin Research (GCR), Chapter One, DAO Jones, Awesome People DAO (Julia Lipton), Vector DAO, The Council DAO, Eve, Morii Music DAO, Chad Capital, We3 DAO, SLCF (SuperLayer-Chainforest), Women in VC DAO, Forefront and many more have or are in the process of launching investment clubs on Syndicate.

And this is just the beginning.

Traditional Investment Clubs

Investment clubs have been around for thousands of years, but the first official investment club in recorded history was started in Texas in 1898 during the Wild West.

Investment clubs are groups of people who pool their capital to invest together—to share ideas, learn together, increase buying power, share risk, and reduce transaction costs. They invest in stocks, bonds, real estate, art, and collectibles—and these days, startups, tokens, and NFTs.

Since investment clubs are member-driven, virtually any community can create one—and they’re generally not regulated by the SEC provided that they follow certain guidelines. For example, they can have up to 99 members, are invite-only, do not charge carry, and require everyone to participate in investment decisions—among a few other requirements that we've outlined in our Gitbook here.

Historically, investment club members meet in person to share, discuss, and make investments together. But a lot has changed since 1898—people around the world now organize and collaborate on the internet. As such, running an investment club should be more internet-native—but it’s not today, with many challenges including:

• Slow, difficult, and expensive to create and run an investment club

• Hard to maintain compliance with laws and regulations

• No modern, internet-native tool to invest together in internet-native assets

But now with Syndicate, groups can easily create and run an investment club natively on the internet—built with the full power and composability of web3.

Web3 Investment Clubs

Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs enable friends, angels, and web3 communities to launch and run internet-native investment clubs as DAOs.

Here are just some of the many benefits of running an investment club on Syndicate:

• Web3-native: Runs natively on the internet via Syndicate Protocol on Ethereum (and other chains soon).

• Transform any wallet into a DAO: Use your favorite Ethereum wallet like MetaMask, Ledger, Gnosis, and more to create and run an investment club.

• 100x faster, easier, cheaper: Create an on-chain investment club in seconds for just the cost of gas.

• Invest in crypto and real-world assets: Invest in tokens and NFTs—as well as startups and real-world assets (via a legal entity).

• On-chain portfolio and cap table management: Real-time dashboard to manage investments (e.g., tokens, collectibles, startups) and club members.

• Composability: Each club’s ERC-20 infrastructure enables full composability with future Syndicate tools and the entire ecosystem of DAO and web3 tools.

• Legal infrastructure: Get DAO legal entities, DAO legal docs, EINs, bank accounts, K-1 tax filings, and more from our friends at doola

• And so much more to come…

Now let’s review in more detail some of the most exciting features of Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs.

1/ Powerful Investing DAOs in a Few Clicks

In seconds, you can transform any wallet (e.g., MetaMask, Ledger, Gnosis) into a powerful investing DAO for just the cost of gas. Syndicate gives wallets new web3 investing superpowers: on-chain deposit management, cap tables (i.e., mirrortables), governance tokens (i.e., mirrorshares), investment portfolio dashboards, and more.

We’re also excited to share that we’ve teamed with our friends at doola to enable investing DAOs on Syndicate to get legal entities, open fiat bank accounts, submit state compliance filings, and issue K-1s tax forms easily and affordably. This is a game changer—and it’s just the beginning of deeper integrations and capabilities that we’ll be bringing to DAOs on Syndicate together.

2/ DAO Deposit Links, Mirrortables & Mirrorshares

Forget manually tracking DAO deposits and cap tables via surveys and spreadsheets. Syndicate automatically generates a deposit link to send to members—and as people contribute capital, your web3 investment club automatically updates its on-chain cap table (i.e., “mirrortable”) and issues each member a proportionate number of ERC-20 “mirrorshares” (non-transferrable by default) as envisioned in this recent post by Balaji.

Each web3 investment club’s mirrortable and mirrorshares are powered by ERC-20 infrastructure, making them fully composable with any DAO or web3 tool like Snapshot, Gnosis, Coordinape, and Guild for on-chain governance, automating distributions and airdrops, recognizing contributors, token gating, and more.

3/ DAO Legal Doc Generation & Web3 Signing

The only thing worse than manually tracking DAO deposits and cap tables in a spreadsheet are DAO legal docs—and manually creating, customizing, sending, and collecting signed copies from members to join a DAO.

Syndicate makes this easy. You can generate, send, and collect signed copies all via Syndicate’s web app. Also, this is all done in a web3-native way. It doesn’t use centralized servers—so nothing (e.g., documents, PII, data, etc.) is stored on a centralized server anywhere, providing users with maximum privacy, security, and control. ​​Latham & Watkins, a leading global law firm, advised us on the creation of these standardized legal documents for Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs.

We’re creating web3-native tools that do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.

4/ On-Chain, Real-Time Investments Dashboard

Never manually track investments, trades, and transactions on spreadsheets again. Web3 Investment Clubs on Syndicate have real-time dashboards that visualize on-chain investments into tokens and NFTs on Ethereum (and other chains soon).

These investment dashboards can be viewed anytime by any member of the club.

5/ Off-Chain Investment Memos & Metadata

With Syndicate, you can also record investments into off-chain assets (e.g., startup equity, SAFEs, convertible notes) and attach off-chain memos, metadata, and links that display on your investment club’s dashboard. This makes Syndicate a powerful tool not just for on-chain token and NFT investing, but also off-chain angel and venture capital investing into pre-public companies and startups.

This tool was designed in collaboration with our friends at IDEO CoLab Ventures, Electric Capital, Delphi Digital, Variant, CoinFund, and many other web3 investors—this is just one of many web3-native tools that we’re building that enable DAOs to bridge to the off-chain world.

The Revolution Has Started

In the weeks and months ahead, we'll be adding an array of powerful new features, capabilities, and integrations to our Web3 Investment Clubs in the areas of community building and management, governance and voting, reporting and tax, social networking, incentives and economic collaboration, and so much more. This is our first product and initial set of features—we are just getting started and have so much more already in development.

The future of investing is decentralized, democratized, and community-driven. This revolution will come from web3—and it starts today with investment clubs on Syndicate.

Join us and the revolution. wagmi.

Start a Web3 Investment Club Read our Gitbook on Web3 Investment Clubs Follow us on Twitter Join our Discord See open positions at Syndicate See our requests for strategic partners

++

Web3 Investment Clubs Launching on Syndicate

South Park Commons-Script Founder Fellowship Vector DAO Global Coin Research (GCR) Chapter One DAO Jones Awesome People DAO (Julia Lipton) Eve Morii Music DAO The Council DAO We3 DAO Chad Capital SLCF (SuperLayer-Chainforest) Women in VC DAO Forefront

​​Syndicate cannot provide any legal or tax advice, and the contents herein should not be construed as such. Syndicate makes no claims as to the accuracy of the information in this announcement or as to the legality of any activity on the Syndicate platform. Before creating and/or operating a Syndicate, we encourage you to seek advice from an attorney and tax professional licensed in the relevant jurisdiction(s). Failure to comply with the guidelines stipulated for investment clubs or failure to seek legal counsel could lead to regulatory investigations and/or actions.

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/7590

Today, we’re excited to announce that Syndicate has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from over 150 leading founders, operators, creators, and investors (full list below). Following our community raise, our Series A is the next major step in bringing our revolutionary protocol and platform for investing to people and communities all around the world.

Within the next decade, investing will be decentralized, democratized, and community-driven. Syndicate is building the infrastructure to enable this at scale—we’re developing decentralized investing and social networking protocols, advanced legal tech solutions, and a next-gen social networking platform that empowers communities to raise, coordinate, and invest capital like never before. This will have a profound impact by expanding what gets funded and built in the world—by whom, for whom, and where. It’ll level the playing field, empower communities of builders, creatives, influencers, and friends to invest in new ideas and world-changing technologies, and introduce radical new models for investing to society that are fundamentally more open, free, and fair.

To realize this important yet complex mission, we’re partnering with values-aligned leaders who represent a diverse array of industries and communities as part of our Series A, including firms like Andreessen Horowitz and its Cultural Leadership Fund, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Variant, Electric Capital, CoinFund, Scalar Capital, Bill Ackman’s Table Management, Weekend Fund, Coinbase Ventures, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures, Aave, Protocol Labs, A Capital, Acrylic, Delphi INFINFT, True Ventures, Makena, Atelier Ventures (creator economy focused venture firm), the Council Fund (all women venture firm), entrepreneurs like Ryan Hoover (Founder of Product Hunt), Alexis Ohanian (Co-Founder of Reddit), Biz Stone (Co-Founder of Twitter), Cordozar Broadus (Snoop Dogg), and investors like Matthew Ball, Packy McCormick, Lenny Rachitsky, Scott Belsky, Alice Lloyd George, and over 100 more people and firms who each bring important capabilities, expertise, and networks to the project.

The funds from the round will be used to accelerate the development of our decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) powered technologies, integration with Web3 projects and fintech startups, and support of communities with the advanced legal and operational tools they need to succeed and grow long term. Komorebi (investing in female and non-binary founders), Audacity (investing in Black and African founders), Fiat Lux (funding scientific research), Delphi INFINFT (investing in the NFT ecosystem), and the IDEO Founder Collective (founders equity share) recently launched on Syndicate—we’re now working with dozens of new communities like CityDAO (democratizing access to land) to launch in the coming months as part of our private beta rollout.

Syndicate was founded in 2021 to develop a decentralized protocol and social network that empowers more people and communities to invest, with the eventual goal of transforming how the world creates and shares value. If this inspires you, we hope you’ll join us and our growing community of mission-aligned users, partners, and friends to change investing for the better, for everyone.

• Follow us on Twitter

• Sign up for the Private Beta

• Apply to our job openings

• Subscribe to our newsletter for official updates

• Contact us to collaborate

• Get our media kit and brand assets

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/4730

Series A Investors

• Andreessen Horowitz

• IDEO CoLab Ventures

• Variant

• Table Management

• Weekend Fund

• Electric Capital

• CoinFund

• Sound Ventures

• Scalar Capital

• A Capital

• Atelier Ventures

• Thirty Five Ventures

• Coinbase Ventures

• Makena

• Aave

• Protocol Labs

• True Ventures

• Acrylic

• The Council Fund

• Delphi INFINFT

• Ryan Hoover (Weekend Fund, Product Hunt)

• Lenny Rachitsky

• Todd Goldberg

• The Council Fund

• Alexis Ohanian (Reddit, 776)

• Scott Belsky (Adobe)

• Matthew Ball

• Packy McCormick

• Alice Lloyd George (Rogue VC)

• Jalak Jobanputra (Future Perfect)

• Biz Stone (Twitter)

• Boris Wertz (Version One)

• Ashley Tyson (Web3 Foundation)

• Maple Leaf Cap

• Ryan Junee (Electric Ant)

• Jonathan Glick

• Jonathan Hills (CabinDAO)

• David Eckstein (Menlo Security)

• Snoop Dogg

• Bored Elon

• 130+ operators at Square, Google, Instagram, Stripe, Airbnb, Softbank, Snap, more

Seed Investors

• IDEO CoLab Ventures

• Electric Capital

• Delphi Digital

• CoinFund

• Variant

• Robot Ventures

• Kleiner Perkins

• DeFi Alliance

• Nascent

• Adam Jackson (Braintrust, ex Doctor On Demand)

• Alex Pack (Pack Capital, ex Dragonfly)

• Ash Egan (Acrylic)

• Brad Holden (Amazon)

• Brandon Cook (Proxy)

• Crypto Dog

• David Nage (Arca, Base Layer)

• DeFi Dad (Zapper, Yield TV)

• Don Ho (Quantstamp, Pioneer Fund)

• Eric Wu (Opendoor)

• Justin Mart (Coinbase Ventures)

• Niraj Pant (Polychain)

• RAC ($RAC, Six)

• Ryan Sean Adams (Bankless)

• Scott Lewis (DeFi Pulse, Concourse, Slingshot)

• Stani Kulechov (Aave, Variant)

• Tegan Kline (The Graph, Edge & Node)

• Trevor McFedries (Brud, Lil Miquela, $FWB)

Community Investors

• Alana Podrx (Eve Wealth)

• Alex Masmej (Showtime)

• Alexis Gauba (Opyn)

• Ameer Suhayb Carter (Mint Fund)

• Anastasia Andrianova (Akropolis)

• Andrew Steinwold (Sfermion)

• Aya Kantorovich (FalconX)

• Baek Kim (Hashed)

• Balaji Srinivasan (ex Coinbase, ex Earn, ex a16z)

• Beryl Li (Yield Guild)

• Blake West (Goldfinch)

• Bo Shao (Evolve)

• Bobby Ong (CoinGecko)

• Brian Flynn (Rabbithole)

• Calvin Liu (Divergence)

• Carlos Gomes (Mint Fund)

• Christy Choi (ex Binance)

• Colleen Sullivan (CMT Digital)

• Cooper Turley (Audius, Variant)

• Courtney Chow (Battery, ex IDEO CoLab)

• Cuy Sheffield (Visa)

• Dave Kim (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)

• Derek Hsue (Reverie)

• Do Kwon (Terra)

• Driss

• Erik Syvertsen (AngelList)

• Erikan Obotetukudo (Audacity)

• Gabby Dizon (Yield Guild)

• George Lambeth (Balancer)

• Illia Polosukhin (NEAR)

• Jacob Horne (Zora)

• Jake Chervinsky (Compound, Variant)

• James Foley (Cowri)

• James Young (Abridged, Collab.Land)

• Jason Choi (Spartan Group, Blockcrunch)

• Jazear Brooks (Sifchain)

• Jean-Cedric

• Jeff Garzik (Vesper)

• Jeff Morris Jr. (Chapter One, ex Tinder)

• Jeremy Allaire (Circle)

• Jess Sloss (SeedClub)

• Joon Ian Wong (ex CoinDesk)

• Joris Delanoue (Fairmint)

• Joyce Yang (Global Coin Ventures)

• Julia Lipton (Awesome People Ventures)

• Justin Ridgely (Syndicate, ex BlockFi)

• Justine Humenansky (Playground, Fiat Lux DAO)

• Kaito (Bspeak!)

• Kazufumi

• Kenny White (Cowri)

• Kevin Chou (Rally, Forte, Kabam, Gen.G)

• Kevin Nielsen (Boardroom)

• “Fully Allocated” (Default)

• Kieran Warwick (Illuvium)

• Kinsa Durst (Republic)

• Kristie Huang (Komorebi, she256)

• Larry Sukernik (Reverie)

• Leighton Cusack (PoolTogether, PleasrDAO)

• Li Jin, Founder (Atelier Ventures)

• Luis Cuende (Aragon)

• Mark Roszak (1121 Law)

• Matthew Roszak (Vesper)

• Meltem Demirors (CoinShares)

• Micah Johnson (Aku)

• Mike Sall (Goldfinch)

• Mike Zajko (CoinList, Free Company)

• Mildred Idada (Open Web Collective)

• Min Teo (Ethereal Ventures, ConsenSys Mesh)

• Morgan Beller (NFX, ex Libra, ex a16z)

• Nathalie McGrath (ex Coinbase)

• Nathan McCauley (Anchorage)

• Nathaniel Whittemore

• Nitya Subramanian (Celo)

• Noah Jessop (Nine Realms)

• Patrick Chang (Dispersion)

• Prabhakar Reddy (FalconX, ex Accel)

• Rahul Vohra (Superhuman)

• Raj Gokal (Solana)

• Ramon Recuero (Babylon)

• Regan Bozman (Dove Mountain Partners, ex-Coinlist)

• Rene Reinsberg (Celo)

• Robbie Bent (Ethereum Foundation)

• Ryan Selkis (Messari)

• Sasha (Aliaksandr) Hudzilin (NEAR)

• Scott Moore (Gitcoin)

• Sebastian Delgado (Fei)

• Sina Habibian (Ethereum Foundation)

• Sriram Krishnan (Calm, ex Tinder, ex Spotify)

• Stani Kulechov (Aave)

• Steve Blank (Stanford University)

• Steve Weinstein (Stanford University)

• Thibauld Favre (Fairmint)

• Todd Goldberg

• Tom Bedecarre (Stanford University, ex AKQA)

• Tyler Ward (Barnbridge)

• Vanessa Slavich (Celo)

• Wsbmod (Wall Street Bets)

• Xochitl Cazador (Celo, she256)

Today, we are proud to announce that Syndicate has raised $800K from 100 early users, partners, and friends in its community (full list below). Syndicate’s community raise is an important first step in democratizing our own platform and making Syndicate community-owned.

Our community raise was completed in less than a week via Syndicate itself: 100 early community members invested in Syndicate via an SPV-like Syndicate DAO launched on our platform and protocol.

DAO-powered Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) are just one of many applications (Community DAOs, Ecosystem Funds, NFT Funds, Economic Empowerment DAOs) for Syndicate that are rolling out now and in the weeks ahead.

Progressively Decentralizing to Our Community

If Syndicate’s aim is to democratize investing, it’s important that we live by our values and—as best we can—take the steps needed to democratize and decentralize Syndicate itself. The Community Raise is just the first step of many we will be taking to both grow and democratize the platform over time.

The 100 community members who are now early investors in Syndicate include:

• Early contributors

• Early users

• Current and future partners

• Current and future collaborators

• Syndicate NFT owners

We’re excited to continue growing our community in the months and years ahead.

Join the Revolution

We are starting a movement to change investing for the better, for everyone. We’ve launched the IDEO Founder Collective, Terra Ecosystem Incubator, Delphi INFINFT, Komorebi Collective, Fiat Lux DAO, and Audacity—and we’re getting ready to roll out our private beta in stages soon.

• Follow us on Twitter

• Sign up for the Private Beta

• Apply to our job openings

• Subscribe to our newsletter for official updates

Community Raise Participants

Alana Podrx, CEO, Eve Wealth Alex Masmej, CEO, Showtime Alexis Gauba, Co-Founder, Opyn Ameer Suhayb Carter, Mint Fund Anastasia Andrianova, CEO, Akropolis Andrew Steinwold, Managing Partner, Sfermion Aya Kantorovich, FalconX Baek Kim, Hashed Balaji Srinivasan, ex Coinbase, ex Earn, ex a16z Beryl Li, Co-Founder, Yield Guild Blake West, Co-Founder, Goldfinch Bo Shao, Co-Founder, Evolve Bobby Ong, Co-Founder, CoinGecko Brian Flynn, CEO, Rabbithole Calvin Liu, Compound, Divergence Carlos Gomes, Forefront, Mint Fund Christy Choi, ex Binance Colleen Sullivan, CEO, CMT Digital Cooper Turley, Audius, Variant Courtney Chow, Battery, ex IDEO CoLab Cuy Sheffield, Visa Dave Kim, Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Derek Hsue, Co-Founder, Reverie Do Kwon, Founder, Terra Driss Erik Syvertsen, GC, AngelList Erikan Obotetukudo, Founder, Audacity Gabby Dizon, Co-Founder, Yield Guild George Lambeth, Divergence, Balancer Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder, NEAR Jacob Horne, Founder, Zora Jake Chervinsky, GC, Compound, Variant James Foley, Co-Founder, Cowri James Young, CEO, Abridged, Collab.Land Jason Choi, Spartan Group, Blockcrunch Jazear Brooks, Co-Founder, Sifchain Jean-Cedric Jeff Garzik, Co-Founder, Vesper Jeff Morris Jr., Chapter One, ex Tinder Jeremy Allaire, CEO, Circle Jess Sloss, SeedClub Joon Ian Wong, ex CoinDesk Joris Delanoue, Co-Founder, Fairmint Joyce Yang, Founder, Global Coin Ventures Julia Lipton, Founder, Awesome People Ventures Justin Ridgely, BlockFi Justine Humenansky, Playground, Fiat Lux DAO Kaito, Bspeak! Kazufumi Kenny White, Founder, Cowri Kevin Chou, Founder, Rally, Forte, Kabam, Gen.G Kevin Nielsen, CEO, Boardroom “Fully Allocated”, Default Kieran Warwick, Founder, Illuvium Kinsa Durst, Republic Kristie Huang, Komorebi, she256 Larry Sukernik, Co-Founder, Reverie Leighton Cusack, Co-Founder, PoolTogether, PleasrDAO Li Jin, Founder, Atelier Ventures Luis Cuende, Co-Founder, Aragon Mark Roszak, Founder, 1121 Law Matthew Roszak, Co-Founder, Vesper Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer, CoinShares Micah Johnson, Creator, Aku Mike Sall, CEO, Goldfinch Mike Zajko, CoinList, Free Company Mildred Idada, Founder, Open Web Collective Min Teo, Ethereal Ventures, ConsenSys Mesh Morgan Beller, NFX, ex Libra, ex a16z Nathalie McGrath, ex Coinbase Nathan McCauley, CEO, Anchorage Nathaniel Whittemore Nitya Subramanian, Celo Noah Jessop, Co-Founder, Nine Realms Patrick Chang, Founder, Dispersion Prabhakar Reddy, Co-Founder, FalconX, ex Accel Rahul Vohra, CEO, Superhuman Raj Gokal, COO, Solana Ramon Recuero, Founder, Babylon Regan Bozman, Dove Mountain Partners, ex-Coinlist Rene Reinsberg, Celo Robbie Bent, Ethereum Foundation Ryan Selkis, CEO, Messari Sasha (Aliaksandr) Hudzilin, NEAR Scott Moore, Co-Founder, Gitcoin Sebastian Delgado, Co-Founder, Fei Sina Habibian, Ethereum Foundation Sriram Krishnan, Advisor, Calm, ex Tinder, ex Spotify Stani Kulechov, CEO, Aave Steve Blank, Professor, Stanford University Steve Weinstein, Professor, Stanford University Thibauld Favre, CEO, Fairmint Todd Goldberg Tom Bedecarre, Stanford University, ex AKQA Tyler Ward, Co-Founder, Barnbridge Vanessa Slavich, Celo wsbmod, Wall Street Bets Xochitl Cazador, Celo, she256

NFT

In the last few weeks, the newest Syndicate DAOs launched on our platform—Komorebi Collective and Audacity—a decentralized automated organization (DAO) empowering communities to invest in underrepresented founders.

Komorebi Collective launched last month to invest in female and non-binary founders and is backed by Dragonfly, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Mechanism Capital, and more.

Audacity is a DAO focused on investing in Black and African crypto founders globally, run by Erikan Obotetukudo, and backed by Electric Capital, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Meltem Demirors, Cuy Sheffield, Jalak Jobanputra, and many more.

Economic empowerment DAOs are just the fourth of many applications (Community DAOs, Ecosystem Funds, NFT Funds) for Syndicate that are rolling out now and in the weeks ahead.

Economically Empowering Underrepresented Communities

Investing is a powerful tool that shapes what gets built in the world, by whom, for whom. However, investing—like many of today’s societal systems—often overlooks underrepresented communities that deserve the capital, resources, and support they need to participate in the development and economic prosperity of new industries and technologies like crypto.

But what if underrepresented communities and their allies could more easily organize human and financial capital to invest in projects and people that mattered to them and the diverse world we live in? What if by investing more capital into underrepresented communities, we could dramatically accelerate progress in diversity, inclusion, and equity globally?

We believe that this is the future: underrepresented communities and their allies will be able to more easily coordinate human and financial capital to invest in building the world we all live in—and in the process, economically empower their communities in ways that today’s societal systems are failing to do at scale.

And all of this will be enabled at scale across the internet by DAOs.

Seeking Mission-Driven Investors

We’re pioneering state-of-the-art Decentralized Finance (DeFi), DAO, and cryptosocial technologies at Syndicate, and we’re applying them to democratize investing and bring radical new models for investing to the world that are fundamentally more open, free, and fair.

If you’re an mission-driven investor who wants to back underrepresented founders and communities, reach out to us, as we’re working with a diverse network of pioneers to reshape our world, for all.

Follow Us on Twitter Sign Up for the Private Beta

NFT

NFT

Last Friday, the newest Syndicate DAO launched on our platform—Delphi INFINFT—an decentralized automated organization (DAO) enabling people to invest in NFTs, cryptomedia, and related startups.

Along with Flamingo DAO, PleasrDAO, and others, INFINFT is one of the world’s first onchain NFT funds that will invest ~$5M in ~20 NFT projects in 2021. INFINFT is co-run by Delphi Digital and gmoney and is backed by IDEO CoLab Ventures, Gabby Dizon (Yield Guild), Jiho (Axie Infinity), Andrew Steinwold (Sfermion), Andy (Fractional), Calvin Liu (Compound), Will Price, and many more.

Collector and NFT Funds are just the third of many applications for Syndicate that are rolling out now and in the weeks ahead.

Turning Collectors into Investors

In the last few months, interest in NFTs has grown exponentially, bringing a new wave of users into the crypto ecosystem: creators, artists, fans, and collectors—people who come for the creativity and culture but are staying for the newfound social connections and economic freedoms that NFTs, DAOs, and crypto uniquely enable.

Fans and collectors have always had an influence over art and media, in terms of what gets attention and becomes valuable after they’re created. But what if this could be taken even further? What if fans and collectors could proactively invest in and shape what art and media gets created? What if fans and collectors could proactively invest in the new infrastructure that enables what art and media could be created in the first place, and in the future?

We believe that this is the future—not only for NFTs, but for art and media broadly: fans and collectors on the internet will evolve to become the biggest and most influential investors in art and media—and also in the infrastructure and technology that power them.

And all of this will be enabled at scale across the internet by DAOs.

Calling All Fans and Collectors

We’re pioneering state-of-the-art Decentralized Finance (DeFi), DAO, and cryptosocial technologies at Syndicate, and we’re applying them to democratize investing and bring radical new models for investing to the world that are fundamentally more open, free, and fair.

If you’re a group of passionate NFT fans and collectors who want to be a part of this transformative shift, reach out to us, as we’re working with leading groups of NFT collectors to drive this change.

Follow Us on Twitter Sign Up for the Private Beta

NFT

Yesterday, the newest Syndicate DAO launched on our platform—the Terra Ecosystem Incubator—an ecosystem fund and decentralized automated organization (DAO) enabling protocols and their communities to co-invest together in new projects.

Created by Terra, Delphi Labs, and IDEO CoLab Ventures, the Terra Ecosystem Incubator will provide grant funding to winners of Terra’s DeFi Connected Hackathon. The most promising projects will be invited to join an 11-week incubation program with Delphi and IDEO, and later on, the Terra community will have the opportunity to co-fund these projects via the Syndicate DAO.

Ecosystem Funds are just the second of many applications for Syndicate that are rolling out now and in the weeks ahead.

Empowering Ecosystems to Co-Fund Development

In the last year, protocol treasuries have grown exponentially. Uniswap’s is now over $5 billion. Compound’s is over $2 billion. Aave’s is over $1 billion. There are hundreds more and counting.

However, as protocol treasuries have grown, several new problems have emerged:

• Centralized: Protocol treasuries are massive, centralized pools of capital, managed by a one-size-fits-all governance process.

• Slow: Due to their centralized governance process, protocol treasuries aren’t as nimble or aggressive as they should be in funding the rapid development and build out of their ecosystems.

• Lack of Community Participation: When protocol treasuries fund new projects, their communities are unable to co-invest and participate with them.

But what if protocol treasuries were more decentralized—into a network of community-run ecosystem funds? What if each community-run ecosystem fund (backed by the protocol treasury) could have a different governance design and process, accelerating the funding and development of their ecosystems, globally? What if communities could co-invest alongside the protocol treasury and get directly involved in new projects?

priyanka🍦

@pridesai

protocol treasury grant giving will disrupt vc too

103

9:42 PM • Apr 30, 2021

We believe that this is the future of protocol treasuries: a decentralized network of transparently managed, community-run ecosystem funds sponsored by the protocol treasury—each accelerating in specific ways the rapid development of projects across its ecosystem, globally.

Protocols that decentralize their treasuries will develop faster than ones that do not. Community-run ecosystem funds backed by protocol treasuries will evolve to both disrupt and collaborate with VCs. And in the near future, more venture funding will come from protocol treasuries than VCs.

Larry Sukernik

@lsukernik

For the first time ever, project treasuries are becoming "unlocked." That is, people are coming together to productively deploy treasuries.

I expect >$1bn in treasury assets will be deployed over the next 12 months.

11

5:22 PM • May 4, 2021

And all of this will be enabled at scale across the internet by DAOs.

Seeking Leading Protocol Treasuries

We’re pioneering state-of-the-art Decentralized Finance (DeFi), DAO, and cryptosocial technologies at Syndicate, and we’re applying them to democratize investing and bring radical new models for investing to the world that are more open, free, and fair.

If you’re at a leading protocol looking to accelerate the development of your ecosystem and want to empower more of your community to co-invest in its development, reach out to us.

We’re working with top protocol treasuries in the coming months to lead this change.

Follow Us on Twitter Sign Up for the Private Beta

NFT

Yesterday, the first Syndicate DAO launched on our platform—the IDEO Founder Collective—a legally compliant, decentralized automated organization (DAO) for sharing equity and ownership across a community of organizations and people—in this case, IDEO and 20+ founders in its portfolio.

Community Ownership DAOs are just the first of many applications for Syndicate that will be rolling out in the weeks ahead.

Empowering Communities to Invest in Themselves

Traditionally, there has been a clear line separating investors and founders. (Founders can mean entrepreneurs, developers, creators, artists, influencers, business owners, and more.) Investors have capital, and founders need it—so a “one-to-many” relationship between a single investor and a portfolio of many founders is created.

But what if communities of founders could instead invest in themselves and create a “many-to-many,” peer-to-peer relationship—blurring the line between investors and founders? What if communities that invested in themselves performed better over time—individually and collectively—due to their shared ownership stake in each other’s success? What if all communities should be designed this way?

We believe that this is the future: communities will start to invest in themselves, become mutual stakeholders, and share in each other’s growth and success. Over time, communities that invest in each other will outperform ones that do not—especially in the crypto economy.

And all of this will be enabled at scale across the internet by DAOs.

The Revolution Is Starting

We’re pioneering state-of-the-art Decentralized Finance (DeFi), DAO, and cryptosocial technologies at Syndicate, and we’re applying them to democratize investing and bring radical new models for investing to the world that are fundamentally more open, free, and fair.

Syndicate Protocol v1 has been deployed and is now in Private Alpha. A full security audit will start in May, after which point our Private Beta will roll out in stages enabling more people to utilize Syndicate’s protocol and platform.

Syndicate DAOs bring a 10x to 1,000x improvement over today’s systems. By reducing the time and cost of investing to zero, the possibilities and communities we can empower become infinite.

Follow Us On Twitter Sign Up for the Private Beta

NFT