A year ago, we put together the Newt skunk team as a fun experiment within the Aave Companies to inspire and scale innovation in crypto and form a deeper connection with the broader web3 community. Working alongside external builders, our mission was to ship proof-of-concept apps and share ideas.

At the time, we hoped Newt would serve as an inspirational playbook to other Web3 companies (by providing a way to co-build with communities) as well as foster creativity and innovation.

The Newt experiment was a success! Over the course of a year, Newt shipped three flagship products: Aika, Config, and re:meme. We formed a Discord community of over 3K members – with 20+ active contributors.

With Aika, 4K+ NFTs were created, which symbolized time on-chain. From consulting services to conference speaker slots, Aika was an experiment on the future of work and was a primitive for public, on-chain, verifiable credentialing.

With Config and re:meme, Newt built quick and novel applications. Config provides easier analytics for users of various protocols, including Benqi. re:meme created the first on-chain primitive for remix culture. With re:meme, artists can create canonical image templates and inspire others to build iterations on top of them.

We believe Newt has paved the way for collaborative product development via dogfooding, rapid experimentation, and simultaneous engagement with the community. In this way, Newt has served its purpose, and we’ve taken in our learnings and embedded this deeper into our ongoing product pods.

As for next steps, the Newt Discord and Twitter account will soon be disbanded; however, the websites, config.fyi and rememe.lol, will continue to run. Going forward, we hope to see new features coming from community contributions.

The aika.market frontend will be sunsetted, but the source code will remain available publicly to allow anyone to host their own instance. The Aika Polygon contracts will live forever on-chain.

The Newt GitHub organization will remain open. It will be an artifact of our ideas brought to life, and we hope people will continue contributing to them and will use the code for their own experiments.

We are proud of what we have accomplished together with the community. Our team will continue to innovate within our product development pods and will support builders through hackathons and other events and efforts.

Thank you to everyone who contributed over the past year and for being a part of our journey. Onwards!

Liking memes is human nature. They’re inside jokes that make us feel a part of a greater community.

Once in a while, we come across a meme so funny and so original that we must ask, “where did that meme come from?” and “how can I add to it?”  But we don’t know how.

Today, we’re launching re:meme, the first on-chain meme remixer -- built on top of Lens Protocol.

Re:meme (a portmanteau of ‘remix’ and ‘meme’) is the newest application by Newt, the R&D arm of the Aave Team. The app allows people to upload meme templates or ‘base’ memes that other people can build on. With an easy-to-use image editor, people can add text, drawings, and complementary images.

The rise of NFTs in the last 18 months has drawn considerable interest in memes – more specifically canonical memes, with major sales of the Doge, nyan cat, Bad Luck Brian, and others.

However, to date, NFTs have only retroactively rewarded the top echelon of meme templates from the late 2000s / early 2010s. Where is recognition of the newest generation of everyday memes?

Memes are also nothing without remixers, toiling in the background and adding value to meme templates while not receiving \ recognition or compensation.

re:meme: the on-chain source of truth

With re:meme, every meme is a publication on Lens that utilizes the power of the protocol to create an on-chain meme template and remix database. Now, meme templates can be traced to their origin. And remixers can receive their due recognition and bragging rights.

By showcasing the branches of creativity, re:meme points to the canonical meme as well as each of the waves of remixes added on top.

re:meme becomes the on-chain source of meme truth.

Moreover, re:meme uses a new, custom Lens collect module on Polygon to allow for the collection and ownership of publications as memes.

The custom collect module allows meme "owners" to update collect parameters such as collect amount and collect funds recipient. Thus, meme “owners” have the ability to change the monetization parameters of their memes.

We’ll be explaining more about this collect module next week. Until then, read more about the custom collect module on GitHub.

re:meme is a remix primitive and can be extended to a broad array of media formats like music, video, and academic papers. We look forward to working with the community to expand re:meme use cases and features.

In the meantime, let’s vibe out together, create hilarious memes, and have fun 🤝 Try re:meme today at rememe.lol

Blockchain technology has brought the power of immutability and trustlessness to individuals. We’ve leveraged this technology to elevate and monetize many aspects of daily life:

• Financial services → DeFi

• Art → NFTs

• Companies → DAOs

Yet, time has not made the list. Newt, the experiments arm of the Aave Companies, decided it was, well, about time (pun intended kek).

Introducing, Newt: Aika.

Following in the etymological footsteps of the Aave Companies (”aave” means ghost in Finnish), Aika is the Finnish word for “time”. Let’s dig into why and how putting time on-chain will revolutionize how people make a living 👇

On time and on-chain

Time is the perfect complement to a growing segment of Web3: the future of earning.

DAOs, bounties, grants, task boards, and the gig economy has permanently changed the concept of earning a living in the modern world.

The self-sovereign individual has complete control of their time, and if given a way to not only organize it but also monetize it, then the value unlocked can be genuinely life-changing.

How it would work:

Simply put, with Aika, your time can be minted and sold as NFTs on Polygon, immutably recording events and your work on the blockchain.

“Ayo, we put time on the blockchain” - 0xjim

Aika brings in a wealth of new options, providing you the ability to take control of your time and how you monetize it.

For guilds, service DAOs, and other crypto-native organizations, Aika can be an easy way to standardize your services, e.g., receive X services for Y amount of hours for Z remuneration. Source business from a global market and easily record and track that completed business.

What it unlocks:

• Dynamic price discovery for your time: how much is your time actually worth? Let the market decide.

• Commemorate milestones: store iconic moments in time on-chain for memorabilia.

• Support up-and-coming individuals: become a patron to rising stars whose time may rise in demand in the future.

• Global reach: immediate access to the entire world.

• On-chain attestation: an immutable record that you completed a task which future buyers can then use to verify your services.

Time to Party 🥳

Beyond income generation, other use cases may arise for Aika: restaurant reservations, personal meetings (Web3 Calendly anyone?), and car-sharing. Everything we do requires time, so the possibilities are pretty endless!

Extension

In the spirit of Web3, Newt is committed to building with full transparency alongside the community. We shipped a smol primitive that still needs work to achieve the vision we have for Aika.

Some ideas include:

• Streaming payments with Superfluid for time

• DAO contributor payout tools

• Sourcing contributors for DAOs

• Reputation system for time minters (e.g., star rating, reviews)

• Arbitration/dispute resolution between time minters and buyers

• Including more tokens for payment (e.g., DAO tokens)

• Creating a gifting economy with Time NFTs

Join the Newt Rally

This is the first step in a long journey. However, we know one thing is for sure, this is a future that we will build together, and we’d love for you to be a part of it.

• Check out Newt: Aika here: https://aika.market

• Check out the code and docs: https://github.com/WeAreNewt/NonFungibleTime

• If you’re interested in contributing, join the Newt Discord: discord.gg/newt

LFG, Newts!

It’s time to roll up our sleeves to ideate, build, and ship the most interesting proofs-of-concepts in Web3. And we are not going do it in super-secret closed doors like the innovation labs of our TradTech counterparts, but out in the open with the community — in a true crypto-native way.

https://twitter.com/0xJim/status/1462495778962763776?s=20

So, how do we do this?

We have our website, an open Notion, where anyone has the ability to view Newt’s roadmap and product designs. Everyone is encouraged to join the Discord. Want to contribute to projects? In the #build-with-us channel of the Discord, simply tag Jim (@0xjim) 😊

🦎 Our Values

1. We build in public. Everything we do is for the education and inspiration for the broader Web3 community.

2. We ship. We inspire through what we build, and we hope for other builders to join us in our journey.

3. We solve for fun. If it’s not fun, it's not worth building.

And when we say “community”, we’re not larping. This isn’t the user/tech support relationship that exists in other projects. This is something that we will build together — for each other.

Just as the products will be experiments, the community that we create together will be an experiment too: on governance, incentives, organization, contribution, etc.

https://twitter.com/0xJim/status/1459514788854255621?s=20

Newt’s first product is already in the works: NFTs as trading cards, a way to programmatically earn on owned NFTs. With a launch goal of Q1 of 2022, the project is already open to the public to help build.

What else is in the pipeline? In our roadmap we have tokenized time, optimized gas flash liquidity, and debt-bearing flash liquidity all slated for 2022. Got other ideas? We want to hear them. Fill out this form and LFG 🤝

Wen POAP? The first 500 degens to join the Discord get to redeem a limited edition POAP that’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen.

See you in the Newt lab!

🧪🦎🥽

Ready to build with Newt? Visit: wearenewt.xyz or join the Discord