It All Started With A 🌱

Welcome to Seed Club’s Newsletter verticals, the launch of CLUB Press, and the Seed Club origin story.

How we imagine you’re reading this.

First things first: Seed Club NEWS+LETTERS

As a subscriber, you’ve now got real time access to all of the brilliant work of the Seed Club Team, Community, and Network. Each week, you’ll get two newsletters delivered straight to your inbox. (You can also catch up on the web or Substack app, if you’re into that kind of thing.)

On Fridays, we deliver CLUB Bulletin. Think of this as the virtual version of your coffee shop’s community bulletin board, except it arrives in your inbox and spotlights the incredible work of the Seed Club ecosystem. CLUB Bulletin links to everything we published from the week, including podcasts, Twitter Spaces, editorials, and beyond. We’ll also include governance announcements and shoutouts for upcoming events.

On Tuesdays, we deliver CLUB Digest and the CLUB Network Journal on alternating weeks.

CLUB Digest (what you’re reading right now 👀) covers the latest from the Seed Club Team and Community. This is the place to catch our newly published editorials, case studies, and productions.

CLUB Network Journal brings you updates from the Seed Club Network, an ever-growing ecosystem of the greatest web3 community-owned networks from the Accelerator, Studio, and Continuity. This is the place to see what these projects are up to, and how to tap in.

We hope you’re as excited as we are to integrate this next layer of connection with Seed Club. Now on to the real reason you’re here…

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Introducing: CLUB Press

We’ve been waiting for the right time and place to tell our origin story. And to be honest, this took a few revisions to get just right. We ultimately decided that our origin story would be the perfect piece to not only debut our newsletters, but to also launch CLUB Press: our home base on the web for all of our written and auditory works in progress, big thoughts, and so much more.

We suggest you read our origin story on CLUB Press for the full felt experience of what it means to be embedded in the Seed Club community. We’re also including it below. Regardless of what you do, stay tuned as we launch more community-driven functionality to CLUB Press in the coming weeks. You won’t want to miss it.

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It’s Time to F*cking Thoughtfully Go

What’s the German word for the unshakable suspicion that you’re standing on the threshold of something transformative? The sense that if you gather the right people in the right place at the right time, something incredible might emerge? 

This is that moment.

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Many of us arrive at this moment wrung out by the pursuit of escape velocity. Web2 prioritized explosive growth at the expense of users. Centralized brands extracted our collective brilliance for the sake of their balance sheets. Social network monoliths captured our attention while robbing us of our creative agency. The gig economy broke us.

But we’re more than just users: we’re builders with a grand vision for a different kind of future. A future that centers collaboration and coordination, not competition and consolidation. We envision a future where community-owned networks are the most powerful organizations on the planet, and the builders are the heroes.

In Summer 2020, the social token landscape was sparsely populated. Friends tinkering at the edge of crypto, separated by time zones, craved a space to jam on questions they were otherwise investigating alone. When Jess instigated the Telegram chat that morning in August, he had a feeling that something momentous was materializing, but he — like all of us — couldn’t yet comprehend the depth of the ensuing reverberations.

We’re living through a period of unprecedented innovation. Like a fern unfurling at the edge of spring, interdisciplinary capabilities that were previously unimaginable reveal themselves to us every day. And the extraordinary truth is that we find ourselves here together, builders enabled by blockchain technology and composable smart contracts. By pooling our unbridled brilliance, our social and creative capital, we can — for the first time in human history — generate shared cultural assets via community tokens. These tokens give communities super powers. At Seed Club, we’re hungry to discover what those super powers are, and how best to use them.

The Accelerator was born out of this hunger.

Through four Accelerator cycles, each successive cohort investigated increasingly complex questions. Together, we pushed the conversation from the technological tooling that enables basic DAO operations to the human dynamics that ultimately give communities meaning. We progressed discussions of bonding curves, staking, and marketplaces to this fundamentally human consideration: what if we released our obsession with scaling and instead invested in intimacy?

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While we’re still uncovering the infinite potential of this new technology, we acknowledge that we’re collectively shaping culture for the next generation of digital builders. That next generation of digital builders is us.

Digital communities create the containers for intimacy on the internet. We’re no longer limited to simply following one another via obtuse algorithms; tokens enable us to find meaning through shared purpose, capital, and even meme. While Seed Club originated as a container for friends to explore technical blockchain mechanics, it has since evolved into a gathering place for web3 builders to cultivate the future of member-owned digital communities.

The significance of the group chat represents the role of friendship not only within this community’s origin story, but also within the fundamental operating principles of Seed Club. Our community is bursting with adventure. Consider Seed Club to be your extended group chat of thoughtful and curious friends along for the raucous ride that is launching a tokenized community. Are you with us?

Let’s f*cking thoughtfully go. 🌱

Words by Steph Alinsug, concept + deep collaboration from John Silkey, Pandy Marino, Nicole d’Avis, and Jess Sloss.