Introduction

FWB’s emergence in the ‘early days’ of ‘social DAOs’ was, and continues to be, an experiment in what’s possible when members of a community have a higher degree of influence over the containers that they convene inside of. Early hurdles around how to translate energy across platforms, and offline, led to the creation of FWB’s Product team, which was responsible for a platform for token-gated RSVPs and an exploration of a micro social networking app.

For all of decentralization’s power and promise, running a proper software development team inside of a DAO surfaced unique challenges. With those insights in mind, in early 2023 a governance proposal was passed by the FWB community that approved the creation of a new c-corp that has colloquially been known as ‘FWB Labs’. This new entity, owned in part by the DAO, would take on the responsibility of iterating more nimbly on the ideas that have emerged from building products for the DAO over the past few years.

In order to deliver on its mission to accelerate software development and expand the utility of the $FWB token, we’re excited to announce that the ‘software c-corp’ – Scene Infrastructure Company – has closed its seed round, raising $3M from a16z crypto.

The Road Ahead

Scene Infrastructure Company will be led by Jose Mejia, long-time DAO contributor and former DAO Product Lead at Dapper Labs, and Ethan Daya, co-founder of Zora. They’re joined by Neesh Chaudhary as Head of Design, who counts Google, Metalabel, and Rabbithole as former clients.

“The relationships between communities, the individuals inside of those communities, their onchain assets, and their offchain experiences are an under-explored area. As the technology continues to mature we’re excited to explore these points and build things that wider audiences will be excited to use,” says Jose. “Our focus is on crafting products that can harmonize those  relationships in a way that feels captivating and novel.”

FWB itself is a case study, having been described as a “new kind of social network” and separately as a distributed virtual city. In reality, FWB is both of those and more: the private, application-gated Discord; a hub of global events, led by community members, that are accessible both to tokenholders and a general audience; an annual festival celebrating the web3 communities and projects that are vying to build ‘a better internet’.

“FWB has grown from a token-gated discord into a multifaceted social network that now exists online & IRL; we are excited to serve as a primary test case for SIC to bridge and connect our collective environments into one cohesive system,” says Greg Bresnitz, FWB’s CEO.

These varied facets of the FWB ‘ecosystem’, if can be imagined as such, are made up of a constellation of connections between people, places, software, and the $FWB token. The challenges that FWB has faced in connecting all those elements together elegantly aren’t unique to FWB; nor are those challenges necessarily only the domain of existing ‘web3 communities’ in a future where an increasing amount of information that is vital to individuals and their identities exists onchain. SIC’s mission is to build better ways of connecting these disparate elements into a more cohesive and accessible whole.

“We see an opportunity to connect aspects of your physical and digital experiences together, building products that create more ‘aha!’ moments for users. We’re especially keen to craft these interactions for users that may be completely new to anything on-chain,” Neesh shares.

Ethan elaborates, "Crypto has rapidly evolved what collective ownership and coordination can enable, but healthy economies require more than just an open ledger of who owns what. In the last few years, we've entered an era pushing the boundaries of what can exist onchain: community, money, art, music, and more. Capturing the next layer up— the dynamic relationship between information, assets, and access— is what we're focused on."

Follow SIC on Twitter and Warpcast and stay tuned for future updates from the SIC team in the FWB Discord.