BUILD Community Token
Community First
While we were planning the original BUILD token we were given a lot of “advice” about how to have a successful launch. Every “solution” came with a price. We were offered centralized exchange listings and market makers with massive fees, interviews on podcasts, paid influencers, and even guest articles on big name websites, all of course as part of expensive sponsorship packages. We were even offered a six figure funding deal by an investor, so long as we gave up a substantial percentage of our tokens and KYC’d all of our SOON holders (seriously, we’re not joking).
Through it all we kept coming back to the same questions as a team. Is it worth it? And more importantly, would it really help achieve our goal of mass adoption while serving our community?
Searching for a Catalyst
Everyone in crypto is searching for something that will propel them into the public eye. In the IOTA ecosystem it’s been a constant stream of waiting for the next announcement from the IOTA Foundation to send us back into the top 10. Whether it’s the UAE, or EBSI, EVM, or 2.0, we are in a constant state of repeating to ourselves that “this is the one”, “this is the one”, and it never is. This isn’t the fault of the IF, they are doing incredible work, hence our effort to support the L1 through our Trust Era platform and the Soonaverse. But the reality is clear. So, what gives?
As project owners and one of the first to launch a product platform in the IOTA ecosystem we have been tracking the size of the community for years and we can tell you with confidence that it’s been shrinking for quite some time, even now with all of the IF’s incredible progress. We all know this, we know instinctively in our interactions each day as we see regulars in the ecosystem disappear, never to return. New audiences aren’t finding us as previously essential platforms like Discord and Twitter, have become empty, bot filled spaces.
The reality is that the opportunity to engage and recruit mass audiences have dwindled and can only be supported by unusually large investments in paid engagements, or aggressive moves in the price of the token, and even then you are one of many as the market moves and the attention you generate is at best temporary.
Finding an Answer
We realized that for BUILD to reach its fullest potential, we needed a way to connect with an entirely new audience, one that would work with us to pursue a collective vision of the future. Fortunately we discovered a solution, one that focuses on two of our most vital assets, our community and our culture. Let us explain.
To achieve our goal of growing the size of our community to new heights, BUILD will now be a community token on the Base network. As a community token, BUILD will celebrate the work of creators, innovators, designers, and degens :) in the Base and Farcaster ecosystems and beyond. Half of all BUILD will be distributed to SOON holders, the remaining 50% will be used to provide community engagement, rewards, tips, and liquidity mining to serve the new home of our community within the Farcaster ecosystem.
More about that upcoming airdrop later in this article, but before that let’s dive a little deeper into the opportunities in Base, Farcaster, and its client, Warpcast.
What is Base?
We were first introduced to Base after listening to a podcast in 2023 from Base founder Jesse Pollack where he spoke passionately about bringing the first billion users onchain. We began tracking the project closely ever since. Jesse’s personal dedication to welcoming all builders, and Base’s mission to drive Ethereum fees below $.01 were what made us collectively agree to create an extension of our community onto Base.
Base is an Ethereum rollup developed by Coinbase using the Optimism (OP) Stack. Base bundles transactions together and submits them to the ETH L1 for settlement, faster and more cheaply than standard Ethereum transactions. Base is one of the fastest growing L2’s, with projects quickly scaling in its relatively new ecosystem.
Transactions on BASE
Trying to become an established community in the vast Ethereum ecosystem is almost impossible now due to its immense size. However, Base offers a unique opportunity for new projects. It’s the perfect balance of size and potential, where the right community and campaign can propel itself into a position of notoriety with the right message and platform.
Farcaster and Warpcast: The Right Platform
Farcaster is a decentralized social graph protocol, that allows devs to build social and product dApps powered by smart contracts. Warpcast is the application/client built on Farcaster that is similar to X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, but without the bots and toxic culture that have come to define the current state of the social media sites.
Its user base includes some of the most influential builders in the Ethereum and Base ecosystems today, including Vitalik Buterin and Jesse Pollack, the founder of Base. The Farcaster community is still relatively small but it’s growing exponentially, going from 2k daily active users in Feb to over 80k today.
Just like SOON functions as the backbone of the Soonaverse, we envision Farcaster serving as BUILD’s homebase and future laboratory. Farcaster as a platform is already a well established ecosystem of builders experimenting with NFTs, tokens, markets, and digital assets in the Ethereum ecosystem. Thousands of new users are flooding into the platform each day. Post BTC halving, during a true bull run we believe this number will grow to hundreds of thousands and being early NOW, is an essential part of our plan.
So, What’s the Plan?
All SOON holders have to do is to join Warpcast (there is a $5 fee for a one year membership) and then follow a channel called /justbuild, where you will access our web app. This will allow you to claim your BUILD tokens directly on Warpast. Then just like that, you will be part of the Base ecosystem and a member of the Farcaster platform. All you need to do after that is use Warpcast, post about yourself, your projects, everything you would normally do on platforms like X, while supporting our channel and message. This is how our community will grow.
Together we will have a native Base community token in BUILD, plus our Soonforce of dedicated Soonanauts, and a small army of degen allies from other chains (more on that later) to form one of the most build-obsessed teams today. If we collectively join the Farcaster / Warpcast movement and bring your memes, your projects, your NFTs, your collective voices, we will overnight become one of the largest and most active channels there. Don’t believe us? Check for yourself (https://dune.com/ilemi/farcaster-explorer)
Once you join you will discover in a very short period of time just why Farcaster is growing so rapidly, unlike X, it’s full of like minded BUILDers and supporters that share our enthusiasm for the future of digital assets. No toxic members allowed! While it does take $5 to join (again this is for a full year subscription) it makes the whole experience so much more rewarding. It’s like being in the space back in 2017, when people were there for camaraderie and lolz.
How about IOTA?
We should be clear that we are not abandoning IOTA. It’s actually the exact opposite. We are harnessing the collective power of our community to create an extension into a corner of Ethereum where there are opportunities for massive community growth and engagement. We finally have a chance to lead, not follow, but timing is everything in this situation. We have to act collectively and we have to act NOW!
The most common complaint for both IOTA and the Soonaverse has been the lack of “marketing” outside of the community. This is a sustainable and innovative approach towards engaging in the future of token-based community building, brand and social development through a native Base token. Something an EVM bridged asset cannot accomplish. Even better, if the IOTA EVM or any of the myriad of developments from the IF do create a surge of new users we will have the benefit of building on both sides of the two networks! A win-win for everyone.
So, we hope you will join us on this journey. I think you can see just how deeply we’ve been processing this moment and how much we want you all to be part of it. No top heavy bureaucracy, no complicated governance, no NDAs, no missed deadlines. The focus is no longer on one association or a foundation, no founders, just builders, where community is king and our shared vision is the only goal. Just. Build. It’s how we all started together and how we will continue into our next chapter. So, let’s create together and let’s GO!
