Q4 '24 Budget + Q3 '24 Recap

Here is the Q4 '24 budget with key takeaways, a summary of team, council, and professional services expenses, dues & subscription expenses, and projected revenue.

Q3 Recap

Vision

FWB is the cultural arm and dot connector for native onchain organizations & web2 brands making their way onchain. FWB FEST is the premier launching pad for crypto ecosystems and onchain products.

New Team Structure → Greater Organizational Efficiency

At the end of 2023 through the first two quarters of 2024, our community has continued to push for more transparency, greater output, and reduced expenditures.

Each quarter, we have pushed the organization to get leaner to understand our core operating efficiency. Hiring a CMO and restructuring FEST-related roles to contractor work has improved our ability to execute on new projects and manage cash flow.

Financials

Our team continues to push towards long-term sustainability and recurring revenue through strategic ongoing partnerships and FEST. Despite its scale, FEST maintains its profitability through careful management with an experienced team.

Since the beginning of 2023, we have reduced our core monthly operating expenses by 71%.

Since 2022, we have increased our revenue by 148%. Three quarters into 2024, we have already grown our total revenue by 36% since last year.

Token Migration

In June, our community approved a proposal to update our token ecosystem with the migration of $FWB to Base and the launch of a new arcade token $Benefits. This was the second most voted on proposal in the DAO’s history.

We worked with Squad and Hacken to develop an audited smart-contract and front-end to handle the $FWB to Base migration.

✴ LP & PartyDAO

A critical component of migrating $FWB to Base is deepening our liquidity. We have successfully crowdfunded 100 ETH on PartyDAO to support the migration. Contributors to the Party will receive a proportional amount of $Benefits.

✴ $Benefits

We see $Benefits as the cultural arcade token across existing onchain communities and brands entering their onchain era. We are exploring new use cases and rewards mechanisms for our community and beyond:

• Permissionless rewards with Stack for members, onchain actors, and adjacent communities

• A Towns community for $Benefits holders and $Benefits powered communities

• Friendslist, is a Craigslist-like classifieds dApp, powered with $Benefits and $FWB

✴ Timeline

Mid October 2024

Town Hall on token migration process and $Benefits launch

Launch of $Benefits and first $100M tranche deployed across Party contributors, proposal voters, FEST onchain actors, and $FWB token migrators

Late October 2024

Launch of $FWB on Base and migration front-end

Establish LP

While the audited smart-contracts for $FWB on Base and $Benefits along with the front-end to handle the $FWB to Base migration are ready to go, our timeline for the migration has been delayed in determining the best process and strategy for setting up a new LP.

At this time, we ask that FWB members and holders sit tight as we get through the final pieces of launching the migration. We will share wider communications about the token migration in Discord, across our social channels, and in TL;DR as soon as possible. At this time, we plan to keep the token migration process open indefinitely to ensure that as many successful migrations of $FWB (ETH) to $FWB (Base).

FEST24

Our annual tentpole festival was a massive success with guests composed of crypto natives, creatives, and builders. FEST continues to work by capturing the broader cultural zeitgeist and blending it with integrated onchain partner activations that look and feel seamless (i.e. Zack Fox DJing while you buy a drink with Bend for preferred pricing.) Take our FEST24 survey here.

The first year of BaseCamp added new energy to FEST, introducing 300+ Base ecosystem builders to our community and reified Base’s L2 launch at FEST23.

✴ Partners & Integrated Activations

We connected even more players in the ecosystem this year with 30+ onchain and cultural partners including: Base, ECO, Lukso, Uniswap, Worldcoin, Stellar Development Foundation, Lens, Livepeer, Metastreet, D3, SIC, Ace Hotel, Refraction, Optimism, IYK, Boys Club, Club Chess, Dirt, Creature World, and more.

We are especially proud of our partner’s integrated activations at FEST. Highlights include Bend powered payments, SIC chat and notifications via Mesh, Lens aura photography booth, Stellar hammocks, Worldcoin gallery exhibit, Livepeer powered stream, and the IYK x OP scavenger hunt.

✴ Launchpad

FEST24 proved to be fertile ground for launching consumer-facing dApps and driving onchain actions.

• SIC, our sister company, launched Mesh with 65% adoption and 100% usage for users onboarded.

• Bend by ECO powered payments across FEST with over 78% of all purchases made onchain. We worked closely with Bend before and during FEST to ensure vendors and guests felt comfortable with their product.

• The IYK x OP scavenger hunt drove 2,500+ onchain actions and the distribution of 10,000 OP to 35+ winners.

Life After FEST

✴ Membership & Rebranding

Our two major focuses in Q4 will be (1) refining the FWB membership flow with a move towards quarterly applications and (2) aligning our external brand with who we are now. Take our membership survey here.

These two work streams move hand in hand as we make our core offerings to our community and partners more explicit and clear. We are looking to expand member benefits and tap into the network of portfolio companies that may be interested in working with us.

Partnerships

We have several key partnerships in the works through Q4 and into 2025:

• A joint venture with Publicis Group to co-own self-service onchain tooling and co-develop a tech stack pipeline

• 4th iteration of our international gallery show with Worldcoin at Aleph in Argentina

• Official FWB TLD domain + token buybacks incentives with D3

• Artist-in-residence program with Ace Hotel, Superchief, Zora, and Base

• Official onchain community and partner for SCOPE Miami with dedicated main stage programming and an exhibition space to offer our partners (similar to how we activated at Consensus)

• Showcase at Token2049 with Refraction and other partners

• TWAMM Hook implementation for $FWB in collaboration with Uniswap

Q4 Takeaways

Growth Focus

As we continue to grow FWB as the cultural arm for web3, our focus on where we apply our efforts continues to sharpen. Our extensive research into the space has led us to conclude that FWB is uniquely positioned to solve the cold start problem for many protocols and dApps in the space. As such, we are refining the types of projects & partnerships we will be working on in the coming months ahead of FEST.

• Special Projects: working with industry leaders, emergent protocols and companies, FWB will build bespoke projects and incubators to highlight key features, PMF & use cases while providing opportunities for our members to gain first access, alpha & benefits.

• TL;DR: We’re developing ad inventory for TL;DR as a source of ongoing revenue in addition to providing 1) a low stakes entry point for new partners, and 2) an additional offering for existing partners. View the sales deck here.

Operations and Financials

• As of Q4 2024, FWB has approximately 18 months of runway.

• One important factor here is the 30% dip in ETH since the beginning of Q3 2024.

• Core has reduced its overall operating budget by 13% and recurring contributor expenses by 7.6%.

• Core projects roughly $75K in additional gross partnership revenue for Q4 as there will be a shift to lining up new projects for Q1 ‘25 and internal projects through the end of the year.

• Core will monitor profitability as the end of the year approaches for considerations around tax liability, remove Kyler W. As administer and make Administrator Solutions our Registered Agent, and have ability to move funds from DAO multi-sig to C-Corp multi-sig

Proposal adapted here due to character limit. Click here for the full proposal.