For the second consecutive year, the decentralized autonomous organization Friends with Benefits, one of the most expensive and popular social clubs in the crypto industry, gathered in the mountains of California on August 3 for a musical meeting, technical discussion and meeting called FWBfest. DAOs continue to grow despite bear markets and may be more popular now than during the last crypto market boom. When people say that there is nothing real behind the arguments other than speculation, they are overlooking the IRL activity that is readily available through DAOs like this.
FWB gave the industry an example of how to build a DAO
Looking back, FWB was founded in 2020 by Trevor McPhedries, an entrepreneur who co-founded the Brood agency after cute computer influencer Lil Mikaela, and now focuses on growing FWB as a limited DAO, which means that members at the club must join. a certain number of $FWB tokens (70 to be exact). There are currently 7,386 FWB token holders based on publicly available data from Ethereum explorer Etherscan, with an average token value of $3 (as of August 10, 2023, a few days after the festival) and an all-time high value. As seen on the Coingecko coin tracking platform, the price in August 2021 was $196.19. Several members of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are among FWB's most prominent supporters.
FWB is without a doubt the largest social DAO with famous members ranging from Erykah Badu, Pussy Riot to Nadia Talakonnikova and Azealia Banks. Hennessy also collaborates with brands such as LVMH. So when I attended the last FWB festival to give a talk on cultural organisations, I also stayed there to interview FWB leaders, speakers and festival goers for a preliminary report. They brought knowledge to the holidays.
FWB “Mayor” Alex Zhang told me that while the first edition of the festival in 2021 was organized solely by the DAO operations team, this new edition was more collaborative. Kai Zhang indicated that 30 outside but like-minded communities helped plan the program of events, from non-profit organization Rhizome to media outlet Zora Zine to podcast club and female-focused DAO Boys Club, in addition to large crypto companies such as OpenSea and Optimism.
“This leads to a pluralistic festival experience and more of a choose-your-own-adventure experience. Or in our own words, we want to continue to promote the idea that FWB is one city and these different subcultures are neighbors,” Zhang added.
In terms of ticket sales, Zhang confirmed that the festival is sold out and has doubled ticket sales from 350 in 2022 (when the token price was higher) to 700 in 2023, meaning DAO can afford more passes. Bursaries for community members who cannot afford it. Ticket price $399.
The festival program included a diverse list of speakers: from technologists to artists. There was a film, a series of free generative art workshops from the NFT platform Highlight.xyz, yoga classes, DJ concerts and even a tennis tournament where many festival-goers ran around in all-white tennis outfits. Discussions about education focus mainly on internet culture, specifically the use of artificial intelligence for creative projects. Authors Eileen Isagon Squires and Ruby Justice Thelott give an almost theatrical presentation on authorship in the age of AI. Later, on the same stage, Washington Post reporter and Internet legend Taylor Lorenz explained how venture capitalists coined the term "creative industries." According to her research, precocious bloggers played a leading role in content creation and monetization.
"In recent years, Internet anthropologists have used the phrase 'Dark Forest' to refer to the parts of the Internet where you can be your 'real self,' away from the monetization of advertising and surveillance capitalism. FWBFest literally took place in the forest where DM - It expanded the pre-social friendships built up over the years to forest dimensions," Suman Basar, a Bangladeshi-British writer who attended as a speaker, told me. Now that the pandemic has forced our senses to crawl in , we appreciate even more these opportunities for our avatars to confront and embrace our corporeal, inevitable strangeness. The future is already here; it's a forest.
But not all participants gathered to join the symbolic revolution. Ann Liu, a 23-year-old artist and art dealer who moved from Los Angeles, said the festival is more like a regular music festival than a crypto conference or hackathon.
"It was wonderful to meet in person so many thinkers and writers who provided resources and jumped at the chance to continue the research," Liu told me. "If the goal was to attract people or to bring Web3 closer, I expect more traction next year because I've had several conversations with people who left the festival and are still not interested in NFT."
Community is FWB's most valuable proposition, regardless of token value, while IRL events reinforce the DAO brand. c-corp software was recently formed under the Friends with Benefits brand to develop new applications and products for FWB members. According to the DAO forum, there is now a clear distinction between a DAO and any legal entity, including a software company. However, the company hasn't strayed too far from its token management roots. The DAO approved this fork during a community vote last May.