We’re still in the Wild West casino of crypto and tokens: the biggest winners are exchanges (“the house”), most products are built to make a quick buck and not necessarily to contribute to a bigger picture, and most people only make value for themselves through frenetic leveraging, buying, and selling.

We need to exit the crypto casino and create crypto civilization. Freehold communities will be the first step in that evolution.

Humanity has organized in communities forever. Occasionally, even tiny communities are able to organize and make outsized impacts on society. Take the Wikipedia maintainers for example, who have become custodians of knowledge for our species.

Developer communities also have organized an effective working model for open collaboration. Tools like Github have made contributing to software in a decentralized manner fairly straightforward, in that there exists a place where it can be made clear what needs to be done and how one can contribute. For the rest of the folks rallied around open projects, areas of need and how to effectively support the project are much less clear.

At Freehold, we believe there’s an opportunity to better empower and activate these individuals in support of these open protocols.

Freehold is designed to be a home for growth positive communities — and to provide them with novel paths to grow, expand, and thrive with skin in the game.

This new model of community-building borrows from a concept called “user-staking.” User-staking means, most simply, that users must claim some economic stake in the community in order to access and experience the associated community or app ecosystem.

Further, Freehold will help provide economic- and values-aligned communities with tools for enabling and measuring their growth and impact. For example, a community box score can measure and reward collective milestones like conversions of new members, mining throughput, keyword sentiment, and much more.

If successful, this model should generate more sustained movements, often led by Community Founders.

If the last two decades were defined by two archetypes: engineer-as-founder (Zuckerberg, Sergey) and salesperson-as-founder (Jobs, Benioff). This next decade should be defined by community-builder-as-founder. This trend will be capitalized by founders that leverage community as an underutilized resource by giving them a new deal upfront — aligning everyone not just values-wise, but also economically.

This isn’t asking people to do MORE than they already are necessarily, it’s making it possible for them to benefit from the success of what they build.

This is a newly viable path to entrepreneurship we are looking to validate based on fostering connected, passionate communities that care about a mission or vision — and not about simply being a silver-tongued fundraiser or mining questionable amounts of user data.

The user-staking model represents a genuine business model innovation, especially as we enter this new era of Community Founders. User-staking benefits and incentivizes the user by turning them into stakeholders in the success of the project, and being a successful Community Founder means there will be more people earning money for building things they believe in.

This is just the beginning of the vision here at Freehold, and we hope you’ll join us to be a part of this movement.

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