Description:
Dystopia Labs (http://dystopialabs.com/) has created a new model for event sponsorships. Companies that have purchased this bulk $250k, 2yr sponsorship package (it comes out to ~$10k sponsorship/event) include: 1inch, Rarible, UMA, Raid Guild, Figment, Mask Network, Ellipti (VC fund), & Harmony. We are reaching out because we’d love to involve the RALLY community in our events & help drive more ecosystem adoption. Specifically, we want to help RLY DAO grow their brand.
Here’s an example of a past event we ran so you can see the content & speaker quality: https://defi-discussions.dystopialabs.com/
Manifesto/Vision
The TAM of loneliness is infinite, especially during the pandemic. What started as an educational platform for amplifying voices has evolved into a community growth engine. By utilizing events, we educate, launch, & grow IRL communities in different cities around the world.
Problem
One-off sponsorships are a hassle to manage & do not incentive-align projects long-term w/ the event organizer. You are also spending an inordinate amount of $$ instead of just being able to HODL tokens for access (to sponsorship services).
Solution
We have an access token called $WGMI that functions like $FWB (Friends w/ Benefits), in that it’s for token-gating events. However, instead of token-gating on the B2C-side for end users like $FWB, we target B2B. Specifically, projects who buy up $250k worth of our tokens ( 4,166,666 $WGMIs) will get access to sponsorship services for 2 years (speaker slot, share edu content, branding, etc). We are committing to organizing 12 summits per year for 2 years (4 IRL summits; 4 IRL hackathons; 4 virtual conferences; total of 24 summits). The value of this is, instead of SPENDING marketing budget, you’re just locking up marketing budget for access. Since this is an access token (ie. you own the right amount, you get access to services) at the end of 2 years you can opt to sell the tokens or continue HODL’ing for on-going event sponsorship access.
Product
At our events, Rally can do talks, panels, or workshops. They can also set challenges and prizes during our hackathons to incentivize attendees to build ecosystem-specific tools or try launching their own social tokens. Rally will have an opportunity to showcase projects in its ecosystem, educate new users, and empower more creators. TLDR; we will be helping RLY DAO grow their brand.
Validation
Dystopia Labs has put on 15 summits to date. We’ve had over 449+ workshops and a total of 28,959+ registrants to date across all of our summits. You can see the exact registration & attendee #s of all of our summits on our website (just scroll to the bottom).
Progress
It’s only January, but of the 12 summits that we’re organizing this year, we have the first 3 planned out (venue locked down, speakers sourced, and a good # of attendees registered). ETH Austin on March 17th & 18th, ETH Portland on April 7th-9th, and ETH Seattle on July 8th. We are also currently planning NFT Devcon in June w/ Rarible.
Differentiation
Dystopia Labs is a grassroots Web-3-native organization who, for the first 1.5 years of its existence, ran free, high-quality technical summits to support the community. We’ve worked with a number of different projects in the space & strongly believe that content & edu should be free to all.
Team
Hsin-Ju Chuang - Co-Founder & CEO of Dystopia Labs. Venture Partner at Hack VC. Former Head of Growth at Stellar & then Head of Growth at Solana.
Cruz Molina - Co-Founder & CTO of Dystopia Labs. Formerly at Consensys, Truffle, and Opyn.
Grant Request $
$250k in $RLY (it comes out to ~$10k sponsorship/event)
Funds
We raised $750k via a SAFE to build an events ticketing platform from angels like Anton Bukov, the co-founder of 1inch Exchange; Seb Audet, the co-founder of Zapper; MetaCartel Ventures; Patricio Worthalter, the co-founder of POAP; Sid Powell, the co-founder of Maple Finance; Jason Lau, the COO at OKCoin & more.
