We’re excited to kick off the second season of Zeitgeist. If you're building a new crypto-native product/protocol and working towards launch - please consider getting in touch by Sunday (March 6) to participate: airtable.com/shrYcBanqizoOPVCE

Zeitgeist is a community of builders working on crypto-native products and protocols. We kicked off last year with a group of 10 early-stage teams coming together to do a collective sprint. We setup a community Discord, had weekly calls to unpack the biggest obstacles coming up across the group, and got support from some of the most effective engineers/operators in the space who ran workshops and office hours.

Since then, teams have continued to make progress:

• David, Matt, and Vignesh launched Sound.xyz, a platform to help artists make a living off their music. They’ve run 60+ sold out drops at this point generating $600k+ for musicians in the process.
• Abram and Will launched 0xSplits, a protocol for trustlessly sharing onchain income. The smart contracts are immutable and take zero fees. Moreover, they’ve setup a donations stream using the Splits contract that retroactively funds public goods they’ve relied on to get to this point.
• Tracheopetryx, Zach, and Zemm continue to evolve Coordinape, a platform for decentralized compensation being used in Yearn, Gitcoin, and Bankless — and are in the process helping shape an operating philosophy for DAOs.
• Shreyas and Austin continue to build Llama - and have contributed to treasury diversification proposals across Aave, Gitcoin, and other DAOs.
• Harsh and David continue to build Shipyard - they have run multiple cohorts in the Shipyard web2 to web3 school, and done security audits for major DeFi protocols.
• Wei Jie launched Scalic, a cross-chain NFT bridge using ZKPs under the hood. The first implementation connected Polygon and Arbitrum One.
• Tarun has launched Aikido in beta, a product for managing bounties as the atomic unit of work in open communities.
• Gail and Carlos continue to make progress on Metaphor, a tool for unlocking participation in DAOs.
• Faraaz and Jonny are building Ape Monitor, a platform for tracking NFTs.
• Jason and Nikita are building Streetcred, a pseudonymous social network using ZKPs.

There have also been multiple meaningful collaborations based on the relationships built through Zeitgeist. Sound.xyz recently used the 0xSplits protocol to launch Song Splits - a major feature which enables artists to set on-chain splits/credits for their tracks. Shipyard has done security audits for two Zeitgeist teams, and placed a developer on a third. And Coordinape, Llama, Metaphor, and Aikido have collaborated in various ways in building for DAOs as users.

Season Two

Building on this experience, we’re excited to kick off the second season of Zeitgeist.

We would love for you to consider participating if you’re an early-stage team building a crypto-native product/protocol and working towards launch.

We will be coming together for a 12-week sprint starting on March 14.

Through this time, we will do weekly calls where we meet as a group, set a cadence, and dig into the biggest obstacles coming up across the group. As we saw in the first sprint, these calls can also help you develop meaningful relationships with a strong group of fellow builders.

We will get hands-on support from experienced engineers/operators in the space including folks like 0age, Patricio Palladino, Santiago Palladino, Liam Horne, thegostep, Austin Griffith, PhABC, Danny Aranda, Kei Kreutler, Connor Spelliscy, Bethany Crystal, Justin Mares, me, and Zeitgeist alumni.

They will join us for regular office hours and 1:1s — and give tactical talks and hands-on workshops on topics like:

• Shipping to mainnet — navigating security audits, setting up bug bounties, deploying to mainnet, doing key mgmt and planning for upgradability.
• Legal — structuring your entities, and setting up the relationships between your C Corp, DAO, and the individuals involved.
• L2s — understanding the trade-offs, and navigating ux/tooling decisions.
• And other topics in areas like hiring, community management, and fundraising.

0age giving a talk on smart contract upgradability patterns used in Dharma contracts.

Technical discussion on Discord.

You’ll also join the Zeitgeist Discord. This will be your introduction to the Zeitgeist community, where you will get to know past participants and where we can collaborate beyond these 12 weeks and into the future.

We will also be hosting an in-person get-together during Devconnect in Amsterdam midway through the sprint. This will be optional — it’ll be an opportunity to jam with other Zeitgeist community members in person.

And participation is free. We are looking to onboard a small group of talented teams who would benefit from participating in Zeitgeist, and can become active contributors to the community over time.

If this sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you. Please consider getting in touch by Sunday (March 6): https://airtable.com/shrYcBanqizoOPVCE