DAVOS, SWITZERLAND, Jan. 19, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DEVxDAO, the decentralized innovation community sponsored by Casper, is thrilled to announce a new collaboration in advanced communities. DEVxDAO, XPRIZE, Vatom, Menagerie, RampRate and Casper Labs are spending millions to develop a new philosophy for advanced, self-governing, online communities.
Initial Grant to Kickstart the Transformation
Thanks to their shared commitment to fostering innovation, XPRIZE and DEVxDAO are introducing one of the largest-ever grant programs focused on advanced communities integrated with Web3, and the single-largest grant to be issued within the Casper ecosystem to date.
The DEVxDAO grant will help build the foundation of XPRIZE’s community-driven future. Specific focus areas will include:
- Strategy for decentralized community, voting and governance
- Self-sovereign identity model
- Universal ‘Wallet of Wallets’ enabling the collection of all digital assets
- Web3 community incentivization design & implementation
- Reputation-based community governance, voting and staking
- Self-service creator tools enabling innovation to the entire ecosystem
- Community engagement tools implementation and moderation
This initiative includes an all-star team of organizations dedicated to enabling developers to build more innovative, future-proof systems:
- XPRIZE - led by Peter Diamandis and Anousheh Ansari - Since its inception, XPRIZE has consistently been at the forefront of innovation - the impact of which can be felt through many industries and causes. The XPRIZE community is a global movement consistently delivering on the foundation's mission to accelerate breakthroughs that address humanity’s biggest challenges.
- DEVxDAO, along with its principal sponsor Casper Labs, committed its largest and most important grant based on XPRIZE’s ability to not only advance decentralized open source innovation, but also use those breakthroughs to reflect and amplify Casper Labs’s commitment to social and environmental impact.
- Vatom - led by Eric Pulier - providing communities built in this project with Vatom’s leading enterprise-class Web3 platform, massively scalable virtual spaces, mass market accessible Web3 wallets, voting and communication systems, and no-code creator tools.
- Menagerie - led by Dr. Wulf Kaal - incubating, fostering, and nurturing the community spirit by designing the underlying economic and collaboration systems for fairness and transparency, based on Dr. Kaal’s seminal research in “Decentralization: Technology's Impact on Organizational and Societal Structure.”
- RampRate and its Syzygy Impact division - led by Tony Greenberg - creating ideas, spearheading collaboration, connecting, and coordinating the various participants in this project, and expanding the ecosystem it creates through RampRate’s grant marketplace, impact strategy, and innovation acceleration program.
XPRIZE - Founder of Modern Decentralized Innovation
XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world’s grandest challenges in exploration, environment and human equity. Active competitions include the $100 Million XPRIZE Carbon Removal funded by the Musk Foundation, $15 Million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion, and the $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest.
At its core, the XPRIZE community is comprised of thought leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs all working toward the foundation's mission. As XPRIZE evolves, so will the community, with an eye to including anyone who believes that we can solve the world's greatest challenges and those who want to be proactive about creating a new, positive vision for the future. By creating a decentralized, global movement, fans and followers of XPRIZE will have the ability to pitch into building toward a future of abundance in a meaningful way for the first time.
DEVxDAO, Underwritten by Casper
As the first blockchain built for enterprise adoption, energy efficiency, and multi-chain compatibility, Casper has been dedicated to fostering transformational breakthroughs since its founding. That’s why it invested in its core Casper Labs team and decentralized innovation through DEVxDAO.
Envisioned and funded by Casper Labs, the DEVxDAO is a community of developers and innovators operating as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Its mandate is to vet and oversee Casper Labs’s massive $250M investment in accelerating enterprise and developer adoption of blockchain tech and decentralization principles.
Operating since early 2021, DEVxDAO was designed by Dr. Wulf Kaal and other thought leaders in the blockchain universe to be an open, community-driven organization that sponsors tangible successes and milestones through a collaborative process guided by the principles of open source development and decentralization.
Harnessing the Power of Community
“If we’re pushing for breakthroughs in exploration, research, the environment, energy, and all the other grand challenges of our time, we need to ask ourselves; How do we get more people involved in our community? How do we make the teams competing for XPRIZEs as admired and followed as star athletes? I fully expect this project to help us grow our communities, and to get more people authentically involved in our mission at XPRIZE competitions,” said Peter Diamandis, Founder, Executive Chairman of XPRIZE.
The project aims to demonstrate that participatory communities are ready to move beyond their initial experimentation in startups, crowdfunding exercises, and communes. As the world’s top innovation NGO takes steps towards becoming more community-run, so will thousands of other non-profits, corporations, and governments.
Tony Greenberg shares: “It is a privilege to work with so many great minds, working to connect and coordinate them towards a breakthrough in building impact-driven communities. Since we’ve oriented ourselves towards elevating the way organizations do business, we’ve sought out the highest-impact leaders of tomorrow to help them kick down the barriers to their goals. This is the first major milestone of that journey– helping build a new ecosystem of innovation designed from the ground up for impact, inclusion, and fairness.”
“The Casper protocol was built to provide real utility for communities seeking to harness the unique powers of blockchain technology,” said Medha Parlikar, co-founder and chief technology officer at Casper Labs. “Our goal was to provide the building blocks for enterprises, entrepreneurs, and the open source community to innovate, create, and discover how decentralization can transform not only their tech stack, but the underlying business and organizational philosophies. This collaboration marks an important milestone in our path towards this goal of powering a more decentralized future.”
About the Participants
XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement working to create a better world, a world of infinite possibilities. A more hopeful future for all. A world where everyone’s days are spent imagining, creating, and collaborating, not fearing and fighting. A world where everyone has access to clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, effective learning, top-tier medical care and non-polluting, abundant energy.
Casper is the first blockchain built specifically for business adoption. Casper’s unique design allows it to adapt and endure with your business over time – and thanks to Casper Labs, organizations building on Casper always have a clear place to turn for dedicated services, support and bespoke software development.
DEVxDAO is a place where protocols, projects, and engineers work together to promote the frontiers of emerging technology. Based in Switzerland, the DAO provides grants to developers, researchers, and scientists all over the world and supports open source, transparent scientific research into emerging technology.
Vatom enables both companies and individuals to easily engage directly with the emerging Web3 to help unleash unlimited creative and financial opportunities for every person on the planet. Since 2015, it has been developing the technical backbone for major global Web3 projects, including the metaverse, smart objects and universal wallet - which have all already been deployed at massive scale for top brands, including Pepsico during the recent World Cup.
Menagerie fosters and operates grassroots communities as a service. Menagerie is led by Dr. Wulf Kaal, who is the pre-eminent thought leader on how to build and maintain healthy and productive communities, based on 85 years of academic research and more than 3 years of successful operations in the DEVxDAO and other decentralized communities.
RampRate, a certified B-Corp, is a connector and problem-solver for impact-driven initiatives. Accelerating the path of tomorrow’s market leaders with rational decisions, hands-on followthrough, and profit-through-purpose thinking, RampRate’s Syzygy Impact division kicks down the barriers for startups and maturing organizations, enabling them to focus on their core value.
