A History of Fractal Communities: Our Journey from 2021 to 2025

more about Eden Fractal at EdenFractal.com and watch discussions with community leaders

Many of the most respected members of the Genesis Fractal were cooperative visionaries who wanted to experiment with the new processes of Fractally in the Eden community. You can learn how Dan Singjoy started Eden Fractal and explore detailed show notes about our first meeting here. The Eden Fractal community has met every week since then with an average of 15 weekly participants and many of the community members have experienced immense benefits that changed their lives. Eden Fractal has created tremendous success for over 78 weeks as a grassroots, self-funded community of volunteers and is trailblazing the future of collaboration for the benefit of all. The community inspired Vlad, Tadas, and many other brilliant builders to create invaluable open source tools and architect new paradigms in human cooperation. A few notable milestones involving Optimism Fractal team members include the initiation of our Eden+Fractal consensus process created by Tadas, the proposal to start Alien Worlds Fractal by Vlad, the introduction of Cagendas and election of Dan as moderator in our 28th meeting, and our introduction to Rosmari in the 35th meeting (which also saw the introduction of Fractalgram). You can watch every Eden Fractal meeting in this playlist, read detailed show notes for many meetings here, and explore articles linked on EdenFractal.com for an overview of various public goods and (amazing experiences!) shared by Eden Fractal community members.

For example, Eden Fractal bootstrapped it’s innovations for almost two years with less than $20k in self-funding from community members.

The original developers of Fractally decided to stop pursuing their original vision with the Genesis Fractal to focus on related initiatives for fractal cooperation called Psinq. Meanwhile, Eden Fractal has used a non-transferable form of respect and focused on building unique innovations to protect community members from legal liability.

In addition to a lack of funding, the regulatory climate has also introduced challenges that have slowed our growth.

Optimism Fractal provides a perfect place to collaborate with talented builders and earn awards for helping the Optimism Collective. You’re welcome to join our weekly events on Thursdays at 17 UTC, watch our previous episodes, and explore our blog to learn more about how Optimism Fractal can create profound benefits for the Optimism Collective.

We encourage you to explore our articles and videos about the Respect Game to gain a deeper understanding of how Optimism Fractal can enhance RetroPGF. We build open source tools to help all communities enjoy the benefits of the Respect Game and grow with Optimism. You can learn about our tools here. We’d appreciate your support in our RetroPGF Grant. Feel free to reach out with any comments in our discord or the forum post. Thank you for reading!

An Overview of our History and Future with Optimism

Fractal communities are rooted in profound wisdom designed to help communities thrive and our processes have been honed by hundreds of the world’s most talented builders for countless hours. It’s helpful to learn about our history to better understand the immense potential of Eden Fractal, Optimism Fractal, and other communities cooperating with our innovative social games. We encourage you to explore a brief overview of our story below to gain a deeper understanding of how fractal communities will provide profound benefits for the Optimism Collective.

The initial concept for fractal democracy was created by Daniel Larimer, a visionary innovator who interacted with Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and invented the concept of DACs/DAOs as Decentralized Autonomous Companies to describe Bitcoin in 2013. Daniel is a prolific founder who created the world’s first decentralized exchange (Bitshares), the first stablecoin (BitUSD), the first Web3 social media app (steemit/hive), and designed the software for the largest ICO of all time (EOS). Each of these projects were among the world’s most successful blockchain projects for a period of time and continue to grow today with decentralized, autonomous communities of countless talented builders. These innovations provided immense inspiration for industry leaders and paved the path for the largest sectors of Web3 today. You can learn more about each of these outstanding projects and Daniel’s track record in this infographic.

In 2021 Daniel Larimer wrote a revelatory book called More Equal Animals: The Subtle Art of True Democracy, which provided a blueprint for humanity to cooperate peacefully with a novel concept called fractal democracy. This book inspired the formation of Eden on EOS, a community with hundreds of members who have been pioneering fractal democracy with upvote elections for over two years. For a high level overview introduction, you can watch this summary by a community filmmaker, an election recap from prominent a news outlet, and a news show hosted by Dan Singjoy following his election as a chief delegate. For a more detailed exploration of how this community provided enormous inspiration for many builders, you can watch the first election with 182 registrants here, many historic videos on the original youtube channel, hundreds of hours of fascinating discussions with community leaders at our Eden Town Halls, and many more in our repository of YouTube playlists.

The learnings from these experiments inspired Daniel Larimer’s team to create fractally, a profoundly helpful framework for the next generation of DAOs. Their keynote video gives an excellent introduction and the whitepaper provides a manual for decentralized, autonomous communities to create public goods and mutual aid in ways that were never before possible. We collaborated closely with the fractally team and about 130 other participants in a 30 week experiment pioneering the fractally processes called the Genesis Fractal. There was an average of 40 participants in each meeting and the large majority of participants experienced tremendous benefits. Our founder Dan Singjoy recorded videos of each weekly Genesis Fractal meeting (as you can see in this playlist) and earned the third most respect in the consensus games, as you can see in a comprehensive dashboard created by an esteemed engineer in the community.

Many of the most respected members of the Genesis Fractal were cooperative visionaries who wanted to experiment with the new processes of Fractally in the Eden community. You can learn how Dan Singjoy started Eden Fractal and explore detailed show notes about our first meeting here. The Eden Fractal community has met every week since then with an average of 15 weekly participants and many of the community members have experienced immense benefits that changed their lives. Eden Fractal has created tremendous success for over 78 weeks as a grassroots, self-funded community of volunteers and is trailblazing the future of collaboration for the benefit of all. The community inspired Vlad, Tadas, and many other brilliant builders to create invaluable open source tools for cooperation. You can learn more about Eden Fractal at EdenFractal.com.

Though our fractal consensus games have created profound benefits for over two years and we are on track to greatly empower all communities, the trajectory of our success has been slowed by the environment where we are growing. Most of our work has focused in the Antelope (formerly EOS.io) ecosystem, which emerged from the largest ICO of all time in 2017 and has seen it’s flagship token (EOS) decrease in market value by over 97% after the company that conducted the ICO stopped supporting the network. Whereas the EOS Network used to have a top four cryptocurrency with a market cap of over $18 billion, it now has approximately a 300x smaller market cap than ETH and far less funding available than the Ethereum ecosystem. As a result, there is a huge community of talented, veteran builders and a very limited amount of funding opportunities in the Antelope ecosystem. For example, Eden Fractal has bootstrapped all of our innovations for over a year with less than $10k in funding from community members. Our organic success is attributed to builders who have heroically volunteered thousands of hours and are intrinsically motivated by deep conviction in our ability to create positive change. In addition to a lack of funding, the regulatory climate has also introduced challenges that have slowed our growth. The original developers of Fractally decided to stop pursuing their original vision with the Genesis Fractal to focus on related initiatives for fractal cooperation called Psinq. Meanwhile, Eden Fractal has used a non-transferable form of respect and focused on building unique innovations to protect community members from legal liability.

As a community of volunteers, we have laid the seeds and nourished the growth of countless innovations that are profoundly helpful for all communities. Though tremendously successful on a grassroots level, our work has not yet had the right kind of environment to fully blossom. So many of our innovations are being developed like roots underneath the surface of a primordial garden and are nearly ready to emerge to create wonderful effects for all. After years of refining these models and demonstrating strong product-market fit with communities like Eden Fractal, the time is ripe for massive growth. We are stoked about how Optimism can perfectly nourish this growth and we’re confident Optimism Fractal will rapidly blossom into a flourishing ecosystem under these ideal conditions. The synergies are truly unique here. For example, we can imagine so many exciting ways that RetroPitches and other exciting Optimism Fractal games can enhance RetroPGF…

By combining Optimism’s ethos of empowering builders who create public goods with our proven tools for coordinating with community consensus, we expect exponential results. The ‘ROI’ of fractal communities from a public goods perspective is incredibly high and we are very excited to see what can become possible with the philosophical alignment and ample funding opportunities in Optimism. We firmly believe this collaboration will unleash unprecedented creation of sustainable value for the entire world. The technology is mature, the community is ready, and we have the expertise to smoothly execute. It's as if millions of years of biological evolution have prepared the perfect conditions for a new species to propagate rapidly. We are thrilled to be on the precipice of a new paradigm and exponential breakthrough in how cooperative ecosystems are structured for the benefit of humanity.

The Roots of Optimism Fractal

Optimism Fractal is rooted in deep wisdom and designed to help communities thrive. Our games have been rigorously honed by hundreds of talented builders. This article summarizes the development that led to Optimism Fractal 🌱

Welcome to Optimism Fractal!

As sunlight shines, sunflowers bloom! In the first episode of Optimism Fractal, the Optimystics embark and introduce a fun consensus game to create profound benefits for the Optimism Collective! 🌻 🌞 🔴