Overview
Fractal communities are rooted in profound wisdom designed to help communities thrive and the Respect Game has been honed by hundreds of the world’s most talented builders for countless hours. You can explore a brief overview of our story below to gain a deeper understanding of how fractal communities playing Respect Game can provide profound benefits for all. For a more detailed overview of our history and deeper context around our work, see our article Fractal Democracy: The Natural Evolution of Governance.
Table of Contents
- Overview
- The History of Fractal Democracy
- More Equal Animals & The Roots of Eden
- Going Fractally
- Eden Fractal
- Gardening Troughs
- Optimism Fractal
- Optimystic Future
- Related Posts
The History of Fractal Democracy
The initial concept of fractal democracy was created by Daniel Larimer, a visionary innovator who interacted with Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and invented the concept of DACs (aka DAOs) as Decentralized Autonomous Companies 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 projects and Daniel’s outstanding track record in this infographic.
Discover more about fractal democracy in this article and continue reading to see an overview how this process has evolved over recent years, maturing into a robust governance solution on Ethereum and the Superchain.
More Equal Animals & The Roots of Eden
In 2021, Daniel Larimer penned a groundbreaking book titled "More Equal Animals: The Subtle Art of True Democracy". This work presents a revolutionary blueprint for peaceful human cooperation through the novel concept of fractal democracy. For those interested in exploring these ideas further, you can listen to the audiobook or delve into additional resources in this comprehensive article.
This book inspired the formation of Eden on EOS, a community with hundreds of members who have been pioneering fractal democracy with Eden Elections for over two years. This community attracted over 400 members and raised approximately $1.5 million to distribute for builders via onchain fractal democracy elections. 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, and many more in our repository of YouTube playlists.
Going Fractally
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 37 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.
Eden Fractal
Eden Fractal was founded in May of 2022. 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 ten weekly participants and many of the community members have experienced life-changing benefits. Eden Fractal has hosted over 100 events as a grassroots, self-funded community and is trailblazing the future of collaboration for the benefit of all. The community inspired talented builders to create invaluable open source tools for cooperation and produce hundreds of educational videos. You can also learn more about Eden Fractal in 50 episodes of Eden Town Hall.
The Eden Fractal formed consensus on it’s vision in late 2023 and it’s mission in 2024. Since it’s inception, Eden Fractal has educated hundreds of people about fractal decision-making processes, fostered countless fruitful collaborations, and inspired the creation of dozens of fractal communities.
Gardening Troughs
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 was slowed by the environment where we’ve been growing. Most of our work was 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. As a result, there is a huge community of talented, veteran builders and a very limited amount of funding opportunities in the Antelope ecosystem.
The organic success of Eden Fractal 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. A few other factors that hindered growth included time needed to refine our processes, the lack of compatibility with market leading EVM software, and the ability convey fractal democracy in a way that is easily accessible and fun for all. In late 2023, a group of leaders from the Eden Fractal community named the Optimystics created Optimism Fractal, which is now on the precipice of a major breakthrough in growth of fractal communities. Eden Fractal and Optimism Fractal are well positioned to create profound benefits for all.
Optimism Fractal
Optimism Fractal is a community dedicated to fostering collaboration, awarding public good creators, and optimizing governance on the Superchain. We host biweekly events where builders in Superchain network, promote their work, and evaluate each other’s impact with onchain attestations in an innovative social game.
The Optimism Fractal community is pioneering the next generation of consensus processes to optimize collective governance with a council formed with Respect, a soulbound reputation token earned by helping Optimism. All events are recorded and produced with show notes for educational purposes, as you can watch here. We’ve hosted over 55 events where industry leaders have made thousands of onchain attestations with Optimism Fractal software (source).
You’re welcome to join weekly events on Thursdays at 17 UTC to participate in Optimism Fractal and explore many community projects our notion site to get more involved. Optimism Fractal developing in the perfect environment and the stage is now set for an epic adventure!
Optimystic Future
The community of fractal enthusiasts volunteered for years to lay the seeds and nourish the growth of countless innovations that are profoundly helpful for all communities. Though tremendously successful on a grassroots level, their work didn’t have 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 the Optimism Collective and Ethereum can perfectly nourish this growth. 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.
We started Optimism Fractal in October of 2023 and built open-source tools to empower all communities with the Respect Game on EVM blockchains. The feedback from the Optimism and Ethereum communities has been incredible. 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.
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