Origins of FWB
Trevor McFedries founded FWB in the early weeks of September 2020 as a bored pandemic weekend experiment.
The premise was simple: he wanted to gather some of his favorite minds across culture and technology in a digital space and see what would happen. The earliest members were friends and friends-of-friends, from DJs and producers, to fashion heads, artists and curators, technologies and OG crypto folks alike.
In the beginning, the Discord was minimal – #general-chat may have been the only channel, but it was a lively one. The first message that Trevor sent in the chat seems to have set the tone for the overall community as it came together and flourished.
After the intros channel was established in early 2021, some of our most notable community members started out just by dropping their introduction and sharing a few things that interest them (beyond crypto and DeFi).
This is part of why we encourage all new members to drop an intro when they join—you never know who might check the archives and find you later.
From there, the Discord organically grew and took shape – defined by the community members at that time. From new channels to renegade DJ sets, in a world of COVID-isolation, FWB felt like your favorite local bar or restaurant where everyone was family.
Roll Hack & First Town Hall
FWB’s token was affected in the Roll Hack of March 2021. This article and this tweet thread are a good place to start to understand the Roll Hack logistically. Essentially a hacker dumped most of the social tokens that the platform Roll was holding in hot wallets for its respective organizations (FWB was one of 10+ affected by this hack). FWB was one of the DAOs hit the hardest, losing about ~800 ETH. The value of an FWB token went from about 90-100 USD to 0.10 USD overnight as a result of this hack. Because of the rapid decrease in value of the tokens, post the hack many people bought vast sums of FWB hoping for rebound in token price to its former high.
This hack resulted in our first governance process occurring to decide what to do post the hack, and ultimately a vote happened to decide if we should issue a new token or not. Our first town hall was actually held to discuss this proposal before the vote was held (in a lofi way, see picture below of the vote).
The community decided on $FWB Pro replacing $FWB Classic. This post on the FWB pro transition details the logistics of the transition, and other mitigations made to account for the old token holder’s holdings and other factors associated with the transition.
URL → IRL: FWB’s First Party
After many months of hanging out virtually in a Discord, a group of FWB contributors came together to produce FWB’s first IRL event at Floyd Miami on June 3rd, 2021 as a way to bring this bubbling community together during BTC Miami Week.
The vibes were, as they say, immaculate. From that moment on, we knew IRL events played a special role within the FWB ecosystem and the community began organizing large scale pop ups, in and around major crypto and cultural conferences like EthCC, NFT NYC, and Art Basel.
FWB Roadmap & Fall 2021 Fundraise
While a traditional company or organization may have the privilege of one explicit reason for existence, the FWB DAO emerged first as an organic social scene – making sense of how the Web3 world was evolving and affecting culture –that then came together to determine what it's focus areas should be.
Because of this expansion, FWB began to explore meaningful treasury diversification options. This involved a series of events with potential investors and community members. Viewing FWB as a digital city, this proposal was the way of growing its suburbs.
The first Roadmap presented to the FWB community from FWB contributors was shared in a community Town Hall on August 16, 2021. This outlined the planned expansion of FWB internally and the benefits of bringing on these investors to accomplish these goals.
This process culminated in a community vote to decide to move forward with funding or not. The Snapshot proposal here outlines the structure of the investment that the community decided to move forward with.
FWB FEST
After hosting dozens of events around the world, the FWB community came together to collectively produce FWB FEST, a festival & conference hybrid experience bringing together over 500 FWB members for three days of discourse and connection at the Idyllwild Arts Academy.
The event featured talks with cultural creators and technologists, DJ sets and live performances from PUSSYRIOT, Oneohtrix Point Never, JPEG Mafia, group workshops and discussions, and an expansive food and beverage program.
Learn more about FEST 2023 and buy your tickets here
Hackathons
In the past, FWB has organised and participated in hackathons in partnership with Rally and Zora.
Learn more about the Rally hackathon here, and about about the Zora hackathon here and here.