Lore V2 — Turning Social Energy into Collective Power

September 7th, 2023

Lore’s mission is simple — we want to help communities change the world — by giving them crypto superpowers.

Today, we’re announcing V2 of Lore. With V2, communities can turn social energy into collective power.

V2 introduces a modular protocol that covers the entire lifecycle of community capital formation, coordination, and allocation. And in a few weeks, we will launch an app for Collective Crowdfunding, built on Base — mobile and newbie-friendly.

We will be working closely with communities with ambitious initiatives to kickstart their vision on Lore at launch — helping with fundraising, branding, and marketing support.

Apply here to launch an Onchain Community and be on our launch lineup when the consumer application goes live in late September.

The Community Movement

"Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities.”- K-Hole

If you’re here, you know the drill.

The internet connected us, then disconnected us — and now it’s rebundling us into niche communities with would-be strangers.

Our strange idiosyncrasies are not so strange to them. And we feel our soul, during a long lonely day, a bit tickled — like we’re part of something bigger.

Whether it’s interest-based communities, crypto communities, creator-led communities, or ephemeral communities, we feel a sense of comfort within them, knowing there are other people into the same weird things we are and sometimes — into the same world-changing views.

Bringing Crypto to Communities

Online communities are going beyond belonging to influence markets, culture, and society.

Cabin is building new neighborhoods from the ground up, designed for digitally native workers. Forty thousand people tried to buy the US Constitution together. Forward-thinking brands and creators are coming to symbiosis with their communities to co-create.

Whether they like it or not, online communities share many common ideologies with crypto: They’re global-first, collectively generated, and form around egalitarian missions with a desire for value to be shared more fairly.

What gets us excited about crypto is its ability to turn social energy into collective economic power.

Crypto allows communities to form capital on global-first financial rails. Crypto allows communities to make decisions collectively. Lastly, crypto allows communities to allocate resources and share value with contributors.

Crypto is a new socioeconomic railing for society. And society is becoming community-driven.

With crypto, common ideas become a collaborative project. Common goals become a series of coordinated transactions. Common missions become internet-scale movements.

The Protocol for Community Capital Formation and Coordination

Lore helps communities form funds onchain, take collective action, and share value.

We designed V2 of the Lore Protocol based on interviews and feedback from over a hundred crypto communities, creator communities, and interest-based communities that used V1.

V2 introduces a modular protocol that covers the entire lifecycle of community capital formation, coordination, and allocation. It also shares value with those who create it.

Formation — Crowdfund a shared wallet to form members and capital

Onchain Communities can be launched on Ethereum mainnet and your favorite L2s.
Onchain Communities are formed through a crowdsale of tiered Membership NFTs that crowdfunds a shared wallet. Launch priced fixed editions to crowdfund. Launch free open editions to generate income from a mint fee. Upload your own art.
Crowdfunds can be gated by token ownership, onchain actions, or offchain actions so communities can manage who can join and how they earn membership.
Movements start small and then become massive. We designed our model to allow Onchain Communities to start and grow season after season.

Coordination — Make decisions and transactions together

Membership NFTs are encoded onchain with voting rights within the Onchain Community.
Voting rights can be delegated to other members.
All members can propose Onchain Polls to make decisions to vote. Polls can be for community engagement or can trigger onchain transactions.
There is a set of assigned Guardians that bless Polls that trigger onchain transactions to prevent malicious cases.

The Protocol is a wrapper around a shared secure wallet — powered by Safe.
The Community Wallet can initiate any onchain transaction, like payments, buying assets, creating media, and distributing rewards to contributors.
Communities can return distributions of ETH, tokens, and NFTs to members to reward contribution and/or participation.
Membership NFTs can be listed on any NFT marketplace, giving members agency to exit the Onchain Community.

Shared Value — Protocol Fee Rewards

Protocol Fees from Membership NFT sales are split 50/50 with the Onchain Community, or however you want to set it.
Communities can use Free Open Editions to bootstrap funds through a fee split.
Creators can generate passive income.

A Consumer App for Collective Crowdfunds

There’s a lot to be excited about here, and honestly, it’s been difficult to nail down exactly how we package this on the consumer experience.

One principle that sets Lore apart from most crypto companies is that we are consumer-led. And the unspoken truth about consumer crypto companies is that they build a lot of infrastructure — but only to enable novel use cases that simply cannot exist with current infrastructure. (Cryptokitties built an NFT standard before ERC721, and OpenSea built Seaport)

While we’ve designed the infrastructure to be flexible for many use cases, we’re strong believers in building defined experiences — uniquely enabled by crypto — that onboard newbies into crypto.

For that reason, we've developed a consumer app that will launch in late September.

The consumer experience focuses on Collective Crowdfunding of initiatives, media, and missions. The app will be exclusively on Base. Mobile-friendly through a PWA and newbie-friendly through app wallets and onramps.

There is a Reddit-like experience where users can explore communities and mint Membership NFTs to join, which funds a transparent Community Wallet.

Then, users can begin posting content and Polls. They can then and up-and-down voting Onchain Polls using their Memberships.

For those who want to get more creative, we’re also surfacing an Advanced Mode with more customization. We still get a lot of joy from being surprised by the emergent use cases communities launch on Lore.

Apply for Access. Join the Launch Lineup.

Lore isn’t just a product. It’s a movement for a community-owned and created world. Beyond an open platform for Onchain Communities, we want to be a co-conspirator with them.

We will be working closely with communities with ambitious initiatives to kickstart their vision on Lore — helping with fundraising, branding, and marketing support.

Apply here to launch an Onchain Community and be on our launch lineup when the consumer application goes live in late September.