In a growing information landscape where 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are uploaded to the internet every day, it is a gross understatement to say we are lacking solutions that convey higher-quality social signals. We are hungry for products designed not just for what we do, but for who we are and where we belong.
Luckily, the promise of blockchain technology swaps the need for trusted third-party intermediaries with permissionless global access. We now have infinite possibilities to build a version of the internet not owned by big tech, but by every single one of us.
We have a shot at designing a system for the sovereign individual. A system geared towards freedom of choice and on an even deeper level, a common community where we want to be around people with shared beliefs and morals.
I know this sounds grand, but we’ve got big plans. And we’re just getting started.
It’s time to introduce you to belong. This is what we’re building.
belong/why
Wallets are the future of ownership. But as they cater to everyone, they create an increasing array of problems as a result of non-constrained systems. If we want to procure a landscape where web3 wallets = personal identities, order is needed.
Currently, wallets are a wasteland of fungible and non-fungible tokens that enable a variety of usecases. Some are purely art, others are utility-driven and still, others empower communities to govern their entire organization.
These tokens find themselves in your Metamask, Rainbow, or Ledger wallet. And if you’ve dabbled with NFTs in the previous market hype, you’ll know how damn messy it really is right now… Simply check your OpenSea or Tokens profile. You’'ll find an unappealing collection that displays an NFT you got rug-pulled by as well as your most prized digital possessions.
Put simply, we are experiencing an overproduction of ownership noise and a lack of membership signal. Web3 believers need a way to cut through the noise of their wallets to elegantly express their on-chain memberships.
belong/how
Curation is by far the only means by which individuals can make sense of, and express why what they do matters to them. Every social media has evolved to operate on the primitive of individualized curation, so users can selectively share what they want.
With web3 social still in its infancy, only a handful of solutions are designed to leverage this relatable web2 primitive. And as curation begins with user behaviors, belong will bring us three social token-holding patterns identified from talks with degens ↓
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Active & Advocating → you’re closely involved in the community at least 4 times a week, driving conversations & actively contributing to initiatives.
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Inactive & Supporting → you’re on the sidelines, checking in around 1-3 a week, but interested to see the community thrive without committing time.
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Holding & Watching → you’re observing from afar, checking in 2+ times a month, and waiting for project clarity or a good opportunity to get involved.
Each of these tiers communicates your internal involvement & external expression of any held token. Enabling users to curate their ever-increasing social token ownership across 3 behaviors is our starting point to bring clarity to web3 wallets.
Our goal is to help you showcase your web3 memberships from high to low levels of belonging, so you can communicate what each social token means to you.
belong/what
As Li Jin outlines, there are three methods for web3 social building: Product-First, Protocol-First & Community-First. At belong, we chose option one because we are convinced that building on the application layer to gain adoption first will help us tackle much larger problems later on. This is what we found web3 is missing ↓
Belong is your web3 social profile: simply connect your wallet, go through our onboarding process to self-determine your belonging, and share your profile with the world. Belong is not meant to replace your linkinbio, but to act as an additional backlink for you to use wherever you please. Ultimately we want to reduce the low signal tagging of projects in Twitter profiles to a single link that will communicate so much more than just curated social token ownership. For now, we have two simple use cases:
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Share your personal belong profile in your Discord, Twitter &/or linkinbio.
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Discover like-minded holders via overlapping belongings (soon!).
You can signup for early access via our email list here.
Disclaimer: each social token will be manually verified. We will start with a handful of tokens that have a high degree of holder:supply ratio x larger membership base. Each next token will launch on a custom 1:1 basis. You can verify your project here.
belong/about
For now, we are bootstrapping belong as a team of three. Our building philosophy is rooted deeply in First Principles, Lean Startup, Design Thinking & Community-guided Growth. You might not have heard about each of us, but know this: we are here to build something that matters to web3-natives. This is your belong team ↓
belong/support
In the spirit of web3, we find it immensely important to build belong in close coordination with a small group of early believers. To this end, we want to make each next step a community-guided one, after the social profiles get adopted.
Minting this Mirror NFT makes you an Early Supporter with three benefits: your personal /username, all-around early access & any future utility.
The total supply is capped at 111 tokens and priced at 0.01Ξ.
All mint proceeds will flow directly into belong growth.
If you believe in belong as much as we do, supporting early will pay off hugely. I and the team will see to it. Being early should always matter.
Follow along with our newsletter & Twitter ↓