With 2023 all wrapped up, it’s been quite a year, with a lot to unpack. We’ve seen no shortage of builders despite the market conditions, and no sign that all of this crypto and Web3 stuff is going to disappear anytime soon.
In this “year in review” post, we’re going to recap some of our favorite projects we saw on Builda over the year, some trends we’ve picked up, where we’re heading with Builda, and a few other things to unpack with our discoveries!
Builda in Numbers
Our launch back in June this year attracted a handful of partners and their projects to be featured in our spotlight from the start. Since then, we’ve featured a new batch of projects in our discovery spotlight each week.
Some stats to date:
- On-boarded 8,500+ users
- Spotlighted 300+ projects
- Featured 50+ teams on our Builda Weekly Twitter Spaces
- Over 1000+ NFTs minted in support of Builda
We’re hoping that throughout 2024 as Builda continues to grow and we begin our next phase we’ll have a lot more fun stats to share come next year!
Narratives & Takeaways
When it comes to popular narratives in Web3, there’s one that we at Builda will likely always put at the forefront, which is community. On our Builda Weekly calls we host with projects, community is time and time again mentioned as a favorite thing about being in crypto. If you’ve spent any time on the social side of it, you probably know how strong the community is. Going into 2024, we think that community and other social apps that really connect users from all areas of the ecosystem will become super useful, and projects that foster healthy communities will have no problem finding success.
We noticed a huge trend in AI and crypto mashup projects since the birth of ChatGPT & OpenAI’s API. From projects utilizing AI to help with predictions, to assisting members of their community — we’ll make sure to list a few in this re-cap below and we definitely anticipate to see a consistent growth in AI <> Crypto projects.
Another thing that has seen a noticeable uptick both on Builda and in almost all areas of crypto is the focus on more consumer-facing products, especially those that utilize things like account abstraction or various other ways to make for a less “crypto-like” experience. Teams have also been vocal about this on our Builda Weekly calls, with a large amount of them expressing the need to build for consumers who are not at all in Web3.
We’ll dive into some of those projects who have taken this approach and also those helping other projects achieve this approach in our project recaps below — but that said, we’ve got our eyes on projects who want to abstract a lot of the hurdles crypto faces.
And while not a narrative, one other thing that we noticed at Builda that we’d like to point out is the gap between some builders and the community we see on CT (“crypto twitter”). We’ve spoken to many teams on Builda that are not hooked into the echo chambers of CT or participating in the loud community a lot of us might be a part of. It’s a refreshing reminder that our ecosystem is quite vast even when the market is rekt, and there are builders in all corners of the internet, from all corners of the world, building very serious stuff — not just what you see in front of you.
Top Projects
If we were to feature the top projects of each week in 2023, you’d probably be reading this into the next new year. So instead we’ll just cover a handful of top projects we thought were cool for one reason or another, in no particular order. And if you want to discover more, we know a great place.
BasePaint
One of the hottest projects in the Base ecosystem all together, BasePaint is a collaborative art project where every day is a fresh canvas that artists from all over the world collaborate on. Every canvas is an “Open Edition” NFT mint the next day. Proceeds from the mints are then split amongst the contributing artists programmatically. Just mint a brush to participate!
Eesee
After a flurry of NFT trends and various NFT marketplaces opening their doors to the world, Eesee is one of the coolest spins on an NFT marketplace we’ve seen so far. Eesee improves the system for both buyers and sellers, buyers get to buy tickets to NFTs with the chance of winning it for a fraction of the price, while buyers can take advantage of selling their NFT before waiting for one big buyer.
Talent Protocol
With their V2 underway, Talent Protocol’s V1 was exactly as described, a protocol to enable talent to connect with people like you who may want to invest in their underlying talent and future by tokenizing said talent and future earnings and putting it up for sale.
We’ll have to see what kind of interesting stuff their V2 brings.
Faye
In an ecosystem so reliant on communities, Faye is really aiding in allowing you to focus on building and keeping your community happy and informed.
Stop feeding your intern espresso and forcing them to keep tabs on all the social corners your app handles support on. With Faye, it brings everything in one place for you — support your Discord users and website users all in one place.
The best part? They even have automated support with AI for the times when your intern finally runs out of espresso!
Smoldapp
Earning an honorable mention, smoldapp is not just one project (is it?). Smoldapp is a collection of useful “smol” dapps all in one place. Offering tools like:
- MultiSafe: One Gnosis Safe, deployed across multiple chains.
- SmolStream: Stream salaries, token vest, or more.
- Disperse: Distribute ether or tokens to multiple addresses in one transaction.
- Dump Services: Dump all your tokens for the best price all at once.
- Migratooor: The easiest way to migrate all your tokens to a new wallet.
Mava
Another awesome spin on community support and management, Mava brings all of your support channels into one client. Handle Telegram support, handle Discord support, website support, and easily handle all of the support tickets so your users don’t fall behind.
Mava even uses AI to learn from your available docs and existing communities to best support your users at all hours of the day.
With over 200+ projects on Builda, we really could go on all day about some cool projects we’ve seen over the last six months, but we hope this small glimpse of some of them might push you to check out the rest.
Future of Builda
While we’d love to lay out our exact details for where Builda is going next, we don’t want to jump the gun and get ahead of ourselves, but just know that we are heads down working into the new year, and we’re going to make 2024 the year of Builda.
We’ll be focusing on more ways for projects to be discovered beyond just our weekly spotlight. We’re putting a lot of thought onto how both users and projects can actively engage with each other on Builda, and while that doesn’t say much, we’ll be happy to unveil our plans as the year unfolds.
We’ve heard you. Both projects, their users, and all corners of Web3, we’re listening, paying attention to what you need, and we’re building for you.
It’s time to expand on Web3’s collaborative nature and do what we can to boost the dedicated builders and users spending their free time in this ecosystem.
Stay In Touch
Website | X (Twitter) | Discord | Telegram
