Why We Launched on Gitcoin
Bienvenue to Dakar Gallery
Dakar is an emerging green 3D-NFT art house. 3D-NFTs are NFT art coupled with 3D printable art files you own and print at your leisure. Dakar’s gallery and auction house align arts and humanities with social justice.
Dakar Gallery’s Web 3 vision is inspired by Rarible, Nifty Gateway, OpenSea, Web 3, and B Corporations. Dakar is forged upon the principles of responsible freedom of speech, environmental justice, and the declaration of human rights. Dakar Gallery is a social servant of the public and a committed member of the global movement for environmental justice. Dakar believes all human beings have a human right to peace, protected property, and a piously, healthy community. This encompasses mental health and wellness, clean air, wholesome food, and clean water. Art and humanities are a public good and the perfect tool to combat misinformation and disenfranchisement in economic and political representation.
Dakar is committed to ongoing collaborative research on arts, human rights, and environmental justice. Our Green NFT vision is supported by Dakar’s decentralized co-creation lab that aligns NFT art with DeFi’s social impact.
Dakar’s platform will deliver a UX/UI experience for rare digital art collectibles and NFT Defi. Dakar NFTs are coupled with decentralized 3D printable NFT art files you own and can print at your leisure. Dakar’s mission is to be the first NFT-Defi condominium with fully autonomous community governance. Dakar is a creator-centric NFT marketplace and issuance platform that will phase into the utilization of a boutique stablecoin. Dakar’s boutique stablecoin is designed particularly to facilitate NFTs, Defi, and social tokens. Stablecoin economics incentivizes stacking on the platform by allowing members to interact with the community governing consensus. This mechanism design pairs with Dakar’s governing token.
What is Gitcoin?
Gitcoin is an Ethereum community network for public goods. The Gitcoin platform is a growing crowdfunding community of decentralized advocates and open-source evangelists. The altruistic economic moment of cryptocurrency was led by blockchain pioneers Bitcoin and Ethereum. Gitcoin simply amplifies Ethereum's altruistic voice by financially assisting social impact cryptocurrency applications.
Ethereum has established itself as more than a digital asset that stores value. Ethereum has grown to be the IoT. Decentralized finance (Defi) on the Ethereum decentralized ledger exploded with $65B total value locked (TVL) in the Q1–2021. Most Defi protocols reside on Ethereum. Ethereum allows network participants to create digital assets, property rights, and a wide range of utility coins. Gitcoin was born from the Ethereum community. Gitcoin is committed to supporting and growing the Ethereum community network. Gitcoin fuels its mission with Ethereum based grants. Gitcoin’s main grant event, Gitcoin Grants Round 9, ended on March 25th, 2021. There were over 160k crowdfunding contributions from more than 12k individual contributors.
Gitcoin’s community amplifies cryptocurrency’s open-source culture. Open-source development and Web 3 are defining the future of the Internet and public goods. As digital gold Bitcoin may be the cryptocurrency of choice for the foreseeable future but Ethereum is the virtual machine powering most of the decentralized web.
Why Gitcoin Grants?
Gitcoin’s Grants has raised over $1.3M to fund grants so far. Gitcoin has become a beacon for collaboration, open-source communities, and amplifying the value propositions in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Gitcoin is a community of Ethereum evangelists experimenting with liberal radicalism to fund ideas from the ground up. Dakar brings value to Gitcoin by driving the innovation and adaptation of NFTs, Ethereum, and decentralized governance. Dakar executes this through R&D and deep design integration of NFTs, social tokens, cryptocurrency, and algorithmic stablecoins. Dakar selected the Gitcoin community as its home because of Dakar’s clear Web 3 social impact approach that aligns with the Gitcoin community’s altruistic nature.
We believe NFT technology strikes the perfect balance between art, science, and human ingenuity. NFTs enable us to leverage relationships between the physical and digital world. Web 3, Gitcoin, and Etheruem community ushers in a new age for systematically challenged and displaced communities.
Dakar is an NFT art house?
In economic jargon, a non-fungible token (NFT) or asset is a non-tradable asset and is considered one-of-a-kind. In essence, owning an NFT means you own the original digital rights of a digital asset. While the digital asset can be replicated many times by anyone, only the owner of the NFT asset is the true rightful owner of the digital asset. The authenticity of each NFT is verified by an immutable blockchain database called a ledger. NFTs are a relatively new trend in the blockchain and decentralized computing world. NFTs’ origins derived from Colored Coins in 2014. Almost a decade later, digital tokens have grown in prominence.
Ethereum NFTs are digitizing, redefining, and revolutionizing property rights by decentralizing information and removing unwanted third-party events. An NFT stores unique information on the Ethereum blockchain. In the case of art NFTs, the Etheruem ledger records proof that enables the artwork to be registered as sold and resold. The Ethereum ledger behaves as an automated escrow between the artist and the buyer. Smart contracts enabled by NFTs use code to ensure the artist profits each time the work is sold. This revolutionizes the global art world, freeing up the economics of art and culture. Dakar recognizes cryptographic innovation in the arts and humanities offers the opportunity for a global Tokenized Art Renaissance.
So, what is all this Ethereum talk about?
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is one single entity maintained by thousands of connected computers running an Ethereum client. Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin. Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain. Vitaly Dmitriyevich “Vitalik” Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer who is best known as one of the co-founders of Ethereum. Additionally, he wrote Solidity, a high-level and contact-oriented language used for writing smart contracts.
Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2), also known as Serenity, is needed as Defi and NFTs continue to accelerate the Ethereum network to capacity. Eth2 improves the network’s efficiency, scalability, sustainability, robustness, and versatility.
Here are some amazing research links and resources for a deeper dive into Web 3.
What we are working on — Q2 of 2021
- We got into KERNEL Block III — we are officially a part of the Ethereum Gitcoin tribe.
- Organizing a decentralized team to reach our first Beta MVP; We’re building a 2nd market NFT auction house.
- Community building; connect with Dakar!
- Researching NFT’s environmental impact and social impact.
- Check out Dakar Writing Room to collaborate on Green NFT Research!
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— Dakar Tribe
Author and editorial collaboration by Muhammad Hameed and Tagan Horton.
Tagan Horton is a Dakar Gallery co-founder and podcast journalist. Her curiosity for social economics and the environmental impact of the technology age lead her to R&D in cryptoeconomics, NFTs, social tokens, and building Web 3 communities.
Muhammad Hameed is the founder of Playdoe Foundry and Web 3 startup advisor. He is a digital asset designer at Dakar Gallery. He is an interdisciplinary designer and cryptoeconomic researcher. Muhammad’s exploration of human-centered design, data science, and Austrian economics drew him to Web 3 R&D.
A little quick history about Dakar Gallery; Dakar Gallery is a venture of Playdoe Foundry. Dakar takes its name from its design house DK Labs (Dakar Khwarizmi Labs) which was originally named Khwarizmi Labs before February 2021. Prior to Dakar's launch on Gitcoin Grants, it attracted the interest of social-economic researcher Tagan Horton who inspired the lab’s name change. Tagan later joined DK Labs for its soft launch of Dakar in the Ethereum Gitcoin community on March 8, 2021. DK Labs is the brainchild of Playdoe Foundry an Atlanta-based remote-first Web 3 venture studio focused on cryptocurrency, NFTs, social tokens, XR technology, and esports. Playdoe Foundry was ideated in 2018 by interdisciplinary designer and U.S. economist Muhammad Hameed. The studio was founded on one single principle, to build iconic decentralized communities that can fuel the value of social impact.
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