Mental Wealth Academy is a project that seeks to de-stigmatize the way mental health is viewed and help communities with, education, activity, and supporting a diverse set of causes online.
Mission Statement: Provide a fun &interactive way for communities to access & monetize content tailored to improving mental wellness (Wealth) while also retaining the values of irl community and events online.
Mental Wealth Academy champions itself in working to de-stigmatize the negative aura of mental illness by incorporating creativity, self-expression, and other techniques from programs such as AA & group therapy activities. TheProgram is designed in a way that brings comfort to the anxious, restless, stressed, and depressed. By tailoring; meditations, podcasts, and articles to users while also separating “pop psychology” that often misleads people with abstract concepts.
With our Hand-In-Hand Feature. Every friend that refers a friend to sign up is rewarded with Digital Rewards such as:
- Art
- Badges
- Academy Tokens™
- & Virtual Passes
We’re tackling huge issues with diversity as well as Mental Health while being inclusive for everyone. All of us have a unique dynamic and have been passionate about this project, the activities, and Mental Health for a long time.
Over 50% of our team reflect the diversity of the community our project serves with a particular emphasis on including women, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC), individuals with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
The discord acts as our virtual hub, holding all of our community events, gatherings, and activities. Users are onboarded to web3 via in-app wallet integration that holds their badges, stickers, and Academy Coins™.
As members use the app, check into events, and participate they earn more Academy Coins which can be traded in for custom merchandise, access passes to virtual and irl concerts, sporting events, meet and greets, and moreas we continue to evolve the app and allow members the ability to use their tokens as votes to continue evolving in a way that works for our users.
Members are welcome to join free trials of weekly virtual events in the discord.
To describe how a DAO works it’s important to compare it to a company:
Organizational Structure
- Company: A hierarchical setup led by a CEO and other executives.
- DAO: A flat structure led by a group of core contributors.
Decision Making
- Company: Proposals are approved by management, and decisions are made behind closed doors.
- DAO: Members submit proposals and vote on them publicly using DAO tokens.
Onboarding
- Company: Candidates must apply and pass interviews to be hired.
- DAO: Some DAOs permit anyone to join, while others require a minimum number of tokens. Tokens can be purchased or earned by contributing to the DAO (e.g., by taking notes during meetings).
Career Advancement
- Company: Employees must climb the corporate ladder to be promoted.
- DAO: Members can begin contributing immediately to earn the confidence of core contributors.
Compensation
- Company: Most employees work full-time and are compensated via salary and stock.
- DAO: Most contributors work part-time and are compensated with DAO tokens or other cryptocurrencies (e.g., stablecoins).
As you can see, DAOs have both advantages and drawbacks compared to companies:
- Advantages include enabling more individuals to contribute, participate in decisions, and benefit from upside gains.
- Disadvantages include the need to coordinate a part-time workforce in a decentralized manner.
Practical Applications of DAOs
In practice, most DAOs employ:
- Communication tools such as Discord and Notion to stay connected.
- Governance tools such as Snapshot for members to vote on decisions.
- Crowdfunding tools such as Gitcoin/Mirror to raise capital for the DAO.
- Treasury tools such as Gnosis Safe to manage the DAO’s treasury.
Now that you have a broad understanding of DAOs, let’s discuss how you can locate one to join.
One of the best things about DAOs is how open they are.
While some DAOs require you to purchase tokens to join, many of them let you join for free to get a sense of how they operate. Let’s start by covering the different types of DAOs.
Types of DAOs
There are many types of DAOs, including:
- Social DAOs are organized around shared interests. For example, Friends with Benefits is a private social club that builds products and offers IRL private events. You need to hold 75 $FWB tokens to join.
- Investment DAOs raise funds to invest in and own assets (e.g., NFTs) as a community. For example, Flamingo bought an Alien Cryptopunk NFT for 605 eth (~$761K) in January 2021. Constitution DAO raised $47M in a failed attempt to bid for a copy of the Constitution in November.
- Protocol DAOs help a DeFi protocol transition from being owned by a core team to being owned by a community. For example, Uniswap issued UNI tokens to let its community members vote on how the protocol should evolve.
- Commerce DAOs allow a community to co-own a retail or e-commerce business through tokens. For example, E1337 is a luxury apparel brand owned by 1337 token holders.
- Media DAOs empower a community to produce content collaboratively. For example, this content you’re reading was written by members of Odyssey. Another example is Stoner Cats, a community-funded adult animation series.
To describe how a DAO works it’s important to compare it to a company:
Organizational Structure
- Company: A hierarchical setup led by a CEO and other executives.
- DAO: A flat structure led by a group of core contributors.
Decision Making
- Company: Proposals are approved by management, and decisions are made behind closed doors.
- DAO: Members submit proposals and vote on them publicly using DAO tokens.
Onboarding
- Company: Candidates must apply and pass interviews to be hired.
- DAO: Some DAOs permit anyone to join, while others require a minimum number of tokens. Tokens can be purchased or earned by contributing to the DAO (e.g., by taking notes during meetings).
Career Advancement
- Company: Employees must climb the corporate ladder to be promoted.
- DAO: Members can begin contributing immediately to earn the confidence of core contributors.
Compensation
- Company: Most employees work full-time and are compensated via salary and stock.
- DAO: Most contributors work part-time and are compensated with DAO tokens or other cryptocurrencies (e.g., stablecoins).
As you can see, DAOs have both advantages and drawbacks compared to companies:
- Advantages include enabling more individuals to contribute, participate in decisions, and benefit from upside gains.
- Disadvantages include the need to coordinate a part-time workforce in a decentralized manner.
Practical Applications of DAOs
In practice, most DAOs employ:
- Communication tools such as Discord and Notion to stay connected.
- Governance tools such as Snapshot for members to vote on decisions.
- Crowdfunding tools such as Gitcoin/Mirror to raise capital for the DAO.
- Treasury tools such as Gnosis Safe to manage the DAO’s treasury.
Now that you have a broad understanding of DAOs, let’s discuss how you can locate one to join.
One of the best things about DAOs is how open they are.
While some DAOs require you to purchase tokens to join, many of them let you join for free to get a sense of how they operate. Let’s start by covering the different types of DAOs.
Types of DAOs
There are many types of DAOs, including:
- Social DAOs are organized around shared interests. For example, Friends with Benefits is a private social club that builds products and offers IRL private events. You need to hold 75 $FWB tokens to join.
- Investment DAOs raise funds to invest in and own assets (e.g., NFTs) as a community. For example, Flamingo bought an Alien Cryptopunk NFT for 605 eth (~$761K) in January 2021. Constitution DAO raised $47M in a failed attempt to bid for a copy of the Constitution in November.
- Protocol DAOs help a DeFi protocol transition from being owned by a core team to being owned by a community. For example, Uniswap issued UNI tokens to let its community members vote on how the protocol should evolve.
- Commerce DAOs allow a community to co-own a retail or e-commerce business through tokens. For example, E1337 is a luxury apparel brand owned by 1337 token holders.
- Media DAOs empower a community to produce content collaboratively. For example, this content you’re reading was written by members of Odyssey. Another example is Stoner Cats, a community-funded adult animation series.
With the Mental Wealth Library Add-on, We would have access to a wealth of knowledge from people all over the world. We can read about different cultures, learn new skills, and gain insights into your own behavior. The best part? IPFS websites are impervious to central domain control from people like America who’s constantly shut down PirateBay, Torrents, ZLibrary, and any other form of free access to capitalistic products.
Mental Wealth Academy: IPFS Landing Hub
IPFS Websites are run on blockchain, there are no yearly domain fees for it, it simply comes down to which crypto address # owns the website. This means the owner is fully responsible for keeping their site secure.
Oh I forgot to explain what IPFS is so it doesn’t sound like jargon. IPFS stands for Interplanetary File System. It’s made by https://protocol.ai/ Here’s the whitepaper for a deeper understanding.
Ipfs is the filesystem, it’s been around much longer that it’s crypto token (Filecoin) and can be used independently of the token.
The short of it is ….FILECOIN is the incentive layer build on IPFS. It was Protocol Labs solution to getting people to adopt IPFS. Here’s a screenshot of protocol’s website and what they show. Also a good video to get caught up to speed on IPFS highly suggest watching before continuing.
Location Versus Content Addressing
Location based addressing is how we identify data in Web2 on the centralized web. For example, I know that in the past that the Bitcoin whitepaper was stored at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
If I point you to that location, it is based off my memory, and belief that they have NOT moved that whitepaper somewhere else in the directory and continued to serve it at the same location.
Though, they could very well host the Ethereum whitepaper on that location even though the authority hosting it is bitcoin.org and the file name bitcoin.pdf hinted towards something related to Bitcoin. It could be wrong.
Interwebz 2.0: Cons of Location Addressing
In the centralized web, since we cannot verify what content lives at what location, we are dependent on central authorities to label and store information as it really is. It is because of this it is quite easy for us to get tricked by bad actors. Have you ever downloaded a video or a game that turned out to be a virus?
Additionally, location addressing means that the same data can be stored at different locations with different filenames thousands or millions of times, which is mostly useless.
Think about how you’ve saveddownload.pdf and download(1).pdf on your computer. Since content does not tie into location directly, the centralized web is a mess of data that is redundantly saved multiple times under different names at different URL’s, and there is no way to tell which items are the same.
IPFS: Content Addressing
On the decentralized web, we can stop relying on central authorities to label information as it is and hope the data we are downloading is not malicious.
In fact, we can all host each other’s data, with a different kind of addressing (specifically, content addressing) that is more secure than location based addressing.
IPFS: Hashing
The most important piece of tech needed for content addressing is Cryptographic Hashing. We will cover a little bit the properties of hash functions, but if you want to dig deeper into how they work and the math behind them, you can read the aforementioned link.
Hashing is a process in which a function, referred to as the hash function, takes an arbitrary input and produces a single, fixed-size, “hash” that represents the input uniquely.
We can represent it mathematically as follows:
H(a) = bMental Wealth Academy: Trust Implications
As mentioned before, on the centralized web we have come to trust certain central authorities with hosting most of our data. However, malicious actors can sometimes fool us about the contents of a file by spoofing the location.
On the decentralized web, we can remove that trust on central authorities, and everyone can host each other’s files. Thanks to content addressing through hashing, nobody can deceive anyone about the contents of a file if we are looking up and identifying files based on their hash. Had a malicious actor changed a single bit in any file, it’s hash would have changed, and we are not looking for that file.
Mental Wealth Academy: How We Share
But where do we actually get the data from? If you have ever used torrents, this will sound familiar. But, in some sense, you can also relate this to Ethereum’s approach to data sharing.
Let’s say you are looking for a specific file, and you have its content hash. Instead of asking a single authority to give you that file, you ask the entire network!
Your request will be shared through nodes you are directly connected to, and then to other nodes they are connected to, and so on, until you find someone who has the content you are looking for. You will know it is the exact file you are looking for because it has a matching hash. Additionally, if that node were to go offline while serving the request, you may still be able to get a copy of that file from another node that also had that content.
Mental Wealth Academy: Updating Old Data
Additionally, for important data, anyone can store a copy of certain data on their own IPFS node to improve replication in case some nodes go offline. Therefore, data on IPFS can be highly available through replication. More replication is like more seeds from torrents.
Since files are represented by their CIDs, those files cannot be modified after being uploaded. You can upload a new, modified version, but that version would have a different CID than the original due to the uniqueness property of hash functions.
- It is like torrent, so you need to have a seeder node all the time — it is called “pinning” in IPFS.
- There is a number of services, the price seems to be around $0.3/(gb*month).
- Piñata & Textile currently biggest node providers.
Example of IPFS Website:
Also Note, all of the NFTs that you’ve seen in the news or online. They are all hosted with IPFS. Here’s a quick preview of what the interface of the IPFS app would look like for providers. As well as the website in IPFS with the user’s side.
I know this is long and legnthy but it provides a great understanding at how pivoting to this idea can make the project more fun, interesting to people new and old to torrents and decentralization as well as still hosting all of the good feels good mental wealth we want to share with people. We now have free reign to create and host our own Library free from ownership and centralization!
