The Onchain Foundation oversees three divisions: Lisk, Pass App, and Onchain AG (that’s us!). All of us share the mission of bringing more people Onchain, but in very different ways.
- Lisk brings emerging markets onchain by providing advanced infrastructure.
- Pass App brings new people onchain through the support of their smart wallet.
- Onchain AG brings businesses onchain through research, education, and knowledge sharing.
Combined, our mission is to make life easier as you expand your Web3 engagement.
Notably, aside from Lisk, each division is new as of 2024. Our teams are also primarily remote workers residing in 31 countries around the world.
Before October, most of us had never met! As a result, I had no idea how tall my colleague Leon is, or how many incredible tattoos Jean invested in. Zoom does us no justice, so our leadership thought it time to gather everyone in sunny Morocco for a week of bonding and workshops to plan what we’ll bring you in 2025.
Workshopping in the desert
Those of us living in the chilly North were delighted by the prospect of a week in the desert heat. Until the forecast turned against us. We packed for the sun but the weather was cold.
Still, spirits were high in the Agafay Desert outside Marrakech for the first leg of our retreat. Dancing and discussion were on the books.
I personally was surprised that this group of strangers never acted as such. From the first, we were hugging and high-fiving those we’d only ever seen in Zoom meetings and even those we hadn’t. That’s what the Onchain spirit is all about: collaboration, no holding back, not even by the introverts.
“When I was planning this retreat, I really tried to anticipate everything upcoming: people complaining, people getting lost somewhere in the desert, emergencies,” said our fearless leader Guido Schmitz-Krummacher.
His commitment to building a productive and fun retreat brought together the three divisions, so we could plan the future together. A future where humanity is onchain.
We spent our first four days conducting workshops in the desert. No stiff business meetings, but us lounging on pillows while whiteboarding and encouraging each other.
That worked even during other challenging non-Web3 activities like camel riding – major props to those who were afraid but tried a ride anyway! There were other desert activities, such as driving ATVs and simply watching the sun come up over the Atlas Mountains.
What none of us anticipated was how traveler sickness would strike most of the group. But again, when you have a common goal, you can help each other through. And that’s what we did.
2025 is around the corner
Stomach aches or sprained ankle – yup, that was me dancing in the desert 💃 – nothing stopped us from planning an excellent 2025 for everyone wanting to come onchain. Here are some things that emerged from the retreat:
Onchain AG
We’re in the midst of building the new Web3 Insights Marketplace, a place where everyone can find and contribute research content. You’ll be able to monetize, share, collect…, just wait and see! The waitlist for the membership including utility NFT is open. On December 9th launched an MVP version of the platform and will keep adding features during 2025 (so when you read this, it’s live already, go check the feed!).
During our time in the desert we refined our vision, set the timeline and planned additional features for you to engage, contribute and benefit.
The collaboration with bus dev and marketing teams from Lisk and Pass inspired our creativity. In the future it’ll help everyone (including future members and platform users) leverage mutual connections.
Pass App
Pass App is building the most seamless, safe, and personalized smart wallet so you can effortlessly find your passion, onchain. The team takes a unique approach to developing the wallet. It’s a community-driven process and therefore focussed on user experience. And that can’t be optimized without AI in today’s digital world. AI is a central component for building the simplified UI.
Sounds exciting? You bet! For the CPO Josh Ben-David, “Pass App is a Web4 wallet living in a Web3 world.”
By the end of the year, they will unveil their Pass Perks program (you may have heard rumblings on their X profile). If you join the waitlist for the alpha, more surprises are in store in 2025.
“Pass App is a relatively new project in the space… I never would have reached out to the other members in the different projects, but now I feel like we’re a close family.” — Sophie Lawson, Content Designer at Pass App.
Lisk
This is where it all started many years ago: The Lisk blockchain. If you’ve been in this space from the beginning you know the history. What you may not know is that the people who initially built Lisk or joined early on are still there after five, six, or more years. I’d say that’s unique for blockchain companies.
Lisk split into the three divisions that exist today and transformed into a Layer 2 that launched this year, with major announcements at DevCon 2024. It was a new beginning. The Lisk Layer 2 offers a platform for building dApps with real-world impact and focuses primarily on emerging markets.
But there’s more in the works! Keep your ear to the ground for bootcamp announcements and (much excite) more incubator and accelerator programs!
Together it’s more fun and more effective
Despite the digestive distress that affected three-quarters of the 80 attendees, we managed to have fun and build our upcoming fiscal year.
As Daniel Coyle says in The Culture Code, “Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.”
The majority of those cues can only be received in person. If all off Onchain was going to start working as an integrated whole to bring more people onchain, we had to get together in one place. If you have a remote team, this is something we can highly recommend for your 2025 strategic plan.
Can’t stop won’t stop
“Lots of good things will be taken out of this,” commented Ashton Barger, Partnerships Manager at Onchain AG, “especially the different synergies between the different [divisions].” As Ashton alludes, our workflow has changed as a result of the retreat. What truly matters is that these connections enable us to share knowledge and skills among each seamlessly so we can offer you the highest quality insights and products.
For eight months we’ve worked in silos. That period was important to the incubation of the new projects and the relaunch of Lisk. Yet, the warmth that emanated from even those who were strangers before the retreat was an important message: It was time to come together. The Onchain Foundation mission is to bring more people onchain — we can do that better together than apart.
So, let’s close with the words of Filipe Tavares Ventura, Business Developer Manager at Lisk, as he speaks for all of us, “We are three divisions all doing different things. For me, the goal was to understand how we can connect as different divisions and create initiatives together.”
He’s talking about initiatives that help bring the world onchain. That’s The Onchain Foundation’s shared mission. And if that resonates with you, there’s lots of ways to join the community. For example, hop over to the Feed and start participating, or sign up to become a Founding Member.