Adding context to what it means to be a “partner”

TL;DR;

• The word partnership is a joke nowadays in the crypto-world. Since anyone is everyone else’s “partner”, it also means none of it has real value or meaning.

• We are taking a harder look into who do we consider partners, how do we define them, and their relative value to one another and to Mean DAO.

• Not all partners are created equal, and some deserve more love than others.
  
  

  

Some Context

Almost every day eager crypto-founders and eager biz-dev associates from crypto organizations rush to announce their latest HOT 🔥 “Partnership”. It usually serves well to rally some momentum for both “partners” because it ignites the news cycle and brings a spotlight onto them.

However, it is a common occurrence that many of these “partnerships”, even though they are formulated with the best of intentions, are often poorly planned, and end up never seeing the light of day. Others simply were not explored with enough depth and when it comes time to consummate, undesirable surprises arise that cause a silent breakup.

In other much worse cases, and no less occurring, media organizations that promote this news cycle of a partnership, rarely do any due diligence on the matter, leaving much to be desired to the trustworthiness of the freshly published “partnership”.

For this reason and to set good expectations with our community and the ecosystem at large regarding partnerships with Mean DAO, we are now being a lot more careful and specific on who and under what conditions we call another organization a “partner”.

Partners & Couples

As we mature, so does our taste for picking the right partners. When a person falls in love, rarely the first to come out of their mouth is “how do you like JOHN as the name for our firstborn?”. Instead, there’s a steady process to get to that level. And so, we are going to take things on a more sober note from here on out, and this is our process:

Not all partners are created equal

Not all partners are created equal, some give more than they take, others are more balanced. To this extent, we have four types of partners in Mean DAO, that depend on their relationship with our products and organization. They are:

1. Integration Partners: they integrate our products into theirs

2. Vendor Partner: we integrate their products into ours

3. Client Organization: they are a customer of our products

4. Ecosystem Partner: an organization that helps us accelerate our mission without being one of the other three

Many times, the same organization can be more than one kind of partner. For example, a DAO that both uses our MultiSig and Treasuries products, AND also has integrated our Money Streams as part of their own product offering for their users would be both a Client and an Integration Partner.

The stronger the relationship with Mean DAO, the more value we also give to this partnership, which translates into more time, more incentives, and more love and care to maintain it and grow it 😍

Here’s how we view this partnership ecosystem:

A unique position

MeanFi and Mean Protocol are in a unique position to grow our ecosystem of partners in a healthy and sustainable way. Being the front end of many retail customers and organizations, we have a mutual interest in expositing innovative products and protocols to them, and therefore are always looking for the best solutions to bring to the forefront.

We are also in a unique spot since we offer several tools for DAOs and Organizations of all sizes to manage risk, payroll, asset distributions, and more that make the life of an operator many orders of magnitude easier, so it’s a no-brainer for adoption.

In Mean Protocol, we built one of the coolest primitives in DeFi with our Mean Money Streams, to power the payment rails for real-time finance across web3 applications and smart contracts across Solana, and any innovative developer can leverage to get from 0 to 100 in a matter of minutes using the Mean Protocol SDK.

Here are some ideas to build with Money Streams:

• Dynamic NFTs that “mature” or “decay” with time. This concept can be super useful for games, or expirable NFTs that give the holder limited access to benefits. The Money Stream would manage the “decaying” or “maturing” side of the NFT.

• Gamified coordination mechanisms, like live leaderboards, competitions, or progress coordination.

• Pay-pay-use monetization services. Think media content (music, video) where the distribution rules for a piece of content are pre-set, and revenues are distributed based on the consumption rate and progress of the piece of content on a second by second basis based on Money Streams.

These are some of the ideas possible today thanks to the Mean Money Streaming primitive and the Mean Protocol SDK. You can get up and running in minutes, and build an amazing web3 app powered by real-time finance.

If your organization is interested in becoming a partner you can reach out to us via Twitter, Discord, or Telegram, with a well-stated proposition and our Ambassadors will point you in the right direction.

Get Involved!

We are the Mean DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization working to bring financial freedom to people and businesses worldwide. We do this through the Mean Protocol and MeanFi.com, a self-custody, permissionless & trustless bank bringing crypto and DeFi to everyday banking workflows.

Stay in touch with our progress every week, and join the DeFi revolution by checking our website, joining the Mean DAO Discord, or our official Telegram, and following @MeanFinance on Twitter.