• TL;DR
  • Posts
  • Building A More Human Internet

Building A More Human Internet

The Alpha Cohort of FWBuilders at a glance.

✨ Building A More Human Internet ✨ 

We’re excited to welcome the 50 creative technologists joining the Alpha Cohort of FWBuilders. The 6-week program kicks off on Friday. FWBuilders isn't a hackathon or an accelerator. It's an R&D lab focused on cultivating cultural applications of emerging technology. We've created a space for prototyping experiences that feel weird at first, but become obvious in retrospect.

The Alpha Cohort at a Glance

The Alpha Cohort includes builders from across the globe - San Francisco, NYC, LA, Toronto, Berlin, and beyond. They're working on projects across five key themes:

  • Autonomous agents & smart tools: Creating copilots, agentic UX, and programmable rituals

  • Cultural interfaces & UX design: Developing ritual-based interaction layers and identity-first frameworks

  • Onchain trust & multiplayer systems: Building trust graphs and decentralized discovery tools

  • Infrastructure tools & developer protocols: Crafting protocol extensions and onboarding SDKs

  • Creative economies & niche marketplaces: Designing markets for cultural goods with experimental payment flows

What unites them? A shared vision to make digital life more intentional, more human, and more surprising again.

The Program Structure

The Alpha Cohort follows a three-phase journey:

  1. FRAME (Weeks 1-2): Workshops, demos, and sessions led by our partner ecosystem.

  2. FORMULATE (Weeks 3-4): A multi-week build period with feedback loops and DevRel support, where participants can go solo or collaborate.

  3. FINISH (Weeks 5-6): Polishing projects, refining stories, and sharing in a curated showcase with partners and potential users.

The Bigger Picture

A deeper throughline emerged across all applications: these builders are repairing, reimagining, and restoring what the internet could be. Whether through agents that act more like muses than machines, marketplaces built on trust rather than extraction, or interfaces that feel alive instead of transactional, the Alpha Cohort will be working to transform our digital experience.

Stay tuned for updates as our builders progress through the program. We'll be sharing project highlights, workshop recaps, and insights from the cohort along the way.

Learn more about FWBuilders or drop us a line at [email protected]

FWBuilders Partner Ecosystem

Thank you to our partner network for supporting creative technologists, the most valuable visionaries in our increasingly speculative future. Learn more about our partner program here.

$Benefits 4 All

At long last, the $Benefits arcade token has arrived. 

FEST25 is back Aug 1-3

β€œWe are living through a syzygy: a celestial alignment of technical systems and symbolic structures, of oracles and errors, of datasets and dreams.”

Our favorite weekend returns for a 4th year to the breathtaking campus of Idyllwild Arts in Idyllwild, CA.

Tickets powered by Mesh, the social ticketing platform from Scene Infrastructure Company πŸ€³ 

Purchase tickets with credit card, stablecoin, ETH, $FWB or any other token. Payment plans available β€” $0 down!

Artists + speakers coming πŸ”œ

A big thank you to our early supporters πŸ’«

Distribute Your Music with Original Works and Get Paid Onchain, Instantly

Original Works is a decentralized and open-source protocol for distributing and monetizing your music onchain. We integrate with the traditional music supply chain, and once a song is distributed, traditional music royalties are paid out onchain through smart contracts.

If you are an independent artist or label, you can now enable instant royalty collection from major platforms in USDC, with payments sent directly to artist wallets via smart contracts. Access advances, easily manage revenue sharing, and retain full self-custody of your music.

Read the OW artist deck to learn more, and reach out to [email protected] to book an introductory call.

Read β€œA decade of tokenization experiments in music: Where do we go from here?” by Original Works