FWB Fellowships Replace Price Barriers
Q&A with Raihan Anwar and Colby Holliday from Friends with Benefits
This was FWB choosing curation over pure market access. If membership is supposed to bring in the most interesting creative people, then a rising token price cannot be allowed to screen out exactly those people. The fellowship idea turned FWB from a club that people buy into on Uniswap into a community that can selectively sponsor artists, operators, and underrepresented voices, while still keeping the token as the main coordination tool.
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FWB already had two access paths, money and contribution. Members could buy tokens to enter, or earn FWB by being useful in Discord through SourceCred, seasonal work, and community tasks. Fellowships added a third path, direct admission for people the community wanted before they had wallet literacy or spare capital.
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The need became sharper because the token had become expensive and volatile. FWB said Ethereum costs had pushed entry out of reach for many people, and after the Roll hack the group rebuilt the token system and treasury around a fixed 1 million token supply. In that setup, every fellowship slot is a real treasury allocation, not a symbolic invite.
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This also solved a practical problem from early token gifting. FWB had been airdropping tokens to cool people, but some never engaged. The fellowship proposal formalized selection, budget, and expectations through governance, with tokens allocated to design the program and a broader vote on whether to commit 18,000 FWB to bring in members who could not otherwise afford entry.
The next phase for communities like FWB is turning token ownership from a paywall into one input among several. The strongest DAOs will keep a market price on membership, but they will increasingly layer on fellowships, earned access, and human review so the roster is shaped by who adds energy to the network, not just who got rich early in crypto.