# Letter to Contributors

Dear Contributors —

It's not every day we wake up with a sense of urgency. History is happening among us. The exhilaration, anxiety, and restlessness that we feel as we see record-breaking events only intensify the perception of inevitability. In August alone, Ethereum wallet Metamask reached 10M users, NFT marketplace OpenSea's trading volume grew ten-fold in one month, and Ethereum domain name service registered more than 30k names.

There's a duality to the reality we live in. It takes "irrational exuberance" to make what was once impossible tenable, but irrationality can lead to poor judgment, greed, and further exploitation. The "up-to-the-right" memes, rug pulls, MEV bots wars and daily rekts show us both the wisdom of the crowd and the fatality of the mob. Massive networks can be formed in months and disseminated in hours. Speculation can gather thousands, but the responsibility of creating and maintaining software and smart contracts falls on the shoulders of a few. In times of rapid change, we can feel overwhelmed and at times paralyzed, incapable of critically examining the system in front of us and finding our places in it, not to mention contributing in accordance with the long-term interests of our future.

The path forward is clear but not easy. A better future isn't achieved by sheer will, but by the collective effort of a group of highly dedicated, mission-oriented builders. Despite crypto's promise of a more equitable and accessible financial infrastructure, such opportunities are extremely inaccessible and cryptic for newcomers. For brilliant minds not currently in crypto but open-minded to learn, being asked to jump into the great unknown without any guardrails or clear path is a tall order. For global contributors who already spend most of their time online, the choice is whether to obtain economic opportunities or gain dignity and ownership over their labor.

Yes, demand for talent has skyrocketed as crypto projects and protocols continue to grow at an unprecedented rate. But despite this growing interest in crypto, the fragmented workflow, insular entities, and inconsistent branding make it difficult for crypto-native organizations to onboard, engage, and collaborate on projects at scale. As a result, they suffer from operational inefficiency, lack of diversity, and high contributor turnover.

Crypto networks have demonstrated the potential of decentralized human coordination when incentives align and a shared goal is well understood. Without a centralized body, Bitcoin has become the best-performing asset class of the decade, and Ethereum has become one of the world's most valuable computing platforms. Yet crypto’s promise can’t be actualized until we design an experience that works for everyone. That’s not the case right now.

To coordinate a network of fluid talent, we can no longer rely on traditional enterprise software with rigid permissions control and a centralized database. Jumping on a project in the decentralized web shouldn't be gated by a "manager", but with rights to participate earned based on one's on-chain reputation and contribution history. For people to self-govern, we need to build the tools and mechanics that make peer-to-peer collaboration and compensation second nature and help create rituals and culture that contribute an act of honor and love.

We're first pioneering the tools for teams to spin up their own decentralized operations so that everyone can onboard, coordinate, and reward contributors. We use our products to run our own operations to ensure usability and scalability with deep empathy for the end-users.

A network will emerge as a result of interacting with the tools we build. The on-chain data become high-fidelity representations of a contributor's identity, reputation, and relationships — all without compromising individual privacy. These data allow Station to become an ecosystem where anyone can discover others to form teams and build products and services that continue to push the boundaries of decentralized collaboration and creation.

Over the next decade, Station will become an essential public infrastructure where contributors find and showcase work and decentralized organizations discover, coordinate, and reward talent. We measure success by how many connections we've facilitated, how many economic opportunities we've enabled, and how many communities we've helped form.

Station connects people and projects, while TerminalOS empowers on-chain operations to run smoothly to attract the best talent. Terminal creates modular building blocks for governance, rewards, and coordination mechanisms that align incentives across organizational stakeholders and optimize for fairness and meritocracy. With TerminalOS, a new class of organizations can emerge—ranging from social clubs, activist groups, worker co-ops, investment clubs. Everyone can start an organization with a tap of a button.

Providing TerminalOS to communities ensures that Station's contributor network will have an endless selection of interesting, meaningful, and economically rewarding DAOs to join. In the same vein, Station ensures that there will always be people building around, and participating in, the DAOs powered by our open standard.

When a contributor wakes up in the morning, they can log onto Station and find out about updates from their communities. They can see what projects they're currently working on, send some endorsement to their friends, explore other cool stuff to work on, and check out other contributors' work using the Station interface.

When a community is initially forming, they can spin up a DAO running on TerminalOS to easily coordinate and connect their members through Station. They can customize and configure their network settings and reward systems, manage their treasury, facilitate collective decisions, and leverage TerminalOS.

By co-developing these scalable, easily deployable, and configurable services with our partners in the Station Network, we're battle-testing and refining our mechanics in the wild. Mainstream understanding of the crypto industry is still nascent, and we can acknowledge that thi s sizzling moment in time is signaling a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Rather than repeating the effort to build what each other needs, the team can multiply the impact by working closely together and accelerate towards the shared vision.

Together, we might have a good shot at building something that will define the way people perceive work, collaboration, and relationships with one another.

With love,
The Station Staff